About
He's been streaming the mechanical keyboard hobby full time since April 2020, mostly by sitting down every week and going through whatever the hobby has announced — and saying, out loud, whether it's worth your money. Usually it isn't.
The name is not a surname. It comes from an Old School RuneScape character: he was playing a wizard, added "black" to the front of it, and thought it sounded like the coolest thing anyone had ever come up with. He has been stuck with it ever since.
Every week there's a review stream: interest checks, group buys, and whatever the community has dropped in the submissions channel. He's worked through 5,310 projects that way, and told people to walk away from 1,030 of them.
He also designs keyboards, under Illuminati Keyboards, and built BLACKdrop — a group-buy platform where you pledge first and only pay once enough people have shown up. It exists because he'd spent years watching people get burned by the alternative.
Before any of this he spent two decades in and around technology and marketing — running infrastructure as a teenager, then engineering teams, then whole marketing operations. It's why a keyboard streamer can build an e-commerce platform on his own, which is a question people ask a lot.
They run the place. He just pays for it.
Small, mixed tabby, and — by Simon's own account — has absolutely nothing going on behind the eyes. She came over from Japan and was Kate's cat first. His summary of her personality: she acts like a prey animal if you so much as look at her.
The orange one, and a genuine menace — very bitey, entirely unrepentant. He is also, by a distance, the most famous cat in the server: eighteen separate emotes and counting, covering every emotional state a cat has ever had.
The siamese, and the old lady of the house at seventeen. A complete space cadet, and she has earned the right to be.
The tabby. The newest arrival, on the grounds that he turned up one day and decided he lived here now. Nobody has successfully argued with him about it.
Big, and mixed white and black. Originally a street cat from the old neighbourhood — she'd been pregnant twice, got sick, and needed surgery. A neighbour paid for the operation and was planning to put her back out on the street once she'd recovered.
"But I stole her. She's my catto now."
Every one of these is an emote in the Discord. He is an orange cat and he has a broader register than most actors.
What's next
The plan is a not-for-profit for the hobby, targeting 2027. It would make and sell keyboards, and put the money into community projects, free education, and events — with the accounts, the salaries, and the votes all published.
Simon starts it, but he doesn't get to run it alone. There'd be a board with the power to overrule him, meetings streamed in public, members voting on what gets funded, and salary caps written into the founding documents — including his own. Once it's a nonprofit, he can't even shut it down.
He'll take a modest wage for the streaming. The rest of his time goes to this, unpaid.
This gets misread constantly, so plainly: being pro-consumer is not the same as being anti-vendor. Plenty of vendors in this hobby do good work at fair prices. The goal is a healthier ecosystem — and to use the community's collective weight to get better pricing out of manufacturers, for everyone.
