hitm4n wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2020 10:33 pm
PeteProdges last post was March 30th. Anyone heard from him? I miss the polls, wondered where he got to.
Aw, cheers! I have missed this place, and did want to continue posting, but as lockdown came, I had a silly idea that turned really huge and ended up raising thousands for the NHS Birmingham Children's Hospital Charity.
I have other interests outside of retrogaming, like running; the cult 70s/80s show Tiswas; stand-up comedy, etc. I had an idea to broadcast a compilation of rare Tiswas clips online each Saturday morning throughout lockdown. And then, maybe even appear on screen to have a social chat to the viewers, as a kind of uplifting 'lockdown' community conversation. And that's how I got streaming on Twitch. We managed to get a couple of people from the show to appear with us, through a Zoom feed, we plugged our JustGiving page and raised over £100 the first time, and from there we attracted even bigger celebrities - like Chris Tarrant; Sylvester McCoy; Toyah Willcox; Sally James, etc, and it ended up being around £2,500 in the end. We only stopped just after the UK pubs reopened as we were extremely knackered (it took 5 evenings out of my week - I've still been working full-time and doing occasional freelance stuff) and the viewership was slightly declining.
Also, when lockdown hit the UK, I was so worried at being denied exercise, I took the opportunity to run at least 5K (3.1 miles) each day. Exercise was never restricted (aside from only one bout of it allowed outside each day during the hardest phase) but I've kept it up. In fact, I was running so much, I felt fit enough to do a marathon, so in early May
I did just that, streaming it to Facebook here and there, and getting people to contribute to my chosen charity. That's over £200 going to Alzheimer's Research UK.
Oh, and also during the hardest phase of lockdown, when all pubs and clubs were shut, I did a stand-up gig to my work colleagues through Zoom. Quite surreal to tell jokes to an audience you know is there, but you have no sound of laughter (no, not because I was crap!)... They had to be muted because otherwise, Zoom will focus on the biggest noise! That raised nearly £400 for charity, although I think it was the Amazon voucher auction that was the big draw.
Also, I've been giving away Raspberry Pi 3s to friends, getting them into retrogaming by loading them with a RetroPie image and tens of thousands of games. Last weekend where we camped in a friend's very large back garden, I brought along a telly and Raspberry Pi, getting everyone to take part in Pac Man (yeah, get them with hooked something familiar) at least once and making a physical high score table out of it. My friend's 12-year-old daughter almost got the highest score. She later heavily kicked my arse at the N64 version of Mario Kart, beating everyone else. (She's very familiar with the Nintendo Switch Mario Kart, but never heard of an N64 of course).
I'm still doing the running, I've revived the Tiswas website a little bit, and I always did mean to return here once things got near normal! The promised Double Dragon video for Reheated Pixels will be assembled shortly, everything's been filmed, it's just finding the time to edit it all together.
As you might have seen elsewhere on this forum,
the idea of streaming ZX Spectrum games on Twitch very much appeals to me, having done some non-gaming work on that platform. I've got stuff on order from Amazon, like a decent desk microphone, and so I think I'll kick it off later this month.