adventures and naps Q&A

I was ranking British food with my Twitch community when a stream ended in a 30-day ban. It was supposed to be an interactive evening of deciding where different foods belonged on a list. Instead, I lost access to my account and spent a month waiting, even though I’d appealed on the day it happened.

That was the drama I described in my July 2022 questions-and-answers video. At the time, I was back on Twitch and the strike had been removed. The way it happened was still surprising, particularly because the livestreams were mostly a place to hang out, sometimes play games and talk with people.

A food name became a problem

I hadn’t created the food list. I found an existing one online and thought it would be fun to work through it together. One of its entries was the British meat dish called faggots. We said the name because that was what the food was called, discussed what it actually was, ranked it and moved on.

I couldn’t even remember the ingredients properly. I thought it was something potato-based, before the discussion established that it was more like meatballs. Nobody was using the word as a slur or directing it at anyone. That isn’t the kind of community we have.

About ten minutes later, we’d moved on to ranking British biscuits when the stream suddenly stopped. The email I received said I’d had a community-guidelines strike for targeted hateful conduct and a 30-day ban. There had been no warning. I was a little surprised, to put it mildly.

The answer arrived after the ban

Within about ten minutes of receiving the email, I went to the appeals portal. I explained that I realised a particular word had probably triggered the ban, but asked them to watch the stream and see the food discussion in context. I submitted that appeal the same day. Then the full 30 days went by.

Twitch wasn’t my main platform, thankfully, but I did earn some income there through subscriptions. According to what had happened on my account, Twitch cancelled all of them. I couldn’t sign in or reach out to people there to explain why I had disappeared. From their side, the channel had simply gone dark.

Subscribers who happened to check were the ones who discovered my account was available again after the month. Twitch hadn’t told me. The next day, an email arrived about my appeal. As I explained it in the video, someone had reviewed the situation, recognised that I’d been banned by mistake and removed the strike. Thirty days, plus one, was quite a wait for that answer.

There is a lot behind a chatty video

The rest of the questions got into what making all this content actually involved. At that point I made two YouTube videos and one Patreon video a week, livestreamed twice a week in the evenings and had a job. I filmed and edited the videos myself. Keeping a very specific schedule was how I made the work happen.

I’d previously worked as a newspaper reporter, so meeting deadlines was familiar. That helped, but the videos still took a lot of time. Being organised wasn’t an optional extra when there was so much to finish, and it didn’t make balancing everything easy.

The energetic person you see in a video is me at the top end of my energy. I’m not like that all day. I wanted the videos to be easy to watch, hopefully funny or happy, but I sometimes had to start filming when I didn’t feel like it. I could sit down worrying that a topic was too niche or that nobody would enjoy it; usually, once I got going, those feelings went away because I enjoyed making the video.

Why the naps belong in the name

My best friend in Canada came up with Adventures and Naps. I wanted the name to leave room for the good and bad parts of living abroad, including the boring ones. England had been wonderful for me, but there were things that sucked, too. Showing only the exciting bits wouldn’t give the full picture I wanted to share.

I hadn’t expected the community to grow as it had. For years I’d posted videos with very few views, just making things to make them. Having people watch, join the livestreams and support the different platforms still felt hard to believe. The ban had made for a dramatic month, and I was glad to be back.

Watch my full July 2022 questions-and-answers video on YouTube.