
Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat - stevelosh
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2015/11/happy-little-words/
======
lemevi
As a participant, the chat was fun actually. Usually chat can be super toxic
or even useless at the speed at which it was happening on Bob Ross. The RUINED
and SAVED meme was interesting and enjoyable. I don't know why it was such
fun, but it felt like a great and huge temporary community considerably
limited in their ability to interact. One could really only join in the mob at
the right time and when I did so it felt pretty rewarding and fun.

~~~
seccess
I think my favorite meme was "blue OP plz nerf" whenever Bob mentioned he was
using more crimson than blue, because blue was much stronger. I thought that
was an interesting mix of gaming and art culture.

~~~
stevelosh
Similarly "VAC" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-
Cheat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat) whenever he does
something seemingly impossible (like knowing about the stream or doing a
particularly impressive save).

------
cjhveal
I really enjoy Steve Losh's blog. I found his post[0] on returning to Vim
during a formative part of my own career, and it really influenced my adoption
of vim. He's got a great guide[1] on getting mutt set up on OS X for command-
line email. And the minimalistic design suits my personal aesthetic. He wrote
a post[2] on the design of it, like using the ratios of the dominant 7th
chord, implementation of print accessibility/context headers, and even credits
his inspirations.

[0]: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-
vim/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/)

[1]: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-
mutt/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/)

[2]: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-
sing/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/)

~~~
zhodge
Thank you for the mutt reference. I've been meaning to overhaul my email
configuration and this seems like a great place to start.

I too am fond of both the content and design of Steve's blog. He chooses to
write about really interesting topics I find. Love the git koans :)

------
Fiahil
I stumbled upon the channel by mistake once. What I found to be really
interesting was the reactions flooding in the chat. You could, for example,
like the author said, see 'gg' appearing in mass at the end of a painting, but
not only! There was a beautiful moment where Bob decided to use a large brush
and applied brown in a vertical band on the left side of an almost completed
canvas ; you could instantly see the 'RUINED' and crying emoticons spawning in
the chat. Then, he went on reassuring the audience and starting to add
details, so the large band was gently becoming a tree ; he made a very kind
comment and this instantly triggered a wave of hearts emoticons.

It was very strange to witness the involvement of thousands of people through
the chat of an online streaming platform, and I think it was a lot like
watching a pet asking for food. Or something like that.

------
Dirlewanger
Absolutely titilating work.

Off-topic: Never heard of you before, but you paint yourself as quite the
polyglot for someone your age, I'm a bit dumbfounded and frankly a little
upset at myself for not even coming close to what you've produced/created.
What's your secret(s) to being so productive?

~~~
codyb
There's a lot of hours in the day and a lot of years to life. Steve does seem
very accomplished, that's quite a blog and set of projects he's got going on
there.

If you just set out to accomplish things though, you'll be surprised at how
much you can complete,

Also exercise (he does it through dancing it seems), you get a lot of energy
from that.

He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland.
That's super healthy. And he's clearly exercising all the areas of his brain
by playing music, writing, engineering, and dancing.

Probably doesn't spend _too_ much time reading the news (it's easy to get lost
in the rabbit hole that is reddit or hackernews sometimes), probably doesn't
spend _too_ much time binge watching things, _probably_ doesn't party _too_
hard _too_ often. That's very different from assuming he never does any of
those activities, it's probably just not his de facto constant.

So I guess, and this is just an educated guess based on what I can see from
him and my own personal experiences, my recommendation to you (and you didn't
ask for my advice I know!) would be to limit the amount of time you spend
doing things which are easy (reddit, hackernews, reading the news, watching
TV), make sure to exercise, make sure to do something creative, and set
singular goals for yourself (This week I want to write a blog post, my next
goal is to develop a small program to do X). Finally, as you grow and continue
to develop healthier habits it gets easier and easier to continue.

So if you spend one week making sure to work towards your current singular
goal, you're more likely to do so the next week.

Also, starting is always the hardest part. Sometimes it's as simple as just
opening the computer, closing the browser, and starting to futz around with
some code. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes for me and then I'm in there
like swim wear! And I can keep going for quite some time. But starting is
always a bit arduous.

Anyways, this is a bit winding but that's my opinion on your question.

~~~
stevelosh
> He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland.

Not quite, unfortunately. I just moved here a couple of months ago (I'm from
the US). I am taking Icelandic classes though, and I do speak a bit of
American Sign Language from my undergrad time at RIT. So I'm working on it.

Also yeah, getting the hell off of reddit/facebook/hn is extremely important.
Sometimes HN is good for finding interesting reading (I hit hckrnews.com once
or twice a day to find good links) but always remember the golden rule of the
internet:
[http://shouldireadthecomments.com](http://shouldireadthecomments.com)

~~~
Coding_Cat
I don't have twitter, so I'll just leave this here: perhaps it'd be fun to
graph the time delay between RUINED and SAVED?

>but always remember the golden rule of the internet:
[http://shouldireadthecomments.com](http://shouldireadthecomments.com)

Rather ironic you should post that here :).

------
degenerate
Semi-related curiosity question: When viewing twitch chat as a logged-out
user, if someone enters a banned word, it shows me " _< message deleted>_."
However when there are dozens of messages per second like the bob ross chat,
the message deleting seems delayed, because you can sometimes catch a glimpse
of the bad words before they are "removed". I assume the removal is done with
javascript? Are you seeing the non-censored version of the chat when scraping?

~~~
kencausey
I believe the message removal is done by a moderator. This may be a human
being or a bot. In either case the message has to appear in the chat before
either party can decide whether to leave or remove it.

~~~
philipov
It's a bot. It's called XanBot [0]

Twitch's chat protocol is compatible with IRC, but IRC doesn't support all new
features, so things like replacing banned words with <Message Deleted> won't
show up.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_guide_on_howto_configure_and_operate/)

------
abra0
BTW, is there any way to get the chat archive from the original marathon? Is
it saved at all somewhere? rechat.org does a similar thing, but its retention
period is only one week.

~~~
stevelosh
Not as far as I know. Let me know if you do find it -- I'm kicking myself for
not thinking of scraping it then.

------
jaflo
Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and
terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs
really are for data analysis.

~~~
minimaxir
Using terminal commands (w/ "lots of piping") for reproducable analysis that
you intend to show to others is not recommended. More importantly, it
increases the chance of _making a mistake._

There's nothing wrong with GUIs for statistical analysis.

~~~
genericpseudo
I disagree, sort of, a little bit.

If I'm writing a shell pipeline for data analysis, I rewrite it as a Makefile.
Make is a great tool for this sort of thing.

(Use whatever works as long as it's a single command to reproducibly rerun an
analysis.)

------
Ocerge
This looks like it was so much fun to do. One of these days I hope inspiration
strikes me out of thin air to do something similar.

------
axyjo
OP: possible typo? from 2015-11-16 14:30 to 2015-11-16 14:30 (all times are in
UTC)

~~~
stevelosh
Yep I'm bad at copy/paste. Fixed, thanks.

------
n3l50
gold

