I, Justine: An Analog Memoir

by Justine Ezarik

  The date started out so well, but then Jumpcut drank too much and needed help getting home. Typical.

  One year earlier, Karen and I had returned, for the third year in a row, to Macworld. It was the last year that Apple would participate in the expo, and Steve Jobs had announced that he wouldn’t be there to deliver the keynote speech—Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, would do that for him. Rumors about Steve’s health had swirled for months, but the truth of his condition was still largely a secret. He was skipping the trade show, according to a letter posted to the Apple website, due to a “hormone imbalance.”

  In his absence, Karen and I launched “Real World News with iJustine and Karen,” a hard-hitting, investigative (single episode) series wherein we reported on various unconfirmed rumors of Steve Jobs sightings. For the video, we slapped an image of Jobs’s face on a column outside the Moscone Center, tacked a black, long-sleeved shirt underneath it, and then—intrepid journalist that I was—I proceeded to score the only on-camera interview with him of the entire conference. I held the microphone up to a 2-D image of his face and, after asking each question, waited patiently for his (very, very quiet . . . some might say impossible-to-hear) response.

  When I sent it back over to Karen, she called it “an exclusive, fantastic interview.” She promised that we’d return with more news. At that point, you can hear me, positioned just off camera, whispering, “And stuff,” prodding Karen to be sillier, more outrageous, just like I’d prodded Dez all those years before.

  “And stuff,” Karen said. “More news . . . and stuff.” A moment later, something occurred to her. “Why wasn’t he wearing pants?” she asked, straight to camera. “Why didn’t you ask him that?”

  Here’s Steve Jobs telling me how impressed he is with my reporting skills.

  A year later, the first-generation iPad was launching (during a special event on the Cupertino campus) and I was more determined than ever—I was going to be part of the press. Once again, Jobs was giving the keynote speech, and the anticipation was more frenzied than it had been even for the launch of the iPhone; according to the Wall Street Journal, “the last time there was this much excitement about a tablet it had some commandments on it.” And once again, I didn’t have a pass to get in the actual room.

  What I had, however, was a friend who worked at Apple, so I took his pass and snuck in. Jobs had just finished his keynote, and they’d begun opening the room up for reporters and bloggers. I filed in with the rest of the journalists, badge in hand, and there it was—the first Apple iPad. I filmed as much as I could until someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Are you iJustine?”

  “Yes!” I shouted, probably a little too loudly. I was so pumped about the release of the iPad, and now someone at the launch had recognized me. I was at Apple and they knew who I was! These people know who I am! I thought.

  And then I realized I had been “recognized” by security. I wasn’t on Apple’s approved press list, and I clearly wasn’t an employee, as my badge indicated. So, I was escorted out of the room. Never one to be deterred, however, I borrowed someone else’s badge—a press pass, this time. I snuck back in, but it was only moments before security found me again.

  “Justine, we told you, you’re not allowed in here.”

  “Huh, you were serious about that?” I said, gesturing to my new pass. “I thought that was . . . you know . . . a joke? Or I just needed a different type of credential?”

  It was not a joke. I was kicked out again. And it occurred to me that I might really be on Apple’s blacklist. They did not want me in there. And they definitely didn’t want me anywhere near Steve Jobs.

  The thing was, I understood—by then I had my own fans. I’d hit a million Twitter followers, I was approaching half a million subscribers on YouTube, and that had given me a tiny taste of what it might be like to be really, actually famous. While the vast majority of folks who had friended or followed me online were sweet, lovely, normal people, I’d definitely come across the occasional weirdo, the kind of creep I would run away from if we ever so much as met in person. So, I mean, iJustine? Assuming Jobs actually did know who I was (and I’m fairly certain he was at least aware of my existence, seeing as how he ran away from me at our last almost-meeting), I can’t blame him for steering clear. I always assumed it was fairly obvious that I was playing up the “obsession” angle for the camera, but it has occurred to me over the years that maybe I should’ve been a little less, well, crazy.

  • • •

  The next few years passed by in a blur—I hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube, and I got the chance to do some more on-camera television work, including a stint on Criminal Minds (I died again, this time after being chased through a cornfield by a couple of psychopaths in a pickup truck), as well as a recurring gig working as a correspondent for GTECH and Spike TV. I was doing well enough that I was even able to do some “work” on occasion with my sisters, too.

  My sisters have always had a kind of front-row seat to my weird, crazy life online—since they’ve essentially grown up with it, I think they’ve more or less gotten used to having a camera around. For example, Breanne—who is a pharmacist now—is no longer surprised when a customer asks for a selfie with his flu shot. As for Jenna, we’ve always had a bit more in common (we both love video games and fooling around online—Breanne, on the other hand, is the least tech savvy of the three of us), so it was only natural that she’d end up in an increasing number of my videos over the years. Eventually, I started badgering her to create her own YouTube channel, and despite being really hesitant at first, she quickly found that she enjoyed the online world. Since moving to L.A., she’s discovered she’s good at it, too. She works for a public relations firm, focusing on social media initiatives, and based on her unique background, she has a perspective almost no one else in the field has—she intuitively understands what will work online, what won’t, and why. We have a few joint projects in the pipeline, and I’m excited to see what we’ll come up with next.

  In 2011, the three of us got together to found Squatch Watch, southwestern Pennsylvania’s resident Sasquatch-hunting team (a spoof, obviously, on Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot)—which has since

  ballooned to four whole members: me; Jenna (our night vision coordinator, who once rigged a GoPro to the dashboard of our vehicle with nothing but Band-Aids); Breanne (who adamantly refused to be on camera until I dragged her into the frame); and Steve, our safety and explosives expert, in whose honor I made that first website so many years ago.

  Dez and I also continued to make videos sporadically—including the time I made her sneak me into an elevator in her office building because Heinz had some kind of corporate outpost there (I have a weird obsession with ketchup)—but 2011 was a big year for her, too, for a different reason: she got engaged. (I enjoyed her off-line wedding, and did not shoot or post any weird videos from her big day.)

  • • •

  In October of that year, I was having lunch with a friend when my phone started pinging and vibrating, signaling a slew of incoming texts: “I’m sorry,” they said. “I know how much he meant to you,” they said. “Are you okay?” I immediately got that awful, sinking feeling in my gut, that moment when you know something terrible has happened, but you don’t yet know what it is. I navigated over to Twitter; my entire feed was filled with condolences. And that’s when I realized what had happened. Steve Jobs had died.

  Right there in the middle of a diner, I cried.

  You might think deciding to film my reaction was an odd choice, but I knew it was something my followers would expect; Steve Jobs had been too monumentally influential in my life to ignore his passing. Still, I disabled the embedded advertisements (so I wouldn’t make any kind of commission based on views), I posted it without any obvious tags, without using his name in the video’s title, and I buried it in “iJustine’s iPhone,” the least subscribed to of all my YouTube chann
els. I was naive enough to think that only those who followed me closely would find it; by posting the video, I had hoped that, in some small way, we could grieve together. That, of course, is exactly the opposite of what happened: the video ended up on the front page of Reddit within twenty-four hours. Overnight, I was approaching a million views.

  The backlash was swift and ferocious: I was exploiting his death; I was faking my sadness. I was also wearing leather boots in the video, which at some point rubbed together underneath the table I was sitting at, creating a rather unfortunate sound, which became a rather unfortunate headline: “iJustine Farts After Death of Steve Jobs.” If I hadn’t been so depressed at the time, it would’ve been funny, I guess.

  I never got a chance to meet Steve Jobs. I have no idea what he would think of the work that I do, or my “obsession” with him, or the fact that my name is an homage to one of his products. Sometimes I’m almost glad we didn’t meet. By all accounts, he could be arrogant and difficult and unyielding; he could be petulant, abrasive, and even mean. It’s possible—likely, even—that the myth I had built up in my head wouldn’t match the man. And yet he—perhaps more than anyone else in my life—was the one who inspired me to embrace the weird, silly, unique things about myself that make me me.

  And that’s why Steve Jobs was so much more than an inventor of sleek gadgets or a powerful businessman; he was someone who inspired awe, who made us marvel, who made people believe that anything was possible. He was a genius who wasn’t afraid to think differently, and I miss him.

  FAIR GAME

  WHEN I WAS A KID, my family and I spent virtually every Christmas Eve over at my friend CJ’s house. His mother used to throw these wonderfully elaborate holiday parties—decorations everywhere, music playing. But what I remember most about those nights isn’t singing Christmas carols or trimming the tree; it’s sitting in front of the television with CJ and his brothers, waiting patiently (sometimes not so patiently) for my turn to play Mortal Kombat II. We weren’t allowed to have the Mortal Kombat games at my house; my mother thought they were too violent.

  Like a lot of eighties babies, I can chart the course of my childhood less by the year than by the video games I was playing: huge swaths of early elementary school were spent with my butt in that too-small rocking chair, eating Nintendo snacks, playing the original Super Mario Bros. Shortly before transitioning out of middle school, I’d discovered The 7th Guest on CD-ROM, a game so creepy—it was set in a haunted mansion—that just thinking about it now is enough to give me the chills.I And by high school I had entered the world of PC gaming (even though I didn’t have a PC at the time), playing Quake and Unreal Tournament at LAN parties with members of the 1337 Crew.

  As I got older I continued to play games casually, and at one point or another I owned many of the most popular consoles. (You’ll remember, for example, that I camped out at Walmart for the launch of the PlayStation 3.) Whatever equipment I had amassed, however, stayed behind in Pittsburgh when I eventually made the move to California, and for a time, I played less often than I once did. For a brief period in my early twenties, I was far more consumed by trying to make a living than gaming.

  It was in that rocky in-between, when I was still living at my manager’s house and spending an increasing amount of time with Brookers, that I had my first introduction to World of Warcraft. One of our friends was a huge fan at the time, and it had already become such an iconic game that I figured I’d go ahead and sign up for my free trial. Of course, I had no idea how to play—I was playing on a Mac laptop, no less—and after realizing I had to slice a “rabbit” in half (which was actually a boar), I was suddenly overcome with giddy laughter, the kind of contagious cackling where you just can’t quite catch your breath, the kind of wonderful silliness that sometimes occurs, out of thin air, when you’re hanging out with one of your closest friends. Brooke was there to film the whole thing, and she deemed my over-the-top shrieking “the best n00b reaction ever,” which became the title of the video that I promptly posted to YouTube.

  That video has since been viewed nearly a million times, and let’s just say the reaction has been, uh, mixed. Some people seemed to genuinely enjoy my enthusiasm, others suggested that I was faking it for the camera, and, of course, there were plenty of those ever-charming references to a woman’s place being in the kitchen. I’ve never been asked to make a sandwich so many times in my life. There were also lots of accusations that I wasn’t a “real” gamer or that I was pretending to like WoW, which I never quite understood, since the video made it quite clear that I had never played before. Finally, I received a host of emails yelling at me for using the arrow keys rather than WASD (and if you have to ask what that means, well, I would caution you about posting your own WoW video to the Internet).

  Behind the scenes, however, those first few moments of sheer silliness had turned into hours and hours of game play—I quickly graduated from playing in my spare time to playing even when I didn’t have any time to waste. Gaming, of course, will do that to you; it’s addictive. Instead of going out on the weekends, I’d snuggle up on the couch, chatting with my sister on Xbox Live. Sometimes my mom would take the headset to chat a little, too. Gaming, for me, was (and is!) a relaxing escape from reality.

  By 2011 I had more stability than I had ever had in my adult life. I actually had some disposable income, too, most of which was spent on computer upgrades, cameras, and gaming equipment. The increasing amount of time I spent playing games, however, was time that I wasn’t devoting to making videos and posting them to the web. As I’ve said before, my business isn’t self-sustaining; it relies on a near constant output of content. For that reason, it made sense—to me, at least—to start a gaming channel.

  That got me a fair amount of flak, too. I certainly wasn’t the first person to start a YouTube channel devoted solely to gaming; several of my friends, in fact, were already managing their own. That same year, Justin Kan had transitioned Justin.tv to Twitch.tv, an entire platform devoted to not just gaming videos but game live-streaming. To people with only a casual notion of who I was, the move was seen as a play for money; it seemed like my “sudden” interest in video games had been invented for the sole purpose of cashing in on a newly popular phenomenon. There wasn’t enough “evidence” out there of my previous gaming experience to convince some people that I wasn’t full of it.

  But that bit of backlash was nothing compared to the heat I got after posting my first Let’s Play.

  Let’s Play videos, to the supremely uninitiated, are video game playthroughs with voice-over commentary. There are all kinds of reasons to watch—to get a sense if a particular game is worth buying; to enjoy a particular gamer’s brand of commentary (some gamers discuss skill and strategy while others focus more on being quirky or comedic for entertainment’s sake); or just for the pleasure of spectating (after all, we watch other people play all kinds of sports; we even watch other people cook for entertainment—why not watch them play video games?). I realize now, though, that I didn’t know enough about the culture I was getting ready to insert myself into. For my first Let’s Play, I chose a game I had never played before—one I knew nothing about, in fact—in a genre that wasn’t even my forte (I prefer first-person shooter, or FPS, games). That game was Portal 2. And I wasn’t just bad; I might be the worst Portal 2 player that’s ever lived. And if you think I’m exaggerating, just ask the Internet.

  I got absolutely slaughtered. Once the hard-core gamers got hold of it, the vitriol exploded: I was the stupidest person ever. I was giving girl gamers a bad name. I should die. I should kill myself. I should be “blasted off into space along with the rest of such idiots” (and, yes, that’s an actual comment). I finished the game—in an admittedly long, tedious series of videos, which I later made private after receiving a rush of increasingly intense, violent, and graphic death threats. (There have been a few times that I’ve experienced a wave of particularly hateful comments online; this was one of them.)

&nb
sp; Making the videos private wasn’t enough, though, because the legacy of my awful Portal 2 playing has followed me. YouTube is littered with mirrors of the original videos, many of which feature new, considerably less flattering commentary. A Reddit “Ask Me Anything” I participated in several years ago took a nasty turn when Portal came up, and eventually it dominated the thread. (Things got heated and ugly enough that some Redditors actually felt the need to apologize for the general tenor of the conversation, if you can believe it.)

  In 2014 I was asked to present at the Game Awards in Las Vegas—the ceremony is streamed live across several different gaming and video platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, Twitch, and YouTube. Immediately afterward, I hopped on a plane to San Jose to attend a League of Legends event hosted by Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), which is an international e-sports tournament series that culminates each year in a World Championship. The Internet lit up again; apparently there was enough outrage about my appearance at the Game Awards that I briefly became a trending topic on Twitter.

  • • •

  It would be really, really easy—too easy, in fact—to write off comments like these as the work of haters, trolls, or just inherently mean and nasty people, but I think the truth is probably a bit more complicated. Gaming, after all, is still a relatively young culture; modern gaming as we know it has been around for only thirty-some-odd years, and for much of that time, being a “gamer” was associated with social marginalization. Gamers, not unlike hackers or geeks, were portrayed as nerdy outcasts and misfits. Gaming was (wrongfully) considered the domain of awkward adolescent boys with no social skills. That view is still so pervasive that most depictions of gamers in mainstream and pop culture are of friendless, wife- or girlfriend-less losers. Steve Carell plays the ultimate version of this stereotype in The 40-Year-Old Virgin; not only does his character play video games and collect action figures, but the fact that he owns an elaborate video game chair, complete with surround-sound speakers and joysticks mounted to the armrests, is used to signal just how much of a loser he really is. (But seriously, where can I get one of those, because it is awesome?) In the cult film Grandma’s Boy, the main character, a video game tester, is forced to move in with his grandmother after being evicted from his apartment; his best friend and coworker is a grown man who lives with his parents, sucks his thumb at night, and sleeps in a child’s car bed. But the same way that, say, members of the 1337 Crew took pride in our “otherness”—by making T-shirts, by thinking of ourselves as both skilled and elite, by turning something nerdy into something cool—many in the gaming community have embraced their membership in what was, for a long time, an exclusive club; being a gamer was special, in part, because it wasn’t mainstream. It’s only relatively recently that our ideas about gaming culture, about what makes a “true” gamer, have started to change.