[Editor’s Note: The following is a piece I wrote waaaaay back in 2018 that I’ve touched up, edited, and tweaked so it reads a little better. Enjoy the chaos that’s to follow! ~BallisticToaster]

So I had a weird dream last night. A funny dream.

It’s not often that I have dreams that make me laugh, much less even remember them; the inner-workings of my subconscious conjure dreams so inane, existential, nightmarish, or all of the above that it makes the entertaining and coherent dreams I have stand out even more for having had them to begin with. Least of all because they’re a change of pace from the mundanity of the persisting horrors.

Channel Update 3.10

The one that got out of hand

It’s been ten months since the last major update to the stream and now that we’re halfway into Year 2, it was well past time to make changes that are more substantial than “Here are more meme scenes”. The goal with this update is to address a significant portion of technical debt that’s been accumulating over the past two years by addressing long-standing issues and limitations with the way that streams are currently run.

In light of imminent travel plans and time zone changes, stream schedules will be temporarily suspended from January 24th to April 15th as the channel adjusts to a new weekly format to account for time zone differences, content creation endeavors, and more.

Streams will occur at a reduced frequency as the channel changes from the usual thrice a week cadence to twice a week. You can expect to see one weekday and one weekend stream with surprise streams that may occur during the week as time permits.

It’s been a while since we did one of these fireside chats hasn’t it?

Originally this was supposed to be published after my affiliate anniversary stream way back in late September/early October while I was working on while adding things to the channel such as new emotes, schedule formats, meme scenes, and more. I kept writing while I was working on the channel until this post ballooned college essay levels of unwieldy word counts with twice as much self-indulgent bullshit to pad out the pages. When faced with the near six thousand word long monster in front of me, I did what any self-respecting writer does when scope creep sets in:

Happy Easter everyone! Hope y’all had a wonderful weekend with friends, family, and loved ones. This week at the Crumb Club, we’re settling down a bit. It’s been a hectic week from unleashing the Sinister Six in Spider-Man Remastered to hoarding shines in Super Mario Sunshine, fishing with Del Lago in Resident Evil 4 Remake (with Toasty bait to boot), and booping the snoots of Big Daddies across Rapture in Bioshock not to mention all the stuff that’s been happening behind the scenes when stream isn’t running. As such, this week is going to be a much shorter update ranging from discussing some changes that are being made to meme commands to the future of this series of weekly posts.

This Week at the Crumb Club, we’re engaging in a little spring cleaning. With the first Ramadan schedule behind us, we started off on a high note (heh) with Hi-Fi Rush, continuing with another round of Leon’s wacky European adventure in RE4Remake before capping things off with Metroid Prime: Remastered. These late-night streams have been fun, and it feels great to get back to a regular cadence once more! Today we’re going to touch on some things being added to stream audio quality & mixing changes, new channel point rewards & commands, this week’s schedule.

Happy Monday and Ramadan Kareem! This week at the Crumb Club, we’re moving fast in more ways than one. With the completion of Dead Space Remake, we also played RE4make on stream and spent some time getting acclimatized to all the changes that have been made to its combat, pacing, and moment-to-moment gameplay. As someone who loved the OG RE4, it’s been an excellent time and I can’t wait to see more of this game!

Happy Sunday, you lovely bunch of weird-doughs! This week at the Crumb Club, we’re taking a breather; it’s been a compact week with three back-to-back streams all in a row and we’re slowing down a bit to collect our thoughts in preparation for the week ahead. While these blog posts have always been reflective pieces discussing the state of the stream, this will be a small peek behind the curtain as we explore new features coming to the stream in an effort to refine, refresh, and improve things across the board.

This week at the Crumb Club, we’re moving fast and breaking things with exactly the kind of pace you’d expect from yours truly:

This week was more laidback state of affairs, starting with a playthrough of A Way Out with CyberGamingX1 and a brief Destiny 2 stream in memory of the late Lance Reddick. For those who were able to attend any of these streams, I wanted to take the time to say thank you. Whether you lurked, chatted, or passed by, it’s always great to see you. Especially because…

This week at the Crumb Club, we’re Marching forward.

With the second month of 2023 firmly behind us, it’s time to discuss the state of stream as this week comes to a close and a new one looms over the horizon. As Dead Space Remake and Metroid Prime Remastered slowly near completion, Bioshock 1 was reintroduced (thankfully with no errors or issues!) and we also began Donkey Kong Country 2 with FamiliarDan. But aside from underwater dystopias and monke related hijinks, the question remains: “What else is new, Toasty?”

This week at the Crumb Club, we’re operating on schedule with the first of a (hopefully!) weekly series of blog posts dedicated to discussing the state of stream in time for the completion of the first weekly streaming schedule I’ve ever posted. The plan is for these posts to follow the completion of any weekly schedule I post and to discuss upcoming changes, new features, and findings from the past week to provide a better experience for the audience and myself as a broadcaster. Think of it like a weekly digest to keep the community up to date on what goes on behind the scenes.

[Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a text conversation I had with a friend in December 2020 that I decided to spin out into its own post about how I make my own bread. The recipe itself is pulled from various recipes and YouTube videos online, especially from Binging With Babish. Some things have been added, many grammatical mistakes were corrected, and a few sentences have been changed to make it flow better. If you want a bullet-point version of how to make this recipe, look no further than right below this blurb and you’ll find it! God knows no one wants to read War and Peace before they get to the important part of a recipe but if you’d like to witness the chaos that’s about to unfold anyway, look below the bullet points and buckle up. Eid Mubarak, y’all! ~BallisticToaster]

On the final part of Toasty’s OBS Setup, we’re going to be going through the tools you need to build a welcoming environment in your stream from overlays to chatbots and a general code of conduct to abide by when you’re on the air so you can help set the tone for your stream that’ll help support the community that you’re helping to build every minute you’re live.

Overlays

Overlays refer to the various on-screen elements that display information about your stream in real-time such as alerts, sound alert redemptions, follower goals, and messages from stream chat. Some of these overlays can also be bundled with free and premium themes that are hosted on services such as Streamlabs and StreamElements. These platforms also offer tools to help you build and customize your overlays that you can then add to your scenes in OBS Studio using Browser Sources which pull information from a user-specified URL and can be placed anywhere on your scenes like any other source. Fine-grained customization of overlays themselves requires some working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make changes without breaking the overlays, though often you’ll find yourself writing more CSS code than anything else.

In the first OBS setup post I published, I made mention of external stream control tools such as the Elgato Stream Deck and how they can greatly streamline and automate aspects of streaming especially if you only have one monitor. Today we’re going to be focusing on one such example that makes streaming much more convenient, only relies on a tablet or smartphone, and enables moments such as this.

Meme Scenes

If you’ll recall part one, we touched on two different types of scenes: Static and Dynamic scenes. Static scenes require no streamer interaction while dynamic scenes require them. Today we’ll be introducing a third type of scene: Meme Scenes. Meme scenes are the name given to scenes such as the example seen above and are typically used to reference or make light of the current situation in response to a certain context. As such, Meme scenes can be seen as something of a happy medium between both dynamic and static scenes that if used properly can make your viewers that much happier for their inclusion and usage.

Audio mixing is one of the most challenging aspects of streaming to manage and it’s where your setup will diverge wildly from another person’s while also being subject to the most adjustments and tweaks over time. Everyone’s audio environment is highly variable based on a number of different factors and everything from the quality of your microphone to how loud your voice is, to the volume of other audio sources are relative to each other, the acoustics of the room you’re in (including any soundproofing), background noise, and even your own hearing level to name a few possible factors can have beneficial or detrimental effects on how your stream sounds to your viewers. Proper audio mixing can ensure greater auditory clarity for viewers and is tremendously helpful for those who are hard of hearing, leading to an overall better experience that’ll keep your viewers coming back to you.

Introduction

A week ago, I ran a stream talking about my streaming setup going over everything from audio mixing to my scene layouts as a way to help a couple people out who asked how I set things up on OBS and as a way to say “thank you” and give back to the community that helped me become a Twitch affiliate. To all members of the Crumb Club new and old, there’s no way I could’ve done this without you and the community you all helped build. Thank you all so much for tuning in, following, chatting, lurking, and spreading word of our doughy deeds, the best is yet to crumb and I can’t wheat for you all to see what’s in store for the future of the channel!

Editor’s Note: The content of this article reflects the state of Halo Infinite’s live service as of this article’s original publication date: January 18th, 2022. Several changes have been made to the original article to better address grammatical errors and improve readability while adding annotations to correct and update information regarding the game’s state as of October 31st, 2022.

I’ve been debating whether or not I should post this article since Halo Infinite’s multiplayer released on November 15th and its campaign on December 8th, but not for the reasons that you might expect. Mainly because I haven’t had the chance to pull myself away from the game long enough to actually elaborate more on my thoughts.