📼EposVox - Stream Professor

I'm Addie. Stream Professor 📼 CRT Junkie 📺 Tech Writer 💾 Glitch Artist 📸 Photo/Video 🎥 Consultant 🏳️‍🌈 Chaotic Bisexual.
Here's most of the places you can regularly find me. Social media, tips, and shops listed down below, secondary channels and writings on the right.

Who am I?

I've been making YouTube videos for more than half of my life now. I was part of the web-first generation, spent my grade school years teaching my computer teachers how to fix their computers rather than being taught myself. Tech has always made more sense to me than most things in the world, but I tried to never lose touch with my creative side.
I spent my middle and early high school years hoarding custom Unreal and Halo CE maps from constantly-vanishing websites while using the fast internet at my mom's work, then transitioned to re-uploading gaming clips from X-Fire to YouTube and blowing people's minds that such a thing was even possible. RIP X-Fire. I miss it so.

I spent years trying my hands at different niches: Montages, vlogs, creative videos, gaming videos. The thing that really stuck was tech education. I started YouTube in late 2006, but I didn't start doing it "seriously" until my first OBS (Classic) videos, which I began posting in 2013. Those tutorials and my various tech and gadget reviews began to take off far more than anything I made in the 5 years prior, so I decided to niche down and focus on tech. (Gaming content still happened, just on secondary/old channels or live on Twitch.)

For years, viewers would call me "Prof", "OBS Professor", or "Streaming Teacher Man" - so around 2017-2018 I started taking the branding seriously and adopted the moniker "Stream Professor" (not to be confused with a "stream coach") with the release of my first "OBS Studio Master Class".
I was the primary source of OBS Studio tutorials for a long time, along with the internet's leading expert on capture hardware testing and evaluation. These days there are countless creators showing you how to use OBS, but I try to keep my information pure and objective. Plus, nobody covers capture card reviews like I do. ;)

I'd like to think I'm making a difference with my teaching - both in the direct technical skills I teach, but also through the critical thinking I encourage. I didn't start "this whole YouTube thing" with any lofty purpose in mind, but I think what I do is even more important than ever in the current climate, saturated with grifters and so many doing anything to "get the bag". What I do isn't as profitable, but it's far more important.

Becoming a "YouTuber" and online creative wasn't the path I sat out on, but it's the only one I would have ever made it through. It perfectly combines my creative and artistic interests with my technical obsessions. It allows me to express myself (after a childhood of being forced to suppress who I was) while solving problems and helping others. It's the ultimate digital native's sandbox.

I'm so much more than just the Stream Professor, however.

I'm an artist.

I've been a photographer for as long as I can remember. Film, digital, disposable, toy cameras - it doesn't matter. I love exploring the world and capturing it through unique perspectives and with unique techniques. [Flickr Portfolio]
I've been a fan of analog video my entire life. I grew up on snowy over-the-air TV and damaged VHS tapes, it's a key part of how I still see the world. Phosphor dots, scanlines, magnetic mediums. I LOVE glitch art and all forms of analog video art - be it messing with handicams, putting magnets to VHS tapes, or using circuitbent glitch gear. [Outdate GlitchArt portfolio]
Graphic design may not be my "passion", but it's something I can't stop learning things about, and one day I hope to feel confident enough to call myself a "designer".
Miniature painting (for D&D and Warhammer) has been my more recent artistic outlets. Despite shaky hands and poor on-paper/canvas painting skills, I've picked it up quick and can quickly lose HOURS painting away at my fantasy models.
I just generally like getting my hands dirty and making a mess. Whether it's spray paint, stencil work, paint pens, scanning and dirtying mixed media designs, crafting cyberpunk or fantasy goodies with Cricut stuff, building projects the old fashioned way. Adam Savage is my spirit animal.
I may not be able to draw well, but I'm still an artist. A lifelong one. I hope to show that more as the years progress.

I love to cook

I'm one of those awful people who never paid any attention to learning to cook growing up. I could scramble and brown some ground beef and heat up frozen goods, but that's it. I got a very late start in life with cooking. Despite that, I've become obsessed with it in recent years. Grilling ribeyes or sausage and peppers, growing my own tomatoes to make my own jarred red sauce for pasta, perfecting seasonings on everything - I don't always make perfect meals, but it's one of the most rewarding hobbies I've ever had the pleasure of partaking in. And it has the side benefit of sustaining life, too! :P

picture of a plate of food including homemade garlic bread, baked ziti and green beans

I'm a writer

Always have been. I've neglected it for way too long at a time, but I've always been a writer before any other outlet. In grade school I was sneaking online to enter and win online poetry contests, in college I won a handful of journalism awards, and I write every day for my job. Video scripts, blog posts, advertising copy, PCWorld technical articles - my weakest area is creative writing, but that's where I'm focusing my training starting in 2024.

I'm a gamer (not a Gamer)

I played my first computer game when I was 9 months old. (It was "BALLOONS", a shareware DOS game, by the way.)
From there, I grew up on PlayStation and GameBoy Color games. MediEvil, Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Crystal, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken. Then later back to the PC with RuneScape (2, now OSRS), HeroScape, flash games, Space Cadet Pinball, the whole shebang. Gaming is (probably literally in my blood.
I play just about everything, I try not to have too much loyalty to any one platform. Pokemon on GameBoy, Crash on PlayStation, Halo on Xbox, modern shooters on PC, roguelights and Diablo-likes on my Steam Deck. Doesn't matter. I really don't like a lot of Nintendo's business practices, and I didn't grow up with SEGA, so I can't claim to be completely neutral, but I don't stick in any one camp.

For a time, I was a competitive FPS player. I competed semi-professionally in Halo 3 and Halo: Reach on Xbox 360. I still get the itch sometimes and grind out some ranked play to get Diamond in games like Splitgate, Onyx in Halo 5, and Platinum the one time I ranked up in Halo Infinite. I hope to get back to it more soon.
As a busy dad, I don't have time to no-life games anymore. Most of my gaming time is spent either combing through my back catalog or playing through our 80+ hour-long Baldur's Gate 3 campaign with my wife, or sneaking in some roguelight or Pokemon-clone game time on my Steam Deck while on dad duty.
I still collect for just about all systems (when it's financially feasible) as I prefer ownership and physical releases.

ADHD

I got diagnosed with ADHD (hyperactive) in 2022. The ways in which it has permeated my entire life and how I do everything is still being discovered.

Collector

Perhaps a consequence of neurodivergent obsessive tendencies, I can't resist collecting things. Video games, figures, D&D miniatures, Pokemon Cards, retro gadgets, cameras, video assets. Some are more innocent (and less expensive) than others. I have to reign some in more often than I'd like to admit. As a physical media afficionado, 4K BluRays and CDs are my current focus.

Style

The "Chaotic Bi" trope never misses. 80s neon and dense colors. 90s geometric patterns. Colored hair and nails. Synthesizers, electric guitars, kicking drums, big hair. Analog video degradation, guitar amp distortion. I'm a digital native born at the peak of analog dominance, and the fusion feeds my being.

That's me. I hate labels, I always miss stuff when I write these, but I'm trying to be more open. Don't make me regret it.

Why does this site exist? What's up with the GIFs?

I wrote all that without managing to fit in the site's "about" bits. Whoops.

We live in an era where ownership doesn't exist. Everyone moved to centralized, corporate-owned social media and hosting, giving up creative control and any sense of direction. The past couple years has seen many platforms crumble and the consequences of this shift become apparent. I've never liked it, I miss everyone's fansites and separate forums and IRC chats or group IMs.
In order for the internet to be sustainable, we have to resist some of these modern luxuries and take a little control back. This site is part of that movement.
I don't want to be beholden to any platform's rules or whims for how my own content is posted and hosted. I don't want my reach (socially or "audience"-wise) to be limited at random by any third party.
That's why I've spent a lot of time and effort rebuilding my own online homes. Self-hosted tools, owned websites and social services, down to more ownership over my stream alerts and visuals.

Steps I've taken:

Started my own self-hosted HTML site, not dependent on third-party CDNs or links pages (this is it)
Launched my own Mastodon instance for myself and friends
Stopped relying on Notion and Google Docs and went back to using local document files for most of my writing/presentations/spreadsheets
Established my own email host/service for a personal email account
Moved as much streaming tools as I reasonably can from StreamLabs/StreamElements to local Streamer.bot instance
Diversified my "fan funding" (to Discord, my own shop, Ko-Fi, direct tips)
Moved my asset/art shop from GumRoad to my own Shopify shop (apprehensions about ownership with Shopify discussed here)
Begun first steps to adopt POSSE content flow

Steps still to-do:

Establish PeerTube instance for self-hosted and first-publish video hosting
Establish OwnCast instance for self-hosted live streaming
Unify blog posting
Transition from Plex to Jellyfin for local media hosting
Return to local music usage (including iPod+Rockbox) in place of streaming music
Host Discord alternative using a service like FOSScord or Revolt.chat
Many, many more

All of this is very slow progress, but well worth it in the long run. You can learn more about self-hosting and POSSE philosophies below.