The great internet slowdown

Today, or rather a couple of days ago the great internet "slowdown" of 2014 happened. Children wept, websites slapped banners all over the shop and a lot of that shiny internet activism we occasionally hear about took place. I would've liked to included the banner on this blog too, it is possible, but I'm in no way savvy enough to figure it our whilst I'm writing this on my phone (don't tell my boss) The best I can do, at this point in time, is post this infographic.

It's very interesting, and perhaps more importantly very important. If ya'll could take a couple of minutes just to have a look through and familiarize yourself with the situation that'd be grand. The next episode the next two episodes of Resident Evil 4 have been uploaded, they're currently listed as private though until I tag them correctly and get some time off of work to look through everything. Myself & Devyn have recorded two other different LP's of games. I won't spoil them here, because this post is more of a platform to discuss the process of recording and how it's going and the like, perhaps this is a little bit of a declaration too.

Tomorrow, and by that I mean the 13/09/14 I'll likely be releasing part 2 of the series. Part 1-3 of this series has problems with the audio. I'll be pretty frank, myself and Devyn have discussed this at length and the primary feature of these videos is for us to have fun. We don't have the time to hang out as much as we'd with being adults and the like so having these videos are more of a reason to physically see each other, rather than pissing away the hours playing LoL on Skype. That being said, it doesn't speak to our intention with creating these videos. We want them to be good, we want them to be funny and the entire process is a really interesting learning experience. It's funny, you go into creating something with all the intentions of how it should be and how you want it to come out- but it never really goes like you'd planned and that's kind of the beauty of it. The whole mess is what makes it great, hell, the first recording session (before I had the yeti mic) devyn forgot to bring his. Both myself and Devyn- whilst inviting him to do these videos with me- always said we wanted to be a no nonsense play video games and have fun kind of deal. No plan, no schedule etc. Idea is, we'd open our steam accounts & mabes in the future our video game library and go lets play this & boom. Done. Honestly, it's playing havoc with my entire personalty. Lists and organizing stuff are literally my crack.

Regardless, this is the process we decided on and for the most part it's a lot less stressful and a lot less clean and cut than I'm used to- back when I was doing JPA on my own, or when we were doing BSGTV I'd/we'd re-record episodes spend literal hours planning what we were going to do in each episode. I liked it that way, but it was harder than it needed to be. If you've ever listened to any of BSGTV's podcasts that's more the direction JPA is going now. To give it a real life example, we didn't get it "right" until the 3rd game we recorded.Our first 3 episodes of Resident Evil 4 have fucked up audio- I left my surround on and my PC recorded the audio on Fraps & the mic picked up the audio that was so quiet we barely heard it. I had to go ahead and buy a decent piece of gear for once didn't I? The second recording session had issues with the frame rate, we haven't actually solved that yet. We're about an hour and a half into this mystery second game, and throughout we have occasional frame drops for seemingly no reason. It might be down to my PC not being as manly as I thought, or possibly I haven't fiddled with the right settings of the game itself. The third game so far had issues, it was too much for me to be able to record at 1080p. I can play it on full settings, but sadly I can't record it. The mistakes, for the first 2 games were left in. It feels more organic, and whilst it isn't highly professional it's more real and representative of what we want the videos to be about. Two people playing video games. It's not original, but I love doing it. It's a learning curve, I'm using a lot of more expensive software/gear than normal and sharing that journey in a way everyone can see and a way I can look back on is really, really appealing to me. Wall of text I know.