Consider what it takes to be a dad. You might have thought of virtues such as strength, attractiveness, thriftiness, skill, discipline, conviction, and the intelligence to make a plan and see it through to fruition.

But what it really takes is finding a woman who will let you blow your load inside of her.

This becomes easy to see as one ponders the falling-off of Rich, also known as ReviewTechUSA, who has proceeded to throw his toys on the floor and stomp out of the room because he was designated a “lolcow”.

You can try searching for his YouTube channel, but you won’t find it, because he deleted it as part of his temper tantrum. Instead, if you were to look for ReviewTechUSA on YouTube, all that would be left would be videos from creators who criticized him, in many cases rightly so.

His image took a tumble, so rather than just shut up and course-correct, Rich instead ceded ground to all his critics, destroying a money-making channel with a following that took years to build.

What’s especially disappointing about Rich’s recent behavior for me is that he was one of my favorite gaming and tech world commentators when I was in college, back when he would rant about this, that, and the third as gameplay video of GTA would play. I didn’t always agree with him, but I did appreciate his viewpoints.

We could bring up the irony of the fact that his channel was called “ReviewTechUSA”, even though he hasn’t really reviewed tech as a focus since the early days of his channel. I suspect that this has a lot to do with the fact that he turned heavily tribalistic when it came to brands. He was a heavy critic of Apple, and if your tech review channel is just going to dump on Apple, don’t count on Apple to send you new iterations of their products for review.

It seemed that his early videos were enthusiastic about PC parts, which makes me suspicious that ReviewTechUSA was a means to write off a man’s PC gaming money trap, while raking in that sweet, sweet e-clout.

It didn’t help that he would sometimes spout off about some controversial takes. If what you have to say is controversial enough, tech brands might not want their products associated with you.

From what I’ve heard, Rich also went TDS. To risk alienating as much as half of your audience is highly inadvisable. That’s the risk that comes with approaching political content. It might be tempting to go TDS, considering that Trump supporters are more likely to be able to take a joke, but it’s a black hole. When your audience is composed of leftists, they’re likely to be hyper-sensitive, and willing to cancel you for saying the wrong thing at any given moment, and they’re not known for their forgiveness, even with profuse groveling.

With that framing, you might be wondering how Rich fucked up. Did he point out that men and women are different? Or did he go full Hitler and point out that different people from different parts of the world have different cultures?

Nope. He was a shitty dad. His little girl wanted him to put her to bed, but he declined so that he could continue his stream. Which, considering his typical routine, probably consisted of taking off his shirt and playing with a rubber chicken, while self-deprecating by calling himself a fat fuck (his words, not mine).

Naturally, this pissed people the hell off, because when you’re a dad, your first duty is to your family, and a shitty ass livestream doesn’t even come close to it. And because the current system is fucking over young men who have been trying way harder than their fathers and grandfathers before them to accomplish the same thing in a financially responsible manner, this is only upsetting young men all the more that Rich is not properly appreciating the family that he has, and which is his responsibility.

So, latest development, Rich has been branded a lolcow. But, as the tendency of lolcows is, he takes himself way too seriously, so he’s not leaning into it. Just the reverse, he was willing to torch his own paycheck to avoid confronting his critics, destroying a YouTube channel that could have continued to generate passive income for him if he were to just let it sit, doing nothing else with it.

But Rich took a blow to his pride, and he’s not handling it well.

Where he goes from here, I don’t know. Where exactly does someone go if they were once e-famous, but then deleted their own channel? Does he have a backup plan? Can his lengthy experience playing with his nipples in front of a camera somehow transfer to another career choice?

Considering that Rich has a little person who is counting on him, he needs to figure things out pretty quick. Unlike most young single men, he can’t just fall back on sleeping in a car when times are rough.

But we’ll see whether Trump working as a fry cook would discourage him at all from doing the same thing.

EDIT: Okay, so he has a plan. Rich says that instead of gaming commentary, he’s going to do “grown-up” things like comment on the news and politics.

First, it can be pointed out how this new direction would be catastrophic for a man in his mental state. Few people could get into that kind of content without it frying their brains. People who get into politics tend to become tribalistic, which tends towards people becoming so closed-minded that they refuse to see any virtue in a person in the rival tribe. What’s more, news commentary requires a person to have their finger on the pulse of current events on a near constant basis.

Then there’s his implication that games commentary is beneath his level of maturity. Rich was once one of the guys who argued that it shouldn’t be seen as unusual for a middle-aged man to play video games. And now that video games are no longer stigmatized, he goes and acts like playing them is for less mature people.

But if news and politics are how Rich is deciding to rebrand himself, let’s see how seriously anyone will take a man who played with his man-boobs on livestream when he fires off his mouth about current events, or what can be brought into the conversation about politics by a man who engaged in sensuous play with a cucumber, also on livestream (you could probably guess that there was a point when I lost interest in his channel).

But, if he insists, then he’s free to fire off about how he believes the rest of us should live, and the narratives that we should view the world through, in consideration of the exemplar of virtue that he obviously is.