T w e n t y S i d e d

The lack of posting lately is because I’m trying to write all the words. I’ve got more than a few of them together by this point, all lined up next to each other. Many of them are even spelled properly and in correct grammatical order. However, I have to stop writing those words for a few minutes so I can write these ones:

On Thursday 6/28, the Spoiler Warning crew will be doing another “Hangout”. It will start at 9PM on the East Cost. (For people converting to GMT, that means it will actually happen at 1AM on 6/29.) Josh is going to stream a little something or other while we tune in and chat.

I have been informed that people do not like the term “hangout”. This is a shame, since that’s pretty much my go-to word for “unstructured social gathering”. I suppose we can go with Play Date if that’s more your speed. Or perhaps you would prefer a Shin Dig? I’m sorry we’re stuck with the language tools we’ve got, but I’m not going to write posts titled, “Assembly of Internet Friends via Ventrilo While also Streaming a Videogame to Other, More Anonymous Attendees and Communicating via Text Chat, This Thursday”.

The plan for now:

1. Play Dates will move around. Different days. Different times. The idea is that we can hopefully give people in different time zones and with different jobs a chance to participate.
2. I think once a week might be overkill. Maybe twice monthly? Once a month? We’ll see.
3. Not everyone from the cast will attend every Hangout. Everyone else has day jobs and commitments.

Other items:

When I talked about adding forums to the site last week, I wasn’t talking about changing the comment threads or the way we read posts. The main site would remain exactly the same, except there would be a link (somewhere) to the forums, where you could interact with other Twenty-Siders. Maybe even do a little RPG play-by-post. I might also have a section labeled, “Politics, Religion, And Console Platforms”, which will auto-delete everything posted to them. Just kidding. Sort of.

I might keep the forums very tightly regulated at first. Maybe play-by-post will be the only thing available, and I’ll gradually add more sections once I’m sure it won’t mess up the existing comment threads.

The Left 4 Dead Spoiler Warning will (according to Josh) go up tomorrow. Probably. We’ll see.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The plan for last night was to have 8 by Zombies begin at 11PM GMT and run for an hour-ish. Planning ahead, the cast met half an hour early so that we could subdue all of this wayward technology before the audience showed up. But people showed up and began watching while we were still setting up. And then it took an extra hour to get it all working.

Oops.

On the upside, I guess some of you got to see what an absolute clusterblog it is to get this thing working. We need to stream the low-res stream to the viewers, record the vent chat for later, use FRAPS to record the high-res video. Then there was the added challenge of letting the public hear the two sides of our 4 vs. 4 game, getting the game itself working with alltalk on so the teams could speak to one another… gah. We’ve been doing this for almost three years, and it just doesn’t get any easier.

On the upside, Chris kept his stream running after the game, and we sort of hung out with the audience in an unplanned after party. We talked to the folks in the chat room and everyone got to listen in on our usual post-game bull sessions.

Some of the stuff we discussed:

1. We should do a podcast – Maybe. A podcast is kind of formal, requires some editing, some organization, and would basically be another Spoiler Warning level commitment for us. We’re willing, but we also discussed…
2. Hangouts – Do we need to get all formal and do a proper iTunes/MP3 release with a fixed direction, clean audio, and all the boring crap edited out? Or would it be better to just do what we did last night, where one of us has a videogame feed rolling and we all hang out in the Livestream chat? The audience has an open chat feed, which we can read. We do voice chat, which you hear through the stream. It’s easy to set up, and it’s a lot more interactive since we can have a two-way conversation.
3. A forum – I’ve been vacillating on this for years. I’m flattered that people like this site well enough to want to hang out here. On the other hand, I’m very wary of disturbing the community we’ve got. This place is polite and friendly. This is not an accident. This is a product of my secret moderation techniques. (Secret: Moderation is performed on basis of attitude, disposition, and communication skills. There’s no room for rules-lawyering because there are no posted rules.) This is the only system that makes sense to me and the only way I know how to run things. Would this work in a forum? Would I be able to keep up with the extra load? Would the forum eat into the discussion here on the blog? These are things that worry me.
4. My archives and the general difficulty of finding things. I’m having this conversation a lot. A friend recently pointed out that a newcomer could arrive here, become a fan, and yet have no idea that I’ve written a book. Several, actually. This is a thing I am thinking about.
5. Misc – The new Tomb Raider Trailer, Spy Party, Origin, Mass Effect 3, Livestream, Tera, Feminism, Left 4 Dead, Josh & Rutskarn meeting face-to-face, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten. The hangout lasted for about six hours after the game ended, so I can’t begin to remember it all.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, participated, and hung out. Feel free to share your thoughts on any of the above, with the exception of Mass Effect 3. We’re about to cover that game, and I’d rather we not get sick of the topic before we even reach the New Game menu.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.