As many of you know, I am winding down the blog so that in place I might begin an official YouTube channel. For the past month I have been doing test streams over at Twitch so as to experiment with equipment, resolution, length of stream, topic, etc. etc. The reason I have been approaching the stream this way is because I would like to have only the best quality for my audience. Thus far I have purchased/obtained if for free, used, and tweaked to near-perfection a 1080p webcam, a DSLR camera, the Blue Yeti mic, an Ipevo HD document cam, and other equipment or software (such as OBS) that allows me to stream philosophical content while discussing books visible on the stream, PowerPoints, or stream from remote locations.
(The results of my test streams? The technical-quality results have been mediocre at best, not due to the equipment but because I need a new computer which can proficiently use and process the equipment. I had to upgrade my internet just to even run the stream without lag. Content-wise it has just been experimental - nothing too serious in the sense that the streams turn out to be more or less like very loose seminars/philosophical conversations. Those watching report that they like it, which is good.)
So far the experience has been both positive and negative. Now, the negatives are due mostly to the Twitch platform and the audience that one finds there. On the other hand, the only pro of Twitch is its censorship free (or nearly so) approach to the inclusion of free thought and ideas, as well as music: something YouTube doesn't approach the same way. The very weird thing is that Twitch does ban my videos (they will mute your audio) if you critique their platform or if they catch you using music and then using music again on a following stream. So they are pretty hypocritical when it comes to allowing certain streamers to do something and others not. Still, I've been pretty brazen to test the limit and well, it's been interesting. YouTube would have just deleted me, so I consider it a positive.
The question is whether YouTube's heavy hand of censorship will eliminate my channel as soon as it begins. Time shall tell I suppose, but you dear readers here at After Nature would be the first to know as soon as a channel opened up.
In the meantime I am still struggling for a channel name. I would like to have a new name for the stream other than After Nature if only to start a new chapter in my online philosophy presence. The name I go under at Twitch, I am told, has associations online that could possibly wrongly implicate me with some wrong ideas out there, so that isn't worth the risk. But, I do need a good, interesting stream name for YouTube and I just can't think of one.
A friend of mine suggested Forest Crown, which I quite like... or Eumeswil (the title of Ernst Juenger's best science fiction book), which I like too. Waldganger is too clunky and weird, but in English it translates to something like "Forest Fleer" or "Flight to the Forest" - both interesting. But yet the former's "fleer" may elude some, and the latter sounds, I don't know, like a bad movie title. So I'm stuck. No channel until I think of a good name.
Any suggestions? I really like things from Juenger, who is one of my favorite literary-philosophical authors.
Ever since the golden age of philosophy blogs ended (for better or worse), I've been privy to see that streaming is the future. Twitter's obvious political censorship campaign discourages any free-thinking person from taking them seriously; same with something like Patreon or even Google in general. But Twitter is the absolute worst for it. Likewise Facebook (another platform I have never used on principle) is pretty much self-explanatory. I've saved myself the trouble from trolling over my own posts and doing re-posts saying, "See? I told you so!" Gosh, I called that with Facebook probably about five years ago. And people thought I was some sort of outcast. Same with Twitter. It's just unfashionable to use tools which aid the neo-gulag and their thought-police. I don't want anything to do with it it.
Hence my hesitation with YouTube ...
Right now my main objective is to find a channel name and upgrade my computer. The computer is going to be soon, hopefully the new name as well. The original estimate for the channel was this past spring. That seems to have been pushed back until the end of summer (on YouTube that is; if you're lucky you might be able to find me on Twitch in the meantime).
