Balancing school and games

Every time a new semester starts I feel like I'm going to have a fucking aneurysm. It's not even like the new material is particularly hard, or that I'm struggling to understand things, it's just a matter of change. Whenever things change suddenly, it's hard to make a clean adjustment, and this spring semester is no different.

Since we started producing videos of us playing video games back in god knows when (I sure as hell don't), it's been an interesting mix between maintaining an upload schedule, and keeping up with work and school.
For instance, if we record about 2 hours of video, I might spend half that time sifting through and cutting out about 5-10 minutes per hour of the video. From that 5 to 10 minutes I cut together a (hopefully) hilarious video of dick jokes, and throw that bitch up on youtube. We don't have many people following us regularly, but it's not really about getting people's attention, it's about having fun with our friends and sharing the resulting hilarity. So the bottom line is that this newest project of ours, the "let's record ourselves being idiots while playing games" project is simply an extension of what we've been doing for the past decade...we're just sharing it now.

Producing has been both incredibly different/difficult for me, as well as being incredibly fun. There are a huge amount of things that need to come together in order to get a video out, let alone getting stuff out regularly. Fortunately we're not actively working on anything like let's plays, which require even more effort. The clip show format has worked amazingly well, and basically allowed me to keep working/schooling while maintaining some sort of presence. With the addition of our regular streams, we've also been able to keep some video content flowing out there without the huge amount of production effort that go into the regular videos.

Creating the twitch.tv end of the entire thing has been incredibly fun, creating an environment where you can instantly respond and react to anyone who has questions, or who just basically wants to talk about the game you're playing is insanely useful. Instead of a horrible disconnect between when we play a game, record it, and post the highlights, we can field questions and establish friends and followers ad hoc. This also makes my screen look like a fucking command center when I'm recording. Between video recording software, audio recording software, and the streaming software I'm amazed if I have any screen space left.

Also we're apparently going to be playing Final Fantasy XI again in feb, so prepare your fucking anus.