Time to Start Rowing
A thin trickle of soju. Clear glass, clear liquid. I finally understood why soju glasses came loaded with so much decoration. Not my taste, but something sitting inside transparent liquor had a certain atmosphere to it, I supposed.
I emptied the glass and checked Discord again.
Unknown's Slave. A nickname I still couldn't get used to, no matter how many times I saw it.
Vicious for something supposedly set as a joke. Anyone who saw it could easily get the wrong idea — how the viewers would look at me.
Even when asked to change it, she refused, insisting she really was a slave.
What kind of slave in this world torments their master?
I knew she'd picked it just to mess with me, and I still sighed. And occupying the seat next to me — what was that even supposed to mean? Was I supposed to take it as a joke? She hadn't struck me as someone into that kind of thing.
Then again, I'd only met my editor once. Considering how long we'd known each other, it was absurdly short if you wanted to actually understand a person. Human relationships were something you had to approach slowly, over time. The more time passed, the more I'd come to know about Kang Ah-yoon.
Plenty of people were painfully shy in real life. Kang Ah-yoon could be that type. For all I knew, she was just an innocent woman who liked to tease.
But was the board really that bad? Listening to my editor Kang Ah-yoon, you'd think a riot had broken out.
Whatever the topic, once an internet community exists, the fighting never stops. That's just what communities are. A battlefield with keyboards instead of guns. I didn't think you should slap regulations or restrictions on a community. You don't need that kind of thing.
Another trickle into the glass.
Guys who only dig wells are all shady. The more closed-off a community gets, the more the people in it tend to rot the same way. A pile of internal rules makes people feel like they belong. Then come the memes only they know, the inside jokes, and eventually they start inventing slang.
I swallowed.
And that's the end of it. Frogs in a well, licking each other. Mostly the same type of person left, so there's no third party to point out when they're wrong. Without anyone to argue, a human being's field of vision can narrow to a tragic degree. A gathering of idiots who don't even realize something's wrong. A wretched little world of cliques. There's a reason they say an ignorant person with convictions is terrifying.
So instead of stacking well walls from the start, you tear that shit down and make it wide like a river. The dam is the Maginot Line. If the scale is big enough, purification still works even with regulations.
Which is why I didn't want to do regulations.
Trickle — ah. The bottle was empty. Crack another one, or not. That was the question. I was already nicely buzzed, so the mood was good.
One of the few upsides I'd gotten out of the body change. I could fill a decent buzz without drinking much. The mileage on this thing was ridiculous. Not sure I should be calling it mileage, but good was good. Way better than the old days, when I had to pour it down my throat just to get drunk.
Mm. Just one more bottle.
I pulled the soju from the fridge and checked the board that was supposedly a disaster.
This was the one. The moment I opened the board, it jumped out at me. Plenty of views and comments, and the upvotes were pathetic. Controversial posts tended to look like that. Watching someone else's house burn is fun — you just have to watch from a distance. If it's your own house on fire, that's just tragedy.
Let's see the contents.
The gist of the post was that chat had been full of trolls lately because a certain community had made my stream a target.
There are more kinds of communities than you can count. Individual games — even communities for games almost nobody plays. A community for trading information on streamers wasn't strange. And me getting mentioned there wasn't strange either.
When Jump's stream called me a hacker, I'd been mentioned in communities too. All kinds of slurs, people sexually harassing the customized character. They hauled that over to the Trisch boards back then as well. If a community that size is talking about you, you're already a proper named player.
Being mentioned in communities didn't really bother me. People in those places sell each other's mothers and fathers on the regular. Get a little famous and you can become a whore or a gigolo — that's how it goes. Humans wearing the mask of anonymity are just like that. As long as it didn't get under my skin and didn't mess with the stream, it was fine.
I scrolled down. I had no idea why my editor Kang Ah-yoon was fighting in the comments, but I decided to ignore it for now. Amid the mess, one unusually long comment caught my eye.
I read it and understood the point immediately.
Another trickle of soju.
The point was controversy.
Who doesn't have dirt if you shake them hard enough? Even if nothing comes out, this world can manufacture it. Making a chimney smoke is something even a neighborhood mutt can do. Chop a little firewood and light it. Whatever the trigger, if someone comes at you with malice, cooking up one or two things to feel guilty about is easy.
Don't give them an opening? Easy, and fucking stupid, advice.
Sure. In a community you can say anything. Bastard. Cow. Parentless mutt. Plenty of things you wouldn't say to someone's face. That's what this was. One comment.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
Let's drop the cool act.
This real piece of shit was running his mouth.
I'd been thinking this would burn itself out over time. Like a fire that goes out on its own once there's nothing left to burn. Attention dies if you don't feed it.
But this didn't look like a fire that would go out if I just sat and watched. And even if I wasn't adding wood, someone kept throwing logs on.
Like it or not, I needed to put it out. Better to face the controversy head-on than cobble together thin excuses.
For a streamer, wanting attention is inevitable. Viewer count is the measure of popularity, and it hits income directly. No guarantee this would end after one round, either. I clearly needed practice handling it.
There's that saying too. Don't mind the haters. In the end, they're still someone paying attention to you.
So maybe it was time to go live.
In the end, the only thing I knew how to do was charge straight through. The only solution that came to mind was refuting the controversy head-on.
More than that, I felt I needed the habit of streaming on a regular schedule. Regular streams. That was a rule you had to keep if you wanted to establish yourself as an independent streamer.
Most viewers are fluid. Catching people who hop from stream to stream with a single mouse click is no easy thing. But a regular schedule holds onto at least some of them. At first, just planting recognition is enough. A small impression: ah, this person always streams at this time. Once that channel opens, viewers start gathering one by one.
The eventual goal was to make it a habit. The moment the clock hits that hour, they naturally turn the stream on — a habit soaked into daily life.
Of course, just keeping a regular time doesn't draw a crowd. Obviously. How many more important factors are there in personal streaming. A streamer's content, charm, personality, talent... too many to list, and they all add up to one thing in the end: whether the stream is fun.
Time or whatever — people gather if it's fun and charming. Only after that does a regular schedule mean anything. If a fun stream repeats at a set time, you might even get viewers who wait just for that hour.
Of course, as always, there are exceptions. Streamers who don't do regular broadcasts at all, who just make viewers wait. People who stream so rarely that the days they don't go live outnumber the days they do. And yet fans exist who wait for them to turn the stream on.
How charming and fun do you have to be. An extremely rare type, but people who wait more and more even without streaming. At that point you start thinking the reduced stream count creates a kind of premium, like a luxury brand.
My stream didn't have a premium tag yet.
Right now, it was time to start rowing.