About me

As said on the Main Page, my name is Kyu Vulpes. This blog post is going to be about me, of course. I do not vibe with the United States of America, I sadly feel like an outcast here. The friends I care the most about tend to be living in Europe and quite a few Europeans I talk to say I am a European trapped in the United States. I make the most out of what I can while I am living in the United States, I am trying to get this train on the tracks I want it to be on. As I have told many people, I am going to go for my goal or die trying.

Here is a few labels I give myself. I am a Secular Humanist, transhumanist, genderfluid (pronouns are any/all), furry, and a Democratic Socialist.

Furry Fandom

I am part of the furry fandom. For those not in the loop of what a furry is, a furry is a person who loves anthropomorphic characters. It's a scale from humans with animal tails to feral animals that talk and act like humans. The word `anthropomorphic` means the attribution of human traits, emotions, and/or intentions to non-human entities. So think of the Kyuubi of Japanese Mythology, a 9-tailed fox that is super intelligent, and is able to understand and talk to humans. Or in the bible of the serpent that convinced Eve to eat the Apple of Knowledge. This is, of course, not to be confused with personification, which is applying the human form and/or characteristics onto concepts. In that case, think of the Countryballs. Also, there are people in the fandom that have an avatar/persona called a fursona (combination of furry and persona). Mine is, of course, Kyu Vulpes. I'll get into my fursona later though.

The furry fandom is a diverse group of people, and most furry communities pride themselves on being diverse. Sadly, as with all fandoms, there are bad apples. But you shouldn't judge a group of people based on the actions of a few. Most furries out there love animals and want to take care of the world. Furries are a group of people outcasted for being weird/abnormal. For example, a lot of the furry fandom are people in the LGBT+ community, and/or have mental disorders. Like myself, I have Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

My Fursona

My fursona took years to develop into what they are now. Kyu coming from the Japanese mythological creature, a kyuubi. Vulpes coming from the scientific name for a fox. Put the 2 together and you get a sense of what I was aiming for, a 9-tailed fox. I also love flying in planes and thinking one day of maybe getting a pilot license to fly a plane, so my fursona also has wings on them. For the most part I use the Rexouium by Rezillo has the base.

I have been a furry for a good long while now. Is started around 2008, I am not too certain of the date, or even the year, as I don't have much memory of my childhood. I have a hard time keeping memories of life events, thank you ADHD. So I have been in the fandom for about 17 years. And since I am 27 years old, I am considered a Greyfur. Back then, my fursona was a dragon. It was actually a custom species called a Plantae Dragon, a creature that can use photosythesis and do the normal dragon things. As of late, I have switched to a new custom "species" called a biomimic. It is a machine made up of small, cell-like machines that make the bigger machine. This enables it to be organically compatible with organic life while having the benefits of being a machine.

My Interests

I am very much interested in STEM, but there are a few aspects of STEM I love the most. Those area's in STEM are:

Programming/Computer Science

When it comes to programming, I like a lot of the older programming languages. I'm talking C/C++/C#, Java, and Assembly. This whole website is built mainly in C# using ASP.NET Blazor, though I have to disagree with how Microsoft is taking C# as of late. The nice part is that I can still use it like I have throughout the years. I have written in Java a while back, but I am very rusty on Java. I have written some JavaScript, but I hated it.

When it comes to projects I did, I plan on linking them all here on my site on a dedicate page. It may be a while though, as I have many different projects I am doing at the same time right now.

3D Modeling

Most of my 3D Modeling is around taking existing models and using them in Renders. I have done quite a few of them, though most are meant for a mature audience. I do plan on making more renders that are safe for work though, so just sit tight for that. I have been told by a few of my friends that I have amazing quality in my Blender skills, and I have done some renders of a friend.

System Administrator

I want to be a System Administrator. I do not have the certifications at the moment to prove it, but I am confidant that I would be able to do the job. As mentioned before, I have built multiple computers, and 2 of them were NAS'. With both NAS' running Proxmox with VMs and containers.

The Wicker Vault

My NAS is named The Wicker Vault. It is using an ASRock X570 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 128GB of DDR4 RAM, 2 NVMe Samsung 990 EVOs stripped in a mirrored RAIDZ-1. 5x16TB Seagate IronWolf drive, stripped in a RAIDZ-2. It also has a GTX 970 for video out and 2 LSI SAS3008 PCIe cards. This is inside a 45HomeLab HL-15. It runs Proxmox as the host OS, with TrueNAS under it. I have done it this way as a way to mess with virtual machines and do PCIe passthrough. I didn't use TrueNAS as the host OS since it is a NAS-centric OS while Proxmox is more of a data-center, VM centric OS. The LSI cards are passed to the TrueNAS VM for direct control. In TrueNAS, I have the following running inside it:

• NextCloud
• MeTube
• netboot.xyz
• JellyFin

On top of that, I also have a few network shares set up on it. 2 SMB shares and 1 NFS share, and I use the NFS share as the actual mass storage since I seem to get better transfer speeds. With Samba, I only have that to transfer things to JellyFin and as a way to dump things off my phone when NextCloud doesn't want to work. I notice that Samba will use up a lot of memory when transferring large files.

My Dad's NAS

My Dad's NAS is in a similar boat. It is running an Intel Core i5-9400 with 64GB of RAM, it as an iGPU and it has nothing else. The reason why it is running Proxmox is because the NAS was originally a shared one, and I would spin up VMs on it, I never got around to changing it and I do plan on switching over to purely TrueNAS when that NAS isn't going to be in the same house as me. It has TrueNAS running in a VM with the SATA controllers passed to it. It is running 6x6TB Seagate IronWolf drives, they are stripped in a RAIDZ-2 as well. Under TrueNAS, it is running Plex and NextCloud. All of this is contained in a Cooler Master HAF XB EVO ATX LAN.

Network Engineering

I like setting up networks, there's just something fun about it. I have bought myself a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro, and have been learning how to do things off of it for quite a while now. Right now I got it set up with a few rules and a VPN so I can VPN any of my devices back to my house in case I need to do that. I got a lot of firewall rules and use some of their tooling to help protect my network. I have set up 2 PiHole instances and pointed the Dream Machines to that for DNS.

Operating System of choice

Linux is my favorite Kernel/Operating System. I love the modularity and open-source nature of the kernel. It feels a lot lighter and more responsive than Windows. Linux has been used in networking gear, servers, and it is what runs Android. Even Microsoft has their own Linux Distro for their Azure platform. With what Microsoft is doing with Windows, I feel like the Linux Desktop's ability to shine is coming up soon.

I also feel like Linux is way more stable than Windows. On Windows, I have had more crashed and corruption than I have had on Linux. It still keeps around the stupid, and quite dumb structuring, where it seems all programs are to be "system" wide and install themselves into either `C:\Program Files`, or `C:\Program Files (x86)`. Don't get me wrong in that Linux has a similar thing, but if you use Flatpak with OpenZFS' deduplication if you are worried about storage usage is amazing. Of course with Flatpak, it does store all data in `~/.var/`

Biology

I do not know what to say for this section, other than biology and microbiology are interesting. It is so fascinating knowing how a bunch of chemicals came together and through reactions brought about cells. And through many iterations of cells coming into and leaving existence, we got multi-cellular life. Throughout the times leading up to now with us, where cells are learning about cells. Quite meta if you ask me.