The Accident
How did this all start? Well we should go back to the very beginning. Not as far as spending every waking hour of summer break on City of Heroes, the MMO of the early 2000s. As a young child I used gaming to cope with growing up feeling very lonely. But back to 2015 when I was in a life changing car accident. June 16, 2015 my friend drove his car into a pole and I shattered my L4-L5 vertebrae. Chunks of it were sent into my spinal cord. I suffered a spinal cord injury. I was permanently partially paralyzed below the waist at the age of 22.
ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/armdale-rotary-crash-sends-3-101625033.html
Since I was an incredibly social young adult at this time, I was very busy. I spent most of my free time out with friends, partying, riding my bike around Halifax. I even started running for fun. When I wasn’t out of the house I was spending my free time playing computer games with friends online. A rekindled love for gaming I found after moving to Halifax permanently. I fell out of touch from gaming when I left home at 19, because I was travelling Canada and had no access to it.
Once I “settled down” in Halifax my dad mailed me a computer. I downloaded this game all my friends were playing, League of Legends. Suddenly I was in the hospital for 2 months straight with a spinal cord injury. There was nothing to do but watch Netflix. I craved my old life. I learned how to use my new body, was forced to walk 1 week after I broke my back. I was in tremendous pain but all I wanted to do was play League.
Spinal Cord Injury and The Hospital
I was the youngest person in the rehabilitation ward at the time by a long stretch. My roommate was a much older woman and all the other patients were old people with brain injuries. I didn’t meet anyone else with a spinal cord injury. If not for daily visits from friends and my mom I wouldn’t have had much inspiration to get out of there as fast as possible. I yearned for the outside world and started asking them when I could go home after 1 month of lockup.
The doctors seemed very hopeful because of my positive attitude. They agreed they would let me pilot a new program where I could go home daily. I slept at my own home but came back to the hospital the next day at 8am to run tests, do physical therapy and be monitored. That went well considering I had daily help. My friends and roommates helped me in and out of the house.
The first day home we had a LAN party in the living room and I finally got to play League. I was bronze 1 at the time and I was dreaming in the hospital of making it to silver. Sitting at home playing League became my life at this point. My house was completely inaccessible by wheelchair so I was pretty much stuck inside at all times except to leave for medical appointments. Going from raving every week to not being able to leave the house was a huge change for me. I needed to charge my social battery, this is where streaming came into play.
Streaming on Twitch
I had been watching Twitch religiously every night before my spinal cord injury. I would fall asleep every night to Trick2G screaming into his mic, winning battle royales on H1Z1 or opening d gates on Udyr in League. It was nourishing to my soul to listen to this guy having so much fun gaming while living his best life on his house boat. I had only started watching Twitch in 2013 but it was my sole source of media entertainment. I had lots of experience in streaming already.
Before the accident I was a webcam model on a camgirl site, so OBS was already installed on my computer. The switch to streaming on Twitch was seamless to me. So I sat in my room for a year streaming League of Legends and a classic World of Warcraft private server called Nostalrius. I built up a small viewer base. I ended up getting silver.
heyheykoolaid
I streamed like this for a few years. I dealt with the reality that my body was fucked up beyond semblance of the life I lived before. In my free time I was posting on instagram to try and meet other young people that had suffered spinal cord injuries. I made some youtube videos about my SCI experience. But I never tried to really grow as a streamer; I just streamed. In 2018 I joined a local Facebook streamer group called NS Streamers where I met heyheykoolaid. He was also a streamer, but he lived in Antigonish.
We hit it off as buddies and he invited me to play Archeage, a game I never heard of, on a private server. Archeage is a niche Korean MMO that launched in 2014. I liked it because it was a cool MMO. I got really into it, and my stream finally started popping off (to a small streamer 10 concurrent viewers is a lot). We ended up talking a lot over messenger and became good pals over the years. In 2021, I convinced him to come move in with Lium and I and be a real streaming family.
Birth of BOOFSWORLD
The Archeage Arc never lasts long, so I ended up variety streaming this and that over the years. I have a total of 199 different games streamed on Twitch and over 4000 clocked hours since they started recording data in 2018. I really shined on Archeage, Just Chatting / IRL streams, and creative Makers & Crafting streams. Though being the top 2% of Twitch creators, I never popped off like I wanted. I averaged 10 viewers at the end and 20-30 subs. Considering I was putting in 40 hr workweeks for years and only making $50-100 a month, I quit.
During December of 2023, I decided to quit streaming on Twitch because I realized I was barely getting organic viewers from their platform. I found most of my viewers in other communities, were other streamers I searched for, or were friends of friends. I was dedicating all this time to a company that didn’t give a fuck about helping me, and took 50% of my revenue anyway while blasting my viewers with ads that I could not stop. Koolaid and I decided to just make our own damn website with our own community.
We launched BOOFSWORLD Feb 3, 2024 and have been working ever since. We have developped our skills in website building, SEO, and putting out content. Our goal for BOOFSWORLD is a streaming platform for the Boof Gang, a storefront, and a blog.
Thank you to all that have been a part of Boof Gang. Thanks for following, contributing and enjoying all that we put out. ♡
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