March 21, 2015

 I've recently been craving beef jerky. That is one of the things I miss most about eating meat. That and steak. And the McChicken sandwich. Anyway, beef jerky is awesome and I want to put it in my mouth. It's probably for the best that I can't eat it though because my kidneys probably wouldn't appreciate all the sodium. Damn kidneys.

I once again had trouble falling asleep last night. But it wasn't as bad as the night before so that's something. On top of that I was out of bed this morning by 8:45AM. I read a textbook chapter and then half of another one before taking a short nap before lunch. I think I was originally awakened by frantic dog barking, it wasn't an alarm situation, because that wouldn't have happened after getting to bed so late. Regardless, I was glad to at least knock out some of my reading. I still have a sizable chunk of a chapter to read tomorrow but I can handle that.

Before lunch I added in the reference slide for my instructional presentation but that was pretty much all the schoolwork I did today. I needed a break. Not just a night off. And it was great. The Neebs crew had an unexpected livestream this afternoon so I watched that and spent more time making things in Gimp for my own livestreaming endeavors. I also filled out a few things on my Twitch page so it didn't look so barren.

Tonight I finalized an overlay and tweaked some settings in OBS and streamed for the first time. Just a test run. My test game was Squishy the Suicidal Pig, a game with an awful story but it was only $0.14 on Steam the other day. The story involves a pig who lives with his parents on the farm until a barbeque truck backs up and hauls his parents off to the slaughterhouse. Then the pig decides to kill himself so he can join his parents in Heaven but he ends up in Hell and the Devil decides to play with him, giving the pig 31 lives and putting him through a bunch of trials. The goal of each level is to die and once all the lives are gone the Devil will let the pig go to Heaven with his parents. I have no idea what kind of twisted mind came up with that storyline. Someone disturbed obviously. But I like the idea of burning through lives rather than trying to gain lives.

Anyway, I was only going to play that for a little bit just to see how things went but I ended up playing for about forty-five minutes because I got into trying to figure out some of the levels. One was deceptively simple but a couple of them took me quite awhile to figure out. When I finally called it good I waited a bit and then checked out the recorded broadcast on Twitch. The quality was good but the game sound was so loud that my microphone sound was imperceptible. That is something I should have known about because in all the streams I watch they are always having to lower their game volume. Next time I'll spend some time and tweak the sound. Not that it really matters because it is a tree falling in the forest situation, but it would be nice to get everything figured out. I have a few goals when it comes to streaming and actually getting viewers isn't really one of them.

Now I'm going to go to bed. Maybe I'll actually fall asleep within thirty minutes of laying down. That would be a nice change.