You primarily know me as a blogger. But over the years, I’ve actually tried every form of media. I was part of an EVE Online podcast, I uploaded videos to YouTube, and of course I’ve also streamed.

The podcast went quite well, actually, also because I wasn’t alone. I could exchange ideas with the other two and get into a conversation. With blogging, I can take my time, I write a post, I revise a post, or even delete it completely. But just talking into nothingness, that’s difficult for me. Probably also because I know my girlfriend is listening to me. I just talk to myself, whether in a video or a stream. And it feels weird.

In a video, I at least have a script. I can follow along with that. I personally don’t think reading from it is so great. And with streaming? I have no plan at all. And that becomes apparent quite quickly - there’s often silence in my stream. The success has been rather low accordingly. And so it’s not surprising that I also hung up streaming for that reason.

But that’s not all: Streaming, like gaming, is still very much focused on Windows. OBS exists for Linux, but it usually works poorly rather than well. Game Capture? No way. It works somehow under Gnome with x11, but it didn’t want to work under XFCE4. So I have to record the entire screen.
CORRECTION: With the right OBS version (git), Window Capture also works under XFCE.

And that brings us to the next difficulty. I have a 21:9 monitor with a resolution of 3440x1440. A configuration that Twitch doesn’t support at all. For Twitch, there’s only 16:9. Everything else creates bars and becomes unrecognizably small due to scaling. YouTube is no better here, at least in the default settings. Creating a new StreamKey did at least provide a remedy here.

So my stream is set up: I stream in 3440x1440 at 30 FPS on YouTube without annoying bars. More FPS just isn’t possible with my current CPU. So I could get started and I did. I streamed for almost two hours and said nothing for almost two hours. The stream must have been quite boring. But I also had no desire to scroll through the recording myself.

I think I’ll just stick with blogging. Here I have time to gather and organize my thoughts, I can just write away, and when I think I’m done, I click Publish. The whole social media thing has become a time-waster in the meantime, and I might even withdraw from live and social media platforms.

Although, Mastodon is quite okay.