#it's difficult to recommend jerma because I can't articulate why I like him

[some-triangles]

ALSO

WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES 2017

God bless Jerma, Lauren the Flute, and Woolie for keepin’ me sane this year

If you don’t know Jerma he’s a tiny jacked man from Massachusetts who became popular both by playing Team Fortress 2 and by essentially being Scout from Team Fortress 2.   TF2 is no longer a going concern but he’s still streaming and the thing about him that makes him a comfort and a blessing (besides his love of pro wrestling) is his way with bits - there is no bit so stupid that he won’t commit to it, no joke so tired that he can’t squeeze out a few more chuckles.  His sense of humor is simultaneously bewildering, familiar, and super inclusive; he feels like he would have been right at home as a clown presenting a local saturday morning kids’ show on UHF in the 80s, and also as an edgy insult comic from the 90s, and also as the most unacceptable Vaudeville song and dance man who ever got booed off a Boston stage, and also as a person who became famous for playing video games on the internet. 

Lauren was probably born wearing a white mage robe.  She is the archetypal Nerd Caregiver, thoroughly wholesome, but with a hard edge to her philosophy and politics which keeps the effect on the right side of twee.  She’s also the person you want to play a game you care about, because she pays attention, catches details, thinks through implications, and (almost to a fault) makes sure she doesn’t miss a thing.   She has a talent for taking thematic elements from whatever she’s playing and spinning them into autobiographical tangents, which is charming on its own merits (she’s a good storyteller) but also sometimes illuminates the game in surprising ways - during her NITW playthrough she got into a discussion about being afraid of her own capacity to hurt people which was moving and personally relevant but also added to my own reading of the text.   

You know why I got into Best Friends Play this year is I got sick of Arin Hanson syndrome, i.e. the part where you say “it’s OK that you don’t understand basic human facts, internet funnyman, you are just here for my entertainment and it’s fine that your grasp of the world around you is precarious at best” - and the thing about Matt and Woolie is that they know a lot about their pet subjects and pretty much stick to those subjects at all times. (It helps, again, that these subjects include pro wrestling.)  They’re also low-key some of the best readers of dialogue around, because they care more about getting the tone right than about doing silly voices.  (Woolie is my canon Mae and Matt is my canon Bea.  I don’t know how that happened.)   These are dudes who care about the way things are put together - about craft - more than about the subjective experience, and that’s just nice sometimes, plus I’m now kind of a hostage to Woolie’s diction, and experience an instinctive pleasure response every time he needlessly emphasizes the wrong word in a sentence.   

It also helps that they’re around my age.  As is Lauren, come to think of it.  And Jerma.   We share cultural touchstones.  There would be a pleasing symmetry to this if Lauren was also into pro wrestling, but you can’t have everything.