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miaclemeverett · 2 years

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Mourning Technoblade: Fans Grieve a Minecraft Star They Never Met

The expert gamer built a following of millions of mostly young players on YouTube, without revealing his name or face.

Late last month, more than 10.4 million subscribers to a YouTube channel received a notification that usually brought good news: Technoblade, an expert Minecraft player, had posted a new video.

For fans, each new video held the promise of Technoblade’s warm humor, whether he was winning a tournament or going on an inexplicable quest to produce more potatoes than anyone else in a Minecraft minigame.

But when fans clicked play on this latest video, called “so long nerds,” it was immediately obvious something was wrong. Instead of showing Minecraft gameplay, a man identifying himself as Technoblade’s father appeared. He announced that his son, whose first name was Alex, had died after being diagnosed with cancer.

The video has been viewed more than 72.9 million times since it was published on June 30 as the fans who used to look forward to Technoblade’s notifications try to process the death of someone they have known only through a screen.

Social media is flooded with fan art, tributes and links to grief resources. Memorials have been erected within Minecraft, including a digital book that had been signed by more than 377,000 people.

The grief has ricocheted offline, including into the home of Noelle, 13, and her sister Ilana, 11, who had recently told their aunt to name her baby Technoblade.

In a video call from their home near Toronto, Noelle said she learned that Alex had died on her last day of school.

“I was just a mess,” she said. “I was just sitting in my room crying. I didn’t know what to do.”

Ilana, who dressed up as Technoblade’s avatar, a pig in a crown, for Halloween, said, “I don’t like to bring up the topic when I am just sitting with others.”

They both started watching Alex’s videos in late 2020. They liked his lighthearted banter with other Minecraft players and how he would monologue about the absurdity of routine parts of life, like using, and losing, a box to carry soap to a communal shower in college.

Coping With Grief and Loss

Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ.

What Experts Say: Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.

How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.

A New Diagnosis: Prolonged grief disorder, a new entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss.

The Biology of Grief: Grief isn’t only a psychological experience. It can affect the body too, but much about the effects remains a mystery.

Alex spoke over screen recordings of himself playing Minecraft, the immensely popular video game developed by Mojang Studios in which players can create their own world piece by piece and compete against others online. The game developer was later bought by Microsoft.

The guided gameplay had garnered such a following that the company made a tribute to Technoblade on its launch page after he died. Mojang Studios said Technoblade “became synonymous with a source of good” in an emailed statement.

Among Technoblade’s most beloved game adventures was his whimsical quest to make more potatoes than anyone else in Minecraft, a feat first documented in The Great Potato War video, which had 35.8 million views.

In the video, Alex makes several references to Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” as he tries to topple the top potato producer at the time, a player who uses the moniker im_a_squid_kid. After Technoblade sees that his competition has created a rendering of the Mona Lisa in his Minecraft lair, he declares that im_a_squid_kid is not just “a potato madman, but a potato supervillain.”

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Shielding an offline identity

In Alex’s videos, he talked about going to college (and dropping out to play Minecraft full time) and made occasional references to his family, but there was a clear boundary between Alex, the son and brother, and Technoblade. His family has sought to maintain that privacy since his death and declined to be interviewed.

Alex announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer in an August 2021 video threaded with jokes in which he also mentioned that he was 22 at the time. He did not specify what type of cancer he had, but his followers assumed that he had sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that is found in bone and soft tissues, because he created a fund-raiser for the Sarcoma Foundation of America on his YouTube page. He had raised more than $500,000 for the organization before the “so long nerds” video was published.

The foundation, which created a special donation page for Technoblade, said that an estimated 17,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with sarcoma in 2022, and more than 7,200 people will die from the disease.

After Alex died, his fans encouraged eligible people to donate blood to help cancer patients.

Riley, a 21-year-old in Connecticut, routinely donates blood in honor of a friend who died of sarcoma, and she made her most recent donation in Technoblade’s honor. She said his death was all the more difficult because of her earlier loss. “I was bawling like a baby for a couple hours,” she said. (Riley spoke on the condition that her last name not be used because she has faced online harassment.)

She has played Minecraft for about 10 years, but she did not discover Technoblade until the early days of the pandemic when she was working grueling shifts at a grocery store. “There was not a lot of joy in my life being an essential worker,” she said.

She liked Technoblade’s humor and introduced his videos to some of her co-workers, who were reminded of his famous potato war at work. “We were stocking potatoes one night and we just started laughing,” she said.

Technoblade inspired Riley to start broadcasting videos of herself playing video games, or streaming, under the name Notable_Crayon. It has been a great way to unwind, she said, but it has also shown her why someone as popular as Technoblade would protect his offline identity.

Occasionally people will figure out Riley’s full name and send her “creepy” messages, she said. She also has a friend who was the victim of swatting, false reports of crimes in progress intended to draw armed police to the victim’s home. Her friend was not hurt, but others have been harmed, with one man killed by the police and another dying of a heart attack.

In the “so long nerds” video, Alex’s father read a letter that he said his son wrote about eight hours before he died. In the letter, Alex acknowledged the consequences of sharing personal information online and revealed that he and a sibling had successfully convinced online fans that his first name was Dave by using the name in a 2016 video, which was later deleted.

Alex said the prank resulted in “thousands of creepy online dudes trying to get overly personal, going, ‘Oh hey, Dave, how’s it going?’”

Navigating the loss of an online friend

For some fans, the mystery of Alex’s identity has added a confusing layer to the muddle of grief.

Richard England, a vicar at Crofton Parish on the south coast of Britain, said that his teenagers were both devastated by Alex’s death and that they had a few conversations about how not knowing Technoblade’s offline identity affected their grieving.

“Through this new online, offline world we have, many of them will feel like they will know Technoblade and other members of those online communities better than they know kids in their own school,” Mr. England, 47, said. “They will have spent just as much time with them.”

In Canada, Noelle and Ilana’s mother, Janice, admitted she was skeptical at first about the idea that you could have fun watching videos of someone else playing video games. But she said the girls had educated her about the Minecraft world and its personalities, which she now appreciates.

Janice, 52, was well suited to handle her children’s grief about Technoblade because she said she previously worked with children in grief as a child life specialist, a role that helps children and families cope with stress they experience because of health problems, hospitalization and bereavement.

She said that adults tend to want to protect children from uncomfortable feelings, but that it was important to give them space to express, or not express, how they were feeling about Technoblade.

“If we help our children through grief when they experience it,” she said, “then they will be better able to cope with it when they are older and have other situations in their lives that would cause them to be grieving.”

In the video call with her daughters, Janice said her sister in Maryland had called after Technoblade died, because her son was also a big fan. The boy had decided to raise money for the sarcoma foundation, Janice said, prompting Ilana to turn toward her mother and ask: “Is there a way I can help him with that?”

#technoblade #posting this because i thought this was so well done and i know the paywall might stop people from being able to read it <3 #Youtube

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smithyyyy · 2 years

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a toast to technoblade

when i got home from school, the first thing i’d do was check my computer, my youtube notifications. it was so exciting to see the little 1 next to the notification bell, especially when it alerted me to a technoblade upload or video.

i watched all of his videos when i discovered the channel in early april, 2020, and then rewatched them again. when i’d had a bad day, i would load up a youtube tab and be hit with a familliar -

“Welcome guys, to another episode of skywars...”

His videos always made my day.

i remember him hitting 1 million subcribers and the elbow reveal, i remember the ultimate trilogy of the potato war and his rivalry with im_a_squid_kid, i remember technoblade absolutely destroying dream in a pvp match in a mr beast video, i remember how ranboo and technoblade jointly discovered ranboo’s potential to be a protaganist, i remember the speech he made when activating the withers in manburg, i remember how he became sand during the $10′000 refrigerator contest.

i remember the video titled ‘where i’ve been’

i remember the shock, the disbelief, the sadness i felt

i remember the lighthearted way he joked about cancer and the reaction from his health insurance.

i remember the second video titled ‘i almost became an amputee’

i remember how again, his humor never faltered, and he continued to make content - the stream with the revengers and saving michael, and the vr minecraft video

i remember the announcement

i remember that i was on holiday in a motorhome, driving up the inland roads of north queensland when my phone pinged. i opened up youtube, and on 360p, with two bars of connection, i watched technoblade’s dad and floof walk up to the chair. i heard techno’s last message, and his mum’s note at the end.

i cried

i was so upset.

this grounding, down to earth person, this brotherly internet figure, had died.

I remember that i was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021, and was having a hard time coming to terms with it, with what this meant for the rest of my life, so i clicked on the newest technoblade upload, the $100′000 mr beast analysis.

i remember i had found out he had ADHD too, and i felt relieved.

“hey, technoblade is cool and awesome and successful, and he has ADHD, so i should be alright”

and all of my concerns were alleviated

this guy, this funny, intellegent, strategic, strong person, had vanished from my life forever.

never again will technoblade upload or stream or tweet

but myself, and i’m sure that the entire community, will remember him

just like i remember

we will cherish the memory of Technoblade

the memory of the blood god

the potato king

the best minecraft monday competitor this world has ever seen

the man who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity

the second worst thing that ever happened to those orphans

and the first worst thing that ever happened to cancer

as of this post, technoblade hit 14 million subscribers, and i am so proud

when the sleepy bois that remain, phil, wilbur and tommy, get in a call together or meet up irl, it will always be 4/4, because technoblade will always be there in our hearts

so i raise a toast to technoblade, for all the people he helped and inspired, for the content that formed a community and brought people together, who changed so many lives -

my life

the lives of techno’s friends

and the lives of his millions of subscribers and dedicated fans

he made this world a better place and he will be missed

Technoblade Never Dies

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please donate to Sarcoma Foundation of America, the link is here - https://www.curesarcoma.org/

and please donate to charities for cancer research

#technoblade #technoblade never dies #we will miss you techno #cancer #dsmp #minecraft #sarcoma #please donate to sarcoma foundation

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mcytfangame · 1 year

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The Potato Wars

Gain the most potatoes in this idle game, inspired by the YouTube minecraft-based series The Great Potato War, by Technoblade. In this Cookie Clicker-esque game, you play as Technoblade himself, competing against your arch nemesis im_a_squid_kid to be the first player to collect a total of 100,000 potatoes. Build potato minions and add upgrades.

#MCYT #MCYT fan art #Technoblade #The Potato Wars #clicker game #Play in a browser #MCYT fangame

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fictionfixations · 1 year

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Inspirational Person Research Paper

bro i did a whole essay thing for Techno and I kind of just ranted for some of it because I really like talking about like the potato war especially and everything he did and just

A--- LOOK

“Technoblade never dies.” This is one of the most famous quotes from Technoblade ever, where he’s usually doing some cool thing in Minecraft, be it winning a duel, roleplaying in a server as an antagonistic-like character, or just saying it for the meme, it is likely that you have at least seen it once. Especially since according to YouTube’s tribute to Technoblade called “Technoblade Never Dies”, it’s stated that “an average of 300 new videos with ‘Technoblade Never Dies’ in the title are uploaded every day.” Technoblade, or Alex was born on June 1st, 1999, and died around June of 2022 at the young age of 23. He lived in San Francisco, California, and had three sisters and one brother, as well as a dog named Floof. He’s taken a fencing class before in middle school and was in California for the start of his career in YouTube until after his gap year in 2018 where he graduated high school, moved to Chicago, Illinois, started college and became an English major for over a year before dropping out and returning to San Francisco. An addition to this is that he’s been diagnosed with ADHD, yet it is unsure of when, but in a post on a Hypixel Forum from September 27, 2014, he states, “I have ADHD, that was a fully comprehensible and flowing paragraph of nonstop wisdom to me,” to a post with a long sentence that contains zero breaks or pauses. The first reason he is inspirational to me had to be back in July of 2020, where he was invited as backup for Calvin & xNestorio in Minecraft Ultimate because half of their team had dropped out, but since Technoblade is known as a professional at PVP, the organizer said that if Techno joined, then they would have to be the only 3-player team in a game with 56 other teams, equaling to 217 players not including their team according to the side bar in the video, but there might be less due to old members possibly still counting.

In this tournament, he absolutely nerfed everyone alongside his team, starting the Technoplane meme when he flew around with his elytra while his teammates rode on top of him, and breaking the old record of the highest number of kills in the tournament with a combined 116 kills, with the previous record being 19.

The event had raised $36,264 for charity, which almost a third of that he raised, the exact number being $11,625, which was donated to the Miracle Foundation, a charity that supports orphans. It's also ironic because it's been a running joke that his parents were killed by orphans, and in fact has a sword in the Dream SMP called "Orphan Obliterator". The second would have to be The Potato War (Late 2019-Mid 2020), when Technoblade had seen that he had been making a ton of potatoes (242,000/day) on Minecraft due to potato minions on a server called Hypixel, in one of its games called Skyblock, and decided to get the #1 rank on the potato leaderboard, which you get by having farmed the most potatoes. It was also because he was in the top 50 already, and the #1 was a guy called im_a_squid_kid.

With his goal confirmed, he decides to get to know his enemy by going through the forums on Hypixel.net and discovered a post from September where Squid Kid bragged about being rank #1 in potatoes, having 4 million during then. Technoblade went through his profile and found a post weeks later where he had stated that he was around 7 million, so then Technoblade put the two dates together and calculated the slope to estimate Squid Kid’s growth, but then later found out he could just go to his island and figure it out from there.

Basically, so on and so on where Technoblade tends to one-up Squid Kid, meanwhile Squid Kid is still a few steps behind. By around after the first video, I’m not sure if he already streamed before, but he was doing twitch streams as due to being in Techno’s video led to more viewers for him and helped grow his community.

In fact, in I believe the third video, Squid Kid actually complained about being unable to replant potatoes immediately after picking them up compared to melons or watermelons, which are much more efficient to farm because you don’t need to replant them, while for potatoes, with a huge multi-layer farm, half of that time spent on the potatoes is replanting them, and by the time you go back to the bottom, some of them have already regrown. But due to this, the admins added a new update where the potatoes replant when you have a hoe with the enchantment called “replenish”, which is a custom enchant.

The two had also been working hard on getting bonuses to help get even more potatoes farmed that included the legendary rabbit pet, which had a farming bonus where farming minions work 0.3% faster and leveling it up to 100 got a bonus of 30%.

In fact, in the second video, it is revealed that Technoblade has chests upon chests of materials for Flycatchers, which increases the speeds of minions by 10%. The problem with that is that it’s hard to create them in the first place, because they have less than a 1% chance to drop from a high-level tarantula boss, and then need over 10 million coins worth of tarantula silk. And despite having chests and chests full of materials, all of it combined could only make 24 Flycatchers, which you use for individual minions.

That’s not even mentioning how since he needed to level his legendary rabbit pet in the same video, he grinded alchemy since they level based off skill experience, which is a rich man’s skill, meaning if you have the cash, then you can level quickly. By the end of it in fact, he ended up ranked #4 in Alchemy.

Technoblade had also been watching every one of Squid Kid’s livestreams on Twitch to where he amassed 9k channel points, which you get overtime for free by watching their stream.

He had also crawled through Squid Kid’s farm and timed all his minions with a stopwatch every day to calculate about the exact number of potatoes harvested.

The point is, there were a lot of tactics used to get one step ahead of the other, until it eventually ended in the 3rd episode, where they decided to end it at first person to earn 500 million potatoes, and the owner of the server Hypixel, who also goes by Hypixel pitched in, stating that the winner gets a surprise.

Of course, Technoblade won, and the surprise turned out to be 3 exclusive items, that being the Potato Talisman, given to anyone who spoke to the NPC labeled “Potato King” which had Technoblade’s skin. There was also Basket of Hope from the Great Potato War, which was for those ranked top #1000 in the Potato leaderboard, or Potato Collection according to the Hypixel wiki, as well as the Potato War Silver Medal for the player ranked 2nd, aka Squid Kid, and the Potato Crown for Technoblade.

Lastly, my third reason had to be in his fight against cancer and how he treated it. In the video titled, “where I’ve been”, posted August 27, 2021, he explains where he had been and what was going on. In fact, he says that his arm had been hurting, and when he got it checked out, the doctors said he had cancer. In fact, he had Sarcoma. According to curesarcoma.org, or the SFA (Sarcoma Foundation of America), which is a charity that Technoblade had started a fundraiser for back in February of this year (Minecrafters vs Cancer), which raised $119,420 according to the SBI wiki over the fundraiser, Sarcoma is a cancer that has many subtypes since it can be anywhere in the tissue, which is also everywhere on our body. It’s mainly in the limbs, and tend to be hidden deep inside the body, which means Sarcoma tends to be diagnosed when it is already too large to be able to be cured.

Sarcoma has a chance of being cured by surgery, or surgery with chemotherapy, which we know Technoblade took. In fact, in TommyInnit’s video called “100 Minecraft YouTubers VS Natural Disasters!” posted on March 5th, 2022, towards the end, Technoblade states that he must get chemo (short for chemotherapy) in fifteen minutes.

Despite all of this, he still makes a joke about it in his past videos where he talks about it, especially in his “I Almost Became An Amputee” video where he talks about where they trolled him because they say that the treatment’s going fine and so is his arm (which has the tumor). Then 3 days later he met up with his radiation therapist who talked to his surgeon, stating that they might need to amputate his arm next week because the tumor is swelling dangerously due to cells dying off, and that it might be too late.

A few days later, they’re in the waiting room with the reception and he must fill out this form such as if he’s ever had surgery before, and including dates, so then he goes onto his phone to see, and he sees a new procedure on November 8th called ‘Arm Amputation’. He found it funny and joked about it being called arm amputation, saying in the video, “why would they call the procedure arm amputation? Like- Like you’re gonna get the tumor as well, right? … Like I’m gonna wake up on the operating room table, and I’m gonna like push myself up with my one arm and I’m gonna be like, ‘Doc! Doc, did you get the cancer?’ and he's gonna be like, ‘You have cancer? Wow, that’s crazy, you should see a doctor about that.’”

Techno treated it lightheartedly, so when in June of 2022 the news of his death reached the internet, everyone was caught off guard.

Another thing he did that I wasn’t sure where to put was another charity for SFA, for his stream on YouTube labeled, “Minecraft But Viewers Control The Game [CHARITY EVENT]” where viewers could donate to either help or sabotage Techno as he plays Minecraft with his friends on September 25, 2021. There, he raised a total of $363,495, which according to SFA’s Technoblade Tribute, overall raised over 500k. My point is, is that Technoblade is an amazing and inspirational person who stayed strong throughout it all to the bitter end, and while he may be gone from this world now, “Technoblade Never Dies.” He will never die because he will live on from his friends’ memories and from their posts, from videos he’s been in, and new videos that are still coming out now about him, as well as any work of art. Therefore, while he may has left physically, his memory will forever be preserved on the internet. ----- Sources ----- (i was supposed to have only 3 lMfao)

YouTube. “Technoblade Never Dies.” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Oct. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_fZjGm2OrM.

“Technoblade.” Wikitubia, https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Technoblade.

Lol Technoblade | Hypixel - Minecraft Server and Maps. https://hypixel.net/threads/lol-technoblade.185404/.

technothepig. “Absolutely Ruining a $36,000 Minecraft Tournament.” YouTube, YouTube, 2 Aug. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAACnDkKqFo.

“Minecraft Ultimate.” Sleepy Bois Inc Wiki, https://sleepy-bois-inc.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Ultimate#Season_2.

technothepig. “Skyblock: The Great Potato War.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qjnDd1rsII.

technothepig. “Skyblock: Potato War 2.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Mar. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAEqgfAts4.

technothepig. “Skyblock: Potato War 3 (Finale).” YouTube, YouTube, 13 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CeBwGbCeg&t=73s.

“Rabbit Pet.” Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki, https://hypixel-skyblock.fandom.com/wiki/Rabbit_Pet#:~:text=Bonus%20stats%3A,%E2%9C%A6%20Speed%3A%20%2B0.2%20per%20level.

“The Great Potato War.” Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki, https://hypixel-skyblock.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Potato_War. automatic replanting potatoes | Hypixel - Minecraft Server and Maps. https://hypixel.net/threads/automatic-replanting-potatos.3023907/. technothepig. “Where I've Been.” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Aug. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9_aYyEDMD0.

“Patient Resources- What Is Sarcoma? Treatments & More.” Sarcoma Foundation of America, 5 Jan. 2022, https://www.curesarcoma.org/sarcoma-resources/patient-resources/.

“Minecrafters vs Cancer.” Sleepy Bois Inc Wiki, https://sleepy-bois-inc.fandom.com/wiki/Minecrafters_Vs_Cancer.

“100 Minecraft Youtubers vs Natural Disasters!” YouTube, YouTube, 5 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h61SlPZfWfw.

technothepig. “I Almost Became an Amputee.” YouTube, YouTube, 23 Dec. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG1Q1ouemVA.

technothepig. “So Long Nerds.” YouTube, YouTube, 30 June 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPMluEVUqS0.

technothepig. “Minecraft but Viewers Control the Game [Charity Event].” YouTube, YouTube, 25 Sept. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHKsjtB9Q30.

“Made for Fundraisers.” Tiltify, https://tiltify.com/+team-technoblade/tests35352.

Saunders, Cindy. “Technoblade Tribute.” Sarcoma Foundation of America, 31 Oct. 2022, https://www.curesarcoma.org/technoblade-tribute/.

#technoblade #research paper #LOOK AT THIS #im pretty sure i did too much ;__;#technoblade never dies #inspirational person

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