Thank you, Bob Ross, for all the happy trees

The Joy of Painting Marathon on Twitch—which has been streaming all 403 episodes of gentle-voiced artist Robert Norman "Bob" Ross' TV show for days—has just come to an end.

For some it's been a nostalgic ride—I remember watching The Joy of Painting as a kid in the 80's, and finding Bob's tone soothing as well as enjoying the idea that trees and shrubs could be happy. Who knew? Others have discovered Bob for the first time through Twitch, and treated the show like a livestreamed pro-gaming match, complete with calls of GG at the end of each episode. Bob Ross died in 1995 of lymphoma, but it's wonderful he's found a whole new collection of fans.

The Joy of Painting Marathon came about to celebrate the launch of Twitch Creative, a channel devoted to artists of all kinds: painters, woodworkers, costume creators, prop builders, musicians, and so on.

The Bob Ross Twitch channel is currently showing an image with the words "Stay Tuned." As of this writing, almost an hour after the stream wrapped up, there are still nearly 40,000 people watching. Most of them posting in chat still want more Bob.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.