Supporter Appreciation Month
Welcome to our first Supporter Spotlight, featuring popular Twitch Affiliate Corminus! Corminus is a self-described variety streamer from california who enjoys well-designed video games with strong storylines. Over this past summer, Corminus helped support our Young Creators Club program as a member of our #LANathon2017 Stream Team. In celebration of our Supporter Appreciation month, we sat down with Corminus to talk about life, streaming, and learning through video games.
What advice would you give yourself when you first started streaming?
“It’s not going to be perfect. So… like perfection is a fantasy that you’re not going to get and you’re always going to be constantly chasing it. But if you’re going to do content creation… get your basics down, of course. Like, know your gear and what not. But as meme as it is… freaking… just go do it. Just do it. Go. If you’re a YouTuber or Twitch streamer, turn the mic/camera/game on and just record. Go do it. If you’re a voice actor: go do some research go find or borrow a mic from a friend. Have someone who’s a sound engineer from a church or whatever. Grab a listing from a casting club. Grab a listing from there, be like, ‘alright. I’m gonna go do these lines.’ Just go ahead and do it, just start doing it. Because, especially if you’re one of those people – like us – where you learn from DOING, you’re not going to learn if you don’t DO IT (laughs).”
Do you have any advice for content creators who might still be waiting for the right opportunity to just jump in?
“Perfect time and perfect opportunity… that’s one of those things where you really have to – once again – it really requires experience to be able to see the opportunities when they come by and know when to take them. Honestly, the main key where you can end up – not only getting a lot of second hand experience but also research and what not – is… to network… Honestly it’s just networking. You have no idea who you’ll find. Go with the flow and hope for the best.”
Given your personal experiences in education, do you have any learning insights for students or educators?
“I would probably say find things that apply to whatever content you’re trying to teach. Same for the student, if you’re having a [tough] time learning, find something that applies to you. Either talk to a teach or someone in the filed and be like, ‘alright, how does this apply?’ Find parallels, because it actually makes it easier for you to learn if that parallel of one path is already fairly well worn. It sort of self guides… kind of like the wheels of a car on a very well worn road. As a ‘math is not completely useless either’ example for me, in that case, was Trig. Trigonometry: the graphs make absolutely NO sense. You apply it to music: EVERYTHING makes sense! Because, all the sin waves – the cosin waves – like you look at it as if its a sound wave… and everything make sense once you apply it. You end up having these things click if you have them running in parallel.”
What are your thoughts on using digital arts and game design to inspire interest in things like computer programming?
“Well coding is kind of more like [a normal] language, honestly. It’s literally called a ‘coding’ language. In regards to learning through video games… I think the perfect example would actually be myself. Because I did it when I was younger. Math Blaster, Zoombinis, Oregon Trail… all these things where it was sort of like… there’s an educational standpoint on it and it allowed me to become more familiar. It made this big, giant, intimidating subject not seem that bad. Because I’m in a familiar environment of, ‘okay, this is gaming. This is fun. Cool, let’s go!’ And honestly, running that positive [mindset] allows you to carve those pathways a lot easier than just being like, ‘ugh I have to go to school…’ kind of thing. It’s much better for you to be in the positive mindset and be like, ‘OH okay!’ and you just have this active… basically crazy neuron storm happening, firing all at once. You’re excited.”
