Late-Night Turtle Tuesday

Time flies, eh? It's been another eight months since I've posted anything, but here I am! Let's start things off with the obvious: a fresh coat of paint.

New Blog Theme

One of the things I wanted to do recently was overhaul the blog design. The old one was good, don't get me wrong, but realistically it had some issues. Mainly that GitHub Pages uses jekyll by default - which uses the ruby programming language. That itself isn't bad, but installing ruby on Windows is like pulling teeth. I don't know why it's as hard as it was when I tried to do exactly that a couple of weeks ago. I debated on what static website generator to go with and decided to use vue-wordpress with this "hope" theme. It looks super slick. Took me a bit to set up almost everything I wanted to be as expected, but I got there at least.

One thing you might want to check out is my VRChat Memories gallery. It was hidden away before, but I decided to make it more accessible now.

Life

This is probably the longer segment out of all the entire post. Lots happened. I recall blogging about how I lost my job back in late October, but the good news is that it only took two months to get a new one. I was extremely nervous, but confident going into the interviews for my current job and had made it to the code exam (dear god do I hate those)! This time around I prepared myself ahead of time as all I knew was I had to use C# and Selenium to create and run automation tests. I would be given a specific website and then I was on my own. I'm super glad that I passed that and became their top candidate because I am doing really well at my new company, compared to the prior one.

Furthermore, I got a new pet. Her name is Nala and she's a pit bull mix. I originally had a pet turtle for about a year, although if I'm being honest, it wasn't the right pet for me. My friend at the time had convinced me that getting the turtle would be good and low maintenance to a degree. However, after a while I had issues trying to take care of her because of some unknown reason. I mean, I did try to take care of the turtle, but she refused in a way. I wound up taking her back to PetSmart for adoption. Regardless, I adopted Nala from someone who listed her on the local animal shelter's website and she's been great. She is super sweet, loving and drives me crazy almost every day, but I love her and wouldn't trade her for the world.

Lastly, some news.. well everything here is news, but whatever. If you noticed, I at some point changed my blog title to my online alias (and the avatar too, but ¯\(ツ)/¯). Now, I've changed the blog name completely, sort of. Now assuming my parents never find my blog.. which they haven't yet (since I have spoken about the stuff that's happened between us on here): I'm trans. I originally figured this out about two years ago if memory serves. I spent a lot of time in VRChat - and I mean (checks Steam) 2,946 hours total in there. During that time I've only ever felt comfortable wearing female avatars. All the masculine ones just didn't even sit right with me. Mostly because their designs, but also because they didn't resonate well with how I felt. Over time, I wound up being mute around newer people depending on how I felt, (this was around 2020, a year after I started playing). People had mistaken me for a girl, which is understandable because I'm not speaking and also in a feminine avatar. After some time I came to my decision that I actually did enjoy people referring to me with she/her pronouns and it took a bit longer to settle into the idea of changing my name as well.

Initially I met some friends in a Vtuber's community (who are awesome people by the way) and they helped me ease into being more comfortable. After that, I changed my Twitch username to reflect my new name. I did tell some other friends online about all this, but that's not entirely important. At this point, only my one coworker knows, one cousin knows, my closest friends know, and my siblings and their spouses (and my sister-in-law's sister) know as well.

That all said, I have no idea if I'll ever tell my parents. My mother might be accepting, but my father - that's unlikely unless Hell froze over.