Tales of Strange Internet Behaviors

As a small-time video game streamer, and as someone who knows and embrace his own unpopularity on the modern streaming platforms, I do feel a bit small sometimes when there's hardly anyone stopping by my channel. I'm only human, and I can't escape that self-inflicted negativity sometimes. Believe it or not, for as much persistent, perhaps incessant, livestreaming contents I provide on twitch.tv, and then later preserved on YouTube, there were many times when I just felt like I want to stop doing it, when I just wanted to forget about making myself accessible out there knowing that I am unable to bring in any new audience. Every single time that happens though, I would take a deep breath, shake off the feeling, and turn on my OBS to do it all over again. At this point, I know that all of the streaming I have done is only beneficial to me, and me only. Nobody cares, and that's okay. I just wish that I can keep that reaffirming thought in my head all the fucking times. Self-doubt is not only a exclusive feature of being as a small-time streamer, it also means that I get to experience weird interactions with the little number of viewers I have. And I am not talking about the typical stuff out there, like people who would only watch me when I play a specific game, or people who would spout racial epithets on top of other rude comments and then leave immediately. No, these are the more "special" occurrences. I don't think the things these guys did to me would fly in a chat room that goes up 300 lines per second, so these individuals like to target smaller channels. Let me invite you to 3 sordid tales of strange Internet behaviors that can only be experienced by the loneliest of lonely streamers. The names have been changed to protect the silly but the stories are real:

TALE ONE: The Artist

A desolate artist looking for work in a desolate place. Art by the Microsoft Bing.

This story is related to the whole Twitch promoter situation I have addressed earlier this year. Normally, these people are the hit and run type, but this one actually stayed for a bit but still didn't try, whatsoever. So, suddenly, this person, whom I assume was a she based on her name, said "Hi" to me in my chat and then proceeded to ask me about my tenure as a streamer. Seemed like a genuine question and I answered it with some degree of enthusiasm. I knew it was all a ruse but I'd like to believe otherwise, silly me. She claimed to be in awe over the fact that I have been streaming since 2010 before hitting on the breaks quickly and doing the 360 into her spiel about being an artist who wanted to share her artwork with me to further enhance my channel. I explained to her that I do my own artwork for my channel but thanked her for the offer. She then asked me to visit her Instagram account to check out some of her works because that may change my mind about using her stuff. I guess I was in a polite mood and I asked her if her Instagram link was on her channel. Instead, she started typing in the link in my chat, which was immediately deleted of course because I don't allow that crap. I was like, fuck this bi@tch, and started telling her that it wasn't smart not to have the link on her channel - I even checked real quick and saw an empty vessel of a profile - and told her that if she was interested in making money for her works on Twitch, she should really be going to populated channels instead of empty ones like mine. Of course, she was gone by the time I said that. Look, if the links to her artwork were available on her channel and the streamer she was soliciting from had friends who were looking for an artist, things could have worked out for her. At the end of the day, she was just a clueless, lazy artist who thought that she knew everything apparently, and was not willing to communicate with her potential client.

TALE TWO: Tag, You're It!

A strange admirer. Art by the Microsoft Bing.

There was a person who used to stop by my channel rather frequently and the only thing he would say to me was that he/she liked my tags. Let's refer to this individual as "R". In case you are not familiar with it, you can assign 10 custom tags for your channel on Twitch to describe the overall vibe of your stream while allowing potential viewers to search for your channels using the tags. After properly using the system ever since its introduction and finding that it didn't help my channel's visibility whatsoever, I decided to take a more creative approach on the tagging process. When R first showed up, I was thrilled that I found someone who actually appreciated my sense of humor. I was immediately disappointed however when I learned that R would not respond to any of my prompts. R just disappeared soon after leaving me a follow, and I moved on. Then, the second time R showed up, R said the same thing again about appreciating my tags, that it made R laugh. I was annoyed this time around but I did respond with a simple "Thank you, how are you doing?" but of course, no response. The third time it happened, I didn't even bother thanking R after the bloated review of my tags and instead, I warned R that I was about to ban him/her from the channel because I had come to the conclusion that R may be a bot. As soon as I said this, R immediately made a quick comment about what was happening with the game I was playing. "So, you are not a bot after all", I said and just left it at that. R was of course silent for the rest of that session. R would continue to show up for the next couple of months regularly. Most of the time when he was in my channel, he would make the same tag comment, which would just fall on my deaf ears because, hey, what else was I going to say in regard to this whole nonsense? Eventually, R would stop coming all together because I eventually stopped receiving the repeated compliments. Just for the sake of context, I have been changing a couple of the tags every so often during my encounter with R. My current tags are ATuber, Downbeat, Fatness, Gay, HiddenAbility, ImOnlyGaming, JustinTVRelic, MentalStealth, noADalwaysHD, and RandomFakeAffliction. I surmise that R may not favor me any longer because he/she no longer knows what my pits smell like since I used to have SmellsLikeBrut and SmellsLikeOldSpiceFiji in there...

◄WARNING: You are not prepared for the last story! You have been warned!►

TALE THREE: Rise from Your Grave

Apparently, Jesus' resurrection ability is merely a plaything for Jay. Art by the Microsoft Bing.

The last time someone claimed resurrection, it resulted in the birth of a major religion. This resurrection story, however, will make you lose faith in humanity even more! We shall name this viewer "Jay". Jay was someone whom I could call a regular viewer of mine. Now let's not be shy, we are all 0 viewership streamers here but you know that you always have one (sometimes two) problematic person who likes to come in often enough to your stream. You appreciate the viewership but at the same time, you hate yourself for even acknowledging that person's existence. Well, Jay was one of those. The start of the streamer-viewer relationship was pleasant enough, until Jay started to complain about his life every time he stopped by. I tried to give constructive feedbacks but then Jay would find himself in the same situation over and over again. After a while, I think he noticed that I was quite blasé to his dilemmas and he changed tactics. Suddenly, he started complaining about his health. I would be a jerk to not show any empathy of course, even though I knew where this was going knowing him. Boy, it was hard to pretend that I cared since you know that no one with this many health issues would just come to anyone's channel and share EVERYTHING about his/her medical condition. It's not like I knew the guy off-stream. This was a complete stranger. And this is the Internet. I wasn't born yesterday. I wasn't born too long ago either. Jay had never even showed a picture of himself on his Discord/Twitch profiles. Jay was addicted to attention, obviously. Then, after undergoing surgery after surgery for his ever changing, ever escalating medical conditions, he told me that they had discovered that he had cancer and that was why his throat, or chest, or nasal passage, or his lung conditions - the story changed so much, I couldn't keep track of it and I think he couldn't keep track of the lies either - couldn't be rectified.

Deep down though, as a human being, I was like, okay sure, this smells like a nasty lie but you never know, it's empathy time. I invited him to a Steam chat so that for the first time, I could speak to him directly, and he agreed to it. The night it was supposed to happen, I got a Twitch message that the surgeon wanted him back in the hospital immediately because they had to operate on his throat. I wished him good luck and a week later, he was back in my chat. The first thing he told me when he got back was that he couldn't speak ever again because of the damage to his trachea. Of course. So, this went on for a little while longer where he kept getting hospitalized and operated on. He would sometimes show up and make some comment about the game I was playing, and then quickly went back to cancer, surgery, feeling ill, you know the drill. One day, he told me that he had to be cut open again. I wished him luck and he quickly left the channel that night. The next morning, I got a message on Twitch from Jay's profile but supposedly it was written by his sister, "Joy". Joy told me that she jumped on his Twitch channel to let his Twitch friends know that he had passed away during surgery. Again, I didn't know who Jay was. Never seen his face. Never got to befriend his Steam account. Never seen a social media account with photos of himself. And this is the Internet after all. For someone who shared the details of everything from his bloody nostril to his sore taint, it was very strange that he didn't have any photos of himself on the Internet. I replied, "I'm sorry for your loss. Thanks for letting me know." and Joy immediately typed back, "Jay really enjoyed your channel, I saw him watch it a lot." I said "Thanks, sorry again," and that ended our correspondence.

Here's the thing. Jay mostly stopped by whenever I would stream Audiosurf 2 and this is significant because it's such a personal time for me. I would chill out by singing along to my favorite songs while riding the tracks generated by the game whenever I feel a little depressed. Perhaps that was the reason why I was so willing to give Jay the benefit of the doubt despite his blatantly fake, phantasmagoric existence. I studied psychology during my undergraduate years, so I recognize problematic personalities when I encounter them. Now a little over a week after the, uh, death of dear Jay, I was in that mood again to jump on Audiosurf 2. There is only one other person who would be kind enough to be there for me when I stream this game besides Jay but on that day, I guess I got lucky. Let's call this "new" viewer, "Jax". Jax suddenly showed up as a new viewer on my channel and actually said "Hi" to me. And as if the galaxy had fated this meeting, Jax showed up around the same time Jay would show up on my channel during an Audiosurf 2 stream. Jax told me that he had never seen the game before and thought it looked interesting and asked a lot of questions about the game's mechanics. Nobody had ever done this before. Ever. People usually commented that the game looked too busy and too complicated. Jax apparently, wasn't deterred. I kept Jax engaged, since he seemed to be very friendly and was interested in what I was doing. But yes, there was one thing that Jax/Jay didn't know about me. And that was my specialization in communications and language as an undergraduate, and those skills have served me well during my 10-year stint in the corporate world. Jax was no criminal mastermind. His attempts to mask his writing was cute, with the fake capitalization and punctuation errors. It was all oh, so very cute. His name may now be Jax, but it was Jay's sentence structure and isms alright. Though the emotes themselves were different, they were placed at the same location as Jay's and the emotes were used for the same emphases. I knew it was him. But hey! Audiosurf 2 streams normally means 0 viewer without Jay, or Jax, or whatever your real name is, so I played along... Until I got to the grand finale. I selected Jewel's Jupiter as my last song. I sang my heart out. Jax seemed to like it. He asked, "Why were you so emotional when you sing that song? Is there a special story behind it?" I looked to the camera and said, "It was the song I used to sing whenever I missed my boyfriend, but you already know that." Jax didn't respond. He left the channel. I went to look at his profile and of course, it was generic as heck. I guess Jax was waiting to drop me a follow by the end of the stream. I am glad he never did. I have never seen him around since.