Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. Today, I’d like to have a little reflection on my experience with livestreaming over Lexember and what that could mean for the future.

First, Conlangery is supported by our patrons on Patreon. If you would like to have access to the scripts to my solo episodes before they are recorded, we have a tier for you to get that. And if not, still consider throwing a little my way. It helps me to sustain the podcast.

Another year has come and gone. 2022 was a bit tumultuous for me, so I’ve been off and on with Conlangery because of the complications that happened in my life. Also, the pandemic is still on, but people want to act like it’s off. It’s been... a lot.

At the end of the year, I did something that I had not tried in the years since I started this show. I streamed myself live. I’ve been wanting to do a livestream since LangTime Studio started. Even before that, I thought about recording Conlangery live once or twice, but I didn’t think of it seriously. Watching David and Jesse showed me that there was a way to do a conlanging stream that was entertaining and took advantage of the format.

There are several reasons I kept to recorded, edited podcasts for years. First, from the beginning, I have been self-conscious about my speaking performance. Although most Conlangery episodes are unscripted, I edit out quite a lot of pauses, hesitations, and repetitions. I also rely on my guests or co-hosts to help me out when I trail off or cannot find words. This is why my solo episodes are scripted. I have heard podcasters who have recorded long episodes alone, but I don’t know how you just... keep talking into the ether.

Another personal reason is that I have Tourette’s Syndrome. I have a relatively mild form. My tics are only an occasional issue, and I have the ability to suppress them. However, suppressing them for an hour would be painful and take a toll on my speaking ability. The reason you have never heard my tics on the podcast is two fold: first, I’m generally fine when focused on talking about something interesting to me. When I’m on the podcast talking about conlanging and linguistics, the compulsion just doesn’t occur. Second, I have the ability to mute my microphone. If I feel verbal tics come on (generally a feeling in my throat), I can be muted so that the guest does not hear. Most of my tics are motor tics that would not come across on audio anyway, though I still do spend a lot of time on mute.

So, as one might expect, live video was a bit scary for me. How well could I entertain people? What if I had tics in an environment where I cannot hide them?

Luckily, that issue has grown to be less of an issue over time. When I was first diagnosed, I often had difficulty getting through classes. But that was back in college, and since then my symptoms have been less pronounced. Tourette’s tends to get milder as you age, and over the decade since Conlangery started, or really, the twenty years since my tics started developing, I’m at a point where I only occasionally have an issue. Indeed, writing this is causing them to be much more frequent than they usually are.

Still, the fact is that I’ve just been busy for the past few years. Children and job hunting and house buying have taken up a lot of time and energy, especially in the middle of the emotional drain of the pandemic. So it’s just not been in the cards for some time.

As I was really working out how to finally get a stream started, I saw that Lexember was coming up. I often struggle to find time to do Lexember, even though I really enjoy creating and sharing my words. So I decided, why not carve out a specific time slot to get through Lexember and get over my misgivings about streaming in one go. And so, the Conlangery YouTube channel was born.

(I really should have had a YouTube channel before, for other reasons.)

Anyway, it went great! My views are very modest, but I got good interaction from the chat. People were throwing ideas at me and getting excited about it, and I had lots of fun doing the stream. And I think I want to do it again.

I want to talk about what I see as the pros and cons of streaming my conlanging, from my first experience here.

The pros are that I have a time carved out specifically for it. There’s a limited amount I can do in two hours, of course, but it’s time that I’ve already set aside. I don’t have anything else to do during that time. I’ve made arrangements for any other obligations. It’s just me, the computer, and the audience.

It’s also collaborative, with people throwing out suggestions to help me along. It’s definitely helpful to motivate me to create things and to give me some thoughts as to where I can go. Frankly, I may have been leaning a bit too much on the audience to direct me, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Conlanging is usually such a solitary experience. It’s interesting to have people collaborating live while you’re working things out.

The cons, well, I have to find a way to be entertaining while live. I don’t try to put on a persona or anything. That wouldn’t be sustainable. But it does take some energy to get through it. I also had to figure out to set up a makeshift set in my office-slash-kid’s playroom that I could easily set up and tear down. I also think that streaming after this, I probably would do better to prepare some prompts or structure to keep things on track.

I think one issue I had was with managing how much control people in chat had over my language. The language I was using for Lexember was personal to me. It’s from a novel that draws pretty strongly from my own life experience. There was a point where I was a bit uncomfortable dealing with people pushing for their own stuff to be put into it. I know, of course, that I can be free to accept or reject anything based on whatever criteria I choose, but it’s complex. I don’t want to cede too much control, but I also don’t want the audience to think their suggestions don’t matter. I’ve already considered reversing one decision I made on screen because it felt pressured, but I’m also not comfortable with removing any “cannon” I created on stream.

That last issue leads me to where I might go for future streams. I think I would want to do a different project, something that’s less personal that I’ll be more comfortable taking wild suggestions for. That way, I could be a bit freer to do things in a collaborative way. The fun of a stream is really in that collaboration. On the other side, I can’t really watch LangTime Studio after the fact. I have to watch it when I have a moment to be in the chat, even when I’ve been out of the loop for a while. I want that kind of atmosphere to exist for any stream I make.

My initial idea, one that I’ve actually had for quite some time, was to create my own versions of each of the spellcasting languages in Dungeons and Dragons. These are the “exotic languages”, to use D&D’s term, that spellcasters get for free with their classes, presumably because it’s necessary for them in some way. My idea was to create a language to a point where I can start composing in it, then switch to writing incantations for spells that have a verbal component. For instance, I would start by making Draconic, building phonology, grammar, and some starter vocabulary, and then start going down the Wizard spell list. Each season would then be another one of these languages.

There are a lot of reasons I felt these languages work best. First, it was the easiest way for me to justify letting each language just be an isolate with fairly little time depth. They’re spoken by immortal, mystical, or extraplanar beings. They’re very conservative, with justification for less interaction between them. It also would need less upfront worldbuilding, deliberately so to allow people to use them in their own games. I also thought it might draw in some of the tabletop role-playing crowd that’s normally outside of the conlanging community.

The thing is, with news about the upcoming changes to the Open Gaming License, I’ve been very uncertain whether I can do that. I’ve started to come up with rules to generate a language, and have had ideas for a while for rules to handle multilingualism differently than standard D&D 5e, and I’d like to have the option to publish all of it alongside the incantations I write. That story is very rapidly developing, and I’m following it the best I can. I’ll see how that shakes out.

There may be other projects I could try doing. I’m very interested in having conlangs connected to some kind of world that can be used for other purposes. I just am not quite sure what I should do at the moment. Maybe I’ll have to make my own game, or spin up another conworld for some writing. If anyone has ideas, I’m interested.

Otherwise, I do plan to use my channel. At present, I have converted a sizable number of Conlangery episodes to videos, in case anyone wants to access the show on YouTube. I just need to convert the rest and spend time copying and pasting show notes before I’m ready to release that.

I also have looked into a way that I could possibly record video for my regular podcast interviews. It depends on whether this solution works as well as advertised and interviewees are game, but it might be interesting to see people’s faces as they talk about different linguistics and conlanging subjects, even if it would be mostly a talking heads show.

I have thought in the past about creating proper video content for Conlangery. There are some linguistics topics that benefit very greatly from visual aids that I cannot provide in an audio format. The thing is, I’ve done video editing. It takes more time than audio editing, with different constraints and goals. I’d have to find the time to plan the topics and do the work of editing it all. That’s quite difficult when I also have to have a day job and be a father.

All in all, though, the streaming was a very positive experience. It takes some getting used to to talk into the void while people reply via text on a delay, but it was pretty great to see everyone get invested in what I was doing. I love that more conlangers have started doing videos and streams. Everyone does things a little differently, and it’s worth it for us to be able to see each others’ ideas and processes. I hope that I can get back into it soon.