Monthly Archives: March 2012

 

FAQ About my Competitive Tetris Stream

Posted on by in Competitive Tetris Live Stream

Hi humans.

As I suggested a few days ago, I will not be having my competitive Tetris live stream today, nor will I have it next week Friday, because of my spring break. Even though I’m not actually going anywhere on vacation, I would still like to take a vacation from my normal responsibilities in order to relax for a little bit.

Because I’m not streaming today, I decided to instead address two frequent questions about my stream.

I’ll start off with the first one, which includes all questions regarding how I stream, what software I use, and how I manage to make it look so professional, even though I haven’t been streaming for very long.

To get the simple quesions out of the way, the only software I use for actually streaming is XSplit. In the background, I have Tetris Arena open on Google Chrome, a bunch of other pages open on Firefox, and Skype up and running so my co-caster can make it into the stream. It might seem a little strange that I’m able to macromanage all of this at once, but it’s actually somewhat easy for me because I have a conveniently large 17.3″ widescreen laptop. Thus, I can have programs open in the section of my moni­tor that is not shown on the stream, which keeps things uncluttered for the viewers and gives me convenient access to useful tools.

As for the professionalism of my stream, all the scenes and transitions seem clean and aesthetially appealing because XSplit offers a feature where I can switch from one set-up to another with an easy press of a hotkey combination. As for the actual graphics, I spent a little bit of time creating those my­self in Photoshop. It takes a little bit of intuition and a good fundamental understanding of geometric graphic design to get the overlays to match up well (or, if you’re unskilled, just spend tons of time doing trial-and-error and you’ll figure it out eventually).

If you were curious about the facet of professionalism in the sense that I was able to literally come out of almost nowhere and become a skilled streamer, it’s because I didn’t really actually come out of almost nowhere. Even though I wasn’t known to be a streamer at all before my debut during my pilot broadcast a few weeks ago, I was still working behind the scenes on behalf of other people with projects that in­volve streaming and eSports casting. As you might have already guessed, I have a lot of background experience when it comes to multimedia production of pretty much all different types, and that ex­pe­ri­ence I built up helped me jump to success.

And now, we’ll move on to the second frequently asked question, which was more commonly asked by my closer supporters who were curious as to a slight discrepancy they noticed about how I’m promoting the stream.

If you’ve been keeping up with my website and looking at the stream recaps I’ve been posting as blog entries, you might notice that I always post them in the form of Twitch.TV replays, rather than YouTube videos. Only recently did I start posting YouTube versions of the replays of the streams, and this was only because there were people having trouble accessing the Twitch.TV replays.

Those supporters who are closer to me know that I’m all about taking advantage of opportunities and max­imizing rewards. To them, it seemed strange that I wasn’t immediately uploading these replays to Youtube and advertising them there, as, because I monetize my videos on YouTube, I would be re­ceiving direct benefit from all my views.

No, this is not something that I simply overlooked – if I was so unalert that I overlooked things as obvious as this, I would probably not be as relatively successful as I am today. The real reason I am sticking with promoting Twitch.TV replays is because of a long-term goal that I would like to achieve.

Similar to YouTube partnership, Twitch.TV has a partnership program where they offer their streamers portions of the advertising revenue they earn. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that people can get from one hit video like on YouTube. For those who are unfamiliar with YouTube’s monetization program, and for those who have not yet been fortunate to have a decently popular video on YouTube: if you upload a video that gains a good influx of views and attention, YouTube will invite you to monetize that video, no matter what the condition of your other videos. So, for example, if you have 100 videos that have 5-10 views each, but one video turns out to be a great success and gets 5,000 views on the first day you upload it, YouTube will send you a notification saying that you are eligible to make money off of that video.

On the other hand, with Twitch.TV, streamers must be well-rounded and have consistent success with their live broadcasts, and the standards for what Twitch.TV considers successful isn’t negligible. Some of the qualifications include concurrent viewers during streams, but other qualifications include view counts on stream re­plays.

I think by now, it’s clear as to why I’m promoting the Twitch.TV replays. I’m confident that, because of how unique Hard Drop is in the sense that there are not very many competitive Tetris communities out there right now, and because of how massive Hard Drop is relative to other competitive Tetris com­mu­nities, we have a good shot at becoming a Twitch.TV partner. The only thing left now is to work our way up the popularity ladder.

So, bringing this all to a full-circle close, here’s my greedy personality shining through once again that my long-term supporters have come to know me for – I feel that, by taking a sacrifice now and not uploading replays to YouTube, and instead collecting all these views on Twitch.TV, it will help us get partnership in the long-run. Once we get partnership, I feel it will be well worth it, far more worth it than getting a small immediate monetary reward for my efforts.

I think this will be a good place to end this blog post. I most likely will not be updating my blog fre­quently throughout my spring break, but I will post a relatively large update towards the end of break covering things that I did.

 

Academic Overload before Spring Break

Posted on by in General / Uncategorized

Hi humans.

This week is my final week of classes before spring break, and as expected, I have an overload of work to get done.

Earlier today, I had a presentation and an exam. Tomorrow, I have a paper due. On Wednesday, I have a quiz in the morning. On Thursday, I have another exam; on Friday, I have yet again another quiz.

What made things worse was that there was an epic fail with the Internet yesterday at my workplace, the Badger Herald. I, being the web director and the closest thing the office has to technical support, was asked to come in to fix the Internet.

Usually, fixing the Internet is an easy fix – I simply call our Internet service provider and ask them to make sure there are no strange outages on their side. Unfortunately, yesterday, this didn’t work out at all. Our Internet service provider was giving us internet perfectly fine, but our router wasn’t distributing that Internet signal properly.

I had to go into the office and lose some studying time, but I didn’t expect it to take too long. I just planned on restarting our router and sort of expected it to work again. Sadly, that didn’t work out because our router itself was completely broken. The worst part was, it took me about an hour or two to figure out that it was irreparable.

I asked for help from the former web director, but he didn’t really know what to do, so we had to call someone who graduated from our university four years ago and retired from his position back in 2008 because he was the one who originally set up our router system. He was heroic enough to drive two hours to Madison from his home, and get everything set back up and running for us.

So, as a result of my academic overload, I will most likely not be blogging or tweeting much throughout this whole week. Also, on a slightly related note, I will also most likely not be doing my weekly com­pet­i­tive Tetris live stream show this week either, as Friday evening, I will be getting a ride back to my home town to visit my parents. I’m not 100% sure when my ride is going to arrive yet, though, so make sure to keep an eye on the announcements at the top of the home page of my website and follow me on Twitter for the latest updates.

 

Recap: Tetris Arena Live with Parkzer, Week #3

Posted on by in Competitive Tetris Live Stream, Video

Hi humans.

Time for another stream recap from last night’s Tetris Arena Live broadcast.

If you encounter any problems with the embedded player above, or if you want to watch it without the Twitch.TV watermark in the corner, go to http://www.twitch.tv/harddrop/b/312640039.

I opened the stream with a great start, actually having an introduction this time, rather than acci­dentally switching over to my webcam and not realizing it until someone told me half a minute later that the stream was already running. I also got my audio fixed, so it’s back to high quality, rather than being engulfed in static like it was last week.

Unfortunately, the great success didn’t last, as, shortly into the stream, I started having massive lag issues and nobody could see what was going on. Strangely, my audio and background music was going through the stream perfectly fine, but the video was only updating about once every few seconds.

The problem was that I had no idea what was going on or how to fix it. After fiddling around with my XSplit settings for a little while, I started closing background processes, hoping that something will ran­domly make it work again. Nothing seemed to work, but out of nowhere, people started telling me that the stream was working fine again, so we kept on going on.

I opened the stream by shoutcasting a six-person free-for-all match, but after a while, the room decided it would freeze. I transitioned on into a one-on-one room, and shortly after an hour into streaming, I invited one of my friends, who goes by Ukrainian4Life, to co-cast with me via Skype.

A little over an hour and a half into the stream, I joined the queue in the one-on-one room and started playing against Paul676 while Ukrainian4Life casted my matches. Ukrainian4Life then joined to play a few matches against me, and just before closing the stream, I played a handful of one-on-one matches against vipjun.

I streamed for only two hours this week rather than three because I have a lot of academic-related stuff coming up this following week, and I need to spend as much time studying and preparing. (I’ll probably be going into more details about upcoming academic stuff in a future blog post.) Also, on a slightly related note, the week after this coming week, I will be on spring break, so I will most likely be taking a short vacation from broadcasting. I’m not 100% sure yet, though, so I’ll post an update on my website and on Twitter when I find out for sure.

Update: It has been brought to my attention that a few people are having problems accessing the Twitch.TV recordings, both as embedded players and on the actual website. To accomodate for these issues (and because it’s good to have footage archived in multiple locations anyway), I have uploaded a copy of the recording to YouTube as well, and have embedded it below. Please only use YouTube to view the video if you are having problems with Twitch.TV, so I can use the view count on YouTube to get a better idea of how many people are unable to watch via Twitch.TV.

 

Unseen Footage #1 and LoL Game

Posted on by in League of Legends, Video

Hi humans.

I know it’s been a really long time since I’ve uploaded a vlog to my YouTube channel, so I decided to go through some old footage while cleaning out my hard drives and SD cards, and throw together the first ever Unseen Footage video.

This video is a random compilation of clips taken between August 2011 and January 2012.

Yes, I know that the word “gymnastics” in the thumbnail and 1:49 into the video is misspelled. I didn’t catch that before rendering, and I didn’t want to rerender the entire video just to correct a typo.

I’ll probably have one of these videos out about once or twice every year, or whenever I have clips that are somewhat interesting but weren’t good enough to be their own standalone vlog.

In related news, I also released another gaming video yesterday. I actually had this uploaded to my ac­count for testing purposes back in late February while I was trying out Fraps and never made it openly viewable, but I decided that I might as well just make it public.

This is a game called League of Legends.

This video is a poor representation of both League of Legends and of my playing ability because this was a custom game where everyone got a random character to play. As a result, this was the first time I played Kassadin, so I had no idea how to use him and epic failed (and the fact that I’m not really that good at League of Legends anyway sort of contributed to that). On top of that, my team wasn’t really that great, while the opposite team was stacked, which was why we got roflstomped. In my opinion, it’s a really boring video, so only watch it if you literally have nothing else to do with your time.

One random thing about the video, though, is that one of my teammates was Cat Valdes, better known on the Internet as Catrific. You might know her as a vlogger on YouTube, a host on Teen.com, or a live streamer on Own3D.TV. So if you’re into her stuff, then the video might be worth watching for you.

 

Bleach Stains on Colored Clothing

Posted on by in General / Uncategorized

Hi humans.

What was that?

Oh, you want to know what happens when your bottle of bleach leaks inside your laundry bag and gets on dark colored clothing?

Well I’m glad you asked, because I actually happened to have that experience a few days ago when I did my laundry.

I put all my pants and two jackets into a separate plastic bag because my main laundry bag was full. I also had laundry detergent, softener, and bleach to carry, and I unfortunately do not have three hands, so I threw all the bottles into the separate plastic bag. For whatever reason, the last time I did laundry, I thought it would be a great idea not to close the bleach container tightly.

The bleach slowly leaked out of the bottle and into the plastic bag. Of course, the plastic bag doesn’t have air filter holes in it like my other regular laundry bag does, so instead of leaving a small trail of bleach on the ground, it instead slowly pooled up at the bottom of the plastic bag, and got absorbed by my clothes.

It was a slightly tragic experience when I found out, and in panic, I threw them into the washing ma­chine as quickly as possible, hoping that somehow, water will restore the color.

… As expected, it didn’t.

After realizing that I had no idea what to do, I tweeted to my Twitter followers asking for help:

I got a handful of random responses, such as scrubbing it with vinegar, bleaching the whole article of clothing so it becomes an entirely new color, or just leaving it as is. One of the responses I got was to use a permanent marker. At first I thought this was a troll suggestion (especially because it came from one of my friends), but after a while, I realized that it was actually probably the best suggestion.

I started with my black jeans. Fortunately, it was only a tiny spot, and it would be easy to color back in. Here are the before and after photos:

Bleach Stain, Black Jeans, Before

Bleach Stain, Black Jeans, After

Even though the texture in that tiny spot is a little weird now, it actually turned out a lot better than I thought it would.

Next were my blue jeans. Again, the spot was pretty small. As I looked at the stain more, it seemed like I would be better off just leaving it, as it was way at the bottom where it wouldn’t be that noticeable, and it just looks like that portion of my jeans faded a lot faster than the rest.

Bleach Stain, Blue Jeans

Next up was one of my jackets. It’s normally a really dark shade of grayish blackish forest green, but the bleach stain turned some spots creamy orange.

The first spot was right up at the collar. I decided it would be fine to just leave it because it’s right at the edge where my shoulder would be, and if the collar flops down a litte, it’s covered up anyway.

Bleach Stain, Jacket Collar

The rest of the stains on my jacket were on the front down at the bottom. I considered filling them in with marker, but I decided that none of the colors I had would blend in that well. Also, because of the shape and placement of the stains, it doesn’t look as strange as it could have been.

Bleach Stain, Jacket Front

There was one last article of clothing that got stained, and seeing this actually made me really happy. I was lucky enough that the article of clothing that absorbed most of the bleach was a pair of pants that I wear as pajamas.

Bleach Stains, Black Corduroy Pants

Nice job taking one for the team, corduroy pajama pants.

 

Recap: Tetris Arena Live, Week #2 (Epic Six-Hour Stream)

Posted on by in Competitive Tetris Live Stream, Video

Hi humans.

As promised last week, I did another live stream yesterday.

I planned on having the stream be three hours long, but somehow, it ended up being six.

Also, on a side note, the audio quality of the replays is poor because XSplit (a broadcasting control pan­el) developers decided it would be a great idea to remove a bunch of features from the free version of their product, including high-quality audio encoding. I’m pretty sure that I will find a solution by next week, or by the next two weeks at the latest. For now, the sound quality will have some static.

This week’s show started with me participating in a six-person free-for-all match while sitting and sweating beads because I had to keep my air conditioner off, or else the only thing the entire stream would hear is a loud rumble that sounds similar to the noise an airplane would make if it was parked out­side my apartment. Then, we transitioned into a one-on-one room where I shoutcasted some matches. As we approached the two-hour mark, I took my first drink of water, and ended up less able to cast the games because the water was too cold and was constricting my throat.

If you encounter any problems with the embedded player above, or if you want to watch it without the Twitch.TV watermark in the corner, go to http://www.twitch.tv/harddrop/b/311898988.

During the second part of the show, I continued shoutcasting one-on-one matches. After a while, some­one suggested that I also participate in the one-on-one matches, so I joined the queue and started play­ing as well. Thanks to both the increased lag due to streaming and recording, and due to my medi­o­cre Tetris-playing skill, I lost a good portion of my matches, including one to a Rank 8 beginner player after underestimating how well she plays.

After getting tired of playing, I transitioned to a different one-on-one room and watched much better players play, and did some more shoutcasting. Near the three-hour mark, another Hard Drop community member named Polaris joined me on Skype to co-cast some games, and subtly but epicly trolled me about three or four times.

If you encounter any problems with the embedded player above, or if you want to watch it without the Twitch.TV watermark in the corner, go to http://www.twitch.tv/harddrop/b/311908706.

After streaming for four hours, which was one hour longer than what I was intending, we added another streamer/caster, Paradox, to the Skype call. We did a little bit more casting of one-on-one games, then Paradox joined the match against hebo_MAI, generally accepted as the world’s best competitive Tetris player, and the champion of the first Tetris Tournament Online, hosted by Hard Drop back in late 2010 and early 2011.

After Paradox left, I started falling asleep and Polaris started doing weird things. As the end of the final two-hour stretch, we listened to three Christmas songs, then left.

If you encounter any problems with the embedded player above, or if you want to watch it without the Twitch.TV watermark in the corner, go to http://www.twitch.tv/harddrop/b/311917429.

As a reminder, I will be streaming again next week from 7-10 PM US CST (I will most likely not be staying for six hours like I did this week), so if you’re free during that time, come watch me at the following link:

http://Twitch.TV/HardDrop

If you miss it or are unable to attend, I will have the recordings of the stream embedded in next week’s blog post as well.

 

Epic Persuasion Skills

Posted on by in General / Uncategorized

Hi humans.

I tweeted this earlier today and got a handful of people asking for more details about the situation and how I pulled this off, because everyone seems to like it when I tweet about stuff related to real-world applications of human psychology:

Yes, there is a typo in the second tweet – the “then” should say “they.”

For those of you who don’t quite understand what I’m talking about, I’ll do a little bit of elaborating.

I live in Madison, WI, USA, which is a highly-populated city — the second highest-populated in my state. In most cities of this density, there are usually lots of buildings and stores packed very close together, and there isn’t much open space like fields or parking lots. A lot of the stores near where I live have doors that lead directly out to the sidewalk, rather than a parking lot.

Earlier today, I got off the bus at my local McDonalds to get some food, then started walking back to my apartment. About a quarter of my way back home, I noticed that there was someone walking directly and closely behind me. I kept walking another quarter of the way back home, and I saw that this person was still closely behind me, but wasn’t making a pass. I wasn’t sure if this person was doing this on purpose, or if I was being paranoid, but I decided to have a little fun with the situation.

I was closely approaching a bike shop, so I gradually slowed my walking speed (and so did the person be­hind me). A few feet away from the door, I slightly adjusted my walking position so the front of my body was fully exposed and my arms weren’t covering my chest.

When I was at the door, I reached for it with my left hand and opened it, pulled my right arm back be­hind me, shrunk my body down very slightly, and made direct eye contact with the person behind me. I smiled, tilted my head towards the door, said “go ahead,” tilted my head back upright, and made a slight nod.

The person behind me looked slightly taken aback and said “thanks,” then walked into the store. After they were completely inside the store, I let go of the door and continued on my way.

About five seconds later, I heard someone behind me saying “wait, what?!” in a bewildered voice. I didn’t look behind me, but one would assume that it was the man who I just trolled.

In response to the people who have been asking me how I pulled this off, and saying that they would never fall for it, it all relates to the power of using subtle cues associated with persuasion, and the con­text of the situation. I’m not going to go into much detail because this is a very potent skill that is difficult to acquire and master, and I want to keep it that way, but I will say that the general under­pin­nings of why this worked is because the person behind me was overwhelmed by so many stimuli that I sent him concurrently and consecutively that he complied with my wishes without intending to do so.

I will admit that I did get somewhat lucky for this to work, because some people are inherently resistant to such stimuli due to their nature and personality. For those who said that they were going to try it themselves, good luck, but don’t make a fool out of yourselves.

 

Recap: Tetris Arena Live with Parkzer, Week #1

Posted on by in Competitive Tetris Live Stream, Video

Hi humans.

A few months back, I posted a video of me playing a series of competitive Tetris games, and the re­sponse was decent — a good handful of people wanted me to make more Tetris videos. But, as you prob­a­bly know, I’m not much of a gamer, and when I do play games, it’s more casual than purposeful. On top of that, it takes time and effort to make a video, as I would have to go through and edit it so my viewers don’t have to sit through waiting times where the scoreboard is shown for 20 seconds after every match.

But, I’m also against mindlessly doing things with no determination, and casual gaming falls under that cat­e­go­ry; I like doing things that I know will contribute to some sort of bigger goal, and I don’t really get much out of playing games for fun. So, I decided that, from now on, I will be live streaming Tetris when­ever I am play­ing.

For those of you who are not aware, streaming is basically like watching live television on the Internet. I will be in my apartment in front of my laptop and webcam, and you would be in front of your own com­puter, able to see my face and what I’m doing on my laptop screen.

I have occasionally streamed in the past on some of my personal channels, but I’ve never advertised it much, and when I do stream, the only people who are watching are usually just a few people who ran­domly stumbled upon my stream at that time. I’ve always wanted to take this to a bigger scale, but I felt as if I wasn’t ready until now.

Another factor that contributed to my decision is the Hard Drop community. Hard Drop is a website where a bunch of (relatively competitive) people who like to play Tetris come together, talk about the game, and organize Tetris-related events. One of the website’s management’s new focuses is improving the frequency and quality of their stream­ing, and I decided to contribute by setting up my own show on their stream channel.

Yesterday, I ran my first broadcast on the Hard Drop stream as somewhat of a pilot. It turned out to be a decent success; you can watch the replay of the show below:

If you encounter any problems with the embedded player above, or if you want to watch it without the Twitch.TV watermark in the corner, go to http://www.twitch.tv/harddrop/b/311185595

As a result of how well this pilot broadcast turned out, I will be consistently doing a live stream every week on Friday nights from 7 PM until 10 PM, US central standard time. If that time doesn’t work out for you, all the shows will be recorded and posted, so you can watch the replays if you would like. The stream (and all the recordings) can be found at:

http://Twitch.TV/HardDrop

If I (or someone else from Hard Drop) is live streaming, it should automatically start playing in the main embedded video. If you would like to watch replays, scroll down a little bit and click on the Videos tab directly under the em­bedded video player.

If you want a notice as to when I am live, you can follow me on Twitter at @Parkzer, as I will be tweet­ing a reminder message and a link to the stream a few minutes before beginning the broadcast. If you don’t like using Twitter, then you can add me to your circles on Google+; I can’t guarantee that I’ll re­member to post a reminder there as well, but I’ll try not to forget. If I happen to be co-hosting when someone else is streaming, I’ll try to post about that as well.

Some changes that I intend to implement for next week are improved structure and a bit more polishing to make the stream look as clean and professional as possible. I will hopefully have some sort of a plan when I start streaming next week rather than just randomly jumping into a game and going with the flow. I’ll also have some aesthetic improvements implemented as well, including an introduction screen, a scrolling announcement bar, better webcam usage, and a specialized one-on-one feature screen.

That’s all for now; don’t forget to stop by next Friday if you have time and say Hi in the chat.

 

Taco on the Inside, Doritos on the Outside

Posted on by in General / Uncategorized

Hi humans.

Here’s a random fun fact: whenever my deputy and I go to work on Friday evening, we always go to Taco Bell.

Today happens to be a Friday, and we both happened to go to work today to work on some pro­gram­ming.

I know I said a few months back that I’m going to stop trying Taco Bell’s new items because of the relatively poor experiences I had with the layer steak wrap and the XXL Chalupa, but this time, I couldn’t resist.

Taco Bell on the inside, Doritos on the outside

Yes, that is literally a taco inside a massive Dorito.

Yes, the Dorito tasted like a real Dorito, but with about five times the flavor.

Do you know when you’re eating a bag of chips and some of the chips have a lot of seasoning on them, so they’re a lot more flavorful than the other chips are? Well, the entire Dorito shell was basically like that.

 

Car Collision and Twitter Commentary

Posted on by in General / Uncategorized

Hi humans.

Remember how the weather was a troll earlier last week and made it start snowing massive chunks?

It happened again.

And this time, it caused a car collision right outside my apartment building.

Car Collision in Madison, Wisconsin

In other news, I think it’s time for more Twitter highlights and commentary.

 

My child developmental psychology instructor apparently thought it would be a great idea to integrate Mi­crosoft Word Art, rainbow gradients, and the font Comic Sans MS, all in one slide in her Powerpoint pre­sentation during lecture. For those of you who aren’t aware already, these three elements are prob­ably the top three worst things you can possibly use when designing anything that doesn’t belong in a day care center.

 

During a social psychology lecture, we were doing an in-class review and our teaching assistant was going through the main ideas of each of the sections that were going to be on the exam. One of the sections was about surveys, and he emphasized the fact that surveys are one of the most prevalent research techniques used in sociology.

The person sitting next to me (whom I did not know) decided that this would be some useful information to write down in her notes. It appeared as if she was about to write the word “survey,” but instead started writing “suer.” Curious to see if she would catch her error, I kept watching her. Instead of going back to fix her mistake, she kept on writing “vuermy.”

After taking a second to register what had just happened, I burst into laughter and abruptly stopped myself when I realized that I was laughing out loud. The people surrounding me stared at me for a little while, and I put my first up to my mouth and pretended I was coughing and sniffling.

Crisis averted.

 

This tweet isn’t as funny as it is disappointing. I found out on the 27th of February that, a few days prior, someone representing Pokémon made an announcement that the new Pokémon games would be called Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2. That is probably the most uncreative name that they could have possibly come up with.

I’m pretty sure that if they hired a professional boring man (which is obviously a man who professionally goes around doing boring things) to come up with a more boring and unoriginal name for the new Poké­mon games, he would have failed.