Introducing Lyre

30 September 2024 20 minute read character, jungian psychology, stream

My ongoing evolution of my digital presence and stream design, and some thoughts on separation of personae.

“Who’s Lyre?”, you ask - but alas it’ll be a little bit of time before we get to that. It’ll make sense, don’t worry! We’ve just got to follow the process…

Let’s talk history

I’ve been online for a while now, relative to my age (though certainly not as long as others!); at this stage it probably wouldn’t be unfair to label me as terminally online, but that’s simply how it is. The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the pros and cons of being online, but I mention this to provide some context around the timeframes we’re looking at when it comes to my digital identity: unlike my physical identity, this only began around twelve years ago when I first went online myself, and has an odd structure wherein it’s simultaneously more malleable than a physical identity (for example, if I were to change a characteristic of my digital identity, this is relatively simple in principle: changing a bit of text, or changing an image, etc.) but also arguably more permanent too: the famous line is that nothing you do on the internet disappears^[1]. Consequently, whilst my very limited attempts to change aspects of my physical identity have taken (and continue to take) considerable effort and time, the same efforts digitally have been trivially quick.

People who knew me all those years ago won’t know me as Lyrenhex: I went by another username back then, and that circle will still identify me with that name; in part, this is an intentional effect: whilst I appreciate and had great experiences with many of the people in that circle at the time, as time went on there was a smaller pocket with whom things ended poorly, and keeping some isolation between that - especially with how young I was at the time, and thus how much I dislike some of my own behaviours at the time - and myself now is ideal for me. I am no longer the same as the person that username represented, and whilst there may be some small amounts of bleed between that identity and that of Lyrenhex, overall not having them kept consistent is good for me.

Indeed, my identity back then revolved around a username I’d created in about 30 seconds whilst watching a movie in the background, with haphazard features based on whatever media I was into at the time (such as references to certain books I was reading and such), combined with a limited skillset I’d use to try to create my own profile pictures and the like. Simplified to its core, it was an inconsistent identity reflecting someone who was still finding the core facets of who they are, and who they wanted to be online, with little to no real coordination or direction as a consequence.

Over time, this underwent a sudden and major shift, with my username settling on the new replacement, Lyrenhex, which I’ve probably used going on a decade now, and since 2017 a consistent profile picture I used for basically everything:

A period of relative stagnation, my digital identity was relatively static during this period of about 7 years, with the only significant change during it being when I started streaming in 2018.

Streaming was a return to form: I had no idea what I really wanted to do, but loved hanging out in my streamer-friend circles, and had three main driving aesthetics:

1. My adoration of penguins; by far my favourite animal, these were basically the only things I thought of for emotes and subscription icons;
2. My (at the time) new favourite colour, hex code #0099ff (spot it all throughout this site!), which usurped my prior fascination with green; and
3. At the time, I had a strong interest in aspects of The Elder Scrolls lore, an interest that’s generally continued and expanded with strong cosmological interest in a variety of games’ lore.

Alas, with limited resources and skills at the time (with programming itself not being the most useful of skills for such a visual medium as streaming), the visual design of my streams was as inconsistent as my original digital identity: my standard profile picture had little relevance to the rest of the stream, and whilst I might have worn a suit (an interest and appreciation that drove the design of that image), this never actually ended up happening out of an ongoing general anxiety^[2]. Scenes were then a curious combination of inconsistency and personal aesthetic failure: I both did not like how the translucent grey I used looked, nor how the scenes felt so different, but had no real idea at the time how to do it better. Each adjustment I made to the stream at this time was accompanied by me telling myself “it is what it is”.

Phase 0: Finally developing a standard stream design

As of the past couple of years, however, you might be able to identify gradual changes I’ve been making to the visual design of my streams. In particular:

1. The outright removal of translucent elements on most scenes
   I do not enjoy translucence, at least as it renders on a 6 Mbps 1080p stream, and so removing the elements which used this both cleans up the image to me, and removes a lot of obstruction to the content of the scene that I felt unnecessary.
2. Unattaching elements from the sides of the canvas
   A common design principle I used for a while was elements such as my webcam being fixed to a side or corner of the stream, largely due to using a very flat design, but I disliked how this looked. With the third main change, though, I felt that I could finally have overlay widgets be unshackled from their positions.
3. Rounding elements & having them visually float
   Elements such as the webcam gained drop shadows to simulate the appearance of floating, and rounded corners rather than the raw right angled rectangles.

Ultimately, these changes boil down to personal preference, but finally identifying the visual elements I disliked, I could finally standardise a style I liked, and retool the stream to match this more consistently.

This, I think, marks the start of the evolution of my stream, but the true catalyst for this effort was unintentional and triggered not by me, but by a friend…

Starting a rebrand, accidentally

KreepBee (also referred to as ‘Molly’ or ‘Moll’ on stream) surprised me with a spur-of-the-moment emote, lyrenhStar, at the end of a Desting 2 Raid stream:

This, interestingly, is the greatest single contribution to my design direction for rebranding more coherently, as it provided a character to work with. KreepBee’s helped more as part of this work, and I’ve had their explicit blessing to do what I want with the character and so on, so let’s take a detour to the title of this post…

Actually introducing Lyre

Lyre, forming 50% of my username, is how I’ve taken to mentally reasoning about the fundamental character design used in lyrenhStar: at its core, it’s an artistic representation of myself (to my interpretation), wearing a penguin hoodie. This design was just so perfect to the vibe I wanted the stream to give off; is it particularly complex to think of? Not really, I suppose. Had I thought of it, though? Nope!^[3]

So, Lyre (similarly evolving slightly as I’ve run with it, such as the eye colour shifting to my shade of blue) is rather crucial to me: they represent my digital identity, tie the stream’s design together, and provide a mechanism for isolating personae. Lyre is, fundamentally, me as I want to be seen online; we’ll talk about that more shortly.

The ongoing evolution of my stream

Phase 1: Emotes

Starting with the aforementioned surprise emote, phase one is finally settling on an emote design I want to use moving forward. I want to take the opportunity here to, again, thank H7aunos from the older streamer-friend circle I mentioned earlier, for designing the first round of emotes for me which had a pure penguin design: I still love these emotes, and appreciate how they encapsulate the representation of the stream I wanted at the time, but they don’t match how I want to represent myself now. They aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but whilst I look to the future I did want to take a moment to appreciate the past.

Any future emotes, however, are planned to generally follow the design established with lyrenhStar and refined in lyrenhHug.

Phase 2: Profile picture

Marking the first time I’ve ever changed my profile picture in over seven years, the new design (courtesy of Meg James, who did a phenomenal job) finally represents a separation of profile pictures between my online professional and non-professional personae; the design with the suit always fit better for a professional setting (for as long as I don’t regularly wear a suit casually yet, at least), and finally my general online persona has a more approachable picture that fits better with the vibe I want to express.

Something I do want to mention here is that whilst the profile picture is technically a Pride icon, featuring the colours of the Bi Pride Flag in the background (being the identity I most identify with in Pride), this is currently what I consider my standard profile picture at this time. In principle, Pride is not just for a month (we don’t become straight the rest of the year), and if I ever do accrue variants, these would be changed as and when but not in a classic corporate “switch at start of month and go back to bland logo at the end of it” style.

Phase 3: Scene designs

Whilst the starting scene has barely changed, and has no immediate plans for change (but I am thinking about it, so don’t be surprised if anything does happen there), the rest of the stream scenes have undergone an overhaul.

• Ingame
  1. Removal of the top bar
  2. Redesigned webcam into a floating widget with a drop shadow with rounded corners
  3. Moved chat above the new webcam position
  4. Added a toggle-able Discord widget I can place above the chat, creating a floating column for showing Discord streams, chat, and my webcam in the least-used section of most games’ UI.
  5. Added a Discord speaker overlay slightly offset from the top right, to allow identifying who’s speaking when in voice chat.
• BRB & End
  Completely redesigned to remove the heavily text-based design, in favour of a much cleaner design featuring a large hero image with rounded corners, bordered by a white & blue striped design, with floating text (shadowed) over the top left of the image to identify what’s happening in the scene. This is much more pleasing to look at at-a-glance, and provides a lot more to look at:
• BRB specifically
  Cut out the central image, so it will fall back to a hero image but otherwise show the active game in the middle (such as when playing multiplayer games with friends, to show off what’s going on).

These changes have much better standardised my stream design; in time, I expect to add scenes for ‘Chatting’ and similar, but the core design template is finalised now.

Phase 4: PNGTuber

The start of every VTuber’s descent into becoming fully virtual is first turning into a PNG; whilst I have no imminent plans to debut a full VTuber (despite conversations to that effect having already begun on stream), I did desire a representation for myself when I was uncomfortable having the webcam on. Part of this justification was to ensure I still have a way to block elements like MMO chat systems without having to have my webcam on, but also my time watching certain VTubers has also swayed this decision, admittedly.

Created, again, by KreepBee, my PNG Avatar depicts primarily Lyre, and is used as a fallback automatically whenever the webcam is disabled:

I absolutely love this avatar; I mean, just look at the fish aglets! Oh my god.

Of course, I have a few channel point rewards available which meow~ndate I wear something specific; these are also represented, such as cat ears:

Cult mode, however, wherein I wear a cloak gets some unique handling; meet Hex, Lyre’s tricksy alter-ego, who makes a visual cameo^[4] for cult mode:

Phase 5 (today!): Lyre artwork

I am absolutely ecstatic, today, to introduce the latest (and, minus the ongoing nature of phase 1, penultimate) phase of this endeavour: full character artwork I had commissioned from Chocolace, who has done a spectacular job:

I want to give particular credit here for the background, which is spectacular: whilst I gave a fair few reference images for the character, and think I did a decent enough job explaining what Lyre should be doing and such, I had no real idea what I wanted from the background - my description for that was practically just:

in a snowfield. I’d love a few penguins to be visible in the distance

I absolutely love the detailed background Chocolace came up with, even if my mind’s eye could not visualise it at the time^[3]; it’s interesting and complex, and even managed to fulfil the request of having a huddle of penguins too.

You can expect to see this image used in conjunction with my profile picture going forwards, as an at-a-glance introduction image on the website homepage, my stream offline screen, and similar places!

Phase 6: Stream panels

The panels that appear beneath my stream are good enough, for now, but are in a similar position to where I was a while back with my stream scenes: I want to change them, but I don’t know what I want the end result to look like. In time, do expect these to change, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions do send them my way!

Lyre & Hex = Lyrenhex?

Yes.

At least, sort of; humans contain multitudes (famously), but I find it helpful personally to identify a few specific personae^[5] that are relevant at different times, and in general the character design of Lyre/Hex resonated so much with me, in part, because it maps so cleanly to concepts I already had regarding my own mental model of personae:

1. My work persona, which is irrelevant to this discussion. I likely behave slightly different at work, as most people (I think) do.
2. Lyre is my mental image of how I want to be seen; how I intend to come across in online communities, and ideally a representation of who I am in social contexts.
3. Hex is my mental image of the facets of myself that only I - or those very close to me - might see or know; Hex is tricksy, sometimes inconveniently so, but represents an important part of my mental model.

It’s perhaps of interest, though, that these aren’t the origin of my username; rather, quite the other way around: ‘Lyrenhex’ actually represents a few of my interests: ‘hex’ is simply a basic reference to computer science and maths, namely hexadecimal numbers, where ‘lyre’ is an overloaded reference to both my love of music and my strong interest in Ancient Greek & Greek Mythology, in which the lyre is an instrument of great significance. That ‘Lyre’ is actually also a pretty good name for a character is merely a happy coincidence.

Do they really need a name if they’re just you…?

Again, it’s easier to reason about, but more than that is the fact that I struggle enough using ‘I’ sometimes as it is (you can definitely find some examples of me saying ‘we’ sometimes if you look close enough at my writing over time), as looking at things as if from a third-person perspective is useful for me.

In any case, the way I describe things matters: when I’m streaming, it’s me, not a character^[6]. Lyre is, as described earlier, simply the name of the visual design, being different from an actual image of me in reality; the way they map to my mental model of personae is a different topic that was fun to write about here but ultimately inconsequential for you.

Closing thoughts

Some of the thoughts I’ve touched on briefly here, relating to characters, personae, and the intersections of those, are topics I might expand on more over time either in blog posts or other projects for this website that I’ve been thinking of lately - do be sure to check those out if this has interested you! I generally post links to blog posts on Fedi, so that’s the best way to keep fully up-to-date (though the blog specifically supports RSS too, if you prefer that).

Before I go for now, though: the artists I’ve mentioned here are all, as I’ve already said, incredible. If you need someone to create some artwork, or just have an idea you want realised, I highly recommend each of them; do commission them if they’re open to that!

1. I disagree with this perspective, though; things do disappear. I am no longer aware of any copies of the map sharing platform I made for PythianRealms 2016 anymore, and given the lack of attention that project had I could, if I wanted, have deleted the project entirely sometime in the past 8 years: if I had, by now, I don’t think there would be any real trace of it left. Similarly, I know for a fact that I’ve engaged with content in the past that I both do not remember anymore and cannot find any trace of; perhaps traces of these do still exist, but I disagree that it’s tangible enough to suggest that nothing disappears: it can, and often does. The internet is both a strong mechanism for permanence, but also not as intrinsically permanent as people like to believe; hence the purpose of projects like the Internet Archive. ↩

2. The threshold for me to wear a suit on stream is higher than I’d like it to be. Ultimately, this is unequivocably a “me problem”, but I dislike wearing things specifically for a stream: I’d rather either wear what I’m wearing throughout the day anyway, or not stream in the first place. This is easily resolved in theory by simply wearing a suit throughout the day, which makes it feel less wasteful to me (versus changing specifically for stream), but hits an issue with anxiety, wherein I struggle to bring myself to do so - however much I might want to - out of fear of standing out. I still hope to make progress on this in future, so I do look forward to eventually winning one of these mental battles and wearing a suit on stream. :) ↩

3. This remains the greatest skill of artists, to me: to show me what I really wanted without me even knowing it to begin with! Artists, you’re all fantastic. Please keep making art; an AI cannot do that, I promise you. ↩ ↩2

4. Again, the art wasn’t made to be Hex here, but it fit so perfectly with what my brain was failing to visualise that it just works. ↩

5. The most common impression of this is Jungian Psychology, and that’s probably the best place to look for a formal description of personae and the like; I’m not a psychologist, and I’ve only had a more recent exposure to the core concepts of Jungian Psychology (… in part thanks to my love of the Persona franchise), but have yet to deep-dive explore the topic (don’t worry: I expect it to happen soon). In general, when I describe personae, I’m discussing it from my own perspective and not a formal definition; it’s a vibe based on how I feel, and not a true professional psychoanalysis. ↩

6. Of course, the impact of that distinction is lessened by the fact that ‘Lyre’ is a pretty reasonable shortening of my username anyway. If you want to know my opinion on shortenings, though: ‘Lyren’ is preferred. ↩