pr0mythean

Streamer & ttRPG Shenaniganista twitch.tv/pr0mythean

[pr0mythean]

i want to bend your thoughts

like art bends light

like music bends air

until my words have your mind touching your heart

and your heart pours from your eyes

we are our truest when weeping, I feel

if we only have the courage to face ourselves

in that moment, and those thereafter

[pr0mythean]

I know I'm still a noob DM, but hard disagree on this take.

"You should avoid injury in this fight by rolling around on the ground for the next 20 minutes." is perfectly reasonable.

[16ruedelaverrerie]

Hit him where it hurts, Cassandra! (Apollo is the WORST.)

[escuerzoresucitado]

[oneheadtoanother]

[pr0mythean]

my open invite to friendos and mutuals to trauma dump on me if they ever need to

[pr0mythean]

get in losers, we're screaming

https://www.twitch.tv/pr0mythean

https://www.twitch.tv/itsfatesgrip

[offbeatworlds]

The Monster MANual calendar - a fireman-style calendar of D&D monsters reimagined as humanoid beefcakes.

Aboleth, Mind Flayer, Werewolf, Troll, Gelatinous Cube, Shadow Demon, Mimic, Vampire, Beholder, and Shambling Mound.

I have two more left to finish, which will be done in the next couple weeks. Pre-orders for the calendar open tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct 18th!

Find out more here

[pr0mythean]

reblogging for important PAXAUS reasons

[thefallingdream]

[pr0mythean]

BORBS

[pr0mythean]

now would be a wonderful time for some brilliant dicewright to put out a D20 with a blue checkmark for both the 1 and the 20

[dicemakers]

We have one dyed surprise for you this week. These will be released tomorrow!

[highlandparanormalsociety]

Adventures in small boxes

[elliottkay]

Random D&D thought of the day: Anyone else ever consider how intrusive the Sending spell would be?

I mean it’s basically texting but it goes straight into your brain. There’s no block function and you don’t even get to decide when to pick up the message.

Somewhere out there, a wizard with 3rd level spell slots won’t leave his ex alone.

#dnd

[pr0mythean]

There are a stack of adventure hooks right here..

The party are hired to track down a serial sender and.. "encourage" them to stop

The party are enforcers of the United Mage Guild's Sending Accords, which impose severe penalties on those who use the spell for non-authorisrd purposes

A local royal suspects their betrothed to be exchanging spicy sendings with a secret lover and employs the party to confirm the suspicion and bring the offending party before them

Sending has been banned outright, and the Arcanearati are agitating against the authorities who have imposed the ban

[warakami-vaporwave]

[thatonenewdungeonmaster]

[pr0mythean]

My duergar ranger on literally every survival roll so far

[thatonenewdungeonmaster]

[pr0mythean]

Optimus(ic) Prime

Twitch and its users have had a bitter relationship with the music industry these last couple of years - but is that ready to change?

Remember Twitch Sings? I do - fondly. It closed in January 2020, at a time when more people than ever were finding joy in the quirky karaoke corner of the world's biggest live streaming platform.

There were a few fairly obvious things going on under the hood. Twitch was rife with streamers illegally broadcasting music - which likely led to the industry players refusing to renew the licencing agreements that allowed Twitch Sings to exist until the platform addressed that issue. In the same year, streamers on Twitch were hit with wave after wave of DMCA takedown requests targeting the platform, and a flurry of opinions and half-baked services were thrown out into the world in the months that followed.

Pretzel Rocks emerged as the outstanding leader in finding a solution that works for artists (obligatory reminder that anyone telling you their tracks are safe to stream from spotify is either ignorant of spotify's terms of service - or isn't, and is just exploiting you for the plays), and streamers. It's one of the only services out there that works with artists to acquire the fully fledged sync licensing required to leave a track up on a VOD. But two years on, even with the clout of SongTradr behind it, Pretzel has peaked at 425k tracks for just 500k users.

Twitch themselves struggled with the problem. Music licencing is complicated. Many streamers are more than willing to steal another artist's work for their own benefit. Few are willing to put in the cognitive effort to acknowledge that's what they're doing in the first place. YouTube put 10s of millions of dollars and a decade into their solution - the end result from the Twitch side was their Soundtrack service - a curated list of tracks that can be plugged in via OBS or Streamlabs to be shared on your live stream (importantly, only your live stream. evidently the licensing agreements in place for Soundtrack are covered under the platform's performance license, meaning the songs aren't cleared to stick around on a VOD).

All the while though, there's been an arguably superior option from Amazon, the humble li'l Amazon Music extension.

With the Amazon Music extension, you (the streamer) would listen to tracks via the Amazon Music web player, and the extension would list the track kinda like a 'now playing' type thing. Viewers watching you who also had Amazon Music could listen along with you, but entirely independently of the actual stream audio. No nasty licensing issues around the live or recorded stream content, and a clean count of plays for everyone to get their royalties.

Amazon Music has just opened up 98 million more songs to Amazon Prime subscribers. That's not a small number of songs.. and suggests that the relationship between Amazon and the industry is healing somewhat.

So it's a little weird that Twitch have (very) quietly announced the extension will be killed off from November:

Starting November 1st 2022, the Amazon Music Twitch extension will no longer be supported and will be removed from the Extensions Discovery tab.

Decoder's Nilay Patel interviewed Amazon VP Steve Boom (see the transcript here) and there are some super interesting points scattered throughout. It's worth a read/listen but here are the bits that caught my attention:

When I talk to my team about [streaming service] 2.0, it’s like, “We need to think about a streaming service as not just being a catalog of recorded music, but being a host of services that connect artists and fans together.” You’ve seen some of the things we’re doing there; we have invested heavily in livestreaming and in merch.

Merch and livestreaming are a different part of the industry than the recorded music industry, so we’re working directly with artists on that. We work with the labels to some extent, but ultimately, they are less involved in that stuff than on the recorded music where they own the copyrights.

Now, that last bit isn't entirely true. A sync license requires approval from all rights holders, which - if you're using the same tracks as are available in music streaming services - includes the rights holders of the recording (ie. the labels). And it's not cheap. Mat Ombler has a brilliant piece on this in the context of game development, and points out that clearance for a single track might land you six figure territory depending on the artist and how good you are at negotiating. This is why it's generally easier (especially at scale) to stick with live only type services.

Which brings us to one of Amazon's other recent announcements - their live radio service Amp, announced in March this year.

Amp is the digital version of a community radio station - with Amazon fronting the available tracks so you as a broadcaster don't need to worry about broadcast licensing. It's new, it offers (in Beta) 10 million odd songs and it gives you an option to have 5 callers join you.

Which brings us back to Twitch, as the platform just announced Guest Star - an audio and visual version of the call-in feature offered in Amp, similarly limited to 5 guests.

So, Amazon have clearly done some legwork on a refreshed licensing agreements with the music industry. It's unlikely this extends to the sync licensing needed to pair music with new audiovisual works available on demand, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Amp, or it's core functionality, is on the cards as a replacement for both Soundtrack and the Amazon Music extension as Twitch's go-to baked in music option for Live (only) streams.

And all of that to say... hell yes it's possible we see the return of Twitch Sings by Christmas.