I had a coworker talking to me about my writing the other day. During our conversation, he asked why I went for writing and not something more popular like content creation. The answer is simple: I tried it, and I wasn’t super great at it. Talking to him about my time trying to be a streamer reminded me of some of the fun memories I had while streaming, so I figured I could share them in writing. So, if you’re ever wondering why I decided to write and stay away from video content, here is your answer!

Humble Beginnings: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

So, things happened in 2020 that I think the world would like to forget. This major global event caused a lot of people to be stuck in their homes for an extended period of time. Many more people, like me, were laid off from their jobs and had absolutely nothing to do.

I, like many other people my age at the time, decided to try out live streaming. I bought some… questionable equipment off of Amazon, waited an extended period of time for all of the items to show up at my door (thanks to supply chain issues and an influx of new streamers) and got it all set up.

My first stream consisted of me streaming to my wife and playing Grand Theft Auto V. To make it interesting, I decided to play the game exclusively in first-person mode. I played nothing but GTA V for two weeks and built up an average of one-and-a-half viewers per hour.

Here’s something I should mention. I’m not what you would call a great gamer. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty terrible at anything that doesn’t involve a simulator game. A lot of the entertainment had to come from me as a person. The problem? I’m also a pretty quiet and reserved person — so not exactly the most fun and engaging content when I’m solo. A lot of my views came from people who dropped in on the rare instances I was actually being funny on camera.

After a while, I realized that being purely solo was not going to be the best path, and I began to network so I could play games with others.

Dougie and Adrina: Finding Streamer Friends

After a while, I realized that a one of my friends was also beginning to stream on Twitch. To me, he was Dougie. We began collaborating on stream often. Dougie is a bubbly and fun personality who I could really bounce off of during streams, which created a very fun environment during gameplay.

After a while, Dougie introduced me to a few other streamers, and this became my friend group during my time streaming, and some of my favorite moments came from this. Someone I would consider a good friend at this point would have to be a streamer who goes by Adrinalynn, but I call Adrina.

Writers note: there are a lot of people who I would consider friends, but mentioning all of them would balloon the word count to the point that this would be unreadable, so im sorry if I don’t mention you. Just know, you are all fantastic and I miss a lot of you guys!

Adrina and Dougie began playing a game called Phasmophobia which has you hunting ghosts. This easily became some of my favorite moments streaming, as our dynamics (as well as quite a few others who would frequently jump in) made for some of the most fun I’ve had playing games online. There was one point where Adrina and Dougie had me introduce the stream by doing a word for word rendition of the Ghost Adventures intro (if you haven’t seen it, watch it here).

Of course, one of my favorite moments came later into the games release, where we had all gotten used to the scares. At this point in the game, I made it my life’s mission to capture a photo of every ghost we came into contact with. This would usually end with me resorting to repetitively taunting the ghosts in order to get the photo and hoping that I wouldn’t immediately be killed.

On one round, I had a ghost that was being a bit extra difficult to taunt and get a photo of. My friends had already gathered all of the evidence needed to correctly identify the ghost and were ready to leave. Being stubborn, I refused to leave the house until I got my photo.

After quite a few minutes of waiting, I finally decided to go off on the ghost. I, for some reason, decided to bring up just how old the ghost was the only point of reference I had was a camera. Now, I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it went something like this:

“Mr. Ghost, I just need to take a picture of you with this camera here. Now see, this magical thing is called a camera, and you probably have no clue what that is because you were born in 1864 and were more focused on not dying in the Civil War from a surgery going wrong!”

Side note: yes, I’m aware that they had cameras during that time. It’s a joke.

Immediately after the tirade, the ghost appeared. I snapped my photo and hid in a closet like a coward. Once I got out of the house, Adrina and Dougie were still laughing about the insanity of the entire situation. Luckily, I made it to the end of the round, and we began to prepare for the next round. A few minutes later, I had two chat members post clips in the stream from Dougie’s and Adrina’s streams. Both of them were laughing so hard they were crying.

To this day it is one of my favorite moments from my time streaming. Regrettably, I don’t have as much time as I used to to catch streams from them both. I’ll pop in from time to time to say hello, but it’s few and far between. If you like streaming, please make sure to check out Dougie and Adrina sometime — and let them know Kiwi sent you. They’ll know who you are talking about.

The End of Infinite Free Time and my Departure from Streaming

Eventually, everything began opening back up and people were able to return to their daily lives. At this point, I was lucky to make 15 dollars from streaming and had to get back to working. For a while, I tried to stream and work full time, but eventually my content changed from streaming to sim racing (which is another rabbit hole I will go down in a future post). Eventually, I bowed out of the world of content creation entirely and had to leave my Twitch channel behind.

Looking back, I think that’s why I chose writing over video content like streaming. Streaming was a bit of a challenge for me because I had to constantly be “on” in those moments and react in an entertaining way to moments that I might see as mundane in the games. Meanwhile, writing allows me to reflect on moments in my life and tell stories from my experiences. I get to find the humor and lessons from my daily life and spin them into a fun little story for people to read.

Finally, if you are interested, I have a lot of stories from my time as a “somewhat professional” sim racer, which includes a championship and realizing that I was not as good as I thought I was. If you enjoyed this little walk down memory lane, I would love to share some stories from that time as well!