October 2025

It was a month where I flexed my creative and coding muscle while not having much to show for it in the end. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed it. It’s just that it’s been hard to stay motivated on things that will drive growth of my channels. I mostly just experimented with my tools and rekindled that programming fire.

Solves

on Twitch

Stats

I streamed on 8 different days in October for a total of over 35 hours

I gained 30 follows so far this year, though my current follow count says 27

I streamed for more hours in October than any other month this year.

Thoughts

I didn’t stream the Blackwell series at all. I wasn’t feeling it and found more motivation towards building out a show for crossword solving. To that end, I added a bunch of stuff this month.

• Crossword and Word Games scene layout revamped

• Traffic light indicates hint level

• Crossword solving tips show up across the bottom periodically

• Found a solver that doesn’t use too many resources

• Summaries of Wikipedia articles show up across the bottom after calling the search command from chat (!wiki <search term>)

• Definitions from Wordnik show up in the sidebar after calling the define command !define <word>)

• Added an easter egg involving the Letterkenny crew saying “to be fair…” that responds to chat with a meme reaction when they say the magic phrase(s)

November Plan

The aim is to stream more this month before slowing down at the start of December. Been feeling a bit burnt out on streaming stuff due to a lack of chat/viewer engagement, while I’ve drawn a lot of energy from coding solutions to the things I want to see on my stream. For the next month, this is the tentative schedule on Twitch:

Wordsday Format

My Wednesday streams have been very off the cuff. I think I am slowly getting an understanding for how to build an entertaining stream. Increasing chat engagement is still on my mind, but viewer retention is a metric I’m going to be putting more emphasis on.

With that in mind the format for this month will focus on getting viewers to stay for longer by encouraging the accrual of Channel Points, Twitch’s term for rewards that are open to everybody regardless of subscription status. After watching many of the streams of @rebelappliance and @chetsellers—where viewers and chatters can wager their channel points on the outcome of a game—I have seen how much fun these elements can be. So I’m gonna try implementing this feature into my own Wednesday stream.

So here’s how I’m thinking of structuring those shows

1. Intro (15 min) - discuss life, general things, what the show is about, agenda, etc.

2. Crosshare (30 min) - Catch up on solves from the notifications inbox

3. Wordsday Checklist (2–3 hrs) - Work through a randomly generated list of 5–7 puzzle games, playing each for 10–15 mins

   1. break in between as needed

4. Reality Check (1 hour) - the pièce de résistance of the show.

   1. How many images can I correctly classify as real vs. AI? (40 images in total)

   2. Prediction

      1. less than 30/40

      2. at least 30/40

If I start at around 12pm my time that would be about 2pm Eastern Time. So when I start the Reality Check that will be around 5 to 6 pm Eastern Time, just in time to catch people getting out of work.

on YouTube

Stats

Overall views decreased from September to October

YTD Stats show the bulk of watch hours occurred in the summer

I gained a whopping 0 subscribers in the month of October. Yay!

Codes

on YouTube

October Review

I completed Week 13 of my Tutorial Tuesday series.

November Plan

Trying to complete the archived freeCodeCamp course on Javascript before the end of the year.

Look for me to focus on finishing a lot of that freeCodeCamp course so I don’t have to do much in December.

Constructs

October Review

I didn’t construct any puzzles at Crosshare this month. I was too focused on Solves this month.

November Plan

I don’t plan on constructing at all unless I find something especially motivating or inspiring.

Writes

October Review

I didn’t publish anything this month. Boo.

November Plan

I want to write up a few of my coding solutions I did for the Solves stream. I don’t have a target in mind, but I’d like to at least get one draft down.

• 🔲 Write a technical post

• ✅ Write an update

Welcome to this wooooorld

This is it. I’ve finally gotten around to starting up another blog site. Oh wait. They’re called “newsletters” now. I don’t know what news I’ll be breaking, but it might involve my latest shitposts on the blue place.

Regular Updates

I think I’ll organize these update posts by what I’m doing with each of my content creation venues. This post should serve as a good first draft on a template. I imagine it will take several rounds of iteration throughout the coming year until I find a good format. Bear with me!

Solves

on Twitch

I’ve been trying to get in the rhythm of a good streaming schedule. Right now that looks like commitments to Wednesdays and Thursdays, but here is what I want to set up within the coming weeks.

That should get me about 15 hours a week or 60 hours each month. That seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for.

on YouTube

I get some decent engagement with AVCX and New Yorker crossword content so I’m going to continue to highlight those from my Twitch streams and export them to YouTube. I haven’t been trying too hard to increase the viewership there. I actually get more engagement on my abandoned DxP channel than I do at Solves.

Codes

on YouTube

I’ve been able to commit time to learning on Tuesdays fairly consistently. I would like to commit time on Fridays as well. Eventually I want to learn more web development.

Trying to hit at least 10 hours per week as I work back into the joy of programming and solving coding problems.

Constructs

I’ve been constructing some minis over at Crosshare. The aim is to do at least one mini per week and get comfortable working with Ingrid while I build/prune a word list.

Writes

I want to commit to doing at least one of these types of posts each month. Though the publish dates might be played by my ear. Consider it a soft goal of at least one post per month for the foreseeable future.

Explainers on how I achieve certain effects with OBS and Streamerbot are also on my radar. Those will come up as I work on stream automations and find the energy to organize my chaos into words.

So that’s it for the first entry. Thanks for reading!