As a lover of both technology and Fortnite, I apply a variety of technologies to PopsPlaysToo.com. The goal is to provide great experiences for my fans. Here, I share information and experiences to help others with similar interests.
AI Art
I was looking to create a fun and wacky sort of image that looked a little bit like me that I could use as a main banner for the site and branding on social media. I played around with some cartoony type apps but quickly realized I could probably create something better by making direct prompts to a large learning model (LLM). I decided to go with DALL·E by Chat GPT since I may want to train a Chat GPT model to answer user questions at some point.
After a few hours of playing around, here is the winning prompt that created the hero banner that you see on my home page:
Though I’m really happy with the way the image that’s above left came out, I learned that AI art struggles with words in images. It seems to want to add extra characters and or gibberish. If you notice, the front top of the ice cream truck is “ICE CE CREAM” not “ICE CREAM.” That was DALLE’s choice, not mine! From all the playing around I’ve done with words and AI art so far, it’s amazing that it spelled POPS PLAYS TOO correctly on the side of the truck. My son told me how that the face looks just like me which was my goal. I think the face on the image that’s above right looks like Henry Kissinger.
WordPress for Site Authoring, Hosting, and Domain Name Purchase
This isn’t my first rodeo creating a website. Since around 1997, I’ve created about a dozen sites. I’ve used a variety of web authoring tools to aide me in the past including Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia DreamWeaver, Network Solutions CMS, and WordPress. Still, it’s been about 9 years since I created my last site.
I was very eager to start on PopsPlaysToo so fell back to the last tool I was familiar with which was WordPress. Seemed cheap enough to get going with their Explorer package that included a Domain name and hosting for $96 annually. I soon realized if I wanted to add plugins for SEO, etc., I needed to upgrade to their Creator package which costs $300 annually. I don’t foresee outgrowing this package but if I do, that would be a good thing.
At the time of this writing, the site hasn’t gone live yet. So far, I’m happy with how the site is coming out. The template I’ve chosen is producing a clean, neat, and organized product. I do find the interface not to be very intuitive as it seems like what I’m looking for can be hidden under a variety of headings. This leads me Googling a lot which is something I didn’t have the luxury of doing in my early web design days.
Streaming on YouTube and TikTok
In early December of 2024 I learned that I could easily stream on YouTube when I went live simply by enabling a toggle on my Lightstream streaming platform. Since then I’ve often streamed on YouTube though typically I only get a few viewers per stream there.
Around the same time, I began experimenting with TikTok Live. It’s a PC app that makes streaming on TikTok easy but in general, I confess, I don’t completely understand TikTok yet. When I first go live, there are many people that seem to see my live in the feed but typically I only have a few that are watching me from that platform. It’s fun and exciting to be experimenting with it though. Makes me feel young!
In Feb 2025, transitioned from using Lightstream to StreamLabs as my streaming service. The main reason was being able to multi-stream to more outlets and I wanted to be able to stream to at least Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok simultaneously.
Creating AI Music for my Fortnite Streams
I wanted to create a theme song that captured my journey thus far playing Fortnite. Something that I could use to entertain my fans and empower them to play excerpts of it as viewer rewards with their channel points. Here is a link to the blog post that I wrote that describes how I wrote the lyrics and used AI to fill in the music and vocals. I’m beyond thrilled as to the results of how this song came out.