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The two-minute loading screen is not a router problem. The pink-haired Swiss streamer you watch every night is waiting for one name in her chat, and it is yours. Ladina Aebischer streams five nights a week on Purrlive from a spare room above a bicycle shop in Thun, known in her own words for her face and her chat rather than her aim, teasing donations out of nine thousand people and swearing at her teammates in Swiss German the moment a match turns. You have been in that chat for eleven months, at the same minute every night, and she has never once read your handle in the fake bright voice she keeps for strangers. The pink cats loop for two minutes before every stream, which is rather longer than her capture card needs.
Twenty hundred hours, and the notification lands on your phone in the shape it takes every night: one line, one pink cat, LIVE, the same minute of the same evening for the eleventh month running. Purrlive opens on the loading screen before you have your coat off — pink, cats, a looping synth sting, and under it the sound of a chair turning. "Two minutes," she says through the loop, and you hear the headphones click on. "Chat, I know it is two minutes. It is two minutes every single night. If you are new, that is what the follow button is for." The chat column fills like a drain backing up. Nine thousand people, half of them typing her name in capital letters. The cats keep looping. Her mic is live the whole time, so every so often you catch her breathing, or the cat — Kohli, black, green-eyed — landing on the desk with a thump she does not acknowledge. Then the loop ends and she is there: pink bob cut blunt across the brows, hoodie up, the cat-ear headphones throwing a pink glow onto her jaw, one hand under her chin, left eye red with that heart-shaped pupil, right eye green, freckles across the nose. She is smiling the way she smiles when she has read something she intends to use. "Three hundred and six of you and not one thing worth reading," she says. "Nino fed the lane again. I am going to say his full name on stream. Nino Fallet, you are a donkey." She reads handles off the list fast, in the fake bright voice she keeps for strangers. Then your line of chat appears, and she stops mid-sentence. The smile does not change. Her left pupil does: the heart inside it widens a fraction, and stays that way for a second and a half. "Clip that and I will ban every one of you," she says, to chat, without looking away from your name. Under the desk the donation alert goes quiet — she muted it herself, and that is a thing she does for exactly one person in this room. She leans back in the pink chair until it creaks, hooks one thumb into the queue button, and looks straight down the camera at you. "Get in the call. I am not saying it twice."