This post is a 50-word writing challenge that was requested of me from my stream as a Channel Point Reward redemption, courtesy of Twitch user darthzelduh.
“What’s the last thing you recall?”
“We were traveling west along The Trail.”
‘The Trail?’ the scientist thought.
“You mean the Oregon Trail? Like the video game?” the assistant called out.
“A what?” the traveler asked, confused.
The assistant then enthusiastically shoved a portable game device into the traveler’s hands.
This post is a 50-word writing challenge that was requested of me from my stream as a Channel Point Reward redemption, courtesy of Twitch user darthzelduh.
As the parley came to a close, all the pirates let out a satisfied sigh.
Except one.
“Mom! I want another!”
The ‘captain’ let out an exasperated sigh.
“You can later, now go finish playing!
“Okay…” and the little pirate girl ran to jump in the bouncy ship with friends.
This post is a 50-word writing challenge that was requested of me from my stream as a Channel Point Reward redemption, courtesy of Twitch user darthzelduh.
It was a cloudless night.
Ghost-like, they shimmered and sparkled among the trees as their pale skin lit up where the light of the full moon reached through the leaves.
After dancing and mesmerizing their prey, they pounced, aiming for the throat.
The elves quenched their thirst with human blood.
Last night (as of the writing of this topic) I took a moment to breathe while playing games. I went on a bit of an honesty tangent about what was going on with me and the ‘epiphany’ that I had had earlier in the week. Since starting to work full time from home, I had been experiencing a decrease in my drive and motivation for the things I enjoy doing, and I finally had a name for it. Burnout.
The epiphany had come as part of a conversation I had with a co-worker that I share similar interests and hobbies with but hadn’t actually talked with since shifting to work from home six months ago. I had seen his name in the list of participants to an online presentation and I knew that I should reach out to him and just catch up, so that’s exactly what I did! I sent a meeting planner to just chat for about 30 minutes and let me tell you it was sorely needed.
To put it briefly, our conversation covered a few topics but gave us the opportunity to just vent a little about how the change in our work situation has impacted us. We both agreed, though, that all things considered we were truly thankful and bless with the opportunity to continue having a job uninterrupted unlike so many impacted by the pandemic.
The biggest thing that we admitted to each other (and the reason for writing this) was the fact that we were essentially burning out on screen time. Our jobs require us to be in front of computers all day, sometimes almost LITERALLY all day for the nature of the projects we’re on, and so the last thing we want to do is sit in front of another screen to try and enjoy our shared hobbies of video games and computers. When we reached this part of the conversation I had finally put a name to what I had been feeling so strongly the last couple months. I was experiencing what I considered ‘Screen Time Burnout’. For him, he shared a moment where he actually just shut down from work for the day and sat in his living room staring out the window at the trees. For myself, it was walking to the other side of the room and laying down to stare at the ceiling. (If you’ve watched my stream, you know I have a false wall partition I built to separate my office space.)
I ended up sharing this on stream because it felt like the right place to speak up about. My stream has been one of the things that’s taken the biggest hit for me during this time, because it’s one of the things I realized I was avoiding due to the burnout. I’d rather go do anything else than sit in front of a screen for another few hours. The same was beginning to apply to my writing. So despite my best efforts to combine the two (as I wrote about a couple weeks ago) I was still struggling.
My final comment about this issue last night was that if I truly want to succeed in writing and streaming, that I’ll have to manage myself better in regards to all the screen time and push through the burnout without making it worse for myself. We’ll see how that goes.
This post is a 50-word writing challenge that was requested of me from my stream as a Channel Point Reward redemption, courtesy of Twitch user darthzelduh.
The captain had heard the rumors of the ship flying a skull and crossed spoons.
Hands shaking, he lowered his spyglass and spoke, “Prepare for a parley.”
The first mate barked to ready their weapons.
“No weapons!”
Everyone stopped.
“The only ‘weapons’ that may save us are root beer floats…”
The previous entry I talked about blending my hobbies together. The core purpose was to create accountability towards completing writing and actually streaming. If I blended them correctly they would feed off of each other and help me keep motivated to continue pursuing my goals.
Today I’m talking about how I implemented some new Channel Points Rewards on my Twitch Stream (found here) and how viewers can participate in getting me to write for THEM. This will also help me be a better content creator as I learn different writing techniques and tools on top of streaming.
The Channel Points Rewards in question that I have implemented so far relate to giving me writing prompts and requesting a couple of different writing challenges for me to fulfill. (See the pictures below.)
According to the Twitch FAQ on Channel Points Rewards, the average viewer gains up to 220 points per hour. Subs get up to double (if they’re a Tier 3 sub, at least.) Some of the rewards are limited on per stream redemption’s and increased costs to help keep them from overwhelming me and make it possible for faster turn around on fulfillment.
On the topic of fulfilling these rewards, anything and everything that gets redeemed will be tracked on a Google Sheet I have set up. Link here for you to look things over if you’re curious what others have redeemed so far, as well as links to completed/fulfilled entries. Ideally I will be posting all of the fulfilled requests here on The Dragon’s Grove so that it helps generate views and traffic for the blog as well as (and in extension to) the stream.
The combination of these two concepts, writing and streaming, ultimately encourages me to stream AND write but also encourages people to stay and view/support my stream so that it can kind of create a sort of feedback loop of motivation. If people watch, I’m incentivized to stream and if they redeem points for writing…well you get the idea.
In the end, I’m hoping this will be a beneficial experiment so that I can try to keep moving forward with my goals.
First off, if you’re somehow here because you thought I would talk about blending random shit with a Ninja Blender or some other such food processor, you’re in the wrong place and I apologize. I’m actually here to talk about how I am going to try to overlap my hobbies together so that they complement each other.
With that little disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into it.
So, what ARE my hobbies? Well, according to what I wrote on my About page I like to play video games, read, and write. For those of you that are familiar with me and the blog you might be saying “Why aren’t you mentioning streaming? It’s listed as a hobby!” Well, you’re right it is listed as a hobby, but in my mind I see it as an extension hobby and I’ll get into this a bit later.
At the top level, video games are the primary hobby because I can pretty much play whenever, where ever and they’re easy for me to pick up/digest. The same can be said of reading and writing, thanks to today’s technology making access so much easier (there’s an app for EVERYTHING these days). But I don’t treat them as the #1 hobby I have because I’ve fallen out of habitually reading and just default to games, while writing takes motivation to want to complete. I do want to point out here, though, that these three things aren’t exclusive of one another in my mind. They have some fun overlap! Classic jRPG’s have lots of reading, and modern Party Games often require clever writing to grab people’s votes. (Although let’s be real here, clever in that case is more than likely catering to the particular audience with in-jokes and low hanging fruit, but whatever.)
On the subject of streaming as a hobby, I’d like to point out that there is a whole host of information and data out there around streaming, as well as differing opinions around it being a hobby for people. For me it’s an extension hobby branching off of playing video games. When I play games I don’t HAVE to stream, and I’ve done just that to enjoy a game that I felt like wouldn’t lend itself well to streaming. However, as I’ve been streaming off and on for a few years now, investing the time and money in my setup and equipment, I have tried different kinds of streams (like painting Pathfinder/D&D miniatures) and it really took on a life all it’s own in my mind, which is why I decided to include Streaming as a hobby when I started The Dragon’s Grove.
All that being said, how can I BLEND these hobbies? Well, that’s the challenge I’ve put on myself, because for the last couple of years my motivation towards these hobbies has dwindled (2020 events having a strong impact) and so I decided I needed to change things up. I’d been quietly tossing around the idea of doing writing streams for probably a year, soliciting interest from friends and acquaintances to validate the concept. Some of them even helped me brainstorm ideas on how I can make these streams interesting and engaging, but I didn’t act on any of it. Then, at some point in the last month, something clicked for me and I realized how I could make the interactions viable and easy for my viewers through Channel Points Rewards. This has given me the first sparks I needed to put things in motion. So with a little help from a friend to brainstorm through some options, I set things up.
Now let the experiment begin! I can play games on stream, people can hang out and watch and earn points. They can redeem points to give me prompts and to ask me to write something for them. It’s all very much a work in progress, but I’m just going to run with it. I’ll go into the specifics in the next post, but I will say this: You’re going to hopefully see a lot more activity here, which is a good thing! This way, I’m encouraged to stream and to write because I won’t likely be able to do one without the other unless the whole idea falls flat on it’s face. Which I’m going to fight to prevent (especially since I’m the sole person responsible for maintaining it all!)
See you in the next post!
Wow. No exclamation point to demonstrate my lack of enthusiasm, because 2020 has been a real shit show of a year. Not just standard ups-and-downs that come with life over the course of a year for most people, but a massive let down with not a lot of ups to balance it all out. Doesn’t mean we’re not trying, though, it just means that when we do finally dig ourselves out of the hole we fell in we might find ourselves in a VERY different part of town, so to speak. Others might even find themselves in a completely different town. I’m still trying to figure out where 2020 is taking me.
At this point if you’ve watched the news (especially in America) you know the state of things and so I don’t have to rehash it all in yet another way for you to understand the impact events have had on life so I’ll spare you all that reading and just sum it up from my perspective.
The pandemic sucks, no brainer there, and its changing things for everyone. For me, it meant going from an office environment to working remotely. It meant reverting into an introverted hermit (I was much more extroverted at work) and being very inactive. I retreated back into my shell of just watching the world burn, quite literally in some cases, and not interacting with anyone. I barely streamed or wrote anything. All I did was consume content. Most of the time it was garbage, like the sensationalized news and clickbait-y articles of shit that I never even finished. I did mix in some “healthier” content to try and balance out my brain, like some things I’ve been meaning to learn about which lent itself to increasing my social interactions through Twitch, making new friends, and having some fun in the process.
Now I’m going to try and bounce back. I’ve had some discussions with personal friends, and picked the brains of friends I made through Twitch. I have some ideas I can try, found some encouraging words to back them up, and I’m ready to just jump in. The next post I’ll talk about some of the future content I’m planning, but for now all I will say is that I’m hoping to blend and crossover the things I’m working on so that they better complement each other for my work habits and lifestyle.
I’m going to step up my game and try to do better, because I want to see my writing and streaming go places. For now, though, fuck you 2020.
Back in December I wrote a little blurb about some goals I set for myself for 2020 and beyond. I even shared a picture of the whiteboard (complete with my awful handwriting) that I’m using as a daily reminder of what I need to be focused on.
For those that are familiar with the whiteboard picture, or who recently came back from following the link above and saw it, I’m going to be talking about the left side only. I wanted to take a deeper dive into what those goals look like to me and how I might go about accomplishing them as the year goes on. (Next time I’ll go over the right side of the board, the things I need to be avoiding.)
First, a list of what they are and in no particular order of importance, followed by some background and motivations.
The first three goals are all kind of a bundled package in my mind. They work together and complement each other.
For as long as I can remember I’ve always had two problems. Reading, and daydreaming. Some of you might be thinking “But those don’t sound like problems at all!” Well let me tell you, when you’re growing up and you can’t pay attention in class because your imagination runs away with you? That’s a problem. Not a exactly bad problem, just one that impeded my immediate educational success.
Reading, though, was a two-part problem in itself. I loved reading, often times reading several grade or age levels above my peers and therefore more difficult than the things we were tasked with reading in school. This influenced my attention problems by making me less concerned with the rest of my schoolwork. I was often bored with the content being supplied to me by the educational system, as it didn’t feel difficult or challenging enough, so I would struggle to focus and complete the assigned classwork. Compounding on that issue was the fact that because I loved reading so much, I had an expanded imaginative capacity and could easily get lost in my daydreams. Fantasy 1, School 0.
Why bring this all up? Because for all that those might have been problems in the past, I never fully realized my capacity to create things from my own imagination! For years I’ve had this itch to just jot down ideas and get lost in them. See where they go and what they can become. I needed a creative outlet. Naturally this led me to the idea of writing my own stories and trying to share them with the world.
By now you hopefully made the connection between two of the first three goals listed above. I need to read to keep my mind fed so that I can be creative and output content. But why the blog? Well, not everything I “create” has to be a fiction novel, and it needs it’s space, too. I needed a home for the shorter things. A refuge for my thoughts when I just need to vent. Almost like a sort of diary but with the intent that in sharing these thoughts and ideas I hope I can also inspire someone else. In the end, this is where the blog comes in handy. It’s my space to share whatever I have on my mind (and thereby get it OUT of my head so its not consuming me.) Plus it acts as a window for the world to see who I am, and reach a potential audience for all my writing (especially if I hope to publish a novel.)
So, an abundant desire to create, complemented by keeping ideas flowing through reading other peoples work (ideas can be contagious), and balanced by a secondary outlet for…well, everything else!
Now, onward to the next goal. Streaming consistently.
Why is this goal so important to me when I have the other ones for creative outlets? Well, this one has its own complementary factors for the others. Who says that reading a book is the only way to consume content that influences ideas? Plenty of video games have wonderful stories, the only difference between them and a book is that the visual is provided to you on a screen rather than in your mind. Streaming consistently would provide a whole host of benefits that complement not only my other goals, but my normally introverted lifestyle.
I may have mentioned it before, but in case I haven’t I’ll say it again. Streaming is like an extension to one of my already existing hobbies. I love playing video games, and I grew up sharing them with my family and friends. We would take turns and watch each other play. We would experience the roller coaster of emotions in the stories together. As an adult this is a little more difficult. We’re all grown up and leading different lives. Some of us have started families. Streaming let’s me carry the spirit of those experiences into the future and share them with people across the WORLD. Which in itself is important because as a mostly introverted person I don’t like to go out and socialize. Streaming let’s me be social in a different way and meet new people with a shared interest. Another family of sorts, but also an audience that I can hopefully connect, and share with, the stories I intend to craft. It let’s me express myself a little differently than I would if I limited myself to just writing out entry after entry here. For example, I can (in real time) test out jokes, or pitch ideas to my regular viewers to see if they have any input.
I guess the direction that it all really ended up going in lends to all four goals being somehow complementary to each other. It will just be reliant on how I manage the balance between them all.
As for the final goal, being healthy, this should be an ongoing thing. It also sort of stands at odds with the other goals, as those ones focus on being less physically active. However, if I can be healthy (which will include eating right and getting in shape) my body will not only last longer but it will improve my overall brain function (or so they say) which means I can be that much more efficient in my creative goals.
See! They all sort of work together, even when they may not really want to.
Alright, with the background and motivations out of the way, let’s take a look at how I MIGHT be accomplishing these goals.
Publishing a novel is going to require being disciplined (I mentioned this in my other entry linked above.) I’ll need to actually WRITE something before it can even get to the point of being published at all, but it wasn’t enough to just say I wanted to “Write a novel” because in the end what would have been the point of writing it if I didn’t want it published? Thus, “Publish a novel” instead. To accomplish this I scheduled time into my week (through Google Calendar, complete with reminders) to sit down and write. These time slots are kind of catch all slots, though, because I needed to have time to write entries for my blog as well.
Due to time constraints during the week from having a full time job, some of the scheduled writing time slots actually overlap with reading/self-education time. The idea being that if I’m not doing one I SHOULD be doing the other. This gives me an opportunity to always be doing something considered productive towards the goals.
So, four days of my week have time allocated to reading/writing. Two of those days being my weekends, because as I alluded to above I don’t have an active social life. Thankfully, I separated the time slots on the weekends for reading and writing so that they don’t overlap. Less pressure. Again, this is all just for building up that “discipline”. Need to have good habits if I hope to accomplish anything productive. As the year goes on I’ll likely assign myself with more detailed goals. I have some in mind, I just haven’t imposed them on myself yet.
The streaming consistently goal is really rather simple. I told myself I needed to just stream three days a week, a few hours at a time. It doesn’t have to be any specific games (I like variety) and I’m really just trying to build up that discipline. Once I’m comfortable with it, I can explore ways to enhance the quality of my stream. Although, I did slot some time on my Google Calendar for Behind The Scenes work for my stream. Just some time to review what kinds of games are coming out that I want to keep on my radar, as well as be mindful of the games I already have in the backlog I put together (you can find it here on Backloggery if you’re curious.) That way I’m always thinking ahead for what I can be playing on stream and not fumbling around about it and making an excuse to not stream just because I don’t know what I want to play. This also ties into things I’m supposed to be avoiding if I want to accomplish my goals, but I’ll write that entry up later.
As for getting healthy? First thing I’ve been working on is just drinking more water and less liquid calories. I’m also trying to get into the habit of waking up early so I can hit the gym before work. I want to get to the point of going to the gym at least three times a week, even if it is just to walk on the treadmill for half an hour. Barring that, I’m trying to take more walks at work and hitting the recommended 6,000 steps a day that my fitness band keeps telling me I should be doing. (Yes, fitness app, I HAVE tried taking a walk today, you’re just glitched out! So chill.)
There you have it, a deeper dive into my current Top 5 Goals. Going to take them one step at a time and see where it all takes me.
They woke up hearing the sound of decompression accompanied by light that began to fill the chamber. These were the first signs of hope that they might survive the long night.
Felix was the first to regain some motor functions. The cold chambers weren’t kind to their bodies. He stretched his legs and began the struggle of bringing his body temperature back up to normal levels. As he moved around he examined his unorthodox companions. Horatio and Octavia were having troubles of their own. He noticed one of Octavia’s legs was encased in ice, a product of the cold chambers process. Though it didn’t take long to free herself the damage was already done. He pitied her for a moment before continuing his exploration.
With time they began to move better, but progress was slow going. Things were starting to look up again.
It wasn’t long after they woke up when they light finally filled the room enough for them to see their surroundings, and each other, clearer. That was when they noticed something wrong.
Looped around each one were long lengths of some kind of tether. This was their first cause for concern since waking up. The second was when they realized they couldn’t free loosen the loops around them to escape.
Suddenly, a shadow was cast over them and obstructed the light that brought them hope. Following the appearance of the shadow came a deep, reverberating sound and a large object floated in above the occupants of the cold chamber. It was then that Felix and his group remembered how they first arrived.
A voice rang angrily through the house “Damnit Jonathan! How many times have I told you not to put bugs in the freezer?!”
“Mom don’t! I need those for my experiment!” The adolescent Jonathan yelled back, hurrying to the kitchen to save the fly, hornet, and spider he had worked so carefully to catch.
The Dragon's Grove 