DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
"DadMode" is a podcast where two gaming-loving dads discuss everything from live streaming to fatherhood in a humorous and relatable way. Join Josh aka Moorph and Bearded Nova as they share gaming adventures and parenting anecdotes, offering a unique blend of entertainment and insight for fellow gamers with kids.
DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
The Chaos of Live Streaming
Ever find yourself cursing at your Xbox Series S, wondering why it won't let you install another game without deleting half your library? We certainly have, especially with Call of Duty's colossal appetite for storage space. Join us as we share our personal battles with this storage dilemma, recounting tales from the Call of Duty battlefield—a place where thrilling kill streaks can quickly turn into chaotic respawns in a hail of gunfire. We also take a moment to spotlight platforms like Lurkit and Keymailer, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how streamers secure game keys and the nuances of game selection that come with it.
We then switch gears to embrace the beautiful chaos of live streaming. After a mysterious hiatus, we're back on air, and the audience has plenty of questions about our time away. We tackle these curiosities with a dose of humor, diving headfirst into unscripted conversations that flow naturally and keep us on our toes. With a format that balances structured topics with spontaneous audience interactions, our discussions often extend beyond the planned time, creating an engaging and unpredictable listening experience. Join us for insights, laughter, and the authentic camaraderie that makes our podcast truly unique.
Josh aka Bearded_Nova
I'm from Australia and am what you would call a father who games. I have 5 kids so not as much time to game as I used to. But I still game and stream when I can. So come join me on Twitch in chat as we chill out.
Business Inquiries: Bearded-n0va@aussiebb.com.au
Josh aka Moorph
I'm a US-based husband and father of two boys. I work full-time and have been a content creator since 2000. I'm a YouTube partner, Twitch and LiveSpace streamer who founded a content creation coaching company called Elev8d Media Group (elev8d.media). I'm a blogger, streamer, podcaster, and video-er(?).
Business Inquiries: josh@elev8d.media
Turning off normal human mail mode. Switching to dad mode. Welcome in to dad mode With your hosts Bearded, Nova and Morph.
Speaker 2:So I have a out here. I have an Xbox Series S and the only game I have installed right now is Call of Duty, and it goes not enough space. It's the only game I have installed. What do you mean? Not enough space? So I had to go and uninstall certain features of the game in order to take an update. What the fuck?
Speaker 3:You know you've got a problem when that's the that shouldn't happen.
Speaker 2:It should, it should not happen, like if you're telling me like a game can't be on a system by itself, that that's bad. That's really that's bad, that's just something seriously wrong. And I heard it's like 150 gigs. I literally can't install it unless I uninstall modern, modern warfare 3, and I don't want to do that. I want to play both. The fuck.
Speaker 3:Well I'm seeing and I'm excited that it's on xbox. I'll actually play, I'll actually dip my toes into a call of duty at launch. Now, now that I'm not paying for the fucking game, I'm like here we go, yep, let's see what happens here I played about 30 minutes of the beta so I I'm still really fresh to it yeah, okay, I'm not played any of.
Speaker 3:I haven't played a call of duty in a very long time, so I'll be coming in. Oh, besides dmz, I did that game mode there for a little bit with average, and that was pretty fun I did my first war zone.
Speaker 2:I played like one, one match a couple weeks ago and it was. It was interesting like I got nervous because, like you know, it was just a different. I didn't know the map, you know and all that stuff, and like I still don't understand the rules, whatever weapons you find versus like my specific loadout. Yeah, but I did all right. You know I I didn't finish really high but you know I killed five or six people, so I was, I was pleased I still don't understand how that game mode works.
Speaker 3:So it's not like a traditional Battle Royale or even close to Apex where you can respawn. I get Apex where you can respawn, but it's like a totally different again.
Speaker 2:So if you're playing with a squad and you're down, they can revive you or buy you back, right? Yeah, if you're playing solo, the first time you die, you go to the gulag and then you have to fight one person who just died one on one. Whoever wins, can go back in the game. If you die again, you're done. Yeah, but then, like when you drop in, you know, just like some other battle royales like Fortnite, you know all the guns you have or whatever you find. You know, yeah, if you get enough cash, you can buy your a specific loadout that you made, but you have to earn cash.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, right, okay well, I just yeah, I don't know. It just seemed like it was too. Sometimes I'm watching streamers play warzone. I'm like everyone just keeps coming back. It's like in the final circle. How is everyone still coming back, or is it like you know?
Speaker 2:it shouldn't be this way somehow, but yeah if you're doing. If you're doing solos you, you get one shot at coming back and then you're done okay all right, I might.
Speaker 2:I might give it a go multiplayer. No, you keep respawning. You know, I had a crazy match yesterday. I killed 63 people, but I died 70 times. Yeah, because like you spawn, you die, you kill, you die, you spawn, you die, you spawn, you die, you kill. And like the spawn mechanics are crazy, everybody hates it and the way it works is like I have someone killed me and they spawn me directly behind them a second later. So I'm like, oh dead, like it's so messed up. Or like sometimes you'll spawn. Someone killed me and they spawned me directly behind them a second later. So I'm like, oh dead, like it's so messed up. Sometimes you'll spawn and the enemy will spawn right next to you at the same time. You're like, oh shit, you know, oh wow, they'll spawn. You Like, sometimes people like to drop a turret or something like that. Right, I've spawned me two times in a row in the game in front of the turret, so I in front of the turret, so I died instantly. It's like Just spawned into bullets. It's insane. It's insane, wow, okay, well.
Speaker 3:I might try that on stream. I actually got so returning to streaming and doing streaming again. Like I got that Black Wukong game. I haven't finished it but you know I did what I needed to there to play it and I do. You know I will go back and finish that game at some point, but I jumped on to lurk it and for, like you know, everyone that doesn't know. It's like keep your login, you link up all your socials etc. And then there's offers for cd keys you can get for different games so you can apply for it and then the creator chooses you know the publisher creator chooses whether or not they'll give you access to the game and keir miller and lurk it. You know the publisher or creator chooses whether or not they'll give you access to the game and keymailer and lurk it. You know they're much the same. Keymailer tends to get more premium games, like way more games that you'd know about.
Speaker 3:I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say the games on lurk. It are horrible either. Like there's some great games that come through there as well, and what I like about lurk it is you can actually filter it to your stats. Yeah, so you, you can click and go only show only show games that I'd be eligible for and they're very clear. When you click on the game you need to have you know, mandatory must have one of the following 500 followers, three viewers or you know, it might say you need 20 concurrent viewers or 100 viewers, depending on the game and how much they value that game. They might say we don't want to give it out to everyone.
Speaker 3:So I've gone through that and I've clicked through and I've actually got like two. I've got four games in the last week and I won't look at any more for a while because I've got a month to do a stream. You've basically got to do a stream Once you've got it, if it's a free cd key and that's it. All that they expect is a stream, and then for you to link that stream to say, here you go, I streamed proof that you've done it. So, yeah, there's some few games in there, like similar games, like rainbow six siege style games. I've got that tactical first person shooter where it's you're not playing against other players, you're playing against ai, like ready, ready or not, similar, similar to that vein. So I'm keen to do that.
Speaker 3:And then there was one that I've been getting emails about for like the last four years on a game called nightingale and it's like a. It's like a open world survivor, survival, steampunk kind of era looking game. I don't know, I must have signed up to the mailing list myself saying this game is going to be interesting. Let's, don't know, I must have signed up to the mailing list myself saying this game is going to be interesting, let's. Yeah, you know, I'll follow it. But yeah, that was on there so I clicked on that, got a cd key for that. So I'm like, yeah, brilliant, you know, this is. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah, I'm now that the stream's running smooth.
Speaker 3:Friday. Friday was the first stream where it actually ran smooth like touch wood. There was one giant crash in the middle, like there was one crash, but I don't know what that was. I couldn't isolate that was. It ran for an hour and a half crashed, ran for another hour and a half, no crash. So to me that one crash is completely normal in the streaming space. That happens, compared to previous streams before where I was getting like 20 minutes at a time without 20, 30 minutes. Stop, start, stop, start. And I just couldn't do anything.
Speaker 2:It's like streaming. The technical component is brutal sometimes, you know it's. Oh yeah, you know. I mean, in the time that I was streaming, everything would break from time to time, every single thing, and you could like. A lot of times I would come out. Well, most of the time I came out before stream and tested everything out and I hit log, go live, and then half the things would fail. It's been five minutes since I just tested this. Well, what's going on like and like you can like. I remember when it first started happening, when I was just sort of streaming, I was freaking out because you know, you know, whatever, I'm like oh my god, I don't know how to fix this, and you have people there. But then after a while, when you've been doing it for longer, it's like you know, whatever, I don't care if there's 100 people sitting in chat, you're just like hold on, I've got to fix this thing.
Speaker 3:I think most viewers are pretty acceptable to it as well. Everyone kind of expects it to happen Because, having said that but yeah, obviously I messaged you the other day In my rage of not being able to sort everything on my computer I went through and wiped Windows and like I backed up the video and everything, I moved it to another drive and like all my documents, everything that I needed, to another drive. I'm like, cool, that's great. So while I'm reinstalling Windows and reinstalling things, you know I've got five different drives on my computer and they're different speeds. So, yeah, I got like a really good small nvme drive, but there's only a handful of games that'll sit on that because they really want they work well with that speed. And then I've got two big ssds, ones for general content and bits and pieces ones for games. And then I've got a mechanical and then I've got another one for just windows, which makes it great. So if you want to get rid of windows, you don't have to delete everything else that you have. You know, I mean I'm not losing everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, when I deleted windows and I started going through, I'm looking in the install folders because I got like xbox folders in every drive. I'm like, oh okay, gotta read re-add permissions, I'll delete that folder because I don't, I'm not playing those games, it doesn't matter. While doing that, I'm like you know what, I'll tidy up these drives. So I started going through oh yeah, cool, clean out all these games, I'll only play this game. And like, got probably you know 80 of the drives cleared out of where I wanted.
Speaker 3:And when I got to the content, one I was was like, yep, there's my documents, I have all these videos. They were all this, that, this, that me and I clicking through. And then afterwards I'm like where's the dad mode video? Oh crap, oh crap. When Ferry started searching through folders, I'm like I know I moved it. I know I moved it. So then I went through like three dozen hard drive recovery tools because the recent it's recent. I should be able to recover it. Yeah, no, no, I could, I could recover. I could recover videos from when we started dad mode. But do you think I could find the one from two weeks ago? Wow, no, wow. And I had two drives where it was located.
Speaker 2:Yeah, neither of them appeared and I was so frustrated, right but that's why it's good, like you know, when we're recording, like I, I record too, so we, oh yeah, something happens. Uh, there's at least I had even started that edit.
Speaker 3:I'd already done it. I just had to render it. Everything was done for it. I'd yeah, that was to the point. I wasn't like I had it, everything was ready. I was like, oh, I'll just have to redo the edit before cutting it, and it just didn't happen audio only because I don't record all the video no, no, but saying that, talking about recordings and resetting up things and bits and pieces, me getting back into streaming what I've done.
Speaker 3:That was what I was doing pre before clicking record tonight. I've set up a vertical scene for that yeah, my slobs. So at any point I want to try it. I can just click live on tiktok and push it straight to tiktok there through bearded yeah, mine, mine, my tiktok. So I've got that scene set up.
Speaker 3:But I was thinking, because I've been lurking around in people's twitches the last like two weeks just popping in and out of different people's twitches because we've had bad weather, I've had a lot to do.
Speaker 3:For one week the daughter was sick, so, like wife and I took turns working from home each day because she couldn't lot to do. For one week the daughter was sick, so, like wife, and I took turns working from home each day because she couldn't go to school for the whole week. And I think, because I know you talked about liking the idea of going back to streaming a little bit or once yeah, a little bit, once, you know, maybe once here and there why don't we just click live for this on your end so you can do twitch on yours when we record this, we just do it live on your end and I, you know, much like we said, this show tickled the itch of making content because it was easy. Yeah, we could just click live and just there you go. There's one stream a week done, don't, if we can you're already sitting in front of the computer.
Speaker 3:We still get the audio part you get a bit more of a live audience, more interaction, because we were talking you know what two weeks ago on the show about you possibly going back to more of your talking stream, because that's what your streams did so well back then. Yeah, you've got a permanent live guest right now.
Speaker 2:We can just pull people in whenever we want, that's true. That right now, we can just pull people in whenever we want, that's true. That's true. Yeah, just sit on the fyi dad mode live, I like it. Yeah, just run on yours one more time because we would do it like recording now it's one.
Speaker 2:It's one extra click, but it's not even one extra click because I'm, when we, when we're doing these, for everyone that doesn't know, stream labs is open, like I'm pushing my video feed to him for the recording through stream lab. So, like it's literally, I just have to hit go live yeah, so go virtual, you go, click, go live.
Speaker 3:It's the same, yeah, and then you got the vod, the vod permit. The vod permanently goes. We can't delete it, we can't lose the vod. My vod gets saved on on tiktok, because that's where tiktok actually saves vods. Now, right, but yeah, it was an idea I had the other day while I was flat around, a couple people actually even mentioned it's like oh, when he where, I've seen you. I think their comment was I've seen you going live, but I haven't clicked through yet. Like I've noticed, you started popping in and out of live again. Yeah, a lot of people are asking where both of us were. I was like I think the conversation when people would ask me what's Morph doing?
Speaker 2:I'm like he's probably in bed playing Xbox right now. Probably, if I'm not asleep or at work, I'm playing Xbox. That's exactly what I said. Now you got me thinking I'm going to brainstorm here. While we're recording, we normally do have a couple topics. We do a quick topic, take a little break, talk to the people in chat, do the other topic and then the rest of the time just talk in the chat, so that way we don't have to edit out random questions from people.
Speaker 3:No Random questions can go fucking in anyway, doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:yeah, well, this show is all about randomness now, where it just starts and then goes and goes, and goes yeah, um, usually we start talking and then eventually at some point we just hit record while we're talking and then it's been about 25, 30 minutes and yeah, that's that's exactly how this goes.
Speaker 3:I was. I was talking to a friend of the show damn daniel the other day too because, because I want to see, I've seen him long. But I said I've been lurking at home. Yeah, that's one face I haven't seen live. Oh, in two weeks that not once I've seen live. So so I showed him. That's because he's playing Warzone. Okay, yeah, he loves that. He doesn't go live on Twitch anymore. He's live on TikTok occasionally, really, not Twitch anymore. Yeah, randomly, you guys, I randomly just play games here and there. I'm just busy.
Speaker 2:I'm like, yeah, I haven't seen his content pop up in my tiktok, not really not even bothering doing that.
Speaker 3:It's just he's. You know, last time he was on, we were talking about how he's doing sports with the kids and he's got so much on with the kids. Nowadays are they getting older? Yeah, and that's where the focus has been. Just, it's much like us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, content creation is a lot of fun if you like being creative. But like, if you want to, if you want to be serious, like to any degree, you quickly realize how much freaking work it is and the benefits do not come close to the amount of effort you're putting into it. And so you quickly get yourself just why am I doing this?
Speaker 3:and I and I I've seen a couple of streamers recently, like some streamers you know friends of ours, they're doing great. I hang out with M West. He's been on here before he's killing it. His lives are fantastic. You know he's hitting that 50 mark at the moment. I believe on average Like it's a fun stream, it's a really cool place to chill out is the best way to put it while working. But then I've seen other streamers and they're still sitting at the same numbers that they were two years ago, a year ago, you know, last time I saw when I popped out and some of them are streaming, you know, daily, daily, yeah. And there goes the question when do you call it a quit, when do you say no, like?
Speaker 2:When do you say no, like, when do you say like it's time to stop? Yeah, I think it all depends on the person. You know, Far too many people realize it's time to stop when they've had like a mental break, you know, like when they're just exhausted mentally or just you know they can't do it anymore, and then they stop. Yeah, and so you know they can't do it anymore and then they stop, which is unfortunate, you know, because it is challenging and it's definitely difficult For me personally. You know, I was getting a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that I was doing and one day I had that epiphany of what am I getting out of this? Like, where you know it's great, I'm helping people, I love it when they, they someone tells me that I helped them, that I helped them through a tough time, I helped them get started, but I'm like it's killing me. It doesn't. It's not any good if I'm helping other people.
Speaker 3:if it's killing me, you know yeah well, I'm looking at it, I'm just clicking on twitch now and I have a look. Yeah, yeah, it was turtle. He, you know he's had an increase over the time he's. He's been moving up and up with all his stuff. So, yeah, keep going. He's, he's, he's got an incline. But there's other people that I've, you know, friends with there. They're still that single digit.
Speaker 3:And if you've got nothing else to do and like I think that's how I said I got into streaming originally was purely I had nothing else to do. I was sitting at the computer, I was gaming. May as well just click live and just see what happens. And you're not, you're not pouring. You know I'm looking at two streamers in particular. I'm not going to actually say names because I don't want to be bad if it make make anyone feel bad. But you know, one I know is purely that's just a fill-in, that they're playing games. It's fun. You know they enjoy it. It's it's, it's the overall, it's just a great enjoyment. Whether something happens with it or not. That's another thing or not. But the other one I know does put way more effort into it and the streams are long and they go to events and bits and pieces like that and their number.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah will be better than the first person, but not by much not for the amount of effort put in, I guess right, right, yeah, I I just opened it up over to twitch and I can see three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people that you probably know too. One of them has 19 viewers now. All of the rest have single digits and I've known them for 4 years. You know, and like I appreciate that they they're going. You know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, respect to that.
Speaker 2:It doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much time you put into it. You know, if you just, for some reason, you can't capture an audience and you can either just keep doing it, and who, if you just, for some reason, you can't capture an audience and you can either just keep doing it and who cares? And just having fun hanging out with the people that come by, or you can say, you know, I don't know if I want to do it anymore, you know, yeah I'm not trying to say one thing or another when it comes to my own stream either, because I said I I know I'm single digits at the moment.
Speaker 3:I've had a year and a bit away from streaming and pretty much lost everything and then, that being said, the last few weeks are coming back. They have not gone smoothly. The streams have been horrible. Yeah, that being said, the friday, when it ran smooth, I was in the high single digits, so I was happy. I'm like all right, cool, that's, that's already a move we're up into. Yeah, it's a high single digits. Yeah, it's taken a few weeks to get back to there, but that's a high single digit, yeah, level. Now I'll break the double digits into the next week or so. That's, I'm happy with that progress.
Speaker 2:So it's, you know I'm not it's great because, like, think about when you first started, how long it took to get to a double digit. And now, oh, it took forever. You've only been back a little while and you're already getting close to it. You know, yeah, and it's because you built a community, because you're active on other places, people see you. Like If I was going to come back, even though I wouldn't post on social media just to drive people, I would post on social media for a while to let people know that I'm coming back and then I would start streaming I didn't even do that I wouldn't post daily like I used to on social media, because I don't have the appetite for that anymore I.
Speaker 3:I didn't even push the fact that I was coming back. I think I hinted a few times saying I was gonna contemplate and coming back in bits and pieces, but I never actually put dates or anything attached to it because I couldn't, couldn't commit to it myself. That being said, even now, even when I have gone on stream, I haven't, I haven't even updated my own schedule on my twitch page to to say when, like, I have two days in my head now, two particular days, that I'll go live, but I haven't updated it. I should, but I haven't because I'm still testing the water, I'm still seeing how that goes before I 100 submit, commit to it.
Speaker 3:I just want to make sure that you know, biggest problem has been the system so far, getting everything to run smooth. Okay, that's running smooth. Now I've changed, you know I'm no longer doing mix it up. I dropped mix it up. Oh yeah, yeah, getting streamer bought a go, because that was another one that everyone done. So I thought, you know, while I'm here, while I've got to redo everything, let's just try other things yeah.
Speaker 2:So I haven't been, I haven't streamed regularly in about a year, I think. And Mixitup reached out to me again like hey, do you want to be an ambassador for another year? And I'm like you realize I haven't streamed in a year. Right, like you know, you have to make some contractually right. And I'm like I'm thinking I don't want to make content like for you, like not that I think a great guy's a good product. I just I don't want to do it.
Speaker 3:So I'm like no, I'm, I'm good I did some great things with mix it up. Once I started figuring out being a half hour, you know I had I had some complicated commands that were running through mix it up. Really pushing the boundary of what mix it up could could do for me, yeah, but I thought you know, trying trying new things, trying out stuff, let's just give streamer bot a go. You know, smash love streamer bot for a lot of the bits and pieces. I'm very interested to see what I can do with it. Yep, where I can go. You know we talked about it before clicking live.
Speaker 3:I have a drunken lumberjack australian beard growing, ai, now that's running rampant and that that, to be honest, I don't think I would have been able to pull out everything that that does with mix it up I'd still need. I'd still need another program to. I don't think I'd be able to pull out the text-to-speech properly, not easily anyway. It'd be a very complicated way of importing one user and doing that with it, whereas mixed streamer bot is complicated, way more complicated than mixed up, and I know that's weird saying that because a lot of people think mixed up is complicated. Streamer bot is far more intellectually pushing in a way to figure out how to get some things to happen. But if you understand basic like computer talk, then you can get it to work, yep.
Speaker 2:I think the one thing I always liked about StreamerBot over MixItUp is that you can actually write code in there. Yes, to have it do things, and as someone who was a developer, that was always attractive. But I got in with the MixItUp guys and I just stuck with it. But that piece of StreamerBot was always exciting for me.
Speaker 3:You know, but that piece of the streamer bot was always exciting to me. But the one thing I one thing I realized when I was trying to move over my multi-step raid scene, because I still love my raid scene. There's things I'm not going to change from my stream that I've had for ages. One of them's my raid thing, because it's a minute long thing and it's all automated. I liked it. It was simple to pull me out and move it in. I can't actually mimic it one for one in streamer, but it's actually. It's actually stripped down.
Speaker 3:There's things that I yeah, and then you know, I tried putting it all into one command. I actually couldn't do it all into one command. I actually had to launch it across two different commands. Oh, one for audio and one for scene changing. Because you can't, it'll wait. I guess the viewers mix it up. You could start a, start an audio track and then still continue with the. You could get it all to launch at once, basically. Or you could go you know, start this five seconds later, do this five seconds later, do that in streamer. But if I went, uh, start the audio five seconds later, change scene, it actually waits for the audio to finish, then waits five seconds, then change the scene. It won't start like yeah, so I've had to split that off. Audios into a different command so they both launch at the same time but there's a delay with the scene changing now instead. So audio starts and then the scene one starts straight away, but there's a delay command before the scene. Actually.
Speaker 2:Interesting yeah.
Speaker 3:A lot to think about. It's actually fun. I spent Friday night and a half of my stream at the end just playing out with Mix, with Streamer Bot, like tilling away, and then even yesterday I did it Honestly.
Speaker 2:I think that's the key. Like you know, you just said you're having fun with it, which is not something that you were saying a year or so ago. You know, until like as long as, like, you keep that, like it's fun, I'm having fun experiment, do whatever, then it'll be good, it'll be fine. You want to? I don't think you'll get dressed out at all and it crashes over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I said I'll leave, I'll give it a few more weeks and I'll touch base with it again and just say where where we're at with it. But so far it's on the up, I'm enjoying it, and obviously this might fold into a permanent life space as a third stream for me. Now too as well, I can just click live on tiktok for this so where can people see you on twitch and?
Speaker 3:bearded underscore over on everything. As we said ages ago, you don't, you play it simple. You get the same name across all your socials because you don't have to worry about a single thing. Yep, exactly, except for Instagram. Because they don't like underscores, don't they? No, they won't allow underscores, mine won't. I have to have a dot. That's why I don't fucking talk to Instagram. Cool Alright.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Dad Mode. Our passion is navigating this wild journey of parenthood and modern life, from balancing family time to managing your career and still squeezing in some gaming and content creation. And no matter what the women say, they will never be able to pry the controller out of our cold dead hands. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, find us on Twitter, tiktok and YouTube at DadModePodcast and we can be found on every podcast site at DadModePodcast. Y'all be cool. See you next time.
