July 2025
My Time as a Twitch Chatter
Over the past couple of months I joined zero-viewer livestreams on Twitch.tv and “made friends” with the streamers.
I use quotation marks because I know that wasn’t genuine friendship. It couldn’t be. It’s impossible for me to have a real friendship with anyone I’ve never had to trust. Online, virtual relationships are the same as pen pals: frail acquaintanceships that allow both sides to present inauthentic versions of themselves.
I did this to try to lessen my loneliness and it sorta worked. While it wasn’t a healthy substitute for real life conversations, I realized that there are thousands of people sitting by themselves, broadcasting their personalities (or lack thereof).
For all the time I spent in those channels, no other real humans ever joined the chat. It was always either bots advertising channel growth opportunities, or sad and desperate “artists” peddling emotes and overlays.
Many of those livestreamers were nice. Most of them had mental damage. They relied on me, their only viewer, for validation and to assuage their own loneliness. The time involved, the emotional investment, getting locked into watching at certain times and waiting for the right moment to leave… I started questioning what I was doing.
That parasocial loop with two-way feedback is a dynamic that feels interactive but lacks the substance of reciprocal, earned trust. It’s not friendship, and certainly not kinship. It’s proximity dressed up as intimacy.
Livestream chat pseudo-friendships are attention barters. You give your presence, validation, maybe even structure to people who are seeking human warmth. But no one’s interrogating the nature of that interaction. They’ll gladly receive what you offer without questioning its cost.
I already know it doesn’t scale, doesn’t deepen, and doesn’t sustain. These aren’t relationships forged in the fire of shared struggle, vulnerability, or consequence. There’s no proven mutual reliability.
But here’s the danger: even knowing this, there’s a seduction to the routing, the ping of recognition, and the illusion of being a part of something. Twitch and similar platforms are engineered to weaponize that instinct.
In the end, I’m better off using that need for connection, attention, and validation to fuel something self-originating. Recording my thoughts. Building. Writing. Talking to the void, even. But it’s got to be my void, not someone else’s makeshift stage.
Media
Read
- George Lois’s Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!)
- Dan Abnett’s The End and the Death: Volume I
- POETRY JUNE 2025
- POETRY MAY 2025
- Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
- POETRY APRIL 2025
I used to read Lois’s book every few months when I was in the thick of my independent creative career. It helped.
Watched
- John McKeever’s Tires
- Yeon Sang‑ho’s Hellbound
- Lenny Wong’s Comedy’s Dirtiest Dozen
- Shingo Irie’s Orb: On the Movements of the Earth
- Tom Segura’s Bad Thoughts
Working life has me spending a normie’s amount of time consuming television. It feels good.
Segura’s Netflix comedy show is excellent and worth watching.
Listened
- Stephan Bodzin’s Powers of Ten
I’m listening to Bodzin’s album right now. So good.
Played
While I haven’t completed any video games in the last month, I’ve started playing a few in earnest. I’m enjoying Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, both parts, in a way I never did. I didn’t have a great time with the original PlayStation 3 release, but all these years later I’ve come to appreciate what Druckmann and company accomplished. I’ll have more to say when I’m done.
I also bought a third copy of IOI Interactive’s stellar HITMAN: World of Assassination. I’ve put hundreds of hours into this title between the Steam and Xbox Series X editions, and I plan to put even more in on the PlayStation 5. I love this game.
Why am I playing these PlayStation 5 games? Because the remote play feature is so damn good. Microsoft has dropped the ball. I know that only a tiny niche collective will ever want to stream their console to their computers, but as I’m now one of those weirdos I’m finding Sony’s implementation flawless. The Xbox in-browser solution sucks total ass.
In lieu of purchasing a second media center setup for my office, spending sixty slippery Canadian dollars on the more-or-less complete edition of HITMAN for a system where it works is a no-brainer.
I’ve also started playing World of Warcraft again, something I swore up and down and to the high heavens I would never do. It’s akin to relapsing on heroin. But this time around I’m playing on a private server and it’s just nice. I wanted to re-experience the classic Undead starting area and I didn’t want to give Blizzard a twenty-spot for the privilege.
At any rate, it’s high summer in the northern hemisphere and I’m staying as cool as a fifty-year-old embittered creative can. Be safe. See you in a month.
P.S.: I am working on a website upgrade. I should at least have a proper mockup to show next time, and at best a working live version. In the meantime, I’ve re-built the old quotes site and created an archival site for the YouTube work. Things are happening, just at the pace of someone who’s giving forty hours (plus downtime) to a corporate overlord.
2025.07.01 – 2025.07.31