That video has David Lee Roth laying out the truth about the long-standing legend around him trashing a dressing room in Colorado because he found a brown M&M on the snack table. The truth about this has been known since the 90s; Crazy from the Heat, The Dave's wildly popular and well-regarded autobiography, was published in late 1997, and even before that he had given a handful of interviews where he had explained the entire story, in much the same manner as in the video.

I'm not going to rehash the entire story, but the salient bits are as follows: Van Halen was the heaviest show on the road at the time and many venues couldn't actually meet all of their technical requirements, and those that could had to follow the tech rider to the letter to make sure everything was safe and correct. They buried a clause in the middle of the rider requiring a bowl of M&Ms with no brown ones, and if any brown M&Ms were found the contract specified they could call the show without refunds, and had the right to trash the dressing room. This gave them an easy way to spot-check that the rider had been fully read and followed, and every time that clause wasn't met they would find serious technical issues with the setup, some of which could be life-threatening.

The real story is better than the legend, especially when you understand that the entire purpose was, as so much in technical theater is and has been as long as theater has existed, to keep people from getting killed. One thing that always stuck out to me, however, that The Dave doesn't really bring attention to and other people talking about this never really bring up, is that the way the contract was set up kept the heat on the band, and in particular on already-notorious capital-R Rockers Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth. It didn't put the burden of dealing with contract deficiencies on their crew, whether the road crew or their management. They found a way to handle it themselves and to make sure the venue owners and promoters, who only care about the bottom line, had a very immediate reason to care. Trashing a dressing room isn't great, but it set the tone and as far as I or anyone else are aware they never did it again or had to do it again.

Whatever else we might think about Van Halen, every stagehand loves and appreciates Eddie and Dave for this. They set a new precedent for the whole industry; these days, riders usually go straight into the hands of the local crew instead of being filtered through the venue owners or promoters, so that we can do things right the first time, and if that includes spending a paid hour picking brown M&Ms out of the snack bowl, hey, that's fine by me.

Capitalists and landlords often just want to cut corners and pocket the difference; we want to keep people safe, and so did Van Halen.

Expect better. Expect the people whose back you have to have yours as well. You deserve it. We all do.

I'm a regular viewer of a few "popular" vtubers Amano Pikamee, Mori Calliope and, most recently, Kureiji Ollie. They are all great performers; Calliope's... actor? even had/has a separate and quite successful music and visual art career as DEMONDICE's Karen that started well before being recruited by Hololive.

So what about the performers that didn't already have a performing career?

There's an industry standard around many performers working in "new media" (and what a fucking term that is for a multi-billion dollar industry) that not only denies them credits but enforces a complete lack of their own identity. It's most easily visible with vtubers; note again that there is no easily-visible connection between Mori Calliope and DEMONDICE. You can look at Kson ONAIR, another active vtuber who was previously the performer behind Kiryu Coco; while lucky enough to have parlayed her success as Coco into growing her (like Karen, already-extant) fanbase as Kson, and the connection between Kson and Coco being rather an open secret, you will not find anything linking Coco to Kson "officially" anywhere. You can also see it in other types of online content; for example, the cook performers for Chefclub receive no onscreen credits, and, indeed, it's hard to impossible to find credits for them anywhere (except, of course, for the founding Lang brothers that own and profit from the property).

This is reprehensible, and an intolerable break from centuries of practice in theater, stage, cinema and television. The modern standard since the 70s (for English-speaking TV and cinema, at least) has been credits for all workers on a production barring extras. Not only the performers, but everyone including the grips and carps, gets a credit. Stage won't always include all the crew in the show programme but will always at least include the entire cast. This is important because a performer's resume or portfolio is their list of credits! In many cases, this is also true of technical/crew roles; a lighting designer, for instance, will grow their career based on the lighting they did on past shows.

So how the hell does this work if even the performers not only don't get credits but are contractually barred from claiming them?! It's obvious that this is an industry norm that only helps large agencies like Cover Corp or ANYCOLOR Inc. (the companies controlling Hololive and Nijisanji, respectively). The fact that it's a norm that's so pervasive that even independent performers who otherwise might be perfectly happy to claim their performance credit as a vtuber, streamer or what-have-you might be hesitant to do so is a real problem, and the fact that some fans - or, indeed, other performers who have bought into this idea - are happy to discipline performers who link their real identity with their work on the basis of "immersion" is absolutely criminal!

Claim your credits! Build your portfolios! Your career as a performer shouldn't be circumscribed because a bunch of capitalists have found a new way to keep their talent under their thumb.

Also: Ada Basilisk and Koffy are independent vtubers who are friends of mine and already know this stuff and deserve support, check them out!

Looks like we're back to regular crashes again. Suppose I should try to fix those.