I first stumbled onto SimplySeze‘s twitch stream a year ago today as I was trawling around Jackbox Party Pack streams. As I had been doing for a few days prior to that, I was looking for a friendly, respectful stream run by someone who cultivated a healthy, inclusive community.
I lurked for a bit before jumping in as a rando, probably on a round of Trivia Murder Party, as that was my early favorite. And as had been the case on other TMP rounds on other streams, I did really well, and soon chat was playfully accusing me of cheating.
We all played a few games, I got timed out once or twice by the mighty Moobot for posting links in chat (to jackbox.tv, LUL) and all-in-all had a great time with Seze’s community. I finally dropped a follow at the end of the stream.
Over the next couple months, I would drop in from time to time when Jackbox was being played, or lurk while I played GW2, occasionally reacting to things, suggesting quotes, or cracking jokes. And during that time, I began appearing in chat more and more, and keeping up with her schedule as much as I could.
Then, on her January 5th stream, she decided to pre-empt her scheduled Sims stream for a run of Doki Doki Literature Club. Her normal 3-4 hour stream quickly became a 12-hour epic, and I stayed around almost to the bitter end.
The next day, after watching the last hour of the VOD, I dropped a sub while she was offline.
After that, I tried to be around even more, even if I was still just lurking most of the time. But I still quickly felt more and more at home with Seze’s community, so much so that just before my Tier 1 sub was about to renew that March, I upgraded to a Tier 2.
Then a couple days later, I was up to my usual “lurk and occasionally chat” while Seze was doing her one and only Fortnite stream, when a Pun-off started. Despite the fact I’m usually very good for puns, I was off my game most of the stream. Toward the end, though, I emerged from my lurk and picked up the mic, only to drop it.
My discord DM with Seze also started picking up – branching out from chat during a stream where her sound was wonky, I helped her dial in compression and noise gate settings on her new fancy stream mic (which involved a lot of hilarious videos of her talking at a normal voice, then screaming.)
Then in early May, Seze asked me to join her Mod Team, and soon I was wielding the green sword. Her and the other mods quickly became a new inner-circle for me, and it was in our mod chat that I started showing off my skills with audio and video editing, mostly for inside jokes and memes.
One day, while trying my hand at creating custom scene transitions in my video editing software, I came up with the ‘SimplyStinger’ and shared it with her. After exchanging funny videos where we used it as a transition between our personal stream-start and face-time scenes, she made it part of the stream immediately as her default scene transition.
Then, between twitch whispers and discord PMs, I started creating new gif alerts for her. These turned out to be extremely fun to do. They reminded me a lot of making funny instagram videos back when you could cut between multiple sources. Most of the gif alerts Seze uses now are ones I’ve done or recut for her. Some of them come from specific ideas she had, some of the more recent ones I’ve done come from “I would like a new x, but not quite sure yet what I want for it.”
Each time, I stretched my abilities, challenging myself to create visually stunning mini-productions. My favorite is probably the ‘sub-bomb’ one, where I realized I could use the consistency of the tracked-shot of Markus’ painting reveal in Detroit: Become Human to seamlessly intercut between multiple paintings. The inspiration for this was the audio that Seze had picked – the beginning of a song from Heathers: The Musical – “Holy Shit!” was pretty much what we all felt every time we saw a new Markus painting for the first time.
Seze has been very vocal in her support and continued awe at the sort of things I’ve been doing, which is why she asked if I’d like to start compiling highlight reels of the stream for her YouTube page, which the community wanted to see brought back.
I accepted, and the first one covering October of this year went live this past Sunday. I had been looking forward to the livestream premiere, but what I didn’t expect is that Seze would watch it for the first time live on-stream.
It makes me think back a year ago to the very beginning of my efforts to find new social circles for myself via twitch. And realizing I have indeed found a place for myself in a community of people I never have met in person hearkens back even further to being a teenager on a local IRC server in the mid-90’s.
Now, as my 30’s start to wind down and old questions of identity begin once again to surface, I know I have an interesting road ahead, so it’s good to have a community again.