Tech Over Tea - The Guest Is Not The Anime Girl | Nova & Pulse

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Today we have Nova & Pulse on the show, you might think we have 2 guests but only the Pulse is the guest, Nova is a TTS bot powered by a complex chain of streaming tools to make the Twitch streams more exciting.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/novaandpulseBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/novaandpulse.comWebsite: https://novaandpulse.com/techaro.lol==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brody Robertson. Welcome back to the show and welcome to all the live chatters who may be watching this as we're doing so as well. For anyone who's seeing the VOD afterwards, we are currently streaming this over on the Nova and Pulse channel over on Twitch. So if you want to see some of the stuff

we talk about today in action, head over there, you know, go have some fun and yeah. How about you introduce yourself for any one of my viewers who may have no idea who you are and may not even be VTuber fans in general. Yeah, totally. Hello everyone. So I am pulse of Nova and pulse and that obviously should ring some alarm bells Like why the hell is my name second in the title that goes along with my gimmick? But yeah, so I am a Vtuber I've recently had my first year of streaming and will be doing my affiliate anniversary in about I want to say one or two months So fairly new to it But with so much tech I decided to go extra hard mode and do everything on Linux and then pick even more

Difficult harder on myself choices, you know in this whole thing So I got into twitch streaming just around that time and man did I did I not pick easy mode yeah you have a like the Vtuber streaming setup just the general setup is already for most people fairly complex chain because you obviously have live 2d most people also have some sort of stream redeem tool setup as well maybe they have some stream bots maybe they have some other things and then you also Have Nova as well Yeah

Should I begin by just explaining why? Yeah explain explain now the gimmick and yeah what what your deal is Yeah, V2BG on Linux ultra hard mode. God. I'm gonna have to also be careful and not read chat too much out loud, but it's habits. This is the the embarrassing part of the story. Where I came into like understanding about VTubers just a couple years back, maybe just two years back at most. Okay, wow. And... Yeah, like I kind of missed the big 2020 wave, even though I'm not unfamiliar with anime at all. Like I understand all this stuff. But at the time, I was only seeing the big players, only seeing the big, huge, like agency VTubers and maybe like the huge indie VTubers.

And they're all sexy anime characters. All of them, at least the ones that make the big headlines. And so in my mind, those two things were synonymous. Like, you can't be a VTuber without being some sexy anime girl, and well, you and your cat girl would probably work the same way. But I thought to myself, well, I can't be the cat girl. I can't. It's not for me.

It's not right. But maybe I can be the companion. And so this harebrained scheme started forming in my head of having some excuse to have an anime girl, you know, in my, in the stream somehow. I took all my cues from Noctopus, if you're familiar with him. He's like a different style of, I want to say, we have Nirosama and Vito. Oh yes, yes, I do know, yes. They're the only others that are kind of doing

this sort of thing, and they are huge, you know, really huge. So like, I have my admiration to them, but I wanted to be the primary focus of the show. So I wanted to provide the primary focus of the show, so I wanted to provide the bulk of the entertainment and have the anime girl be sort of the mascot. But the funny thing would be that she's got all the main character energy and I look like the mascot. Right.

So, yeah, hilarious thing where I just, I didn't realize just how broad the Vtubing world really was until I got into it and then I saw everybody can do whatever and you see all these kinds of creative avatars and had I chosen to go with the silly little guy from the start no anime girl required probably would have worked out just fine but here we are I own Nova and pulse.com and so She's here to stay. Mm-hmm. I Do think I Look, I like I like the cute anime girl thing that most people do But I think a lot of you just don't realize that with live 2d

You can do other things and especially with like 3d models. You can especially do other things then Some of your chats probably gonna know the name, but their early on was a gun VTuber I don't remember their name But there have been other ones like this is like skeleton VTubers and things like that like live 2d It's just it's just an animation tool It's just most of the most of the artists most of the riggers You know, that's the kind of work they do because that's the thing that most people want. So it sort of gives a, I guess, a skewed interpretation of what is actually possible

if you want to step outside the bounds. Totally, totally. And if you go even further beyond just Live2D and other 3D modeling options and go into something simple like a simple PNG tuber, oh my god, the variety you find. And I found no shortage of like robot-themed VTubers, and not all of them had to be anime-themed aesthetic at all. So clearly there is a lot out there, and it's kind of like my point of embarrassment that I kind of felt like this was the necessary, you know, thing to do. Like, okay, who can help draw this anime girl in my head and also draw this crazy little guy also in my head? And yeah.

So it's my point of, you know, just a bit of an embarrassment But also it's it's kind of unique in itself. Not many people do this sort of thing and go through the trouble of being the Go through the trouble of being the mascot in your own stream. It's kind of hilarious. So I keep it Yeah, unsurprisingly considering it started in japan there are Especially if you go back right to the start when things if it was still like trying to work things out when basically the only Vtuber who was big was Kizuna AI, Hololive was just getting started Sora had like 500 viewers there were a lot of very experimental JP indie Vtubers like again like you had things like a gun Vtuber I don't know if that was Ian or JP I'm sure other people have done the same concept. I remember early on there was someone who is like a grandma

You had like a monk. I know I Know that there is someone currently active who is who is an ugly bastard VTuber. Um, so, oh my goodness. Yeah. There's a lot of fun experimental stuff. If you're, if you step out of like that, that like mainstream part, but even so, like, look, it makes sense why the cute anime girl is like the main thing that gets people attention.

Yeah. So I kind of bank on that a little bit where, yeah, pretty anime girl gets the attention. And that's kind of the thing that I was going for. Oh, I do all the work. She gets all the love. And yeah, but no, ultimately, I think I think what I was set out to do has worked. It's really me and my showmanship and personality that carries the stream. And she kind of includes, you know, just a little extra once in a while.

And also being like a solo, like a one-man show, gives you someone else to bounce ideas off of, or at least just bounce, just to play off of. So whenever one of her redeems goes wrong or she has a weird question to answer that gives us a topic of conversation, you know, something to work with, but she doesn't have to be the focus and there sometimes are streams where maybe she won't even talk at all and that's fine, you know, sometimes she'll take up half of the attention and sometimes not at all.

Yeah, I do agree with having someone to bounce off of. This is a, this is especially a problem that a lot of people run into when they are a small streamer. That, not just small, but also new, that yapping ability, being able to just, and I think doing these podcasts, I've done like solo episodes of the podcast as well. So it's basically two hours of me yapping without even a live chat.

So it's just me yapping to the camera. And I feel like by doing that, it really has improved my like stream yapping ability. And the stream yapping ability sort of feeds back into that. It's just it's sort of a skill you develop over time. But having something to bounce off of, whether it be a chat or in your case, whether it be Nova and the chat when the, you know, people are way to bounce off of it instead of you just trying to somehow keep your stream of consciousness going for multiple hours at the same time as playing a game at the same time as trying to manage your stream. It can get a bit overwhelming. I admire the Yappers. I've seen many. They've got incredible talent to just keep the stream of consciousness alive and well. It's incredible to see because they don't even need a video game. They'll be like in their just chatting scene for like an hour at times and it's like,

Oh my god, do you not run out of stuff to talk about? And apparently not. So like for me, having like say the game will be something to bounce off of, but yeah, having any other opportunities to improv, just go with it. Heck that for that matter, one of my redeems, not active today, by the way, one of my redeems is just here's a random Sonic line from one of the Adventure Era games, just random out of like all the games. And it gives me an opportunity to just jump and riff off of it, see if it melds or doesn't meld. And I don't know, something about being able to improvise

scratches the theater kid itch that I've had. Oh, are you actually a theater kid or is that just... No, for real. Actually, in middle school, high school, I did a bit of theater Are you actually a theatre kid or is that just? No, for real. Actually in like middle school, high school, I did a bit of theatre and acting was a thing that I had a small eye on. Not much, but you know, I've done my fair share of like, you know, tabletop role play and just that was a thing where a creative outlet was something I always needed, even

though I ended up working in a very tech field. Mm. I'm kind of the opposite. When I was young, I was very much... I was very much in my shell and didn't really... I didn't really interact with that many people. I had friends, but I wasn't the kind of person who would go out of my way to talk to people.

If someone came up to me, I would interact with them. If someone invited me somewhere, I would go there, but I was never the person who was usually involved in the planning of things and this like YouTube thing, this streaming thing, I don't know, it's- it always surprises people that I grew up with or my family like when they come back and check it. It's like, oh you were not like this at all when you were young. I don't understand how how this has happened. Oh dear. Well, I think, I think this has always just been like my personality type.

There's been a part of me that likes to, you know, be out there. And I think it... Oh, shit, we have a raid incoming. This is the things that can happen. So right now we're playing a little bit of Daft Punk to, you know, harder, better, faster, stronger to celebrate the raid. Yeah, it's a party every time we raid here. Also, Zwarhart is here, who is a lovely VTuber and artist and archer.

Apparently, she's an archer today. I like to always greet my raiders by, if I can, you know, saying something about the people that are coming in, about the streamer coming in. I just want to recognize and be like, hey Zwar, what's up? She's really cool. She goes to the gym to make sure that she doesn't injure herself while practicing archery And I think that's the most amazing thing And also does her own like rigging and icons and really nice. Wow You know as you do as you do you introduce yourself, which I think is what you're supposed to do first But god damn it if I'm not backwards with everything

So I say hello Raiders! I'm Pulse by the way of Nova and Pulse and we have a guest today. The cat girl on the screen is actually Brody Robertson, a Linux YouTuber who is honestly on the pulse of all things happening in like open source and yeah, on the pulse. Oh god damn it. I didn't mean to do that But yes, I'm afraid most of our crazy redeems are turned off for today or at least for the duration of this podcast Yeah, apparently we're on Brody's podcast. So welcome Raiders. Feel free to hang out. We'll be mostly yapping and and getting into you know, the Vtubing and Linux and why the heck I'm even doing this thing. We might do some live questions afterwards, so if you want to stick around for that, feel free to do so.

I might forget, so no guarantees. Remind me at the end, maybe. Yeah. So, I guess, with the whole VTubing on Linux thing. I know people have done so for a while. I know people have very different setups. Some people use Live2D. Some people are messing with open source tools like Inocchi2D. How?

I guess where do we even start with a V2 setup on Linux? Like, where did you get the idea that doing so was even a thing you could do? Right, because for context, I switched to Linux long before I even thought about streaming. So by the time I got the idea in my head, hey, I could do some streaming, I already had to figure out how I was going to do it from Linux to begin with. I got the idea in my head, hey, I could do some streaming. I already had to figure out how I was going to do it from Linux to begin with. It wasn't like I was on Windows and then had to figure out how to transition into Linux and my whole setup.

No, I'd started from the beginning. And I knew, hey, OBS, it's open source. Of course it's going to be Linux native if I want it to. Not a problem. And then came the other concerns. To be fair, I did spend a year before I got my Live2D models. A year I did all my streaming with PNGtubers, began with PNGtuber Plus alongside VietoTube Mini, and then I switched exclusively to VietoTube Mini because PNG

Tuber Plus was no longer supported and kind of breaking with every update. So yeah. So most of where I began was with VietoTube Mini that was being also given a lot of Linux love. Sorry. Oh, let me put that into the chat. Yes. VietoTube. And I'll even put it into your...

Yeah. VietoTube Mini, which now there's a big VietoTube live version coming. And to be fair, the version in pre-release now of the full featured software for PNG tubers is gonna support PNG tuber plus model so like if you want to have a PNG tuber and really step it up like that's one of like the best ways to go and especially if you want something on Linux well there's basically a ready-to-go Linux binary I wish it were a flat back but yeah it's just a Linux binary and if you're on Arch it should just work as long as you have your dependencies you know installed mm-hmm so yeah early on it was a lot less of a headache because it was just

the the PNG tubers I did a little bit of animation with oh god animate animate yeah like I had my my PNGtuber avatar cut up for some, you know, minimal animation. Right, right. You know, just some loops, just so he could move around. And Nova was her static PNG self, and we had little more than moving mouths and blinkings, and that was it. So that was easy enough to do, but yeah, I spent weeks, if not months researching my options for Live2D, because I knew it was going to be a while. And I think it was like, oh god, between start and end, with all the hiccups in between,

it was probably like eight months between the starting of the Live2D project and actually going live with the models. Mm-hmm. I just heard him yell that. Oh, good. Those are coming through. Yes, yes, those are coming through. So, anyways, so yeah, on that note, I looked into the options.

Even in Ochi 2D, which is like the open source one, that was a possibility. But I figured unless I wanted to learn to rig myself, I was probably not going to find too many people who could use it. I know there's like one or two JP riggers that exist. Like the developer, they have a model and there's someone in Japan who knows how to do it. But there's like very few people. Yeah. Plus it's an evolving tool, so documentation is a bit kind of funky as well. Totally.

Yeah. And of course, like 3D would have been an option too. And I think Rogue Ren will attest to 3D being a little easier to manage on Linux, particularly. But personally, I like the look of Live2D. I think that there's a charm to the 2D aesthetic, and it's hilarious when people say, Oh my God, your avatar is 3D now. And the thing is, he's really not. He just looks 3D. He's as flat as a pancake, but he looks 3D. There's definitely a charm to that, and so I wanted to make sure I could do it.

And so I said, you know what? Everyone that I know doing Vtubing is using Vtube Studio. Most of the people, except for like a handful, would like go in default to Vtube Studio. So if I had any concerns questions, I would have like a dozen people I could reach out to who could say, oh, yeah here's how you do that thing on Vtube Studio and be like cool and everyone in like the in the asset for or the art asset world so from creating the avatar to rigging they're familiar with with the tool, they know what it can do. And if you ask like, oh, hey, could we do this? Would this be possible? And they'll be like, oh, yeah, sure. You can do it like that. And that's a lot of it, you know, with my rigor, working hand in hand to say, hey, this is a very, very odd situation of what I'm going to ask you to do.

We've got two avatars and I have to figure out how to make this work. And thankfully, you know, this being a common tool, I was able to get a lot more insights just that way. I assume you probably are aware of other people that are... Obviously Noctopus, yes. Is there anyone else who's doing whether it be, you know, you said there's not really anyone doing this specific thing you're doing, but like the idea of having two distinct models at the same time. Yeah, I can tell you about that. So

the way Noctopus does is his and this is my intuition based on how I see it. An octopus does is his and this is my intuition based on how I see it He does the smart thing where the little octopus is just attached to the main model So they're actually one model and in fact you will you can see how like they're they blink in in they blink completely synchronized So it's all the same model so that you do only have to manage one model at a time. Right. And that that makes it easy. There are other ways you can technically make a second instance of Vtube Studio. Do not recommend on Linux but I suppose if this was Windows it would be fine. And Vtube, like his little like turtle is barely animated at all but yeah so he's doing multiple and you know multiple models So we got

You know, we've got Vidal doing the multiple models, especially during things like when evil and neuro Yeah, yeah, like duetting and so on like yeah, that's gonna be a thing He obviously drives them differently using like WebSocket APIs and all that. So yeah, fine for him. But I rarely see anyone just trying to manage two models at the same time, especially ones where they kind of are not attached to each other. So early on, I was running two different instances of VietoTube Mini, so that was just, yeah, I just needed one for each of us.

That meant two windows, two different captures, and that also gave me the flexibility to arrange them on the screen in different ways. So, yeah, that was a thing that I realized early on, okay, this is going to be extra challenging, but I'm going to make it work somehow. I can go through some of my dead ends and going through here, that, and the other, but ultimately I ended up with Vtube Studio. We did get an old used iPhone for tracking.

I'll tell you why I don't use the other options. But ultimately most of that just works. And with the tools that I have today, I have just about all I need. There's a couple of limitations that I work around when I can, but it's not so bad that I think it really impacts, like, you know, I don't think it impacts the show in any way that's all that detrimental. Minus side tangent, especially early on with how many windows you said you had floating around, how many monitors do you work with or do you manage it with virtual desktops? How do you keep track of everything?

Okay, okay. For what I'm actually streaming, I did get a third monitor by the way I got third so it's three I have my my main monitor in front of me for like where the game goes I have a vertical monitor to the side where I keep keep browser and my firebot dashboard And then the third one's literally just to keep an eye on OBS and be able to look at, you know, see all of the audio levels, see what I'm actually displaying and sending. So all of that.

I was using just two originally, and I was splitting my vertical monitor into three sections. I feel like having the tiny third monitor is just such a relief. So yes, I have three and it's so that I can have just these four things in view at any time. That's enough for me, but obviously I have way more like active windows, you know, for actual streaming. Right. And I guess you just put those on virtual desktops or do you put them behind the windows? They're just behind. I never got into virtual desktops.

I know some people love and swear by them and that's cool. I'm fine with that. I just have lots of how would I say I have lots of taskbars on each like each monitor has its own taskbar. So I can look at a glance and say, oh, yeah, that windows on that screen and that one's on that screen. And when you have enough monitors, I think you don't need that much out of a virtual desktop. Okay, so a lot of the VTubing tools

obviously are based around Windows, but there are definitely pieces of your chain like OBS, which are Linux native, or like other things, which might just be web applications, in which case they'll work on anything. But for those things which are Windows software, how did you go about working out how to get them to work? Yeah, okay. So the most, most of the time, like 99% of the time, okay maybe not that, but most of the time Proton does the time. Okay, maybe not that, but most of the time Proton does the trick. For all things

that are games, Vtube Studio just runs through Proton happily. I rarely ever have to poke at it. And once in a while, like maybe once in a while for certain games, I'll either use Lutris or see if Wine will pick it up naturally. And there we go. That'll be the end of it. Heck, you would appreciate Final Fantasy XIV. I have that XIV launcher that keeps it running happily on Linux. But for the actual stream, yeah, I think it's really... Like, for every day, it's just Proton handling Vtube Studio and whatever other game may or may not have a Linux binary

And the rest is kind of just there like the rest is all kind of Linux native one way or the other and And I'll get into like it feeds into why I stay on Arch Linux or at least the Arch Linux ecosystem is one of the reasons just because I Linux ecosystem is one of the reasons just because I keep finding the tools I need in the AUR and I have little need to continue trying to force Windows software to run. Yeah, the AUR is a fantastic tool. I can definitely attest to that. There are many, many pieces of software which you, okay, usually if I'm looking for something and there's no other packages the dev has made a package there's no flat pack nothing exists I go to the AUR and most of the time it's going to be there sometimes

not but in those cases it's very rare Yeah, I get OBS and all the plugins I need for it from the AUR. I was surprised that, yeah, I was surprised that even some basic stuff like browser source, which apparently on Linux doesn't come baked in, you have to get it as an add-on, but lo and behold, someone on the AUR just says, hey, here's an OBS package that already has that built in.

And I know it's probably better now, maybe, but I've got the specific OBS package I've grabbed, came bundled with a bunch of other things, and it's just, it's just beautiful. It just freaking works. And I don't even mind that it takes a little time to compile locally. It's fine.

I feel, I feel more in tune with my computer that way. So that thing about OBS isn't entirely true with it not having the browser source on Linux. Oh, it doesn't have the browser source on Arch. Uh, I've, I've just, I've talked to the developers a number of times. I've made videos about this. The Arch devs basically, the long and short of it is the Arch devs know the problem exists and refuse to fix it. Basically what happened is all of the browser-based stuff in OBS, whether that be the browser sources,

whether that be a lot of the plugins which require the browser sources, there's an optional dependency called CEF, that is the Chromium Embedded Framework. And OBS is very particular about the version it needs. And basically what would need to happen is Arch would need to have either need to bundle the dependency with OBS, which is very possible. They could do that. Or they'll need to have a CEF package specifically for OBS.

And that's what exists on the AUR. And that's why things like the, I think the Git version on the AUR. And that's why things like the, I think the Git version on the AUR works, Titan's fork works, a bunch of other versions work just fine with the browser source, just because they actually have a working dependency. Look, that's the reason I use the Flatpak,

because I want the browser source to work. Oh, that's fun. Well, thankfully I've only run into a problem like once, maybe twice. Like I know that I've learned my lesson. Don't run updates right before stream. That's just happens. Yep. Um, but otherwise, yeah, I, I, I gotta say for most things, if I am, if I am looking

for something, like I want to install some piece of software, and I know it's out there, I know it's got a, if it's like on GitHub, the first thing I do is just go look with the AUR. I don't even check that the GitHub read me for installation options. Usually someone's already done the work for me and it's like, wow, you know, great. I'm just going to stick to that. great I'm just gonna stick to that and it's funny that that Arch Linux that has this reputation of being hard mode is actually the the the ecosystem I stay in because it's easier for me I do think the hard mode the hard mode perception is kind of overblown and I get why it's like that. It's kind of you know it's it's it's a long-running meme right and

people look at the at least the I Would say traditional arch installation method, but here there's some fun stuff in there with the the early history of arch very early on they actually had a Installation script like Debbie it has they got rid of that probably in the first few years of existing. And for most of Arches life, it has been a manual install method. Now we have the Arch install script,

which you can automate installation again. But because of things like that, the manual installation method, because of the perception of rolling update being more like the break stuff, you will run like your like your key ring being out of date when a key gets rejected And you know update that so you can actually install packages, but realistically art isn't actually that complicated. It's just Really it's just starting from a slightly earlier point than something like an Ubuntu. And that's... Right.

It's only complicated because you have to install things that otherwise would be there out of the box than anything else. But if you know what you need to install, which is all very well documented, it's... Yeah. Really not that much harder. And I come from a power user background, so this didn't really intimidate me. And in fact, the reason I even went to Arch anything in the first place was that I needed that rolling release model. I there was a time when I was trying to use some very, very new hardware, specifically new graphics cards.

Yeah. And I was like, oh, shit, this is just not going to work if I don't have the stuff that released yesterday. I stopped doing that. But but ultimately, that was just my foot in the door and then I found, oh, this is actually nice. I have this easy way to find all this open source software that I can compile locally without having to go through the added effort. For goodness sake, I think I compiled some freaking kernels on this machine at some point. Not that I think it's smart to do so, but but there we go. All thanks to the AUR. So I'll probably be sticking with Arch for the foreseeable future and it will be a long investigation before I even think about hopping to anything else.

Yeah, I've had people suggest things like, oh, maybe you should come try out Fedora. But every time I think about trying out something, I'm just like, well, at the end of the day, the thing that I'm gonna have after all my configuration is gonna look eerily similar to what I already have right now, but I won't have the AUR. So. Yeah, so at that point, why bother?

Yeah. Like I do use, to be fair, and like, no shade against the Ubuntu Debian crowd or the Fedora crowd. Like, everyone uses what's right for them. I have a... What do I use for Fedora? We have a Fedora spin on our little HTPC, our home theater PC. Actually it was a fairly recent fork or something that came out. But anyways, like,

we use a lot of different stuff. Like my wife's the, was the Ubuntu girl for the longest time. Like she was in that space. And I think she's moving into more fedora usage these days, but whatever. You know, it's like, use what works for you. Bazite, that's the one. Damn it, Rand, good, thank you. Bazite. Bazite is really cool. I've got the- Bazite is really cool. I've got the dev coming on sometime soon-ish.

Need to arrange your time. But yeah, Bazite's a really cool project. I've been following that for a while now. Frankly, for all the people that want something steam-o-s-y like, Bazzite is probably the best thing to go with. But even if it's not on a Steam deck or a handheld device, just for a gaming system, it's perfectly fine. Yeah. I just installed it without any Steam, but with still an automatic login. And we

have that on a tiny little micro PC that's just hooked up to the TV and that's where we watch our stuff. I guess that works as well. Yeah we don't use a smart TV because I can't control the stupid apps on that shit so yeah. I prefer to have an actual computer that I can mess around with and and tailor to my needs which is more likely just know, setting up the appropriate extensions and a browser. Yeah. Well, with the whole smart TV thing, it's kind of like any of the car entertainment systems. They usually use the oldest hardware they can get their hands on, the oldest and cheapest hardware.

So by the time you buy it, it's already slow. It's already out of date, unless you're buying, you know, an $8,000, $10,000 TV, which I don't have the money for that. Yeah. So I'd much rather just plug in, you know, a $200 10 year old PC. It'll be faster than whatever you're going to buy in a smart TV. Oh yeah, I think we paid maybe like 300 bucks for this micro PC or whatever, mini PC. And it's perfect. Like the Intel NUC that we had was starting to get long in the tooth and really couldn't handle the resolution anymore.

Right. But this one, this new one is just like, great. Perfect. We, we're good. Yeah. If all you're doing is- Praise B to AMD Ryzen. If all you're doing is video, as long as it can handle, you know, 4k decoding like it's...

Yeah, totally. Doesn't really matter. Exactly. You don't need a lot for something like that. And I encourage anyone who's like fed up with their, you know, home theater, or rather, fed up with their smart TV to consider just plugging in a tiny computer into their TV and just using it that way. So we kind of got sidetracked there, which tends to happen. No, it's all good. Sidetracks are fine. So back with the whole VTubing setup on Linux, I guess we should probably get into how Nova works. Because that's the part that complicates your set up a little bit more than most people. Yeah.

And some of it is, oh goodness, I want to say that like, oh, I can do exactly the same thing that Noctopus is doing with Kanna, or what maybe Vettel is doing with Nero. And unfortunately, no, I cannot. I cannot. So the reason for that is simple. One is that she has more sounds than just the TTS. She makes noises beyond just the TTS voice and that's because there's like a real person behind all that, that is another VTuber, SakuraVixi. Shout out to her. We were, we kind of connected early on before I even took on the Nova and Pulse like thing.

I said, you know what? I would like you to be her voice. And I, you know, she's been paid and compensated. She's got a contract that we'll be renewing for the use of her voice. But also she provides a lot of little one- off clips, like lots of little sound clips. Like Matt man just demonstrated. I don't know if you got to hear that, but I don't know.

I didn't hear anything. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But like there's a bunch of little one off clips that that are there that are triggered off of firebbot currently, but used to start off as just a simple soundboard. Before I hit affiliate, all I really had was a soundboard, and I would manually trigger some of her sounds before I had anything that could do TTS, like say Tangia, which I'm going to continue to it for now. Anyways, to bring it back by why I didn't go with like the tried and true VTS POG, which is kind of like the go-to tool.

If you are a VTuber and you want to have a TTS mascot, well, okay, you could do that. But that limits you to only being able to drive your mascot through TTS. And if you have any other sound source, you're gonna be limited. You're not gonna be able to get your avatar to react to anything else if that's the only way you're driving them. So Nova's actually a couple of things. Her TTS currently is Tangia, and the way I get her to pull on that is by essentially having Tangia's audio route straight over to Vtube Studio.

The hilarious thing is that Nova is the main model for real in Vtube Studio, and Pulse is a live 2D item. That means that Vtube Studio can only pick up on a single microphone, or it can monitor a sound output, which is what I have it doing. And so her mouth movements are all driven off of the sound either coming in through Tangia, or it's all, you know, funneling into the same place thanks to audio cables. Or I have right now Firebot handles doing all things that are the one-off sound effects. So certain text in chat will trigger events and or certain like, say someone gives a sub or bits or something, then she'll say, thank you, thank you.

It's one of the pre-recorded lines, straight off of Sakura Vixi, with just a tiny bit of audio editing to make it sound slightly more robot-y, whatever. And the combination of all this is what makes it not really feasible to use a tool like VTS Pog, where it kind of forces you to go in this one direction. So ultimately, she's a little bit tangy, a little bit of Firebot, which is my stream bot. It's also Linux native version, so hooray.

And then the virtual audio cables, which you know as, what is this, QPW graph. It's a, what a mess. But with that, I'm able to route, like essentially combine both of these audio sources, being Tangia, being these audio clips, route them into the same sound sync and have Vtube Studio listen to that.

And yeah, that's what essentially drives her speaking, drives her mouth. Everything else. Oh wait, for all the movements, there's still more. Yeah, there's that as well. Because it would be easy if you just did the, hey, if I move my head, Nova moves as well. Yeah. And if you are watching this stream right now,

you can see that we are kind of in sync here and there, but not all the time, not all the time. And that was also very deliberate. I didn't want her to just mirror my movements one-to-one, and for the first week or so she did until I finally got that all sorted out. Here's the funny thing about Vtube Studio. You can create idle animations. And if once recorded, you can have that just be the animation that plays, usually

so that when you lose tracking, your model will do something. Usually like go to sleep or do a little dance. Maybe you loop it. It's fine. What you might not realize is that you can also disconnect inputs from Vtube Studio. You can have a whole bunch of different inputs for your model and then use them to record an idle animation

and then get rid of some inputs. And suddenly, suddenly, the idle animation only takes over for the inputs that you're not sending. So this is actually what happens with her. She's got a long looping idle animation that it was recorded by me with like for the whole body. But some of her parameters are handled by me and some of them are mirrored. So like maybe you know, you'll see that I'll look one way she'll look another. Our eyes will kind of be looking in different directions. And some of them are mirrored, so maybe you'll see that I'll look one way, she'll look another.

Our eyes will be looking in different directions. All in the interest of, say, if I'm looking at chat or I'm eyeing chat, then so will she. But all of that makes her look a little more independent. She's doing her own thing even when I'm fussing around and I can do all sorts of stuff, but there's certain angles I can get at where she doesn't really react much at all to what I do. Right. And that's all by design and it was quite a clever thing that I didn't realize could be done, but it can and it does help give her a little bit extra

independence. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think this is one of those things that people kind of forget because of the main attention that the Live2D tech gets is Vtube Studio is through Vtubers. But I remember when this was first coming on the scene, like I've been paying attention to the Vtubing space

since the very start. And I remember early on live 2d and it's still used today for this used it like it was being demoed for vision novels so like this is like the whole idle animation thing like that that is like a core thing to a character in a visual novel as you're like going, you're reading the text, you're waiting for the next bit of text to appear. So it makes sense why you can do that. It's just most people are not taking advantage of that because they are doing like direct mocap. Yeah, yeah, totally. Direct, complete motion capture, which by the way, Totally, direct complete motion capture, which by the way, Live2D items do not have idle animations.

Tell me how I know this and why it hurts me. Yeah, so she's the only one that can have the idle animation. And that's why, yeah, I'll tell you why I use a single instance of Vtube Studio and not two, because I think adding two would just be more of a headache. But yeah, I totally lean in hard on the whole treating this as true animation and doing what I can to only put in some parameters, not all of them, letting her do her own thing. There is a different animation that will play when she's excited. So if somebody charges the station

or does something interesting, I can even put trigger this button and she can start doing her thing. And we can just kind of vibe and be excited about something together. And then it'll stop. But all those things, like I would want to do more with animations over time.

It's just, I guess, the interesting balance between having her animate, like, completely on her own, where at which point the 60-second loop will loop around and it's going to start looking like, oh, she's just a broken record in animation terms. But with that little tiny bit of human input, I feel like she definitely looks a little more organic and a little less like repeating the same patterns over and over again. Actually, that's a really good point. Yeah, I hadn't even thought of it. So it's sort of, so there is that loop there, but you're writing in the randomness of your movement.

So it sort of hides the fact that there is a loop. Exactly, exactly. So you almost never notice and like you go looking and you watch the stream long enough I don't know if you'll notice when something's happening like that because you know depending on what I'm doing she will react more or less to it. So yeah, this is one of those things that I had to kind of figure out or look for stuff. Like, you will find some tutorials or guides on like TTS mascots and even creating an idle animation for your TTS mascot. Actually, wait, no, you can't do that. You cannot make an idle animation for yourself. But a lot of this for me was uncharted territory because how many VTubers are doing two main models

and like with full like tracking and animation on both of them and heaven help you if you're trying to to use your main model as the second little one. So a lot of stuff I had to figure out how to do like the head pat redeem is a complete work of fiction whenever the hand comes over pulse. Have you ever considered like making a video series on this or documenting the process you've done in any way? Like anything like that? Is anyone else wants to try your cast set up? Oh, I probably should. I've definitely gone over the tools and the specifics on stream before, usually just for special occasions.

So like when we did the big 2.0 debut and we debuted the Live2D models, I went through all of the tooling and everything that kind of makes Nova work and makes Pulse, you know, what he is. So it comes down to will I have the time and the energy to do something that's useful as a guide? Because hey, believe it or not, this ain't my full time gig. This is, I stream three times a week and I could not do any more.

Like I work a normal nine to five and yeah. So this is my side gig that I use mostly as creative outlet as a way to tap into different energy. So I don't, that's why my YouTube language is so much. I barely have like any energy left after these things to do something with that. So if you know any editors, maybe, maybe hook me up. Well, even if it's just for your own, your own personal documentation,

just so you're like, you don't forget any, anything. Any weird stuff you might have done. I do document now and again. Okay. Okay. I actually have a checklist for, for streaming. Like my Go Live checklist has so many steps and so many pieces of software written down. No, that actually-

Just building up everything. That is really cool. Cause my streaming setup is... I turn my lights on, I turn my camera on, I turn my microphone on, I turn OBS on. I turn my microphone on, I turn OBS on. Let's press go. Oh, God. Hold on.

Let me see here. Just in applications. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven applications I need to run. Not including Steam. Steam is one of them, so I guess that makes eight. And then whatever, like, you know, if we're gonna game, usually that's gonna be the extra one unless we're, like, capturing off of the Elgato card. So yeah, I've got a lot to set up. Not to mention the hardware.

So I do use Stream Deck for managing a lot of stuff. I'm so thankful that we have some decent options on Linux. Which of the tools do you use for the stream deck? Oh my God. I've used all of them at some point or another. Which one do you currently use? I'm currently using Stream Controller. That one is easy to find. They do have a Flatpak offering, I believe.

So you should be able to get it. And it was, the main reason I go with this one is because it was the only one that could drive the audio dials on the Stream Deck Plus, which sadly don't work the way I want them to, but I'm gonna use them anyways for like just balancing my own audio for me. They don't do a damn thing for the stream.

But between this one and Firebot, I've kind of reconsolidated all of my actual functionality into Firebot, which is just a stream. It has the OBS plugin. It has the Vtube Studio plugin. It's able to talk to everything, to be able to talk to Twitch. So all I really do from my stream deck and from stream controller is literally just send HTTP post requests into Firebot and Firebot handles all of the details.

And honestly, that's a lot less convoluted than anything else I was doing before, where I'd have to try to do it all within the Stream Controller or the Stream Deck software, not always Stream Controller. And it's a mixed bag of what's going to be supported, where if you're going to have to go do a workaround with some CLI commands, so some terminal commands if you can't get a plugin, and if that plugin even works commands, if you can't get a plugin. And if that plugin even works,

and if you can get it to work, yeah. So ultimately I stuck with Firebot, because it's a Linux native application. It's free and it's open source, all the good stuff. It does all I need it to do. And it handles basically all the dynamic events know, it handles all the dynamic events, it handles all the things I need to activate from the stream deck.

Though it greatly simplified my stream deck setup where each button effectively is just one HTTP post. Maybe it'll change state to like a different button underneath to post something else, but yeah, that it's gotten so much easier when I just switched everything over to Firebot rather than like, than saying, oh, this stream deck software can do this, but not that. And this one can do that, but not this. And some of the stream deck software could, could simulate key presses. Others couldn't. Some could send out

terminal commands. Others couldn't. And eventually I realized, you know, Firebot can do everything. It can do all the things and I just need to tell it to do a thing. And that was exactly what I needed. I might have to take a look at this one then. Oh yeah, Firebot's freaking great. I will be happy to send you to that. Sweet. Yeah, I'll take a look afterwards. I'm going to put that in Discord, but also in chat, which I actually, I don't need to put the Firebot GitHub. I should probably put the actual website, which is firebot.app.

I should probably use that instead. I'm just so used to GitHub for so many things now Sweet sweet, thank you for that Okay, um So I did want to ask you about sort of The

Okay with the setting up of Nova's animations, I'm sure things didn't go well initially and there were maybe edge cases where things broke or other cases where things didn't behave the way you expected them to. What are some issues you've run into along the way? Oh my goodness. So for her, honestly, most of it works the way I'd expect it to, though I'll be honest, sometimes making her go kind of bananas is not so easy. So, but that aside, which is like kind of a point I will just accept.

I think the real challenge in Vtube Studio wasn't around her, it's around Pulse. Because Pulse is an item. It's hilarious. I am the sidekick mascot item in my own stream. Also we're gonna have an ad break, but sorry. Not gonna stop. We're not gonna pause the action tonight. So the problem with being an item is that other items do not pin to items. So you can't pin an item to an item. And if you've seen like the many, like, I don't know, put a sticky note on the Vtuber, you know, do the head pat, all those things, they require taking the item that will pin to a point on the model

and it will keep to that point. So if the model moves, the item moves with it. But Pulse is already an item himself, which means I can't really pin anything to him. I could pin Pulse to Nova, and we can demonstrate that any time. But I can't pin anything to pulse which makes certain things more limiting I get around that by effectively doing like kind of having him in a known location so all the times

where pulses all the times were pulses on stream he's in a known location so if I want to do a head pat redeem or something like that, I will just set up that alternate item to just be roughly in the correct place. And it's not gonna be pinned, so it's not gonna track necessarily, but it'll look decent enough for the effect. And then I think people don't really mind.

Like, oh yeah, they see the little hand animation padding pulses head and I go ah that's great and it just works but but that is something that I have to keep in mind for everything and it does mean more like extra work also if I want to have say a like an emotion toggle so I don't know if you're watching, but we have angry faces and we have sad faces. We can have happy faces. We can even have you little shit, I'm disappointed in you faces.

So all of those things are more work, because I have to get a command, like a hotkey, essentially, not only to the main model, but to the item itself. And items don't really get those unless you create an extra hotkey to the main model. So anything I add to Pulse also has to be added to Nova. So her list of actual toggles and options is going to double by virtue of also needing to be added to Nova so her list of actual like toggles and options is going to double by virtue of also needing to like essentially pass things

on to the item. So it's a lot. You should see my effects lists anytime I push one button it's probably going to send maybe two at least commands over to Vtube Studio to do stuff. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that's a... That is something that... I had to learn to work around. It was perhaps the most infuriating thing that I had... I couldn't just, like, send hotkey commands.

And by the way, hotkey doesn't mean, like, a keyboard. It's just what Vtube Studio calls it. But, yeah, just having to like forward that whole action model. Yeah, you can think of them as actions. They can be triggered by all sorts of things. And generally what you want to do is just trigger them by some WebSocket requests. So usually that's usually going to be like the plugin.

Yeah, just so that I have to create a separate one or getting things over to pulse That like just doubles the number of actions that Nova has to like have on her model Are you able to demo something that? Is kind of like doing the rough location Sort of like the head pat and yeah, yes Yes, perhaps. Let me because I've moved

unfortunately I moved pulse to a different location here so I'm gonna switch to my other screen yes okay where I know he's in a in a current known place I'm gonna go ahead and enable the head pat redeems now so I don't know if someone's gonna beat me to the punch, but if we head pat Nova, that's just going to work normally. And she's going to have that hand tracked onto her. Right, right. Whereas if, yay, someone already did that, hey.

And then for pulse, the hand will show up roughly where he is, but it's not like completely pinned and tracking for me. Mm-hmm. I see. Okay. So if I happen to change positions, obviously that's going to break. Mm-hmm. So for the sake of today's event, I've been keeping these mostly disabled because technically I do have a version of this that works on the chatting scene and that chatting scene

Is one where I've recently just moved myself So I'd have to you know move myself back, but I didn't want to be stuck behind the the screen where I'm where you are Yeah, that makes sense, but this one works. It's just wild that I have to effectively use Firebot, create a conditional command to check what is the current scene in OBS and send the appropriate command to Vtube Studio. Because for anything like those headpats, there's a different one for Pulse, whether he's in the corner or whether he's in the, you know, the chatting space. Right.

I haven't, I have yet to make one for when, let's see if I can push this button. There we go. This is another space Pulse can be in, which is here, Pendantanova. This one doesn't yet have a appropriate head pat option. More to come, I I suppose at some point because yeah. Right okay so it it makes those firebot commands a little bit more complex than just hey run the thing. Yeah totally like creating a head pat redeem for a normal Vtuber where they are their own main model, is almost trivial.

You just create the item scene and set it to a hotkey or an action, and there you go. You can even create it... You can have Twitch handle that directly if you want, if you have something to go with. Oh, Crescent Flame is going to be upset that the headpats are not equaled. But that's another thing we'll deal with later. Oh shoot, we broke it. Oh, there we go. I'll go into space. I thought I disabled these. There we go, Now they're disabled.

Okay. I can return, unless you would like me to share my screen or share any visuals, I'm happy to. I don't think, is there something you would like to share right now? We can do that if you want to. The only thing that I've shared that has scared people has been my virtual audio cables

Oh, we don't need to get into that. Oh, no, if you want to show that I would love to see that She'd love to see that Let me go ahead and and and get that going so Voila and I oh my For anyone who's just listening right now, how do I describe what's on the screen? That's nest of nodes and lines. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. Imagine a ball of yarn and you just pull out a bunch of it.

Just take a handful. The worst part is that I understand this shit now, and I wish I didn't sometimes. It's surprisingly clean for what it is. Yeah, I have kind of moved things around and I know that I don't need to mess with it too much, but I will point out the few things that I do mess with. This is my my Corsair headset, which is still working, fantastic. This is where all my monitoring audio goes, and all of these things here are all the OBS monitors, so all the very different, oh god, I forget how many sound

sound things I have in my audio mixer. I have an OBS. I have a lot. So for every stream, what I do is here's the monitor for Tangia coming through OBS. This audio sync over here, which is just randomly one of the monitors, like one of the audio from the built-in monitors that doesn't go anywhere, but having an extra audio sync for me is very helpful, because that means I can get Nova's audio

on a completely different channel, separate from me, and also can provide the same sort of audio ducking options for her voice. So ultimately, what I end up doing is passing Tangia over to this. This audio sync is broadcast through OBS normally. I also have to, normally when this starts today, or when I first boot it up, it's going to be plugged only into the Corsair headset, and I have to connect it manually over to the other audio sync, which I might be able

to automate, but I don't trust it, so I just do it manually. And then for the sake of me not hearing Nova twice, I will just disconnect it from the normal route. But what I can point to you is that the you know, the sound produced by that audio sync, this is another reason I use Firebot. Because Firebot, when you tell it to play a sound, you can tell it which sound output to play from. A bunch of the other soundboard options that I had would only play through, like, the desktop.

And the one amazing thing that Firebot does is that if you have multiple places where you can play audio, you can individually set where they're going to go. So I can have Firebot say, play this sound clip and play it over this specific audio source, which is different from the one that I use for for like random sonic lines. So the great thing happening here is that this I can I can route this over to like OBS or sorry I can route this to Discord so that you can hear it so and everything that happens through here like all those

little sound clips that are just straight up recorded lines. They will also go to Vtube Studio and they will trigger Nova to speak. So like you will see her mouth moves even when it's not TTS that is driving that sound. Vtube Studio doesn't care, it doesn't know the difference. So that's one of the reasons I don't just switch to using VTS POG, because ultimately I'm still going to want to send just arbitrary audio clips into Vtube Studio for her to react to. And yeah, like maybe there'll be a time where I find a way to do that with VTS POG, which is not the simplest thing to use on Linux. But you know, for now this works.

And in spite of how scary it looks, there's really only a handful of things I do with it. And it kind of just works and I'm shocked that it just works. I think that's one of the nice things about having a native Linux version. I don't... I'll probably have to read the documentation, but I assume they actually put some effort into making the Pulse Audio Pipewire model actually function. And you can actually make things like this work properly. Yeah, oh god, Linux Audio. I believe I'm using Pipewire, and PWire has a Pulse Audio interface for everything that expects to be talking to Pulse Audio. So yeah, that makes things complicated. But ultimately, once it's set up, I've learned to just

stop touching it, leave it alone, it's gonna be fine, stop messing around with it, and there we go. But yeah, I do not envy anyone who has to troubleshoot Linux audio. I have had to do it now and again, but usually only because I was fussing. You know, like you don't fuss. If you don't fuss, it's not going to break. Yeah, my audio setup is quite a bit less complicated. Pretty much the only thing that I use QPW Graph for is when I have my capture card,

I like to route that out to my desktop speakers just so I can actually hear it. Because I don't like using the OBS monitor for it. There's a bit of a delay for it. Okay. Yeah, no, that's fine. In my case, and I'll show you this, because maybe if you're having problems with delay,

I will actually show you something if I can. Okay, no, no, no, I'm not closing WP Graph. I am going to share a different thing. I'm just gonna go ahead and share my main screen for a second. It's scary to do that sometimes, but I will. For all things that are... Oh, shoot, I probably should not have minimized that window. I'm trying to find where I left the thing.

If not, I'm going to go back to it. So for doing all things like Elgato capture, here we go. Apparently, they have a buffering option ticked by default. And that adds some considerable latency to your actual capture. However, disable that and it's as good as real time. And I kid you not, I have used this to play action games, like high precision action games. And I just play off of the full screen projector from OBS

and use like my headset monitor from OBS. So maybe you'll still end up using your audio cables. Maybe you still will. But I'd say give it a shot. Like this has simplified a couple of things because it's like less that I have to fuss about with say changing the input source of my monitor. Makes that a little simpler.

And it does mean that the gameplay is much more in time with my commentary In like the final product like in the actual video stream, so Heck for that matter I played stellar blade With with like through the network So we have the PlayStation 5 and I use the the networking tool like to to play it up from my PC I'm surprised that that was very playable. Like, I couldn't even notice the difference in all the... in whatever lag there might have been.

So we're getting pretty good with that. I have noticed. Weird delays with the video capture from time to time. That actually... OK, I will have to definitely try that out next stream. Oh yeah, try it out, try it out. See what it works, see what it works for you. But yeah, I guess while you're concocting your next question,

I can like share a couple of other silly things like what is the, like sharing my, I don't know, my capture card setup for example. Yeah, sure, if you want to share any of that, go right ahead. Like this is what I actually use, which is a couple of just like all buttons for things that are like Vtube Studio related, just all the various toggles if I need anything that's a one-off, like if I need to send Nova somewhere else or send her back, a bunch of... This is growing as it goes, like OBS. I have certain buttons, as you might need,

stuff that I think every streamer is going to want to have without having to click around for it, mostly because not every game is going to behave in terms of what happens when it loses focus So like some games will like mute themselves or pause themselves and it's like ah So being able to do that without changing without like, you know, switching focus of on the windows is nice my favorite ones are the ones that are Tab when you tab out they go into windowed mode, but also change the resolution of the game. That's always fun.

Oh God. Oh God. Yeah. That's not fun at all. That especially happens with some older titles I've noticed. Usually modern games, uh, like UE5 games, I've noticed a pretty fine. Most Unity games are fine, but I've definitely run into some ones where I have... The game would just run badly on Windows as well.

So putting it in Proton, it's just... Yeah. It's just a mess. I mean, Proton sometimes fixes things with more people coming in. So this is... I'm also going to go ahead and show off Firebot. I keep it usually on the dashboard as a better place to keep an eye on chat and keep an eye on the activity feed. Though I still use what Discord offers.

Discord? Twitch offers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think what's interesting is that everything you saw from my stream deck is all powered by effectively these preset effects lists, where you set up some effects. So say, for example, if I wanted to do the thing where we go into this Colab position, I'm going to show you just how scary that is. Hey, thanks for the follow. Non-bank plane? Okay.

Wait, wait. Shoot. No, shoot, shoot. Oh my god, when they give you difficult names. But thank you, thank you. Here's all the things that happened just to get into this position. We have like, we have this many hotkeys from Vtube Studio just to get both of the characters in proper place. Just this.

The video is a big compressed through video ninja. Is that the blue thing we're seeing there? It could be, it could be. Without having to get into the details, the blue things we're seeing there. Oh, that's probably super... It could be, it could be. Without having to get into the details, I'm just gonna... All I'm gonna say about that is the number of items necessary. Yeah, I can definitely see how many list entries there are, yeah.

Yeah, that's just a lot of list entries. If I go back to, you know, where we normally are, which is the same button to switch back to the gaming scene, well, that's like an OBS change and then like four other Vtube studio related actions. Yeah, all of that. So thankfully, it's really simple on the other side. It's really simple on the Stream Deck software,

on the Stream Controller. But I handle all the complications in here. And if I need to do any sort of logics, like, oh, only run this if that, that's doable from Firebot. OK, OK. Yeah, so otherwise, yeah, it handles all my, I can handle custom channel rewards here, can handle my timers, any sort of chat commands,

a couple of counters, like the head pat counters, which some people don't care, and some people really care a lot about making sure that we have an equal number of head pats. Yeah. So just all that. I normally don't have firebot like super maximized, but for the sake of that, that that scene there.

Yeah, yeah, you have a lot going on here. I know, I know. And I'm going to repeat something that I say to anyone either thinking about streaming or new to streaming, you don't have to do it all at once. Like I did not start out with all of these things. You know, did not start out with everything here. I began pretty basic Um, I just started, you know added things over time

Um slowly, but surely just getting more and more things and sometimes a new idea Sparks and I just go for it and say oh, yeah, let's do that. Let's do that Uh, I can switch back to the to the chatting scene if we unless we've got yeah, that'll work really want to see Uh, we can always get back if we... unless we've got something you really want to see. We can always get back if we need to. Yeah, which for anyone watching on... for anyone watching on live, the reason that my scene transitions have all these like fancy little animations where each individual component kind of slides in and such, that's only to hide the loading lag of Vtube Studio when we're switching

like positions. Because apparently we can't just move an item to a new place. There's no move item command. What there is, is creating another item scene. So it's the same pulse item, but it's a different item scene that will show up like the one that's here. Unfortunately, he's got to be unloaded and reloaded, and that causes a hitch that the more elaborate scene transition hides. It's just, I can't believe how long that took me to sort out. I'm ashamed at how many hours I spent putting that together, just so people wouldn't see pulse like blinking in and out of existence so much.

Right. You mentioned a really good point there about not needing everything when you get started. I think this is a problem a lot of people run into especially now as You know the Vtubing scene is as big as it is as like the high-end like the the the top-end Vtubers are as big As they are a lot of people see that they see these you know $10,000 models they see all of these customer motes

$20,000 models they see all of these customer motes very expensive opening screens where you have like even some cases like a custom model on your opening screen and Like that's all really expensive and that all you know it does make it's a nice flair but I think what people forget is At the same time that that exists like there are there are like regular like can be tubers who stream on a 50 dollar webcam who streamed on that for the past 15 years. Yeah, I think this comes up over and over again in every every space for like new creators, new streamers or whatever they are, the veterans will always give the same advice

that it's really you. It's you and your personality and your showmanship. That's what matters most. You don't need all of the extra flair. At most, maybe just a good microphone for some decent audio. Yeah. And that's it. The rest is all up to you. And people may look at you a little bit, but VTubers aren't a new thing anymore.

You're not gonna get attention just for being a VTuber. And you're not gonna get attention for having a really fancy model. You gotta bring the show. And that's priority one. Though early on I started with very little. I had like my regular full screen capture and just like the little pulse in one corner, no in the other. To be fair, like I did also commission PNG tuber avatars, like custom ones, but that's that was an indulgence that I could give myself.

Sure, yeah. Because I can, because like I have a normal nine to five, I could afford this sort of shit, but for anyone who wants to, you can change it up, rebrand, use all sorts of free options, free assets. There's so many ways to get started. If you want to do Vtubing of all things, and maybe you don't want to do Vtubing, maybe you just want to put on a camera and put on a show, you will find people will flock if you give them a good time. And I think one of the chatters here who I've collabed with before, he knows who he is. He's got just a regular webcam in his like, I want to say his dorm room.

Not the best lighting, but he is a treasure on screen. People love him. He is just absolutely lovable. And that's why everyone keeps coming back. Like it's not high production. It's not all that that has people coming back. It's the guy that people come back for. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah I think what people forget is the additional flair can make things better but it can't hide the lack of good

content in the first place. Totally. Like you can have, what's a really good example? I mean you could have Cinder and Iron Mouse's model budget and if you're not entertaining to watch, people are gonna drop off eventually. Well yeah, actually this is a really good point I remember when iPhone tracking was first being a thing people were doing like, you know Well, like I remember like the early snuffy clips when she was showing off like wow Look at these like face shapes that I can do that no at the time Nobody else was doing and it was really impressive like wow and now on like the Especially for like the the high-end indie stuff like that's pretty standard now yeah yeah pretty much true like it's anyone

who's doing this is gonna use like just plain old iPhone in this and it's it's not gonna stand out in the same way that just being a VTubers not gonna stand out eventually you know everyone kind of catches up and you have to stand out eventually, you know, everyone kind of catches up and you have to stand out not just by your tech, but just by you. Yeah I think people get like, you often hear people say things like, oh, it's funny to hear this for the VTuber scene. Oh, the VTuber scene is, what's the word, saturated. Saturated is the word I'm thinking of.

Saturated, yeah. Because I've heard people say the same thing about just regular YouTube. Oh, YouTube saturated. The text space is saturated. No, you're just boring. Yeah. Um, before I went live, there was a VTuber, an educational VTuber that was doing a sort of a seminar on like getting into streaming. He's still around, still does stuff. And one of the things that kind of really was shocking in my mind was

when he pointed at the big giant pyramid of here's all the people that never make affiliate that tried to, you know, and only like the top 5% of people will get to affiliate and out of that the top, only the top 1% of streamers will really like get any, you know, notoriety and then it's like the people who make bank like stupid levels of money on Twitch are like the top 0.01%. You know, that sort of thing. Yeah, right now, 6.89% apparently are affiliates on Twitch. Geez. Well, it gave me some perspective, obviously.

I wasn't trying to like explode or anything and heaven help me, if I go viral, I I think that's not gonna be good for me. I don't think it's good for anybody I think I think it happening slowly is a good thing like yeah happening slowly is better But what what what gave me that extra bit of motivation? Gave me that extra bit of motivation was that okay? So I just need to be in like the top 5% of streamers So I just need to be in like the top 5% of streamers to reach like the affiliate goal. And in my mind, I'm like, oh, I just need to be better than 19 other people. So I'm like, OK, OK, I can probably do that.

I can probably be entertaining enough compared to, you know, a whole bunch of other stuff out there, because there's a lot of stuff on Twitch. And yeah, not all of it's that entertaining. And goodness help. Like on YouTube, I don't know if it's the same, but yeah, especially with the, you're encouraged to go and you raid in other channels and so on. And sometimes I'll be like,

I'll take a chance on someone I don't know. And you raid in, like, hello. And then you're like dead quiet or like, oh, hi. And then there's are we doing something? It's not like they're, you know, like locked in on some like speed running pizzazz or anything. It's just, uh, are you trying to put on a show here? Because I don't think everyone is.

I think there's a place for that content. There are people that like these study streams, work along streams. But if we're talking about a gaming stream and nothing's happening, I'm just like, what are we doing here? Oh, yeah. So which is why I guess I have a great admiration for the VTubers, especially, or just any streamer where it's like they go live, maybe they had a plan for what they were going to game that day.

And it's like an hour in and they're still just yapping away. And everyone's just thrilled at that because sometimes that's more entertaining than the game. And in some cases it really really is. Like you'd be surprised but I've seen some of the numbers where their viewership, among the really big ones, their viewership tanks as soon as the gameplay starts and they're no longer in the just chatting spot. Yeah, the whole gaming and chatting things, that's an interesting one. I think a lot of people also don't, they don't realize what happens when you are streaming.

This is why when people are doing, you know, more e-sporty things, they do tend to try to be very locked in because trying to split your focus between a game, chatting, reading the chat. Yeah. at reading the chat. Yeah, I would say you probably play the game at best and you can improve this skill. I would say at best 50% of your off stream ability. Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. And this is like, it's kind of the, what, the streamers curse that they always play games worse than they could otherwise. And it's like, wait, but you love this game.

Why are you so bad at it? And it's like, that's just how it is. You're not you cannot dedicate all your your your mental energy to it. In fact, the it's like a 60 40 split and the and the game gets like the 40. That was actually something that, oh, Josh Strife Hayes mentioned. And I took to heart honestly He was like saying yeah, if when you're doing this live you gotta keep you know, chat engaged keep talking to them We're doing a podcast. So sorry chat if I'm not reading every individual message not not today. It's okay. It's gonna be better It's gonna be better next time. But yeah, I make stupid mistakes on stream, but you know what? It's okay, it's gonna be better. It's gonna be better next time. But yeah, I make stupid mistakes on stream,

but you know what, it's fine. No one's here just to watch me like super be like the best speed running whatever. Like we're here to have a good time. And sometimes the little fuckups make for content. So just roll with it. Yeah, I saw someone in your chat say They can't pick a subject or playing a shooter. I can I cannot stream shooters I it does not like I need to play something where I am comfortable like RPGs

I can even like, you know like that like even something like a Dark Souls or Elden Ring I can I can find moments where I can stop paying attention to the game. Now, I do that during boss fights sometimes and I die. I shouldn't do that, but it makes content. But with a shooter, I've just never gotten used to shooters enough to be able to do that. And if I try, things immediately go badly. Yeah. This also plays into like finding your niche, if you will. Like they all say like,

whatever it is you're streaming and however you do it, find what, you know, what is your specific niche? And it doesn't have to be one game, you know, probably shouldn't be one game, but find your niche. And don't tie your entire career to a single game. Yeah. Too many streamers have... They build up because of that and then the game dies and people then realize, oh, this

person's actually boring. I was just here because they were good at the game. Right. Well, yeah, they either lose audience or otherwise, yeah, or they just burn out because now when they want to switch to something else, the audience was only there for that one game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where I'm getting to this is like, finding your niche can also go hand in hand

with finding what you're comfortable with. And in my case, that's where I kind of landed on like, well, I can play a lot of like platformers, I can play certain action games, like, you know, if I'm holding a controller, generally speaking, I'm in a good spot for something that's a little more first person than maybe. I did like Portal, but Portal is not really

so fast paced that you can't keep up with chat. I will try streaming Doom 2016 one day and see how that works. But but generally speaking, I try to stick to stuff that either I'm very comfortable with, that I know I can half pay attention to, and it's not so bad, because I want to give chat most of my attention. And hey, if that means that we gots to be a little worse at the game, that's not a problem. It's not a problem. But yeah, finding your niche

and finding what you're comfortable with is kind of goes hand in hand. So if you like shooters, but you can't chat with a shooter in front of you, maybe try something else. And it doesn't have to, you know, I wanna say the things that you stream may not be necessarily the things that you enjoy in your off time

Or at least not in the same way. I know that there's definitely games that I love to play in my downtime That I don't think I would really want to stream I don't think they would make for good streaming content and usually They're for me games to like unwind or just kind of chill and relax. And I'd have trouble finding what to say. So maybe those are your personal games or the things that you play for yourself. There's stuff that maybe you play just for the stream or stuff that's a little both. But keep that in mind. Yeah, for me, games like that where they're like off streamstream games, are any sort of resource managy games. Like I was playing

schedule one off-stream and I play the game in possibly the most boring way that anyone could ever play it. I will spend 30 minutes trying to hyper optimize how I have things placed. I will just spend multiple hours just doing drug runs and nothing nothing productive is happening in the stream. God, it's not good streaming content, but I enjoy it. And like that. Yeah, that's why I like doing you. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why I like doing action games on stream because generally because one of one of two things is going to happen. One, I lock in and something really cool happens, or two, I die for about an hour and people really enjoy watching me rage at the game. So yeah, totally. I think a similar thing for me is that I've for a time I would be playing a lot of like vampire survivor clones Hmm, but the way that I would play them would be the kind where you you kind of get that at that point in the meta progression Where once you have like a handful of like your items

You just kind of stand still and shit comes at you and nothing can take you anymore And I would just vibe and zone and that would not make good scream content at all to be fair at that point It's kind of like It's kind of subway surfers for yapping. You just put it on in the background and just talk Good I could I could I've not tried that but yeah, there's still certain things that I want to keep for me. Or at least, in some scenarios, I insist on my first playthrough to be for myself, off stream. I know that it can be different for others.

Other people really, really like to play their first thing on the stream and kind of get their genuine live reactions. I respect that. There are certain games that I value too much to do that. I want to enjoy this and I don't want to have to split my focus with chat. I want to be all in with this one game and maybe we'll play it on stream later. Maybe we'll stream it later, but there were at least a handful of cases last year where I'm like, okay, I'm going to play this one on my own time. And if it works, I'll put it on stream, but this one's mine. I think for me, games where the atmosphere of the world is very important, I'd rather play those my own time. Like that's, I played Stellar Blade off stream and that game is really good.

Like I just, you know, I wanted to be able to vibe to the music in that and just enjoy it. And right now I'm also playing Expedition 33 off stream. It's so, if you like classic JRPGs, it's a modern take on that is so good. Ooh. I might, I might. There's some of the classics in JRPGs that I feel like we've lost in the transition to everything modernizing and...

Yeah, everything being real-time action. Yeah, like Bravely Default did some work to bring it back and I had a good time with that one, but yeah, you get the idea. Yeah, had you seen anything? Have you not heard of Expedition 33 at all? I've not, I've not. Okay, I'm surprised. it kind of popped off. I think right now it is the most Most played indie game on Steam like most play account on Steam

Basically expedition 33 I'm actually looking at it right now, and I think I might have seen someone playing this yeah, it's made by group of ex Ubisoft devs Yeah, it's made by a group of ex-Ubisoft devs, um, which normally wouldn't be a selling point, but they- they- they- I think they're the talented people that were at Ubisoft. Ah, okay, okay, okay, I see it. Ah, I'm gonna- I'll keep an eye on this one. The, um- I'll keep an eye on this one. Usually for, like, JRPGs, I know it's a commitment, so I gotta be ready for it.

It's like a 30-hour-ish game. It's not a giant JRPG. But the combat is, it's full turn-based, but on the enemy's attacks, you can dodge and parry. Oh, so kind of, I hate to make the comparison, but kind of like the Mario and Luigi. People saying base sector. Oh, yeah, I was actually thinking again more the Mario RPG. Ah, yeah, okay things Right right that's there No, but the other the parry window is basically as tight as secures is so it's it it's it Usually the whole it's the this is the Dark Souls of X is not a good comparison But I'll grant it in this case. Oh Dear yeah, and at this point

the Dark Souls of whatever or just Dark Souls as a As a modifier to a yeah as an adjective. Yeah, feels like it's losing all meaning. Mm-hmm. Yeah for sure We're at that point where Dark Souls and all of the ideas of Dark Souls have kind of... They've permeated everywhere they need to, to the point where even like, Stellar Blade has some good ideas and other games will rip and pull out of the soulsborne genre as needed. Even to the point where they're not that hard sometimes, but they still take certain inspirations from the ideas that Dark Souls did. Freaking Dark Souls solved the question of consumables, like healing items and consumables

in video games. Dark Souls solved it, period. The Estus Flask is the most brilliant bit of game design that we've had since that game came out. And I love to see it because it is a perfect solution to the problem. So every time I say, oh yeah, this is a... Every time I see it, it's like, okay, yeah, they're just using the Estus Flask idea and it's perfect.

Great. Now we don't have like 99 ethers in your inventory anymore, just languishing. Well, okay, two exceptions. Dark Souls 2, where you actually can grind out healing items. You have the Estus, but you also have this like little healing item as well, and you can have 99 of those. Crap. And then Bloodborne, where you have to farm out the Estus, which is really annoying.

That would be annoying. Like you can have you already have five of them in your inventory, but if you die to a boss a bunch of times you will run down your inventory and have to eventually go and just grind them out. Gotcha. Yeah, I think with like Stellar Blade, it was a pretty, pretty simple. Yeah. Yeah. Like the way it would work. And I've been playing Doll's Nest recently that takes some Dark Souls cues,

but you still have to like go and buy your your healing items, but you can only hold the five at a time. So it's like, OK, OK. Mm hmm. I've not heard of this one. Doll's Nest just came out. It's a it's like, okay, okay. I've not heard of this one. Doll's Nest just came out. It's a, it's an indie game. It's a game that is taking cues from the older armored course games.

So if you like Mecha combat, it's there, but with a very, like a lot of near inspiration, like near automata like inspiration in terms of atmosphere, story. It's not a horny game even though you play as a little, you know, tiny anime girl in the robot, like the anime girl is the robot. They're mecha girls. Of course I would play that game.

Anyways, yeah, no, definitely, definitely been working with that one and in and seeing like I pointing out to all the things that are oh like you go into your save point where you Heal and suddenly all of the enemies you defeated are respawned. Well, that's a Dark Souls thing so I just Trailer started playing on the stage and I've unmuted from it. I was very confused what happened. Oh, cool. Oh, God. Let's see.

Did I answer your question on where the heck the idea came from? I think that might have been the first questions I asked. I don't remember. Like, I don't know. I just had the thought that if I wasn't going to be the anime girl because I thought that that was an obligatory thing VTubers had to do, forgive my ignorance at the time, I figured, you know what, let me take a cue from Ratchet and Clank or Jack and Daxter or all the other so on and so forth, you know, Scooby and Shaggy

Whatever that actually made me not those but just all the the duos and see how the heck I could make that work And here we are You do I'm not going to share just how long I was workshopping the name Actually one thing i'm i'm curious about because i'm sure this is not your final incarnation. Do you have any ideas you would maybe like to try out that you're not really sure how to do yet? Maybe new models you'd like to work on at some point? Oh, there are things that I want to do. There are definitely things I want to do.

And they are just they are just held back by mostly other people's time. Like, I'm willing to pay for them. They will cost money, but they mostly require specific people's time, mainly my VTuber mom. So when I set up the concept for Nova, the idea was that I was really inspired by one of my favorite mecha shows shows which was Zoids back in the day

I loved building the things. Okay, so you got your attention now, okay And I one of my favorite obviously was Zoids new century or Zoid zero depending on how you might know them I built the Liger zero and had all of the armor kits So yeah, and the idea was to have her be sort of like the Liger Zero and had all of the armor kits. So yeah. And the idea was to have her be sort of like the Liger Zero. This is her Zero armor, if you will. And the next couple things will be to get her different armor sets kind of like going in that direction. So though she's already been built with a nude base, which by the way been built with a nude base,

which by the way, you're not gonna see anything. Like you see all that, all the greebles and the stuff behind her white armor. Yeah, that's her skin. So she's only got human skin on her face. So if ever, anytime I push the wrong toggle and her armor comes off, which it will, it does, Twitch is not gonna get mad at me. I'm not showing any anime girls on my stream, but yeah, that'll be something that

I planned. Oh God, I had that plan since day one when we were still doing concept art and I knew it was going to take forever to get there because just making a VTuber model, a custom one, takes so long. It's a long process and it is what it is. It can get expensive sometimes. So not for everybody, but I really wanted to have my little own. And especially in my case where most of the free options involve creating a humanoid character, just a regular human VTuber character if you wanted to do something on the cheap. Well, Pulse needs to be not that. So yeah, I went with custom. So that's my plans for hopefully this year.

There's only my Vtuber mom, Mysticsan, who did all the artwork and does the models. She will hopefully be able to come back to me soon, and then we'll start doing concept art for her next model set or armor set, which obviously is just another costume change. But hey, that's how you do. And that's one of the things I learned from Ironmouse herself, that she was talking about how she has so many

different outfits is that you got to have your your main model needs to have a version that's rigged with no clothes on so that you don't have to go through all that extra work when you have a different outfit. Yeah, yeah. I personally know someone who's made that mistake themselves and not done that and it's Put them in a very limited state when they wanted to change something They could make minor changes like they could add to the model they have they could do some recolors But much more than that

It requires basically doing everything again exactly exactly if you go with like like having it all flattened out with just the outfit they have on and you ever wanna change it, oh God, Helvin help you. So it was a little more upfront, but it was, it's essentially means I don't have to pay for an entirely new model in the future.

I'll hopefully only need to do just the armor parts and then, you know, rigging should hopefully be a little easier as well. So that's to come and that shouldn't honestly be all that difficult. One of the things I'm wondering is like, should Pulse have different armor sets? He's just a companion bot. He doesn't do a whole lot he's a yeah I love it pulses a bouncy mecha ball who lives for adventure without fear wait what oh god I do I live for adventure without fear I'm just a little guy it's so we'll see but that's a that's definitely on the on the the plans for

this year and and I do it not because this makes that much money anyways. I do it because I like it. And for once in my life, I have like an OC, like a pair of OCs, which I think I haven't done in such a long time that it's kind of like, oh shit, this one's mine. This one's mine. So yeah. This one's mine. This one's mine. So, yeah. On that note, for anyone who is curious about the art being shown on the stream right now,

that is art of my Final Fantasy XIV character. I use that as the base for it. Yep, yep. And it's also the icon on your streaming channel, if nothing else. So perfect. That way people... Wait, is it? No, I use it on Twitter. I don't use it on the channel.

You use it on Twitter. Yeah. You also use it on Blue Sky as well. So yeah, you do use it in a couple places. So someone's going to recognize it. Which is always fun when... Because look, there's a lot of people in the Linux world who are old and don't know what anime is and they're like why do you have an anime cat girl as your avatar?

I've had people tell me it's unprofessional and you're going to like lose out on opportunities because of it. Like, I if that's the case, I didn't want them in the first place. Yeah, yeah. I think I feel a lot the same way, because if I'm honest, I could have just turned on my webcam, you know, and just gone with it. You know that I could have streamed without being the whole VTuber thing. But part of me wanted to the the added layer of privacy Like that was like I think my first priority in that sense, but also I kind of like the the style I like that. I can be a little cartoon. I

Enjoy having a mecha cat girl and honestly, there's very few Mecha Cat Girls out there. And so, god damn it, be the change you want to be in the world or be the change you want to see. So I decided, you know what, there's there we need to have a Mecha Cat Girl out there somewhere, because if I don't do it, no one else will. They're too expensive. And by the way, I'm not kidding. Her art is definitely more expensive than

than most similar character art or even model art, just because she has all those fiddly little details. Right. I have to move around. Like, just the amount of fiddly details involved in this character art. All of this takes a lot of time, a lot of time to draw. So every time that I do artwork with Mystic-san, she puts in an incredible amount of effort and detail into everything she does. And you will pay the price for it, but it's worth it. Yeah, yeah.

I guess that's another reason... Good thing I have my regular job. I guess that's another reason I have my regular job. I guess that's another reason you don't really see much in the way of mecha stuff. Just in the stuff you do see tends to be very light mecha. It's closer to like, you know, a cyborg sort of deal than it is like full mecha. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why goodness, just finding the artist and early on was such a challenge because I needed to find one artist

who could do both Mecha and also the Moe anime. Right. And at the at the time, at least on VGen where I was looking, there were literally three options. I literally have three people I could pick from out of everyone on VGen as of like a year and a half ago. Oh my God, I can't believe it was like three. There's a little more now. There's a few more now. And I could probably point to a couple artists that were, it might not break the bank as much if you want to get some good stuff. I have commissioned art of Nova and Pulse from other artists with my Vtuber mom's blessing.

Just putting that out there. And you know, she commands a pretty penny, but there are others out there now, at least on VGen. But man, finding an artist that can do both is not easy. I wanted to show VGen on the video for a moment I went to the website and the first thing I see I'm just like, okay, maybe that's maybe that's TOS Hope not anything that's true TOS I don't look YouTube can be a bit finicky with what they have an issue with same with twitch I

Can't Jen, but yeah, good luck You might cut out for a second there All right. Oh it did. Yeah. I didn't yeah. Do you hear any of that? All right now just saying like V gen the sensitive content should generally be, generally just be hidden by default, but I can't promise you anything if they don't market as sensitive content. Yeah, it's that line where you can, look, you can be like, oh, it's artistic nudity. But at the same time, it's like, is it though? I will. I will put this in chat, though, because these are the specifically

the ones that I have liked on Vgen because they are like either my commission. They're really just all my commissions. Right. Right. Right. So this I know I vetted and is safe to share. So yeah, that also includes like some of you can see some of the people I've worked with via VGen. And yeah, just I like to also commission art for CoLabs. And I'm not sure if you have any art, any 2D representation of you that might be cool. Cause like we got one with Shadiken who was just a guy.

He's not a VTuber, he's just a guy, but we turned him into a little cartoon guy for a particular collab for a particular piece of art. I might have to do one with you in there. I do need to get more stuff done at some point. Like I've got that to the art that I sent you and that's pretty much all I have. I got that done a couple of years ago.

That's, I really, it looks, it's just a matter of firstly finding someone and then actually feeling like, you know, paying for it. Yeah, yeah, cause you got to. This is why I don't quit my day job. Yeah. I do not quit the day job anytime soon. We're not there yet. Would I like to? Probably. I think I would like to get this to a point where

it sustains itself and I can kind of pay for all the things that I want to do for the stream with the money that comes from the stream, would like to do that someday. That would be cool. Until then, it's still just hobby territory, but I try to treat it with the same kind of respect as it would be if it was like a real job thing. So I keep to the schedule, I try to plan that out, I keep an eye on the community. Um, mostly just, you know, being consistent. And I think part of how I got to, uh, to Affiliate so fast was because I was being consistent. Mm. Yeah, that's a, that's that.

Yeah. I think treating, there's nothing wrong with treating a hobby like it is a job. I, I honestly, I, I kind of, I can respect that. It's like you are, you are you're just treating it seriously right like it's there's nothing wrong with taking a hobby and then just doing it haphazard throwing it away oh I just want to like do it when I feel like doing it like there's nothing wrong with that as well but at the same time if you want to actually see where you can take a hobby, like what can I actually do here?

What sort of content can I make? What sort of streams can I do? Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And I guess I can segue this into perhaps, I don't know if you have this as a question or not, but I'll segue it anyways, which is why I got into this thing in the first place because I worked in software, I work in tech. I've been a developer for my entire

professional life just about. And there was a point in my life where I began this when I was so bored and I needed a creative outlet, it was one of those points in your life where you're just like vegetating between work and sleep. Like you get out of work, you get out of your office job or your desk job, and I was like working from home, so I wasn't even commuting between office and work anymore. I'd just go from one desk to the other, veg on like YouTube for several hours and then go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again. I was like, wow. Was the work you were doing

pretty much just like code monkey stuff? It's like, you're just a number in the system or was there some creative outlet to it as well? At some points it kind of was. At the time specifically, because of like some of the mismanagement with the company, we were grossly underutilized and kind of bored all the time. But even then, even when I'm not,

I'm part of a small team at any point in time. And it came down to like sure this is scratching one particular itch but not the itch I want to scratch right now. That makes sense. So it's just a completely different energy that I tap into during stream and in that case I, okay, I don't want to just spend my downtime vegging. I don't want to just like, you know, be a couch potato or something, and just like, get up work, watch TV, go to bed and do that forever. I was like, Oh, God, I gotta, I gotta change something. And so it's like, Hey, this could be a creative outlet. Believe it or not, I did a bit of YouTube back in like 2007 to like 2009 or so.

You're not going to find that that channel got like blown away. But that was like kind of interesting. All I knew was that I had the voice for it, or at least the mind for it. I didn't quite like video editing as much, but I was starting to understand Twitch, finally, which is weird considering that I had an account on Justin TV. Like I was on Twitch before Twitch was a thing.

So you'd think I would have been on the pulse of Twitch, but I wasn't. You'd think I would have been on the pulse Hey, hey, let's uh, let I wasn't let's when was Justin TV. When did it turn into twitch? Oh, it was fuck. I forget the the exact the exact date. You can look that up In 2011 Justin TV separated its gaming category section to a new site called twitch 2014 then it all became twitch. Okay. Yeah. Right that was that that was that oh I remember that section because that was that was back when people like oh my god like shortly after that oh my god why are you doing things that are not gaming on Twitch like

it was this big deal that I think like that I think Linus Tech Tips was doing the WAN show back then on Twitch and like why are you doing just Why are you chatting on Twitch not playing games? Just chatting is one of the biggest categories It is it really is. Oh god. Yeah No, so it's funny to me to think that it took me so long to understand what the appeal of Twitch was to understand some of its most basic cultural concepts, like what the heck a raid was, or why subs were a thing. I didn't

understand it for the longest time, and I only began to understand it around two years ago, as I was starting to make some sense out of this. And for that matter, one of my favorite YouTubers, Mega G Wolf, shout out, was also on Twitch. And I was not quite understanding, because obviously a fully and tightly edited YouTube video is going to be different from a live stream, obviously, but it wasn't until I started to see like, oh, shit, there's like live fan interaction here. You can actually talk to the person and kind of go back and forth. And it's and sure, well, there's plenty of people lurking and just kind of watching and letting the podcast roll,

which, hey, that's another bit of appeal for me. It was like the interactivity as like, oh, shit, that's another bit of appeal. For me, it was like the interactivity. And I was like, oh shit, I get it now. And so there I was starting to make sense out of things, watching like the VTuber clips and whatnot, and being like, hey, maybe I should give this a shot. I think I could do that. I think I have the, I can reach deep inside myself,

pull out the old theater kit and get them on, get them out there and doing something. That's awesome. That is, I totally respect that. One thing I did want to ask you is, you said you've been using Linux for a while. What brought you to Linux? Is that somehow related to your your dev work?

Because I could definitely see that connection. No, that was a personal choice. Okay, I've been like Windows user since Windows 3.1 back in like the early 90s. Just to contextualize. That was like my first operating system outside of anything that I might have used on a school computer that would have been something else just as old. I learned my first bits of development on like a Windows 98 machine. So yeah, I've been on Windows for the longest time,

but I've also been a power user for a pretty long time as well. So I was never shy about poking at the registry or doing other things and configuring stuff or installing random shit to to modify my system. Like for crying out loud, I jumped on to Windows 8 at the time when it was most hated and the first thing I did was install the replacement start menu. Yeah, yeah. So no so no, for me, coming to Linux was more of just like, okay, Windows 7 was pretty awesome. Windows 10 was tolerable. And then I started to see what the hell was on the horizon with Windows 11. And I'm like, oh God.

And it's just the Microsoft getting more and more user hostile and making it more and more difficult. And if you wanted to really take control of your machine, that was going to get harder every time. And I think for me, I was just also tired of the needless amounts of telemetry and tracking. I'm just like, I don't want that. Like this is my computer, let me treat it like mine. Yeah. It wasn't until I got my Steam Deck. There we go, hey Valve.

Wasn't until I got my Steam Deck and poked at the desktop mode on it. And oh my God, I just fell in love with KDE. KDE Plasmo's like, okay, I could do that. So I was just looking at it and it was like, I could get used to this. This is fine. This makes total intuitive sense to me. And I did my bit of research here and there just to see what I was getting myself into

and where I might want to start. I distro hopped for God Maybe a year almost. Oh Maybe it was six months. I don't know, but I was definitely distro hopping for a good while until I finally found my home But yeah, I I just like I didn't want to do it anymore And the big question that I always had in my mind was like, Linux sounds like I should be there, but I got too many PC games, I wouldn't wanna give up.

And lo and behold, here we go. Valve, amazing, thank you, Gabe. And pushing for Proton and pushing Linux because they don't want to be like, totally subservient to Microsoft. And if Microsoft ever decides to lock gaming on PC to like Microsoft Store only which thankfully didn't happen but if that ever did happen yeah if that ever did happen then we I wanted

to have like you know my backup so yeah valve pushing hard for Linux you know brought a whole lot of people on board, myself included. I have no shame in saying that just getting my hands on the Steam Deck itself was enough to show me that, yep, there's good possibilities here. I could work with this. It can play the games I want. Can it run the software I want or something similar or equivalent? Cool.

Then the rest I will learn like I learned anything else. I Saw someone in your chat when you were talking about Windows 3.1 saying we are old we are my um My school I believe we had When I first started school, I think they were XP systems. So I'm a little bit younger than you are. I remember Windows XP as like, oh, that was the good one because you know what? I suffered through Windows ME, Millennium Edition. That was the first and only time that I broke a hard drive or damaged a hard drive from kicking my

computer out of frustration. I see. Because my god that thing would blue screen so much and I had to take it to a data recovery you know thing to try to you know rescue the files off it because it wouldn't boot because the boot sector was scratched or something. Yeah I learned my lesson, learned my lesson the hard way and also said, fuck Windows ME, I'll install anything else. I don't think there's anybody who has fond memories of that era. Even with Vista, which is, you know, generally widely disliked. Vista wasn't a bad operating system. The problem is they built it around systems that wouldn't come out for about

five more years. If you had about double the RAM that was standard, it was great. It's just no one had that. Yeah. Yeah. It was a bit too much for the time, which this is what makes me actually a slight, light defender of Windows 8 when it came out. When it came out, I know that the design was a total mess and the whole like trying to make the, you know, unified tablet interfaces with desktop interfaces was a dumb idea. But behind the scenes, behind all that, the kernel was so much better on 8 than it was

on 7. Like just the boot times alone to go from a cold boot into into like Windows 8 was so fast compared to that. And this is on spinning disk drives, by the way. I was so shocked to see how quick Windows 8 installed and booted compared to 7 on the same hardware. I was like, what? Okay. I was kind of happy with it. And so I just did what I usually do and, and turned the thing, you know, into what I wanted it

to be. Cause I still like to customize my system and by whatever means necessary. I'm very much a power user have always been. So the, the idea of Linux didn't scare me. Even the idea of like harder Linux distros didn't scare me even the idea of like Harder Linux distros didn't scare me as long as I could achieve what I wanted to achieve. I would do it. Mm-hmm Fair enough. Um Does anybody in the audience maybe have any questions? Because otherwise we can I think we've covered pretty much everything Unless you want to get into my long developer background.

If you want to touch on that as... We can touch on that as people are maybe asking questions. If no one has any, then we can just sign off after that. I will put an announcement in chat. We're taking questions from the audience. Make that an announcement. Bet now do LFS to prove you're not scared. Yeah, that I, I, I, I partially didn't install and then my system broke and I gave up at one point.

Yeah, this is, here's a stupid thing that I wish I didn't know about hmm I shouldn't know this but I do know this having Multiple kernel options in your OS a good thing Yeah, because if you brick one of them you have another one. Yeah, that's why I quote That's why I am constantly telling people to do it Yeah, cuz like one bad update and you won't know until you like reboot and yeah thankfully I have like an LTS kernel I have like the current kernel and something that's like I want to say it's

it's optimized for Ryzen for AMD Ryzen and yeah I keep like three of those just in case if ever an update goes sour yeah and I keep like three of those just in case if ever an update goes sour. Yeah, and it's like, oh crap, I can't boot on this anymore. It's like, well, okay, let's go to the one of the other kernels and boot and then fix. So what is the deal with your developer background? The deal is that I'm old. Right, I got that from a 3.1. What is the deal with your developer background?

The deal is that I'm old. Right, I got that from a 3.1. Yeah, the very first thing I actually coded, believe it or not. I don't know how familiar you are with LEGO Mindstorms. I don't know if that's around anymore. I had a whole class in university that was nothing. It was a robotics class. Um, which all we did is just went through Lego Mindstorms. And basically if you showed up to class, you would get an A and somehow

people still managed not to do it. Amazing. People still manage not to do it. Amazing. So there were I used what was like the first iteration of Mindstorms, which before it was even called that, I actually had to rebranded it by now. I don't remember. Yeah, they probably rebranded. But early on, I had something that it was in a class in a in a like an after

school class with four kids and we still had to type our code. Like we didn't get a nice graphical interface. We basically had like a text editor and that would run our programs that were all like hooked up to this weird board that would connect to different sensors and motors and other things on the little Lego robots that we'd make. And that was actually cool.

Nice way to get started. In that same place, that same locale, I would later learn Visual Basic 6 as my like first real programming language. Just to kind of point out how old I am. Just to kind of, you know, point out how old I am. VB6 is... Ah, 98 was the final release of VB6.

First to be in 91. Oh, God. Wait, was that VB? Yeah, I would have started that in like perhaps, yeah, like 99 or so. Uh-huh. Yeah, we do have some questions, but I can rattle off real quick what uh where I landed because uh funny thing in uh when I was going to college or university um I was learning on Windows 98 machines and we were running Turbo Pascal 6. machines and we were running Turbo Pascal 6. Turbo Pascal which has a syntax I want to say similar to basic. But without the go-to's this was like

more properly structured but still no classes just structures and program calls and so on it's like pretty barebones and oh god your ID was was notepad++ was a better IDE than what we had there. So all of those like old things until I finally landed in like you know Microsoft.net which is hey that's why perhaps one of the reasons I was like so sticking to Microsoft because I was deeply entrenched in the.NET ecosystem, and happy to be so. Everything I needed was there.

It's gotten a lot easier nowadays with... What was it originally called before they... Because there was a light version of the.NET framework for Linux. .NET Core, which then they merged into being just.NET, I believe. Yeah. All right. We got plenty of questions, but yes, short of it is that I started learning how to code when I was around 12. I went to school.

Anytime I could in high school, I would take a class on it. I went to a computer science course, like that's what I did in university. Not really, I didn't get to graduate for reasons I won't get into, but ultimately I started working, I want to say around, oh God, maybe 2010 or 12, started working in software, mostly within.NET, and that's been the case. I've had a specialty in electronic payments. You care? But other than that,

I've been doing just there. Right now, I'm tech lead to a team where I don't do most of the coding. I just kind of do all the other stuff where it's about the project and the architecture and designing this, that, and the other. And the actual coding is done mostly by everyone else, which is fine because they're working within PHP.

And I am trying to wrangle everything so that we don't have all of the pitfalls of PHP in some very sensitive mode. Shall we get to audience questions? Yeah, sure. What is your current operating system? What distro are you using right now? I use Garudo Linux. I installed the KDE Lite version, which is the one that they will not

give you any help with on the forums. That's fine. It's fine. Mostly because I think Gerudo Linux offers some cool stuff as far as its foundations is concerned. The chaotic AUR I am ambivalent to, but just having this as a nice, good starting point for an arch base is kind of nice. I've had odd problems with Endeavor OS. Don't want to get into it because I know Endeavor OS is fantastic, but this one was the one where I installed it and everything I needed worked out of the box without like fussing with it. And I started from the KDE lite version of it because it's the one that required the least amount of visual unfucking. Because if you've seen Garuda Linux it has that gaudy gamer aesthetic which some people love but I don't quite like that much. So I stuck with KD Lite.

I customized the hell out of it. And it, I really just treated it like a basic arch system. Uh, I, I took a cue from like Manjaro and installed, uh, what did I fucking I install like, uh, yeah, PAMAC. Uh, I can, I can run some updates terminal wise if I need to, but I enjoy using Pamek here and there, or the Discover Store if it comes to it. So I don't recommend Arch or even Garuda to everybody. It works for me. I'm not gonna say it's the best thing ever or the best distro,

but it does what I need it to do and I have no real reason to jump ship anymore. Mm-mm-mm. I should have read the second question. Will Nova 2.0 look like a bionicle? No, it's really going to be the same girl, just different armor. So sorry. Um, do you miss anything from windows? Oh God.

I mean, sometimes I miss things just working because they were meant to work on windows. So part of that, which, you know, comes back around to the whole stream setup thing is like, say for example, the stream decks, they are much harder to deal with in Linux because you have to kind of work around the fact that the manufacturers aren't gonna make software for Linux for these things.

There are some people who have reverse engineered everything and made them work. But I do miss just the people are actually writing software for this OS. I miss that now and again. That's kind of like really it for for other things. Every time I have to go back to Windows, I'm like, ew, why? Right. It's like, heck, even at work these days, I will kind of, if need be, I'd rather suffer with a Mac,

which I detest Macs, but I'd rather suffer a Mac than suffer Windows 11. Yeah, my housemate, he uses Windows 10 right now. He's tempted to switch over to Linux, just because he's had a number of issues. You know, the whole Windows 10 EOL is coming up soon. He had an issue with audio devices where, for some reason, the game he was playing was playing audio out of his PS5 controller and he could not get it to switch through the audio mixer on Windows. Ouch. So it ended up just restarting the app and it went to the right place but I don't know how the... Like every time I look at the Windows audio mixer I'm just... Any problem with Windows I just don't know what I'm looking at anymore.

It's so bad. God, I, I don't know what's going to happen. There's going to be one day my dad asks for tech support and I'm being like, oh fuck. I don't know what's going on anymore. Oh yeah. I think this one's pretty self evident, but do you two have a favorite version of Linux for me? That's arch. I would assume it's probably the same for you. Um, like as far as like general flavor, yeah. Again, I have respect for all of them.

I think Arch is right, the right fit for me. I don't necessarily recommend it to just everyone or even, you know, especially not first timers. Again, I know my wife started a lot in the Ubuntu space and is kind of moving into Fedora a little bit thanks to either Bazite or just one of the Fedora spins. I think it's one of the spins for her. But yeah, for me, yeah, I like what the Arch ecosystem and I hesitate to call it that, but essentially I like what the Arch ecosystem and I hesitate to call it that but I essentially I like what the Arch platform Provides I've learned to work with it. I can deal with the AUR. It gives me a lot of flexibility So like if there's no flat pack if there and if it's just on github

Then you're probably better off on the AUR like looking for it there and nine out of ten I've found what I've looked for. Like I can't tell you the times that there's something I need and it's there, someone's written it, it's on GitHub, and they don't mention anything, but I go searching and lo and behold, it's there. I'm in the AUR, here we go, build it, run it, done.

Let's see, what is this? I guess it's not Linux related directly, but is there an OS interface or style that you feel like is very memorable and has character how it presents itself to the user? One of their favorites is Windows 7 and Vista. Yeah, I mean, I think if you go all the way back, like it all comes back to Windows 95, like it's all been

evolutions and iterations and refining of that same like that same idea I think and I'm like obviously Mac OS did a lot at that same space, but If I had to say oh, yeah, this one was really what did it? But if I had to say, oh, yeah, this one was really what did it Probably like I want to see their XP but even XP was just kind of refining what came before so there was a big jump between Windows 3 and 95 and that was a big deal because it really changed everything having like that the start button That's a construct that I still use like like I don don't need to use that in Linux or in KDE, but I choose to because I find it

kind of comfortable to use that. I know that I could go in the more either GNOME slash like Unix or Mac route where you kind of just you click and you see a whole full screen listing of all your applications and maybe you see a whole full screen listing of all your applications and maybe you start typing there. Personally, this is just again, just personal preference. I prefer to have like a little box that I type into and get my application rather than take over the full screen.

So yeah, so as far as memorable interfaces, it's hard to go like to say, oh, it's got to be 10 or 7 or even Vista when they're all just kind of doing what came before a little better. So I'd say maybe go all the way back to 95 and say, yeah, this is where it began, where the concept of a start menu of folders, of organizing your applications, I think that's something that's worth at least celebrating a little bit. I'll always have a personal soft swap for XP, just because that's the first thing I personally interact with.

I have used it. Oh, 95 was a piece of shit, I'll tell you that right now. I have used it. It had no program safety. So yeah, no XP was the better choice I we all suffered 95 and 98 was only a tad bit better, but not by much. I've used earlier my I had a family friend that I think had a It was either a 98 or a 2000 system. I don't remember I think had a, it was either a 98 or a 2000 system. I don't remember, but that's the oldest I've personally used. On the Linux side, I do kind of a soft spot for early KDE,

especially KDE 3. Like there's videos on YouTube, you can go listen to the KDE 3 like sound theme. Cause back then, pretty much everything you did had a sound effect. And it's just something you don't see Really in modern system like Windows will give you that like error sound if you do something wrong Yeah, but like boot up and shut down noises are gone. Yeah. Yeah most computer noises only happen When you're actually playing audio now

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um. Yeah, I kind of have a nostalgia for those like boot up sounds of the old OSs. So yeah, maybe I'll do that on mine one day, but at the same time, I don't live alone. So if I boot up my computer at, you know, the wee hours of the night, maybe I don't want it to make noise. Right, right.

That makes sense. Um, did you go through an intense ricin phase as a Linux user? And if you did, did you go harder than PewDiePie did? I need you to explain that to me, please. What, the ricin thing? Yeah, what is ricin in this context? Oh, basically, you know, like heavily customizing your system Theming it things like that. Oh

Oh, okay. Oh Kind of but not to that extent. I have not installed a window manager But I did essentially set up my taskbar Mm-hmm. I mean I could even show it off but like I essentially up my task bar. I mean, I could even show it off, but like I essentially have my task bar. I like to have the start button for lack of a better word on the left and have the, my icons in the center with spacers in between,

obviously tweak a bit of the colors, but beyond that, not much. In fact, the only thing that I've done recently to change like the theming, if anything, is now that there's been a nice update from KDE with the system monitors. Now I can actually get monitoring on my GPU. And so I've added those here and there to some of the taskbars that don't need a lot of use. And those are purely for pragmatic reasons because I want to just keep an eye on things and it's like, oh, am I overusing my system memory? Or is my GPU being hammered right now? Or CPU? How much am I pushing in terms of, I guess, bandwidth? Those are more practical concerns. But yeah, I don't think I wouldn't consider

that I've done too much beyond stock, beyond like maybe adding some spacers to what was mostly a default taskbar. Okay, fair enough. Last one we have here is, do you use Linux purely for pragmatic reasons or do you believe in the free software philosophy and principles? I'm gonna answer by saying if I wanted to be pragmatic, I'd be using Windows. Fair, fair.

Yeah, I do believe in the free software philosophy. I guess to a to a extent I do understand the need for proprietary software, but I highly respect and kind of Encourage, you know the free software space. Oh, if that's if there's an option that's free software you know that there's some free software that can do the thing and You and even if it's like slightly less convenient than like the proprietary version. I will probably lean in that direction And yeah as far as like the, you know, for those principles, mostly for me, it was getting away from the the telemetry and tracking and not being in charge of my own machine. So yeah, that was what drove me towards Linux.

And I guess you could say it's from a philosophical standpoint. Be what it be. And so yeah, if I wanted to be pragmatic and purely like, oh, let me get the stuff that just works. I would have stayed on Windows, probably have a lot less issues here and there. But yeah, also remember everyone to donate to devs when they can. Yes, that's a, that is a thing. Which I have done, you know, I do use a lot of free software and when it comes, when the time comes around, you know, I've use a lot of free software and when the time comes around, you know,

I've got like plenty of like cherries going so we'll leave that aside but I do believe that it's better to go in that direction when possible. Okay, I think we've pretty much touched on anything unless there was something else that you wanted to bring up? Uh, let's see. I mean, this is the silly question, but to ask you a thing, um, what got you to do, what, what drove you out of all the things you could have done to, uh, set up a, for lack of a better word, like Linux news YouTube channel? So my, my channel is going through a couple of different phases. Well, okay, one thing I've been doing Linux videos, I've been doing YouTube videos on and off since, I wanna say 2007, maybe 2008.

I've gone through maybe two or three channels So Some of those old videos are still on the internet and you can find them and they're bad videos and you shouldn't watch them But they do exist, right? Like really not good videos anyway So back then I had made like some RuneScape videos, I'd made videos and various other things, I've done some, there was like a period I did some programming stuff. And when I started this channel, this channel, it's existed for a long time, like the actual age of the account. I think is 2013-2014 something like that

but initially Well initially I just kind of got interested in doing It I don't really know what what's what's like Really started it from the very beginning because I started it when I was in the middle of university and I don't know something grabbed my attention I know I'd started watching Linux videos by then and I was because I was in a software engineering degree at the time

I was in my second year of software engineering and I engineering degree at the time. I was in my second year of software engineering and I started watching Linux stuff. I had a class where we used Linux for one thing I think it was what a class that first introduced us to what Git was and Yeah, initially I was just kind of Making a bit of anything early on there's a couple of anime videos on the channel, they're still up. I think one of the initial things that did make me decide the direction I was going is there was a channel that was doing Linux videos a couple of years back called Luke Smith. He still has videos

up now. A lot of the stuff is very terminal focused, window manager focus, things like that. I think now he, I think now he, like the last thing I saw from him, he was like speaking at Monero conferences and doing Bible readings or something. I don't, I don't, his chat was shifted as well. But yeah, he's, so he was doing these Linux videos and honestly, a big part of it was I looked at the way he was doing them and I was like, this is shit, I can do it better. That honestly, there was definitely some ego there where I was like, I'm gonna do that better. They weren't better initially. It took a long time to work out.

Like early on, like in those videos, there were a lot of people who were like, oh, um um This is like a Luke Smith clone channel and frankly early on it really was early on I did a lot of videos on random Linux command-line software just the most random things that like really didn't need a video but I would just go over those. I did there was a Time when I was doing videos on Vim plugins as well. Um, which you'd think is hyper niche, but there's actually surprisingly a lot of people that wanted to see that. Um, then I guess over time, I think one of things that helped me shift like not help like maybe not help me should like maybe shift is I at

some point I started covering Like the history of various different projects like I did have a history I think was the history of the UNIX philosophy I think I did a video on the history of the Unix philosophy. Um, I think I did a video on the history of the free software philosophy, things like that. Like, what are the four free software principles? Um, and at some point I started covering what was happening in, like, GitLab issue trackers. So I've got a number of videos where I go over these Weyland issues where it's like 500 comments long and basically just like break down what's going on. Because I feel like a lot of people, they see that development is happening, but they don't really know how it's happening and what's going on behind the scenes.

And like you would see like for Ronix they will like occasionally upload articles where Usually it's one comment and that's the entire article. So it's like a very surface level look But they'll include a link to the full thread so I know just start digging into that and just I Find it interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes in the FOSS world. I like to see... I like to see how things work and I've had people complain about this because like, oh, you know putting like more people are maybe coming to it and being trolls. Yeah, of course they're gonna do that because people are gonna do that.

But at the same time, I feel like what it has done is sort of humanized a lot of The development is done. It's not just these names. It's not just these avatars. Like these are people that will just You know start arguing with others just on the dumbest things like You don't need to idolize the people that are working in the kernel. You can do that as well You just need to workize the people that are working in the kernel, you can do that as well. You just need to work out how to actually get involved in that space, work out the the mailing list model, you can work out and get involved in projects like KDE, Gano and Wayland. The people there are just people like this. There's nothing special about them.

True. I don't know. Like there's nothing special about them True I don't know, I think that's like it And I've done my fair share of like development to know and understand that very intimately Yeah, yeah The kernel is a crazy place, very true, very very true The kernel GitHub, go to the kernel GitHub because they don't monitor They just have a bot there that auto closes issues being like if you want to submit a patch to the kernel github because they don't they don't monitor they just have a bot there that auto closes issues being like if You want to submit a patch to the kernel?

go to the mailing list so There's basically no moderation there you have some like Absolutely insane threads. I think the last time I told looked at it was probably like 2010 Oh God funny thing um Oh God. Funny thing, like two little anecdotes I'll make, one that's actually interesting. While I was in college, in university, and this was like around 2006 or so, one of my teacher's aides would do, like he would offer his services as a computer

technician consultant, whatever, and making money. And he would like, he said he doesn't sell Linux, he sells solutions. He was definitely a Linux advocate and was pushing for it way back when. And you know charging people for the service not the software right right so yeah I wonder how many people he got onto Linux on his own oh dear what would it what would have been I didn't I didn't think at the time cuz like yeah at the time I was like no I do too much PC gaming and at that at that point in time would have been impossible.

Yeah. So, yeah. Now, the only other thing that I'll mention is that I didn't get to use Git until maybe freaking 2015 or early 2016. Uh-huh. Funny enough. Yeah, I got good at it. I got really good at it.

But I'm just surprised because I spent so much time working solo that I didn't need a version controller. Didn't think about that. Well, I was gonna- And then suddenly I'm part of a team. Right, I was gonna ask if maybe you'd been using some of the older systems and the company you're at just kind of migrated over.

I use subversion for a year, SVN for the people who might know. But yeah, beforehand, like when I was like the one dev with no one to kind of give me any guidance, yeah, I was just like, just making backups of all my binaries. Oh my God. Well, I think we've pretty much covered everything here.

The podcast has run on longer than it normally would go, but that's fine. It is what it is. All right. Well, Brody, it's been an honor and a pleasure. I honestly thank you so much for, you know, giving this old bot a chance, being able to share some of these insights on how all this shit works. I hope you get some good content out of this. No, I think it was a really good episode.

I really like the way you handle your streams. This is a very unique way of doing it. The fact that you do it on Linux as well is really cool. And yeah, I hope you keep, I hope you keep doing, keep doing this long into the future. Yeah, I just, I hope so. Ask me on my own stream if we're gonna talk about Cosmic.

You don't have to ask me here. No, it's all good, it's all good. Well, if you got to drop, then that is okay. I will probably stick around on the stream for at least a little longer, maybe do some actual like gaming or catching up with the many people in chat. Yes. Every time someone puts an LOL or LUL or one of the many permutations that you might say to laugh in chat, Nova will laugh too. So just for, just on my side, if anyone wants to find your stream, your bluesco, anything like that, let people know where they can go. Honestly, if you need a starting point, go to Nova and Pulse.com.

It's literally just like a link tree at this point, like nothing special, but that's got all the links to my Blue Sky, to my Twitch, to my Discord community channel if you want to really bother me personally. So just go Nova and Pulse.com. I bought the.com for a reason. Might as well use it. What do you mean it doesn't work? Are you kidding me?

They are, they're obsessed with Joel on my stream. Oh no, it does work, it does work. God damn it, you had me scared Ahmed. Yeah, Nova and Pulse.com does work, you can go there just to get links to everything else. Well as for my side, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes there is a stream on that channel as well. There hasn't been for a while.

I've been meaning to do my 100k stream. Now it's going to be the 101k stream. Um, so I'll get to that soon. Um, pro- it should be- it should happen before happen before this goes, this goes out on the podcast channel. The gaming stuff I stream over on Brodygon Games on both YouTube and Twitch. Right now I'll probably be playing through... I'm gonna, I think I said I was gonna do Ori and Kazan the first Berserker Yeah, that sounds cool. Go to the stream. You'll see what's there. I've got the react channel as well

Brody Robertson reacts for Apple Eclipse 2 and the Video version of this podcast can be found on YouTube at Tech over T. If you would like to find the audio version, it is on Spotify. There is an RSS feed. It'll be on pretty much every podcast platform. There's video on Spotify as well, if that's if that's your jam. So how do you want to sign us off or can you get Nova to say something?

I don't know how you want to handle it. I guess we could let her say something for this. Whether I can get her to say... Well, you know what? I'm gonna do that, but I hope nobody gets in there before me. This is terrible. You know there's gonna be people who are who are gonna jump at the opportunity. So here we go. I'm gonna try to try this out. All right. There we go. Got her. I was expecting someone to just snatch that up and if this was a larger audience I'm sure

someone would have but yeah. So here we go she's got her she's processing right now Nova and pulse asked me could you sign us off Nova sure thing thanks for hanging out star Mavericks Remember keep your gaming spirit strong and your hearts full of fun me and pulse will catch you next time stay awesome and keep looking respectfully Until then game on