No.

OK I was purple at work but now I'm green. I'm very confused.

Why am I purple?

Cbear....

I still don't understand why that restraining order is tied up in court.

Oh huhy I can't stay mad at you.

I mean, I guess I was never mad at you? I'm not really sure where this is going.

#51 I honestly don't believe that. Cbear and DJC are both much quicker to the punchline than I, and usually the punchline is better than whatever I was thinking about saying. As it is though, you still owe me a co-cast. At i49.

Never before has it been such big news when I quit doing something. Someone posted it to reddit and everything. All the suppport in this thread means a lot to me.

It's based on number of ads served, through a Machinima contract. I didn't have enough subscribers to get a contract with TGS.

Hey let's not sully this thread with lies and slander.

"You're going to leave a big pair of shoes to fill" - Dr. Longshaft 2013

...By which I mean I will just keep doing what I've been doing, which is about 1 video per week or whenever I feel like it.

The main reason is that I've found a social life and have other things to do than make vids. When I do get a couple of hours of free time in the evenings or on weekends, I'll be spending it either relaxing and playing or practicing the piano / some other useful skill. So with that out of the way, here's how I feel about it all:

I really enjoyed casting TF2, and I still will on occasion. I hope I won't be so out of practice that I'm barred from casting at i49! I got to play a key role in the growth of the competitive TF2 scene that's happened over the past two years and I'm very grateful for the opportunities and the help everyone gave me. I'd always planned on being the "HuskyStarcraft" of TF2, the not-so-experienced-but-excited-and-committed-to-improving loveable goofball. I think I mostly succeeded, although recently I've been getting irritable on forums and I definitely said some stuff about cbear and djc that was wrong. That aside, I had hoped that after a couple of years of casting, I'd be able to get up to something like $1000 a month in YouTube money. I am barely at a tenth of that - my best month was December at $250, and that was mainly because of my MvM Wave 666 video (which is at 175k views by the way!!!). If I had gotten up to that point, I would have done some serious evaluation about how to step into life as an entertainer rather than life as an accountant with management aspirations.

I know I'm not quick enough on my feet to be a great comedian or entertainer on most days. This may be due to a very long-term erosion of confidence or maybe I'm just not very smart. Nonetheless, I'm glad I could bring enjoyment to thousands of viewers through TF2 casting. To everyone who ever cracked a smile at one of my idiotic off-topic ramblings, thanks for watching. I'll still post videos, but it will probably never be daily again, and I'll be branching out to other games depending on what I'm playing at the time.

I'm hesitant to give specific shout-outs because there are so many people I want to thank that I'm almost guaranteed to miss someone. If I do, just post something here and tell me I'm a bad person. With that disclaimer out of the way, thanks to:

Chriz Ta Fah, Maik and Cheeriss - For giving me STV demos and critiquing my earliest casting.
eXtine and Duder - For pulling me into eXtv and giving me a big stage.
Mikal++ - For sharing wide-eyed dreams about making a casting company.
Lucky Luke, Shdwpuppet and Airon - For amazing work at i46 and being the best at what you do.
Kip - For all the fan gossip that spins around.
Cbear - For great times on Fully Charged (which shall continue, never fear) and for being an adult when I wasn't.
DJC - For putting up with me even when it was obvious that you were carrying every cast.
Torden - For setting me up with Vanilla.
Comedian and Skyride - For casting, i46 and beyond.
Leftism, Monty, Sakura, Mocha, Enigma and Lamefx - For the mostly thankless jobs you do or did.
Every player I've casted - For providing me and the viewers with awesome entertainment.
Everyone who's watched a video - For watching a video. I guess that one was obvious.
edit: More Thanking
Thanks to these communities:
MSPA "Sepulchritude" - For being some of the earliest viewers and friends in TF2.
eXtv - For being the first big casting org I joined.
TeamFortressTV - For being the LAST big casting org I joined.
Reddit - For continually awesome times on servers and for voting my stuff to the front page.
edit 2: The Thankening
Ashkan - For having me do the TF2 Mixup Matches.
Yogscast - For actually putting me on their channel.
Agro, Tempest and Ruskeydoo - For having me on Kritzkast.
Valve - For making TF2. But come on, how hard was that to even do? Seriously.

TLDR: I'm still making vids, just not very often. <3

I guess I'll organize this critique so I don't ramble.

-Strategy

Not team strategy... yours. Define for yourself very clearly how you want this to go. Do you want to be well-known for hilarious jokes? Impeccable game sense? Covering TF2 lobby games? You want to differentiate yourself from all the other casters somehow. Set yourself a strategy.

-Camera / Streaming

Eliminate extraneous overlays. Nobody wants to see your netgraph in a cast. Also, there's a cvar to get rid of the "weapon inspect" box that displays what your target is carrying or wearing, use that.

Spend a few casts (it took me probably 5-6) focusing intently on improving your camerawork. Make some mental rules that establish when you want to be watching first-person POV versus third-person, which person to watch, when to switch, and how to handle third-person zooming. Make sure you have "moveup" and "movedown" bound to different keys so you can move in 3 dimensions.

I'll mostly echo what Edy said about what he calls "3rd person," which I've always called "over-the-shoulder" camera. 1st-person POV or 3rd-person free-cam are almost always what you should use unless you feel like developing some serious over-the-shoulder skills. The problem with using that camera is that it clips into walls and players all the time and gets really hard to see much at all.

When you're picking a first-person subject, think about what that player is likely to do next. Medic nearly has uber? Time to watch his most likely uber target (pocket/demo). Most of one team is dead? Watch a scout for the cleanup, or just watch the retreating players. Make a choice and try not to change it for at least 20 seconds. The more you change camera targets, the harder it is for the viewer to follow.

-Casting

This probably was not the best video to judge your casting ability. But I'll pretend it is. When there's action happening, sometimes it catches you by surprise and you falter for what to say ("oh he should reload a rocket now" etc etc) so you narrate what's on the screen. My preference is to interpret what's happening on the screen rather than just narrate it so that I'm adding some value to the cast.

I don't like the word "faggot" and I think you'll find a lot of hostility to using it.

Anyway, that was a huge wall of text that might seem discouraging. I mean it all as constructive criticism because you do have potential. You've got good vocal variety, you know how to display enthusiasm, and you know TF2. Asking for critiques is a good sign that you want to improve and will keep casting. :)

They convert because there's a market demand for them, just like oil or shoelaces convert into currency. You can exchange dollars for bitcoins and vice versa on certain websites and exchanges.

Some business, especially businesses that want untraceable money handling, use bitcoins for transactions.

I think I'll take ESEA's side on this and we can have a crossfire-style "debate" in which I spew inaccuracies faster than anyone can respond. I might even wear a bowtie.

I think Pictures for Sad Children is a psychological test battery to see how emotionally resilient you are. Did you get through 30 pages without exhibiting signs of depression? 60? I'm sure there's some hopeless optimist out there who can read the whole archive and not feel anything. Or maybe psychopath.