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Tim would consider himself a calm person. He had patience, and whilst he had a rather… hit or miss attention span, he kind of needed to be able to keep a level head with his career.
But right now, Tim wanted to punch his hand through his monitor. This stupid game had no right being so goddamn hard. He was meant to be good at this, for fuck’s sake. It was his job.
He groaned frustratedly and glanced at the scrolling chat on his second screen, the viewfinder on his webcam and the monitor with his stream up showing his own irritation clearly on his face. His Twitch chat was filled with various messages, but mostly the letters F and L being spammed. He rolled his eyes and adjusted his headset over his messy hair.
“I can do this, chat, shut up.” He muttered, leaning close to his mic. The game wasn’t anything special, some small and relatively underground puzzle game he’d heard good things about and gotten a few requests to play. It’d been going fine, until the goddamn sixteenth level.
He rolled his shoulders back, took a sip of water, and tried again, pushing his little tennis ball themed character across the screen. The whole game was sports themed, but all anime-ified. It was cute, he’d probably have more fun if it weren’t apparently the hardest game in existence. He was gonna be seeing cartoon sparkly tennis rackets in his dreams for weeks.
“Okay, so I just need to like… roll myself up the hill.” He said slowly, narrowing his eyes. “And then…” he pressed down on the S key, his character rolling – “Jump! –” he hit the space and A keys, and his character jumped up and rolled to the right and –
Just missed the platform. His stupid little anime girl character making a stressed face as she fell, the bright background and cheery music taunting his crushing defeat.
He took off his headset, and tossed it onto his desk, well aware he jostled the stupid camera, leaning back in his chair, one hand coming up to rub at his face. He could already tell what the chat would look like, and he could practically see the clips surfacing on TikTok and YouTube. “Red Robin LOSES HIS PATIENCE with ANIME SPORTS GAME!” plastered across every recommended page – ugh.
“I am…” he said, before remembering that no one could hear him. He leaned forward in his seat, and gently pulled his headset on back over his ears. “I am not having fun, chat.” He said, looking towards his second monitor. The chat was exclusively ‘L’, which he couldn’t help but smile at a little bit. Yeah, he’d take that.
“Should we take a break?” he asked, reaching over for his water bottle and taking a drink, after seeing a few “HYDRATE”s thrown in chat. “You know what, I’ll turn on mediashare.” He said, opening his stream settings, and changing the category to ‘Just Chatting’.
“Now, okay chat,” he said, typing quickly as he renamed the stream. He’d only been going for an hour or so, he wasn’t stopping now. He could normally go for about five hours before getting tired. “mediashare is where you can donate me some money, and I will see any video you send me, as long as my mods think it’s okay.” he explained. “We could do a try not to laugh challenge?”
Chat was suddenly filled with thousands of YES YES YES’s, and Tim, thankfully, closed the game.
The next forty minutes were filled with Tim trying, and succeeding, to not laugh at the variety of absurd videos his followers sent, some not even being memes, but funny regardless. Steph messaged him after one particular video of a monkey that made him laugh as he tried to take a drink, and he snorted it through his nose, and that only made him laugh more.
It didn’t help when the next clip was the infamous one of Steph playing her Hardcore Minecraft world, saying “I’m gonna just take a tiny risk, nothing bad–” and then falling and dying from a dramatic height, which made him launch back in his chair, absolutely deflating with laughter.
“Okay chat, what else have you got for me?” he asked, once he’d managed to reign in his wheezing, unable to control his giant smile, leaning back and clapping his hands, rubbing them together as he turned his grin evil. “I am undefeated.”
Chat was suddenly filled with “YOU JUST LAUGHED”, and he threw his hands up in the air in mock exasperation, staring down the webcam.
“You’re all so pedantic.” Tim said, dragging his chair forward. “Can’t even breathe without you all going ‘um, actually’,” he said light-heartedly, readjusting his mic. It was a little annoying sometimes, but he honestly didn’t mind chat correcting him so often. It proved useful before, and truly, they weren’t that bad.
Another video was sent in, and Tim leaned forward eagerly, expecting a meme or a clip from a music video – but instead he was greeted with a smiling face, round sunglasses, and a mop of curly black hair.
“Okay, so,” he’d clearly been sent a clip from the middle of the video, as the guy – who seemed to be around his age, tall, tanned, and wearing a faded Ramones t-shirt – was holding up a leather jacket, and a can of red spray-paint. “I’m thinking we actually dye the jacket red, and then paint the gold symbol on the back…” he said slowly, tossing the can in the air and catching it effortlessly. “See, the thing is, Red Robin has this really nice shade of gold for his logo–”
And that made Tim sit up straight in his chair. Was this guy painting his logo onto a jacket? He pulled the mic towards him, and whispered “Where’s this going, chat?”
“–and I wanna try and make it… I don’t know, shimmery?” the guy said with a shrug. “It’s gold, you can’t do nothing with it.” He said cheerfully, before the video cut to a frame of what seemed to be a piece of paper covered with sketches, before the time donated ended.
Tim blinked. “Wait, what? Hang on, chat, what was the name of that guy’s channel?” he asked, pulling up a new tab, and opening up YouTube. “Pause the mediashare,” he muttered into the mic. “sorry mods, I’ve got an agenda now.” He added, as he saw a few upset messages in chat.
He read the chat carefully, and typed in “Superboy Red Robin Jacket”, as the guy’s channel name was apparently, well, Superboy, the information generously provided by his chat.
The video was actually titled “DIY JACKET – MY FAVOURITE CONTENT CREATORS EDITION :D”, and the thumbnail was the guy – Superboy – holding up what appeared to be a jacket, but it was heavily pixelated and blurred.
“I will check that out at some point,” Tim told his stream, saving the video to his ‘watch later’ playlist. “I’m surprised no one sent that to me yet.” He confessed, running his eyes over the view count – just under three thousand, damn – running a hand through his hair.
There was a sudden high pitched anime girl voice, singing loudly into his ears. He jumped back, and hit the back of his chair, the whole thing toppling backwards, with him crashing to the floor, his headphone cable disconnecting from his PC and smacking him in the face.
He groaned, and just laid there on the floor, despite the smile growing on his face. He slowly pushed himself up onto his elbows, an sat cross-legged on the floor next to his chair.
“Chat.” He said, well aware he’d have to yell a little bit to be heard. “Chat, come on, jumpscaring me with that freaking theme song is not cool.” He added, readjusting his setup as he sat down again.
“Sorry chat, I was just so literally blown away by this guy.” He joked, snapping the headphones back on, and closing the YouTube tab. “I’m thinking a few more minutes of mediashare, and then maybe the Minecraft world, or ending. Depends on when my brother gets home with food.”
Eventually, Tim ended the stream, as Jason had eventually returned with food – sushi, specifically – and he really wanted to watch that video. It intrigued him, because there was definitely at least effort put into the thumbnail, and what he’d seen on stream had been decently shot and edited, no crackly audio or anything.
“How’d the stream go?” Jason asked, handing Tim his food, as Tim swivelled in his chair. “I got you a lollipop, by the way. They were giving some out for like a few cents.”
Tim took the lollipop from him and shrugged. “Stream was okay, did some mediashare, fell off my chair, it’s gonna be clipped twelve million times.”
“When are you not clipped twelve million times?” Jason asked, grinning as he began to walk out of the room. “At least you haven’t been cancelled… yet.” He added, before shutting the door behind him.
“Fuck off!” Tim called after him, twisting his chair around to face his PC again.
He leant forward in his seat as he chewed on a sushi roll and pulled up the video once again. Really, he should be cutting up and stitching together a stream he did a few days ago for YouTube, but this was more interesting. Did the rest of the video measure up?
As it turned out – it did. It really did.
The camera quality was amazing, it had to be expensive, especially for a guy with barely over a thousand subscribers – which was insane to Tim, with the amount of effort and quality this Superboy guy was putting in, he should’ve been blowing the hell up – the audio was a little unclear at times, but only in the few sections of the video that were outside, and even then, it wasn’t so bad.
The actual content of the video was interesting, too. Superboy – whose real name appeared to be Conner, as the girl behind the camera called him that a few times – had taken a plain, half ripped up leather jacket from a thrift store, and patched it up, dyed it bright red, and meticulously painted on several streamers and YouTubers’ logos. But Tim’s was easily the largest, taking up the entire back and some of the shoulders.
“How am I gonna include Spoiler’s logo?” the guy asked, looking vaguely distressed. “I wanna put it close to Red Robin’s, but she doesn’t even have a logo, it’s just like… a square of purple.”
“Conner, wasn’t your plan to write Spoiler in a fancy font? In purple?” the girl behind the camera asked, as Conner turned the jacket over in his hands. Tim watched, fascinated. How did he put all of that together without it looking so cluttered? Art was never Tim’s forte, so maybe this wasn’t actually that impressive, but Tim was entranced.
“Yeah, I could…” Conner frowned. “Oh! Cassie, what do you think about doing something on the sleeve! I could do a black square, and…” The camera bobbed up and down like it was nodding. “Nice, okay, let me get the fancy paints out.”
Tim found himself replaying the video, over and over again. He was completely mesmerized if he was honest. Something about the genuine enthusiasm in his smile and the care he put into painting the jacket, hell, even just how he was sat down making things outside in the sun, spray paint decorating the concrete. It was charming, it was cute, and Tim really, really wanted to say something.
He slowly selected the ‘leave a comment button’, and typed out, as the video repeated for the third time, “Hey man, absolutely love this!! It looks so cool, awesome work.”
It felt a little generic, but he couldn’t think of anything better. He hit post, paused, and then clicked the ‘like’ button. And then that still didn’t feel like enough.
He quickly grabbed his phone, and opened Twitter. He grabbed the link to the video, and quickly added a caption, something like “WOW, THIS IS SO COOL Y’ALL”. He could barely remember.
He quickly clicked on the Superboy channel name – and realised with a delight that he had several other videos. And it seemed the high quality was far from a recent development.
He opened the discord tab, and sent a link over to Steph, with the message “STEPH I AM IN LOVE”. She quickly responded with a little “:0” face, and a lot of exclamation marks, which was an accurate representation of how Tim himself felt about the video.
He opened up the playlist titled ‘ART CUSTOMS :D’, and promised himself he’d just watch a few, as it was getting late.
He barely looked away from his screen all night.