Stream music and sounds

Over the last few years streaming I have sourced and used music to play on intro and outro, however the mood of them was a quite industrial sounding, great for me but not so much for anyone tuning in at 9am on a Sunday morning (my usual time slot).

So I’ve been hunting for some alternative music pieces and two weeks ago I heard a tune over an infographic video on a news site that really caught my attention and I thought it could work well for an intro piece as it reflected the Cyberpunk/Futuristic theme of my overlays, with the industrial ground pounding that I was using.

After some digging around ( I found it on Google Music first) I discovered that the music could be licensed with a personal license being £10 a month with a 30 Day free trial, of course for that price it also includes many other tracks and sound effects too.

So have taken the plunge to see how it all works, the 30 day trail allows you to test out before  you have made any payments, but your channels (Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Podcast) are still able to use it without having a copyright strike.

The key point that I wanted to check and that is confirmed is that any content created (uploaded) during the time you have a license is also covered when you cancel.

Last few streams have been good, I was pleased with the audio quality and felt that it could be a great investment to help me customise my Twitch Channel more to my liking and capturing more of the feel I’m after.

This IS my referral link https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/5o13xg/ however if you want you can navigate directly to the site https://www.epidemicsound.com.

Lockdown for me so far

For myself lockdown seemed relatively straight-forward, I have my “Office” setup facing a window so that family members walking by won’t distract me too much.
Munki has been homeschooling Little Troll since September so there has only been some small tweaks needs to handle my being home all the time.

I bought Animal Crossing New Horizon for Munki so there was something new to her distract from events and the fact we will at some point get on each others nerves, this hasn’t really happened but I’m not sure if it’s just luck or down to ACNH.

We are arranging for shopping once every 7 to 9 days to keep the fresh foods topped up, this seems to be working well so-far and we are noting down dates of foods so we don’t forget to use anything. This has actually seen our weekly food waste amount diminish quite a bit.

The Unexpected

The first Monday after the UK entered lockdown (23rd) mid morning we got the sad news that a family friend of ours had passed away (unrelated to CoVID), this came out of the blue even though they had been in Hospital recently they had been discharged and were at home.

Later that same day we learnt that one of my grandmothers had also passed away (again unrelated to CoVID), she had been unwell for a little while but it was still another shock that hit us for six.

This week both of the funerals have taken place and in both cases the number of attendees is heavily restricted, one to under 5 persons (excluding officials and pallbearers) the other 10 persons (including officials).

I couldn’t attend either of the events due to the limitations, there are plans afoot to hold events in celebration of people’s lives in the future once the world returns to normality.
However not having the release/closure that comes from the attendance of a service is something that is very difficult to get to grips with and I found this very overwhelming at certain points this week.

Ancient Enemy : First Thoughts

I had the pleasure of playing the newly released Ancient Enemy by Grey Alien Games on stream this evening. It is a really fun RPG card battler game with an atmospheric and compelling story, underpinned by some great mechanics and customisable loadouts.

Firstly it’s worth pointing out at first the mechanics feel similar to those in Grey Alien Games previous game Shadow Hand (worth a look), but rather than just repeating them they are expanded and reimagined and make up the core being of Ancient Enemy.

These mechanics give you flexibility to take a loadout that suits a certain playstyle, but you will need to work out strategies to overcome an enemy’s resistance or immunities, while ensuring that your own defense can counter whatever they throw at you too.

Added into the mix are Passive abilities and Active abilities, these influence the actual cards inplay on the game board, which are used to accumulate power for your actions.

Defeating enemies unlocks certain items, but you accrue resource point during play also, which allows you to purchase some upgrades too.

So far I’ve put in just 3 hours of playtime and I’m really loving the art style the game employs it fits the overall tone and feel the game has going on.

I plan to to continue the the same save on Sundays stream (9am BST), for those of your following along at home. http://www.twitch.tv/welshtroll

Two Point Hospital DLC – Off the Grid

The latest DLC expansion for Two Point Hospital was released two weeks ago, Off the Grid is the 4th DLC that expands the map of the base game.

Off The Grid focuses on running eco-hospitals over 3 locations, this brings with it:

  • 31 new items for your hospital decoration needs
  • 35 new illnesses, 9 of which are visible ailments and 4 new treatment rooms

The game mixes things up, with the items and levels are eco-centric, with items like a rain water collector that acts like a drink dispenser and beds to grow fruit and veg snacks, the first area I played you are basically building rooms out in the open with the corridors being just outside.

There are additional features like wind turbines and solar panels that come into play as you make your way through the DLC, The first level Wanderoff County Park you didn’t gain money from diagnosing or curing the residents, it came from a wellness Index they had created.

I really did enjoy playing the level even though I could have done with being further along in the base game too.

Another DLC was released at the same time the Exhibition Items Pack which contains 30 new items to clutter up your hospital with, it can be found on the same link above.

I recently got Two Point Hospital for my Switch but I’ve not had chance to get stuck into it yet, so I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

RPG Notetaking

I always like take notes when playing Tabletop Role Playing Games, however moving into the digital world I have found it tricker to do.

If course I can use a pen and paper or one of the numerous erasable notebooks. The paper solution is kind of wasteful, but when the games run on for years it can be difficult to find the right note book/pages or you may have destroyed the notes in that time.

So I’m sold on writing and keeping them digitally, there are a number of solutions that take your notes and digitise them but that again suffers from the difficulty in searching through them.
I have tried to use a note on Roll20 to keep track of them however as I have my windows pop-out of the main window, which when it goes into edit mode, re-attaches itself to the main window, vrenders it frustrating as it’s in the way of the scene.

So for the last month I’ve been testing out CherryTree which as the name suggests makes use of a tree structure to allow you to build a hierarchical structure for your notes.

The application has a huge list of features that I won’t begin to list but I’ll pick the most useful for me and my TTRPG note taking my requirements which are fairly straightforward.

  1. Customisable Colours and Fonts
    I want a dark scheme but not always black or grey, I need to able to read it comfortably.
  2. RichText
    An editor that allows me to highlight words and even cut and paste
  3. Link between Nodes for cross referencing
    To help referencing information between different areas
  4. Ability to search
    Straightforward I know but I want to be able to find data as and when I need to refer back to it.

So far I’m very happy with the application and I can even export nodes into PDF if I want to share anything with other team members.