The LOONAHTIQ Stream began at the tale end of 2020 out of total necessity. My mental health was at an all-time low, and my wife who has 3 different auto-immune diseases, was going through her own anxieties. This is when streaming became a part of my isolated life. I needed the distraction, and there was much to read, learn, and build…

I’ve always believed that if you plan to fail or go into something with low to no expectations, everything will surprise you. Well, I went into it with just that mindset. I read that streaming on Twitch was so saturated at this point in my entrance to the world of streaming, that to think you could achieve Affiliate would be a fool’s errand. Without really knowing a soul through and through, I achieved it in less than three months playing Gears of War 5. I was already following streamers with many more followers and many more months of streaming than I had, and they had yet achieved Affiliate Status.

Here’s the biggest thing I learned from streaming and it’s that

streaming is also (like anything else) a business, whether you do it for fun, therapy, or career choice; it’s a business because we measure our success, first by the number of followers, then by the number of followers who show up to each stream, then by the consistency in which they follow in order to become Affiliated, and then by the number of those same followers who subscribe. Before you know it, we’re on our journey to becoming partner, and that’s alright as long as you don’t lose yourself in the process. As Al Pacino said in Scent of a Woman when describing an Amputated Spirit; “There’s no prosthetic for that.”