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By Ryan Smith
Senior Pop Culture & Entertainment Reporter
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Brandon "Bashurverse" Ashur, the Minecraft YouTube star and Twitch streamer more recently known to fans as Toasty Time, has died at the age of 36.
Ashur, whose YouTube channel garnered 1.58 million followers, had been documenting his battle with the virus on his Twitter account, revealing one month before his passing that he had the novel coronavirus and pneumonia.
Ashur's sister, Anesa Ashur, announced his death on Monday in a Facebook post that was subsequently shared to Reddit and across Twitter.
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Sharing a series of throwback photos of herself with her late sibling, Anesa Ashur wrote: "Brandon Dylan Ashur. There are so many things I could say but I don't think I could even put our lives into words if I wanted to. Why is this beast so terrible? Why did it have to get you?
"You have faced so many challenges in your 36 years, never would I imagine we would lose you to a pandemic. You are one of the strongest people I know, and pushed through no matter what the Internet said, no matter people wanted to think.... you proved how amazing of a soul you are. I love you, to the moon and back."
Continuing her heartfelt tribute, she added: "my brother fought covid, and unfortunately lost the battle. He has moved so many people through streaming. His 1.5 million on YouTube. The endless streamers on twitch.
"He fought so many demons all while saving millions of people without even realizing it. I cannot believe [this] is happening. He withstood every stupid comment made by the people who wanted him to fail. He was amazing. He is amazing. I hate this so much."
Brandon Ashur kept his more than 333,000 Twitter followers abreast of his fight with COVID-19 over the past several weeks, after initially revealing that he became ill on August 7.
He wrote on August 12: "5th day with covid. Dad gave it to me, he's in the hospital on oxygen. This is the worst, would not recommend getting."
On August 15, Ashur revealed that he was in the hospital and was battling "covid and pneumonia at the same time," which he described as "pure hell."
Two days later, he was moved into an intensive care unit, from where he shared a photo of himself hooked up to intravenous lines.
"Still in the ICU on oxygen, its hell," Ashur tweeted on August 23, before urging, "please get your vaccine you don't want this. Not going to lie I was very close to death, now I'm slowly fighting back."
Sharing a snapshot of his severely bruised wrist, he tweeted on August 26: "When I can type better and recover I'll show you some of the worst parts of covid recovery you don't want to experience.
"Like daily wrist shots into a major artery. Extremely painful. There's more horror you have to go through."
"Another fun thing about having Covid, I get two shots in my stomach everyday," he wrote on the micro-blogging platform that same day.
His final tweet came minutes later, when he explained to a follower why he was getting the aforementioned shots: "It prevents blood clots while you're [bedridden]."
Ashur initially enjoyed YouTube fame more than a decade ago via his scripted Minecraft series The Legend of the Hobo and his vlog series, BashDoesThings.
Rising to fame under the name Bashurverse, he subsequently changed his moniker to Toasty Time, after returning from a two-year hiatus in 2019. Under his new direction, he gained 166,000 followers on Twitch.
In 2015, Ashur threatened to quit YouTube, as he defended himself against allegations that he had sexually assaulted a minor years beforehand.
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