The /r/osuplace community had a couple of technical projects running behind the scenes for making things work like the overlay on the /r/place canvas and the verification website. In this article I will talk about these projects and explain many of the components that were made and used. These tools are also made available for you to use, study and to potentially improve upon. I will apologise in advance for abundant usage of technical jargon in this article. I go pretty deep into the details for certain things we have done. I hope you will be able to get a rough idea of what we did. Firstly, I will talk about the verification site that was made to automatically verify users based on their Reddit account age. Secondly, I will talk about the overlay that was made for users so they know where to place the pixels on the canvas. Lastly, I will cover some of the Python scripts that were used to make the overlay work correctly. At the end I have also included some statistics and links to many of the people that worked on the projects.

Verification Site

A couple of days before the start of r/place oralekin approached me about using my tournament verification system (TVS) for the r/osuplace Discord server. I would help him out with the project and host it for them for free for the duration of the event. The TVS verifies a user by having them login with their osu! account and their Discord account on a website. After the user has done both, they will be checked against the criteria set in the backend. Then the Discord bot that sits in the same backend joins them to the Discord server and adds a role signifying that the user is verified now. The main advantage for this application is that staff members on medium to large servers do not have to manually verify the details of a user anymore. The application can also accommodate for edge cases where users do not meet the requirements, and they will be shown an error page or directed to the staff members of the respective discord server.

I modified this system recently for other people to be able to easily adapt and use in their own environments. So, I directed oralekin to this new version and he set it up with an additional path for the verification of a user's Reddit account and different verification criteria. I also assisted him with certain regressions that he came across when I changed the backend to be more universal. These changes will be added to the upstream repository as well. When it was finished we did a couple of test runs on the domain name and declared it ready for the event.

oralekin managed the DNS for his subdomain (o.ralek.in) and I gave him the IP of the proxy that this verification site was hosted behind. Due to the expectation of a high traffic flow and the potential of malicious actors trying to do something to it, we did the following things:

• Secured the backend using built-in security features
• Implemented a rate limiter to prevent the server from being flooded
• Used Cloudflare as a proxy to hide the server's IP and to also make use of their other security features like DDoS protection
• Used HTTPS end-to-end from the origin to the user using a combination of Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare. In Cloudflare the security was set to Full (strict).

We did not use HSTS, because if it is configured wrongly it could leave the domain unreachable for a long time.

It successfully verified more than 10.000 people during the event and it did not crash at all. We saw only two types of actions fail. From time to time Reddit's authentication would fail, because it could not obtain the access token for a user. This is likely because we were hitting rate limits on the Reddit API which caused the failures. The second action we saw fail was writing of cookies for certain users. This could be due to the fact that they have cookies or javascript blocked by default on their browser for privacy reasons, because both are required and we do not write the cookie without consent.

The final code base for this verification server can be found on GitHub. We are proud that this project was successful and useful to the community.

/r/place pixel overlay

After publishing the verification project oralekin told me they were working on an overlay to show users where to place their pixels on the canvas of /r/place for the osu! logo. I joined their voice chat and they were initially having some problems finding the right spot to insert the overlay into. Their original plan was to hook into the canvas itself and track the movement and zoom level. However, I quickly found out they were overthinking the operation by inserting an image above the canvas inside the same container.

By appending an element to that container it was possible to overlay an image that just worked without any extra effort needed. The first proper version of that element was the following:

<img style="position: absolute;left: 677px;top: 677px;image-rendering: crisp-edges;width: 101px;height: 101px;" src="https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/959453204163199056/959454670479298590/dotted_template_v3.png">

The first version of the Tampermonkey script that came out of this was:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         osu! Logo template
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  try to take over the canvas!
// @author       oralekin
// @match        https://hot-potato.reddit.com/embed*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=reddit.com
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==
if (window.top !==window.self) {
    window.addEventListener('load', () => {
            document.getElementsByTagName("mona-lisa-embed")[0].shadowRoot.children[0].getElementsByTagName("mona-lisa-canvas")[0].shadowRoot.children[0].appendChild(
        (function () {
            const i = document.createElement("img");
            i.src = "https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png";
            i.style = "position: absolute;left: 0;top: 0;image-rendering: pixelated;width: 1000px;height: 1000px;";
            console.log();
            return;
        })())
    }, false);
}

https://hot-potato.reddit.com/embed was embedded as an iframe on the Subreddit, so we had to address it directly to be able to access the child ShadowRoots of that embed. Reddit also used the Custom Elements API for the elements of r/place which they named <mona-lisa-embed/> ,<mona-lisa-canvas/> etc. This made it easy to traverse the DOM using JavaScript to get to the correct location for the element. After that many other contributors like LittleEndu, Wieku, ekgame and DeadRote added more features to this script. The very first versions can be found on oralekin's GitHub Gist. As you may have noticed I did not get co-credited for creating the script, but I do not mind it. Later, oralekin's gist got replaced with this script made by Wieku, Deadrote, and 101arrowz, hosted on Wieku's GitHub Gist. This takes a different approach using the normal version of the canvas. It masks and dots it in the browser without the need for separate python scripts. A user interface is also included for some level of control on how the overlay gets displayed. The screenshots showcasing the userscript have been taken after the wipe of /r/place.

Over the course of the event I heard that the script got used by many communities and even got expanded on by them with their own versions and image templates, which is awesome. However, there were also certain communities that used the code, but also took the effort to remove the original authors' names from the script.

The image template that /r/osuplace used was hosted on my S3 space with CDN. So, while I was not credited, it was very obvious that I was involved with this script.

The following two files are hosted and served to hundreds of thousands of users across the world:

• https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.1-1.png (full canvas with all the allies and friends of /r/osuplace)
• https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png (full canvas as dotted template suited as overlay)

The images are hosted on DigitalOcean Spaces but with Cloudflare functioning as the proxy for a secure CDN connection between the two. Initially, this caused a number of issues due to double caching happening. There was caching on the edge at Digitalocean, but Cloudflare also cached it. The solution was to create a page rule for the CDN subdomain and to set that to bypass all of Cloudflare's caching. This way we could keep using Cloudflare's proxy to keep a secure connection between it, DigitalOcean and the end user, as well as prevent any of the caching problems. We also set the edge caching TTL on DigitalOcean at 10 minutes and if quicker refreshes were needed we could manually purge the cache for the specific files as well.

The files were generated by LittleEndu using a couple of Python scripts. I have received his permission to document the scripts, so these will be listed below. Where applicable, instructions on how to run them are also given, with example output. I also added his name and the original filename at the top of every file.

# dotter.py by LittleEndu (2022)
import sys
from pathlib import Path

from PIL import Image
import numpy as np

target_filepath = Path(sys.argv[1])
img = Image.open(target_filepath).convert('RGBA')  # make sure image is RGBA
img_3x = img.resize((img.width * 3, img.height * 3), Image.NEAREST)
img_3x_arr = np.array(img_3x)

for i in range(img_3x_arr.shape[0]):
    if i % 3 == 0 or (i - 2) % 3 == 0:
        img_3x_arr[i, :, 3] = 0
for i in range(img_3x_arr.shape[1]):
    if i % 3 == 0 or (i - 2) % 3 == 0:
        img_3x_arr[:, i, 3] = 0

img_3x_back = Image.fromarray(img_3x_arr)
img_3x_back.save(f'!dotted_{target_filepath.name}')

This first script resizes the image to 3 times the original size in both axes with nearest neighbour scaling. After that makes every first and 3rd duplicate pixel blank to create a dotted template of pixel art.

Run instructions:

> pip install pillow numpy
> python ./dotter.py file-to-dot.png

LittleEndu also made a script that reverts the dotted template back to the original image:

# reverse_dotter.py by LittleEndu (2022)
import sys
from pathlib import Path

from PIL import Image
import numpy as np


def i_dot(target_filepath):
    target_filepath = Path(target_filepath)
    img = Image.open(target_filepath)
    img.paste(img, (-1, -1), img)
    img_array = np.array(img)
    small_img_array = img_array[::3, ::3, :]
    small_img = Image.fromarray(small_img_array)
    small_img.save(target_filepath.with_suffix('.1-1.png'))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    i_dot(Path(sys.argv[1]))

Run instructions:

# pip install pillow numpy
# python ./reverse_dotter.py dotted-template.png

If you use the dotted template as input, the following output will be produced:

He also created a script that placed pixel art on the canvas at specific x and y coordinates. This was useful for setting the location of artwork on the canvas for the template.

# convert_to_2k.py by LittleEndu (2022)
import sys
from pathlib import Path

from PIL import Image

target_filepath = Path(sys.argv[1])
img = Image.open(target_filepath).convert('RGBA')

x = int(input('x coord: '))
y = int(input('y coord: '))
w, h = img.size

new_img = Image.new('RGBA', (x + w, y + h), (255, 255, 255, 0))
new_img.paste(img, (x, y))

new_new_img = Image.new('RGBA', (2000, 2000), (255, 255, 255, 0))
new_new_img.paste(new_img, (0, 0))
new_new_img.save(f"2k_{target_filepath.name}")

How to run (example with the first version of the /r/osuplace logo):

# pip install pillow
# python ./convert_to_1k.py template_v3.png
x coord: 727
y coord: 727

Lastly, he wrote a simple script to rename the files for the CDN and to generate a reverse dotted version.

# rename_for_cdn.py by LittleEndu (2022)
import shutil
import sys

shutil.copy(sys.argv[1], "dotted-place-template.png")

import reverse_dotter

reverse_dotter.i_dot("dotted-place-template.png")

The outputs of this script were the final files that were uploaded to the CDN for use by everyone using the Tampermonkey script.

Closing words

It was honestly so awesome to see the /r/osuplace community work together, not just by themselves, but together with many other communities as well. Over the duration of the event over 436.000 requests were made to the cdn, with more than 2/3rd actually hitting the png content-type. About 100 GB of bandwidth was transferred between my servers and end-users (verification server data included too). Cloudflare also reports "Web traffic requests by country" over the past 7 days. Here are the top 5 countries:

1. United States: more than 150.000 requests
2. Canada: more than 30.000 requests
3. Germany: ~30.000 requests
4. United Kingdom: more than 20.000 requests
5. Philippines: more than 15.000 requests

Thank you for reading through this blog post. I hope that you have learned something new from this, or maybe this motivated you to use one of our projects for yourself. Either way, I think the efforts of this community were super cool and I look forward to next time.

Links

oralekin's GitHub: https://github.com/oralekin
LittleEndu's GitHub: https://github.com/LittleEndu
Wieku's GitHub: https://github.com/Wieku
Deadrote's Twitch (has no GitHub): https://twitch.tv/deadrote
ekgame's GitHub: https://github.com/ekgame
exdeejay's GitHub: https://github.com/exdeejay
101arrowz's GitHub: https://github.com/101arrowz
My GitHub: https://github.com/MiraiSubject

Let me know if I forgot to credit anybody!

/r/osuplace verification stack: https://github.com/oralekin/oth-verification/tree/place
osu! tournament hub verification stack: https://github.com/MiraiSubject/oth-verification

First versions of the userscript: https://gist.github.com/oralekin/240d536d13d0a87ecf2474658115621b
Most recent versions of the userscript: https://gist.github.com/Wieku/7d5a88c0a34d5bdf0b6bd9959f7d5e1d/
/r/httyd place userscript (source for masking/dithering by 101arrowz):
https://github.com/Anticept/httyd-place

Mention me on Twitter or Discord if you have something to say about the article! https://twitter.com/MiraiSubject

Apologies if the English is lacking here and there, if you find any mistakes, let me know and I will change it.

Update 1 (2022-04-08 13:06 UTC): Added 101arrowz's contribution to the blog, courtesy of Anticept on Twitter.

A proper article/tutorial has been long due for streaming tournaments using osu!lazer. The only way to get this knowledge currently is through the word of mouth from people within the tournament community and an already outdated Russian video tutorial. So, here is a definitive guide on how to operate the lazer tournament client and stream it using OBS.

Important note: osu!lazer tournament is only being used as an overlay for the existing tournament client.

Table of Contents

1. Prerequisites & Requirements
2. Initial setup for osu!lazer
3. Setting up osu! stable to work with lazer
4. Configuring the tournament clients
5. Setting up OBS
   1. If you already have an existing OBS setup
   2. Adding the necessary items for your stream
6. Known problems

Prerequisites & Requirements

There are a couple of requirements and programs you need to have installed in advance.

Software requirements:

• OBS Studio
• osu! Stable, running on the Cutting Edge branch, this is required
• osu!lazer, at least version 2020.623.1

Hardware requirements:

• At least 16 GB of RAM
• A Powerful enough CPU/GPU combination to game and stream at the same time.

Hardware recommendations:

• At least two 1080p (or higher resolution) screens.

The amount of RAM and general horsepower your system needs from hereon depends on the teamsize you set for your client. On average one osu! stable instance uses ~300 MB of RAM and you need to incorporate some headroom for OBS and osu!lazer well. Some estimates for OBS and lazer are about 500-600MB each.

Initial setup for osu!lazer

First off to boot up osu!lazer into tournament mode you need to boot it up with the --tournament argument. You could achieve this by creating a shortcut that does this for you.

1. Right click on your desktop, hover over "New" and then click on shortcut as shown in the screenshot below:
   
2. In the location field paste the following in: %LOCALAPPDATA%\osulazer\osu!.exe --tournament.
   The window should now look like this:
3. After clicking next you want to give it a name. Something like "osu!lazer tournament" would suffice.
4. You can now boot up osu!lazer in tournament mode using the shortcut you just made!

Setting up osu! stable to work with lazer

Go to the installation folder of the stable installation that you will be using. This will have to be cutting edge as well, so make sure you're on that branch!

You can do this over here in the options overlay:

After you've confirmed this, you can close it. Once you've closed it create an empty text file called ipc.txt. It will look like this in your installation folder:

Configuring the tournament clients

Configuring osu! stable in tournament mode is already documented really well on the wiki, so set it up according to the instructions over there: https://osu.ppy.sh/help/wiki/osu!tourney/Setup

Take note of the Height that you set in your tournament.cfg file, because you're going to need this information a couple of times later in this guide.

After you have followed the instructions above, you can open osu!lazer tournament. You will be greeted by this screen:

Here is a short explanation of what all of these sections do:

• Current IPC Source: Over here you set the location of your stable tournament client a.k.a the place where you made the ipc.txt & tournament.cfg.
• Current User: You login over here with your osu! account so it can grab the information of the players and beatmaps in lazer.
• Ruleset: This decides what stats and which ranks are retrieved for players that will be shown in the client during matches.
• Stream area resolution: This is where you match the Height you set in the tournament.cfg file.

You are now ready to connect all the pieces together in OBS.

Setting up OBS

If you have a completely new and clean installation of OBS you can skip this part!

If you already have an existing OBS setup

1. Create a new scene collection in OBS using the following menu:

   

2. After you've given it a name you will see a new empty collection of scenes. You will use these later to set up osu!lazer and stable together.

3. Create a new profile the same way you created a scene collection.

You will now be greeted by a completely blank OBS canvas. You can now switch back and forth between your tournament profile and your other livestreaming profile and keep it separate for organizational purposes.

Adding the necessary items for your stream

Open the OBS settings, go to the Video section and set the both the Base (Canvas) Resolution and the Output (Scaled) Resolution to the Stream Area Resolution that is being displayed in osu!lazer tournament. Remember that this should match the height you set in your tournament.cfg.

Apart from that set the video settings to the following:

Make sure you have osu!lazer tournament open so you can add it as a Window Capture source in the scene. Make sure the settings match like this:

After you click OK your OBS window will look like this:

The osu!lazer tournament window is off-center. You can rectify this by going to the following context menus (by right clicking on the source in the canvas):

When you have your window centered, head to the Gameplay scene in osu!lazer. You will see the screen, but the place where the gameplay is supposed to be is completely green.

Right click on the source you just added and go to Filters

After that a window will appear where you can add filters to your source. Click on the following buttons to add a Chroma Key filter to your window capture.

A new section will open on the right where you can configure the Chroma Key settings. As of right now the screenshot below is the ideal configuration that properly keys out all, if not most of the green pixels.

Click Close on all the windows until you get back to your canvas. Then click on the lock so you can't accidentally move or adjust the window any more.

Now you can add the windows for all the players that you spectate through osu! stable tournament, using the following settings. You have to repeat this for every player.  

Next up select all of them and drag them all below your osu!lazer window.

It may look like the windows are getting cut off now, but you can use the Chroma Width & Players Per Team to adjust it according to your needs.

Your OBS canvas will now look like this on a 2v2 setup:

Click on the lock icon on the sources for all the players when you're done.

All you need to do after this is enter your stream key in the settings and then you're ready to stream tournaments!

Known problems

osu!lazer is still a work-in-progress so a lot of things are still incomplete or can break. Below I've made a list of issues that I am aware of at the moment:

1. Background videos in osu!lazer can cause memory consumption to never stop increasing while you stream. This is being tracked in this github issue. Essentially, don't use videos in resolutions higher than 1080p and make sure you have more than enough RAM in case it does increase dramatically. Your whole operating system will come to a halt and OBS will crash if it fills your RAM up completely.
2. If you use a resolution height of 720 in osu!lazer tournament the component that shows the beatmap info may disappear the next time you start it up. I commented a workaround on the issue on how to get it working with 720p for now.

You can follow the osu!lazer project here on GitHub: https://github.com/ppy/osu
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MiraiSubject

Feel free to shoot me a tweet if you have any questions!

I've been someone indulged in the Apple ecosystem for many years now. This doesn't mean I'm limiting myself to devices of other ecosystems. I live in a mixed ecosystem. I have a Windows desktop, but also a Macbook Pro. I have an Apple TV, but also an NVIDIA Shield. I have an iPhone, but also Android phone. And then also an iPad Pro, but no Android equivalent.

As such, this review does not have a hard conclusion. There is no "buy it"  or "don't buy it", because of X, Y, Z. I will be giving my experience with the AirPods Pro and with this hopefully help you make an informed decision on buying a new pair of Bluetooth headphones.

A little bit of history

Before using Apple's line of wireless earbuds, I used one of JBL's Reflect series and then the JBL Everest 100. The cable of the former started malfunctioning so the store gave me credit to pick a new one. My dad uses the Everest 100 every so often now and it still works!

I've been using the original Airpods for about two years before swapping to the Airpods Pro in December. The originals were very convenient to use compared to any other pair of Bluetooth earbuds at the time and the absence of the wire made for a great experience while moving about with them.

The audio quality in the 1st gen Airpods wasn't exceptional. They were basically Earpods, the wired earbuds that Apple includes in the box, but with a little bit of extra oomph in the volume. It was good enough, because all the convenience factors made up for it.

Upgrade from first gen

I've been using the AirPods Pro since the end of December. I started writing this article at the beginning of February but, I only finished it another month later. So this is technically my 2 month experience!

When you first put in the Airpods they turn on the noise cancellation. The sound of the outside world fades away and it just gets quiet. It's ready for the media you're about to throw at it, is what you'll think when you get them in for the first time.

These Airpods feel more comfortable than the original ones. The silicone buds sit gently inside your ear without completely pressurizing the inside like other in-ears do. There's also no hard plastic rubbing against your ear, this made hard for me to keep the first gens in for long amounts of time, especially when you're moving about.

After the initial pairing process you can start playing around with the three different modes: Transparency, off and Noise Cancellation.

The last one makes the most sense. This is the ANC feature that everyone talks a lot about. Off is basically the same as having normal Airpods, except in-ear. I see honestly no reason why you'd pick this option, because this one sounds the worst of the three. The sound is very muddy and feels like it's much worse than other two modes, but this does come with the benefit of increased battery life, because the microphone of the Airpods are not being used.

Transparency mode is what you could basically all the opposite of Noise Cancellation. Instead of using the microphones to cancel out the noise, the microphones are being used to capture the audio around of you and pass it through to your ears. This is especially useful when you're at a train station and want to hear announcements or the people around you without taking them out of your ear. This also *can* give the simulation of having a very open soundstage that you'd get with open back headphones, but this is very much an exaggeration because it's noticable that the audio coming through is digital and not natural. Despite the audio sounding very digital, it's a very useful mode during commutes.

To switch between modes,  just hold one of the stems and it switches between Noise Cancellation and Transparency. You can change the functionality of this in the Settings app on iOS.

Pressing the stem once toggles the play/pause functionality, pressing it twice skips a track forward and pressing it three times skips back a track. This is more intuitive than the touch areas on the original Airpods. I never got them to work consistently despite reading tutorials and attempting other people's solutions.

Issues

Using the Airpods was certainly magical for the first week, but then reality hits. These are still pieces of technology that depend on software. And software can have bugs and other issues:

• The Airpods Pro were supposed to be paired to all my iCloud connected devices, but they didn't show up on my Macbook Pro or iPad Pro as available devices. So I had to unpair it on my phone and re-pair it so iCloud could try again. This only happened once.
• My left Airpod sometimes feels like it isolates the noise out worse than my right one. Even after double checking it with the fit test that comes in the settings app. This is still an ongoing issue.
• Sometimes only one of the two Airpods actually connects. I then have to put them both back in the case, make sure they're actually disconnected from my phone. Then pull them out and put the opposite one in my ear, the one that didn't connect. I always put my Airpods in left first, so it's always trouble with my right one.
• Sometimes only one of the Airpods actually charges! I've come to discover this the hard way. After one of my listening sessions I put them both in the case and my right Airpod was silently draining its battery while in the case, probably trying to maintain a connection to my Mac or iPhone, but neither actually showed them as currently selected audio devices. I only noticed later in the battery widget that the Right Airpod was just slowly draining battery. This is only fixable by actively checking the light on the Airpods charging case. It fading out and in once when an Airpod gets seated in actually confirms that it's charging. I've made the habit now to double check the lights and the battery widget on my phone to see if they are actually charging.
• Very rarely, one Airpod goes into transparency and the other in ANC. Switching back and forth between the modes put them back in sync. This also happens when somehow one connects to the Mac/iPad and the other the iPhone. So much for seamless switching.

Sometimes bloggers say that a list like this would go on and on, but these are all the issues I have. Despite these issues these Airpods consistently provide by far the best user experience for bluetooth earbuds. And that is what it's all about in the end for something that you use on a daily basis.

Quality

This is going to be a super short paragraph about the audio quality. There's a lot of YouTube videos and blog posts out there that describe the quality objectively, scientifically and also by their own taste. I will just do the latter.

I've always liked the AKG M220 Pro. These are semi open backed headphones and they sound is very natural, wide and warm. I even think it sounds punchy enough with songs that have bass and beats going on. I only use these in my room and I've never used them for travel because the audio leaks everywhere like mini speakers.

I also liked the first gen Airpods. I already described them as a normal Earpods, but with a little bit of extra oomph in the volume. These are nothing special and I'd always prefer my AKGs over the first gens whenever I had the chance.

The Airpods Pro however somewhat changed that. In the ANC and Transparency modes, the highs are pretty clear, they're not the clearest. But clear enough for me. The bass is punch but it doesn't sound overwhelming at all. Like, it's not fatiguing. The mids are still a bit muddy but they've improved a lot over the normal Airpods. I could keep these in for multiple hours without a problem.

Not to mention the ANC functionality can make you lower the volume of them preserving your hearing. With the first gens I usually had my volume slider on Apple Music at around 70%. With the pros I can keep them at around 50-60%. In the image below you can see the basic improvement of the audio levels when wearing these.

This is by no means a health recommendation, nor am I allowed to do such a thing. But seeing this improvement in the health app was pretty nice. Mind you that these values are only accurate with Apple or Beats headphones. The disclaimer on the page reminds you of that as well.

Conclusion

After having used the original AirPods for two years and having experienced its convenience. I shot for the AirPods Pro. This was a great decision because I benefited not just from the increased comfort and audio quality, but also from the Noise Cancellation feature. I do not have any other audio devices that use ANC, so I can't test which is better than which. What I can tell you, however, is that these work really well.

At around $250 or €279, this is an expensive pair of wireless earbuds. In the Netherlands Sony's in-ear ANC wireless earbuds are commonly found cheaper for around €100 euro less than the AirPods Pro. These are the ones that are being the most against each other.

The whole ecosystem situation and the convenience factor is what made my decide to get these. Like the ability to seamlessly switch between Apple devices, while also retaining the ability for them to function as normal headphones (I also use them with my PS Vita).

This is something you as a reader has to think about.

On the go I only really carry my Apple devices and this is why it makes sense for me to get these.  If you live in a similar situation and your on the go carry are Apple devices, then you should consider getting these. Try them out in a nearby Apple Store with the type of songs you listen to the most and judge for yourself if it's worth spending on.

If you carry no Apple devices, or these are the in minority. I encourage you to take a lot at other offerings as well. Try them out if possible and base your choice on what you prefer.

This isn't really a definitive conclusion, but I don't want you to blindly go out and buy something just because I say so.

If you have any comments about this article or want to talk about it feel free to reach out to me on these channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/miraisubject
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/miraisubject
Discord: https://mirai.gg/discord

I also have a YouTube channel you should subscribe to if you're interested!
YouTube: https://youtube.com/mirai-s

This is going to be my fifth attempt at maintaining a blog. Maybe this will finally stick?

If this is your first time seeing any content from me, then welcome! I am Mirai. I'm (at the moment)  a pretty sporadic content creator and I maintain a small community.

As of writing this blog post I'm 21 years old and I'm currently a university dropout. In the time I have now I work on getting consistency in creating content for YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. This blog being one of those platforms.

Backstory

I started live streaming as a casual hobby around 2013/2014. I used to stream a bit of League of Legends, but I wasn't serious about it at all. It was just a hobby for me. I also had a YouTube channel that I uploaded gameplay videos to from either streams or recordings I made of when I played games by myself. I really had no community back then and my communication whenever I published was well... worse than it is now!

The time after that is a bit of a blur. But thanks to past me for keeping a somewhat decent archive I do know that I basically didn't stream much (or at all) in 2015, but I did stream again in 2016!

Somewhere in 2017 I replaced my old brand, Subject4S, with "Mirai.". This wasn't originally supposed to be a rebrand for me as a content creator, but for me as a developer. I was developing a futuristic platform-like game in Unreal Engine 4 and a friend of mine suggested this for the name. I stopped developing the game shortly after, because of time constraints and lack of proper assets. I did create another cinematic in UE4 that caused my gameplay channel to get banned and I created a video game for biology in it as an assignment.

During all of this I created a Discord account, back in 2015. I met a lot of people on it and I made my own server in 2016 and opened it up to the public in 2017.

osu! Tournament Life

The same year I opened the server to the public I was asked to stream for an osu! tournament and I got in contact with this fantastic community of people hosting community tournaments. And I thought:

I want to do this too.

So I got in contact with a friend that knows people in the community and we made a tournament, called Mirai. osu! Summer Tournament 2017. That tournament was a great success and I learned a lot from everyone when it came to tournament management, bracketing etc. I hosted two more tournaments after that: Mirai. osu! Winter Festival 2017 and the Mirai. Idol Tournament 2019. The former was pretty much a disaster on multiple fronts, but I learned from it. The latter was a small tournament that I used to test out a concept of verifying players using their Discord accounts. This was pretty successful and I am building upon that implementation for usage in future tournaments.

The Present & The Future

As of now I have a few channels that I operate from mainly: Twitter, Discord, YouTube, Twitch and this blog. I've been learning from various content creators on how to improve my video creation skills and increase the production quality of my live streams using my existing tools.

I have a few goals set to reach by the end of 2020 in regards to my growth on social media and this blog!

So yeah, this is pretty much who I am, what I've done in the past and I'm doing right now.

I hope you'll enjoy future posts!

These are my social media channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/miraisubject
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/miraisubject
YouTube: https://youtube.com/mirai-s
Discord: https://mirai.gg/discord

P.S. I still don't know what to put in the SEO metadata so that will still be a mess...