If you're looking forward to passing your weekend watching the tail end of SGDQ, here's a modest little tool to help make following the stream chat a much more tolerable experience.

ChitChat's not much to look at, but it offers something I've wanted desperately for some time now. It separates the wheat from the chaff of any Twitch stream chat it's fed, spitting out a tidy and much more readable chat minus a few hundred :kappas: and such. Viewers can even pop into the settings and enable a video preview as well, so they don't need to juggle multiple windows. It also has a custom word filter, which is particularly handy whether you're blocking slurs or are just incredibly sick of seeing the word "waifu" every few seconds when there's a cute girl on stream.

As of now, ChitChat's biggest drawback is that it doesn't allow users to submit messages to the chat through the site. There's no Twitch API built-in, no way to login and interact seamlessly through ChitChat alone. In a perfect world ChitChat would allow for that, or even be a simple Chrome plugin.

Wait, no. Let's aim higher. In a truly perfect world these would all be options embraced by Twitch itself. Reality is sadly nowhere near perfect of course. Instead we have the hands-off moderation policy and emote-heavy community strategy that lead to pretty much every highly trafficked Twitch stream having a chat like a fast-moving river of raw trash and noise. Slurs, spam, strings of repeated emotes pack themselves in tightly around the actual conversations people try to carry on with each other, and anyone actually interested in following those conversations better learn to speed-read because they're in for a rough time.