Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Saying Goodbye (to Twitch)

 


Happy New Year, Farmhands.

    I'm in mourning. (Hi, "in mourning", I'm Dad)

    On April 22nd, 2018, I took a deep breath and clicked a button that read "Go Live." My cell phone whirred and the camera showed a younger and incredibly anxious me, in his kitchen, surrounded by the ingredients he'd need to make Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes. I was a cake decorator, you see, having been trained in the ancient ways of Sam's Club to frost and sprinkle atop freeze dried baked goods. With my move to Florida to marry my beautiful wife 3 years prior, however, those skills had been relegated to the hobby space and left to get rusty. Not anymore. I was adamant that I was going to teach myself the missing skill set, use my flock of chickens and their organic eggs to convince the health nuts in my area that my baked goods were somehow superior, and sell my cakes to them for money. And this was the first step in that journey; asking friends and family to watch me work as a way to pressure myself into consistently experimenting at minimum once a week.

    My channel quickly evolved. What started as a simple motivating tool became it's own unique hobby; I switched to a refurbished computer running Linux, designed bespoke graphics, upgraded my cameras to only SLIGHTLY shitty laptop levels of cheap, bought cool new baking tools to try out- but mostly fell face first into enjoying being an entertainer more than being a baker. I made some damn cool cakes, tried and failed at perfecting various flavors (still haven't figured out from-scratch strawberry), and eventually got the bug to try sharing video games I enjoyed to my audience that were increasingly there more for me than for the cakes. I remember passionately regurgitating the talking points of the latest Matt Colville video to a friend who'd never read 4th edition. I remember cackling like a madman when my cat decided he needed to be on my shoulders in the middle of a frosting session, laying down on my back while I was bent in half to accommodate him. I remember starting to cry when I hit 100 followers and achieved Twitch's (then fairly lax) Affiliate status live on stream. 

    The thing is, as I write this, I'm remembering all the good times and only the good times. Being a Twitch streamer wasn't always candy and roses. I fought tooth and nail with my very shitty and cobbled together PC to maintain any semblance of watchable video quality on an incredibly small budget. My un-medicated anxiety made hitting that button and Going Live feel impossible some weekends, compounded by the guilt of skipping a week when the entire POINT was to make me bake often. I struggled with my internet provider, and in particular, a neighbor who twice CUT OUR LAND LINE because he believed the buried cord to be on his property.  And all of that is before you take into account the amount of Dishes that piled up after any given baking sessh. (Beautiful Wife was mostly upset about the dishes.)

    Existing as a creator on the internet is a lot of work, actually.

    This is why, despite my love for the craft being as strong now as it was back then, I have made the decision to say goodbye to being a twitch streamer. Some may call it "graduating", a term popularized by Vtubers and the Japanese Idol culture that they've basically lifted outright, but I prefer the term "retiring." It isn't that I've aged out of the hobby, nor that I'm leaving to pursue bigger and better opportunities like a high school senior moving states to chase a specific college degree. I'm more like an old man who's accepted that maybe this grind isn't for him anymore. Even though I've long since switched the kind of content I produce from the live baking streams into interactive 2d puppetry Vtubing atop Video Game game play, this shit still isn't easy, and the amount of time required to keep it up and running just isn't available to me these days.

    Saying goodbye to parts of yourself is never easy. Admitting that you're not the same person you were 10 years ago comes with a sense of grief. Very rarely do we get to have that realization until it's too late to properly say goodbye. So with heavy heart, I look upon my twitch channel, and metaphorically watch as the cake decorator in his kitchen with anxiety and hope pauses before hitting the "Go Live" button, and gently reaches over to close the door between us. It is April 22nd, 2018, and he has Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes to bake. It is January 1st, 2025, and I have a TTRPG draft to edit.  

    Until next time,

        Farmer Gadda

     

    

Friday, February 16, 2024

Farmer Gadda's Famous Buttercream

Cupcakes that I definitely didn't make, but I could have if I wanted to - Pixabay
 Howdy, Farmhands.

    I have had to explain to literally everyone who has ever eaten my cakes that no, they don't hate buttercream, they've just only eaten the store brand "frosting" that is 90% hydrogenated oil. Don't make me repeat myself for the nth time.

Please just consider the following;

Ingredients

    2 Sticks Unsalted Butter, Softened at Room Temperature (discerning tongues can add a dash of salt to taste if you're that picky)

    1 tsp Vanilla Extract

    2 Tbsp Milk (Almond works fine)

    4 cups Unsifted Powdered Sugar (Once measured, you can sift if you prefer)

Recipe

  1. Place both sticks Butter in a large bowl, beat until creamy
  2. Add 1 Tsp Vanilla and 1 Tbsp Milk, beat again
  3. Add Powdered Sugar, half a cup at a time. Combine completely before adding another cup. Use all 4 cups of Powdered Sugar. Do not add more than a half cup before you turn on the mixer. Trust me on this.
  4. If at any point the mixture becomes too thick to mix, add the remaining Tbsp Milk to moisten the mixture, then continue adding the Powdered Sugar.

For chocolate, replace 1/4th cup Powdered Sugar with 1/4th cup Cocoa Powder, mixing the dry ingredients together fully before adding them as in steps 3 and 4.

Replace the Vanilla Extract for the relevant flavored Extract when making Fruit Flavored frosting.

Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Art of Fucking Up Your Branding

that's not my url anymore
  Howdy, Farmhands.

    I was supposed to be a Vtuber.

    Once upon a time, I would log onto social media with a single goal in mind. I had a Brand, you see. I had an Image. I had this concept lodged into my brain that the only person who would be able to successfully promote the Idea Of Farmer Gadda in a marketable and appealing way would be Me. This was back in the early days of Vtubing, the year 2020, when all the bells and whistles of Japan's Idol Culture were being lifted and repeated wholesale with no critical analysis of whether that mentality was at all healthy for the entertainers trapped in its systems. I was just a lone Farmer with a dream, and a step-by-step plan to make those dreams come true. 

  • No Stories about my personal life. (even though I'd been a 'Fleshtuber' for two years, with a ton of personal information shared during those early baking streams)
  • No Content outside my limited range of acceptable tones. (Farming Games were only fun for so long, and I was too much of a sonic autist to not immediately desire the hog)
  • And no matter how much I believed in something and held it dear, absolutely No Hot Takes.

    This lasted about as long as you're imagining, by which I mean, not terribly long at all. Unlike ACTUAL Idols, I did not have a team of PR specialists and legal contracts to keep me from acting outside the parameters that would ensure only the best and consistent activity of my mind was blasted into the eyeballs of my prospective audience. No matter how strong I thought I was, I was just a man. A weak, fallible, opinionated little man. I was doomed to failure, really.

    From the minute I read the phrase, 'System Matters', I became embroiled in the Discourse of the day with a religious fervor. I had thoughts! I had distastes! I had OPINIONS. So many opinions! I had to start using third party software to contain my opinions, limit posting them to once daily to make sure my ACTUAL branded posts and messages got the air needed to be seen! My existing audience was confused and frightened, wondering where their sweet and loveable cake baking blorbo had gone, replaced by this passionate acolyte of the church of Math Rocks, evangelizing on the merits of Imaginary Elf Games. To anyone just finding me, primarily through said evangelizing, it was nothing more than a funny oddity that the Good-Take-Haver they'd found on Twitter also moonlit as a cartoon farmer-man who played a bit too much Minecraft in his spare time. And once I became privy to that portion of my followers having that opinion of me, I knew I'd fucked up. Farmer Gadda wasn't a brand associated with having a good time with cowbells and plants anymore. It was still that, but with something louder and utterly unrelated, inextricably tied into it's core identity.

    The problem with first impressions is that you only really get them once. Even if I had then and there cut down on TTRPG Poasting, reverted to the squeaky clean marketable image I'd arrived intending to push, the Poastings had been Poasted. I bemoaned this for a minute before something really weird started happening.

    As it turns out, Human beings are messy and multi-faceted. We're not MEANT to have our personalities put into little boxes to be experienced piecemeal. The Sonic Autist in me railing against the constraints of only making Farmy-Cottage Core experiences for my viewers? The passionate flames of Righteousness that burned in my soul whenever someone was wrong on the internet? Those were just as much a part of me as the positive facets I had tried to isolate and exaggerate as part of the Farmer Gadda Caricature. It wasn't for everyone, sure, but it was Me. And people somehow liked Me, warts and all. Even existing followers who didn't care one lick about Dice Math followed along. Some even took to the new style of Poasts with interest of their own, turning my personal journey into unmarketability into a GROUP journey into TTRPG Brainrot. Along the way my audience went from Just Minecraft Enjoyers and Just Cake Lovers to both of those things but also Sonic Fans, and Game Designers, fellow Vtubers and yes, Math Rock Opinion Havers.

    The Art to Fucking Up Your Branding is an ART, not a Science. There isn't a step by step process to replicate doing so smoothly, because the only step is to Be Messy. Be Human. Be everything of yourself at once, screaming your passions and desires into the void and listening to the people who heard you and decided to scream back. 

    I was supposed to be a Vtuber. But I think I'm much happier being an Experience.

Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

I made a blog.

 

You, probably, after reading how good my Thinks are.

Howdy, Farmhands.

    My name is Gadda. I'm a man who wears a bunch of different hats depending on the hour, but the roles you may or may not be familiar with are as follows: He/They, Vtuber, TTRPG Designer, Cake Decorator, Chicken Tender, Wife Guy. And this here is my blog, in which I intend to POAST about these things.

    I don't consider myself to be any sort of expert on any subject; frankly, I'm too frequently wrong to lie to myself about that. But I do have the unfortunate habit of regurgitating the things I Think I Know with the confidence of a man who's won awards for his opinions, which leads to people assuming I'm an expert. I would like to apologize in advance for that. 

    I'm still getting the hang of this platform, as well as learning the process of turning my shorter form thoughts and too-long ramblings into a more readable form. You can get updates via email somehow. Maybe get an RSS Feed and slap my url into it. (Google it, they're great actually.) And who knows, maybe some nugget of wisdom will be worth something to you.

Until Next Time,

            Farmer Gadda

The SANIC Hack: Part 7 - Auras and Aura Shards

  I learned TODAY that the Japanese releases call these "Barriers" which is a much better descriptor than "Shields" but ...