SandyFortune

So, I've been doing it. I've been streaming over at twitch.tv/sandyfortune. If you want to catch the regular reminders, make sure you follow my status updates here, because I'll post a 1 hour warming for a drawing stream. Or you can follow twitter.com/mlpsandy for more frequent reminders.

I've been streaming fairly regularly so far. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8pm to 11pm (EST/EDT). So far, I've been gaming on Tuesday and drawing on Thursday. But I'm gonna switch it up. My streaming goal was not to play games (as fun as that is), it's to draw. Streaming art will keep me in the habit of drawing regularly, give me communication practice, and give me everything I want to get out of streaming.

But I'm going to adapt my current schedule. I'm going to try a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday schedule, from 8pm to 10pm. With any ol' random pick up stream when I feel like it, but those will be the regular events. Short and sweet, but more often. (And still 2 hours more than two 3 hour streams.) The days are a bit odd, but that's because Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings are usually full.

Anyway. That's it for now!

Second time writing this on my phone because I forgot to post this last night from my PC, and the DA app is horrible to the point I can’t see what I’m typing. Ahem. Anyway...

I’ve started streaming! I’m going to try streaming art tonight! I’m over at twitch.tv/sandyfortune right now, aiming for Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 to 11pm (EST/EDT). I’ve been playing Portal 2 to get the bugs worked out, but now I’m ready to start poking at art again. (Which should be “fun” since I haven’t done any drawing in a while.)

I decided against Picarto for now. I’m more familiar with Twitch as a whole, and would like to get established there since there’s a lot of options. I’d like to primarily do art, with some story-driven games sometimes. I don’t know if I want to split that between two sites right now. I guess I’ll see how Twitch Creative section works out. Maybe I’ll fall back to Picarto if I end up knowing more people there, but... Twitch is Twitch.

Anyway, I’ll probably be trying to draw stream splash screens and such this time. Also remembering how to use Photoshop. And a tablet. So... We’ll see how it goes.

Hi. Hello? Is this thing on? *chews on microphone and makes feedback*

So, uh... As you no doubt have noticed, nothing came from the Picarto vs Twitch thing. That was almost a whole year ago. Time flies when you're having fun unemployed, running out of savings, and don't know what to do with yourself. Long story short, I got another programming job, moved to the city, and now...

I have fiber Internet. The good stuff. 1000/1000. I have absolutely no excuse for not streaming. I still don't have a Cintiq like I've wanted, but my Surface is already showing its age. It can't run Photoshop CC and stream, so I'm going to have to work on my Intuos on my desktop again. I haven't done art in about a year, either, so I'm definitely going to be rusty.

So far the plan is to start streaming a couple days a week and see how it goes. Maybe I'll draw. Maybe I'll play a game. I don't know yet. What I know is Internet speeds like this are rare. I don't want to sound goofy, but this is a blessing I can't waste. I need to make use of it. I don't know what I'm supposed to stream, but I have to do something.

Soon™.

So let's say I'm serious about streaming, but the only thing left to decide is what platform to stream on... For the 2 or 3 people who might want to watch, would you want me to use Picarto or Twitch? 

I've been trying to read up all I can on both platforms, so maybe I'm missing some huge feature that'll make me pick one or the others, but for now, they both seem so close that I might have to go on what people want to see. As far as I can tell, the viewership is about the same in both places. At least when I looked, which was during the time of day I'd be streaming. So the only things I need to consider are the kinds of viewers, and the platform's features.

We all know what Twitch is. Question is, is the broad community a good thing? Is it good to be able to switch your channel to games sometimes? Or a creative channel that isn't drawing? What about the chat features? Subscriptions, and tips, and chat overlay systems, and all that? There's an established way Twitch streams work, and everyone's familiar with the tools.

Picarto is more focused on art, so the overall community is smaller, but that could also be a good thing. It seems there are channel subscriptions. Also support for multi-streaming. But last time I paid attention, mobile support was pretty lacking, and the streams I watched always had people who couldn't watch, but wanted to chat. (And when drawing streams have so few viewers in the first place, 2 or 3 people who can't watch is a big deal.)

So yeah... Streaming. It'll keep me working and also encourage me to interact with people, which is something I'm really bad at, because I'm scared of people, heh.