Furality Day 1

VRChat screenshot of a purple reptile-like character named Aroo looking out into the game world of Furality Sylva's lobby. It is a cartoon rainforest with many treehouses hanging from the trees. They are connected by bridges and ziplines. A smoking volcano can be seen in the distance.

Furality has started for real, with panels and games and other crap like that! I'm real motivated to blog today because I realized no one else is really cataloguing and archiving information about this, and to me it's just fascinating. I don't know if there's any other virtual reality hobby conventions this big? Even if there are, I can't say that I see many personal accounts of it. So... I shall share my experiences with the worlge... The COMMON MANS experiences might I add. I've actually created a screenshots folder on my FA to contain, well, screenshots of events and such. Plus, I like to write down my Thoughts... And I can actually safely list exactly where I was and what I did because this is all on the computer. I will not be detailing this much about my whereabouts during Anthrocon, for example...

So today was mostly chatting and meetups. But I'm not gonna lie, I was disappointed with all the meetup instances I joined. There were set topics to chat about, and no one stuck to the topics at all. Sci-fi furs meetup, disabled furs meetup, all of it was just people chatting about their avatars! But then again, this is the game where people spend hours sitting and staring into the mirror, so, what else did I expect. I ended up skipping out on most of them early, and I played some games instead. I ended up having fun meeting new people while playing some cooking game, and then VR among us.

I attended one panel today, which was Avatars 3-point-WOAH by Ekkosangen. It was a pretty introductory glimpse over the capabilities of 3.0 avatars, but I still learned a few things. For example, contacts and receivers are news to me. I kinda just assumed that boop animations (Like, if you boop someone's snoot and their avatar is programmed to make a face in response) were connected to physbones, somehow.

Despite knowing most of the information I got soooo motivated. God I wanna get deeper into avatar making. God, I want VR. I'm just a stupid desktop andy.

VRChat screenshot of a room full of seats facing a screen. Various furry characters are seated and watching a panel. A projection of the speaker is on the stage, and there are multiple screens showing live footage of them as well.

I briefly attended another avatar panel, but I left pretty quick to rejoin my friends when I realized it was streamer-based information. The real joy of the day was exploring the absolutely incredible lobby world. (Which can be seen at the beginning of this post.) The art team completely outdid themselves with this one, it is just beautiful. There is detail packed in every little corner, and there's functional ziplines leading between the treehouses! Just amazing. The lighting and dynamic shadows too are just incredible. Genuinely one of the prettiest worlds I've seen. Definitely the prettiest cartoon-y world that I've seen! I hope to God that they make this world public later, because it'd be a fucking crime to let it just sit and collect dust once the con is over.

VRChat screenshot of Aroo leaning down and looking at multiple cups and fruits sitting on a table.

VRChat screenshot of Aroo dashing across a rope-and-wood bridge high in the trees.

VRChat screenshot of multiple characters standing together on the balcony of a treehouse. There is a blue cat, Dire from Fortnite, a small fox in pastel clothes, Master Chief from Halo, and Kim Kitsuragi from Disco Elysium.

^ Name anywhere else that you can witness this epic crossover event.

But yeah, sitting in the lobby and chatting was great. Made a few new friends just hanging out. I love the culture of VRChat, or maybe specifically Furality, being that you just jump into any conversation you find. It makes socializing SO much easier, because I can hop into groups and others can hop into mine without any issue. And no one ignores you if you're quiet either. When you finally do speak up, everyone pays attention.

I must say that the technical issues from last year are almost completely gone. Invites get sent quickly, I load in fine, the website is functional. Last year man, every event was delayed it was impossible to meet up with friends because everyone was crashing and every instance was lagging and filling up and all that but nah, not this time.

Except...

During the opening ceremony. THAT raised some hell. I don't know what happened. The invite system sent me to three different maps before I finally landed in the correct one. And I was a lucky one for that! Because just about everyone else couldn't get in! My friends and I genuinely couldn't meet up into the same instance, and a lot of others had to take the L and just watch the official Twitch stream instead because the entire website was down from how many people were on it.

But yeah, I was a lucky duck and got to see it the way the creators intended, so yay me. Not like it was anything crazy anyways, it was mostly just some PSAs about how the con functions and how to protect yourself from trolls and poorly optimized avatars in such big worlds. I tried to take good care of myself today despite the excessive screen time. Lots of water, stretching, exercise breaks, and I even took a walk so I could touch grass and stay grounded in these online times.

Sometimes I feel... Motivated, after having a good time. Whenever I have great times with my friends like this, I'm just like "Man, I wanna get my shit together." and I'm gonna grab that motivation and hold onto it so fucking tightly cause I don't wanna lose it because I really do wanna get my shit together. Well I guess that's it. Dealers den is dropping tomorrow, I hope there's plenty of avatars to try out. Okay Love you bye

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