Taking Breaks

I know it sounds hypocritical, coming from someone who’s posting daily while also streaming regularly and who also has university going on but taking breaks is important and that’s something that I knew already… but I didn’t quite realise it completely until today. Hence, another short on some of my ramblings! So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been streaming pretty regularly on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Basically two days free and five days of streams. Mostly because I have more time now due to the Semester break… and because my exams were dotted around quite a lot.

I ended up streaming five times a week because I had too much time and that’s cool and all… but I’d also stream for about five to six hours often, which wasn’t necessarily good. Some of my HUMANKIND streams would even be up to nine hours long… by accident. Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this but it also became rather draining for me. I don’t really play games outside of reviews and streams, so I had to tune it down. For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to stream for a maximum of four hours and it worked a lot better and was less draining… And while previously had two days of free time as well, I had to recently change the schedule a bit and I am enjoying the fact that I have Saturdays and Sundays off now. It’s a weird thing but I got to do a lot more today and yesterday compared to the weekdays that I had free previously.

So, what I’m trying to say is that you need to have breaks and basically stream smart and not a lot. If you stream too much, you get exhausted, tired, and drained. You end up regretting it or disliking it. People catch on to that. They tune off because of that. Hence, don’t do that. At the same time, having streams readily available to you every day means that it’s less rare and it’s less like an event. You wanna catch an event! I mean, the more often you see something, the less attached you are to it. If it means that I get to catch a special event tomorrow, I’d happily skip watching the sunset over here today, if that makes sense.

While YouTube and Google have their own algorithms that reward frequency and short content, Twitch doesn’t necessarily have that. But even if it did reward those that stream 24/7, I don’t wanna be famous or anything on Twitch… I really wanna just meet new people, create a place to distract them from the shitty world outside and share my love for games with other people. Still, that doesn’t mean that I wanna produce shit content. I mean if people are stopping by anyway, I wanna provide a good show for them. For that, I set up a bot account, logged in the bot, and created some fancy graphics in Krita. I tried recording some new sound effects for alerts, practised animation for the stream, and worked on some other graphics. I changed a lot of commands around and managed to fix a bunch of things for the channel while also checking out the new drawing tablet and stuff.

It’s been more productive and I feel a lot better about taking that break. Now, this post could have been a “Bleeding Purple” post of sorts but I don’t think that this is much great advice really or help that isn’t known already. “Breaks are good”, well “duh” but I didn’t think that taking a break on the weekend makes this much of a difference compared to weekdays. So, hope you enjoyed my ramblings. Part of me being “productive” included avoiding to write a blog post because I thought that I already published once… What I didn’t know was that that was yesterday (aka Saturday), so I have to now hurry with this post and… I’ll most likely schedule it back but nobody will know, right? :) Eat your greens and hydrate!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!