Nah, but I love that you had one too.

Oh man, my Topology teacher was way into knot theory, I think that was his research topic. So much so that he would go on long tirades about it in his classes. Great for those of us in his Topology classes, not so much for his Linear Algebra classes.

You’re a sub.

I did this, it’s a great place to start.

Serious question, where are we supposed to buy things we need? Big business is bad, small business is bad, what’s left?

Goncharov

Bepis

LaVeyan satanists aren’t deistic, they don’t actually believe in Satan.

I think sales touches on it, but still the persona you adopt is a “sales representative”. You are selling a product, your insincerity is locked to the product, with a few curated pithy anecdotes to flesh out the role. It’s closer to acting. You’re using charisma to make the sale, but you still take your hat off at the end of the day. You interact with a few individuals over the course of the day, and likely never see them again. If you do have an ongoing relationship with clients, it’s one-on-one and segregated. And you can choose how much you want to rely on a persona, you can do sales from a position of relative sincerity if you actually believe in the product.

With streamers, their identity is the product. They aren’t using charisma to sell cars or vacuum cleaners or medical equipment, they are selling their personality. A sales representative doesn’t have to change their being when market research demands a change in product. If a streamer wants to change their product, they have to change themselves, or at least their persistent persona. Because it isn’t one-on-one and segregated, they have to be their persona all the time for thousands of anonymous commenters at once. It’s fundamentally existential. You can’t do it another way, it’s endemic to the industry

Steaming may be soul-sucking in unique ways

Yes, that was the entire claim. No one said other jobs don’t suck out your soul. The only claims were that there is a way which is unique to streaming, and that it’s basically universal in the industry. No one’s trying to negate the fact that other jobs suck.

They really aren’t. I’ve worked quite a few different kinds of “real jobs”, and my soul was not sucked out. Maybe I put on a bit of a mask in customer-facing roles, but that’s temporary. All my customer-facing roles involved making myself a sort of blank company representative. No one cared about me or my identity, just my ability to navigate the customer’s demands of the business.

No “real job” has ever made any demands of my actual personality or identity. I was never judged on my opinions. I never had to modify my personality to cater to critics to secure income. That is a unique struggle of streamers. You can compare and contrast the physical difficulty or monotony of other jobs, but that wasn’t the claim. The claim is that streaming sucks out your soul in its own particular way.

I don’t have any further context, but he’s got a point.

Sure, physical jobs are physically demanding and the monotony can be taxing. Even customer service jobs are mentally and emotionally taxing, but at the end of the day you’re just a rando in a uniform. You’re selling your skills and labor, you can be yourself off the clock.

Streaming is selling your personality, your perspectives, your values. With lots of viewers, you’re exposing yourself to criticism for every opinion you express. You basically live every day with your identity under the microscope of thousands of anonymous critics. Either you deal with constant character attacks, or you commodify your personality until it’s basically unrecognizable.

“Real jobs” don’t really attack your soul in the same way, because your soul isn’t the product. Aside from certain kinds of celebrities that are basically streamers anyway, it is a pretty unique struggle. At least actors are portraying characters, and can separate themselves from their roles. Streamers are the roles. The line between self and curated content is pretty heavily blurred, it really is a singular kind of soul-sucking.

I started because I used to follow a 28-hour day and would wake up at 6:30, look out the window, and wonder “Which 6:30 though?”

Right, which is exactly what makes the middle period of existence, while brief, extremely appealing.

Ch-ch-ch-chia?

It was written for the nobles who were made military leadership.

👉👌

v.a.p.e. = verily, a penis électronique

Alternate take: fool me once, shame on you.

I can tell this is fake because of how full the bag is