My Story

I started doing video editing way back in my junior and senior years of high school. I was a Visual Arts (drawing, photography, etc) major, but due to my disability, spent basically the last 2 periods of most days down in the Communications (aka A/V) room. It is there that I learned some things and got into editing. During my junior and senior years of high school, I spent more time there than I did in my actual major. It is there that I found my fondness for video production. After that, I started making anime music videos. In 4 years, I made 36 AMVs. I've used a host of video editors, including iMovie, Windows Movie Maker (Classic), Magix Movie Edit, Windows 10 Photos, and DaVinci Resolve.

Tipped off by a post on LiveJournal, I was in the 2006 Troma Entertainment horror musical, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. It was an enjoyable experience and I forged a friendship with one of the leading actors, Allyson. It's thanks to her that I was in the 2008 Pure West Films documentary, Second Skin, about Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games and the effects that they have on their players, both positive and negative. Afterward, I helped to promote the film's DVD release, as well as being on the lookout for illegal uploads of it.

Due to my disability, I have always written/spelled/typed to communicate, so writing has always come rather easily for me. In 2008, I had the privilege of writing a guest editorial that was featured by Wired on the GameLife section of their website. In early 2009, I wrote another guest editorial, this time featured on The Escapist. Starting in June 2009, I teamed up with Pure West again, this time as a regular contributor on their community website, PopTen. At first, I was a Video Games Columnist, but I later transitioned to the role of Reviews Editor. In 2011, I was lucky enough to write a guest review for Kotaku.

I created my YouTube account in October 2010,  but my first upload wasn’t until the following Summer.

In 2012, I had my very first actual job, for just shy of 6 months. I worked in Aspire of WNY’s Technology Today program, where I helped teach individuals with physical, and intellectual challenges how to use the computer, internet, and technology in general. Later that year, I started actively uploading videos to my YouTube channel.

In May of 2013, I won a video contest for which the prize was a video capture device (“capture card”). These devices capture HDMI video inputs to your computer. You can then either save the content or stream it online so others can watch. 99% of the time, I do the latter. Using this capture card only served to rekindle my passion for video production. I’ve been broadcasting, or “streaming” my gameplay live on Twitch ever since. The reason why I started streaming was to show folks that just because we're "disabled" doesn't mean we can't play just as good as, if not better than, the next guy. That goal has never changed.

That being said, learning the ins and outs, and the nuances of streaming was a process. I’m fortunate enough to have had a mentor, and one I can still go to for advice: fighting game tournament broadcaster, Bifuteki (“beefu-tekki”). Fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken have always been a love of mine. As such, of course, I watch annual fighting game tournaments such as Combo Breaker, CEO, Summer Jam, Winter Brawl, and the Evolution Championship Series (EVO). There are several streamers all over the world who broadcast fighting game tournaments, but I found Bifu to be the most affable.

So, I reached out to him and asked for advice. Lucky for me, he was really willing to give advice, and I was really willing to get it. He and his team made me realize that a good stream needs interaction. Together, we figured out solutions for improving my audio, among other things. They made me feel like I’m one of them and not just some “token disabled person” who’s just there because they feel sorry for me. To this day, they still help me when I ask for it. They do right by me, so my loyalty is to them. I also pay it forward and pass what I’ve learned on to others. On July 23, 2021, I finally became part of the Bifuteki stream team on Twitch.

I also had a technological issue to overcome. One that I wouldn’t be able to take care of until 7 years later. Turns out that, at that time, my upload speed was only 6.43Mbps (Megabits per second), which is kind of bad. This, in turn, impacted the video quality. It wasn't until 2018 that I started uploading my playthroughs to my YouTube. Watching them now, my older playthroughs aren’t horrible, but the video quality is definitely lacking,

Two months later, I left PopTen and started my own website, SaltyAccess. This site was focused on reviews, but not in the usual way. As I’m disabled and can only use my right hand, I decided to also review games and products from an accessibility point of view. I received several things to review because of my standpoint. SaltyAccess lasted for 2 years before I decided not to renew the domain.

I took a 3-year hiatus from writing and focused solely on my streaming career, which ultimately paid off. After some serious grinding, I became a Twitch Affiliate in June of 2018, which means I can now make at least a little money from streaming. Over the years, I’ve made upgrades to my streams, including new capture cards. I also decided to not only return to writing but also create one central hub for everything I do — This very site.

In February of 2018, I released a song after 5 years of discussion. I describe it as the anthem for the warriors and the survivors. It was a joint project between Omega Sparx, DJ Optimus Prime, and myself. The song is titled “Adapt”. It's a celebration of my life and those in similar circumstances. I've had to constantly adapt to situations as they arise thanks to my disability, regardless of whether it's in games, or real life. I adapt and push on. I reached out to Omega Sparx after his first EVO (which was 2013). We talked for a long while and he was interested in my poetry, so I sent him some. The idea was then thrown around about him turning one into a song. With that very idea in mind, I wrote a whole new one in the vein of a hype song for fighting game tournaments, and my other friend, DJ Optimus Prime made a custom beat for us. The track is currently on sale on Bandcamp for $2 or pay what you want. It is also available on Spotify, Google Play, Apple Music, and iTunes.

On October 20, 2020, I purchased a new modem, and router, which allowed me to utilize an upload speed of 11.80Mbps. However, it wasn't until the next Summer that I remembered to turn up the settings for my stream, from a resolution of 1280x720 with a bitrate of 2500kbps (Kilobits per second), to 1664x936 with a bitrate of 6000kbps. This increase improved the video quality of my streams, and consequently my playthroughs, exponentially.

I used to just upload my streams to YouTube, as is. As such, most of my videos were anywhere from 3 to 5 hours long. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with me. So, starting on November 12, 2020, until June 29, 2021, I downloaded all of my old videos from my YouTube, cut them into more reasonable chunks (about 30 to 45 minutes), and uploaded those to my YouTube. All 458 videos.

What's interesting to note is the files you download from YouTube are not the same as what you upload. This irked me when I found out, so I bought a 5TB external HDD and now have a local copy of all my streams saved to it, just so I have local copies.

From November 2020 to October 2021, I was using The Photos app on Windows 10 to edit my videos, because it’s quick and easy. What I didn’t know is that Windows 10 Photos only renders videos at 30fps (frames per second). 30fps is fine and all, but most console games run at (or target if nothing else) 60fps, so I wanted that extra oompf.

On October 17, 2021, I discovered DaVinci Resolve, a video editing program from Blackmagic Design, and one that lets you render at 60fps. DaVinci Resolve is the only one I've found that lets you adjust the data/bitrate and framerate. I used that for a few months, until late January 2022, when I realized that rendering at 60fps really was not sustainable for me on my laptop. A single 30-minute video took approximately 2 hours to render. It would have taken me anywhere from 8 to 12 hours to render all the parts of just one stream, and I stream pretty much every day.

Four days later, I finally pulled the trigger on something I had been contemplating subscribing to for years – Shadow. Shadow.tech is a Cloud gaming service, but unlike other similar services, Shadow.tech is not limited to running Video games, as it provides remote access to a complete PC infrastructure. This allows you to get a full desktop experience, where you can run tax software, Photoshop, or video capture tools just as easily as you can PC games. As such, I use my Shadow to do video editing and rendering.

On my Shadow, rendering a 30-minute video in DaVinci Resolve only takes approximately 55 minutes, as opposed to 2 hours on my laptop. On February 4, 2022, thanks to a friend, I was introduced to another video editing program, called Shotcut. Using Shotcut, my rendering time was cut down even further, to about 30 minutes, give or take, on a 30-minute video. As a result, all of my playthroughs will be rendered at the correct framerate, be it 30 or 60fps, going forward.

As of this writing (2022.02.10), I have 872 videos on my YouTube channel.