ToadieZzz

And learning to embrace my sense of self.

Yesterday I cancelled my first stream back on Twitch since mid-December. It should have been a joyous thing – coming back and getting settled in chatting with the community. But my spouse has a horrible cold and actually called out of work, which is a rare thing for him, and I am just despondent. My ears are poorly in some way, I think infected? They have been for months. But now they’ve got open wounds and my lobes are all swollen and I suppose I shouldn’t waffle on about them because it’s quite gross.

But if I’m being honest, while my ears are making me miserable to be around, they were a convenient excuse to cancel. I didn’t want to come back this week.

The reason I took so much time off streaming was to ‘catch up’ in a way and redo my streaming setup from the ground up. New OBS scenes, Touch Portal setup, channel points and commands, plans for streams, everything. I didn’t get started on that all though until maybe Christmas day? I don’t even remember what I got stuck on. A video for the Cities: Skylines channel which I wasn’t the proudest of, and beside it a video for my own YouTube channel which I am quite proud of but won’t perform well as it’s a tutorial and views will slowly trickle in over time. Also my regular contract work for Paradox which involves reading constant toxicity about Cities: Skylines II. I think it all had me feeling a bit burnt out really.

Maybe I’ve felt burnt out for a while now.

Back to the redesign, I think it’s gone okay. I started with the idea of wanting my scenes to revolve more around being Toadie and so introducing swamps and lily pads and greenery and moss. But then my brand colours, if you will, are my blue and yellow. I thought of changing them to include a green, and an excuse to do so would be to take the Wartortle costume that my logo girl wears and make it a shiny Wartortle. Shiny Wartortles have a green shell, wings, and eyes. Their main body is a soft purple. I redid my logo, emotes, and lots of channel art in those colours and they’re pretty but… I just didn’t like it. I didn’t hate it and I think they’re quite pretty, but something feels meh when I look at it all as a whole.

What I eventually realised is simply that I love my original branding. Can’t even say why, really. Probably that is represents my start to this crazy adventure and the original art all commissioned by a friend of mine is clean and exactly what I asked for at the time. The idea of moving away from it doesn’t feel right to me.

After chatting it out with a couple friends I decided that I was way overthinking this branding colours thing and that they don’t need to match my OBS scenes. Now I’ve decided on keeping my original branding and still changing up the looks of my Twitch streams. I’m happy about this decision! Just not happy yet with how I’ve got the Twitch streams looking.

And then there’s the consideration of wanting to stream on YouTube every now and then.

And making YouTube videos? Maybe? Some day? When will I ever find the time. And what videos can I make, or should I make? The Cities: Skylines II community has really weighed me down with their toxicity and the idea of putting more videos out on that game when all I’m going to get in comments is hate doesn’t appeal. I would like to get started on a beginner’s tutorial series for it, but with patches coming out it’s difficult to know if game mechanics will change in a major way.

Otherwise I would love to start taking my channel in the direction of highlighting different games, going through challenges with them, and telling a story in those videos. I’ve tried a couple of these but haven’t felt like my storytelling skills are up to scratch and that’s something that I think weighs on me more than I’d like to admit. I always say that if I ever grow up I want to be an author and so need to be more than capable of weaving an enticing story, and I feel like I’m not there. But I’ll never get there if I don’t practise.

Time also feels against me.

Honestly. How do people do this? People do this while still having a full time job and even kids! I can’t understand it. I genuinely think I don’t waste my time but it still feels like I have none.

Part of my solution for this is to take some of the tasks I do for my work and do them on stream. An easy example is recording footage for a YouTube video while I stream it, or meal prepping every other week on stream so I don’t have to do it off stream. I also have plans with a creator pal to paint every other week together on stream, some of the things I’ll paint during these streams I’ll sell.

Speaking of these art streams. We’re now how far into this ramble and I’ve finally come to the point that prompted me to start it in the first place.

Yesterday I cancelled my first stream back on Twitch since mid-December. Today I am moping on the couch, feeling sorry for myself, when I should be at my desk working on things that I’m behind on. Just a moment ago I was whining about feeling out of time!

I may have had a bit of an epiphany though.

My spouse and I have been watching The Great Pottery Throw Down in the evenings and I’ve found myself reading about pottery, watching videos, looking at pottery artists’ website and what they’ve made, and of course looking up studios around me to see how approachable it is to get into pottery myself.

Today while he’s at work and I’m here moping I wanted to continue watching it but wouldn’t do so without him. Instead I’ve found and put on The Great British Sewing Bee and of course am finding myself feeling similarly excited about sewing. I’ve done it in the past, was fine at it, and would think it a lot of fun to get back into.

However I’ve realised that’s not realistic for me right now, so instead I found my mind drifting to other creative works I’ve been drawn to, settling into thoughts of wood burning. I’ve always wanted to get into it and I think it’s something I could do on stream. Spent an hour or two Googling wood burning projects and learned about how people paint their works after they burn them – I would love to do that!

I’ve decided this is something I would like to work towards, but now… When? I have committed to one art stream every other Wednesday and that’s a dedicated collaboration time with Leanne that I don’t want to give up. I look forward to those streams the most right now. I also don’t want to give up my meal prep streams as they’ll help me manage my time and I genuinely look forward to them as well. I enjoy cooking!

So… I consider dropping another one of my gaming streams to replace them with art. Like. Maybe I just want to be an art streamer. The thought of this feels like it could be a complete disruption of my community and I worry to dive too hard into something and then eventually pitter away from it. The curse of being the type of person who gains new interests quickly and with passion.

When you get into creating content online you hear a lot about niching down and choosing one thing you’re good at and sticking to it. I’ve seen success with this principle in Cities: Skylines and now that I’ve seen that success I get the good tingly feelings from that success and any time I deviate from it they turn into bad tingly feelings.

I never really intended to put all my eggs in one basket though; I always wanted to do variety at the very least with streaming on Twitch and eventually bring it over to videos on YouTube. Obviously I haven’t achieved that. This recent release of Cities: Skylines II has shown me a bit more urgency with the want to be more diverse with my content though. The community has become so negative and toxic and I am a person who takes negativity inwards very strongly. As a result, I have almost no desire to create any content around the game and so now any content at all because it will so likely point back to Cities: Skylines.

All this to say, it’s known that sticking hard to a niche is better for success, but it’s equally known that doing variety and adjusting to what you enjoy is miles better for your mental health.

Right now I feel like the poster child for both of these facts.

Often when talking shop with creator pals specifically in the streaming space I’ve recognised that what I provide, so-to-speak, relates to how to do X, Y, or Z thing in the game I’m playing. Either a straight tutorial, or showing a creative process, something to do with the game. But a few of my creator pals have done so well in making their spaces and their streams centre around them and their adventure, so that no matter what they put in front of the audience there is still an interest, as the interest was originally founded on them.

I think maybe I want to take that forward. It’s a terrifying thought, really, but if I’m going to find new hobbies and new ways of expressing my creativity that I want to get into, I would like to be able to bring them into my streams.

So maybe I make my one consistency the fact that my streams all centre around my current creative adventure. Embrace the fact that I change up hobbies, am most passionate when I’m learning new skills, and simply invite others along for the ride.

I need to think about it a bit more, I guess. Which maybe is another way that I tend to lose time – I think about things a lot.

I also need to find a way to be okay with slower growth and a smaller community. But hopefully that would mean that core community is tighter – based on values rather than a game. If I look earnestly, I do already have that core group of community members around me.

And I need to be okay with people coming and going as they do or do not enjoy what I’m doing and not take it so personally. Because of a few factors of my life growing up, I do want people to like me. To a fault. I probably put too much value in that to be in this industry really.

It’s probably time to wrap this up. Because I know better than to over-promise and under-deliver, I won’t end by saying “okay I’m going to do this starting this day”, but I do have some changes on my mind and am going to get my butt off this couch and head into my office to get to work.

Regardless of when you’ve hopped on or skooched off, I appreciate you being part of this adventure!

🐸From the next day:

Adding on to this today! I’ve had even more wanderings of the path I want to take and I think I’ve got something that will both challenge me and bring me joy. I’ll bullet point to keep it as brief as possible:

• Starting soon™ I bring polymer clay into my streams. This likely means more art streams than the original every-other-Wednesday plan.
• In an effort to make something more than just fruits or mushrooms or other regular life bits but still avoid copyright issues that would come from doing video game characters, I invent a lil’ blobby species that lives in a swamp. And other swamp-related bits!
• Eventually – maybe by June? – I would like to do this with wood burning as well! I’ve done it a tiny bit on the axes I throw but I want to really learn how to do it. Use wood from my mom’s place, paint over top the burning as well, the whole lot. Also on stream!
• Tuck away these creations until I both have acceptable skill and can afford a PO Box (to use as a sender’s address) then eventually open a shop to sell them.
• While I’m streaming these creations, I want to create a world around them. Like, in our minds, not physically. Write it down. Essentially build the fundamentals for a story.
• Off-stream, I’ll actually write this story. Actually finally write a novel. Likely a shorter novel than what I envision ‘normally’, but it will garner me practise and we could tell a cute little story with these little critters I have in mind! In my head I picture as what The Hobbit is to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I would love to properly publish this thing, you know? Have it be my first experience into publishing, learning all those skills.
• Then much long term, I finally actually write my six novels. And this ‘little’ one that I’ve written about these blobby swampy creatures doesn’t feel like it has happened in that universe, but at the end of the first novel I have the main character come to a swamp, look down, and notice them. So it is actually in the universe, they’re all just so small no one noticed.

That’s the plan, really! And I think it’s a plan I’ll actively work towards. I still need to figure out where gaming and YouTube fits into it because I don’t want to lose them entirely. I do think this outline will allow me to really let my creativity out in ways that I’ll enjoy. And I’ll learn from!

A bit of thinking and planning to do, but I wanted to update with what my sort of actual plan feels like is coming to be. Much love! 💙