Thursday, January 26, 2023

The Night I Cried: My Twitch Community Is Awesome

Good morning everyone,

Saying yesterday was rough... is an understatement. At about 3:30 PM, I was in a telephone conference with my Aunt Hillary, my brother Leo and the care team for my mom at Cooper Hospital, where in no uncertain terms they basically laid out the fact that my mom's battle against Lung Cancer is going to require Hospice care. Considering my mom is only 63 years old... and we were reaching milestones to where she could start dialing back and taking it easy for her senior years... this is devastating. See... I had hope, and I still hope, that mom can fight this and make it back home. To live the life she worked for.

After the call, I called my dad, who lives out in the North Dakota... and we had the longest conversation we had in probably ten years or so. Granted we ended up talking about his replaying of the 1953 Baseball season using APBA Baseball for Windows. It certainly was the first breath of levity I needed, all things considered.

Then came time to for last night's broadcast... and for the first time, I cried on stream... and prior to last night, the only folks who have seen me cried was my brother a few weeks ago, and my aunt who came by to pick up some things. I've been open and honest with my viewers, as few as I have, regarding my mom's condition, and ya'll know I've posted updates here in this blog day after day. But last night I openly cried on stream... it's just surreal that i just... talked for an hour, talk about mom, what she means to me and all sorts of stuff... and opened up about a whole lot of things, my failures, and how we both expected things to be.

I want to thank everyone who was in the chat during that, ya'll are awesome for just letting me just talk, because it's not easy for me at all, and just vent like that, with no real judgement. Those in the chat, including new viewers were really kind. And once I started talking other stuff like the VHS tapes I've been finding thing started to get on track a bit.... which lead to me recalling the theme for Felix the Cat, of all things.

Now I've been broadcasting regularly on Twitch since January of 2017, and it has been the only thing I've done where I feel like I could actually be good at something, and while I may have a small community of folks that have stuck with me along the way, they are the best people that I know. It's why I say without question, my twitch community is awesome.

Now once we got into playing Fall Guys like maybe an hour into the stream (I kept saying we'd get to it but I wouldn't shut up lo)l, but when finally we did, I was joined by long time friends of the channel Felkimchi and PandaSweet for a run in the 'Squads' show... and somehow, some way, we won, with me being the last person standing. Talk about surreal. To have that moment was incredible.

Of course we also played Fallout 76, and Iceman joined me for that, and since he's gone through this sort of things, we ended up just talking during an extra final hour of the stream, in addition to our usual hi-jinks that ensured during our adventures in West Virginia.

Last night's stream will be preserved in an uncut state over on my YouTube channel, and I also segmented out the entire first 90 minutes to keep on Twitch as well. 

Stream Clips

With everything going on, I barely managed to finish a short story commission based on things in WWE, and got another one to work on, but I'm going to have to delay writing it until probably Friday, because I intend to see my mom today. The person who requested said story understands.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Defensive Combo #1, Front-Back Step Combo and Uppercut Combo #2 for only 21 minutes. Woke up later than I intended.... sorry.

"What did the janitor say when he jumped out of the closet?" "Supplies!"

Song of the Day: Tuesday’s Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

For tonight's stream the plan is to play Star Trek Online, which has a new episode out that sees the STO debute of Gates McFadden who played Dr. Beverly Crusher on TNG. In addition, we'll also play  Final Fantasy XIV, we'll do some side quests, maybe some raids and other things. We'll see.

So on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

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