What is the appeal of DSP?

[leChinkyRaccoon]

Probably three things:

1. He really doesn't learn. Today I caught a recap video where he apparently rage quit RE 0, which I played a few years back finally and despite the fact that I always found the classic RE games clunky and difficult to acclimate to the controls I thought it was pretty easy, got through it quickly and had a good time.
Phil has played RE0 before and beat it. He's played, I believe, all of the classic RE games twice on stream and beat them. He got beat by a game he beat before.

Most if not all of his problems could be solved by implementing some of the easiest to implement suggestions that he gets, the green screen or a gaming PC for instance.

2. He just never shuts the fuck up. When I used to watch him live daily, probably 2019-2020 you know he'd really be on one when his pre-stream would last past an hour and fifteen minutes. Now he's regularly just spewing shit for near two hours pretty regularly from what I understand further cutting into his actual game time. He typically does this reacting to gaming news or news about streamers, youtube, twitch, stuff that's relevant to him. Now if someone joins the stream later and ask him what he thinks about it he'll tell them that he already talked about instead of giving a quick summary.

This recent youtube memberships debacle is a good example. He gets gifted a ton of memberships and the money doesn't add up. He goes on a rant blaming youtube for one thing. Finds out that they were gifted from a foreign country and that's why the money doesn't add up. Blames youtube. Is clearly butthurt about it. "Trolls" realize this is an attack vector and gift memberships. DSP feels robbed by being offered such a pittance and is upset again. This is the ouroboros of his content. Just this never ending stream of consciousness rant style soliloquies while his eyes aimlessly wander the chat.

3. It is at this point to me that the DSP sphere is the most interesting display of just bizarre psychology or sociology or whatever you want to call it. Real fans, fake fans, fake trolls, double agents, trolls trolling trolls. Gay DSP mods who think they'll be welcomed as heroes in detractor communities for leaking some discord logs.

It's like its own ecosystem and while KF has some of the more annoying parts like detractor infighting, (I like this re-streamer fuck you for liking that re-streamer,) and Theo Theories, Kat is Pregnant, Kat is gone, Mama Burnell has moved in etc. they're certainly much less pronounced than in other communities.

All that being said, you can only maintain hardcore interest in DSP for so long, you have to take breaks or at least lower your focus on him from time to time. Other cows on this site certainly have bigger and more shocking moments, and generally they're far far worse people. DSP is not some horrible person who belongs in jail, he's just a guy that can't help himself and if he wasn't such a bad combination of lazy and arrogant he could probably really make a lot more money doing what he does. He's lucky to get ~500 people watching him concurrently at any given time and is probably usually half of that. That being said, Keemstar and RTU talk about him regularly, re-streamers and detractors get a lot of views so there is an immense amount of interesting in DSP, however he is completely unable to make this work in his favor at all. There is something about him that is interesting to a lot of people but he just can't nail down what it is and large part of that is him just accepting that he's a fucking retard.

 

[millais]

The subforum, and the separate threads about gacha-spending, finances, bankruptcy, etc, are very important for accurately connecting the dots and dispelling the so-called "pignosis" effect.

For over a decade, Phil has spewed out on a near-daily basis such a large volume of micro-failures that his macro-failures are often buried and not the most obvious to a cursory examination. The "signal" is often lost in the "noise".

It takes the dedicated threads for people to piece together the true extent of his macro-failures and track his spending and finances over the decade-plus span of his internet footprint. Without these dedicated threads, people trying to find out about Phil's macro-failures will only find the most surface-level takes, often from years-old sources that are long out of date or were not even accurate to begin with. Even so-called detractor channels on YT often get the facts wrong, and to this day people regularly misquote some of the most mind-boggling figures of his macro-failures.

Fore example, you regularly see people mocking Phil for wasting $40k on gacha games, when the actual figure is well over $100k by this point.

 

[Cucktry Roads]

I hopped on the DSP train when Ralph went sober last year. I always said that if Ralph died, I'd just become an AF or DSP troll. Well, AF went and died and with Ralph basically dead, I was bored and hopped on the DSP wagon. I've greatly enjoyed both their content. While Ralph is like a rager of a party, sometimes he's completely inactive, leaving nothing to consume. Meanwhile, DSP is a fine whiskey. You can sit back and enjoy it everyday without ever running out. These 2 lolcows are about the journey not the destination. Neither of their current lifestyles are maintainable and you're watching it in real time. I always like the estimate that Phil has 5 years before he has to get a real job, cause people are crunching his numbers and from 22 to 23, his income was down 20%. And the problem is Phil's attitude. His constant need to lie and attitude dug him into this hole, but he refuses to fix things.

Another amazing different between Ralph and Phil is how hard working the trolls are. 90% of Ralph's content is lost media because clippers are far and few between and Ralph's always deleting stuff or getting banned. Phil on the other hand, people archive fucking everything, upload it to a database that transcribes it, and that creates PigPigGo. Also a lot of the famous trolls that stream are great people. They showcase what positive and chill content is and foster communities, while Phil is toxic af.

 

[Nate Higgers]

Another factor is that Phil isn't an abject monster and he isn't political or culture war related like most of the active cows these days. I can talk with normal people about "that guy who is bad at video games and jacked off on stream" with normies, most of the people I feel comfortable bringing up DSP with already know who he is. He's that infamous, even if the incident is all anyone knows about him.

I wanna second this. I was talking about DSP to my old friend the other day and I mentioned to him that I like occasionally observing Phil’s shenanigans because for the most part he’s just a plain dumbass milquetoast lolcow. Unlike Cobra, Cyraxx, Boogie, Blade, or even CWC, there’s not much there in the way of “oh by the way he’s a pedo*”, “oh by the way he’s a rapist”, “yeah he goes on retarded political rants”, “he’s got a crippling addiction to alcohol/air duster/food”, “he spent six digits on prostitutes”

Basically you’re just watching a useless whiny middle aged man who refuses to change or give up, and then you start hearing his “nothings wrong, I did everything right” copes. And if you’re in the right headspace, you just laugh and laugh because you can’t believe that he’s this deluded and stupid. I have another old friend who’s a huge MGS super fan. I linked him the This Is How You Don’t Play for MGS3 because I wanted his unbiased fresh opinion. First thing he tells me is along the lines of “this is an act right, he’s doing it on purpose? He can’t be this stupid”. I gave him a very brief explanation that yes he is that dumb and he’s bad at everything he plays but I just think it’s funny to see him not only fail but grasp at straws for excuses on why he’s not to blame for failing.

And once you get into the slightly deeper lore of Phil literally rewriting history and past events that he’s recorded and statements he’s made on camera, you get a little more insight into what kind of creature you’re watching.

tl;dr: he’s a little less of a horrorcow compared to some of the classics, IMO.

* = I’m aware of the Pandalee grooming lore but AFAIK it’s not been 100% confirmed that he was talking to her since before she turned 18. Not saying I don’t believe it but it’s just one of those things that seems like a storyline that has yet to be verified

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

I like ADF Phil better. Way funnier.

 

[Amanda Byrnes]

Well, to put it simply, Phil Burnell is a guy who has, ironically, become the example of, “this is how you don’t live.” Phil has the unique ability to squander and fuck up every part of his life and career and it’s all self-inflicted. He’s not a transgender degenerate pedophile or some deranged white trash trailer park neo-nazi who goes on unhinged rants. He’s a boring, middle aged, middle class guy who plays video games for a living. He’s a self-isolating ego maniac and narcissist who blames everyone around him and it’s amusing to see the lengths he will go to protect his ego and this vision of himself.

I’ve been following him since 2013 or 2014, so I’ve dedicated hundreds of hours to watching this dude. This is is only downfall. To follow this dude you have to subject yourself to hours of torture. From about 2010 to 2015 he pretty much spent every waking moment archiving and publishing his life to the Internet. Yet when his sagas happen, such as the recent membership bomb saga, they are quite the spectacle.

 

[BSV]

Thats just wrong and retarded as fuck.
Vidar got me fired, i never contacted his job. In fact, he didnt have a job he ran a janitor business and a ice cream business that bought with his millions of dollars he got from a lawsuit with a cruiseline company that had to file bankruptcy.

I do feel I need to correct the record a little. When I was 4 my family was in a ferry disaster. I got payed an insurance of 25 000 Nok (which is 2500 USD) My parents pocketed that money. There was in fact a lawsuit that Failed. The ship was owned by an american company , and they didn't complete the sale of the ship until a half year after it had burned. However it was insured in a danish company. Under a danish operator. They had sort of made the deal to purchase it and just not completed the transaction.

It's a real complicated issue. I could probably write a book about it. But it's not the topic we are on. I just can't have it on the record that I am a millionaire. Between the years of 2015-2018 I did work with CPS. Around that time you where writing essays about how I was some pedophile on the other side of the country. That actually happened. I quit that job, and I will be fair to you and say there was a number of reasons. But your shit did influence that decision.

Sorry for the OT remarks.

I just pretended to like phil to have some fun with it. BSV was obviously me mimiking metokurs somewhat ironic name. Which divulged in to something fra more insane then I could ever imagine. I did get a lot of genuine entertainment from phil over the years, and I think I conditioned myself in to becoming a real fan for a while. How someone keeps watching and not grow tired over time is a mystery. I can understand a part time fascination. But Some people in the DSP hole seem possesed and seem unable to be free of their delusions.

 

[Preacher ✝]

Thank you all for your replies, keep them coming.

For those this deep in the thread I have a follow up question.

Is Phil actually retarded?

 

[Shirō Ishii]

Thank you all for your replies, keep them coming.

For those this deep in the thread I have a follow up question.

Is Phil actually retarded?

Yes, even though it's never been 100% confirmed but he's definitely on the autism spectrum while his wife is also a retard. One of his biggest achievements was getting Valedictorian at his high school, which is hard to believe when looking at him now. Phil presumably went to a high school filled with basketball type people while having a mother he coddled him and probably had him actually study and do homework which would make his chances of earning valedictorian that much more likely. Additionally, Phil has an autistic schedule which he refuses to change 99% of the time and expects games to have the same pattern over and over and over again. He will rant whenever there's a hint of randomness to not just games but anything else in his life

However, years of being an extreme narcissist, being a hermit, living in a safe space and alcohol abuse has all but ruined his brain. Phil has played every Resident Evil game and still struggles to remember who the main characters are or what the overall story of the games are.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

One of the reasons is how he constantly manages to screw himself over, as is being shown currently by the Argentine members saga. This is a man who has had life on easy street, never known any real hardship or struggle, has a job most people would kill for and has trolls who are incredibly tame compared to others. Yet he genuinely believes he has a tough life and works hard to make good content, and has managed to blow countless opportunities thanks to his own idiocy.

Another is just how unfunny he actually is, it's rather fascinating how he doesn't have a single positive unironic trait. He isn't witty, charismatic, a good singer, intelligent or thoughtful, but has somehow convinced a small handful of people they need to give him $100k a year so he can shout about how developers lie about ping to make their games look better.

 

[millais]

Thank you all for your replies, keep them coming.

For those this deep in the thread I have a follow up question.

Is Phil actually retarded?

Until his early 30s, he used to walk on the balls of his feet when not wearing shoes. That's literally a textbook symptom of developmental retardation in the medical sense.

 

[Incel Death Note]

His streams are like awful B-movies. They're a lot of fun to watch while drinking and shit-talking in chat. They used to be better because it was about his awful gameplay but now he tends to stick to casual games and walking sims so it's more about how bad he is at streaming and the odd shit he says.
He himself is like a sitcom character come to life. There are hundreds of bizarre quirks and strange little lore nuggets but I'll drop a few of my favorite.

• blames his hairline on his mom combing his hair until he was 17
• is 41 and still seethes to this day over a toy his parents didn't buy him
• infamously tried to eat a cup noodle with a spoon "look, it's incredibly difficult to get a spoon of noodle" is a quote
• used to do educational cooking videos, would cook basic shit like tuna sandwiches or scrambled eggs, somehow still fucked up every video
• can't ride a bike or swim
• calls his wife "mom" frequently
• gets incredibly upset if you make fun of his gout or post-nasal drip
• dressed up as Ken from Street Fighter for Halloween, everyone thought he was Hillary Clinton
• viewer offered 200 dollars if he did 25 pushups, he waddled off screen and counted out loud to 25. got pissed when the viewer said he had to do them on camera and banned him
• claims to be an ex-bodybuilder
• accidentally masturbated on stream, says it makes his wife cry when people bring it up

Here is the pushup shenanigan. The guy has done dozens, maybe hundreds of little things like this throughout his streaming career. He's just a really odd person, like a King of the Hill character or something. There's nothing big or flashy, just a lot of moments like this.

 

[RX-0 Unicorn]

Okay, so this might be a little power levelling so if you think it is then slap me with it, but I use to watch Phil back in the very early years, I'm talking 2008 early.

I can tell you the exact moment I gave up on his content because it was even before the incident, I had completely forgotten all about him until a few years ago when a few friends made jokes about him which peeked my interest but not enough to poke my head back in.

After coming to the farms and seeing the sheer amount of stuff just on Phil alone drew me back in, others have said it earlier in this thread about the "mystery" so to say, of him still being around and it's just so amusing that even from 14 years ago he hasn't really changed. That alone is interesting in and of itself but there is just so much information to read that it just draws you in.

Sure Phil is boring but it's the small moments that really make him interesting, you just have to wade through a load of shite to get to the nuggets of gold.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

DSP is one of the Internet's most fascinating cases of Dunning-Kruger, dishonesty, delusion and somehow in spite of all that he manages to keep trucking on without having learned or changed even the slightest bit.

 

[Guinan's hats]

he clearly has undiagnosed autism, but instead of being obsessed with trains or whatever his special thing was "being a youtuber" for the 3-4 years he was actually successful at it (when there was no competition)

and that's funnier than you might think it is.

 

[Lt. Jim Dangle]

People keep saying Phil blew a lot of opportunities. Can someone name some of these opportunities? Are they like sponsorship deals or something?

 

[Caligura]

I always just thought DSP maintains some popularity and lolcowdom, purely because of Grandfather's Clause.

He's a 'OG lolcow' like JustinRPG, despite both being kinda irrelevant these days.

 

[Kane lives in death]

People keep saying Phil blew a lot of opportunities. Can someone name some of these opportunities? Are they like sponsorship deals or something?

- He was very popular at his time (in part because he was manipulating youtube but honestly good for him on that one), but he refused to adapt, his content has just gotten worse over the years, his streams are insanely boring so his views would be dead if it wasnt for the thousands of detractors and his 200-300 real fans. hours of nothing podcasts, hours of shitty gameplay where the decades old gamer gets handholded by chat...
- He had a young atractive girlfriend that for some reason was really into him, but then she matured and he refused to do the same so she left and now he is married to warever Kat is.
- Even though his career is on the downturn, he has gained absurd amounts of money in this past 15 years, if he was smart right now he could have a huge amount of money getting ready to retire, but as far as i know he has 0 savings, he has not even paid off his house and prefers to drop tens of thousands on WWE champions.
- He also refuses to do any sponsorships, i dont know why but it might be so he can feel superior to the rest of youtubers, he usually calls them paid shills.



He was given the keys of having sucesfull content creator career, having a decent relationship, having a lot of money to retire. Its absurd how 15 years ago he was given everything to succeed at life and he blew it all up

 

[Jaracainofthewind]

I honestly always claim he is the thinking man's lolcow. Ironically, for him being quite the retard. But the trick is he doesn't do fun fat retard shenanigans that are easy to point at and laugh. If you come here expecting football to the crotch, you are here for the wrong reason.

I am here because Phil is just wrong. Incorrect. He is slightly off skew from the rest of the world. He acts like an adult, yet has an even more childish and naïve view than kids playing house. He calls himself a pro gamer yet can't figure out how to crouch jump. Acts as if he is an old hand internet celebrity, and was only best known as Guru Larry's favorite punchline.

But the reason you really stick around is to wait to see when he finally realizes this. And in the meantime, you are here to watch him tie himself into knots to avoid the cognitive dissonance. Its what makes his prestreams so much fun. But you have to be able to stomach and enjoy a man lying to himself and the few idiots who still haven't added all the math up.

And its those frequent brief glimpses when he actually hits reality. Thats the gold dust. Like computer programs don't acclimate to your concept of reality. So cold hard code reminding him of his place in the world? *That* is why TIHYDPs are so good. They just crack his world view a little.

Otherwise its just watching the world do that to him, and the fun ways he lies to himself to patch the cracks. Its small little hits, and they can be hard to understand. But thats why he is my personal cow.

EDIT: Actually the most crystalized Phil I think, to provide a concrete example, is him arguing with Turkey Tom about the title a Decade of Failure. A normal lolcow would get all mad and outright refuse the concept. But Phil? He sat down and acted as if a Decade of Decline was a better title. As if he was willing to concede that he was a fuck up, but didn't quite realize that was the point he was conceding. He was gonna meet Turkey Tom 97% of the way there, and act as if that was a huge win. And if you don't find that idea hilarious, then DSP might not be right for you.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

People keep saying Phil blew a lot of opportunities. Can someone name some of these opportunities? Are they like sponsorship deals or something?

One thing @Kane lives in death didn't mention that I think is very important to mention is the networking opportunities Machinima tried to give him back in the day, whether it be with figures in the gaming industry or trying to get him to get a job as a fighting game commentator as a side gig or to do after he gets tired of the whole Youtuber thing. Phil thought that what Machinima tried to do was stoopid (his own words) and now he has zero connections to the industry and zero prospects to get an actual job besides being a minimum wage slave. He could've easily saved up a bunch of money and spent some on an investment manager who would make him independently wealthy, or he could've easily used any connections he could've gotten back in the day to pivot into an easy 6 figure do-nothing consulting "job" but he didn't, he hasn't and now he has to beg literal retards for literal grocery money.