Making progress...

Well, hopefully I'll be in a better position for when I stream Doom II next because I spent the best part of 1-2 hours trying to get myself in a better position for Map 10, because I pretty much snookered myself up to the point I got to in the last stream! I managed to find some more ammo, as well as get the BFG, so I at least have some crowd control, although I do have to restart the map from scratch. I just hope I don't make the same mistakes I did last time, although that said, maybe I should consider going a different path, or maybe cause more in-fighting and take out the stragglers? Of course, if I did take the wide area to the left, I need to control the Pain Elemental that's with that group, whereas I just have imps and zombies at the path I usually take. It's a decision I'll save for next week though I'm glad I at least managed to give myself a better chance this time, because I doubt people want to see me die for the entirety of the stream xD

In other news, the GUC Discord will be deleted from Friday, leaving only the GUN Discord. This should hopefully make certain processes easier to manage, although I still need to think about how to handle the channels. I haven't been completely resting on my laurels at least; I've been using the time to consider plans of action, and to clear stuff up, as well as organising things better. This week, I also want to give the overlays of my OBS install on Windows 10 some love, especially now I've managed to reduce some work for myself in places, seeing as certain overlays can be entirely handled online, meaning I just need to worry about placing stuff like the Kappamon, the placeholder images for the bordered areas in some of the overlays, as well as a couple of other bits here and there.

It will be nice to have a level of parity between Windows and Linux, even if I rarely use the former right now; I do need to freshly install Linux Mint 19 at some point, but I'll more than likely save that for when 19.1 comes out, so I have time to back stuff up. It may also be time for me to start recording my streams and save them to their own external drive too, though by December, I will be changing the week order around to start on Sundays; better yet, the StreamElements thing has started working again, so at some point I'll be setting that up properly to handle my loyalty stuff, in addition to using it as my streaming timetable. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a "stream break" thing, so I've only put up Monday's slot for now, with Wednesday's being put up on Thursday, and as each day passes, I'll start putting the times back up.

As far as things go, it makes sense for me to stream on Sunday afternoons for "Strategic Sundays", seeing as I want to reserve all of Saturday for filming and occasional thrifting, as well as real-life stuff, although thinking about it, I could also revive Mind-Bending Mondays as an idea (to happen before Multiplayer Mondays of course), which means I can reserve Saturday and Sunday for filming projects, as I did in the past - and that might be a better option, to be honest, both because it's a working pattern I'm used to, but also because it allows me to provision for what is currently a pretty unlikely event, but it just feels right to continue on with what I was doing anyway. With that in mind, I'll need to write up a new schedule for December onwards, keeping in mind that I'll be having my "Xmas break" in mid-January, although I will probably not necessarily stream the 24th to the 26th Dec, and the 31st Dec to the 2nd of Jan.

Either way though, as I get used to things, I start to feel more comfortable with doing things, although officially speaking, it won't be till February that things kick up a gear; even if I'm trying to automate, organise and simplify over my 2 week admin break, there will more than likely be a lot more stuff to do after then, but at least things can be better organised! I've been expanding to other platforms over time, partly to see how well they work, and partly for additional exposure, as well as a fallback for when something else fails, though as of yet, nothing has. Additionally, some of the platforms I use work via blockchain, meaning that I can potentially earn an income of sorts (however small it is right now), which will hopefully mean I'll be able to meet eventual costs more easily. Of course, a lot of the stuff on the other platforms are mirrors of my main stuff, unless there's something specific to the platform I need to bring up.

Either way though, it is a good idea to expand presences, as well as make sure that you reserve the name for your exclusive use on the platform, just so there's no confusion. the added benefit of going on other, lesser known platforms (or ones that are just starting out) is that there's less competition on them too, which is something to consider, especially given that between Twitch and YouTube, it's somewhat saturated in places, plus in the case of YouTube, channels smaller than a certain threshold have less visibility and are getting royally shafted. Really, I could go into a fair bit about this but now's probably not the time. In any case, I really want to work on making my "Stormkeeper at Geeked Up" and "Played Up with Stormkeeper" sub-brands a bit more professional, and making processes more efficient and less reliant upon me having to constantly watch things, as well as giving them more visibility as well, in addition to doing stuff with Stormhaven Media as a whole, which is going to be a fun time.

I am mostly happy with my progress thus far, but I do need to get myself out there more somehow as well, seeing as sometimes I get less than 3 average viewers per stream, which is in a sense falling backwards; yes, I've made Affiliate and there's no danger of it being removed from me (as far as I know), but I would ideally want to at least keep my stats in line with being Affiliate-eligible, meaning I'd want 3+ streamers each time I stream. This is also a major reason why I'm cutting my hours, as I notice that over the last 1-2 hours of past streams (depending on the night) I drop below 3 and sometimes go down to 1, which will subsequently lower my average stream for the session, as well as impact my 30 day stats. Of course, then we also have the issue that with fewer viewers, you're also going to have less visibility as well, which can hit viewing figures. It's ultimately a tough balance, although another reason why I want to lower my hours (as I have said before) is to facilitate the 2 extra streams I'm doing a week, as well as also making it a little easier to organise things for stream export (after 7 days).

I've actually done a mock timetable using December's hours, incorporating reruns, although it's currently more likely that I'd only implement reruns (at different time slots from Tuesday to Saturday) if there's enough of a demand for me to do them, keeping in mind that VOD is available, and I wouldn't export them to YouTube for a week after (from all streams after the 12th of November). Additionally, I'll probably start the new timetable from the 25th of November (a Sunday), though it doesn't affect a lot overall. In any case, I have to consider if streams would be worth doing reruns of; if there was a demand for a particular streaming day to be streamed, I'd first consider streaming it on the slot I had planned for it if I were to rerun all my streams for the week.

I'm rambling now, plus I have a lot to think about, so I'll leave it here. I'll catch you all soon.