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Yesterday, I made my debut as a pinball commentator on a Twitch stream! One of the new regulars at our local league got seriously, hard-core, into playing pinball and combined the enough-money/job-that-needs-a-hobby-away-from mix into building up a camera rig. The original intent of that, he tells us, was recording his own play so he could get better at it. But then, if you have the camera rig, you can stream, so why not stream? So he brought the camera rig to the last couple pinball events at our local hipster bar. And then this time he also set up a separate camera and got wireless microphones so he could set up a commentary booth.
So, with the women's pinball club having its monthly tournament he brought out the full gear, including an iPad set up to the side as a telestrator, and after some false starts got it running. And, soon as I was free, called me over to join in as second chair.
How'd I do? I'd give you a link to the feed but I don't actually know which stream it was. After a bit of warming-up I think I got tolerable at nattering on with reasonable relevance, and keeping my gaze somewhere near the camera, though it's hard to resist looking at the computer screen with its live feed of, you know, the actual game. But my voice was muffled, partly because I was wearing both an N95 mask and a cover for that. It got better over the course of the stream, as I got more confident in enunciating, and also as I had to take off and reattach the microphone and ended up with it closer to my voicebox. In the future I might wear a KN-95 to comment instead, or might attach the microphone to my mask.
Also for future streams: sound balancing. There were three sources of sounds for all this. There's the commentators, there's the pinball game being played, and there's the ambient music of the bar. That last is beyond our control and, apparently, beyond anyone's control, because the bar plays whatever's on at about 5.5 on the Richter scale. Mostly this is okay because it's 80s New Wave songs and I'm not going to be tired of that, but it does mean that games near one of the bar's speakers are hard to hear.
The commentators booth --- actually the long table --- was far enough from any bar speakers to be okay. But on the stream it was mixed much lower than the game-and-bar audio were, so that even at my clearest my voice was lost under the game noise and stopping the world and melting with you or whatever. The people on stream didn't have any chance of hearing me ramble on.
The experience was nice enough, and I got the hang of drawing something on the telestrator without looking too distracted early enough. The guy's planning to bring the rig to pinball league Tuesday although since I'll be playing in league --- and he will too --- I don't know there's any place for a commentator. So it goes.
Now, we're getting nearer the end of the night at Dollywood, and you know what amusement parks do for early-summer nights?
Here's the Mystery Mine again, by night, under either the moon or a very high streetlight. I love the colors of light cast upon the ride, though.
And here we go! Fireworks! They had both fireworks and a drone show; the drones did some nice stuff like a butterfly that flexed its wings but it's fireworks that really interest us. The drones we can put up with as making it easier for parks to justify their fireworks budget.
Rollercoaster (1977) in Sensurround!
And here's a better-focused view of a firework behind the track of Mystery Mine.
Bigger and more exciting fireworks going on and you might see a mesh of lights rising up beneath it. That's the drones.
Here's the drones taking on the look of a spiral galaxy while one of the Mystery Mine trains zooms by. Sorry the photo is so out of focus but it's more interesting motion than those adjacent to it on the photo roll.
Trivia: Lord Palmerston's first term as British Prime Minister ended in February 1858 when he was defeated in an effort to strengthen the laws against foreign conspirators. Palmerston's move was in response to a demand by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was acting against the assassination attempt against him by Italian republican Felice Orsini. Source: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848 - 1918, A J P Taylor. (Orsini had tried to assassinate Napoleon with a bomb made in Britain, and while Napoleon III supported Orsini's cause to a surprising measure, he didn't want a habit made of this sort of thing.)
Currently Reading: To Touch The Face Of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957 - 1975, Kendrick Oliver.
