#never in a million years will i give youtube money

[frankieunscripted]

My reasons to hate Drake

First things first, I'm the reales- wait, wrong theme. First of all, I would like to say this is NOT an unbiased recap, this is literally just me listing things I've hated about Drake for years. You might as well join in on the hate train. Go watch some YouTube video essays on this if you wanna know more!!! You'll find plentyyyy

Certified Pedophile ("allegedly"): Texting teen girls until they're of age and then go and date them. ew.

Cosplay Gangsta: disrespecting the culture as a whole, but especially what hiphop is about. Flexing money, cars, girls, drugs, clothes bc he never understood hiphop was never about flexing, but about being heard bc you're oppressed, about revolution. Now we got his die-hard fans running around acting like this is true rap. no. "You don't know nun bout dat!"

Culture Vulture: jumping from trend to trend in order to make it "his own", faking accents that he has no business playing with and dropping them as soon as he's done with this specific type of genre bc it's not trendy anymore. Adapting whole "personas" around this, instead of just merely collabing with other artists. Jamaican and African accents are just 2 examples here.

Blackness: Drake never really got out of his acting career. Back on DeGrassi he was acting as a high school jock. Now he's acting like a tough black guy who's from the streets and knows what it's like to be down bad, when this was never his life. Lil Wayne warned him to never change and act tough just bc he would sign to Weezy's label where the rappers were predominantly "gangsta type dudes". And what did Drizzy do? He's acting all tough and "outta dem streets". He's clearly overcompensating for not feeling black enough (I've already reblogged 2 posts about this, pls see these for further context). Drake's mad for not being referred to as a rapper who speaks on being black, when in reality the black experience was never of topic in any of his songs. He also doesn't give back to the community.

Lil Wayne: Drake had relations with fellow rapper Lil Wayne's gf (she actually was of age, ayoooo!) while Wayne was away in prison. Wayne got word of the fact his gf was cheating on him with the young guy he signed under his label and was pissed. Drake, in an effort to smooth out the situation, got Wayne's face tattooed on his arm. Say what you will about portrait tattoos, but this story is just so fucking typical Drake. How the fuck do you think this is gonna help anyone?

Validation: Drake donates money in the music video for God's Plan, only to earn more money with that video/song than he donated in the first place. He felt good about donating and then never did that shit again.

Numbers: As a great man once said: "Crack fiends bought 10 million rocks, that don't mean it's good. It don't mean nothing." (As you can imagine, that man was 2Pac). And with that I say that proving your worth in the industry by numbers don't mean a lot. It means you and your team figured out the market and started producing stupid, vapid, but terribly long albums to maximize streaming numbers, automatically bumping up your place in the industry. This is about quantity, not quality - good rap/ hiphop was never about that. Drake actively validates his music and status with his fame, money and streams and neither him nor his fans seem to get that says nothing about the artistic value of his music. "Numbers lie too, fuck your pride, too!" (I mean really, Baby Shark has 14 Billion views on YouTube - you think that's REAL artistry, Mister Aubrey?)

Cocky Ass Bitch: I would be okay with a lot of his music if Drake just knew his fucking place. He went pop ages ago, but still people (including himself) refer to him as a rapper - no even, as THE rapper, placing him in the Top 3. Sometimes I feel like y'all do this, just to piss me off personally. Apart from everything else wrong with Drake, there's nothing wrong with liking music like his persé. Not everyone likes conscious/ deep stuff and sometimes, when you with the homies, you just wanna chill and listen to something "mindless" - MIND you, I'm not looking down on "non-conscious" rap, I'm just saying not every artist has to be woke/ deep all the time and some "empty" party anthem about girls, fashion, cars and alcoholism is fun at times. These party anthems deserve their place. And a child actor turned rapper turned POP STAR is valid in my books - just not if it's Drake. Apropos cockiness: The dude compares himself multiple times to Michael Jackson and while that got a few good lines out of him, I believe it's close to fucking blasphemy. Drake and MJ on the same pedastal. I mean sure, questionable stuff happening with kids, both of them wildly successful in their industry (mind you, streaming like today wasn't around back then and many of the numbers cannot be compared), but one of them a real talent and the other one some guy who more or less made it as an industry plant. "I can dance like Michael Jackson? / I'd argue your skills really lack, son!" (okay sorry, I know, that was corny as fuck xD) Dude is flexing with numbers instead of poetic abilities -

About the art itself:

Ghostwriters: "What poetic abilities?", I hear you ask - Yeah, don't think I forgot! Best believe I been cooking this one. There's evidence for Drake having ghostwriters - which on its own is fine, don't believe every star writes every single bar on their own. My problem with this is, that Drake keeps his cocky attitude, even though many of his hits aren't really Aubrey-written and also many ghostwriters never get their credit (this is why they're called "ghostwriters", I know that this is not something specific to Drake, but slapping one more name on the credits ain't that hard, when you're worth a billion bucks already). This is the rap equivalent of flexing your homework when you know DAMN WELL copied it off of your best friend and did nothing for that success. I guess his song Right Hand wasn't about a romantic interested after all, but the dudes who been writing it!

STOLEN SHIT: Why in hell is no one mentioning this on here? Drake is KNOWN for stealing other artists' verse metres (referred to as "flows", y'all tumblr, idk how much you guys do know, okay?), melodies, whole beats, samples or verses in general. In no other studio would you see mentions of a "reference track" concerning songwriting. They take a song as reference and build around it as they construct a beat. There's PLENTY of evidence for this happening, one story really had me baffled, where a young indie-rapper met Drake in the early 2010s, gave him his CD to listen to and a whopping 5 years later the indie-rapper realizes Drake just fucking stole his entire song (a really personal one at that) on his latest album back then. Being indie, of course the guy had little to no means of fighting back with lawyers or anything, man's was working a 9to5 job and had other stuff going on. Before you wanna argue with me though: YES. There is a difference between stealing and paying hommage. One famous example is Drake biting Eminem's Superman flow on Chicago Freestyle: "But I do know one thing though/ Bitches, they come, they go/ Saturday through Sunday, Monday / Monday through Sunday, yo/ Maybe I'll love you one day/ Maybe we'll someday grow". The only good thing Drake ever did was changing Em's "Bitches" to "Women" on his song. Other than that: exact same few bars. This is a hommage. Why? Because Eminem, that's why. You can pay hommage to great, well-known artists with good bars. It takes a common ground of knowledge from artist to audience to make a hommage like this work. That can go well. Kendrick copies the flow of a Kanye West song on HiiiPower and it works just fine because you listen to either of the song and think: "Ah yeah exactly, that one part, okay, I see you." You don't pay hommage to a small, unknown, indie-rapper by copying his whole verse about his Mom, when you would never say stuff like that on your records before. You don't, because it wouldn't work. None of your listeners would understand the innuendo at all, because no one ever heard of the "great guy you'd be paying hommage to". So shut up.

Music: It's just not that good. Like yeah, he had a few bangers, but let's not exaggerate. Artistically Drake does not offer anything. If he ever did, he probably left all of that on the first few albums he still rapped on. His delivery sucks, his singing voice sounds like he's tryna be The Weeknd at times but isn't. The lyrics aren't special. What the fuck?

Euphoria: Even before getting deeper into hiphop, I've always hated the way Drake presents himself. When Kendrick said: "I hate the way that you walk, talk, dress" I felt that. I hate the way he "raps", the way he drags his words, the way he laughs, the way he "sings". Just a whole lotta shit I dislike about the guy.

Sneak Dissing: If you want beef then get in line, don't just kinda allude to it, you weak ass bitch

SENSITIVE ASS BITCH: I love a man who's in tune with his feelings but Drake being the cosplaying gangsta clown he is, acts like he's all tough when in reality, you can't really say shit to him, cause he "can't let this shit slide, ay".

Kendrick's Control Verse drops - a verse calling out multiple rappers saying Kendrick will come for them in friendly competition for the crown of being the best. Drake was mentioned. Everyone thinks it's kinda cool and goes along. Drake is mad. In an interview he basically said he found it fake because the next time he saw Kendrick "it was all love" and that he wanted it "to be real. Let it be real then". Okay crodie, next time you get called out in a fair rap competition, best believe I'll sock you in your fucking throat, I gotchu.

The Weeknd doesn't sign to Drake's label OVO after working with Drake for a while. Drake is mad again and feels betrayed. Why you gotta be like this?

Kendrick says that he doesn't wanna collab with Drake because their music is too different, not because of anything personal. He just doesn't see it happen in the near future because it would not match artistically. Drake gets mad.

Drake stopped beefing with Pusha T back in the day. Probably because he exposed his son. But still, if you want beef, then clean up your plate, bc you eat what you order and dont't just start to "let this shit slide, ay"

("allegedly") being involved in XXXTentacion's passing back in 2018 over beef. This beef started because of the flow of X's popular song Look at Me!, which Drake stole shortly after letting X know his management would contact him about a possible collab. As you can imagine, X was never contacted by Drake's people. The kid was 20 years old, man. He said some outrageous shit at times, but no one deserves to go out like he did.

Also, the famous DMX ("Y'all gon make me lose my mind!") once said in an interview that he'd like to punch Drake in the face and I support that. Kendrick and his homies laughed at the clip - as did everybody else, cause it's hilarious if a beast and a legend of hiphop hates Drake. Drake was mad at Kendrick laughing about it and not taking it seriously. What did he expect? Should Kendrick have went after DMX and made him apologize for what he said about lil Aubrey? How old are you? 5?

Drake gets mad at a lot of shit - bottom line. I could go on and on, but I've been writing this for hours, it's half past 3 am and I wanna sleep after uni and work, y'all.

DURING THE DISS-ERTATION: this section is about shit Drake did during the beef with Kendrick.

Saying Kendrick's Like That verse was weak af. That's your core response? Someone flames you and people are already throwing ass to the mere sound of it and you think: "Huh, that sucked anyway." Pathetic.

Calling Kendrick short (over and over and over again) as if his height is under his control/ his fault? - as if that takes way from Kendrick's skill, Kendrick's allegations againt Drake! - as if that means ANYTHING AT ALL to people over the age of like... 12?

Going after anybody's family in the first place. I know nothing is really "off-limits" in a rap battle like this, but please have the fucking decency. Don't mention my Momma, my kids, my dog, my fam, my friends who ain't got nothing to do with the fact that I hate you. I will say I am not proud of Kendrick for getting down on that level himself - but I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Meet The Grahams and the sheer panic it induced. And sometimes I gotta be a little childish and yell "But Aubrey started ittt!"

Hitting on Whitney in The Heart Part 6. Don't go for another man's treasure, you absolute dog. Accusing Whitney of being unfaithful. My friend, this beef is about us (the Culture) hating you and the things you do. Stop trying to shift this into something it is not.

Reacting to diss tracks via instagram stories and memes, like he's that one popular girl in 7th grade who's gotta clap back to something someone said in school on her IG. Shut up.

Calling The Weeknd and his manager gay. Are we not over homophobia yet? Being queer is not an insult. Also falsely "accusing" people of being gay is uncool as fuck - but oh "You don't know nun bout dat!" bc false accusations are basically everything you do - and also possibly outing someone like that is fucking hurtful as shit. I know the people involved are probably not queer at all, but if they were - period.

Using AI in a song at all. Drake, you already proved you suck. Don't force it down our throats. What part of you thought it would make you look good? What part said it would be good to do in a diss track, when the world knows diss tracks are even more a show of capability than other songs. Nah, you go and use AI. Idc about your "mind games": Using AI Snoop Dogg is just weird as fuck cause the Doggy is still well and alive - if you want him to feature on your song, call the legend and ask hi- oh wait, you knew he woulda said "Aww hell nah!" cause everyone hates you? Huh. Snoop probably woke up one day, hit a blunt and asked "When the FUCK did I collab with Drake?". Anyway, using AI 2Pac is straight up disrespectful, when you know damn well the guy would've hated you if he knew who you'd become. Just doing this because it's 2Pac, because you can and not even asking for permission of Pac's people is crazy. Glad the shit was taken down anyways.

The 8 Mile "Airing Out Your Dirty Laundry"-Trick before the big battle does NOT invalidate future claims on you diddling kids. No. Not even if 2Pac says it first. Nah.

His Damage Control Effort in post to make it seem like/make us believe that he's in control, when Kendrick has been bodying him is hilariously embarrassing. Anyone can claim the mole was fake "all along" after it happened.

Making fun of Kendrick for his verse on Taylor Swift's Bad Blood is just stupid. Look at all the features Drake does. Rihanna, BadBunny, DJ Khaled, Future, PartyNextDoor, Lil Wayne, Diddy, Nicki Minaj, Wizkid, ..... the list is so fucking long (I'm just picking at random songs at this point, cause I do not want my browser/spotify history to be associated with Drake's music. I don't wanna go out of my way to say he NEEDS these people to stay relevant but let's face it: His discography and his success would be different if it weren't for them

Acting like he's so great for "finally making Kendrick rap again" - Sir, you don't write your shit on your own, stfu. You don't invest time and effort into your vapid albums. YOU should be thankful for Kendrick destryoing you, giving us the best few lines out of you in a long time.

Not addressing important shit. We been over the allegations, I will not repeat them in this post cause this is already long enough. BUT y'all on the same page as me, aight? Instead of addressing EVERYTHING, he just responds with diss tracks that aren't terrible but really not THAT good, yk? Not going into the shit that we want to se addressed.

Acting like disstracks need replay value. Idk if this is a Drake or a fanbase problem, but people really act like Drake's tracks were better, bc you can listen to them more casually. "Kendrick basically made a whole song about Drake" - THIS IS WHAT A DISS TRACK SHOULD BE! Notice how we don't call every song containing a diss immediately a "diss track"? That's why. Diss tracks were meant to hit your opponent in the stomach with witty bars, double entendres, nice delivery and good production. Diss tracks weren't meant to be club bangers - bonus if they do end up being some though, looking at you, Like That and Not Like Us.

Not reading into stuff properly or just not listening. This is a small one, but ngl I hate the fact they got the Mother I Sober reference wrong (The song is NOT about Kendrick being abused, BUT about Kendrick not being abused and his Mom NOT believing him and passing her sa trauma onto him, even though he didn't experience that). Also Kendrick explicitly says "DOT, the money, power, respect / The last one is better" on Like That and Drakes response (again) is "Huh, I have way more money than you and in the industry, I'm way more powerful than you. Also, you so short tihhihi." BITCH he SAID respect was the most important of the three and you disrespect him, not by calling him out by his wrong doings but by picking on physical features the man cannot change like a 5th grade bully.

Anyways. phew. If you made it this far... wow. I'm impressed. I'll keep updating this. Thanks for coming to my beef talk.

EDIT: Thank y'all for the positive reactions on this post. If you seek more info/ want me to further explain stuff/ have even more dirt on Drake, let me know and we can work something out. -Frankie out

[gamora-borealis]

I think dan and phil are special but not because they are special people. like don't get me wrong, they are extremely talented and creative and funny and phil does seem to have inherited some kind of special intuition from his northern grandma but! there's a million other queer / neurodivergent people out there just like them... just as talented and intuitive or whatnot. what's special is that they were in the right place / right time to broadcast this unique kind of existence on a mass scale to a broad audience but more importantly a kindred audience. and they've kept it authentic by balancing their entertainment personas and working relationship with their real selves. It's like we've been watching a reality tv series about them for 15 years except they are the producers (who maybe exaggerate some things like producers do but, it's their own choices)... and they never meant for the show to make money but it did so yeah they need it to maintain their lifestyle now but in general their intentions are less clouded by clout or success compared to some influencers/creators out there. What's special is the insane parasocial relationship we have with them and they have with us that truly is a product of a specific context that I don't think will ever quite exist again. They learned from the first YouTubers and mastered the art form to the point where they are able to go on these huge tours that to this day no one can top because YouTube and the Internet have changed far too much with algorithms and advertising and etc. They are a testament to the lost dream of what the internet could be and a showcase of what can happen if you give gay dorks the perfect ingredients to build a media empire. and as a result we know them so intimately as they truly have been open about so much over 15 years and yet they've still kept so much private, to the point where there's still so much that people speculate on. It's like the perfect case study for Web 2.0 media produsage and digital community building amidst the decline of in-person connections because of the progression of capitalism... anyways if by chance there are any phannies getting degrees in media and communications and need help with paper topics and writing please hit me up I'm yearning for grad school again 😭

[sunflower-lilac42]

𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 | 𝘩𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘦𝘴 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 ♔

➪ summary: when a youtuber comes and asks y/n and her friend which one of their siblings would send them more money, she realizes she's never been so grateful to have rich brothers

➪ warnings: luke not sending reader money :(

➪ word count: 0.9k

➪ file type: blurb

➪ sunny's notes: this is the result of me scrolling on youtube shorts too much :)

nhl masterlist || taglist || navigation

⟹ Version One | The One Where They Are All Together

She was walking through campus with her friend, talking about what had just happened in the past day that they had seen each other. As they got closer to their destination a man approached them. He was around their age, maybe a year or two older, he had a microphone in one hand as a camera guy trailed behind him, “Do you guys have any siblings?”

The two nodded, a little skeptical, “I’ll give 20 dollars to whoever can convince their sibling to send them more money than the other.”

Her friend whined, “No, her brothers are rich, this is so easy for her, it isn’t fair.”

“Oh, they’re actually all together right now so that works! Wait, why am I making them send me money? I’ll think of something.”

Y/n pulled out her phone and face-timed Jack, hoping that out of the three of them, he’d pick up, “Hey y/n/n!”

Quinn and Luke joined the frame soon after, “Uh hey, can I ask you guys a huge favor?”

All three raised an eyebrow, but Luke was the one who answered, “What is it?”

“Can you guys send me some money? I need to buy a new textbook but my paycheck hasn’t come-“

“How much?”

“Like a 100? I’ll pay you back, I kind of need it soon.”

Quinn, being the big brother he loved to be, answered right away, “Yeah, of course. no need to pay me back too.”

“I promise I will.”

“Nope, I make like millions a year, I think I can spare my baby sister 100 bucks.”

“Thanks, Quinny. good luck tomorrow you guys, don’t hit each other. Love you.”

“Love you too.” The three chorused back right before she hung up.

Quinn was quick to send her the money, yet instead of the 100 she asked for, he sent her 200. Attached was a note saying that they missed her and to go buy some food for her and her friend.

“Hah, have fun beating that.”

Her friend called her sister, getting a mere $30 from her. She frowned and rolled her eyes, telling y/n that she owed her for lunch now. And after the guy left, she sent all $200 back plus the extra 20 she had just got saying it was just for a video and that she loved him. Jack and Luke whined about losing 20 dollars after that.

❛ ━━･❪ ❁ ❫ ･━━ ❜

⟹ Version Two | The One Where She Asks All Of Them Separately

She and her friend had been walking back from class, talking about the new project that they were doing. They were on their way to grab something to eat as it had been slowly approaching lunchtime. There was a guy in the courtyard, with a microphone and his own camera guy. It was a little weird and they became a little skeptical when he asked them if the two had any siblings.

While her friend shook her head no, she replied, “Yeah, three.”

So while they couldn’t see whose sibling would send them the most money, they could see which ones out of hers would, “Okay we haven’t done this one before but I’ll give whatever sibling of yours who sends you more money 20 bucks.”

“Deal!”

She called Quinn first, figuring that out of the three of them, he would be the one not doing anything at this time of day. He answered instantaneously, a soft hi coming from his side of the phone. 

“Hey Quinny, I have a favor to ask you.”

“What’s up?”

“Can you send me some money? I have-“

“Yeah, how much?”

“You didn’t even let me finish my question.”

“You’re my sister, I’m going to send you money no matter what. I mean unless you’re buying drugs, are you buying drugs?”

“No just my-“

“Yeah okay. How much?”

“Like 50?”

“Okay, I’ll send you the money. I have to go, but I’ll call you later, okay? I love you.”

“Love you too.”

She looked back at her phone and smiled when she realized he sent her 75 instead of 50. She looked back up as she moved to call Jack, “Alright, let’s see what Jack will do.”

Jack answered his phone within the first three rings, “Y/n.”

“Jackson.”

“What’s up sasquatch?”

“I got a favor to ask you.”

“Should I be scared?”

“I don’t know, do you have a reason for the Devils to stop paying you?”

“No?” His voice was more confused than worried at this point.

“Okay cool, can I borrow some money? Just like 50 bucks.”

“For what reason?”

“I need some new books for class.”

Jack raised an eyebrow from the other side, “Positive?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay fine. 50 you said?”

“Mhm.”

“I’ll send it when we hang up.”

“Thank you, Jack. I love you.”

“Love you, you dork.”

And when the phone hung up and she got a notification, she realized Jack had sent her the exact amount she was looking for, “Cheapskate. Just kidding, I’m sending this back anyway after this video. Alright, I highly doubt Luke will send me any money, but we can try at least.”

“Luke!”

“Hey y/n/n.”

“Listen I got this huge favor I need to ask you.”

“Whatever it is, no.”

“Not even for your favorite sister?”

“Not even for my “favorite” sister. What is it anyway?”

“I was just wondering if you could send me some money for my-“

“Yeah, no.”

“What do you mean no? You didn’t even let me finish?”

“I’m broke.”

“You’re literally a professional hockey player.”

“So? Get your own money.”

She scoffed, “Rude. And this is why you aren’t my favorite.”

“Oh well.”

“Bye Luke.” She hung up before he could say anything else.

“And just for that, I’m sending Quinn and Jack like an extra 20 each.”

⬂ 𝗛𝘂𝗴𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗕𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗧𝗮𝗴𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 ⬂

@zebraszegras | @ru-kru | @alwaysclassyeagle | @flowergirl1134 | @puckslxt | @ivy-34 | @jjgsunflower | @kei943

[girliism]

rockstar!patrick zweig who thinks being in a rock band is the best thing to ever happen to him. the endless access to fame, money, girls, and boys. he was more than happy that he joined when his childhood friend brought it up one day while they were chilling in one of the many rooms at casa zweig.

“dude i think we should start a band.” art donaldson his closes and probably only person worthy of “the best friend” title blurts out randomly. “what?” patrick huffed. “we’re sixteen and have never played an instrument, you’re crazy.” the conversation ended after that as they went back to watching their movie. but still they found themselves later that night in their respective homes watching youtube video after youtube video on how to play different instruments.

that was seven years ago, and thanks to arts sudden interest (and hard work from all three of them) the challengers were everywhere, sooo why were they playing some venue in tiny college town. “oh, don’t act so upset pat, this whole week you’ll be surrounded by drunk easy college students, your favorite.” tashi patted her hands on his shoulders trying to reassure him. patrick groaned “with a number one song on billboard hot 100 all i’m saying is we should be selling out stadiums”

art laughed shaking his head. “haven’t you ever heard of humble beginnings?” at this patrick mocked him in a higher pitched voice with a roll of his eyes.

“hey guys, you’re on in five” some stage manager popped into their dressing room to say. standing up the three of them get miced up and start doing vocal warm ups to get ready.

“ok, huddle up.” tashi said gathering the two boys up in a small circle. “whether it’s performing in front three mice or 3 million people we give it our all ok.” nodding they all take a couple deep breaths putting their heads together before walking out to the stage.

the crowd was insane to say the least, singing along to all the songs louder than the band themselves. it almost hurt them to have to leave the stage. almost.. because what’s better than a concert? the wild after party full of fans eager to please their favorite band member that comes after.

“ughhh, why does she do this?” art groaned from the kitchen as he watched tashi shove her tongue down some random guys throat. “i think i’m gonna be sick.” art downed whatever was in his cup in one gulp before pouring another.

“when will man up and just ask her to be exclusive, tell her you’re more than just a warm body to use for when she’s feeling bored.” patrick mumble into his cup looking around not really caring for art’s pinning at the moment. “tashi doesn’t do exclusive you know this.”

whatever art was saying sounds completely muffled to his ears as he spots you. sitting there looking bored out of your mind as if you’d rather be anywhere else. he’s got to talk to you he’s got to know you. it’s like you’re pulling him in without even trying like some kind of siren that drags sailors to their death with ease.

“yeah art that sounds great.” he says absentmindedly as he goes to walk over to you leaving his friend alone, though not for long.

he plops down next to you. do all girls smell this good? he thinks before saying. “you here alone?”

eek ok that’s all for now!! part one part three

[decodedlvr]

As long as I’m with You

Steve Harrington x You (short)

Summary: Steve wakes up to another bad night you’ve had this week

Warnings: hurt/comfort, talks of poor physical and mental health, doctors, suicidal ideation, medication use, drug use, chronic health issues, BPD if you squint, disabilities, use of the word “girl” x times, negative self talk, mentions of sex, angst, fluff~~

This is based off my own experiences and inspired by my pal Morgan’s version; feel free to check hers out

Tick tick tick

The clock strikes 12 and then 1, 3, 5am in the morning, no sleep no rest it’s an every day cycle. The same shitty cycle.

It’s a new year, but not a new you.

Sitting in your walker in front of the excruciatingly bright television screen, high as a kite, everything in existence running through your mind 100 mph, sometimes the weed helps the pain. Sometimes it induces it or even makes it worse. Right now it’s doing nothing for you. Looking over at your loved one sound asleep. You don’t want to bother him with your whines or crying. So you just sit there silence, tears rolling down your cheeks; while you watch some bullshit on YouTube.

Sniff Sniff

“Baby?”

Shit.

“..yea?” you say in a whispered tone

“Are you ok? what’s wrong?”

“Ah, you already know”, you’ve used that line probably over a million times

Steve comes along your side expecting a few dried tears, but his eyes widen when he’s sees the collar around your shirt bitten, snot dribbling down your mouth and throat, crouching down, he lies his head onto your thigh looking up at you, “Talk to me sweetheart”

“No.”

“Hey, I know you’re hurting”—

“GOOD FOR YOU! Congratulations you know I’m hurting, you know I’ve been hurting for fucking years. I’m glad you’ve acknowledged it unlike some people”you sniffle getting up in a hurry to take a piss as he follows with sad eyes leaning against the door frame

“I’m fucking tired, I’m so goddamn exhausted nobody will ever know what I’m dealing with!”, you say wiping your ass not bothering to wash your hands, “I can’t do anything I can’t run, I can’t jump, can’t go to the stupid, fucking grocery store without one of those motorized carts.. my back hurts, my fucking knees are throbbing, stupid fucking nerves won’t calm down FUCK! It’s not like I can get in the bathtub to calm my muscles down. Nothing is helping! No medication, no PT, no injections, no nothing! Why?? am I just resistant to any source of help or treatment? I-I can’t even lay in the goddamn bed to sleep. That’s all I have left is rest!! What is rest!? I don’t know what the hell that even is”

“I know baby I know”—

“NO YOU DONT STEVE, all you know is what you see. I wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy, my worst enemy to feel what I feel. That’s how bad it all hurts. The most evil, sick and twisted person in this world, I would never wish this upon. I just..”, getting dizzy you collapse on the bed sobbing into your own hands, then eventually into Steve’s shoulder as he rocks you, tears spilling from his own eyes—

“Nobody cares, nobody wants to help me. nobody cares unless I’m rich and can afford to give them any and ALL the things off my back, but I can’t. Even with the money you make it will never be enough to help the poor girl who’s too young to have any kind of issue. It’s “all in my head” I’m just fucking crazy. I could break my own neck and still be told it’s only from anxiety. Nobody cares just”—

“I care” he exhales

“It doesn’t matter if you care, all your care is useless, all your help is worthless to me because it gets me nowhere. Nobody’s love and care gets me nowhere. It’s nothing all but fucking false hope. Don’t you get that? None of you still to this day seems understand that. Stop praying for me to get better. It’s never going to happen. I can’t take it anymore.. I just wanna die! All I wish for is to die but, I can’t even have that. It’s like all of you want me here, to live and suffer for the rest of my life for y’all, it’s not fair, fuck that”, your trembling, body in fight or flight

“Don’t say that, you know I’d do anything to take your pain away”

“It doesn’t matter what you’d do because you’re not a doctor. You’re not a professional, you can’t help me get better.. sucks to hear but it’s the truth Steve..fuck”—

Steve’s really trying not to beat himself up over your words, he knows you’re in pain, it comes from a place of anger, frustration and fear

“I have all these pain medications I could easily take all at once, so I’ll never have to wake up in this position ever again. Why can’t I do it huh? I could end right here right now you never have to suffer again, but I just d-don’t; If anything, I’m the most selfless person for staying alive for YOU just so I can be alive but in pain all over again for YOU!”, your tone getting higher and higher in pitch

“I-I’m sorry.. I wish I knew the right words to say baby”, he’s trying his best to stay strong for you

“You’ve got to be sick of me, tired of me. All I do is cause more money to come out of your pockets, more exhaustion, more burdening, more crying, more everything bad for you. You already deal with your own shit. I do nothing but make your own mentality worse, hell you’re making your own self worse being with a person like me. A broken and useless excuse of a human being. You deserve somebody who can go hiking with you, go to the beach, travel with, who can do the bare minimum. Can’t even fuck you properly—

“STOP! Stop that right now” he shouts

You freeze because he’s never raised his voice at you, atleast not on purpose at such a vulnerable time

“I hate it too. You know it hurts me to know that you hurt and I’m sorry that I can’t take the pain away from you. My sweet, sweet girl I’m so sorry that nobody has given you the chance to hear your voice, to help heal you..but I’m gonna make you the same promise I make you almost every single night. As long as I’m with you, I will try my best with all my power to make it a little bit more bearable for you to be here, and I am so grateful that you are still here and choose to be here with me for us to be together. I know you hurt, but as long as you’re with me, I’m going to do my best to put a smile on your pretty face, beautiful sunshine of a smile because you’re my sunshine.. y-your smile gives me life did you know that?”

You nod. He tells you all the time

“I- I’m tired for wishing to feel ok for my birthdays, every Christmas. All the shirts and posters you got me for Christmas? I haven’t even touched them yet, you know why? Because the selfish person in me doesn’t give a fuck about none of it. The only thing I care about and want and NEED is pain relief and that’s too much to ask for isn’t it? Apparently wanting to be better in the world it’s too much to ask for”

“You deserve to feel better”, he says while his hand travels up your back to rub your tense neck, “You deserve to be free from all of this and I can’t give that to you. You’re not selfish baby you’re hurting. I love you for you. I knew what I was signing up for, and if I didn’t want that I wouldn’t be here right now with you. I know the sacrifices Ill have to make, the tears I’ll have to shed, the strength it’ll take me to pick you up when you’re down, but I fell in love with you, how you are, and who you are”

“Who are you kidding Steve, you don’t even know who I am. The real me. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I wish you met me when I wasn’t sick then maybe you wouldn’t be so stressed out a-and.. and,” you start sobbing again, it’s all too overwhelming

“Hey, hey look at me, no. I met you at the right time. You need me just as much as I need you. You may not think you’re worth nothing but you’re worth everything to me. Yeah you have a good and bad days..—

“I’ve had nothing but bad days for the past few months Steve”-

“I know, I see it, I hear it and I witness it, I may not can feel it, but at the end of it all, you still love me. You’re still here. You still want to cook for me. You still get up to brush your teeth and I’m so proud of you for still trying to care for yourself. That’s the biggest job you’ll ever have, and it’s been a very hard job hasn’t it?

You nod, as he nods with you

“Yeah, it has, but you don’t have to do it alone anymore. I want to provide for you. I want to take care of you. You’re my girl, you deserve so much and as long as I’m with you, I will try every day, every hour, every second or minute, to make sure you know how loved, how great and how amazing you are. How great and amazing you’re doing for yourself and for me. How strong you are”—

—“im tired of having being strong all the time”, interrupting him

“I know you are. You are so strong for being on this earth, even when you don’t want to be. I wouldn’t ask for anybody else, you’re it for me always. Will you continue to let me try to make it better for you every day? To take care of you?”, he squats in front of you, cupping your wet cheeks, kissing your forehead

“But Stevie.. you know you’re getting your own hopes up because nothing you do helps either and I feel like a piece of shit for saying that because”—

“I know what you mean, you don’t have to be sorry. I understand you may not have hope but I do. All my Hope goes towards you and it always will. You are the most important thing in my life. I’m not gonna give up on you, on me or on us, ok sunshine?”

..”okay”, you repeat rubbing your temples

“Head hurt, darling?”

“yes”

“From crying too hard?”

You nod, looking away in shame, “It’s okay, I’ll get your Migrane cap from the freezer and i’ll set your pillows up how you like, just sit tight”, he says it standing then pausing at the doorway, looking over his shoulder, “I love you”

“luv you—

“Hmm? What was that, I couldn’t hear you” he exclaims

“I said love you gosh.. shut up”, you barely crack a smile

That was enough to get him through the rest of the night.

[sunflowerhae]

The Flops™️

Y/n

A 22 year old professional dumb ass with a side gig in being comedic relief. Y/n is easy to understand; she loves video games, loves her cat, and loves pasta. And well..MAYBE she loves her fans too. Y/n is what you could call an “unstoppable force”. She’s going up in the online entertainment world, and has no plans on stopping soon. After having JUST passed her 4 million subscriber milestone on YouTube, y/n believes her life is just near perfect. Which is exactly why God needed to humble her, she thinks. Because WHO kicks someone out of their apartment (3 months before their lease ends, might I add) because of a “miscommunication” if not compelled to by God Himself. So, now Y/n has to move all of her things..AGAIN..to a new place…AGAIN…and pray to God (who we’ve found does NOT have a soft spot for her) that this one sticks - at least for a little bit. Everyone around y/n quickly learns that it’s not her who’s the comedic relief, but instead her life which is so ridiculous, that you can’t help but laugh.

Giselle

Giselle has two main interests. She is a fan of music, and a fan of y/n. She got the music part covered by being one of Korea’s leading superstars. AND she has the y/n part covered by being y/n’s absolute ULTIMATE best friend. When she’s not hypnotizing a whole country with her melodies, she’s dreaming of hanging out with her friends and, maybe hot Greek men. But be careful! This kitty bites, and if you poke too hard at her, you’ll understand why they say she has claws.

Winter

When winter isn’t focusing on her (some would call it) obsession with animal crossing, she’s focusing on her blossoming career in the mukbang community. If you can name it, Winter can eat it. She’s still pretty new, but she’s gaining a steady following by her charming personality and, quite frankly, insane ability to hound a plate of food faster than you can utter an insult. It of course doesn’t hurt her new following that she’s good friends with some of the most influential people of her generation, but that doesn’t mean much to her. With a laugh and bite - winter is a happy girl.

Jisung

Jisung would never call himself a streamer. Sure, he plays video games for people to watch. Sure, he gets viewer numbers up to the thousands. SURE, he makes money off it and has a weekly upload schedule. But no, Jisung would NEVER call himself a streamer. So y/n does it for him! You might think the whole “bicker like siblings” thing is an act for the camera, but that’s just the nature of these two friends. When she’s not nagging him about how much he eats and yet never goes to the gym, Jisung fills the space by laughing and bullying y/n’s gameplay choices. Some newbies are convinced they actually hate each other, but OG’s know these two love each other fiercely, the difference is they show it in their own..unique..way.

Jaemin

Ah..Jaemin. The irony of Jaemin befalls all his friends. He is, by far, the most outgoing one of the bunch. Jaemin sees a new person as a new opportunity for a friend. He laughs in the face of introverts, while also hugging them and giving them a free bag of chips. Jaemin knows just what to say, and just when to say it. And it pains them all that he’s the ONLY “normal” one of the group. Jaemin is currently studying business at SNU, hoping to one day open a cat cafe. His nonchalance towards being in the most envied and admired friend group of their country confuses Jaemins classmates. And what confuses them even more is that, when asked if he feels lucky to be friends with them, his reply is only, “those idiots? More like what crimes did I commit in my last life to be cursed to know them”. But fear not for little old Jaemin, for he is probably the sneakiest of the lot. And if you don’t know what I mean, I’m sorry, but it’s already too late for you.

Jeno

Jeno is a model. It’s really that simple. Jeno is a model - and also so much more. He’s Jaemins best friend, he’s winters boyfriend, he’s the “glue” of the group (as y/n would put it), and he’s just genuinely a nice person. If you have an issue with anything - he’s there. A leak in your roof? Call Jeno. You’re missing a final ingredient for a recipe you’ve been dying to try? Jeno will find it, or die trying! Need a shoulder to cry on after a nasty breakup? Jeno is at yours with a tissue one minute, and an undisclosed location with a gun and some rope in the next. He’s the fiercest and loyalist friend you’ll ever have; who just so happens to be a model.

GG! (Good Game!) 👾

Notes: does anybody actually read my character descriptions bc I actually think I popped off w these ngl. Also not them being a hype house lowkey (without the house part)

☆ Masterlist ☆

Prev ─〇───── Next

⇄ ◃◃ ⅠⅠ ▹▹ ↻

| EXTRA |

<message or comment to be added to taglist; status: open>

[autisticsupervillain]

Now that Zero Punctuation is over, I want to immortalize it with some of Yahtzee's best quotes. God speed you magnificent British bastard.

"Those who had the random chance of being born white in the first world are the most privileged fucking people on this unequal fucking planet and Call of Duty is just those people complaining about how hard life can be when everyone's jealous of you."

"We live in an age where mass communication has counterintuitively turned all attempts at verbal debate into a basketball game where the teams are on different courts, racking up meaningless points and throwing shit over the dividing wall. That's why the only way you can safely express your politics these days is to anonymously spend money. That's how homophobic pizza joints can mysterious aquire a million dollars in donations. So two groups of middle class people annoy each other, Hatred makes tons of money, and the world at large gives less of a toss than a quadriplegic shot putter, good night!"

"The only reason I wanted to talk about it was the depressing inditement of modern gaming it creates. Not by itself, but by Value's indifference to this waterfall of piss trickling down its legacy's nose. Twenty years ago, Half Life was a focal point in gaming's ever-growing development as an artistic medium. The next few years saw a slew of titles that combined triple A game design with genuine emotional story. But what happened between then and now?! Why are the games rewarded with triple A status and income exclusively loot box infested live service bullshit designed not to stimulate our emotions, but to numb them and hypnotize us into lab rats mindlessly pawing the button that makes treats come out while games created with love drown beneath bottom feeders like Hunt Down the Freeman as Valve themselves, once habitual founders of new eras of narrative gaming just waves them on, barely glancing up from their tax paper work. What happened to you! What happened to us!? To the people we were supposed to become!"

"Hogwarts Legacy is by every definition of the phrase, a game made by cunts. As well as very literally a game made by a cunt."

"We really need a better term for shit like Gotham Knights than 'live service'. It sounds too much like a good thing. Being alive is good and so is being serviced. We can't let the publishers control the narrative on this one, they'd call a kick in the bullocks a key entertainment reinvigoration scheme. Hmmm, how about... cunts. Games made by cunts. Evil money grubbing cunts who make soulless, emotion deading skinner boxes deliberately designed to foster addictive behavior. Demonitize me YouTube, I don't care. And neither does my editor. Probably."

"We as gaming audiences have always separated games into the worthies and the unworthies. My dichotomy is this. Games that make you feel vs games that make you numb."

*Begins review* "Undertale is a good game." *Ends review*

"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee hee hee!"

[6lostgirl6]

Hey bestie could you do the boyfriend hc's for Marko and David PLEEEASSEEEEEEE!!!!!!????!!!!!

Ask and you shall receive, I wanted to make a singular post just for Marko and David will have his own which will be coming up soon! I hope you like this, bestie!

Marko As Your Boyfriend HCs

Congratulations, you’re basically dating a vampiric gremlin!

Being in a relationship with Marko is always chaotic with a wicked sense of humor. Your days with him are never dull and you always run into trouble when you’re together. 

In a nutshell, your relationship is like those couple youtubers that live on pranking each other but show deep amounts of love for one another. You both can never get even and the pranks get more and more creative. 

His love language is gift giving and quality time. Marko is basically a bird in the body of a vampire. Whenever he finds something relatively shiny or pretty, he will take it and present it to you. It sends the message that he thinks about you when he collects them and wants you to have a physical representation of his love for you. For quality time, he just loves spending time with you. Spending time with the boys for all those years rubbed off on him so he’ll want to be around you a lot! 

Speaking of finding things to give to you, they are a million percent stolen.

You: “How did you even get this?”

Marko: "What do you mean, dove?"

You: “This is very expensive and I know you don’t have money, so how did you get it?”

Marko: “Five finger discount, babe! :D”

He can be very clingy, it’s essentially part of his vampire nature and you being his mate but he would be the clingiest out of the four boys. If you wanted to go somewhere on the boardwalk, he would go with you. 

He’s an adrenaline junkie, therefore you are going on every roller coaster on the boardwalk with him. He’s the type that would be laughing during the entire ride. 

He would make up corny nicknames for you when he wants to mess with you. The type of corny petnames that make you cringe. Ex: Honeybun, cupcake, sugarplum. Your reaction would make him do it more. 

However, his genuine petnames for you include; dove, baby, and babe. Dove being his favorite because he thinks you’re the only pure thing that has ever happened in his whole life, alive and undead.

The type of boyfriend who wouldn’t tolerate someone disrespecting you. He’s not the type of boyfriend that would just stand there and not do anything while his S/O is getting bothered by someone. 

He may be smaller than the boys, but he can be fucking mean when he wants to be. It’s like poking a pissed off raccoon and getting your shit rocked by it. He’s not afraid to fight someone bigger than him or outnumber him. He’s a vampire, not like he can get seriously hurt!

He is an artist. He loves all types of art including; painting, drawing, sculpting. He doesn’t sculpt often but he loves to draw and paint. 

He has an artbook that has hundreds of drawings dedicated to you on the pages. You’re his muse and he is literally obsessed with capturing your image on paper. Whenever you feel insecure, he would show his drawings to you to show how beautiful you actually are.

He made his jacket and he isn’t opposed to making one similar for you to wear. He would help you make it and add your own little patches, buttons, and accessories. He would even make you a matching one if you asked. Matching couple.  

Similar to Paul, he is very affectionate, especially when it comes to kisses. He can’t help but want to kiss you all the time. Careful, he nips. 

Speaking of Paul, he is also your automatic best friend. Like in Paul’s headcanons, Marko and him are best friends and spend a lot of time together. Trust me, being best friends with Paul is hilarious. 

Marko would spend more time with you though after dating you, he just can’t help wanting to spend time with his mate. 

Dates with him consist of going on safe rides on his motorcycle and racing down the beach. He loves when you tighten your grip around his waist and scream from how fast he’s going.

[formulatrash]

you need to shut the fuck up forever i think. watcher makes at LEAST ~1.2mil a year via patreon ALONE. over-employment and saturation of the workplace is a BAD thing for everyone involved. its basic business. literally no one is saying they shouldnt get paid for their content. BECAUSE THEY ARE. THEY ARE GETTING PAID. they get plenty of ad revenue and again. patreon. they want to be dropout so bad but they simply do not have the consistent fanbase for it. watcher has only existed on youtube for like two years and their viewer base has been stagnant for months they genuinely fumbled so hard. also steven is so annoying and no one wants to fund his waste of money content which is just him traveling and eating expensive food. bye

there's so much going on here. the figure from the Patreon keeps being doubled every time I see someone "quote" it. there's 5880 paid subscribers so averaging the tier levels and assuming the majority of people are on the £8.5 one (probably) then that's just shy of £50k a month, which is like 600k per year (roughing it here) that works out about $740,000 per year before corporation tax etc.

I get that there are lots of Shane and Ryan fans who think people hate Steven and his content and that no one wants a new Worth It. this is not true. lots of people want a new Worth It. Worth It is an incredibly beloved show. if you hate Steven so much you don't want to watch it: don't do that. but Shane and Ryan chose to work with him, so unless you're going to get a time machine and prevent dead-eyed venture capitalists gutting Buzzfeed until they all got so desperate they had to leave, that's how it is.

also "saturation of the workplace" "overemployment" give me strength I didn't realise so many tumblr girlies (gn) were taking majors in corporate bullshit. creating secure jobs in industries that have historically never had them is a good thing. bucking the trends that the Buzzfeed guys saw when they were there, of repeated corporate takeovers bleeding every drop out of the content they'd bought just to drop it once its exsanguinated corpse stopped flowing, is a good thing.

I already addressed the ad revenue thing but given the likelihood of demonetisation in many of their videos there's a strong chance that for the 12.4 million views of Watcher videos in the last 30 days, YouTube collected ad revenue but didn't pay out more than $10k or so. 12.4 million views man, that's a lot. even if (extremely unlikely, quite a lot of the content will be demonetised because of what it is) they got the full amount it'd be less than the Patreon ($32k pre corp tax) so idk man! doesn't seem like very much to be running a company on if you can do basic maths.

but sure let's demand they fire people so they can carry on hand over income to Google, who has decided their content doesn't deserve them seeing payment, instead of employing people to make the shows they want to. you guys are honestly sucking so much corporate dick right now and it's incredible.

[golbrocklovely]

I haven’t watched the interview yet but I keep seeing things on twitter saying that some of the old fans wants “ the old Sam and Colby back “ I just want to be being honest they kind of changed every since they hit 1 million Subscribers on YouTube

i think they have changed, but that's inevitable. it would be weird if they still acted like 20 year olds (or when i first found them).

i know some would argue that they still act that way, but there is clearly a difference between who they were and who they are. and if you don't agree, that's fine. i'm just not in the same boat.

but referring to them via their content and how they deal with shit, snc have never been innocent angels. these fans that want "old snc" back forget to remember that snc have been trouble makers since day one.

they started their career doing public disturbance shit. they followed fat ppl (but those two plus size men were in on the joke), they had the killing best friend prank, they broke and entered building for content for threeish years and ran away from cops, they got arrested and were felons at one point (but charges have been dropped). they've always had a bit of controversy with them. just bc you ignored it all this time doesn't change that.

snc have done dumb shit, sure. and will probably always do dumb shit, bc that's what humans do. they make mistakes, they apologize. some fans just don't give them the grace to grow and change. but that can't fix that. no one is perfect.

and also, bc it is part of the same conversation, yes - they do care about views and money. shocker to literally no one bc this is their job after all. they don't do everything because of views and money, tho. that's where the issue really lies. some fans don't think that way, others do.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Happy 1 Million Views to the Video That Broke Me

This is a repost of something I wrote over on my Cohost, but I figured a year later it should also probably live on the domain I pay money to have. Better late than never!

This is the most successful piece of content I have ever created. At one million views it is the thing I've made that people have seen the most. It is the thing that the most people have seen my name attached to. And it's total trash.

It's 2017 and we're a week or so out from the release of Sonic Mania, a game that I'm, at that point, pretty damn excited for. A kindly poster from the Something Awful forums (that I have known from many forums previous) poses a challenge: be the first to beat his short kaizo Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM hack and he'll gift you a copy of Sonic Mania on Steam when it comes out.

I was already getting the game on PS4 but I figured whatever, everyone else seems to be having trouble with it, I'm bored, I got nothing better to do, I'll give it a shot. I load up KEGA Fusion, start a low bitrate and resolution OBS recording because it'll probably take a few hours and who cares it's a forum contest verification video, and get to work. A hour and half-ish goes by and I'm finished with the hack. I upload the video to YouTube, post it in the thread, win my free copy of Sonic Mania, and that's the end of the story. Thanks for reading.

Except of course it's not the end of the story. A few months after I got done thoroughly enjoying Sonic Mania, I realized that I'd been getting a weird amount of new subscriber emails from YouTube. I decided to actually look at my metrics and noticed a uh, highly localized spike of activity. Give you one guess on which video (hint: it's the one this post is about). "The Algorithm" had suddenly taken it and was running away with it at lightning speed.

In the timespan between posting the video and this spike, YouTube had announced they were drastically raising the bar on the metrics you needed to hit to have your channel monetized. I was by no means a large YouTuber at the time, but I was meeting the old requirements for monetization just fine. I wasn't anywhere near meeting the new requirements until now and this video was blowing the hell up for whatever reason, so I decided to do what any good opportunist would do and made it an unwatchable experience.

I set the ad frequency on that thing to the maximum that it'd let me. I forget exactly how frequent that was but it was something absurd like an ad every 5 minutes. Maybe even more than that. I figured I'd either get rich or maybe it would make people stop watching and leaving the worst comments in the world. Seriously the comments on this thing are their own nightmare, a bizarre soup of people ascribing meaning to nothing, trying to suss out emotions where there are none, saying complete gibberish, I'd need an entire second post to unpack whatever the hell is going on there.

Well, I wouldn't quite say I got rich. The money you get off what most people would conventionally call a popular YouTube video is just not much in the grand scheme of things. But holy shit they didn't stop watching. If anything they were watching more. Why didn't they stop watching? This video was less than nothing. It was an ordeal to watch all the way through. Why were they doing this? Why was the algorithm showing this to everyone? Why this and not one of the things I put effort into or something that was at least meant to be entertaining at all? I didn't have the answers and I still don't.

Before this I personally wasn't lamenting the possibility of losing monetization on my channel as up until this point I had made around $40 total on YouTube in the decade or so I'd had a channel. But I had been spending a lot that time watching friends with channels around the size of mine who were actively hustling to, and unfortunately failing to, meet the new hurdle. They were putting out some really good shit. Way better than my stuff, frankly. And here I was getting launched to the finish line by... a throwaway, blurry, hour and a half long, commentary-free, save state abusing playthrough of a crummy Sonic ROM hack? That I had made as a means to a completely separate end?? That got promoted by a computer program for seemingly no reason???

It felt shitty. One of the friends I mentioned in that last paragraph was my longtime friend Fotts who was in the middle of getting their (sadly now dormant) series TAS Force off the ground. They were constantly tweeting about the ordeal of trying to meet the new monetization requirements and it was a damn shame because they were putting in a ton of effort and it was great. The kind of thing I'd watch even if I wasn't friends with anyone on it. It was a million times funnier than anything I was doing, and the complete opposite of my shitty contest video. If there was any justice in this world the views I was getting on this dumpster fire would be going to them. But as it turns out, there is no justice online.

I recalled a conversation I had with them a few years back while they, I, and a group of about 7 or so other friends were all wandering around an Orlando Wal-Mart wearing identical black t-shirts that read "MARVEL CAN SUCK MY COCK" in big block letters (long story). They had actually kind of gone through this sort of thing before. See, they're the uploader and one of the voices of this video you may or may not have seen with 6.5+ million views on it.

They lamented to me many of the laments I was currently lamenting. "This was just a stupid throwaway thing", "why is this so much more popular than the stuff I put effort into", "it's just me making PaRappa the Rapper say the word 'Chinese' over and over". Ok maybe that last one was a bit more specific to them. Anyway, I responded with (and I admit a lot of the reason I felt this way was because I thought and still think the video is funny) something along the lines of "you can't pick what hits for people, it might have been throwaway but at the end of the day you posted it because you thought it was at least a little bit funny, try and focus on the fact that you have a popular video at all rather than the fact it's not one of the videos you're particularly proud of".

But yeah damn turns out that advice is easier said than done when it happens to you, and it's even harder done when it happens to a factually not entertaining video. One you could have uploaded as unlisted and achieved your intended result with. The runaway success of this thing genuinely broke me on this whole "Internet" deal.

I should stress I mean this in a good way. I realized that it's not so much that you can't pick what hits for people, it's that you physically cannot pick what gets put in front of people. The people cannot pick what hits for them. A computer does. You can try and promote and affect what gets seen in your own small sphere of influence, but ultimately we are, on YouTube and on all of our social platforms, at the mercy of a black box of computer programs that I'm not even sure the people who created them understand anymore. I'd obviously known this on some level prior to this video existing, but bearing witness to it all happening firsthand to this video in particular was another thing entirely. Anything prior that I had achieved marginally similar success with (there were a couple that had broken 100k) was meant to be entertaining. It was meant for people to watch and go "I liked that", not for one guy on a forum to see and go "good work solving my maze Superman". I could classify the success as "neat, people liked that one" in my brain. This defied classification.

The only logical conclusion was that it truly didn't matter what I uploaded. It's all decided by a random machine picking things at random to serve random amounts of people, and the people click on it and watch it simply because it is there. You can poke at the machine, prod at the machine, try to guess what the machine likes, try to iterate on something the machine has previously demonstrated that it likes. It's all an effort to get the machine to put it in front of the people who will click it because it is there. That's what all the bigger capital-C Content Creators do. From the high level stuff of "what kind of things do I upload" to the low level minutia of "how many curse words can I say in the first minute", making it Big On Line in any capacity is about trying to appease an unknowable mechanical entity and nothing else. It's either that or you're "old money" in a sense, established before this all became the case.

And again, the bigger names do this. Entire companies do this. If I were "smart" I would have pivoted my entire YouTube channel to nothing but hour and a half long commentary-free bullshit hard ROM hack playthroughs. Maybe another one would hit like this did. But for the life of me I could not and cannot think of anything more soul crushing.

I wouldn't say I had aspirations to be a Big Time YouTube Man, but at that time I would have maybe liked to be a Moderate Size YouTube Man. Or a moderate size Twitch man. Someone who had people watching but was still able to have fun with it and do his own thing. This newfound realization that it was truly a random lottery, even beyond the random lottery that most of human life is, that becoming any size bigger than Small Time was literally decided by an actual factual random number generator, freed me from the desire to do anything that I didn't want to do. If actively chasing success on these modern, algorithmically-driven platforms, actively going after "Kaizo Sonic 2 Full Run" numbers, meant putting aside the things I like and reinventing myself and the things I do down to the minute details in order to appease a literal ghost beyond anyone's understanding or control that changes what it's looking for on a whim, then I did not want to do that. I did not want to keep a timer for when I could talk normal, I did not want to announce my streams on Twitter with the link in a separate reply one day, in an embedded image the next, and in my display name the next. If there is absolutely one thing I do not want to do in my life, it's dance for a robot.

But the most freeing thing about realizing this is that it also meant if I just kept doing stuff I liked, maybe, someday, I could get lucky enough to where the unknowable internet robot would push that in front of a million or so people. In the grand scheme of things it's about an equal chance of that happening on something I like and am proud of versus something I made in a desperate cloying attempt to placate an algorithm.

Anyway damn this got long and rambly sorry about that lol. This was initially meant to just be a little toast to the 5 year-ish anniversary of me fully becoming an Internet nihilist. Remember folks, it's meaningless to chase success in an algorithm dominated landscape. In the words of a certain extremely Normal-type man, "real life isn't all just being true to yourself", but I reject the notion that the Internet is not or should not be, in spite of the legion of ghouls and freaks at the top of the chain actively trying to make that the case every day.

Be true to yourself. Do what you love, make what you love, post what you love, and maybe if you're lucky a computer somewhere will decide it's your turn, because that's the single deciding factor in all of this. In the mean time, you'll end up slowly and naturally surrounding yourself with cool people who get you, if only a little bit. At least that's what's happened for me so far. I've been pretty alright with it.

[sandgraab]

autism moment for a sec and it only makes sense to post on here since 10 years ago my blog was almost exclusively posts about this particular youtube gamer man. that way I can type all of this and then never think about him ever again.

but anyways I just watch drew gooden’s new vid and the whole time he was talking about an auction and I was like is he gonna do a pcrf fundraiser like a lot of his friends are doing and then that’s what it is. which is cool obviously. but it made me remember that mr mark i. plier has yet to do his typical political schtick in regards to palestine. which is almost, ALMOST funny to me because people like to rewrite history and pretend he’s always been this woke dude as if he didn’t release that god awful pulse shooting video where he waffles about without really saying anything substantial. oh and then the RESPECT video about respecting his racist friend who was being racist for his 100 million subscribers. my post about that video is probably still up on the depths of this blog because I was so mad about it lol.

anyways I think mark gets away with it because he’s hot and kinda funny lol. so many other “influencers” have been bombarded by fans for months to say something - rightfully so, mind you - but not him. he’s the only big one I haven’t seen people mention when they talk about normally “outspoken” creators being weirdly silent about Palestine.

and honestly i don’t really care if he has a dumbass movie to ship out and doesn’t want to burn bridges. he likes to pretend that he gives a fuck because he knows that gets him money and a dedicated fanbase, one that will read posts like mine and say “BUH BUH BUH…. HE SAYS TWANS WIGHTS…. GAYE WIGHTS……….. HES KOREAN ALSO!!!!!!” which like. All I have to say to that is Lol. lmao. rofl.

the other possible response I see for a lot of people is the, “why do you expect this random YouTuber/tiktoker/celebrity to comment on a foreign conflict.” Which by the way that line of logic is so fucking stupid when we’re talking about a guy who likes to pride himself on inclusivity and being politically outspoken. which he isn’t. he’s always had some cringe centrist sounding takes. but that doesn’t change that he uses that progressive image for himself. like you wanna tell me the guy who got on twitter after like every major trump decision to voice support for whichever group trump decided to upset, THAT GUY doesn’t want to be vocal about a genocide happening? yeah sure lol. he’s either a zionist bitch or he’s a greedy coward LOL. or I guess the secret third option is that he’s one of those “can’t acknowledge it because that would hurt bidens chance of winning,” which is kinda just a weird mix of the first two.

or wait actually… maybe he just doesn’t want to piss off scott “weirdly absent from dawkos palestine fundraiser” cawthon since they’ve been each other’s money horses since 2014 🤭

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

More than anything, I want to make a living doing something creative. I want to draw, I want to animate, I want to write, I want to film, I have so many ideas but no skill and no attention span. Neither of those are insurmountable hurdles, I can improve both with practice, but the more I observe creative industries the more I realize they're not nearly as lucrative as they appear from the outside.

Before I deleted my twitter account, one of my mutuals was a professional animator who has worked on dozens of shows for Disney and Warner Bros, and they're struggling to make ends meet. They're more talented than I could ever dream of becoming, and they have to couch surf in order to not become homeless. A ton of Emmy and Oscar award winners, the best of the best of the best, live in squalor and can't even afford insurance. They're all living the dream, they're undeniably successful by every other metric, but financially they're in the hole.

What chance do I have? If they couldn't make it work, how could I?

A youtuber I've followed for years just posted a video saying they have to give up animating for the foreseeable future because their art has done irreparable damage to both their wrists; they have chronic pain, and even after six months of physical therapy they simply can't work anymore. They're famous, they have millions of subscribers and thousands of monthly patrons, and their livelihood just went up in smoke.

Again, what chance do I have?

If I put in the effort to get good at something, even half as good as any of these creatives, even 1% as good, I'll be in the same miserable, penniless boat as they are. It feels like fighting against entropy, a ton of hard work to try and stave off the inevitable. If you let up for even a second, you lose so much progress that it doesn't seem worth it to keep trying. I will never be as famous or as talented as my favorite artists because I don't have the temperament to keep going against the odds. I'm weaker than they are. They have every right to be proud of their work for its own sake, but they still have to eat. You can feel good about making something, but if it doesn't pay the bills it's hard to stay motivated.

The dream of making it big and never having to work again is just that, a dream. It's like winning the lottery; yeah, sure, "somebody has to win," but that doesn't mean you will, and there's no correlation between input and output; the odds are so long that spending ten or a hundred or a thousand times more money doesn't significantly increase your chances of winning. A million times zero is still zero. In the case of art, hard work does not guarantee success. It's all random! A handful of people make it big by chance and the rest of us look to them as inspirations, but even if you do EXACTLY what they did you're not gonna wind up like them.

The act of creation should be emotionally fulfilling, AND you should be able to make a living doing it...

[tedcicle]

i find it so interesting how the chuckle sammy boys branched out and became very popular within their chosen niches. jschlatt, one of the most popular streamers on twitch. ted nivison, greatly beloved commentary youtuber. charlie slimecicle, massive minecraft streamer currently going through a cuntification arc.

charlie slimecicle, deranged toxic yaoi roleplayer

on a more serious note, i think the big shift in focus comes from well, they don’t want to really play video games all the time. you can say a lot about how the market is kind of shit right now (indie games are dominating over huge AAA releases, games are releasing unfinished because “live service” games are all the rage, the goal is to get you to spend as much microtransaction money as you possibly can before the game becomes irrelevant and buried by the newest trending one) and that probably contributes to all of them stepping away from video games as a sole source of content/income

the best example is schlatt: a lot of people kind of forget/never watched schlatt’s 2020-2021 stuff, where he did a LOT of big irl projects (oh jenga vod I miss you). he’s got a similar content cycle to say, ludwig, where he balances big projects with simpler to make videos like streams, react videos, tier lists, podcast episodes, and of course, the occasional gaming video.

and yet, people seem to eat up the stream react content slop (in a way i don’t really understand. like, yeah weezer meme funny but it’s not really my thing). this happens to ted and charlie as well — people simply don’t watch charlie if he’s not playing minecraft, to the point where he’ll end streams early, and yeah ted’s videos perform well, but you can see the difference in millions of vides between his last three big videos and the videos in between them.

not to imply there’s a “correct” way to be a fan of someone, just that i don’t think they really CHOSE these niches. charlie’s “bimbofication” arc, ted’s return to streaming, schlatt’s big interview and moving back to NYC… the underlying current is a lot of big changes coming for all three of our dear boys. good changes, i hope

this is parasocial as fuck, but like, i would rather have the most authentic and happy versions of the chucklefucks then have them burden themselves making content they don’t enjoy for an audience that doesn’t give a shit about them. if that means less to watch, so be it, i have literal years worth of shit to catch up on. they deserve to be happy

[randomvarious]

1996 London Playlist

God, you folks really have no idea how much I love making these location-year playlists 🥰. I mean, I love doing the genre-specific ones too, of course, but my name is random fuckin' various, for Christ's sake; I love it when shit's eclectic, which is what these location-year playlists allow me to do!

And no metropolis on this entire planet, as far as I can tell, is more eclectic and vibrant than London. That place seemingly has nearly everything, and when it comes to the very broad and expansive world of electronic music, specifically, I don't think that there's a single place that has more of it than they do.

So here's the start of a super dope look back at London in 1996—all electronic for now. Everything on here involved a Londoner in some way, as either producer or remixer, and as far as the genres go, we've got drill n' bass, deep house/house, breakbeat, trip hop/instrumental hip hop, drum n bass, downtempo, and IDM.

And that IDM track, by the way, I just learned was finally added to Spotify a month ago. If you've never heard of Freeform before, that guy is a *very* underrated IDM artist in my eyes, and while his tune, "Dice," which originally appeared on a comp called Alt. Frequencies, isn't my absolute favorite of his, it's still a total banger. And as of right now, it's sitting at under 1,000 plays, so make Spotify give this man some much deserved money! 🤑

Now, last week, I posted an update to my 1990s breakbeat playlist, and with that update came a song by Ashley Beedle presents The Uschi Classen Band called "Do You Believe in Love?" which, if you're a true-blue hip hop junkie, has a very recognizable sample in it: Smokey Robinson's "Theme From Big Time," which was also used by Company Flow for their underground cult-classic "8 Steps to Perfection." That Beedle/Classen song is on this playlist too, but I've got a couple more for the hip hop heads this week as well: legendary Luke Vibert's "Get Your Head Down," which uses U-God's famous "hip hop will rock and shock the nation" line from Wu-Tang Clan's "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'," and London Funk Allstars' "Junkies Bad Trip," whose lifted funky guitar riff from James Brown's "Blind Man Can See It" was used in Das EFX's huge 1992 hit, "They Want EFX." Surprisingly, "Get Your Head Down" has over 1.1 million plays (!), and "Junkies Bad Trip" has over 250K.

And to open up this whole shebang, we've got some signature madness from the one and only Squarepusher, whose remix of DJ Food's "Scratch Yer Hed" really finds its footing once he finally pairs his stuttering drill n bass concoction with some chilly pads in the second half 😌. Over 144,000 plays.

This playlist is ordered as chronologically as possible:

DJ Food - "Scratch Yer Hed (Squarepusher Mix)" Faze Action - "In the Trees (Original Disco Mix)" Coldcut - "Atomic Moog 2000" Ashley Beedle presents The Uschi Classen Band - "Do You Believe in Love?" Luke Vibert - "Get Your Head Down" London Funk Allstars - "Junkies Bad Trip" Fluid - "Dust Dancing" Fluid - "Spitting Sand" Spacer - "It's a Nano World" Freeform - "Dice" Sir Raymond Mang - "Number One"

Now, everything that's on the Spotify playlist is on the YouTube version of it too, but the YouTube one also has a few extras on it that can't be found on Spotify at all. And speaking of the one who Pushes Squares, I've got another one from him, under his government name, Tom Jenkinson, called "Vogon & I," which is a crazy piece of zappy, head-nod-inducing trip hop-IDM that currently only has a smidge over 860 plays, which is unbelievable considering the fact that it's by fucking SQUAREPUSHER!

And you might be wondering, hey, where the fuck is the techno?! Don't worry! I've got you covered with the terrific Darren Price remix of Underworld's super famous "Born Slippy" and Holy Ghost's highly rhythmic acid-dank basement track, "MK Ultra." The "Born Slippy" remix has almost 353,000 plays across a whole bunch of uploads, but "MK Ultra" only has a little more than 600.

Underworld - "Born Slippy (Darren Price Mix)" Holy Ghost - "MK Ultra" Tom Jenkinson - "Vogon & I"

And this playlist is also on YouTube Music.

So with the maiden voyage for this playlist, we have 11 songs on Spotify that end up totaling 74 minutes, but over on YouTube, we're at 14 songs that total 89 minutes. So if you want an obscure Squarepusher track as well as a couple great bits of techno, go check out the YouTube one!

And I know that I said last week that I'd have another breakbeat playlist for this week, and I didn't, so while you have no reason to ever trust me again, I'm still going to say it anyway: more breakbeat next week! 😎

And here's some more 90s London playlists for you all:

1995 London: YouTube / YouTube Music 1997 London: Spotify / YouTube / YouTube Music 1998 London: YouTube / YouTube Music 1999 London: YouTube / YouTube Music

Enjoy!

More to come, eventually. Stay tuned!

Like what you hear? Follow me on Spotify and YouTube for more cool playlists and uploads!

[gamebird]

About a month ago, I read 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' based on a recommendation from a friend. It had some good points and bad ones.

Good points:

It is super important for me to have discussions with my kids about how to handle money, what their options are with the money I've given them, and what that means for standard of living, activities, etc.

It is very important in people's lives to have someone advising them about money, instead of just leaving them to fend for themselves and figure it out on their own.

If you already have money (like tens or hundreds of thousands of unencumbered cash), then there are a lot of relatively low risk, low labor means to put that money to work for you and generate income. It's a lot less tedious than, say, working for a living. But you have to have the money FIRST.

The various principles laid out in the book caused me to move my money around. Now instead of retiring in 4 years and leaving nothing to my kids in inheritance unless I died early, because I'd need everything to fund my retirement, I'm going to retire end of next year and leave millions, assuming I live that long. And if I don't, then there will still be a nest egg. Same standard of living for me either way.

Bad points:

Gotdamn does this guy undersell how hard it is to get your hands on enough money to start with to do this. It takes generations and he doesn't acknowledge that.

He also undersells the value and rarity of someone giving you good advice at every turn, feeding you opportunities, and picking you up when you fall ... and never victimizing or abusing you in the process.

He makes almost no mention of the severe adversities many people find in their lives, like chronic health problems, useless or abusive partners, addiction, expensive hobbies, terrible families, bad luck, accidents, legal problems, and the like. Some of these you have a little control over; a lot of them you don't; and even with barely controllable things like partners and family you don't know its bad until its already bad and its not exactly too late at that point, but it really sucks.

So anyway, I tried to get my kids to listen to the audiobook. No dice. I found it on YouTube for free. No doing. I bought the guy's Cashflow board game. Huzzah! They played it a couple times. This let us talk about things. (I mean, I'd already tried talking to them, but trying to discuss the relative merits of savings account vs t-bills vs etfs was not making much progress.)

We talked about:

What's a mortgage and why can't I just be homeless and not pay that

Why are my expenses so high

Why are children expensive

Why do I have to pay for a loan (I was surprised and shocked they only barely understood interest rates. My inability to communicate effectively about investments made sense now. I have failed as a parent. But I'm trying to fix it.) also: why is a credit score important

What the fuck why does this boat cost so damn much?!? (the boat is the most expensive piece of shit doodad you can get saddled with in the game; I talked to them about the dangers of expensive hobbies)

OH MY FUCKING GOD I ONLY MISSED ONE PAYCHECK AND I AM RUINED (because ... yeah. that's real)

What does 'yield' mean

What's a trading range

And a bunch of other things. I also talked to them about the things the game does not include, those things I mentioned earlier like accidents, addictions, lawsuits, and health problems, or the same happening to anyone you financially support or feel beholden to, like a partner or child or possibly parent. I talked to them about the mentality of 'my savings always gets wasted on emergencies so why bother having any', which is valid and real, as well as a rational reaction to a maddingly irrational situation.

An interesting thing about the game - there's no rule for or against giving money to each other. And it makes a huge difference in propelling someone from the rat race stage of the game where you're working for a living and into the cashflow part of the game where your money is working for you instead. In the two games we played, I ended up ahead early each time (half of this I credit to good decisions while my kids were making dumb ones, even after I told them they were dumb choices; half was probably luck). But each time once I had my position secured, I started giving wads of cash to them and it was remarkable how much that improved their situation.

Kind of like real life.

I also read Bullshit Jobs a couple weeks ago and it ends with a lovely piece about the social value of universal basic income. Which, yeah. We need to do that.