Lack of updates
I initially started this blog with the intent of keeping a diary of sorts and to give some insight as to what it’s like to be trans. Unfortunately I haven’t been in much of a mood to post about things. When I’m in a good mood I forget to make a post and when I’m in a crap mood I don’t have the motivation to write a post and if I did, it would most likely just be “I feel like crap”.
That being said, I do want to start posting more so I’m going to try and post more regularly than every 4-6 months.
Recent enjoyment
Recently I discovered a game called NeosVR, which is like GMod, VRChat and a game engine had a baby. You can import more-or-less any model, texture, media clip or what-have-you in to the world you’re in and basically make the world in the same way as you would in a conventional game engine. All the logic can be accessed through inspector windows and anything can be customised.
The game gives you some basic things to start with, but you don’t have to keep them and can pick-and-choose what you want and what you don’t.
Other than Neos (which does chug on my current CPU), I’ve also been playing a fair few games with TheVirtualFloof and other members of the Floof Gang (OwO!).
Floof Gang OwO
Whilst hanging around the Neos discord, I started watching a few streams of Neos, one of which happened to be TheVirtualFloof’s. I started following Floof around the start of August and have slowly gotten more and more acquainted with him and the Floof Gang community (even getting mod in the process :O). I haven’t yet worked up the courage to use my actual voice in the voice channels, mainly because I hate it and people would probably immediately misgender me. I currently get by with using a TTS program and using VoiceMeter to fire that back into a mic that discord, VRChat or other game can use.
Though every time I even attempt to train my voice, my anxiety flares right up and I then shy away from it… I think I’m going to try harder to train my voice to at least sound neutral, my current goal is to get it to a point where it’s not all growley and shit when Floof reaches 5k followers on Twitch.
New PC Parts
I’ve sorta been wanting to get back into streaming for a while, but the stuff I want to stream (namely VR) needs a lot of cpu time by itself, add on a web browser for chat monitoring/moderation and my current CPU (an i7 6700K with a 4.4GHz OC) starts struggling to keep up. Commonly in VRChat when there’s more than 4 people my CPU will struggle to keep up with rendering the frames, and that’s without adding streaming on top of it.
Recently AMD announced and released their 3rd gen Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs and so I decided that it was time for an upgrade.
I went with their top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5950X to ensure that I wouldn’t need to upgrade for the next few years (my current CPU/MB were bought shortly after they were release if my memory is correct), an X570 Motherboard (I didn’t go too high-end with the motherboard choice, I was mainly after something that looks like it’d work reliably and do what I need) and a new kit of 32GB (2×16) 3200MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM (whilst I could have used my old stuff, that was only 2400MHz and the two different sets of RAM had slightly different timings). I also got water cooling components to keep the new stuff cool and keep my pc quieter, though I’m still waiting on the waterblock for my GPU (maybe by the end of the month) and some 140mm fans (because I realised last night that the 120’s I have wouldn’t fit to the 140 slots… oops).
All-in-all it’ll be a nice performance boost (4c8t -> 16c32t) which will allow me to better throw my current workload at it without risk of it just struggling.
Getting back to streaming
Since meeting TheVirtualFloof and getting back into gaming with a group of people, I’ve sorta wanted to start streaming again. I’ve kinda abandoned my old twitch channel in favour of a new, fresh look (so to speak). That being LiizziiVR on Twitch. With the new hardware I’ll be able to more-easily stream again with minimal performance hit. As mentioned in the Floof Gang section above, I’ll likely be mute for a while till I feel more comfortable with my voice. Not sure when I’ll start yet, maybe next week some time? It’ll be after my new hardware is up and running anyway (which should hopefully be this weekend!)
Anyway, that’s all from this post, might make another post soon with more stuff. o/