Farewell

Nearly a year after first pressing “start stream” for the first time, I am here to say goodbye.  I’m not ending my stream forever, but I’m drastically cutting back to one day a week, and not going to have a set schedule anymore.  This last year has been an awesome journey and I’ve met tons of great people, played tons of fun games, and learned quite a bit, but the time has come to move on and do new things.

Why are you stopping?
I gave myself a year to get partnered.  Streaming is an expensive hobby (largely in time, but to put on a high-quality stream, you need high quality equipment, which is not cheap).  Not only does streaming take up the time you are live (for me, that’s ~7 hours a week) but it also requires prep time – I often try to get ready 30 minutes before going live – so that is another 1 1/2 hours.  For Superhero Delivery Service, I had to write two balanced adventures before every stream.  For Topic Tuesday or Game Dev I had to have a plan of what I was going to discuss and how to teach it.  Then for the event on Friday I had to think of the event, and do prep work for that.  As you can see – that’s quite a big time commitment – especially considering that I have a full-time job and a family.  Sure, much of this was fun, but because of the schedule, it also started to feel like work.

My reason for wanting to be partnered was so that I could justify the effort I was putting in with a small stream of revenue.  For lots of reasons, that didn’t happen.

Are you going to completely fall off the face of the earth?
Nope – I’ll still be on twitter, and Discord, and I’ll keep playing on the community Minecraft server (although less frequently than now).   I also hope to stream 1 day a week.  There will be little structure, and it’ll be me and a friend or two playing any video game we want – the goal is now not to get followers or build/grow a community – the new goal is simply to have fun and turn on a stream and let people join if they want.

Will we see more of Dexter?
I doubt I’ll stop the occasional Minecraft streams where I play with Dexter.

What do you plan on doing next?
I hope to use my newly freed up time to focus on some existing priorities that I haven’t given the attention they deserve.  Additionally, I will most likely be starting up a YouTube series “Practical Programming” which is short tutorial videos teaching people how to be better programmers.

Final Notes
This week I’ll be keeping my normal schedule.  Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, 9:30pm eastern.  Monday is SDS, Tuesday is “The Meaning of Life, Part 2 – Ask me *Almost* Anything” and Friday is a Farewell event on the Minecraft Community Server.  All I ask is that if you enjoyed the streams or the community during this past year, is that you show up in support (hosting is an extra bonus).  I’d love to go out with a bang.