Play It Again

by Aidan Wayne

  Dovid yawned, surprised he felt so tired, and then thought to check the time.

  It was one in the morning. When did that happen?

  And had he really just binge-listened to six hours’ worth of Sam’s let’s plays?

  Yes... Yes, he had. And he’d thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Rachel had been right on two counts. One, Sam was absolutely adorable, no questions about it. His voice was wonderful to listen to, but what he said was equally as nice. Two, Dovid liked him. A lot.

  Damn it, Rachel was going to be insufferable about this. But Dovid also couldn’t bring himself to care. In part because he was so tired, but also because he was absolutely going to watch more of Sam’s channel when he was more awake again.

  But why the fuck did he only have like four hundred followers? What the hell was up with that? Sam was great. It was a fucking crime that the rest of YouTube didn’t know about him.

  But maybe Dovid could have a hand in changing that.

  Chapter Three

  “Hey, guys! This is Don’t Look Now with Dovid and Rachel. I’m Dovid, Rachel’s behind the camera, and today I wanted to talk to you about a YouTuber that I’ve discovered. Well, Rachel discovered him, fell in love with him—”

  “I did not, tell them the truth. From the beginning!”

  “Guys, if I had eyes, I’d be rolling them right now. But fine, fine. Okay, so you know how I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Rachel had gotten totally obsessed with this game Dire Straits? Of course, you do, but if you don’t, the link is right here.” He pointed to what would be the top right of a video screen, for Rachel to edit in later. “Anyway, she found a Let’s Player, introduced me to him and, well, we both like him a lot.

  “Now, first off, I want to go ahead and put it out there that I’m in no way sponsored by his channel. In fact, he doesn’t even know I’m doing this plug. But he’s got like four hundred and something followers and, frankly, I think it’s criminal that more people don’t know about him.”

  Dovid went on to introduce Sam’s channel, talked a little bit more about the game for any new watchers, and then also told his viewers some key points about why he and Rachel got such a kick out of watching him. The word “adorable” might have been thrown around a few times. But hey, Dovid told it like it was.

  He wrapped up with the usual spiel about liking, commenting, and subscribing, mentioned the social media accounts he and Rachel individually ran that would be in the description below, and then ended with one last plug for Sam’s channel, complete with the link in the description, as well as an “or just click here!” followed by another point.

  “That was a really good take,” Rachel said as Dovid took off his mic. “I’m barely going to have to edit any of it. Mostly I’ll just need to throw on a soundtrack and slap on the video links.”

  “What can I say? I’m a professional.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I might have to cut down on some of the gushing though.”

  “Excuse you? What gushing?”

  “Oh, Sam is so adorable. His voice is so nice. He’s so nice. He’s a vegetarian and cares about fluffy bunnies.”

  “He cares about spiders. I mean, probably bunnies too, but he specifically mentioned spiders. How can you not think that’s cute?”

  Rachel snickered. “I do think it’s cute. I just also happen to think that you didn’t, necessarily, need twelve minutes to expound upon his cuteness.”

  “It was really twelve minutes?” Dovid asked, his cheeks absolutely not going hot.

  “Time stamp says eleven minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”

  “Wha—Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Why would I have done that? You were on a total roll. It’s just obvious that you’re also in love with this guy.”

  “I’m not in love with a Let’s Player you found on YouTube,” Dovid said with dignity.

  “Yeah, not yet.”

  “Don’t you have editing to do? Go away.”

  “So you can watch more of Sam in peace?”

  “Maybe,” Dovid mumbled.

  “Ha! I knew you’d like him.”

  “Gee,” Dovid said dryly, “and here I thought you wouldn’t figure it out. After I told you I wanted to plug him in a video. And then apparently proceeded to talk about him for eleven fucking minutes.”

  “Nearly twelve.”

  Dovid let out a self-sacrificing sigh.

  “What episode are you even on, by the way?”

  “Nine,” Dovid said after a long pause. “I watched six episodes last night, and then one this morning while I exercised, and then two after lunch before we filmed.”

  “You watched nine hours’ worth of videos in two days and you made fun of me when I got through fifty in two weeks?”

  “I take it back, okay? I get it now.”

  “Clearly. And I seem to be missing something.”

  “Will you just go away?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But you only get an hour before I’m dragging you out to the living room to start edits.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good-bye, Rachel.”

  Rachel laughed, but she left the room, footsteps fading. She didn’t close the door behind her but that was to be expected.

  Dovid immediately turned to his computer, went to the open tab with Sam’s paused tenth video, and started it up from where he left off.

  * * *

  Sam woke up Friday morning to a billion and one messages and notifications on his phone, all from YouTube, some from Twitter.

  He spent a moment blinking blearily down at his phone, startling as it buzzed several more times. More notifications from YouTube. Sam made the executive decision to ignore all of them as he got ready for work, because there was only so much social media one could deal with at six-thirty in the morning.

  The thing was though, his phone kept going off. All through his commute and his arrival to work, it kept buzzing in his pocket, email after email and notification after notification. He had absolutely no idea what was going on, but he also knew he was absolutely unable to cope with it at the moment, so he made the decision to turn off his phone.

  It was only on his lunch break that he turned it back on, because he did want to read, and he ended up scrolling through his email out of morbid curiosity. His Gmail didn’t seem to be broken, but the sudden subscriptions and amount of comments from his YouTube channel was staggering. In the end, he just highlighted the whole lot of them and set them to delete, then went to YouTube itself to turn off channel notifications for the time being. The actual issue he would wait to resolve once he got home, before he started recording his next video.

  He selected the fantasy novel he was in the middle of, eagerly losing himself in the story, ate his lunch, and went back to work, but the wonder of it all kept him distracted the rest of the day. It was fine when he was actually dealing with a client, but off the phone his mind drifted as he tried to puzzle out what might be going on. He hoped his channel hadn’t glitched out or been hacked. He had all his recordings saved on a backup hard drive, but it would be no fun to have to reupload all of them, nor would it be what he’d want to do. It had been a year of work and comments and fun. He hoped he hadn’t just lost it all.

  It was a relief, more so than usual, once he got off work and went on his way home. Back at his flat, he took off his shoes, hung up his coat, and went over to the corner where he kept his computer. This was clearly not the sort of thing one could handle on just a phone.

  His email was, thankfully, empty of new notifications once he’d logged on, but then it was time to make the big jump and check out YouTube.

  Some of his tension left him once he looked at his channel and realized that nothing seemed wrong with it.

  Except for the number of subscribers and comments.

  “Thirty thousand?” he whispered
in quiet disbelief. “Where did you all come from?” Looking for clues, he scrolled through the comments he had gotten. The top comments on his most recent videos were still from usernames he recognized, but even his old videos had a massive amount of comments now, particularly his first several.

  You’re pretty good, man! Thanks for the videos.

  Dovid was right, he’s adorable, isn’t he?

  Great video.

  I’m a vegetarian too!

  =DDD

  DOVID I LOVE YOU AND YOUR STUFF

  Anyone else here from Don’t Look Now?

  かわいい!

  Thanks for the rec, Dovid!

  whats the big deal hes just irish

  I’m a DLN fan, and I see what they mean about your voice.

  Definitely earned the three adorables from me.

  “Adorable?” Sam asked, bewildered. And who was Dovid? What was Don’t Look Now? Over half the comments mentioned one or the other or both. What in the world was going on?

  When in doubt, Sam turned to Google for an answer.

  “Dovid, Don’t Look Now” immediately brought up a YouTube channel as well as a zillion other hits from everything to other social media websites to BuzzFeed. Feeling a touch overwhelmed, Sam went to YouTube first.

  The featured video was “Let’s Talk Let’s Players.”

  Sam clicked it.

  A young man wearing dark glasses was sitting in front of a wall covered in different colored dots arranged in various patterns. He was wearing a blue shirt that offset his tan skin and short, dark hair, and had arms that made Sam swallow just a little bit. “Hey, guys! This is Don’t Look Now with Dovid and Rachel. I’m Dovid, Rachel’s behind the camera, and today I wanted to talk to you about a YouTuber that I’ve discovered. Well, Rachel discovered him, fell in love with him—”

  “I did not,” came a voice from behind the camera “—tell them the truth. From the beginning!”

  “Guys, if I had eyes, I’d be rolling them right now.” Sam blinked. That explained the dark glasses he supposed. “But fine, fine. Okay, so you know how I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Rachel had gotten totally obsessed with this game Dire Straits...she found a Let’s Player, introduced me to him and, well, we both like him a lot.”

  “No,” Sam whispered. “No way. No way.”

  “Now, first off, I want to go ahead and put it out there that I’m in no way sponsored by his channel. In fact, he doesn’t even know I’m doing this plug. But he’s only got like four hundred and something followers and, frankly, I think it’s criminal that more people don’t know about him.”

  The video proceeded to go on (and on and on) about Sam’s merit, his voice, called him adorable (several different times), and wound down with, “so you all better go to his channel and show him some love. He really deserves it! Link here, as well in the description below. Don’t forget to follow Don’t Look Now on social media. All those links down below as well. As always, guys, see you later! Well, I won’t—” a grin, the grin of someone who had made that joke dozens of times and still found it funny “—but you know what I mean.”

  The video ended.

  Sam glanced at the time stamp. Thursday, around seven-thirty. With the obvious time difference, that was after Sam had been in bed himself and wasn’t checking his messages.

  He looked at Don’t Look Now’s subscriber count, and had to take a shuddering breath. Six million and some subscribers. Dovid was clearly a hugely popular vlogger on YouTube, and he’d just plugged Sam’s channel. Sam’s dinky little let’s play channel, with fifty videos and a lot of rambling.

  Dovid had called his rambling adorable, and said his voice was smooth and soothing.

  Sam swallowed and looked at his notifications again. He’d gotten fifty new subscribers in the last fifteen minutes.

  He had utterly zero idea how to handle this and a let’s play video to record, because that’s what his regular followers knew to expect.

  Oh dear.

  * * *

  “Hello, everybody, I’m Sam, and welcome to another episode of Let’s Play Dire Straits. Erm, we left off last episode trying to fancy up our base a little bit by moving some turf around and adding carpet, because I like the look of that, so I’m just going to wait til nightfall and go off to shear more sheeples for wool to make that and, ah, well, I suppose I want to welcome all you new followers to my channel. I admit to being a bit flummoxed here, that I suddenly have so many. But you’re all welcome to watch of course, and I do hope you enjoy it. I, um, I’m going to go ahead and dedicate this episode to Dovid and Rachel from Don’t Look Now, if that’s alright. And, erm, Dovid, if you’re watching this, I really, really hope I’m pronouncing your name right, because I did watch that particular video of you being mad when people did it wrong, and I know things can sort of get muddled with my accent, but I’m doing my best. Now, ah, in-game, as you can see here, I’ve gathered some more food from my farms; I’m planting corn mostly, because it’s got the best shelf life for travel, and popcorn gives you sanity too, if you choose to actually cook the corn so...” He prattled on as he played, more than a little nervous with how many people he knew might be watching. It seemed so much more feasible when it was just the odd few hundred. Thousands and thousands were a bit much, in his opinion. It was just a silly little YouTube channel he did for fun. How was he supposed to live up to what Dovid had built him up as?

  In the end, he tried not to think about it and just played. He enjoyed his game and making videos, and clearly that was what his viewers liked. He just was going to keep doing that, was all.

  With this thought in mind, he recorded for the rest of the hour and went about his usual routine of setting the video to render while he went to read on his phone.

  After a few minutes though, he got an idea into his head that he couldn’t shake. Should he maybe send Dovid a message? Surely Dovid got hundreds of them a day—after all, Sam had gotten a ridiculous amount himself—but there was no harm, right? Just a thank-you.

  No, no, Dovid probably got inundated with messages if the amount that Sam had gotten recently was any indication. There would be no point. Sam had already dedicated a video to him. If Dovid watched them regularly, and it seemed as though he did now, he’d get the thank-you from that. Right? Right.

  God, he hoped he’d pronounced Dovid’s name correctly. He’d even practiced saying it, making sure it didn’t come out sounding like David by accident. A round ‘uh’ sound. He’d tried.

  Sam made an attempt to put it out of his mind. He uploaded the video, kept his YouTube notifications turned off, content with just checking them Saturday morning via the website itself, and got himself ready for bed.

  * * *

  Rachel was taking a bath when Dovid got the notification that Sam had uploaded a new video. He loathed to wait to watch it, but he and Rachel had sort of made a pact that they’d watch the new ones together, just like they did when there was a series they were following together.

  “Rachel, hurry up!”

  “Why are you bothering me?”

  “Sam uploaded another video,” Dovid wheedled. “I want to watch it. And I don’t want to wait for you.”

  “Suck it up, I’m relaxing.”

  Dovid slumped against the door. “Fine. But you’re not allowed to take baths on Fridays anymore.”

  “Fuck you,” Rachel called cheerily.

  Grumbling, Dovid went to the living room with his laptop and tried to distract himself until Rachel finally, finally walked in. She immediately sat down next to him and put her head on his shoulder.

  “Ack, stop it, your hair is dripping wet.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, who told me to hurry up?”

  “You couldn’t even put it up in one of those fancy towel things?”

  “Actually, I brought a towel out with me to do just that,” Rachel admitted, movi
ng away from him, followed by the sound of fabric rubbing together. “I just wanted to bother you first.”

  “Rachel,” Dovid whined. “I want to watch the video.”

  Rachel snorted. “I can’t believe you made fun of me for liking Sam’s stuff.”

  “Yes, yes, I take it all back. Can I hit play now?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Hello, everybody, I’m Sam, and welcome to another episode of Let’s Play Dire Straits.” Dovid grinned and sat back on the couch. “Erm, we left off last episode trying to fancy up our base a little bit by moving some turf around and adding carpet, because I like the look of that, so I’m just going to wait til nightfall and go off to shear more sheeples for wool to make that and, ah, well, I suppose I want to welcome all you new followers to my channel. I admit to being a bit flummoxed here, that I suddenly have so many.” Flummoxed. Sam had just used “flummoxed” in a sentence. God, but he was cute. “But you’re all welcome to watch of course, and I do hope you enjoy it. I, um, I’m going to go ahead and dedicate this episode to Dovid and Rachel from Don’t Look Now, if that’s alright. And, erm, Dovid, if you’re watching this, I really, really hope I’m pronouncing your name right, because I did watch that particular video of you being mad when people did it wrong—”

  “Oh my god,” Dovid said, mortified, pausing the video. “Oh my god, Rachel, he watched ‘Angry Blind Teen.’ Oh my god.”

  “What’s the big deal? Almost everyone has watched that. It’s our third most popular video.”

  “But he watched it. And he heard tiny angry me whine about my name!”