On Never Streaming

I’ve always kinda wanted to stream. Whether it be streaming video games or doing art, the idea of showing what you are doing, recording your actions and people wandering in and saying hi and talking to you all sound very nice. You end up making friends and maybe even building a community. Heck, you don’t even need to have anyone watching your streams, you can just stream yourself playing games and talking to some guy in the background in Spanish, not caring that no one is actually there, doing a 30 minute survival mission with three squad mates that are oblivious to your recordings, rambles and musings.

The idea is so nice that I don’t even really care if it never took off. I wouldn’t really care if I didn’t go big or anything, I’m not the sort to always look forwards and work towards bigger and bigger numbers. I wouldn’t even want fancy donations or anything. In fact, streamers with constant scrolling chat, scrolling donations, cheers and all that get on my nerves. If I were to stream, it would pure and simple.

I don’t stream though. I can’t really bring myself to do it.

You know why I don’t stream? Well, there’s two main reasons.

The more obvious reason is that, for the longest of times, I had REALLY shitty internet and just didn’t have the tech to stream reliably. The speeds weren’t that awful but packet loss was a huge issue. When you’re streaming, you don’t really want packet loss. Combined with the fact that I always had a shitty laptop and I never had a good mic or anything like that, I’d never be able to start streaming even if I wanted to. These days, I do have far superior internet speeds and a better computer but I don’t have a super computer capable of running everything at maximum settings and also capable of beaming all that data to Twitch or Youtube or Mixxer or whatever.

I still need to get a good mic though. My laptop microphone is kicking the bucket and I don’t have a nice mic that works.

I suppose another reason is that I can’t settle on a username. I’ve been slowly leaving the old Medic persona behind since I don’t play TF2 any more and whenever I do, I play anything but Medic. But I can’t decide what to call myself in return. I’ve currently settled on Retvik, but frankly I’m thinking of switching back to Phovos, my original username before I became (The) Medic.

But the bigger issue is that I am really boring. I have nothing interesting to really talk about. It does depend on what you play, I mean, if you’re playing a competitive game, part of your commentary will be call-outs and things like that, but in more casual games, my commentary just fades off into boring drivel unless I have someone else to talk to. It’s not that there aren’t things to talk about, it’s more that what I can talk about in a long, run-on, off-the-nose way tends to be really boring stuff that doesn’t make a stream fun. It’s that or you hear my stupid, barely understandable call-outs that tend to be late or wrong anyway.

What makes things worse though is that I will drift off into complete silence. I’ll go completely silent because I’m concentrating on what I am doing.

So yeah, the main reason I don’t stream is because I’m a really quiet, boring person. That’s not a bad thing on its own, it just doesn’t make for good viewing.

Then again, there might be a market for that. There’s a market for nearly everything these days.