The other day I went to stream some Ark over on twitch, and I swear my laptop was trying to catch fire. So yeah apparently my laptop's CPU and GPU, which handles most of the processing for my streaming, don't really appreciate me running them at full power, and heat, when it is stupid hot out. The capture card was also a little toasty, and the desktop was screaming fan noises at me, but those two devices were relatively cool compared to the laptop who's heat sink was heating the case under it so bad I almost burned my had when trying to pick it up to stick it in front of an air conditioner in another room.

Yeah that was a fun little bit of excitement the other day, and with that news I have some changes to my streaming schedule, or what I try to use as a guideline for the times when I'm streaming. First and foremost I will NOT be streaming at any time of the day if equipment is even remotely hot, I can not afford to replace anything right now, and if I burn something out with this setup streaming will be done until it gets replaced. I am going to be trying to stream in the early morning, but I have work at that time so I will only be able to really stream either before work if its cool enough or on my nights off. More details for that will be figured out as we go, but due to technical issues stream times be a little sporadic and random. Sorry in advance for that.

As for what I plan to do in my free time in the mean time. I will mostly be using this new found freedom...I mean time to work on getting the community going again. It's been a little slow recently, this is partly because I've been very busy with personal stuff IRL, and been using my remaining time to relax and do other things to relieve stress from the pile of things I've been busy with. I plan to start by rethinking what I want to do for the focus of the community, and I will be tweaking the website and discord accordingly. I will also be working on the SOCS and Rose & Shield websites and/or discords more but will mainly be focusing on my community.

Little spoiler for what I want to add to the community, a projects sections where people can suggest ideas for content and/or coding projects, in fact this will probably be the first or second thing I work on, other competition being my 'blog' area for personal posts and rants, and the website's theme. Those two thinks are kind of important.

Sorry if that was a little long and thanks for reading,
-XerShade

Not much to post about this month, for the most part been busy with most of the stuff I mentioned last month. There are a couple of big changes that will be worked on this month, the first being that I am going to be working on more ESO content as my guild's progression group is starting up, so I'll be playing that more in the evenings to help people farm stuff and grind out my own builds. I'll also be working on coding more, I have a few projects on the go I want to get done, so there may be the occasional coding stream or two mixed in. Other than that not much going on this month.

Thanks for reading,
-XerShade

It doesn't feel like we're into the fifth month of 2020 yet, but then again the days start to blend together when you're setting your own hours. Anyhow I realize I forgot to post one of these in April, things got a little hectic with stuff that's been happening. There are only a couple things to go over this time, but they're kinda of big updates.

Firstly I wanted to just say that I'm working on getting more time put into the website and community. I want to work on getting the community more active and such, so I've been making it a goal to work on the community more. There are a number of things in the works, but for the most part I'll be working mostly on the community forums, and my personal areas of the website for now. Oh and the theme, the theme is important so yeah that's also a thing being worked on.

Next I want to just let everyone know that I am working on getting the Champion's Den and Evergloam Nightingales guilds I run in the Elder Scrolls Online more active. Both guilds have kind of just been sitting there, so like the community I want to get those active again. I will not be prioritizing these more than the community, but I'm hoping once I get more stuff done here, I'll have more time to run these guilds more actively.

Other than that not much else going on, there we not many changes to my life because of the world events recently, and I've been pretty much just been doing the same things as normal. As for streaming, I've been having bad migraines because of the rainy season, so I'll try to stream as often a as I can as consistently as I can, but as I always say personal health takes priority over gaming, and if I don't have the energy or patience to stream, I'm not going too.

Thanks for reading,
-XerShade

Just a heads up, I am currently working on organizing and in some areas rebuilding the community. This is the time of the year for spring cleaning and well, also a little stuck at home when not at work so I figured this would be a good time to work on the back end stuff for the community.

The biggest thing that me and the other administrators have been working on is a complete rebuild of the dedicated server that operates pretty much all of the community's servers and websites. Not going to go too much into it for security and boredom reasons, but we are now running the game servers and other services we host on CentOS using docker. This allows us to perform maintenance faster and causes less issues when one server needs to be updated, but updating it will cause issues with other stuff. At this time we are not running more then the minecraft, modded minecraft, and ark servers but in the future we may put up a monthly/event/limited time game server for some added fun and community engagement, more on that later as it's debated. Also the quarter day restarts on the game servers are gone, we now have a program watching the containers and will let us know when one is having issues.

For the personal side of the community, I am going to be focusing more on website design and coding more than applications and games. I feel I've been spreading myself a little too thin recently working on all different kinds of programming projects, so I am now going to focus and work on specializing in website design. There will be areas of the website setup for this as I work on it, and for now I am only working on projects for friends and myself. There will also be a dedicated blog section, as I thought it would be important to separate my personal posts from the community related ones. So as aforementioned I will be setting up a dedicated personal blog section, and the community based stuff will be posted here in the forums area.

That's all for now, I will post a proper update for April and/or May at a later date as the community is re-organized. Thanks for reading,
-XerShade

There's not much going on this update, but there are a few things I would like to touch up on. The first is I am going to be working with some friends to come up with content to put on the website. I'm personally going to try posting more articles and posts besides these updates. I've been wanting to post more content but was not sure about what to post.

The next thing is I will be working on setting up sections for my projects and the community game servers. We've had the minecraft server up for some time and I''ve been working on a few projects behind the scenes. There will be a new projects section popping up on the website in a bit once I get everything working and functional.

That's all for now, thanks for reading,
-XerShade