Technical Difficulties

If you've been following the stream lately, you've seen me complain about more issues (than usual) and have likely seen the stream flat crash multiple times. Long story short, I'm going to suspend streams for the immediate future. Keep an eye on future newsletters for when I will restart.

For more details on this mess, read on.

At first, I chalked this up to bad luck--I mean, this is me after all. But as weird things kept happening, I finally fired up some network monitors on my end and noticed the hard-wired connection to my office is completely down. While the WiFi on my PC is decent enough to stream off of, I have no buffer at all, especially for the multistream setup that I have. So if I get any kind of a network hiccup, I'm going to crash.

Whoever wired the house decided it would be wise to have part of the run of an unshielded cord along the outside of the house. Tracking back when I started having serious issues last week, I'm rather positive that the storms that rolled through last week finally did the wire in and I just never noticed WiFi took over.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised I got away with it this long.

I've known for a long time that I would have to redo that run. Plus, my work involves using security cameras and I've long wanted to wire up runs to side of my house where the office sits. I've also wanted to make sure the kids' rooms had an ethernet connection too if I could swing it.

With that all in mind, and with weather cooling, I'm going to take the time to do this right--not just with the networking, but also with my streaming set up which is best described as "slapping more stuff on top of each other all year and praying it doesn't break."

I want to make sure that streams are stable, chat bot actually working, overlays & scenes that are actually organized (my OBS setup is a nightmare), and getting rid of bloat in my setup that I just flat don't need. So the time I had set aside for streaming is going to all that.

Again, tl;dr - streams halted for now. Will try to get them back up ASAP. But this should never stop you from donating!