Here's that news thread, as promised! 😁

https://twitter.com/TrezyCodes/status/1574397225928740867

1️⃣ OBS 28.0.2

The new patch dropped a few days ago! I've been using it since release and while I was crashing often with 28.0.0 and 28.0.1, and I've seen a _significant_ improvement to stability.

If you haven't updated yet, I think it's time. 😁

FWIW, I have been able to consistently recreate 1 crash scenario with this update: changing scene collections while the virtual camera is enabled. I'm not sure if this is new, but it's a scenario most users are unlikely to experience. 🤷🏻‍♂️

2️⃣ Bot Accounts

Popular 3rd party @Twitch developer @CommanderRoot has reported a sharp increase in creation of bot accounts in the past 2 days. These accounts seem to be intended for follow botting, but it's difficult to know at this time if anything else is going on.

https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1574177125497708545

According to @RayApollo, @Twitch is aware of this and is actively working to identify/solve the problem.

3️⃣ Turbulence at Twitch?

Okay, this is a multiple part conspiracy theory, so buckle up.

First, @Twitch announced the rev split 5 days ago. It was _not_ well received, to say the least.

Second, @Twitch has not tweeted since announcing the rev split. With the uprising that's been roiling since the announcement, it would be wise for them to say _something,_ but we've had only silence.

@ConnieCKnight (@Twitch's SVP of Global Creators) announced via an email to colleagues that they were leaving the company for another opportunity. They haven't confirmed if it was related to the rev split change, but the timing is miiiiiiiighty suspicious. 🤔

4️⃣ Direct Cheers

@Twitch is experimenting with an alternative to bits. It's called Direct Cheering. Instead of buying an intermediary currency (bits), direct cheers allow viewers to pledge cash directly towards the streamer.

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/cheering-experiment-2022

The percentage @Twitch is taking from direct cheering isn't entirely clear yet.

🔚 That's all the news I have from this past week! Lemme know if I missed anything, lemme know!

Also, don't forget that there is _no stream today._ I'll be back on Wednesday at twitch.tv/TrezyCodes! We'll discuss some of this news while we continue working on my overlay! 🥳

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/TrezyCodes/ycOtjId

Machination Monday: 26 Sep, 2022

The next thing to talk about with @Ninja's "streaming everywhere" experiment is audience engagement. 🧵

One of the reasons audiences look for smaller streamers is because they're better at engagement. When every (or at least most) chat messages are acknowledged by the streamer, it makes everybody feel included.

Alerts on stream give viewers agency to draw attention to themselves and goals (follows, donations, sub points, etc) create a sense of community. This is what adds up and makes streaming so amazing: audience engagement. No other digital medium matches up.

The thing is, this doesn't scale. When you've got 50-100 people in chat, you might be able to keep up. When you've got any more than that, it becomes too much. With ~21,000 viewers? There's no chance.

@Ninja has actually removed any semblance of chat or alerts from his stream. He only shows the game and his face. He does acknowledge the high level alerts (subscriptions and donations) verbally, but that's about it.

Even still, @Ninja reported having serious difficulties keeping up with chat during his multi-cast. While he was "only" streaming to 21,000 people on Twitch, he was also streaming to thousands (or tens of thousands) on all of his other platforms.
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/ninja-struggles-to-keep-up-with-chats-during-multi-platform-stream-experiment

Instead of merging his chats, he was trying to keep up with each of them individually. When that didn't work, he switched gears and just focused on the chat from one platform.

He left all of the other chats derelict. 😬

His viewership still only went up because everybody knew this was just a test, but this could be the death stroke for a smaller streamer. Not attending to chat means people leave, and people leaving en masse is how your channel(s) fade into obscurity.

SO, here's what I would suggest:

If you're going to multicast, make sure your chats are merged. Make sure that you can see all of the messages on all of your platforms in chronological order, and make sure you know which platform a message is from.

Once you get too many chatters across platforms, this is still going to be an issue... you'er going to need mods. Your moderators can monitor chat and pick out the important things. Questions, novel comments, etc. You need a system for your mods to funnel those things to you.

Once this is in place, you should be able to handle multicasting. You'll need more mods as you grow, but that has always been the case.

Now, I've pitched a pretty significant thing. Restream merges some streaming chats, but not all. Maybe there are other tools that can do it, but I'm not familiar with any.

But before you even go down the road of trying to figure out how to accomplish all of this, you might want to check out my next thread on whether or not you should even try multicasting...

BTW, make sure to check out my previous thread about the technical hurdles of setting up this whole thing.

https://twitter.com/TrezyCodes/status/1570789710209093635?s=20&t=2qv1VoZNvngfeAD34fzvVw

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/TrezyCodes/ZVbICD7

Ninja Streams Everywhere

@Ninja's "streaming everywhere" experiment is a _really_ interesting exercise for a whole lot of reasons. I'm gonna cover each of them (technical logistics, audience engagement, and whether you should try it) in separate threads. 🧵

First, let's take a look at the technical setup required to make this whole thing work. If he's using the typical software that indie streamers use, we're looking at home built PCs, capture cards, and OBS.

FWIW, I haven't been able to find much about his setup online but I've reached out to his team to see if I can get more details. For now, I'm just gonna make some educated guesses for now. I'll come back and make corrections if they get back to me.

The biggest challenge is that he actually needs to output (and produce!) 2 separate streams: 1 in landscape format for desktop platforms (Patreon, Twitch, Twitter, Youtube), and 1 in portrait mode for mobile platforms (Instagram, Tiktok).

OBS simply doesn't do this. It's designed to have 1 stream output to 1 RTMP destination. You can output to multiple RTMP servers with the Multiple Output plugin, but you still have to send the same stream to all of them.

Even if OBS _could_ do this, controlling it would be wild. You need to be able to tell both outputs which scene to use when.

There are probably some tricks you could use (like having a small picture-in-picture scene for both streams and having them both sync'd when scene swapping), but in general this is a pretty significant technical feat.

The only options I've come up with are:
1. Run 2 instances of OBS on a single machine
2. Run OBS on 2 separate machines

Both of these are tough, but still doable.

I threw together diagrams of what @Ninja's setup might look like in each of these scenarios. Here's the version where we're running 2 OBS instances on a single machine.

...and this is the version where we're just using 2 separate machines to run OBS.

Now, I could be _totally_ off. There are probably both hardware and software tools that can handle this multiple output setup that @Ninja is using, I'm just not familiar with them.

Other folx with more intense stream tech experience might have more insight, so I'll tag in @heccbrent and @EposVox. ❤️

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/TrezyCodes/CVU1gkd

Ninja Streams Everywhere: Technical Hurdles

Time for another story from my days as a musician. This one is much shorter, I promise. It's about when a house literally fall on my head. 🧵

https://twitter.com/TrezyCodes/status/1564372400426258432?s=20&t=jDfYyLNK8COFT-xoop73mA

Okay, I've mentioned how I had basically no money at any point when I was a musician. That means we really didn't have anywhere to practice, either.

Just a few places we used as practice studios...
- my bedroom (sorry dad)
- an abandoned house
- the barn behind my house (sorry mom)
- an abandoned office building
- another abandoned house
- an abandoned train station
- yet another abandoned house

One day we’re practicing at an abandoned house (the 2nd one). We have access because the singer, Liz, her mom was a real estate agent. She’d bought the plot with the intention of bulldozing the deteriorated old 2-story house, but hadn’t gotten around to the bulldozing part.

We had the place to ourselves. We’d practiced there 3 or 4 times already and the acoustics were... serviceable. Plus, we were all weird, moody teens, so we enjoyed the atmosphere.

The first indication that we shouldn’t have stayed there: the bassist, Ogre, had put his foot through a floorboard the first time we were there. We started putting one of the amps over the hole when we came to prevent people from tripping. 🤦🏻‍♂️

We didn’t know it, but this would be our final practice at the house. We got everything set up, goofed around a little bit, and started to jam. 

After an hour or so, we took a break. We’d played through our set a couple times and decided to step outside to get some fresh air (it was hella musty in there).

We stepped out onto the porch. Ogre and our guitarist, Derek, had a smoke (🤮) while Liz and I goofed around in the yard.

There I am, minding my own business... then it happened. One of the columns supporting the roof of the porch fell directly on my head.

Nobody touched it.
Nobody leaned on it.
Nobody even breathed in its direction.

It just kinda… fell.

I was fine. I’d actually done more damage to the wood than it did to me. As it happened, the wood was so rotted out that it was basically hollow. There was a dent in the wood where it hit my head.

I was absolutely shocked, but that’s about it.

We never played at that house again. Liz’s mom finally had the place torn down shortly after and thanked me profusely for not suing them.

And that was it. That’s the end of the story.

My thoughts on the updates from today's Apple event. 🍎 🧵

First up, we had the Apple Watch Series 8. I'm not an Apple Watch user, and there were no updates that made me want to buy one. The car crash detection is pretty neat. Otherwise... meh.

The Apple Watch Ultra announcement was a head turner for me, tho. It's been a long time since I've been backcountry snowboarding, but I'd _love_ to have one of these things the next time I get out on a mountain.

More specifically, the path tracking and safety alarm features are _super_ interesting. Getting hurt, stuck, or lost in the powder is a terrifying prospect. Having the Ultra would replace the need for several of the safety devices that I usually bring along.

The new speaker on the AirPods Pro 2 is an awesome upgrade. Being unable to find my lost case is the biggest gripe I've had. Being able to make the stupid thing beep at me is going to make my life a billion times better.

Unconfirmed, but it looks like it might have USB-C, too.🤯

iPhone 14 adds the same car crash detection that exists in the new Apple Watch, which is pretty neat. The real showstopper, tho, is the addition of satphone capabilities. You can't actually make calls, but you can send simple text and alert rescue response teams to your location.

The coolest thing about the satellite capabilities is that Apple has setup their own response centres to help ensure your information from the satellite connection gets to the right rescue org!

The iPhone 14 Pro is what I came for, and I was only slightly disappointed. 🙃

First off, let's talk about the new Dynamic Island. I like it... but also I don't like it.

The design of the dynamic island is really slick. The animations are very fluid and feel really good, and the implementation of complications looks quite well done.

The complaint I have is that they've added more space between the island and the bezel. The result is that the dynamic island is now more prominent than the notch ever was. I may feel differently once it's in my hand, but the island made the video demo feel a bit claustrophobic.

Okay, but there's one giant reason I was disappointed: No USB-C. Again, this is unconfirmed as all of the shots of the bottom of the iPhone were either super short or artfully blurred, but what we could see on both the base and the pro models looked like Lightning connectors. 😞

Apropos of absolutely nothing, allow me to regale you about the time that my van caught on fire en route to play a show. 🧵

Many of you may not know this, but I used to be a professional musician. I played drums for various bands from 2002 - 2008. I performed on stage for tens of thousands of people, and on (I think) 6 albums. I toured all over the midwest US, and a bit across the rest of the country.

During this time I had very little money. Hotels were out of the question, so we slept in the very, very old Chevy van I'd purchased for $200. I'm pretty sure it actually had a bloodstain on the wooden floorboards.

This van served us well for a few trips. It provided shelter from the elements and it had ample room for carrying all of our instruments. It also made lots of weird noises that as an adult I'm now pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be making.

I'm sure it was fine.

Now, the van only had 2 seats, so it couldn't haul the entire band. I drove the van and the rest of the band took the singer's car. It was a pretty solid arrangement.

One day we were en route to a gig we'd booked at some tiny venue in Illinois. It was only ~1.5 hour drive for us, which is shorter than a lot of the shows we played.

If you've ever driven through Illinois, you'll be well aware that it's nothing but corn and soy beans as far as the eye can see. It's flat as can be and there is zero scenery. Civilisation doesn't exist.

We're driving down the highway through this corn-ridden hellscape when the band speeds up next to me. We were a bunch of young idiots, so it wasn't uncommon for us to do stupid shit when we were driving. I figured it was just another stupid gag.

It wasn't.

No, see... they had important information for me. The guitarist, Derek, was sitting in the passenger seat. He was mouthing something and frantically spinning his arm as if he'd become a windmill. I waved until I realised he was telling me to roll down the window.

So I did.

"IT'S ON FIRE!"

That's what he was shouting. I had no idea what the "it" was in this scenario. I mean... farmers burn fields sometimes and we were surrounded by crops, but that didn't seem like something dire enough for him to need to communicate to me. My confusion remained.

"IT'S ON FUCKING FIRE!"

At this point, it started to dawn on me that he might be referring to my automobile. I looked around inside the cabin, but saw no evidence of fire.

"WHAT?" I replied.

"UNDERNEATH!" he replied.

Surely not, I thought to myself. The van had served us so well up to that point. I mean... sure I had performed exactly zero maintenance on it since purchase, but why on earth would it be on fire? That kind of stuff only happens in movies, after all.

"Well," I thought to myself, "I might as well pull over and check."

So I did. Well... I tried.

As I slowed the van, I started to smell smoke. "Perhaps there's something to this 'fire' thing," I thought.

As it turned out, the smoke was coming from the stick shift. Not _through_ the shifter, but _from_ the shifter.

As in the rubber gasket around the shifter was melting. 😬

Interestingly enough, the reason the gasket was melting is because the motor was, indeed, ablaze. As I was driving down the highway, the fire was billowing below my vehicle and, consequently, up into the cavity below the shifter. Coolies.

A moment later, the flames started licking through the gasket. At this point, I slammed on the brakes and pulled off to the shoulder to more closely examine the situation, by which I mean I expeditiously leapt the hell out of that van.

Once stopped, the fire started to climb out from under the hood. I was safe, but things weren't looking good for the thousands of dollars worth of instruments in the back.

I was more than happy to let that shit burn in exchange for retaining my life. My band, however, decided that saving the instruments was worth the risk.

The singer, Bobby, wrapped a scarf around his face and tore open the back doors. They created a conveyer line, passing instruments from one person to another in an attempt to get them out of the fire.

Once all of the instruments were out, the van was wrapped in flames. We called 911 and firefighters arrived minutes later. They put out the flame by TEARING THE HOOD OFF because they COULDN'T FIGURE OUT THE HOOD LATCH. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Anyway, everybody was okay and the instruments were out-of-tune but otherwise still in working order, so we continued on to our gig.

We jammed all of the instruments into the singer's car, then sat on each other's laps to fit. We drove this way for 45 minutes. It was awful.

We arrived late of course, but we'd called ahead to let the showrunner know. He moved us from the second act to the headliners because he thought we were badasses.

At the start of the show he even announced as much and made everybody clap for us.

This is the point in the movie where the band would put on the most amazing show they've ever played. This, however, was not a movie. We were awful. 😅

The singer was off key. The instruments were out-of-tune. I couldn't keep tempo.

I mean... we were all suffering from smoke inhalation and exhaustion and we'd spent 45 minutes jammed like anchovies into a tiny car with sharp instruments poking into our flesh.

I junked the van and the band broke up shortly after that experience.

There's no moral here. There's no happy ending. It's just a story about a time when a bunch of stupid kids did stupid kid shit. I mean... I did warn you that this thread was apropos of absolutely nothing. 🤷🏻‍♂️

But hey, if this thread gets 100 likes, I'll post a picture of the band standing in front of the van. A picture which, up to now, has never seen the internet. I look like an idiot in it. But this is your prize, should you engage with my shameless engagement farming. 🤷🏻‍♂️

That Time the Van Caught on Fire

I've had publish (and last updated!) dates on my blog for years, but I recently took it a step further. Technical articles on my blog now have dependency lists. 🧵

https://twitter.com/TrezyCodes/status/1312771137290592256?s=20&t=2yaMTlXLwLMPbpLnyRQIiw

Technical articles often have no publish date, leaving you to wonder if they're relevant to the issue you're trying to solve. If it's an article about a library and there's a publish date, I can cross-reference with lib release dates to see if the article is up-to-date.

That's usually not enough, though. Even though an article about a lib was published recently, it may still be using the previous major version and none of the code examples will work for contemporary readers.

Btw, this was the case with my most recent article. I didn't know the new version of Discord.js had dropped while I was still writing, so the original version of the article was totally borked when using the latest version of the lib. 🤣

This dependency list is something I've been dreaming about adding to my site for quite some time, and I'm stoked to finally have it done. Not only does it list the dependencies at the time of writing, it also lets you know if those dependencies are currently out-of-date. 🤯

It's all very manual right now. I have to update the dependency JSON and changelog in @Contentful. Eventually I'd love to update it to do some _really_ cool things.

1) Have CI notify me when an article dep is out-of-date
2) Run a test suite that actually tests every code block

Also, all articles on my site now have a changelog (that admittedly could already use some styling updates). This is also totally manual and voluntary, but I'm hopeful that it'll help provide context when the publish and last updated dates no longer match.

Personally, I'd _love_ to see this on more blogs. I'm happy to be the first, but the value this provides to readers is immense.

If you're not publishing to your own blog, no worries! @Hashnode and @ThePracticalDev both support Markdown tables, which makes it really easy to format dependency lists. At worst, every publishing platform supports lists.

If you take anything away from this thread, let it be these three things:

Writing is obsolete upon publish.
Content and context are not contemporaneous.
Temporality is the responsibility of you, the author.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/TrezyCodes/LfOdCdV