Week 42: Change of Scenery and Yet Another Recording Experiment

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I thought I’d finished with the recording experiments back when I settled on the GoPro 360 as my best option for console gaming and gotten my webcam/screen recorder settings working for VR/casting to PC.

But I kinda got tired of having to navigate around the “guest bedroom” that is still occupying my gaming space more than two weeks after I was told to return the bed (bought for our actual spare bedroom) on the grounds that we “didn’t need an area for a guest” any more. So I decided to see how the console games would work in my bedroom, hooked up to my monitor.

I wasn’t terribly keen on having to move around a lot of stuff, notably the cords plugged in behind the TV, but we already have tons of spare HDMI cables (god only knows how they keep reproducing), so it was simply a matter of selecting a console and getting my hands on an extra power cord. Given its newness, I deemed the Switch a better option for this experiment, paid shy of $20 for a spare cord from my place of employment, and set up the dock in my room. I might prefer to change the precise setup in a later non-experimental video, and I only consider this as an alternative to be used until I consistently have my gaming space back, but technically the experiment worked.

Well… it worked until I remembered, while reviewing the footage, that monitors have backlights, too.

I mean, the footage is sort of visible so it’s not a total loss, but if I do this again I’ll need to keep the monitor’s backlight turned down. And unlike with the TV, I actually need it bright for some of my games (I rarely play horror games, so I’ve never really been able to get into the “darkness as ambience” mentality when it interferes with my ability to see what I’m doing–I even prefer playing Oblivion with the “Lite Brite” command turned on despite the weird graphic glitches it produces) so I’ll need to remember to turn it back up at times.

This all happened Thursday, for the record. Monday, if I remember correctly, was spent going through the duplicate folders on my backup drive and getting rid of the files that I genuinely don’t need. (Dear god I can’t believe how long that took.)

Ironically, the whole point of going through the duplicates was because, since I wasn’t playing games at that time, I wanted to go through the backlog for my other channels and start getting things uploaded, but my organization has been a little messed up since the factory reset and unwitting duplicates that I wasn’t really sure what which videos in my “to be uploaded” folder still needed uploading and what was simply badly organized, and I wanted to see where all those files existed on the drive before I took action. “Ironic” because going through the duplicates took so long that I simply never got around to doing anything with the videos, so while it’s finally done it didn’t serve the intended purpose to doing it at that specific time.

(Oct 28 update: Oh, yay. So apparently mass-deleting folders from the backup drive to fix the screwed-up organization does not prompt the backup “plan” to recreate them in their correct locations the next time it backs up the entire computer. So after creating an entirely new plan–and as such, waiting for everything to back up from scratch–I get to go through looking for duplicates again. Shouldn’t be too big a deal this time around as there should no longer be anything important in the currently-old backup folder that won’t end up in the new, but let’s just say there’s more than a little paranoia behind my choice to keep the old backup folder for the time being…. And this also means that anything I relocate for organizational purposes, e.g. raw unsorted footage versus labeled ready-to-upload videos, will have to be manually shifted to the correct location on the backup folder, instead of relying on the backup plan to put a copy there for me. Funny, could have sworn in the past that a significant chunk of those duplicates pre-factory-reset were the result of reorganizing things on the computer without manually doing the same on the backup drive.)

Also Thursday, I started on one of the Season 1 20K “races” in Zombies Run.

I couldn’t quite remember if there was a relevant order between this and the New Canton 20K, but since everything I’ve read says they take place more-or-less concurrently I just went with the one the app says is next on my list (which recommendation, I should add, doesn’t actually take into account canonical order–it wanted me to move straight from the New Canton 5K to the NC10K without any regard for the Abel 5K and regular episodes that took place between, and likewise straight from Abel5 to Abel10 again without stopping for the regular missions, so clearly it’s just recommending in the order that the app lists them).

Not sure how long it will really take me to finish the two 20Ks, but barring delays I think I can reasonably expect to finish out the entire season by the end of November.

My back hurt the next day. I really need to work on my posture.

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