SirTapTap.com In The Year 2024

2024, sounds so futuristic, doesn’t it? I’ve got some plans for this year and I figured what better day to post them. Not quite New Years Resolutions as I’ve started on most of these items at the end of 2023, but more how I’ll be focusing my work.

Ownership

The big things for me this year are quality and ownership. I’d like to get some proper custom emoji art and other supporting art for my videos and community, start selling some basic Merch, and upgrade my equipment where I can get the most bang for my buck.

I don’t make a ton online, but I make more than you might think; delightfully in that frustrating middle between “not worth caring about” and “actually viable to live on”. So I’ll be reinvesting where I can to keep my articles and videos up, and I even did some depressing Will writing to make sure my videos and articles are preserved in perpetuity. Hopefully.

As for ownership, 2023 saw the rise of the Fediverse which is honestly the first time I’ve been significantly positive about online spaces since web 2.0 siloed us up and sold us off for parts. The whole Twitter explosion made me rethink how much I depend on callous-to-evil corporate empires I have no control over or recourse from, so I’d like to host as much of my content on my own website that I can. It’s not easy doing that with 3000+ videos of relatively high bitrate and length…but I’m exploring my options and at least my short videos will be available on SirTapTap.com as well as YouTube.

More symbolically, I’m trying to call my videos “my videos” rather than “my youtube” and such. I make videos, I just happen to use YouTube. I’ve pulled back on many sites, but I’m still on Social Media on YouTube, Mastodon.Social, and Discord. I’m already looking for ways to self-host my mastodon presence and maybe set up a Matrix server that talks to my Discord so I have more ownership there.

The Website

Important for both quality and ownership is the physical specs of my site. I’ve already upgraded some critical infrastructure for SirTapTap.com around the end of last year, for the interest of completeness I’ll list the prices on my upgrades:

  • Domain Name ($10/year)
  • Cloudflare Pro Plan ($240/year)
  • Linode VPS Hosting, $24 a Month plan ($288/year)
  • Linode Backups $(60/year)

Mostly boring technical stuff, but the better Hosting and Cloudflare plans mean I can absorb a lot more traffic and have much less downtime. I also started a status page at status.sirtaptap.com with some nice uptime monitoring from Betterstack. I can already see that some minor, brief outages disappeared after the hosting upgrade!

Continue reading “SirTapTap.com In The Year 2024”

Seven Streams A-Streaming: A Holiday Week Of Streams

It’s the end of the year, and we’ve got one last week of streaming to make it count! For the holidays I’m taking a few days off, and as a result I’ll be free to do more streaming than usual. So I gave it a cute little name and I’m announcing Seven Streams A-Streaming, 7 mostly holiday or winter related streams! I’ll have a New Year’s announcement on this site too, so stay tuned.

All streams start 7PM Central and on my YouTube channel, unless otherwise noted.

Dec 24th: Christmas Games

Starting with the obvious, there’s several Christmas games I’ve meant to do for ages and never did. We’re fixing that on December 24th at 7 PM! It will be a random selection of mostly Flash Christmas games with some others thrown in there, and maybe a Mario Rom Hack or two.

Continue reading “Seven Streams A-Streaming: A Holiday Week Of Streams”

SirTapTap’s Spooktober Streams 2023

It’s that most special time of the year; October! And that means a Spooktober Streamathon is here. Jumpscare Horror games aren’t everyone’s thing, so my Halloween streams focus on more dream-like, surreal, and chilling games. Don’t expect too many jump scares or survival horror games, but more silly or strange games in the vein of Yume Nikki with more pumpkins and bats injected in there.

At 6 PM Central every Thursday and Friday of the month, we’ll be streaming! I’ve already planned out the first half of the month below with links straight to where you can find the stream. Come chat with us and get spooked!

Join our Discord, watch for updates on Mastodon, or follow me on YouTube to stay up-to-date. Can’t wait to get spooked? Check out the existing VODs from my 2021 and 2018 Spooktober stream-a-thons or my Lo-Fi Horror Game Playlist!

10/5: Halloween Flash Games

My favorite zombie, Flash, was never as dead as anyone says. We’ll be playing a collection of games straight from Archive.org that, indeed, you can play in your browser without Adobe Flash! Emulation, people, it’s a thing. A good one!

I haven’t spoiled myself on the games yet, but the Deep Sleep series is a fantastic set of unnerving point and click Flash games.

Continue reading “SirTapTap’s Spooktober Streams 2023”

Mastodon to Twitter Migration Guide – Tips & Tools

After what feels like a year of “will they won’t they”, Twitter is finally in the hands of America’s Least Mature Man—quite a competitive category. I set up my Mastodon ages ago just to see how it was, but now that I’m finally using it I’m really enjoying it.

This started as a Quick Start guide but ended up much more in depth than I thought. I sorted the headings from most to least important. Mastodon is “complicated”, but mostly in ways you don’t honestly need to worry about. Take your time and learn by doing and asking!

Feel free to share your tips and experiences with Mastodon in the comments below! Or say hi to @[email protected].

What The Hell Is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter alternative with individual servers operated by individuals or communities rather than a single corporation. The code is open-source and anyone can create an instance. As a result there is a consistent code base but not a “corporate mission” and the functionality is largely based on “pre-algorithm” Twitter.

The tl;dr is Mastodon is Twitter without a corporation or a glass-skinned manchild CEO. It costs nothing to try, so pop on a server and see if it’s for you. I’m writing a whole-ass article about it, but the best way is to learn by doing.

Most features Twitter has are on Mastodon, some slightly renamed. Lists, Direct Messages, Retweets (Boosts), Likes (Favorites), Hashtags, Notifications. Poke around and you’ll likely find more things familiar than foreign.

Pick a General Use Instance

Mastodon isn’t one site, it has Instances, sort of like Discord Servers. I’ll get into what that truly means in the later, more technical parts of the article. If you’re getting started, just load up the server list and find either a nice general server, or something specific to your interests. “Instance” and “Server” are interchangeable in Mastodon’s context.

Which instance you pick really doesn’t matter almost at all. I really recommend just making an account and poking around before you worry much about which server, as you can move servers later anyway. I personally recommend Mastodon.Social.

Continue reading “Mastodon to Twitter Migration Guide – Tips & Tools”

Best and Worst Jackbox Party Packs RANKED!

I don’t usually do Top X lists, but well, I’m something of a Jackbox player myself. With almost 50 streamed games of the series and counting, I thought I’d share some Opinions™. Deciding which game to pick up first can be a bit tricky, especially since they’re all priced about the same. Ready those Comment-Phasers below and let me know your hot takes!

I am rating these from a Streamer’s perspective so unstreamable games will not be treated gently. Note the (few) non-streamable games can be quite fun in local multiplayer. Each Pack has 5 different games, but I’m rating on the overall quality of the full set.

Now on to the rankings.

Continue reading “Best and Worst Jackbox Party Packs RANKED!”

SirTapTap’s Spooktober 2021 Stream Schedule

Are you prepared for CHILLS, THRILLS, and DILLS? Spooktober 2021 is here and SirTapTap has 8 bone-chillingly spooky streams ready for you! Check out the playlist below (the video watch page shows the time in YOUR timezone), or tune in on every Friday (4PM Central) and Saturday (6PM) in October!

We’ve got:

Spookware & Haunted PS1 Demo Disk (10/8)

Spookware is a Wario Ware game but SPOOKY, and the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk is a fantastic compilation of indie games with a PS1 horror vibe—my favorite! I probably won’t be able to catch ALL the PS1 demo disk games, so be on the lookout for surplus streams on sundays or weekdays!

Simpsons Treehouse of Horror YTP Collab Remastered (10/9)

Thanks to TheStreamLord, even our YouTube Poop watch party stream will be Spooktober-appropriate this year. This is a freshly remastered YTP collab of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. Get ready to laugh AND scream!

Yume 2kki (10/15)

Yume Nikki fan games are a Halloween tradition on SirTapTap’s channel; just enough surrealness to be unnerving and odd, but not enough horror that the squeamish can’t enjoy! Join us for this dive back in probably the biggest Yume Nikki collaboration there is.

Jackbox Party Pack 8 (10/16)

Featuring the SCARIEST…okay we just do Jackbox nights in the Discord every first and third Saturday of every month. Feel free to join in and make it SPOOKY though.

Re:Kinder (10/22)

Can’t go wrong with a RPG Maker Horror game translated by VGPerson! They have consistently good taste. Thanks to Priere for the suggestion!

Fantasy Maiden’s Odd Hideout(10/23)

A great looking Japanese RPG Maker Horror game in a fantasy vibe this time! Thanks to CP49 for the suggestion!

Desert Nightmare (10/29)

Thanks to Priere for the suggestion again, this is a German RPG Maker Horror game, translated to English! Always good to have some diversity.

SPOOKTOBER MYSTERY STREAMS (10/30 & 10/31)

These bois are so scary I can’t even tell you what they are! And yes, we’re streaming on Halloween Day even though it’s a Sunday! Continuations of games I can’t finish in one stream may continue on Sundays as well.

Continue reading “SirTapTap’s Spooktober 2021 Stream Schedule”

YouTube Poop Submissions for Sir TapTap Reaction Streams

Life comes at you fast, some days you think you’re normal, then here you are, making Reaction streams on YouTube. Anyway, I make YTP Reaction Streams on YouTube and if you want to see me share some great laughs with my audience, here’s how and where to send me stuff.

If you somehow got here without knowing what YouTube Poop means, you can only really understand by watching, I recommend checking out these Sonic ones.

[no_toc]

Ideally what I’m looking for is a 60-90 minute long YouTube playlist with just the best stuff in it, along with at least some form of theme. Here’s a good example from our Dr. Phil stream. That’ll result in a livestream of 90-120 minutes, which seems to be the best length for these bois.

YouTube Poop is a crapshoot (ha) and the problem is, I can’t really fake exaggerated reactions like most famous youtubers. If I have to watch stuff before hand to find what to stream, I won’t be able to really react to it live. That’s why submissions help so much!

Themes don’t have to be strict (you can slip some other good ones in there) but I like to be able to say “hey everyone we’re streaming King of the Hill YouTube Poops” so people have an idea what to expect.

Sometimes there are YTP collabs that are 30-60 minutes long on their own, if you know consistently good ones that add up to a stream on their own, you can just send those without a playlist I guess.

Submissions

Just make a YouTube playlist or email an existing on you think will suffice to [email protected], with any notes you may have, e.g. “there’s copyrighted music in this one,” “this one takes a while to get good” etc.

You can also reach out in my Discord or drop a YouTube comment.

YTP Reaction streams are usually done on Fridays or Saturdays, around 6 PM Central time. I like to do at least once a month.

Stuff To Avoid

Just a bunch of pointers for what doesn’t make the best streaming experience. In pretty much all of these, a small dose (just a few seconds of the video) is fine as long as the rest of the video makes up for it. But if a video’s humor is almost entirely derived from one of these categories, you probably shouldn’t include it.

Copyrighted Music

It’s hard to avoid in YTPs, but music in youtube’s Content ID system can really mess with the stream. If you can give a heads up for extended (over 5 seconds) periods of copyrighted music in a video it helps me mute the video during the stream, otherwise I have to edit it out of the VOD. And once, it took down the stream.

Racism/Bigotry/Slurs

Try not to include stuff where the only ‘funny’ part is a character saying the n-word or whatever. As with most things, a rare, actually funny inclusion that isn’t the sole thing in the video tends to be fine, like Hank Hill mowing his lawn set to Damn It Feel Good to Be a Gangsta.

Loud Noises, Flashing Lights, Screamers

If you can give a heads up as to which videos are particularly bad for flashing lights/ear destruction that helps, and try not to include things that are only ‘funny’ through use of these. I know these are basically unavoidable hence my warnings at the start of every YTP stream.

Politics

So from the PragerU reaction streams you know I don’t particularly shy away from political stuff but, once more, the focus should be on the humor. Unless it’s specifically PragerU/ToiletPaperUSA style humor which happens to work very well, either ask first or don’t include it. I don’t want to have to give live fact checks when I’m trying to laugh at Dr. Robotnik saying “I hope she made lots of DINNER, gay Luigi.”

Sos

Just kidding, Sos edits are always funny. Include more Sos.

Barely Edited Videos

These are both much less funny and much more likely to get me a Content ID claim.

Watch Sir TapTap’s YouTube Poop Reaction Streams

Continue reading “YouTube Poop Submissions for Sir TapTap Reaction Streams”

Are YouTube Shorts Worth Making? My Success With Shorts

YouTube Shorts were recently released publicly though still technically in Beta. The short-form looping videos are a very clear answer to TikTok (and the former Vine), providing very short videos of a minute or less to a vertical-only viewing experience designed just for Mobile, surfaced in a compact “watch a bunch at once” style experience.

If you haven’t messed with Shorts yet, the YouTube help article describes the technical aspects pretty well. I’ll focus more on how to use them and my experience with them and if they’re worth it. Note it’s very early stages so don’t draw too many conclusions, I’m still experimenting myself!

Have you started using YouTube Shorts? Share any tips or experiences in the comments below?

The YouTube Shorts Camera App

The Shorts Camera App seems to be the most direct answer to TikTok, including many features specifically for Shorts creation. However, it is only being tested in India for now, and users outside India will have to wait for the app to roll out worldwide.

YouTube Shorts Camera explanation

The features sound pretty good and will help notice users make Shorts without much/any editing work. The Shorts Camera is NOT required to upload shorts however, so you can upload them now even if you don’t have the app/live outside India.

Note that while the Shorts “experience” is only on Mobile, Shorts are still also a “normal” upload video that will appear like any other video to Desktop users. You get to have your cake and eat it too.

How To Make Your YouTube Video a Short

Even without the app, you can simply upload a vertically oriented (9:16 aspect ratio usually) video 60 seconds or less in length and include #Shorts in the description or title and the system will recognize it as a Short (though this doesn’t guarantee it will be featured as one).

Shorts are somewhat limited: Users can watch the Short, Comment, Like, Share, Subscribe, visit your channel or with a little effort, read the description. Many YouTube features like Chapters and even captions (!!) are currently unsupported, since when watching a Short from the Shorts slider, you get a different fullscreen interface instead of the usual watch page. No ads are shown in the Shorts experience, so a Shorts feature probably won’t raise your income directly—but subs are money too.

The lack of captions is particularly frustrating for accessibility reasons, plus many of us watching on phone leave our devices muted anyway. If your video completely depends on captions, I would bake them in for now. You also cannot tell what frame will be used as the “thumbnail” for Shorts—YouTube will use a frame from the video, not your normal thumbnail.

Expect inconsistency, new features for shorts etc, as the rollout is still technically a beta, so anything could change (or they could quietly nuke the project in a year as Google often does).

Where Do Users See Shorts?

Continue reading “Are YouTube Shorts Worth Making? My Success With Shorts”

Will Flash Games Stop Working in 2021? Flash Shutdown & Emulation

Never thought I’d be making a debunking article about Adobe Flash but here we are. As someone with a YouTube Channel focused on Indie games often covering Flash Games, I hear the line “sure sucks you can’t play Flash Games after 2020” a lot. So what’s the deal? Is Adobe Flash and Flash Games really dead? Will I never be able to play Bloons TD again?

The short answer: MS DOS’s support ended nearly 20 years ago. Are DOS games unplayable in 2020? No. In fact, they’re still sold on Steam. Long answer: Well, the rest of this article.

Note I basically talked about this same thing on YouTube a couple months ago, if you prefer to watch/listen, check that out.

Adobe Flash’s Official End Of Life

What’s really happening after December 2020 is that Adobe’s official security patch support for Flash will end. (And we all know how useful Adobe’s security support has been). More directly, official browser support of Adobe Flash will end which is probably where you heard about Flash’s death, particularly from Chrome’s lovely little bar warning.

This is basically akin to your OS not natively opening .ZIP files. You won’t be able to, without extra effort, open them up, and sure, to many people that’s all it takes. ZIP files were an impregnable barrier to some until Windows started natively opening them. But a lot of us would just download 7Zip (or god forbid, in those dark times, WinRAR) and go right along.

But how will people play something that’s not officially supported? Flash Games, like ZIP files, are mostly just…files. They’re SFW files generally, just a bunch of data that a program on your computer has to know how to open and process for it to work properly.

As a passionate preservationist the topic is pretty near and dear to me even if I didn’t like Flash Games so much, but before we talk about the how of preservation, allow me a brief sideline to talk about why we actually don’t like Adobe Flash itself.

Isn’t Flash Literally Internet Hitler?

Not quite. You’ve probably heard of Flash’s countless flaws (or maybe you just heard Apple didn’t like it, and that’s all it took), and to be sure, back in the days when advertisements, video players, and even whole website designs were in flash, it was a mess. Adobe’s never been big on stability, or security, or, …well, let’s just say they had to patch Flash a LOT.

Flash and Adobe’s…’security culture’ or lack thereof, meant dynamically loaded flash content from third parties was an incredibly risky move, which is why Flash ads were a disastrously bad idea, and they used a ton of resources too. …modern ads are still resource hogs, but most of that badness is because they’re ads from third parties who don’t give a crap—turns out that’s a bigger problem than the ad serving technology. Whodathunkit.

Flash also wasn’t good for website layouts at all—it’s not designed for accessibility so screen readers and other assistive technologies had a heck of a time with it. Video players weren’t much better, Flash just never ran too fast and had a habit of crashing if you had lots of tabs with Flash open. When most of the web ran on or expected you to use Flash, it was a big problem.

So what could Flash possibly be good for? What redeeming feature could this evil, hateful technology have?

Well, it’s pretty damn good at animations. And games. Which is. You know. The things it was made to do. And that’s one of the biggest reasons Flash became such a problem; it was so easy to use and on so many people’s computers, people started using it for stuff it was not made to do. If no one ever made an ad or website layout in Flash, we probably wouldn’t be here having this not-quite-conversation honestly.

Anyway, back to saving Flash, now that we know why some crazy person like myself would want to do such a terrible thing.

Adobe Flash Beyond 2020: Emulation, Players, Extensions

There’s three basic ways to play Flash after the official extension is unsupported/removed. The most basic way is Browser Extensions—with native Flash support they aren’t necessary, but official (or sideloaded) extensions could allow one to just run Flash in browser with a little extra work.

Then there’s Flash Players, like the Newgrounds Flash Player. Flash is just a way of encoding executable information, so downloadable players can (and do) just run .SFW files similar to how you can load .nes files in your favorite emulator. It’s a little more effort, but you won’t lose it after 2020 and don’t have to install any browser extensions which people—for good reason—often don’t trust. For a laugh, try the flash player with a Homestar Runner cartoon to see how it works. Here’s a direct SFW link to a classic H*R cartoon, open the file in Newgrounds Flash Player and boom.

The most advanced, promising, and (slightly) far off way of preserving Flash content is Flash Emulators. More on these later, but like all emulators, Flash Emulation is basically an interpreter or compiler that lets a system play games or content that your system doesn’t natively run. In this case, it would be a program that interprets Flash games/animations without directly relying on Adobe’s code.

But Are Flash Games Safe?

Of all the reasons to abandon Flash, safety was by far the biggest and most reasonable. Is it even safe to still run Flash stuff after 2020 then?

Most of the Flash game and animation content people actually care about is years, even a decade or so old. New Flash security vulnerabilities will surely be found, just like new MSDOS vulnerabilities are found occasionally. While a new Flash Player’s official support certainly could keep up with Flash files, the basic assumption of security would basically move from “is the platform secure” to “is the file secure”.

The best way to play Flash Games post Flashpocalypse will be basically the same way it is now—to only play Flash Games from reasonably secure sites like Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor Games, places that take down actually malicious software instead of trusting your Flash Player to be secure. This is basically the same paradigm your phone’s App Store uses.

It’s not like trusting Flash Player to be secure on its own ever worked when Adobe supported it anyway.

To a lot of people that’s still very scary and that’s fine; I’m not saying your average user is going to download SWFs and play them without even thinking about it. But for those of you who download Fallout 4 mods on the regular, playing a post-2020 Flash Game is going to be similar in difficulty and security—and frankly a 15 year old flash game is probably a lot safer to run than Fallout4NudeMod.exe. Just saying.

So I’m not trying to argue the security aspect too much, as a pretty hardcore “gamer” I regularly download stuff from Itchio and even Mediafire and I know some people would flip out doing that, and the same will basically be true of non-packaged Flash games for a bit. I’m sure I’ll get plenty of comments that it’s unsafe and I acknowledge for the average user, fine. The average user doesn’t run DOSBOX either though, some of us will always go a step beyond the path of least resistance, and in this case it’s not really too big a step.

The Future Of Flash Games Is Emulation

But even if you’re too scared of trusting individual flash files (including those that have worked without issue for 15 years…), Flash Emulators and other solutions can replace Flash while keeping their own security as well, it’s not like we’ll be using a Dec 2020 version of Adobe flash for 2000 years, just like DOSBOX isn’t exactly using a wild and wooly 1999 release of DOS begging your real OS to be invaded by Napster viruses.

Even if you’re too scared to download Newgrounds’ Flash Player, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future of Flash Emulation. I imagine in a matter of years Flash Emulation will be as pleasant and smooth as SNES emulation is now—smooth enough to run in your browser without even knowing it’s emulation, in fact. The Ruffle demo is already pretty close, though its support isn’t yet universal. It’s very likely in the future Flash emulation will just happen in the browser with no manual installs or downloads at all.

So Will Flash Die? Official Support will end, yes. Will Flash Games and Animations still work? Yep. The two aren’t as mutually exclusive as you might have thought. Flash isn’t an MMO or service that requires server-side support—oh, and MMOs can be preserved too by the way!

In short, whatever happens, my obstinate keister will still be playing Flash games for years to come, and you’ll be able to too. In fact, join me on YouTube to check out some Flash Classics!

(Subtle plug, TapTap. Nice.)