The question for day 26 of #AprilTTRPGMaker is “Blogs, streams, podcasts?”. I'm not sure if that's meant to be querying what I produce myself or what I consume, so I'll answer both.

What I produce

Blogging at Steemit.com

Currently I do my long-form blogging on the Steemit site, where you're reading this right now. If you're unaware, Steemit is a cryptocurrency-based social media/blogging platform. Basically, it works kind of like any other free blogging site, but it uses the equivalent of the likes/+1s/upvotes that a post gets as a way to allocate the distribution of newly-minted crypto-coins. In effect it turns your “likes” into microtransaction tips that don't cost you anything because the recipient is paid from growth in the money supply instead of being debited from your account. It's a bit weird, but I've argued that it's an economic system that potentially makes a lot more sense for culture-product creators than traditional arrangements (especially when the transaction fees of more conventional payment systems eat so much of a small transaction). There are a few other tabletop RPG enthusiasts here and posting, but not a lot of people have been willing to try the experiment yet. I've been trying to post something every day for the past few months, and there are pros and cons to that. Sometimes that has prodded me to write good stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have written, other times it has been a bit more than my creative energy can sustain and therefore emotionally draining.

I used to occasionally post to my blog danmaruschak.com

I have a personal site, danmaruschak.com, where I have a wordpress blog. I would occasionally post RPG-relevant stuff there, but I'd rarely get many views so it was hard to maintain motivation to write posts since it would often feel like talking into an empty void.

The “Designer vs. Reality” podcast

Several years ago I produced a podcast called Designer vs. Reality. It was an Actual Play podcast based on recordings of playtest sessions of games that were in development. The premise of the podcast is that the reality of a game-in-play isn't always the same as it is inside the designer's head, and the development process of a game involves an iterative test/observe/revise process. I basically let the podcast podfade. A few years ago I wrote a blog post explaining why.

What I consume

Blogs

I have Vincent Baker's anyway blog subscribed in my RSS reader because you sort of have to pay attention to what Vincent is talking about if you care about RPG theory stuff. I rely on social media feeds to encounter other RPG blog content. Jesse Burneko is working on a blog series where he does deep-dives on interesting yet under-appreciated games, I think that's a cool endeavor.

Podcasts

A while back I used to be really into the podcast scene around indie games / story games. A lot of them podfaded or closed down, and I lost interest in some. My favorite was Clyde Rhoer's Theory From the Closet. I'm not sure if the show is currently on a lengthy hiatus or if he's given up on producing content (a lot of times podcasts exist in an indeterminate Schrodinger state between those two), but I really liked his interviewing style as well as the way he chose to leave in stuff that you'd expect to be cut out in a more slickly-produced show, such as when he would go make tea in the middle of the conversation. I used to listen to a lot of AP podcasts, such as The Walking Eye, but I fell out of love with them for a variety of reasons. In my opinion too many shows try too hard to be “entertaining” to their fans which tends to lead to a shallower “performance” style of behavior rather than genuine interaction with the other people or the subject matter.

Even though my RPG podcast consumption had already been declining, my podcast listening overall declined dramatically over a year ago when I developed tinnitus and got paranoid about listening to things via earbuds. Now I occasionally listen to podcasts while I'm trying to fall asleep, but not many of them are RPG related. I like the Very Bad Wizards podcast, which is about psychology and philosophy. I started listening to the Cinema Supercollider podcast, which does reviews of “bad movie” films, because I followed one of the hosts because she was on one of the RPG podcasts I used to listen to, The Jank Cast. I find this one to be a nearly ideal “fall asleep to it” podcast, because it's mellow and conversational but I don't feel bad if I drift off partway through and miss the end.

Streams

I don't watch any live streams, and not any about RPG-specific content. I started watching some YouTube video game Let's-Players a while back, and some of their content tends to be reposts of things which were streamed live on Twitch.tv. That's mostly video game content, but occasionally there's crossover with tabletop stuff – for example a few days ago I watched a Northernlion Live Super Show where they played the video game adaptation of the constrained-communication board game Mysterium and I found it very entertaining.

I used to watch Wil Wheaton's YouTube show Tabletop but I found his insufferable smugness too much to take so I eventually stopped watching. I do sometimes enjoy watching boardgames played on the BoardGameGeek series GameNight.

Apparently D&D streaming is a big thing now, but I'm generally uninterested in D&D and I suspect that D&D streamers would lean heavily into that “trying too hard to entertain” thing that I found frustrating about some AP podcasts, so I don't have any interest in looking into it.

The #AprilTTRPGMaker questions

(From Kira Magrann's twitter)