update note

 Just a simple message to mention that today I changed my display name here from Doctor A. Ray to Spy A. Ray. Although my notes here are often of a medical nature and I'll continue to use this blog spot to post medical concerns, I would rather reference my newer title(self-given both) here.

Attemping to master my health

 So I have been attempting to master my health and I've been doing a lot of things right but I may have to go try shilajit again. It's super expensive but it seemed like it was helpful. Right now I think it would be a good timing to buy it again, I've purchased some of it twice and at the moment I'm actually doing very well but the one thing that's bothering me more than anything else right now is my digestive system keeps serving up diarrhea. I'll take diarrhea over constipation but there's got to be a way to put this down and I'm just not sure what it is. Anyway, I might come up with some more ideas later but for now I think I'm going to try the black goo.

 One thing I had been subjected to that took me by surprise was I scratched my cornea. Now I might have done this in the past and simply been less sensitive to this and not understood what was going on and really the healing duration that the body needs for this condition is so relatively short that I expect lots of people may do this to themselves without realizing it. I figured out that a way that I can avoid this happening to me in the future is to hold my head down when I clean the outside of my eyes after my body has been trying to get me to sleep(the body does this so you can properly engage REM sleep I think, whatever the case, it can happen theoretically if you're tired but not sleeping but it's generally irresponsible for you to clean your eyes before sleeping first because then you're draining your body of something it's just going to produce again anyway soon). Anyway, I seem to be getting sleepy more often than I would prefer and part of this may be attributed to my body's inability to process various foods correctly. 

 Part of me wonders if indeed we will have new ingredients for foods created during that 1000 year reign while Satan and his demons are in the abyss. It would potentially help us attain perfection faster like that's a long time but we are also so far from perfect we are going to need all the time we can get. I'm also wondering if it's going to even be normal for us to eat as much or sleep as much, that kind of thing in the future. Imagine just pooping more than we do today, or less for that matter. Or will we even just have full control over our bowel movements? I mean nobody does today right? Certainly there are people out there with superior control over their bowel movements compared to others but nobody has full control, do they? I don't know, that's not exactly an every day conversation in our culture.

 In any case, my worry over my pathetic control over my bowel movements is precisely why I'm worried about my ability to get and keep a job. But what's more frustrating than anything else is just not getting a chance to have some minor form of emotional validation from working at a job. Right now the only thing I can do is preach informally or show off videos games... I need to either find other things to occupy my time to get some more emotional validation or I need to figure out a way to get back my professionalism. 

Changed my Twitch TV alias!

 I am now found here as I have changed my alias to Spy Andrew. As a spy, it is my job to investigate games and report back on discoveries I made while playing them. This may include recommendations and reviews as well as analyses of game developer view points.

 My health has improved considerably in recent times. I am not very confident in what I can do but I do not struggle with the simplest task of every day life anymore, diet. A common vegetable, cauliflower helps keep my digestive system feeling good, and various other ingredients that I cook with are providing some good feelings.

 The weather is improving my condition now as well, with winter firmly behind us in this area. I took a much lower-than-usual temperature shower this week. I would like the opportunity to work again but so far it has eluded me. It has been more than 10 years since I had a paying job. I didn't think it was possible to even last this long without a job, and I also had no idea that physical recovery would be so difficult. 

 If not for my older, spiritual sister who has now perished, I may not be as healthy as I am now. She gave me a chance to live on my own without too much interference from toxic personalities. My family has been a great disappointment for me as my mother has admitted that even she is a source of disappointment for me in my life. But it doesn't stop at family! So many people are caught up in their own needs that they don't acknowledge mine.

 And I might just be part of the problem. When was the last time I asked someone if I could help them with something? I know so many people that I might or might not be able to help them with something, and what am I spending my time on? Playing games that most of them really don't care about in the slightest. I'm never busy doing anything, I'm just available and never get asked to do anything. I want people to ask me to do things. But perhaps my status is just too unbelievable for others.

 I suppose moving forward, my goal should be to change the minds of those around me, and prove that I am a valuable assistant. Because I really want to help others. I know I need a lot of help and I'm not getting it, but that doesn't mean I can't provide help to others that are willing to accept my help. It's a strange realization for me. That my time is not over simply because I have this willingness to do more. So what comes next? I can't tell you, it's undetermined. But I hope it happens soon.

The development of the pandemic and the decline in popularity of Super Mario Maker 2

 It's difficult for me to decide what to type in this post. I'm thinking so fast and yet I can't nor should I even dare to try to put it all down. I have been feeling abnormally lonely. And I think that's because I've been limited in my back and forth communications with other people. Circumstances being what they are around the world, I sense a general lack of interest in the content I'm making on Twitch. Some would say, move on with your life, there are other things you can do. But there really aren't. 

 I've been doing a lot of thinking. Everything we experience is some sort of communication. Whether it's something man has built or the maker of the world has built. Sometimes the communication is difficult to understand, especially if people are intentionally or unintentionally lying. Some philosophers might argue that it's  possible that nearly everything or indeed everything we ever say is some sort of lie. This may be extreme, but it's a bit humbling perhaps in a proper sense to acknowledge that we are imperfect.

 Building stuff in Super Mario Maker 2(SMM2) has been a way for me to communicate ideas to other players. And some players have done the same for me as a streamer, shared their ideas. This has helped me deal with my loneliness. But now that Super Mario Maker 2 is not very popular, I'm experiencing some withdrawal from having my loneliness somewhat dispelled? Is that what I'm going to call it? Hmm, I'm not sure how accurate that is. Can someone be addicted to not being lonely? Maybe I have an imbalance in my hormones. Better add that to the list of things that's wrong with me.

 I'm not the only one that streams in order to not be lonely. But you know what? Streaming isn't really all that helpful to making me not be lonely. I streamed over 150 hours in the past 30 days...that's almost the standard 40 hours a week...and I didn't feel like it was as productive for dispelling loneliness as it used to be, even when I put more time into it than I had previously. Maybe it helps the few viewers that actually show up to my stream. By my stats, 3 people out of 413 who had notifications turned on tuned into the channel, and throughout my 140 minute broadcast of Super Mario Maker 2, it was revealed that each of those three watched the show for about 42 minutes. Some of these aren't even bad numbers to be honest.

 What concerns me more are the differences between numbers such as 413 and 3. The 413 people are following users that have notifications turned on. Okay so that's 0.7 percent. Less than one percent. And if you change that number to 1110 people, which is the total number of following users, it drops to 0.2 percent. My average viewer count was 0.9 viewers. If even one third of the one third of people that get notifications actually did the same as the other 3 viewers, I can expect that my average viewer count would be... around 130. Which is quite frankly beyond the requirement for partnered streamers.

 So why are so many people online feigning, or pretending if you will, to support small streamers? Maybe they get some sick satisfaction from it, I don't know. But it's unfortunate that it is so incredibly common for people to just prefer someone else and instead of being honest about that, they have to go and act like they want to spend time with the people that don't like as much, when they really don't feel that way. I suppose it's because they want to not 'get on your bad side' if they were to treat you poorly but in the end they are just putting a false hope on the streamer that they might be a friend or whatever.

 Twitch has been so disappointing to me lately, that I think I might change my username on Twitch. I've been calling myself RayTeamStrategy and so have many others. And my lack of doing well as an affiliate is making me reconsider my username. First of all, I have nothing against Team Strategy games such as LoL, Pokemon Unite, and so on. I'm actually regularly playing them, believe it or not. However I can admit they can be stressful at times and therefore I feel like I must play them in moderation. Unfortunately, the moderation levels are so strict that I'm unable to actually make a decently competitive footprint if you will in the resetting ranking systems. I don't know what kind of ranking system exactly Pokemon Unite has, but if it's like Shadowverse where the ranks don't actually reset(get lowered automatically so players can climb again) regularly then I guess everything will be fine in regards to that. So, I like these games, but I don't feel like I've become known for them, and I feel like there's a disconnect between my username and my identity to other people.

 So, I feel like I should just change RayTeamStrategy to DisappointedRay. I remember when my mom was responding to my requests for her to give watching Twitch TV a try and to chat with me on my channel she had to tell me that she is a disappointment. Which might be a little harsh, but perhaps she's right. Seems like the majority of people are a disappointment to me. Whether or not that's fair to call a PERSON THAT...like she did...personally I'm leaning towards no...it's undeniable that circumstances being what they are has led me to being a very, very, very disappointed person.

 I like using different usernames sometimes. Particularly when gaming. And I think it's time to rebrand myself on twitch. I kind of wanted to keep my username in case Pokemon Unite was everything I could have asked for in a game and more but to be honest... I feel more like a variety streamer at my core than anything else, and I don't want to grind the ranks of various games to make a name for myself. I don't mind some competition in general, but the levels of competitive effort you have to apply to games just doesn't allow me to keep my interests broadened when it comes to gaming and I feel like I want to communicate to as many people as possible, even if that means it's harder to get loyal viewers. 

 I want to try to rediscover who I am as a lot of the time I feel peer pressure to do things the way other people are doing them and whether or not that's a good idea I feel like I'm not those people and while I don't necessarily want to rebel against whatever's meta to do, I still need to honor the concept of doing things my own way, especially when it comes to my TV content.

 There are a lot of changes happening with my various sources of content, whether it's my YouTube, or my Twitch, or something from some game that I've been working on. I'm trying to think more, and act less, in order to improve the quality of the energy I spend each day. This isn't easy, and I don't think I'm as successful as I'd like to be. Especially considering how downright traitorous some Twitch users can seem to be from time to time. I feel like it's at least for me, a better use of my time to spend less time trying to be others' friend and more time trying to help myself out or being my own friend for lack of a better phrase.

 One of the big changes I'm making is that I'm making it so archived videos on my TV channel are only accessible to subscribers. I'm also doing reruns on my channel now which will be running highlights or previous streams so that viewers can still see some stuff, especially if there wasn't anything in particular they wanted to watch. An important thing to keep in mind is that in order to gather viewers, the streamer needs people showing up to the live shows. In all of 2020, and 2021, I have not kept up affiliate requirement numbers. I haven't even been halfway there. And monetary contributions are practically non-existent, but that's not necessarily the issue(if past broadcaster viewers were generous contributors there would be no problem). The issue is I need to prod viewers that just settle for watching past broadcasts, however few they may be into watching my live shows. I have zero problem with people watching my past broadcasts for free on an ethical basis but the problem is the numbers have been unacceptably low all things considered, and doing these reruns and locking down the past broadcasts, while not getting me my numbers back, has shown a mild increase  in the numbers. To clarify, these numbers are absolutely nothing to brag about, as I cover quite thoroughly in my latest YouTube video that is 61 percent done uploading as I type this...but I feel like I have restored those numbers to a point where I'm not feeling massively ashamed for being essentially labeled as a worthless broadcaster by the majority of the community.

 Is the community worth fighting for? No, of course not. Have I been trying to fight for it? Eh, maybe. In any case, and before I type anything else let me clarify, I don't know what it would like like to do such a thing anyway, so I don't know how to analyze my own behavior in that context, but I'm leaning towards I might have been doing that...I think I should not fight for the viewers. What I mean is I should just do what I think is right and ignore feedback. None of the feedback I get is useful anyway. Much of it is lies and the feedback bits that aren't lies are irrelevant information provided for unknown reasons.

 Like the other day, someone showed up to my LoZ:SS stream on a Saturday at the start of the stream. Then they got out of the stream and didn't come back at all. I noticed a shockingly low average viewer count afterwards that exposes that at the very least I received irrelevant information when the parent  told me that the child enjoys LoZ when they showed up 2 days in a row and fled the Zelda stream. So you show up to the stream at the start and nobody was watching the entire time...nobody. I know I've never streamed a Zelda game before that moment and that the pandemic is making things very competitive on Twitch at the moment, but I am not sure that viewer realizes the embarrassment potential for me being teased about potentially getting someone to watch the show and then come to find out EVERYONE wasn't interested in it.

 I make a lot of mistakes, sometimes I stream a game nobody wants to watch me play. That's fine. But I would appreciate more communication/honesty from the community in general. Unfortunately it appears as if I'm never going to get it and I'm just going to have to figure out how I want to deal with it. 

 I was tempted to try to make Pokemon Unite my next attempt at growing the channel, but it's clear to see that I haven't really harvested anything meaningful as far as viewer numbers go from playing SMM2. I don't feel confident that it will be worth my time to spend an easily regrettable amount of time on that game in particular. However, with that in mind, I still think it would be worth it to reanalyze my streaming schedule and make plans for Pokemon Unite to get a guaranteed day to be played. On the other hand I'm not sure if making a schedule is even a good idea. Well, when I became an affiliate I had a decent schedule going on, but I was modifying it from time to time slightly to make adjustments for associates that could direct me to 'fill in for them' if you get what I mean. On Twitch there is this feature where streamers can send viewers off to hang out with a different streamer and by rearranging a schedule one can get those viewers in there and that is a certain kind of boost that helped me to get affiliate in the first place. Unfortunately, despite how popular such streamers may have been, they have either lost interest in SMM2 or Twitch TV in general and are essentially no long my associates. I feel quite lonely as a result.

 Maybe this is what it's like more or less to be dating someone or even married and then break up or divorce. I get some viewers for a few months and then I got a year and a half feeling sorry for myself before I get a new date? And that's what Pokemon Unite is supposed to be for me? I mean I guess it's not a bad idea, but I am not sure what I should do about that. I think I'd rather just be a variety streamer. I don't know if this is the correct decision, maybe I'll always be a failure as a variety streamer. So I need to take some time to think about what to do next. I've considered attempting to salvage my current username just in case the new name change doesn't feel like it's delivering and/or I actually start feeling proud of my Unite accomplishments and want to solidify an identity better by taking back my old name. I can do this by renaming my alternate account but there's also the possibility that instead of using the new name idea of DisappointedRay that I could use the name CoinGang instead. Well, technically it's CoinGangBot, I'm not sure if CoinGang as a name is available, or even if the DR name is for that matter. I don't think I'm in love with the CoinGame name... maybe it would have been nice before I learned about Levelhead but yeah, I think ArtisticRay or DisappointedRay would be better. I guess Disappointed is too...not positive. But I have to change my name to something. I'm going to put RTS as a username on hold, at least for Twitch anyway. I feel like I have no choice.

 So, I guess this is where I drop some links and tell you all that I'm trying to rebrand and the Twitch channel link in particular may be updated later based on whatever I happen to decide. I just hope I remember to update it promptly.

TV channel 

Free discussion server 

Public messages profile

I realize I have left out a link to the YouTube channel or the new video, but I suppose this is fine. You can find it through my Twitch TV channel if you click around for it or type !youtube in the chat.

 The pandemic has been a strange thing. It doesn't feel like it affects me IRL but I suppose it affects everyone even if they don't feel like it does. Well, for one thing it took more than a month for me to get my new PC this year when I ordered it. I try to not worry about things I can't control but in any case, I want to make it clear that I don't think I'm in any particular danger from the virus and I don't feel any necessity to get vaccinated at this point in time. I keep to myself and don't even have a real job in real life(IRL). So the idea of me worrying about getting sick and dying just doesn't even make a bit of sense. However, I have to mention I am proud of myself that I pushed myself to finish making my newest Super Mario Maker 2 Superworld. It is a solid piece of work I think and well, it might not be a wild hit, and the game may not have much of a community to appreciate it anymore, but I think this game is relatively timeless and that if people want to make returns to the game they can have some enjoyment out of such curated content.

 I want to live each day thinking I might not be alive tomorrow. I'm not trying to hurry to my death, just trying to avoid wasting time. So that's why I'm not trying as hard as I could be to see growth on my channel, or else I would have been playing Pokemon Unite every day instead of how much I have been. I feel like I want to lean more into the artistic side of my personality, because my imagination when put to work can deliver some fun experiences.

 And now that I type that I realize that this could be an instance of me trying to make myself feel better in a roundabout way. Maybe I'm denying the idea that I could be afraid of failure when considering Pokemon Unite. And I think there is some truth to this suspicion. It's like trying to ask someone out on a date. Maybe you don't even do it because you are worried you're going to be rejected, as I was by the SMM2 community. As I was by the Dota 2 community before that. These rejections lead to disappointment.

 I like both name ideas. Part of me wants to try to be as positive as possible and another part of me just wants to be as honest as possible. I'm going to have to side with honesty.

New opportunities and new apprehensions

 Over the past few years, my voice has been heard and my words have been read by powerful people from time to time. My highest viewed video on YouTube reached over 750. I drew Twitch staff's attention to a chat history functionality that a third party website was offering to select paying customers for added security for TV channels on that website and they decided to add this feature to the clients automatically and for free, but it is only visible by authorized individuals instead of everyone(for moderation purposes). I made some poor audio quality Saga Frontier playthrough videos and I successfully predicted Saga Frontier Remaster coming to Switch and it will be ready to play in April. 

 Am I worthy of the title influencer? Most certainly not! Would I ever be? I do not know. But it is clear that I am a noteworthy individual. Am I exceptional? It would appear most people on the internet do not think so. But that doesn't stop me from being what I am and being true to myself and those who believe in me. And I can assure you, that I will never have an interest in dishonestly manipulating other people, unlike many of the influencers I've seen online.

 Sometimes disgusting things happen, and whether they are important or not changes from person to person, and from disgusting thing to disgusting thing. I debated with myself often whether I should post some sort of shame video on YouTube since it's not something that's forbidden and this year I finally did just that. I am proud of myself for doing it. I'm not sure when I'll make another video like that or what it would be about, but it's somewhat likely that I'll continue to make such videos.

 Sometimes exciting things happen. Starcraft 2's story coming to fans was one such exciting thing. The multiplayer design was a disaster IMB(in my book), but that didn't stop me from appreciating what we got that was good. This year I think I will purchase the remastered version of Starcraft: Broodwar so that I can gain access to ranked play. If any of you are on the fence about that, we could play private matches on the new ranked maps to help you decide.

 Other exciting things are the plethora of games coming out that look quite interesting. Project Triangle Strategy released a Demo(which I've already played, it has replayability but I declined to replay it so as to save storage space) and it looks a lot like Pokemon Conquest and Final Fantasy Tactics and Saga Frontier 2 and Octopath Traveller. Presumed to be made by the same development team that worked on Octopath Traveller.

 The next numbered platforming adventure in the Crash Bandicoot series is finally coming to Nintendo Switch, which has been my most used gaming platform since I started playing Super Mario Maker 2. Playstation 2 and 3 game development actually skipped such an adventure, choosing instead to try out a bunch of experimental game designs that were hit or miss. I've briefly previewed someone playing this game on Playstation 4 and I'm pleased to report that it looks just as intriguing as the good old games.

 And of course, this month, the Green Star grabbing game, Super Mario 3D World game came out on the Switch and I've been playing it. And it's so much fun. I decided to do a sort of celebration for it. I figured it would be fun with lots of cool ideas and so far it has not disappointed. I'm not done playing the game yet, but it's been an interesting ride, and apparently full of optional challenges and comes with optional cheats as well, so as to be interesting to all skill levels of players. I don't regret deciding to unlock all the rest of the emotes, and it was also a way for me to reinvest in the stream because I had not ever gifted a single subscription before I got my first payout. Of course I proposed that viewers help with the cost of the emotes, but ultimately it was up to me to make sure the goal that I set was met and I fulfilled the majority of the obligation myself. And since the government has been giving just about everyone some money to help build the economy, who am I to tell them that I should not invest the money they've been sending me?

 It's worth noting that I predicted SM3DW game was coming to Switch, also. But I did not anticipate the announcement of Bowser's Fury. And I haven't had the chance to play this new attachment release yet, but rest assured, I will soon. And this explains what Nintendo had been doing with Mario after all this time since Odyssey. SMO was really good by the way. And so was NSMBU Deluxe. Still working on post game content for those games, however. Definitely planning to 100 percent NSMBU and NLU.

 The celebration for Saga Frontier is coming also. And like when I celebrated SM3DW, I am hosting a SMM2 course making contest. However, I can't be as generous as I was then with gift subs. Honestly, that was a one time thing. But I am resolved to gift a tier 3 subscription to the winner for any Twitch TV channel they want. It's an often underutilized subscription tier, but there are some partnered streamers out there that have fantastic emotes, and I'm doing a nod to them by obligating myself to this proposal. If you do not know, partnered streamers are able to offer a greater quantity of emotes to their subscribers than affiliated streamers. And this quantity extends to tier 2 and tier 3 emotes of course. As it is, the winner of the previous contest chose to get their gift to my channel, since they knew that a portion of the money would go to my channel directly, while the rest goes to Twitch.

 

 My physical health and my diet are difficult for me to talk about, but originally I made this blog so that I would not have to repeat myself about this kind of thing so for this log I will also discuss these things.

 This winter, when around the time when the snow hit, I got constipated. Now, I ended up having a sort of explosion of liquid coming from my bladder as it was full. I do not believe my colon was full, as I was led to fear that it was as has happened many times in the past. However, at one point or another I had eaten some refried beans and they were not digested very well. Furthermore, they made me feel like my colon was crammed too tightly with beans as if it was a can of beans itself. It was extremely disturbing of course but it wasn't a particularly new experience for me. The new part was the bladder fullness feeling. Although I have to say, the pain all around was extremely hard to bear and I wished I could just die without pain. I doubt that will happen. If I die, I will presumably be in a lot of pain. It's grim to think about, but I suppose the will to live and do good is strong enough that the pain cannot be dulled. Any attempt to dull the pain just ends up in failure if not outright backfiring.

 In any case, I believe it is moderately plausible that I have type 1 Diabetes, if type 1 Diabetes even exists the way doctors think it does. There are a few problems here. One problem is I don't want to inject myself with insulin. Another is that sugar isn't the only thing that can be problematic for me. But everything I know about it fits what's wrong with me. The problem is that there's a lot more to it than that. So, I'm resolving to try to eat as healthily as I can. And one of the ways I'm improving my diet is to add sunflower oil to some vegetables and fry them. Instead of just eating them without additional fat content. I'm also trying to be more careful about ingesting herbs and peppers since they have helped problems along more often than solving them. I would go into more detail about it, but I do not have conclusive information on these things at the moment. 

 Another thing I started eating recently was sunflower butter. And I'm not joking when I say it looks and smells like peanut butter. I stopped eating peanut butter because well there was a time when that was the only thing in the house that we hadn't eaten that could be eaten as it was. Back when my parents were distracted and hadn't been giving us enough food each week. Food is very complicated. Perhaps through overeating of that particular source of protein I developed an emotional aversion, or perhaps it is something else. But for whatever reason, so far this SFB has been good to me.

 I've tried and tried to take in milk, whether whole or not, whether lactose free or not, and I keep getting similar results. My body doesn't want the sugar in the milk. I can only say that this has to be attributed to my 'type 1 Diabetes' or similar illness. My body goes through some really annoying experiences when I consume some sugar that doesn't agree with me. And it seems like it's especially bothersome when it comes to tapioca and nuts. And that includes sugar from peanuts. I did an experiment recently, I had 2 packs of spinach, and I ate one with some cane juice(derived from a can of fruit, in this case blueberries, but that's not particularly relevant since I've determined that blueberry sugar is safe to eat for me or at least safer than other kinds), and another with sunflower oil. Now, spinach naturally has some sugar in it, but my body seems to be able to handle it just fine when I eat it alone. In fact, it really appreciates it. I'm not sure how helpful or how neutral adding oil to it is, but it's clear to me from the experiment that it's better than adding cane to it. My body was actually surprisingly fast about purging the cane, probably because it was eaten with the fiber from the spinach.

 I do not pretend to understand what type 2 diabetes is, but I've been watching some YouTube videos, and if what I'm being told is true, it sounds like 'a typical diabetes sufferer' has a problem of self-control that I do not have. They can eat sugar and gain weight. They can also get energy from exercising. It is argued that they have trouble losing weight because their stored fat does not get recognized as a source of energy from their bodies. But that doesn't sound like an illness to me, just an overabundance of food. They say that if you stop eating, or better yet, stop eating sugar, you can keep on using fat and protein as nutrients. I think this talk is primarily directed at hunger issues. Your body is hungry so even though it has energy, it's blind to it. If you fast long enough, your body will adapt and start consuming the fat you have built up in your body.

 If all of that is true, then type 2 Diabetes as far as I can tell does not deserve to be acknowledged as a condition. How is it any different from a properly working weight managed body? The properly working weight managed body can recognize all sources of food energy. I am pretty sure my body can't do that. All a type 2 Diabetic needs to do is stop eating? That's a joke of an illness if I've ever heard one.

 Now, part of me wonders, is it possible that my type 1 Diabetes condition or whatever you want to call it is also self-inflicted? Would that be, then it would also be possible that aside from takin insulin to be okay? If it were a simple matter of these conditions being opposites to each other, then you'd think that would be true but it does not appear to be. But what's more concerning is a general lack of sensitivity to the dietary needs of someone like me.

 Now, I remember being recommended to me to try Amaranth flour and so I did. People argued that skinnier people just need lots of carbohydrates and to be perfectly honest, even though I went through an entire pound of that stuff, it really didn't seem to help my body, it kind of felt worse. And the awkward thing is that it's not like I thought it tasted bad. My conclusion is that my body doesn't really want carbohydrates that much and it would rather have protein/fat primarily. That might have something to do with some sort of anti-sugar thing but the question is, is this really involving the pancreas being attacked by my own immune system? I don't know, and even if it does, can't I do something to help the pancreas besides just taking insulin as some sort of cheat code? Wouldn't taking the cheat code do more harm than good?

 What I know for sure is that often times, medical practices do not address core issues, they address superficial issues. And I suspect the same is the case with insulin. Unfortunately, at least in the English speaking repository of knowledge that we have on the internet, as far as I can tell, there is no alternative treatment. And this is a seriously big deal so I guess at least for now, I'm on my own for figuring out a way out of this mess.

 But at the same time I can't be too optimistic. Even if there is a way to reverse the condition, there's no telling how long it would take to figure it out. I wonder what people that take insulin think about type 1 Diabetes. I feel like the people that realize they have this condition are in a great minority among the world. Most people seem to have no problem gaining weight and is insulin injection just another path to gain weight? I don't even know, there are a lot of unanswered questions right now, and I should probably try to do some more research before I conclude that I have that condition.

 It's hard to find reliable information about this stuff. As an example, I'm very allergic to the sugar in such things as apples and grapes, just as I am to it in tapioca. And such things are actually on a list to help the pancreas be healthy. Various suggestions to improve health are probably worse than batting averages.

 I will continue to try to be healthier and in the meantime I will continue to share some of my experiences with anyone that would like to find out about them. That might include some video editing, but most of what I've been doing lately is streaming Twitch because that is something that is a lot easier for me. However, if you would like to get together with me and talk about video editing ideas or help me with the process, you're more than welcome to chat with me about it on my communications server.  You can also just join the server if you want to chat about things in the web log in general.

Finding a way to being valuable

 2019 was a big year for me. I got too busy to even make a blog. I'm sorry to all that I've left wondering what I've been doing. If you were reading my last blog from 2018 you'll notice I was trying to get a 'job' streaming games. I basically work for myself, but the value of my work is essentially earned through others deciding that my entertainment being provided to them has value and they have the resources to contribute to me for my efforts.

In other words, Every Twitch TV streamer is subjected to the idea that they must labor tirelessly until people find them worthy of donations. This hasn't been something that meant a lot to me personally until I became an affiliate last year. Yes, while playing Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, I reached the goals I needed to reach in order to qualify for a job at Twitch. It's worth noting that the majority contributor to my affiliate status was me playing Super Mario Maker 2. Have I made any money yet? In that entire year worth of streaming? No. Twitch does this thing where they wait for you to earn 100 dollars first before they pay you. So, as you can imagine, my viewers have not been able to give me very much. In order to encourage more donations I have done things like draw my own emotes which people can use across all of Twitch in any channel they chat in, not just my own. 

I'm running a Super Mario Maker 2 contest...if you make courses for that game, you can get the information you'll need about that here. And I'm planning to make a big deal out of it if I can; I'll donate gift subs if I have to in order to unlock another emote slot for tier 1 subscriptions.

Today something interesting happened that really got me curious; and sometimes when I get curious I stop procrastinating. I was procrastinating making another blog among other things. I got a notification in my channel that I got 100 bits donated to me by a bot. So I found out where the bot came from; and apparently someone, whoever it was has some sort of... Coil Subscription. I am not sure how helpful Coil would be to most users, but in any case there seems to be some sort of website traffic earning system in place in addition to the watching service(presumably someone would want to bypass the commercials that they would otherwise experience when trying to watch content from my past broadcasts or highlight videos). How useful would that system be for me? I have no idea. But it's something I might need to look into. It's questionable whether I could make it work for this blog, or for that matter if I could make it work for multiple things. So far, it looks more intriguing than the service called Patreon has been...in any case, I need to figure out where I can earn some regular money instead of just 100 dollars every 3 years or whatever Twitch is doing to me(it's not their fault, it's my lack of a consistently generous or otherwise populous audience that is to blame).

To be fair, 2020 has been a rough year for consumers in general. They might not get as much work as they used to due to the terror of the disease that has been worried about. And it wasn't until around the end of 2019 that I became affiliate... and it's not like I made a huge announcement(like, on this blog, for example) about it. I've told some people close to me. But they haven't really cared about my effort enough to so much as show up once to say hello while I work(even though me entertaining people and talking to them while I play games is the entire point of my work, and many of these people spend time watching TV in their spare time, which is my work... TV). I'm drawing art just like my mom did and her mom before her. I thought it would... attract more people. I actually got a host from a 2,300 viewer stream recently. I ran one ad when there were not many viewers left and my ad revenue for the month shot up to a comfortable all time high.

A lot of what I've been doing the past year or so has been me goofing off and having fun, and there have been precious few that have definitely got a lot of enjoyment out of watching that. But I think the moments where those appreciate the show are not as numerous as I'd like or perhaps I'd be receiving more. In any case, I feel like perhaps it's time for me to try harder to reach a more broad audience and at the moment I feel like it wouldn't be a bad idea to announce something. But first, I need to introduce the announcement.

Some months ago we makers in Super Mario Maker 2 got access to the Super World update. We can now have players go through maps course by course, through various paths(sometimes just 1 path, and to be real the maps have a maximum course allotment of 5), up to a total of 8 maps. I've uploaded a few variations of a Super Coin World, and then eventually took down the final version of that in favor of a Super Extermination World. If I could leave both up, I would. But I cant. So, the next best thing was to double my investment(online subscription with Nintendo) and use my alternate email accounts to make additional SMM2 accounts that can upload new Super Worlds. So, with that in mind, I would like to point out, that I have been deep in development on a new Super World. The Super Worlds that I've uploaded up until now were not designed specifically with the limitations of Super Worlds in mind. Some courses may well have been thought of as Super World friendly, Endless Challenge friendly, or whatever... but mostly they were just considered to be fun courses to watch and to play, for me to share with other Twitch streamers so I could have fun watching them play and they could have fun and entertain their viewers. It would be an understatement to say that I've had a blast uploading those 83 courses that are available on my first SMM2 account. I'm near the limit of 100 courses, but I'm still planning to make more courses there, but the production is slowing down. And that's doubly reasonable because I'm going to hit the limit, plus I'm making on alternate accounts.

 

My new Super World, which I hope to release as soon as possible, and I'm not sure when it'll be fully released, but I have a strategy for uploading the courses and updating if necessary...will be a 3DW-exclusive Super World. That means all the courses will be from the same style of Super Mario Maker 2 course. There are 5 possible styles to build in, and I'm using only the fifth. This is because I've noticed that an enormouse percentage of the first clears I've got in this game are from 3DW style courses, and it's easy to see that the average player just hasn't mastered the fundamentals of the style. This new Super World of mine is aimed at fixing that problem. It's going to help the players to get good, without making anything too difficult for them. I have to admit, I've got inspiration from many sources, but one game in particular has probably done something super important for me to make me realize something that's been missing from my course designs... Minesweeper Genius is a game on Switch that has some pretty strict rules about how the randomizer works. And that helps make the game easier. Well, I'm being strict with myself about certain things, so that the players know what they can expect and the puzzle aspects of the Super World are going to be toned down because of that. Many times my puzzles have frustrated players and yet as they'll be going into this Super World, they'll gradually be exposed to the same rules that I'm restricted by and they'll learn to trust those rules instead of getting suspicious if the rules change from course to course.

That's not to say that the Super World will be easy. I don't think I could find playing it fun if it were too easy. It'll still be exceptional, and yet I'm hoping at least random players can clear every course. One thing that I'm working on is I'm bringing down the average clear check time for my courses with this Super World. Most courses will be cleared before 3 minutes, if not sooner. The only ones allowed to go over 3 minutes are those with multiple Check Points. The overall size of the courses should be more similar to a Nintendo game course while also containing exploration challenges just like the old Nintendo games. The NSMBU Deluxe mechanic of Star Coins is going to be here in the form of Green Mushrooms. And once per map, the player will be reminded that every course in the Super World has exactly 3 Green Mushrooms that they can grab because grabbing all 3 Green Mushrooms will be the clear condition for 1-2, 2-2, 3-2, and all the way up to 8-2. Similarly, the -1 courses will be 'grab 6 Key Shards then open the Goal room door', the -3 will be 'two Zones of autoscrolling while collecting coins(my most popular archetype when performed in the SMW style, I'll be attempting to '1up myself' with this decision)', the -4 will be 'linear challenges', and the -5 will be 'Thwomp courses'. This pattern is going to help players to be prepared for the next course and will give them a steady flow of things to practice...without feeling like they are getting too much changed for them by leaving the 3DW style entirely. I think that's something that more casual players struggle with more than a veteran player would... changing styles when they'd rather not. And that could be part of what separates the best from the above average in a mode like Endless Challenge. Even I find myself switching controllers sometimes based on the style of the course. 

I'm done working on the first 16 courses of my superworld, with 24 more planned, one of which is being worked on now. If anyone reading this post plays the game and wants my first maker code, it's NGK-D5J-B1G. You can then access my Super Extermination World if you'd like. All the hardest courses in that Super World are optional. So although I think the majority of players can clear it, many of the relatively easy courses might be too frustrating since there are so many clear conditions and people tend to prefer Check Point courses. That's why with my new Super World, I'm trying to use Check Points more often, as well as make more linear courses because players tend to get lost and then frustrated when I give them too much freedom to explore.The Super Extermination World is themed, and it's mostly based off of RPG games like Lightning Returns, so it's no wonder that many platforming casual players aren't too interested in the Super World. But the ones that give it a chance have definitely enjoyed it so far. I don't plan to take this Super World down, so even if you read this blog late, it might still be up. Granted, I have a lot of Coin Collection courses, but I doubt I'd put back up a new Super Coin World, at least on my first account anyway. Time will tell.

In other Super Mario Maker 2 related news, I have convinced a website helping big SMM2 teams to put a link to my discord on their page. My team, the Coin Gang is not a 'partnered' or hosted team, but perhaps with time and enough support from the community, we one day will be. With enough members, we can qualify for that and perhaps see even greater growth and as a result, affect the SMM2 community as a whole for the better. I also make courses called 'Explorer's Guild' courses and that's basically what you'll see in my Super Extermination World... but when it comes to elite gaming, there are teams that pride themselves on getting good, and that's where the Coin Gang comes in, where players are tested by the makers in fair ways outlined by the leaders of the teams...in this case, by me. I'm the sole approval agent in the Coin Gang and I doubt I'll be delegating that responsibility any time soon. We have around 30 makers or so in the Coin Gang now, although a large portion of them just make appropriate courses and are either barely conscious of the existence of the Gang or are completely oblivious. But that doesn't stop me from listing the courses for people to check out because I truly think these are fun courses. If you're wondering why call it Coin Gang instead of Team Coin...it's because 4Kids censored Team Rocket from Rocket Gang. I'm just going with the original translation. I don't think the word gang really needs censoring. Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong.

Well I should probably get back to streaming and maybe do some proper video editing again, but I hope everyone that read this enjoyed the read and who knows, maybe they'll have fun watching Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Toadette run around doing Super Mario things designed by members of the community...if they care to find out, they know where to watch it, on my TV channel. I think I'm going to make a document soon providing links to every collection of videos that I have up on Twitch because my Videos page on Twitch doesn't have enough shelf slots for them all. You can check out my discord for an update on that or maybe I'll post about it in a blog here soon.

Online gaming communication services of our modern day

In an effort to make my blog a little less about me and more about helping other people learn something, I figure it's time to start blogging information that is more suitable to the average person. Who knows, maybe more of my friends will read my blogs since it's like my blog world no longer revolves around me and has more of something they are interested in finding out.

For this web log, allow me to explain some of the programs I use online and how they work and what they are used for. In the process of writing this log, I have determined that the flavor of this post will be slanted heavily towards "teams" and not so much the other things.


Steam. Not the stuff in the kitchen. Because this is the name of a game downloading service, a browser, a friend-based chatting service, and a company that sells games and in-game content for free-to-play games as well as the non-free-to-play games.

I remember when I first started using Steam. It was only because there was only one game on there I was interested in playing? Wait, nope...that's actually not when I first started using Steam. I am pretty sure although I don't remember it clearly, that I started using it as just a chatting service rather than anything else. Yeah, because it's super popular and sometimes your online contact just wants to communicate on one of their most-used communications services.

Does that mean Steam is a great service to use for chatting? No, not at all. It's okay. It has some dark mode chat as default and many programs do not, so it has that going for it. People that spend a lot of time on computer games will be able to appreciate how easy and quick it is to read messages with Steam's default chat mode. So, there's certainly nothing in particular that's wrong with it. But it's just an extra, important and necessary service attached to what Steam is primarily used for, and that's a place where you can go to play various games.

But how's the Steam community? IMHO, very terrible. The vast majority of Steam players are very rude to put it mildly and even a relatively calm and sensible person may eventually transform into a hostile person from too much exposure to what many of you may know as either 'toxic players' or 'bad association' or perhaps you have your own term for it? In any case, due to a pattern of bad behavior from immature people on those servers, I mostly just play either single player games or 1 vs 1 games on Steam nowadays. Long gone are the days where I would regularly serve as a diplomat with little to no thanks for my efforts in a game where teamwork was important? Well, no, that's not entirely true, because Steam isn't the only platform where I can play some team strategy games!


Riot Games. They only have one game ironically enough. They don't really pride themselves on proper English and you don't have to look any further than their company name to figure that out. However, one thing that I've noticed over the years while studying video game companies is that they excel at communicating. They have a general idea how important communication is, so they make some efforts to control their players in that regard. I won't get into details about that because this is a blog about communication rather than punishment. In any case, the only game service they have available is their team strategy game, League of Legends.

I believe it's still the most popular game in North America when it comes to team strategy games. And I believe the primary reason for that lies in the general toxic mindset of the average United States citizen. Such behavior is not welcome on Riot's LoL servers, and as such, the game serves as a bit of a safe zone, where someone like me can practice their diplomacy skills and not in vain. I've received recognition for my efforts on a regular basis, even though it hasn't been public recognition, but from individual players and from the game itself when it passes along feedback about statistics of being honored by players.

Their chat services are very similar to Steam chat services, although I will comment that even though LoL supports voice chat in game, Dota 2 has superior voice chat enabled for the Steam platform. Although I will mention that there are much, much better services for voice chat than Dota 2, it's still a decent starting point of comparison. Both games allow tags or nicknames in case you would otherwise have difficulty remembering a player appropriately through their username and/or the rest of their profile. And both games have emotes in place, although I have to admit that in Dota 2, they are definitely steering towards the obnoxious with how they are being implemented. Furthermore, Dota 2 literally has ads while you're playing the game, as well as gambling as a side game while you play, such as predicting the winner of the game and they also support a subscription-based matchmaking which they didn't in the past but throughout its history, they have tainted their own product with favoritism. League of Legends has different issues however.

So, what's wrong with LoL? To be honest, I haven't given it that much effort to figure out yet. I think one of the biggest things they struggle with is transparency in showing their players what's going on that could be improved on. There's a lot of 'ear-tickling' to players, doing their best to reward everyone with acknowledgement of their job well done performances, no matter how helpful their teammates were that may have influenced those performances. To fix that wouldn't have anything to do with changing their communication style, but rather to more accurately assess team fight contribution and honestly as I know, there are no team strategy companies actually in any kind of race to do it.

Years ago, I tried to get a rank in LoL, I don't even remember what was going on in my life at the time, but I remember enough to know that I had computer troubles. I disconnected and got credit for losing a match that I helped my team win in the end, among other things that went wrong, not that such things necessarily influenced the result by much. Who knows. However, it's worth pointing out that the very popular game streaming service "twitch.tv" is influenced more by a player actually playing ranked than by other things as far as I can tell. So I'm going to start regularly playing ranked LoL and hopefully get some more viewers into my channel from that.


On the twitch scene, the majority of my viewers come to watch me play cards. I know a part of that is those card game communities are smaller, and I have less competition. But I also know that if I was more skilled at such games then I would have an easier time getting viewers.

Let's go tackle the stuff you probably want to know about twitch? Not yet, I'm not done talking about video game companies yet.


First, let me break up the discussion of cards a bit. I was going through computer troubles and because of that, I started playing Hearthstone. What's Hearthstone? It's a free to play collectible card game online. No clutter in your room from cards while deck constructing which was potentially eating up too much time in attempting to keep things tidy. I've been playing card games since I was very small. I remember even in preschool, my teacher had me playing cards and I think perhaps even some relatives were playing cards with me in order to develop my understanding of some things, as well as to train my mind. I was impressing older people apparently, but there's always a bigger fish as Qui-Gon Jinn would say.


Blizzard. Not the cold storm that you're worried about in winter. Because this is the gaming company that makes Hearthstone. This is the third company I'm mentioning in this blog and it will hold a special place in many gamer's hearts, even if they no longer play their games anymore for many reasons. South Korea as a general gaming population turned Starcraft --which is a Blizzard game-- into the first major E-sport. That is, an electronic sport to be played. League of Legends and Dota 2 are both also recognized as big E-sport games.

Hearthstone is interesting in that it actually isn't recognized as an E-sport but is wildly popular. To be honest, I've played card games that were more fun, but this one isn't hurting overall on the interesting game play experience. You can pay money to speed up card collecting or you can do it much more slowly if you're actually enjoying it or have nothing better to do. Given the economy of the game, it's more difficult to invest in it nowadays than it used to be, and there are better options IMHO that you can go to if you have limited time on your hands. But I don't have a good reason to discuss all the various card game options and their pros and cons in this blog post, so perhaps in the next one I will tackle that.

Blizzard's card game has a relatively limited chat experience, and the emotes are very interesting and sometimes very well done, while other times they are generally super cringe-worthy. You can link your Facebook account and get friends over Blizzard's App that way, and you can find out what your friends are playing, whether it's Hearthstone or one of their other games.

Blizzard has WoW(World of Warcraft) that's free to try, then you have to start paying to get past the introductory progression level, which I only played to get myself the Hearthstone Paladin class' alternate hero art, which simply meant bringing a single class to the point where you can't progress any further without payment. The game is actually not interesting and the only explanation I can offer for as to why people play it is they like reading books because there are small tidbits of story that you can unlock while you play the game and complete quests, but in actuality, there's nonsense afoot because the game effectively has no classes. You can make any class do a job that's basically asking for a skill-set/interest from a completely different class. IMHO, it's a very poorly designed game that apparently did some things better than its competitors did, but that's not saying much considering how incredibly boring those games were. I'm more critical than your average person would be however because I actually played a lot of role-playing games, in particular, the higher-quality ones and I can assure you, the only thing this game has over most high-quality RPGs is that it is simply another genre, the massively multiplayer RPG genre. The genre is in my opinion, emphatically inferior. That's not to say that it would be impossible to change that opinion, but this game certainly doesn't change it.

Blizzard has OW(Overwatch) which is their style of a shooter game that I've never been particularly interested in, is a pay-once-to-play game from what I know of it, and it apparently gives special powers to the characters to spice it up and make it more interesting than it would be otherwise. The simplest way to explain it would be "what if all the team shooter players had their own Final Fantasy class flavor?" or something like that. I haven't really been tempted to play this game, but if a twitch viewer ever donated to me with the express wish that I try it, I most certainly would without complaint.

Blizzard has 4 other 'relatively popular franchises': Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. I don't play Diablo, Warcraft is a dead franchise thanks to WoW --I may have to do a YouTube video explaining why I call it dead as well as a separate franchise from WoW even though the HotS interface considers WoW and the Warcraft strategy games the same franchise-- existing, I don't play Diablo as I consider it boring and weird, Starcraft is a phenomenon that has partially burned out in my mind but is still an interesting game if one wants to be a high-energy player, and Heroes of the Storm is another team strategy game, and since communication is very important in team strategy games and this post is about communication online, I will have to just skip over the big 3 game franchises(even though I had some cool things to mention about Warcraft in the previous blog) for now that I just mentioned as they are not particularly important for the information I'm trying to get across.

Heroes of the Storm. Not related in any way to the precipitation cycle that makes sure all the crops get moist. The storm is a fictional thing, something in an alternate universe that steals characters from other universes, which explains in story why Blizzard is able to bring in characters from all their franchises. Something that actually makes a lot of sense and is something that both Riot Games and Steam have failed to deliver in any particularly sensible way for their team strategy games.

Just talking about its name deserved an entire paragraph. HotS is a game that ironically has been designed astonishingly well, which compared to the amount of effort that has gone into it, has largely been ignored by computer game players. As a result, the player base is amazingly toxic and weak-willed compared to the player bases for Dota 2 and LoL. I'm not currently playing HotS, but if I had reliable friends that are good at strategy games to play it with me, I most certainly would. At the moment, for the average player like me, the gaming environment just isn't supportive of us going solo if that makes any sense. LoL just has more to offer, but I really like this game a lot and wish I could get more out of it.

Like LoL and Dota 2, you can voice chat with people, but it's also something that a lot of people ignore, while in Dota 2 you are defaulted to listening to other people. Meanwhile, in LoL, you only voice chat with people that are in your group. So in Dota 2, people can tell others if they are going to be muting whoever, but in HotS, we just have no information about those kinds of things for the most part. Now in LoL and Dota 2, because of the game's design, you'd think that wouldn't be too much of a problem because there are small moments of downtime in LoL that you can use to your advantage sometimes to send very short messages or slightly longer ones if you have higher WPM typing skills, and in Dota 2 there is actually a pause system which many players don't respect and therefore violate, but the funcationality is there. But in HotS, you don't really have time to talk to other players through keyboard chat. You can sometimes send very short messages, but there's so much constant action that it's honestly pretty easy to either ignore those messages or be ignored yourself.

But I insist that it's not the game design's fault, it's the developers that don't know how to implement a better-working communications system that are to blame. The core problem is they are trying to use similar rules for communicating that LoL uses, even though the game design is very different. IOW, whoever designed the chat in HotS made mistakes and they need to rework or overhaul it. I like a lot about the game and they do a lot to surprise me, so I doubt it's really my place to tell them how to fix that, but I'm sure if they realized just how much of a problem it was they would actually fix it. It's probably just a matter of time. I'm not sure why until now I didn't realize just how much of an issue it is, but it's there. I'm not sure exactly what direction they could take, but I have some ideas although they aren't really all that important for this post.


So, since I brought to your attention the 3 big team strategy games that I've played, you probably are wondering if I'm going to go into more detail about twitch.tv, right? Not quite time yet.

There's one more company that I didn't mention yet that is very relevant, and its game is not on Steam, so it's worth mentioning it even though I'm going to leave out mentioning other games that share a lot of similarity to it for this post.

Pokemon. That's right, the Pocket Monsters. They have a card game. It's online. It's free to play. And instead of the card crafting system that Hearthstone uses, they have a trading system. A lot of the cards you might get are trade-locked, but since you can acquire trade-unlocked cards without spending any money, the progression in this game has an unusual acceleration curve potential for players, especially if they are good or simply have generous friends.

On twitch, many streamers will try to promote themselves by offering giveaways to their viewers. I've received most of my donations this way. Which means, not a donation that was given specifically from a viewer to a streamer. However, as a streamer, I've received a few donations from viewers in my channel's chat box, even though as far as I know, they don't watch me regularly. Interesting, isn't it? Of course, it's easy for partnered streamers to do giveaways because they get donated a lot of stuff! You can find out a little bit more about what that's like later on as I will provide a relevant link.

My friend asked me which card game was I playing exactly. So let me explain. Wizards of the Coast made numerous card games, including Pokemon and MTG. MTG is an extremely popular card game that is played anywhere that paying large sums of money for hobbies is popular and card games are played. Pokemon as a card game was developed with a lot of issues, so it's far from an especially pleasing experience overall, but it's surprisingly entertaining compared to Hearthstone simply because it's easier to acquire the cards you want to play with through the trading system. WotC sold their intellectual property which is the card game to the Pokemon company. Which means it has changed a lot about the game to make it more fun and a better hobby to invest in than it used to be. Smaller community, therefore less competition, and it's easier to get noticed.


I think we're at the point where it's time to mention one more company before going into more detail about Twitch. It's technically not a gaming company, but this company like Facebook has been a very big influence in my life over the past decade or so. Facebook has been fantastic, don't get me wrong, it has been amazing and I wouldn't trade my experiences on there for anything, but there's stuff I've got from YouTube that I honestly can't say I would have got anywhere else. I can't even begin to explain how influential it has been not only for me, but upon a huge population of the entire world. So I won't even try.

Instead, let me link you to my YouTube channel's video listing and a few related videos.
Keep in mind I'm aware that the recording quality for some of these videos is not good. Some of them are quite old after all and I am still learning how to record and edit properly, I'm sure there's always going to be more to learn for quite some time more. Also, I'm aware that in at least one of these videos I was being a bit foul-mouthed, I'm trying to improve on that but I've sustained some really frustrating online friendships over the years.

The video directory. (iNsOmNiAcAnDrEw was my old Starcraft username but I changed my YouTube name to GreenRay to match my Hearthstone/HotS username)
A LoL highlights video. (This one is edited to include Starcraft music and some comments about the plays in it, will definitely continue putting in comments, not sure one way or the other about the music)
A sample game from Pokemon cards online. (this game has a rotating standard and expanded format, so some of these videos might be from obsolete decks)
A sample game from another card game called Faeria. (as you can tell from this video, it has balance issues, but it's been fun besides that)
A sample game from another card game called Shadowverse. (it was a draft mode, this is what some people would call the "Japanese Hearthstone" but it's not quite that simple)
A sample game from Hearthstone. (this features Reno Jackson who is famous among Hearthstone players, to find out why you can watch my game, but there's also a music video parody of him you can watch that I had nothing to do with personally but if you like Hearthstone, you should definitely watch it!)
A single highlight from Heroes of the Storm. (this is the shortest video link I have here and it has some music that I was listening to at the time I was streaming)

Now, some of these videos, like the Shadowverse video, show my face with a webcam, or maybe a dancing 'ray avatar' or other things that indicate this was extracted from a live stream on twitch.tv. I can export videos to YouTube directly, or I can download them and edit them further. In the case of that LoL video however, the interface will show that the highlights came from the game's highlight function. So, it was not necessary for me to record the games live on twitch.tv since there's replay functionality in the game. Finally, you've arrived at the point where I'm going to comment on the online television service.


Twitch. Not a jerking or convulsive movement. This is a streaming service intended for gaming. Many players are able to generate a lot of money using it. Even though I don't have a job at twitch yet, I spend a lot of time on their website watching other streamers and learning how I can do better work as an entertainer. Yes, I'm attempting to entertain people online through more than just YouTube! YouTube would be a great place for me to generate exposure for my twitch channel if I were to actually be a better YouTube user than I am now. I'm currently a power clipper(previously known as clip champ) for YourPrincess, and the statistics support the influence YouTube has had on her streaming channel in an interesting and encouraging way for anyone that can make good YouTube content and get some reliable exporting of information from it for others, which I hope to be me one day.

Twitch channels can host other channels, to help keep the channels like mine without a schedule pumping out content for viewers, or to help give smaller channels like mine(which happens a bit in the card games I play at times) a little extra exposure from the bigger channels. So that streamer I just mentioned is on my hosting list if you want to stick around and see her. Is a streamer from California that plays LoL, in case you're wondering about the details. So if you show up to my channel, you might not always see me streaming. Why not give me a call someway and show me you would like to watch me play something if you're not finding the channel I'm hosting interesting enough? I would appreciate it and if I'm not busy I'm sure I can change whatever plans I had for that day to accommodate you. If you cared enough to read this far into this post, you are undoubtedly someone that at the very least enjoys my style of communication on some minor level and would probably be a good audience member for my stream.

At this very moment my chat box is popped out on my secondary monitor, and you can type "!day" without quotation marks into the chat as a message and the bot will update you on my current status where I live with a weather report. You might also see some twitter-generated public messages from one of the bots since I've got that programmed in since I don't visit that site all that much and would otherwise miss some of those messages. That's mostly for my own purposes and not others, it's something that might pop up. In any case, it tells me when my channel has stopped hosting someone(their channel is no longer live or I canceled the hosting due to starting my own stream or changing host selection), as well as whom it is currently hosting and other important notifications as well like if someone is hosting my channel or if I have a new follower.

Saying hello can be just as simple as asking the chat robot for a weather report for the city I live in! And there are many other commands that streamers can program the bots for to make things a bit easier. There are also default commands, like /ban or /timeout which help to discipline or punish unruly viewers. And such commands are generally usable by any volunteer moderators.

Right now I don't really have any online friends available that I can trust to moderate my channel, but my channel's community is so small right now that it would be completely unnecessary to have anyone do it besides myself. Some bigger streamers have many moderators, and they have options for their channel to regulate the content of course, including but not limited to restricting chat to followers only or subscribers only and that kind of thing. I have that option too of course, but it would obviously be pointless and really, even if I was a bigger streamer, I would have to be careful about such restrictions if I really cared about the community and also those outside the community or just less dedicated to it. I saw one guy streaming from Japan that would just enable follower only mode just for when he wanted to do a giveaway then would turn it off after that business was over, so that made sense for what he was doing as an example.

I'm not really an expert twitch user yet, so allow me to post a YouTube video of a top Hearthstone streamer explaining a lot about how the economy works on this television service.

As you can see, there's reason to believe that I could definitely make gaming a part-time job. But it's going to take a lot of work for me to accomplish. I know many players such as  Disguised Toast(the maker of that economy video), YourPrincess(I jokingly refer to her as ZergPrincess because she's generally role-playing as an aggressive champion in LoL, but she prefers to be called Jayden), and Faellu(first twitch.tv channel that I became a regular viewer of, she is a variety streamer that was streaming Hearthstone primarily at the time) have worked much harder than I have at this and they are very successful for a great many reasons. And I'm sure some of you may think(if you've even read this far) that I can't become an affiliate, much less a partner. And maybe you're right. But I can at least try.

So for now, that's my main focus, getting a job streaming games. And it's been so for a while, but I haven't communicated this very effectively to many of my friends, which is why I decided it's owed to all of you to make this blog. And I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to do so. To be fair, my health has been so miserable that I'm not sure my focus would have been strong enough to come up with all of this. In any case, I hope you'll look forward to my next blog which I can't make a promise on when I'll make it, but assuming I remember to review this blog before I make it or I simply remember normally, then I'll make it about card games online specifically in order to generate some interest in some of the stuff I like to play for my friends. Because I enjoy playing cards with my friends and it would be nice to have more of that than what I'm currently experiencing.

My username there is RayTeamStrategy, and this is the channel.
The username is a play on words. Real-Time Strategy is a genre of game which Starcraft(one of my first great "PC gaming loves" if you want to call it that) is in, among other games, and Team Strategy games are the genre of game I like to think I have a special talent for.

You might think that twitch.tv was the last thing I could possibly explain when it comes to communication. If you thought that, I wouldn't blame you. It's been a long blog already, and to think that there's more would be quite the assumption indeed. But there's more.

Discord. Not a disagreement between people. Incorrectly derived from the word discourse it seems. It's a place you go to discuss gaming in particular, for it is a communications program built for the gamer. And it's free. It's an amazing service that I feel like people would pay money for if they had to, but it's free. The server is free. I suppose you can make purchases on Discord to suit your purposes and get some value out of that, but for the most part, there's nothing to pay for. I think you can do a subscription so that you can use emotes from other servers and/or programs or something like that and I don't know there might be more stuff, but everything I need to communicate as a gamer is here and I don't have to pay anything for it.

I can invite an unlimited number of people to my server. I have chat channels set up to discuss various genres of games, I can assign members of the server to various roles to indicate what kinds of games they like to play. I can do a lot of cool things with it, but in the end I could always use more people that I know in real life on that server. I can talk to you just as readily as I would on the phone, with the exception that my phone doesn't work with Discord. But I know some gamers whose phones work with Discord and I've even talked with at least one friend that I met online over Discord using my computer and their phone.

There are voice channels on my server so voice chat can happen while playing cards together to make the game a bit friendlier, and there is also the possibility of teamwork being enhanced by voice chat, which I took advantage of during the recent League of Legends quest in order to defeat a rotating game mode boss on the highest difficulty possible with a specific handicap for each player. I remember literally talking on mobile phones with one of my friends while playing 2 vs 2 Starcraft back in the day, and it was glorious. And all this can happen on the computer without any kind of phone bill.

Of course, I have a phone bill and if you are my friend on Facebook, you have access to that phone number that I'm using. But it's unrelated to Discord and mostly irrelevant to me when it comes to my gaming activities. I can actually sometimes voice chat with the opposite sex on Discord because we have a common interest! We play the same game, although there's usually more required than just that, it's still a lot easier than trying to talk to such people over the phone!

I know what you're thinking, "but did Discord help him get him a romantic relationship?" Okay, smarty-pants, you're right. I'm still single and ready to mingle or whatever you like to call it. But from what I can tell, the opposite sex is interested in men that have a job. So I can't allow mindless chasing after the wind to be a priority to me. I'm tired of wasting time. I want to do work. And for now, it seems the most viable work that I can do is entertaining through twitch. But Discord is a great place to communicate with me and anyone else you play games with. It's definitely far superior to any in-game voice chat service I've run across. And none of the other voice chat programs even compare to it because it's so superior in so many ways. I'm not going to detail out why it's so good, but it's truly amazing and a must-use program if you enjoy playing games on the computer regularly IMO.

Twitch TV has its competitors and I could argue for or against twitch for whether streamers should or shouldn't use their streaming service(I've found out recently that a YouTube user I've subscribed to switched to Facebook for streaming of all platform possibilities), but I can't imagine liking a voice chat program better than Discord, and as an overall communications platform it seems completely peerless to me. Facebook has voice chat now and I've used it a little bit and that definitely helps Facebook step up its game, but it's meant for a different audience and doesn't really suit the gamer's needs appropriately most of the time from what I can tell.

You can join a discord server from just a link and chat through your browser, and you can also download the app for an improved experience. And here's the permanent link to my server, Stronger Together.

If you'd like to share your gaming experiences, you can post screenshots in general chat as an example. I do that myself from time to time. Usually I know who people are(roughly at least) immediately when they join, but let me interrupt this web-log-post-making for a moment to make another chat channel specifically for people that might not want to post directly in a general chat to explain who they are, because then whether myself or someone else is confused about who someone is, they might be able to find out there. Would make the server a little less confusing for newcomers to it I guess for every post in there.

Nothing we can do will be perfect. All we can do is our best to make what we do as perfect as possible. In other words, try to improve and look around you for examples, because there's always someone to learn from. Good and bad examples of various things are everywhere. And I'm hoping you'll find something to like about my Discord server or my Twitch channel. Either way, I'd appreciate any feedback you can give me so that I can figure out an improvement.


The nice thing about twitch and discord is that I have a lot of control over such things because I'm the administrator on my own channel and on my own server respectively. And not everyone may know this, but I like being in control. But there's more to building a community than just trying to control everything. You need people in it, and I know that controlling people is generally not a thing we should aspire to, even if my oldest email account's username would suggest otherwise(it was an ode to Civilization/Starcraft which are strategy games) which was dcttr66, dictator without the vowels, followed by 2 sixes because that's how many letters are in my first and last names. I think 6ray6 is a good improvement, but keep in mind I have many aliases(usernames) so don't try to use the same one somewhere else again and again and expect to always get it right!