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[need-the-grade]

Technology Expirimentation and Learning 10: Discord

My roomate told me about Discord a while ago, but I still don’t really understand it. It’s a chat app, made for gamers to talk to their friends on, and includes voice chat and text chat. That seems simple on paper. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t actually have any friends online, or that I don’t know how to branch out on this particular platform. 

I tried googling discord servers, and that was actually quite helpful, but when I try to get on Discord on my browser, it tells me I need to verify my identity, and then tells me that a registerred user already has my email. Spoiler alert: it’s probably me. 

I have the app on my phone though, and as far as I can tell, that works perfectly. I registerred in an account, and there are a ton of little channels for me to join, although they are all my roommate and his friends. 

This isn’t a platform like I’m used to. Tumblr and Facebook revolve around making and posting content, getting likes or reblogs, and focusing on that. I haven’t used Facebook in years, and I don’t know any of my followers on Tumblr. Discord is just a chat app that people are using as a social networking app, which is a strange and new concept in my opinion.

[need-the-grade]

Technology Expirimentation and Learning 9: Epic Games

So when you’re a PC Gamer (which I’m not) and you want a game, a lot of the time you have to go through a third party store. Most of the time this doesnt mean driving down to the store and buying a disk and putting it into your computer and such, it means going online and downloading the game. The one everyone goes to is called Steam, it publishes indie games, tripple-A titles, and even has gamified the proccess of buying games. It tracks achivements in your game like a console would so you can show off to your friends. 

Well, recently, there’s been a newcomer to the market, called Epic Games. They’re so new I just heard about them this week, so I’ll check them out and explain what all goes into this proccess.

So I’m not a PC gamer, I’m a console gamer, which is a very differnet thing in the gaming sphere. Most PC gamers build their machines themselves out of parts they order online that look like they came out of Star Trek and glow different colors more often than not. I walked into Target, pointed at a box and said, “That one,” and walked home and put it in a shelfing unit that I made out of stacked milk crates. I don’t even have a PC, I’m doing all my schoolwork on a tablet.

So the first thing I noticed when I googled ‘Epic Games’ is that it seems like you could buy the games straight from the website and download them right there, but you could also download the store itself. I did. The downloaded store prompted me to set up an account, and offerred to link said account to a console system of my choosing, which I really didn’t expect since I don’t think Steam does that. I clicked on Microsoft (because I have an xbox) and followed all the onscreen prompts, however after I was done, it told me that I need to be authenticated externally. 

I have no idea what that means. I went back to the website and tried it there, and I couldnt get any further, and I checked my emails, but I haven’t gotten anything. I’m not really sure what to do, so I just left it.

[need-the-grade]

Technology Expirimentation & Learning 8: Wattpad

So I first came to Tumblr in highschool, because I wanted to be a writer and I thought the way to go would be to get my writing out there and see what people thought. I came to tumblr because I liked the vibe, and it has a pretty wide multimodality to it. I found out about Wattpad later, and have always been way too intimidated to try it. I’m used to being the only writer in the room, and didn’t really have to get over that until college.

Wattpad is a social network/storytelling platform that I heard about but never really looked into. My little sister is addicted to it.

Making an account was so easy that I didn’t even realize I had done it until I checked out my own profile, and the first thing on that page was an option to pick a color scheme. clicking it will immediately ask you to get a premium account, because without one you can’t change your color scheme. 

I found the upload page, it wasn’t easily accessible of clearly defined, but it took me to a page where I could create a book.

It looks super easy, but I have no experience making a cover, which might give the advantage to people who can make elaborate covers, or who can pay someone else to do it. Looking at this, I understand how incredibly easy it is for basically anyone to make a book, and while I find that confomrting because I know it means I wouldnt have any trouble with this, It’s also a little worrying because I know that my competition would only be almost everyone in the world. 

[need-the-grade]

Technology Expirementation & Learning 7: how does one You the Tube?

I use Youtube a lot. Watching videos with the boys is a great way to unwind after a long day, but I’ve never actually tried to be on the uploading end of the video. I got some video clips (two of them) from that last TELP, so I figured I’d give that a try. 

This was the graphic that I saw as soon as I clicked the tab for content creators. Having seen this, I expected to find some sort of video editting software. I didn’t. There isn’t anmy sort of video editting software on Youtube (that I saw) which confused me because I was sure there would be. Basically, you have to edit the videos on your own time and tech, and YouTube just uploads them. That makes sense, but it wasn’t was I was expecting. It means that if you don’t have any sort of video editting software, than you can’t easily create amatuer content. I guess in theory you could find a ton of free apps, I know Apple’s tech always comes with iMovie, but if you have an android and you want to create a compilation of videos of your buddy skating around, you need to find an editing software.

I only had two videos, so I decided to just upload one of them to see what all it entailed. It was a fairly simple proccess, just drag and drop, and now a very short clip of a glitch I encountered in Fallout 4 is importalized in the archives of YouTube.

[need-the-grade]

Technology Expirimentation and Learning 6: getting gameplay videos out of my gaming consoles.

Gaming consoles are essentialy computers, and I have a couple. Now, witht the rise of the Let’s Play community (people who make a living off of playing games, adding commentary, and uploading to the internet) consoles have been optimized to capture gameplay while the player is gaming. I know I’ve takes at least a few screenshots of my own gamelplay, although I never really intended to use it to get famous. 

So to get this content off my devices, the first thing I did was grabbed a flash drive and plugged it into my Xbox. 

...but it turns out that’s not really how it works. The first thing that happened was that I couldn’t find any of the content I’d made in the file explorer of my xBox. My solution to this was to boot up a game and take a new screenshot, because everytime you do, a prompt appears at the bottom of the screen that asks if you want to see the screenshot you just took. I did, and found that all the videos and screenshots i’d taken over the years were on a cloud save storage, xbOx Live. I didn’t really expect that, as the places I had looked for them had been the pictures file and the video file of my xboX. there had been nothing in either of those folders, but on the captures menu I could see that the last two I’d taken had been saved locally. So I have no idea where to find those screenshots normally, and I;m not usre about any other way to find them than the one I used. 

The next thing I found out was that the captures didn’t have an option to be shared to the flashdrive, so digging that thing up was pointless. Instead, they had to be shared to my OneDrive account, and I could retrieve them there.