[2 of 3]

FalconWings commented: “At least it got you here, didn’t it. I’ll …” on I’m only here because you made…

The memory of the slight insult-slash-compliment-slash-reprimand came back to me the next day. I expanded the full comment, expecting to feed off her disgust and rage.

FalconWings: “At least it got you here, didn’t it. I’ll keep your delicate feelings in mind the next time I need to put myself out there. Or perhaps, since self-promotion is such a sin, you could go out there and be my representative.”

Me: “I’ll Pass.”

Post

“Why did I reply to that?” I thought. I could only assume that I had been compelled to reply out of pure instinct. It felt so natural to keep the thread going, even if I didn’t want it to.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had beaten me. Her reply to my comment was wittier than my original insult-slash-compliment-slash-reprimand. And all I had to say was “I’ll pass?”

I hovered my mouse over the “edit” button on the comment, considering adding something clever. But that would require effort. I moved on.

The Spectral Slammers thread was still going strong. I expanded the new comments to see what I had missed. It looked promising because there were multiple new comments, meaning someone new had probably joined the game.

Sniper4life: “Did you even see the what they did to the original movie. I’m not even mad that they replaced the whole cast. It just looks like complete garbage.”

Ra-Gamer (oh, boy. Here’s the new guy.): “+Sniper4life Are you seriously judging the movie based on the original? Talk about closed-minded. What kind of egotistical moron are you that you can’t let something new replace your precious classic. Maybe watch the movie and give it a chance.”

Sniper4life: “+Ra-Gamer Ive seen the movie, and it is just as bad as this review makes it out to be. Remakes are usually a bad thing. You can’t give me crap for that, it’s a solid fact.”

Hannathehorse1996 (another new player. This is so great.): “+Sniper4life you say that like it’s not about them being women, but I find it hard to believe that it’s not at least a part of it.”

The comment was approaching its melting point and would be deported to Twitter if someone didn’t save it. I opted to be the rational mind for a second.

Me: “+Sniper4life it’s not about the original movie. And it isn’t about the review either. that can be skewed and spun with bias. I think the movie looks decent and you just can’t accept the fact that someone can disagree with you. And you’re so caught up on the fact that it is a remake that you won’t give it a chance.”

Post

“So much for the voice of reason.”

I’d give sniper some more shit later. I went off to the home page of YouTube and looked through my subscription feed and killed about three hours watching videos and gorging my fat ass on junk food that will kill me before I’m thirty. I’m a responsible adult, and I do what I want.

After I was done with the new videos I subscribed to, I still felt like sitting down and doing nothing. So I went to the homepage and looked through the recommended videos, subconsciously asking to be taken on a spiral through the depths of YouTube.

Nothing good

Nothing good

Nothing good

I saw a familiar set of purple and black thumbnails. They were that gamer girl’s videos—FalconWings. I normally would have just closed the recommendation and moved on, but, for some unexplainable reason, I felt generous and decided to “help out” the newbie chick and watch her videos. I didn’t have anything better to do.

I stayed away from the Fifth Night’s Nightmare playthroughs this time. I really didn’t care about that game in the slightest. It turned out that she had also played Space Sailor Simulator, though, and I had been wondering if it was any good.

Click

Space Sailor Simulator #1 – FalconWings

“Oh. My. God. This game.”

Her voice came in immediately over the footage of a spaceship flying through space. I took a quick second to judge the quality of everything. The graphics on the game were decent enough. But I suspected she wasn’t using the highest quality recording techniques. I’d seen better.

“How can I say this?”

laugh that breaks all train of thought.

“This game is so boring! I’ve been playing for an hour and I feel like I’ve already seen the whole game. It’s supposed to be a game that can literally go on forever. Right? Shouldn’t it be, you know, fun?”

Breaks down laughing

I suddenly became aware of a pulling on my cheeks. My face muscles were contracting in a strange way that I had not anticipated. A smile? It was her laugh, honestly. She just had a funny laugh. And that can be contagious. Ok. It wasn’t because I thought the video was good.

Jump cut

She falls to her death while exploring a desert planet on foot

Complete-and-total-over-reaction to falling

Laughs

And her reactions were funny. I couldn’t believe myself. I actually chuckled when I saw her fall to her death and scream like a maniac. I had to check that it wasn’t already two in the morning when my standards usually fell this low.

I kept my eyes in the top left corner where she filmed herself with a webcam. I must admit, I judged her by her appearance. Yes. I was a scumbag and thought to myself, “This woman is very attractive based on outward appearance.” (Maybe not in those exact words.)

The video was around 10 minutes long. At the end, she stopped what she was doing and looked directly into the webcam.

“That’s all for now.”

Laughs

“Good lord. I can’t believe I’m going to actually keep playing this game. Why do I do this to myself?”

Exaggerated exasperation

“Stick around and subscribe. I’ll upload more of this crap tomorrow.”

Pause video

Scroll to comment section

Two comments

Jayson R: “Cool video. (String of heart emojis)”

RayDaTy: “Some people say it is boring, but I can fun if you give it time.”

I considered typing out a comment of my own. I was going to say what no one else had said yet: “If you don’t want to play it, then don’t. No one is holding their breath for your next installment.” But I guess I’d grown a conscience, because I didn’t do that. Not to mention, I knew she would respond—because small channels always respond—and I didn’t want to deal with that. She would know that I came back, and I would be proven even more wrong about her self-promotion. Also, it was genuinely mean once I thought about it.

My mouse pointer aimlessly wandered over to the recommended sidebar where I saw the sequel video was waiting for me. It turned out to have been one of her oldest playthroughs, and she had completed the game long before I discovered her videos.

Purposeful click

Twenty episodes and two hours later I was still watching FalconWings play Space Sailor Simulator. She never became less funny. Her quality never dropped. And, even though it was all technically the same thing over and over again, it never got old. On the last playthrough she kept complaining over and over, using metaphors like “This game has all the fun of trying to dig every grain of sand out of the beach and hoping to find the pirate’s treasure without a map” And at the very end of the ten-minute block, she broke down and finally decided to stop for good.

“Please. No more. No more sailing through space. No more empty planets. No more falling to my death. I have been playing for so long. I don’t even know how long. 16 hours. That’s how long. I’m done. I quit. Get out of here.”

Screen cuts to black

30 seconds left in the video

FalconWings shows up on the screen with links to other videos floating next to her

“Thanks for watching through all that nonsense. If you had a better experience with the game, then feel free to let me know in the comments. If you’re new, then remember to subscribe. And if you have nothing better to do, then follow me on twitter. Ok. Bye.”

Video ends

After more than two hours with her voice constantly screaming in my ears while I watched her die over and over in a game I will never play for myself, I felt obligated to do as she asked. I smacked the subscribe button and scrolled down to the comments section.

I clicked on another one of FalconWings’s videos, but I was getting tired of sitting around and doing nothing. (Yes. That does happen occasionally.) I didn’t pay attention, and it wasn’t as funny.

When that was over, she restated her desire for everyone to subscribe and follow her on Twitter. I was so sick of looking at YouTube that I didn’t hesitate, and I went to Twitter and typed in her username.

764 tweets

Following 1,451

Followers 77

She and I might as well be from different countries if she spent that much time on Twitter. I stocked her feed. It was nonsense. I guess she live tweeted or something because nothing had context. Regardless, I was resolved to show my support to her and her channel on YouTube. Even though I knew I would never actually read her tweets.

Follow

Twitter: “Log on to twitter. Don’t have an account? Sign up.”

I plugged in my email address: [email protected] And then typed in the password I remembered using.

Twitter: “The email and password you entered did not match our records. Please double-check and try again.”

It had been a while.

Twitter: “The email and password you entered did not match our records. Please double-check and try again.”

Ok. It had been a really long while.

And that’s when I remembered that I had deleted my Twitter account. I think they kept emailing me about recent activity or something and I over reacted. Like burning the house because you see a spider.

Well, I wasn’t going to create a new account just so I could follow FalconWings and make her numbers go up, was I?

No. So I clicked away, went to Reddit, refreshed the page, and went about my business of fishing for good memes.

The waters were quiet that day, yet I still managed to spend an entire hour reading every poorly-captioned photo on r/funny and r/Memes, watching every mildly-amusing .gif on r/gifs, and looking at cute animals on r/aww. It became a compulsion after a while. I never expected the next post to be any better than the last, but I still opened it or at least read the title.

By the time I realized I could find something better to do, it was dark out. I told my computer to go to sleep, and I went off to do the same.

I lifted my blanket and crawled under it, wrapping myself in its fluffy (yet slightly smelly) comfort. Rolling on my back I opened my eyes wide and looked at the darkness above me. But, in that darkness, I could see FalconWings’s face—her long, bleached hair, the dark makeup around her eyes, the smooth pink lip-gloss shimmering in dim light as her mouth moved.

I closed my eyes again and tried to hold onto the image, romanticizing it, cleaning up the grainy webcam photo with my mind, and imagining her entire body rather than just her head and shoulders. She was beautiful.

Her voice filled my head. She wasn’t saying anything in particular, but I could hear her voice mumbling random words. I heard her laughing, and screaming, and complaining.

I remembered what she had said to me in the comments at the beginning of the day. That “argument” that she “won.” I could hear her voice saying those words: “I’ll keep your delicate feelings in mind next time.” They fit her sassy tone of voice. But then I remembered what that conversation was about.

“How did my opinion of her change so quickly?” I muttered to myself with my face pressed into my pillow.

I tried to shut her out of my mind and go to sleep. This was a person I would literally never meet in real life. My mind was making something out of nothing. There was no point in thinking about her. There was a point to sleeping, though.