Ever wanted to watch someone else's feral run?

...probably not, but now you can!

There's an old computer sitting in the family room that serves as a "public" computer... it's the one we let guests use when they visit, and it's pretty much free-for-all for the family to use too, even though we all have our own computers. Since I can't remember the last time anyone used it though, I decided to load Docking Station onto it and start a live Ustream of a vanilla Chichi feral run.

The world is also actually online at the moment, so if you send a creature through the warp to BluburryNorn, it may show up on the screen... as a chichi though, I haven't installed any other breeds yet. In fact, the only thing I have installed is the Supernamer and a homemade script made to automatically cycle through the norns every few minutes so it's not targeting the same one for hours.

I suppose this would be a fun way to do a community feral run-- have several people send in their norns and then watch the run unfold. But I really haven't gauged if there's enough interest for such a thing yet, or if I have the technical capabilities.

See, the computer I'm streaming the run from is quite dated, not to mention full of various applications that strangers have downloaded onto it over the years. That means I have to keep the population low and can't really inject a bunch of extra agents and metarooms or the computer will slow down dramatically. Streaming the video takes an awful lot of resources as it is. Not to mention that since it is a public computer, anyone at anytime could just come by and use it to check their email or something, or just turn it off.

Streaming from my own computer is an option, but a complex one. While I would be able to have a lot more world variety, I wouldn't really be able to have sound. My sound card doesn't support recording from anything but my microphone (most newer soundcards disable it as a form of music piracy prevention... frustrates the heck out of me), so there would be limitations there. Plus it would tie up my computer and prevent me from doing anything else on it, so I really wouldn't want to use it to stream constantly.

Still, I could use it for events that only ran an hour or two and benefitted from narration. I am tossing around silly ideas in my head like a Truman show knockoff: "The Trunorn Show" which would run for an hour per session for six sessions (since most norns live about 5:40) and track a single norn throughout his life (among other norns, of course). But since watching a norn grow up and live its life isn't the most interesting thing in the world, a lot of the show would rely on exaggerated, interpretive narration. I would need a cohost or two and I really don't know a single person that would be interested in such a thing right now. Not to mention getting enough people interested enough in watching live norns to actually set aside a scheduled hour of their day to do so would be a feat in and of itself, considering how small and scattered the CC is.

A lot of these are just overinflated dreams right now, but they're fun overinflated dreams. For now I'll just have to wait and see how much interest this silly little feral run gets.