A couple of weeks ago was Spring Break for the district that I am substitute teaching for. I was going to use that time to write, but I ended up streaming on the platform Twitch. I’ve been a viewer for a very long time, maybe seven or eight years. I always thought that I would never stream, but something sparked my interest to start doing it.

I got a new graphics card for my computer since my old one was not being recognized. (It turns out it was not the graphics card, but the motherboard. I had to get that replaced.) The new graphics card had four HDMI outputs. I was thinking of getting a second monitor, but I didn’t know what I would do with it. My thoughts went to streaming. Maybe I could have one monitor to play a game and the other monitor to have my streaming software displayed. I also thought it would be fun to stream some Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), since I play it almost everyday. I also thought it would be found to have my own emotes when I actually make affiliate with Twitch.

I tried to stream LOTRO, but I didn’t have enough memory to smoothly run the game and stream it at the same time. My computer only has 16G of RAM. I could stream and play the game, but periodically the game would freeze on me. At first I thought it was just normal server lag, but after looking into my memory usage I noticed that was the issue.

I didn’t decide to give up streaming. Rather, I switched games and started to stream Stream Raiders and Marbles on Stream. I wasn’t getting enough viewers for Marbles, so I stuck to just streaming Stream Raiders. I don’t get many viewers, if any at all. I’m still learning how to work with OBS and the Twitch channel in general. It has been fun and exciting so far. I just need to save up money to upgrade my memory so that I can stream the games that I really want to.