Why I Create Content

I remember my childhood consisting of me always begging anyone I could find to sit there and watch me play my video games. I've always loved the idea of entertaining others by doing what I love. I can’t really connect with my younger self, I have as good of an idea what motivated me at the time as you probably do. All I can speak to are my current motivations. Firstly, however, let's look at my journey in becoming who I am now.

I think one of the first gaming videos I ever recorded was a minecraft lets play on a superflat survival world. I played minecraft on my ps3, on the TV in my bedroom, with my old HP laptop lying on the ground in front of me recording with a 240p built-in webcam. Since then I have made lots of videos across like 12 youtube channels. One of my core memories is coming down to the living room in my Grandma's house in Italy after being called by my father and seeing him sit on the couch with a youtube video of a book review I recorded on the TV. He lectured me about the dangers of what I did, the idea that someone could find me. This probably instilled some paranoia in me, and probably dismayed me from content creation for a while but my natural passion could not be extinguished. This is also why I believe I never showed my face or name in content until TikTok. I always went by other names, I remember a couple: MoftyMan, MooshroomMan, TeamAlphaGaming, FoxtrotGaming, VisageGaming, amongst others that have been lost to time.

No matter the gear I had I always wanted to make videos, from stop motion lego animations to messing around with a video reversing app, throwing furniture around my room to pretend I had magical powers and could move things with my mind, to making short movies in the hills of sintra with friends using a VFX app.

I got my first gaming laptop for christmas of 2017. This was a major shift as it unlocked a whole new universe of possibilities.

I believe this phase marked the birth of Nefarious AKA. N3farious, AKA, N3fariousP6. I streamed consistently on Twitch from June 30, 2018 to July 25, 2018. During this first period I averaged at about 3.3 viewers, I gained 105 followers, 1 subscription, and streamed for a total of 86 hours and 7 minutes. I became a twitch affiliate on the 10th of July 2018. This felt like a massive accomplishment because it signified that what I was doing wasn’t just a random thing I was doing for fun. I think it signified the potential of actually being able to do this seriously. The idea that at least 3 people were taking time out of their day to sit there and watch me do what I have always done for fun felt amazing and mindblowing. I believe I mostly streamed CS:GO and Fortnite during this period. I then went to Imperial College for a couple of weeks to study machine learning and deep neural networks, and travelled for essentially the rest of August. After returning from travels I sporadically streamed between the 30th of August 2018 to the 18th of January 2019. I believe streaming became difficult because of school so I kind of gave up / changed priorities. I could have persisted and kept streaming but I also was just 14-15 at the time.

Previously when I was younger I had a musical.ly account so when TikTok came around and the Musical.ly accounts migrated I started with a light 4k followers. I posted my first tiktok on the 13th of October 2018. At the time I would just make parody and satirical tiktoks. I posted my first non-parody/satire TikTok video on August 15, 2019. It reached 35.7k views and 3k likes overnight. Growth accelerated quickly: 6k followers by September 7, 2019, 11k by October 9, 2019, 20k by October 12, 2019, and 50k by November 9, 2019. The tiktok account continued to scale to 100k by December 1, 2019, 150k by December 20, 2019, and 190k by January 26, 2020, before peaking around 204k by June 14, 2020. This was a bad period for my mental health. I think my tiktok wasn't growing anymore or something, I'm not sure. All I know is this was probably one of the first instances of bad mental health. This was also during covid, basically nothing was going right. I felt this void in my soul too, because people only cared about me for my looks, and not what actually mattered to me, which was my personality. I felt like a shell of a human. This caused me to lash out and come out as a Trump supporter on my tiktok which of course due to the fact that this was peak BLM, essentially killed my TikTok. It's hard to remember what was going through my mind at the time because I have almost no memories of this period, but this was certainly not a good moment in my life. Honestly I have no idea why I did that, I knew that it would certainly hurt if not kill my account which is what makes me believe it was intentional self sabotage. In a tiktok I posted after this I explained that I started hating tiktok and thought it was actual “dog shit” and has become “cancerous”. I think all of this was a consequence of the algorithm and the mind rotting structure of short form content. This was my public explanation, which probably did not align with my internal thoughts and beliefs, at least not wholly. I concluded the video explaining that I didn't want to just cold quit, I wanted to “piss people off”. If that was my goal I sure did, getting an insane amount of hate comments and DMs. I went from having my DMs flooded by (usually older) girls begging for a reply, to DMs flooded with hate and outrage (and a little bit of support). Personally, having the beliefs that I have now, I empathise with the hate, but do remember this was 2020 Trump pre-election. It's far harder to empathise with the hate received when supporting that instance of Trump, especially when you are a 16 year old boy. However we are not here to litigate the morality of outrage, this is all just meant to contextualize the period of my life. Looking back I am not proud of this moment, I don't want to defend this moment, and I think it is amongst my worst moments, but it happened, I don't believe in living life with regret, and I strongly believe it has contributed to the man I am today. In some ways I'm proud of this moment, because of what came after, growth and change to point B, always requiring a point A. I am proud of my point A because it shows just how far I have come.

On the 6th of dec 2020 I returned to twitch streaming sporadically until the 30th of January 2021. I averaged at 3.6 viewers here, gained 85 followers and 14 subs! I streamed for a total of 20 hours and 49 minutes. Here I mostly streamed with friends playing Rocket League and Amongus, and covering the gamestop fiasco. I also streamed the Jan 6th insurrection, this time as a socialist.

On the 15th of may 2021 I then returned back to twitch streaming consistently until the 21st of June 2021. Here I averaged at 1.6 viewers, gaining 31 followers, and 2 subs. I streamed for a total of 46 hours and 1 minute. Here I believe I played mostly minecraft and apex legends.

I then took a small break where I streamed again between the 7th of July of 2021 and the 13th of July 2021. Here I averaged at 5.3 viewers, and gained 21 followers, streaming for a total of 9 hours and 38 minutes. This was again mostly apex and minecraft.

After a short break I came back to streaming on the 13th of August 2021 and streamed very consistently until the 6th of February 2022. This was the golden age of Nefarious Politics, this was my greatest streaming bout. I made a name for myself in the twitch politics space, and built what became a small but tight knit community. I averaged at 7.2 viewers, I gained 457 followers and 81 subs. I streamed for a total of 292 hours and 41 minutes. I think this was also a radical moment in my view of the community. Because of my rapid success on TikTok, I was a little spoiled, and probably still am. It's like having nothing, then everything, and losing it all the next day. It most definitely does something to a person's mind, however this period kind of healed me. I didn't have the eyes on me that I had before, but I would take what I had during this period over the tiktok days any day. I had on average 7 different people standing next to me at all times, listening intently to what I had to say and watching what I was doing. This is the equivalent of driving past a crowd of people and having them check you out, vs having 7 people in a room with you every day of your life. I am truly humbled and honored that what I had to say was valuable enough for people to take that much time out of their day, and honestly I miss streaming every time I think about it. One thing that does stop me from streaming is probably the belief that I don't really deserve it, the idea that it's a waste of time because why would anyone watch me? I think that's why I'm more comfortable with YouTube because you literally don't have to click my video, and if it fails the algorithm is probably not tuned, or someone didn't like the thumbnail enough. However, someone coming into your stream, seeing the number go up, saying Hi and not getting anything back, then watching that number drop again is so much worse.

Then on the 9th of November of 2022 I decided to go back to streaming, this time in Austin, which lasted until the 14th of November. Here I averaged at 2.9 viewers, gained only 7 followers and streamed for 8 hours and 47 minutes. I believe I essentially just covered the election here.

I also posted YouTube gym vlogs from February 2, 2024 to May 30, 2024, non-gym videos from February 15, 2025 to May 3, 2025, and another gym vlog run from May 24, 2025 to June 19, 2025.

Earlier I said I couldn't speak to my internal experience when I was young, and thus couldn't explore why I always loved entertaining/content creation. What I can say is that what began as wanting others to watch play games has changed into a different form of entertainment. Entertainment has become purely a tool to enact positive change in the rest of the world. I want to make fitness content in hopes of inspiring those around me to be fitter. I want to make political/philosophical content to hopefully inspire those who watch me to take more mindful approaches to these topics and hopefully adopt some of my systems/lenses which will help them navigate the world and hopefully improve it themselves. I can pretend that when I was young that's also what I wanted to do, spread joy and entertain those around me, however, I also can’t ignore the fact that just the idea of others watching me do what I love didn’t/doesn’t warm my heart. I think there is still definitely a component to content creation that stems from a desire to be seen, which part of me sees as narcissistic and impure / not noble. However, another part of me sees the humanity of it, and embraces it as a genuine motivating factor, seeing it for what it is and not applying value judgments.