Wasting time

by Duf Anything and Everything

Last night I should have been doing more prep for the road trip than I did. The yard was still filled with ponds so mowing the grass was off the docket.  I did a few things but I mostly just screwed around.  One of the screw items was messing around with X-split, twitch.tv and WoW. X-split is a tool that is used to broadcast your local desktop to the world, through sites like twitch.tv.  This combo is often used to live stream video game play.

I had no idea how popular video game streaming is nowadays.  Not only do people love playing video games, they apparently love WATCHING people play video games nearly as much.  I found myself spending 20 minutes watching Boogie2988 play Hearthstone and found it very entertaining.  Boogie is one of my favorite people to watch on YouTube which you may find odd since physically (morbidly obese) he represents the segment of the population that I find so annoying. However I find the guy to be a good mix of funny with intelligence.

So anyway I thought I would play around with trying to broadcast some WoW play.  With the free X-split broadcaster you have a number of limits with what you can do but I got it streaming.  X-split is cool in the way it allows you to bundle multiple A/V sources into a live stream.  In my set up I had my web cam video in a corner while my WoW window filled the rest.  Unfortunately my mic was misconfigured so you couldn’t hear my additional commentary, just the game sounds.

Of course this set up could be used to do something more productive than streaming video game play.  You could use it to live stream just about anything on your pc.  You have the option to stream it right to twitch.tv (aka. justin.tv), or save it as a local file.  I want to try to do more with this in the future.

My buddy Jeremy has been out of town for nearly two months.  It has been a rough 60 days for me, not having Jeremy available to me via Skype IM to bounce random thoughts off of is a luxury I found myself missing.  Thankfully he is home again now, making my daily grind at work more tolerable.

Tonight I am going to stop by Ali’s place to see the dogs before I leave and then later begin packing/preparing in earnest.