He had a strong conviction about never taking charity while he was alive, I don’t know the family’s position on this but this seems pretty disrespectful.
4 Likes
I agree it seems odd, especially after his statement on his official reddit -
We’ve had A LOT of questions about donations, how people can help etc. That’s always humbling to see. Some suggested a GofundMe. I’m not comfortable with taking donations when I’m still able to work and have income from several different sources. I dont begrudge anyone for using donations as a form of income, its just always seemed inappropriate for us when we have several other ways to making money that result in both parties getting something. If you would like to help, do the things you’ve always done. Watch our videos without adblock or with Youtube Red (yes Red helps, a lot, much more than watching an ad).
Edit - Seems legit though…
5 Likes
I mean what else is she going to say? No thanks please don’t give me $200k? At least it seems like this David is someone she knows and not a complete random nobody. Though it seems in recent years there’s been a rush to set up a gofundme page for anyone who’ve died while moderately famous or having run into any sort of hardship.
I guess the question about whether charity is good even if it’s only done to pat yourself on the back or not applies.
7 Likes
Is there any question about whether charity is good or not? How could helping one who is in need not be good ever? (I perfectly understand there are some cases where it does more harm than good.) If a person has nothing to feed himself with although he’s done all he can, or he’s in a wheel chair for example or paralyzed from the neck down, would it not be a good thing then to provide for him if he has no one who does so?
And then there’s the fact that charity can eventually do way more good for the one who actually gave it, though that entirely depends on that person’s intention while giving it.
4 Likes
Well that is a very complicated question. Though it has mostly been raised in regards to social media twerps going around filming themselves giving stuff to homeless people. It looks kind of like a shitty thing to do, but on the other hand some homeless dude got a hamburger out of it. He didn’t necessarily ask for a hamburger though and he certainly didn’t ask to be filmed and put on the internet.
There are cases where charity has caused great harm too. Practical example of great charity drives where EU/US donated huge amounts of clothes to Africa in the 90s which completely annihilated one of the only strong industries the continent had, the clothing and textile industry, which has never recovered. This is why today charity shops that take donated clothes sell those clothes back to us for money which is then used for charity stuff.
Then there’s of course the question of integrity. As I mentioned TB himself was vocal and consistent about never taking donations. He wanted to run a business, he wanted to provide a service and products for the public to use and purchase. Even as he suffered this cancer he stayed adamant that he was not going to take charity. He ran several charity projects for things he believed in, but never for himself.
It just seems to me that if you wanted to do a charitable thing in the memory of John Bain then doing a drive for Able Gamers or Charity: water, two projects he supported himself, would have been a gesture he would have preferred.
6 Likes
That question is no longer an issue, and he certainly deserves respect for those decisions he made, no doubt about that.
I personally imagine that this has been done with his wife’s permission and in the interest of his son, and I can’t see any wrong in that, and his wife will be at liberty to use that money for other causes he believed in if she wants to do so, so it could be that both objectives are satisfied.
(And if it wasn’t with her permission then there’s nothing preventing her from refusing this money anyway, and she certainly wouldn’t be the first person to do so either.)
[It was very nice of the EU/US to donate huge amounts of clothes, now let’s hope one day they will also donate all the people, diamonds, silver, gold, oil, and whatever else they stole from Africa in the first place (and had they not done so, then maybe it would have been Africa who would have sent them clothes, rofl), or maybe they could at least just leave those countries try to run and manage their countries and natural riches themselves.] [and y, i know i’m the one bringing this up, but let’s not make this thread about that, so i do apologize, but i do feel it could be necessary to bring it up]
2 Likes
TB was the one who got me here and who I supported here on Chrono. May he Rest in Peace.
8 Likes
Alright, it took a while to really collect my thoughts on this one. It was just a few weeks ago that I was writing a short textwall about his announcement about retiring WTF is _______ content in his usual tone, and this whole thing caught me completely off-guard. So, without further ado… I suppose I should pay my respects, even if only via a simple textwall.
F
Ironically, what I remember most about TB was how he introduced me to Spiders RPGs. I’d been offered Bound by Flame a long time before, and while I liked what I saw on the Store page, I had been deterred by the reviews panning the game for its combat and general Spiders jank.
It was when I saw his video on The Technomancer that I actually liked what I saw. I felt like TB was missing something in the video, similar to how AngryJoe has destroyed every Piranha Bytes RPG over his own mistakes rather than actual flaws in their games (which were quite severe ones, by the way). Respectfully disagreeing with TB, I picked it up on an 80% off sale and played an hour. I ended up enjoying it so much that I quit so I could buy and play Mars: War Logs first, then finally bought and played Bound by Flame before finally picking back up with The Technomancer. Despite its jank, I really enjoyed my time with it.
I suppose that really describes my thoughts on TB as a YouTuber. I’ve disagreed with him plenty of times, even criticized him heavily over some things I considered petty or dangerous. At the end of the day, he’s still basically the trailblazer of game reviewers on YouTube and probably one of the main reasons why “critics” on YouTube can be taken seriously instead of being thrown aside for the main outlets. He gave a voice to a completely new platform where someone like TheRussianBadger can basically come out of nowhere and become one of the most relevant YouTubers around, and have a voice almost as loud as all of IGN or Gamespot combined. He’s the reason I can tune into someone like TehSnakerer, kick back, and forget that RPS and Eurogamer ever existed.
That’s not even getting into the fact that he is, after all, the reason why I’m here. He introduced me to Chrono as I was already interested in RedOut. I’m usually very suspicious of online retailers, especially in the wake of G2A and other fraudulent sites, so I would have just been a little suspect and walked away had he not talked about them.
I just find it extremely hard to be mad because of one joke, a few crappy remarks about American politics, or a few insults here and there considering how much good he did across a long period of time. With an audience that large, any slip-up you make will be put on a pedestal, so the fact that his reputation went relatively untarnished speaks for itself. That’s not even getting into the fact that he’s been going through God-knows-what in chemotherapy for a long while, and the fact that he stayed as professional as he did literally until the end is quite an achievement. I may not have always agreed with TB, but I respect him a great deal for all the good he did.
Phew, that was a textwall and a half. Rest in pepperoni, mi paisano.
6 Likes
There’s no “apparently” in it judging by those screencaps. He outright revelled in it. To celebrate anyone’s death, no matter the differences you might have, is a terrible indictment of character. Crooks seems like a terrible human being, with a large chip on his shoulder.
6 Likes
He contributed quite a bit to PC gaming as a whole over the years. RIP dude.
@User123698745 Geez that’s just not cool. I can understand him not liking TB (I didn’t either in his later years) but to celebrate someones death is just evil
4 Likes
I would rather we didn’t make this thread about hatred, or about giving attention to some jackass, let’s just honor tb, show our respect for him and ignore the morons.
12 Likes
6 Likes
@User123698745 Funny thing is, that vile hack only proved what a paragon TB could be at times. That guy had it easy.
I have a lot of disagreements with TB, especially towards the end, but arguably the two videos there dealing with BioWare [as well as the one he conveniently “forgot” to mention] are some of his best.
NFS Rivals: TB trying his best to find anything good to say about a terrible PC port. I’ve played this one myself, by the way. It’s the first time I’ve played a racing game where I could ever break the game simply by going fast. I managed to slam into an invisible wall because a long stretch of track didn’t load in time-- the road model was missing, and I slammed into the dirt road as if it was a wall. This caused me to lose about 40 seconds on my time while the engine tried to figure out what the hell just happened. That and all the issues TB talked about made this PC port completely irredeemable-- and no, patches didn’t make it better. I played it in 2017.
An entirely justified response to one absolutely TERRIBLE move for EA’s PR. While Javik turned out to be relatively minor as a character, his implications were still serious. He also impacts Liara greatly-- there’s a great arc in Mass Effect 3 with Liara’s reaction to finally meeting a real Prothean, after a lifetime of archeological studies trying to learn about this ancient race. Not only that, but TB wasn’t kidding about his boycott-- at the time that he made his WTF is… video for Mass Effect Andromeda, he still hadn’t played it. That’s some serious principle.
One he didn’t mention, I suppose because he conveniently forgot:
TB's surprisingly extensive coverage of Mass Effect: Andromeda (YT links)
Livestreams
Mass Effect Andromeda or, some claim, the bubonic plague. - YouTube
TB plays: Mass Effect Andromeda feat. Force - YouTube
TB Plays: Mass Effect Andromeda - YouTube
WTF is…
WTF Is... - Mass Effect: Andromeda (Single Player) ? - YouTube
WTF Is... - Mass Effect: Andromeda (Multiplayer) ? - YouTube
Standing basically on its own, TB ignored the CrowbCat videos and every meme on the internet to give the game a fair chance. He actually gave a very compelling overview of the game that more or less lines up with my own opinions: it looks beautiful and improves the combat in every way, but there are some HUGE caveats. This was perhaps the most lenient and forgiving review on the internet I’ve seen of the game, so…
Yeah, way to go, you worthless hack. I hope you enjoy the fact that your two seconds of fame came from shitting on a reviewer that accomplished a great deal even with his life cut short, rather than the shit you worked on. Unbelievable.
If anything, any questions I had about TB’s standing as a critic has only been reaffirmed as idiots come out of the woodwork to embarrass themselves. I’ve looked back a few times, and regardless of what he said, or how wrong I believed he was, there’s a very specific thing that TB has consistently done. Under the cynicism, the persona, and the informal attitude, TB has always had one key to his success: REASON. He’s always dropped his reasons behind his criticisms, and he’ll reveal exactly how he comes to his conclusions. He was exactly the kind of person you could have fun arguing with, and no matter what you thought about his political views or whatever nonsense post you might have gotten angry about, the world definitely isn’t the same without him. This is coming from someone who wasn’t even subscribed to him at the end-- I lost interest in his content after a while, and I certainly didn’t like some of the things he said online, but that doesn’t devalue anything about him as a person, or in any way change all the good he’s done.
Just a little post edit. I just remembered this video again, where TB tears into a lot of the port problems of The Darkness 2 as well as the responses that DE staff gave on the status of the PC port.
Digital Extremes handled this quite well, and by the way, Warframe has years’ worth of options menu updates from FoV to dynamic resolution. Don’t be a hack. Be like DE.
I’ll definitely miss that occasional video in my recommendations, the moment when a large cluster of angry whining occurred over an internet issue and TB just jumped right in to set the record straight to the best of his ability.
TL;DR: In hindsight, TB left behind a great legacy, also this:
Of course it was politically motivated… I have no words. THAT? THAT’S WHY YOU’RE UPSET?
6 Likes
Perhaps? Is not so much of a saying, is more like a reminder or suggestion that if you can’t come with something else than just an insult, it’d be better to not make the comment at all since you wouldn’t be adding anything to the conversation in any way, it says good, not nice after all.
6 Likes
live atm
11 Likes
This really took me back to when I was looking after my dad (he had a bone marrow transplant for myelodysplastic syndrome in 2016, we spent seven months living together across the road from the hospital).
My dad did extremely well but there were three other people we got to know well and they all passed. Most memorable was one fellow who was due to go home the next day and went to bed not felling too well and woke with a fever the next day, he went in to hospital and went down hill from there. His parents were the ones caring for him and his father came to update us on how he was doing and told us that the doctors expected him to pass in the night, he talked a little longer, despondent at the thought of burying his child and I mostly sat there silent, no idea what to begin to say. Once he left I rushed up to my dad, needing a hug and the both of us began crying, we stood for I don’t know how long just hugging while he tried to comfort me and remind me that this was always a possibility and I said that in no way prepares you for it actually happening. That man was about TB’s age with four young children, my dad still speaks to his parents and every now and again he pops into my head.
I told dad a little about TB and his situation, I do have 2 shirts and a hoodie from TB’s collection, I think I was wearing one when I first talked about him though I’m pretty sure my dad doesn’t believe that YouTuber is a job title. TB’s reach was far and wide, even extending to people who have never seen his stuff, I’m gonna miss you TB, thanks for everything.
8 Likes
I don’t know why I didn’t say anything about this… that was a great stream. For those who were unable to tune in, it was mostly focused around a memorial for TB with Jesse and Dodger, as well as Genna herself in TotalBiscuit’s normal place; the guest-seat on the stream was left as a small image commemorating TB. I was really surprised to see how well Genna was taking everything, and on a side note, I’m interested in seeing how she continues the TotalBiscuit/TotalHalibut channel from here on.
You never really know what you’re missing until it’s gone, unfortunately. I wasn’t really following TB at the time that his medical situation went completely downhill, and looking back, it’s hard not to respect the humility he had to the end. He didn’t play anything up for pity, or ever try to use his position as mere leverage, even for very justifiable and understandable reasons… he underplayed everything and very much kept acting on the platform that people subscribed for to begin with.
He set a very high bar for content creators in general, and much farther than a few assorted gaming channels on YouTube. I hope that other CC’s will be able to learn a great deal from the example he set forward, establishing a strong foundation on his precedent actions and learning from his mistakes.
9 Likes
I can’t wait to watch this on YouTube. I had just seen harith’s post right before I had to leave for work. I clicked on the video just to get a glimpse for a few seconds and Genna was smiling.
3 Likes
I’ll just leave this here in case anyone’s missed it:
For those who want more TB stories Dodger’s stream had some sweet/sad moments:
Twitch or Saturday Morning Dooger (May 26, 2018) - YouTube
8 Likes
Just saw this comment in Chrono’s code :’>
7 Likes