In 2019, I’m going to be changing the way I focus my creative energy: my goal will be to create more things that I can look back on and be proud of what I’ve made. This means that I’m going to be changing up some of what I do regularly, and directing my efforts towards telling more complete and thoughtful stories in 2019.

An End To Regular Streaming

For the past 3 years, I have focused a lot of my creative energy on creating interesting twice-weekly live streams centered on video games. I always tried to share more than just a passion for gaming: I talked politics, technology, creator tools, and more. I put a ton of passion into those creations, and I loved it, for years, and I’ve built up a small-but-dedicated audience who have kept it fun and interesting for me as I’ve played more than 355 games across 20 different gaming platforms.

The problem with live streaming as a platform for me is that the ideas that I have are always half complete thoughts. I get far enough along to talk about them with somebody – whoever is in the chat, usually – but not far enough along that I actually feel like the thought is complete. I end up repeating myself, both as I think through it, and as I share it with more people who might wander in mid-conversation, and not making much progress on finishing thoughts.

There have been exceptions to this. One of the videos I’m most proud of on YouTube is my intro to FamiTracker and how the NES does music – but the reason I was able to do this live is that I spent more than 20 hours prepping for that one 45 minute period of my livestream. Today, I wouldn’t be able to do the same thing, because I have drastically ramped up my other commitments, without cutting out something that I feel obligated to do.

More and more lately, I find myself wanting to complete those thoughts. In the same way that I am transitioning more from short-form Twitter status updates to longer form blog entries, I want to do the same with the half-baked thoughts featured in my livestreams.

Currently, my live streams typically take somewhere between 10-12 hours per week of creative energy: typically an hour or two of work outside of stream, and 4 hours of streaming, twice a week. In the past, I had a lot of passion for this: I felt like I had a ton of retro games that I loved and really want to share with people. These days, however, I find that I no longer have that same energy: I find myself struggling to identify games I want to play, especially ones I haven’t played before.

Overall, there’s a lot of energy that I put into these streams, creating and sharing half-baked thoughts, and I want to redirect that time into completing the thoughts: Doing more work on more concise storytelling, both in text and in video.

What this means is that I’ll be bringing an end to my weekly gaming livestreams. For three years, I’ve been saying that I am “The Chris Who Plays Games, playing retro games every Monday and whatever I want every Friday at 9:15PM Eastern time” – but it’s time to hang up that hat and work on redirecting that energy into cooking, political advocacy, tech labor organizing, and more. None of this means that I will never stream again – I’ll certainly be happy to consider playing new games that strike my fancy, and I hope to mix in gaming content as part of my ongoing effort to tell completed stories – but it does mean that it will no longer be on a regular schedule like it has been for the past three years.

My final regularly scheduled livestream will be a “going away party” on Friday, January 26th at 9:15PM Eastern; join me if you can!

New Beginnings

In previous years, I’ve had many creative things I’ve wanted to work on, but have allowed myself to feel hamstrung by a lack of home to put them in. This is an entirely self-made problem – I feel intimidated by sharing content that folks might not be interested in – but it’s one that I hope to fix in 2019.

However, my fix for this is not “Just accept it and move on”, but instead to hyper-specialize my content. This means that rather than a single location where you’ll be able to find everything, I’m going to migrate into a bunch of little micro-silos of specialized content. For me personally, this is better: I don’t feel like I’m infringing on anyone’s time in a way that they didn’t explicitly sign up for. (I fully acknowledge this is emotional, and not rational, thinking, but that’s just the way it is.)

For most folks, this is probably better: My cooking, gaming, politics, and tech work are distinct efforts, and folks who are interested in one are usually not interested in all of them. However, I know that there are some folks out there who are interested in everything, so I want to provide a weekly round up of what I’m working on. The purpose will be two-fold: to collect my various efforts, and secondly, to force me to keep track of my efforts.

This tracking effort will be available in a variety of ways, to make sure you can track it in whatever way works best for you:

This content is my first weekly update of this type, so it’s a bit weird, but going forward, expect a brief summary of anything I publish within that week, and a preview of the trends for the next week.

I’m still trying to organize my thoughts on what I’ll be making, when, and how. Some of the plans I have are more concrete than others. For those interested in following individual updates, you’ll still be able to get those directly as I post content in its various homes:

  • Chris Plays Gourmet, my cooking blog and YouTube Channel
  • Chris Produces Gadgets, my (so far, empty) YouTube Channel focused on 3d-printing and other maker artifacts
  • Chris Plays Games, my continuing home on YouTube for gaming content.
  • Politically Unbalanced is my home on YouTube for political content, which may become more relevant going forward.
  • Christopher R Schmidt, my first YouTube channel will continue to be my home for drone content, and possibly other things.
  • Thoughts on the web, a blog targeted at longer-form analysis of the various realities of web content publishing.

I hope to have more things that go out there that I’ll be able to share with you over time.

Onwards

I want to thank my dedicated streaming audience, who have been amazing to me over the years – helping me cope with struggles at work, the loss of my wife’s mother and father, and through their generosity helping fund many creative efforts, both of my own and others. That experience will always be special to me, and I hope I am able to bring the same passion that the community brought out in me around to my other creative efforts going forward.