I have decided to start another blog. Tech/games/whatever.. I need another outlet that is not on my personal blog, nor my poker blog. But where do I put it? What accounts do I use? I'll try to figure that out while catching up on my DVR'ed Big Bang Theory.
Let's start with what do I feel the need to blog about? Having worked in the video games industry for most of my adult career, I think a gaming blog might be an ideal place to start. I need a better computer arrangement in order to be livestreaming full time, as it overheats my laptop currently. Perhaps I should figure out a way to pipe the video/audio from the gaming laptop over to another pc for xpslit or similar broadcasting like they have been doing over at
www.GamingForGood.net ... Xsplit has some handy features for quickly switching from one layout to another. But initally starting it frequently crashes. If I use this setup, it will lessen my ability to move laptop arounds the house for non livestreaming use.. or will it?
I might also later start a more tech/programming type blog. But maybe now is not the time? For now I can consolidate. I'm not starting a 3rd blog is even a good idea right now. It does seem to fit my personality more though, being able to switch gears and type about different things from time to time. One of the things I think I can do, and would like to investigate is having a "roaming" IP, using one domain name, but several sub-domains, and being able to use that while traveling via Mobile phone or laptop, or other devices. What is the optimal setup for doing this? VPN to home machine? Mutliple points of authentication for being able to blog on the go? This deserves more investigating. The more I think about it, the more I see a need for a Gaming blog and a Tech blog, but what do you, the reader, think about this? Can a Gaming/Tech blog survive in this modern day niche world of "too many blogs"? I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, and will see how it goes for now.
So what games? How about ANY games I am playing or developing or testing or interested in? In the past 2 years, that has been Rift, Diablo 3, and League Of Legends, for the most part. And a whole lot of live poker. Online poker has returned to Nevada this month, but I'll blog about that mostly over at
Poker Paradox , which is my poker blog. There may be some interesting posts about poker software on this blog, but most of the poker news will be over there. Speaking of online poker, long ago I was trying to talk to
PokerStars about livestreaming online poker so you SEE your opponents on cam while playing .. like a cam window for each chair at the table. This adds in some of the live elements to playing online poker, such as poker tells, being able to converse, dig for info, and some of the "fun" of poker. And it would appear, that
Inifniti Poker has done just that!
I have also played Guild Wars 2, but not very much. Everquest has some free features available, and I checked that out, but it's been SOOO long since I played Everquest. I used to play it for 5 solid years as my main hobby around the time my son was born, but that was a long time ago. He is now going to be 13 next month! Diablo was sort of fun with their Real Money Auction House, but there was always a gap between those riding the current inflation wave, and those left behind. It also got quite boring, something I related to "mowing the lawn to see what I can find today". I would often watch TV while playing because it was so boring, or listen to music, and then worry I wouldn't hear or see the times I would get a special item drop. It would be nice to have a nice immersive MMO of some kind.
What I really miss playing is a nice FPS like Doom or Quake or Unreal! I miss building levels, and the amount of fun you can have in a short time, which I think is missing from a lot of games today. I used to love games like Total Annihilation, where you can get involved a game that goes on for quite some time, giving the feel of an epic battle. This is in contrast to a game like League of Legends, where a long game is almost an hour, but where you feel like you are losing the whole time with no chance to win, or a game where you are winning, but the enemy team surrenders in 20 minutes flat!
I'll stop here, and come back to speak at length about
League of Legends by
Riot, something I've been playing for over a year now, due to the fact that my employer,
Alt Ego LLC, has two titles to use with this game,
Champion Select (
http://championselectbeta.appspot.com) (Browser and Android) and
LOL Brain (Android only, currently).
Champion Select is a tool for sharing your match results via posters showing those results via Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram. It also let's you post an image of certain champions with custom message currently, but that part of the app may be removed soon. You can share your K/D/A results along with your teammates names and your enemy's names, or a specialty poster, like Highest Damage, or Killing Spree like Pentakills, or streaks like Godlike and Legendary.
LOL Brain is a stats comparison utility that shows much of the same type of info you can find on
LOLKing, but let's you easily look up and compare stats vs all players, vs a specific player, or vs a certain range of players, such as "Mid" "Bronze" league players. It's also much easier to read on your mobile device. I'm not sure why
LOLKing and
MobaFire do now have mobile sites yet. Seems a bit of an oversight on their part.
I think I'll stop here, so I can get in a match before work, as I still have two more Quintessences to buy for my main builds in LOL. I have a level 30 summoner (WookieAE for Alt Ego) with about 28 Champions on
NA servers, and have just hit 30 on
EUW servers (TheWookieWayEU), but still can't play ranked yet.. apparently I need to buy more champions!
Well played, Riot. Well played.
