Thoughts This Week - May 16th

This is my second weekly thoughts post. I actually made some notes during the week, but I saved the actual post to do over the weekend. But then I suddenly felt wild busy/stressed towards the end and it messed up the plan.

There’s the CraftCMS/React client work that I’ve been falling slightly behind on (which btw, has been involving a lot more server administration¹ than I thought it would), the self-hosted live streaming stuff I suddenly got into Friday and wrote a lot of custom code for, and also the blog post about the live streaming stuff that I was hoping to get done soon.

So now it’s 2 AM and I’m trying to get this post done so I can turn off my brain and go to sleep. So with that said, here’s the stuff I’ve been thinking about this week:

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

I’ve played 295 hours of Elite Dangerous on Steam so far. I clearly like the game.

The developers announced a pretty ambitious expansion a few months back that would finally allow you to leave your spaceship and do shit on foot. I was skeptical but very interested. Then back in March they started a closed alpha for people who pre-ordered the game. I broke my “no preorder” rule and did it.

I played through the alpha and “skeptical but interested” sums up the whole experience. It was definitely buggy, but I could see the potential. But there were also some real concerns as the alpha went on and certain things weren’t getting improved.

The expansion finally released last Wednesday and the reception was… not very good. It looks like the developers have a lot of bug fixing ahead of them.

I’m still pretty into the game though, even with the issues.

Owncast

I’m writing a separate post about this, but since it took up so many hours of my weekend I figured I would mention it here.

Owncast is software you can install on your server to let you do live video streaming (like Twitch) with your own setup. It seems like it’s been around for a while, but I haven’t heard of it until now.

I used to stream PC games on Twitch, but I haven’t gone back to it in a while. I think I just got tired of Twitch’s scene. But I still like the idea of streaming in general for either gaming/entertainment/chat or sharing the web development process. I came across Owncast Friday and was immediately interested in trying to get it set up so I can stream without dealing with Twitch (which is obviously the theme of all the tech decisions I’ve been making).

I got the basic version of it setup, which results in a page here on the server that looks exactly like a Twitch stream page. But the literal instant I saw how the chat system worked, I knew I was gonna have to disable it and do something very custom and involved to replace it. Which is exactly what I did and will continue to think about and work on next week.

And then maybe make some time to actually stream things with the system I’m spending so much time on².

Comment Spam

For some reason I started getting a lot more comment spam than normal here. I approve all comments before they’re visible (unless you’re registered) so they were all piling up in my “Pending Comments” list in my admin section. Every one contained a link for a specific website that I never heard of that clearly looked like either spam or malware.

It eventually got annoying enough for me to extend the junk/spam filtering stuff I wrote for messages (the contact form) to work for comments too. I added the link that I saw in all the spam to the filter and it’s been (very) quiet again.