The girl, the brand, the avatar
About Shiva.vu
Welcome to Shiva.vu! Shiva.vu started with an idea to help creators with up to date information and resources to help grow both their business and their skills. The website has multiple sections: A shop – you will find various textures, builders, shaders to help you create products easier! You can also browse the services available which include mentoring sessions, social media management and services, custom art, and the ability to purchase ad space to feature your IMVU shop. Articles & tutorials – plenty of useful information will be added every week free of charge. Articles are original and exclusive to shiva.vu. Various contests and showcases – I will feature artwork, organize contests and giveaways for anyone who is interested.
Who am I?
I am a creator on IMVU and the owner of Shiva.vu where I write articles, create tutorials and offer virtual products and services to help people improve their creating skills, teach them how to create a brand for themselves and how to improve their business.
Everybody is creative. They just don’t know it yet.
I incorporate psychology and social science in my articles both to help explain a subject better (by referencing real-life examples), but also to share interesting ideas, facts, and/or concepts about individuals and societies, particularly because we work a lot through identifiable patterns.
I am influenced by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Jordan Peterson and I try to incorporate non-IMVU related messages through my articles and tutorials to share both a bit of wisdom and motivation.
Articles represent my ideas based on the experiences gained as a creator, as a business owner and everything else I’ve done in real life that made me a bit wiser. I try my best to offer a neutral view on things and I try (and hopefully I am succeeding) at stating both pros and cons of different actions that can help an individual grow their business.
Articles
Articles are the heart of Shiva.vu. They represent my knowledge transferred into writing. I will try my best to offer a neutral/balancing view on topics unless it’s about general best practices on creating (for which there will be a clear direction of what I recommend and whatnot).
My style of writing is quite complex due to the long sentences and occasional philosophical references that make an idea hard to follow at times.
I weigh both pros and cons and you will find various articles: topics for creators, tech enthusiasts, business people, creative folks, parents, kids. Every article is an original creation and exclusive to shiva.vu. If you want to quote the website, please read the Terms of Service.
I have an active list of over tens of titles just for topics (tutorials aren’t included on the list) I plan on writing about! 😀 Weekly content will be provided every Monday. Articles are written from my own perspective, experience and the information I know from research and/or from other trustworthy resources. Research links will be provided where is needed at the end of the article.
Honest approach
Shiva.vu is both a shop and therefore a business, but shiva.vu also represents a trustworthy resource for growing and learning more about IMVU. The question is – how valid can the information provided be when there is a goal of making money? That’s a valid point. It’s also true, but the goal of the reader comes first. If you are someone starting out, there is no point in investing money in anything else but buying credits to be able to afford submitting products. You can learn and you should learn basic things like working with a graphics program, creating a simple catalog icon, understanding how UV maps work on a product.
If you are in a scenario like that, you shouldn’t invest in buying resources to make your work easier. At that point, no work is easy because you don’t have the basics. After you learn the minimum, sure, you could invest and buy resources such as a top shader – maybe it will allow you to see a new shading technique, maybe it will help you understand how depth is created, etc. Is my intention to teach people best practices and practical advice? Yes. Is my intention to make money through my shop and services provided? Yes. Will I manipulate the main goal of offering practical advice and a balancing view on topics to gain more sales? No. Will I suggest my resources and services for appropriate scenarios where investing money in growing knowledge/skills would be beneficial? Yes.
I’m not looking for dirty money. I’m not implementing every marketing technique in the book to make you buy something. I’m not looking for the smallest chance to try to sell some bullshit to you so that I can make more money. I’m not going to dehumanize myself to rip you off. There’s already too many people who do that. And it’s not nice. I’m not going to profit off of your naivety thinking that you buying whatever I have to offer will make you better at what you do. Because it won’t. I do something else – I offer you a platform and a choice. I also give you free resources to help educate you so that you make the best decision on what you spend your money on, that’s if you should spend any money at all.
I’m not even sure that in the majority of cases you even need to spend any money at all to become better at what you do. Your will is your way. The stronger the will, the more successful you can be.
(I lied a bit about not having to spend money at all in most cases – I still believe it’s true, but it’s surely not true if you want to be a professional photographer and have no camera – even then, you wouldn’t need the most expensive one.)
Not only this, but the resources on www.shiva.vu are to serve as a base and help create/enhance skills.
The girl
I’m in my mid-twenties, based in Romania and I’m a piece of art, as you can see in my flattering Mona Lisa Photoshop edit. 😀
I’ve been using IMVU since 2006 (with a 5-year gap between 2011 and 2016) during which I focused on gaming and school. It was during this time that I started becoming inspired to help others and do things that I consider meaningful.
Everything I publish here are things I wish I knew at the right time and things I wish I knew how to do better.
Background
I was born on a heavy snow day on the first of January. I grew up in a very modest family to a mother that was almost never home because she had to work and a father that would abuse my sister and I mentally every day for years for his inability to cope with everyday life like a responsible adult.
I grew up watching a lot of Cartoon Network and RTL2 which was a German TV programme that was running anime. I took up drawing as a hobby and for a couple of years after starting drawing, there was never paper available in the house and my mother’s phonebook was always doodled with my nonsense.
At that time, an uncle was living with us because he was in high school/college and I looked up to him like a bigger brother for the first 7 years of my life when he lived with us.
He inspired me to take up gaming, which was a fun extension of drawing in some sense for me. I would mostly play strategy games and doodle quite a lot in Paint.
I started gaining even more interest in using the computer: I set up websites, forums, cracked games I wanted to play, started drawing digitally and creating movies.
I found myself immersed in the endless possibilities of a processor and the internet.
As years went by, due to financial problems, I went on to study Computer Science, my second choice after CGI and Visual Effects. I was very involved in different activities in my college years, that’s what landed me an internship at Microsoft that transformed into a permanent position that was waiting for me to finish college.
I left my engineering job at Microsoft to focus on IMVU
After graduating, I worked at Microsoft as an engineer for 2 years and a half. It was a huge learning curve and a very painful experience as a kid transitioning into adulthood and taking up responsibilities.
I was working a full job at Microsoft and would usually spend about 11 hours every day at work, then at night I would work a few hours on IMVU and reading articles on fashion and mostly marketing psychology because I was interested to know how the consumer mindset worked like. I was making quite a lot of money when I was working late nights to focus on IMVU too.
I couldn’t keep up the insane schedule of working so much, so I had to focus either on Microsoft or IMVU, so for some months I ignored IMVU a bit to be able to focus on my real life job. I knew I wanted to leave, but it was also overwhelming, so I made a list of things I wanted to finish at Microsoft before leaving.
Although my everyday job meant solving technical issues for Microsoft customers, I managed to get involved in various projects to help around, from the struggling engineer to the curious student who wanted to learn more about Microsoft products. Heck, Microsoft was my first customer for which I produced an official movie. It was an ad campaign for a global training for technical people. It was fun. And awesome. 😀
I had all these projects I was working on, some of which I was leading, that I wanted to leave behind to make sure people could still benefit from them, so there was a lot to prepare before leaving.
In July 2020 I started doing IMVU full time because I wanted to focus on creating a business, a brand and to allow a smoother transition to the next chapter of my life dedicated to making movies (unrelated to IMVU).
Transitioning from what most sane people would call a “dream job”, huge salary, excellent benefits (we had everything covered for medical investigations, dentists, huge promo sales on various websites etc.) to IMVU, especially when my income back then was under 500$ was a crazy move. Crazy is a small word.
When the day came to tell my manager I was leaving, I had tears running down my cheeks. I didn’t know if what I was doing was right. But the thing is, no one knows best. I prepared mentally for a few months to leap into the unknown, to hang on and conquer whatever was coming at me.
I had about 3 months left of savings and I was earning enough on IMVU at that time to pay my rent and bills. I was scared. I quit my job during the most uncertain times in Covid when people were being fired and struggling to make ends meet. I was afraid of what was to come, but I was more afraid of staying in a place where I could not have grown in the direction I wanted.
There were many downsides to working at Microsoft and the most important one for me was my inability to express my creativity. It was then and there that one random day of doing the same things again that I felt stupid, as if the qualities which I most admired about myself were useless. And the truth is that they were useless because it was not the place for them.
Currently, IMVU is what I do every day and it is my source of income. I have managed to create multiple sources of income all derived from IMVU activities such as earning money directly from IMVU as a creator, selling resources for creators, mentorship programs, etc.
I always have a plan for my future and I’d highly recommend everyone to sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and write what they would like to do in life. It’s not always that you follow the path written, at times you are way off the track, but it’s important to know where you are heading and where you would like to be, regardless of how much you fail in the pursuit of it.
Professor Dr. Peterson was the one that inspired me to voice my plans. He said the following:
A huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don’t ever set up the criteria for success.
Often, people won’t specify their goals because they don’t like to specify conditions for failure. So, if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is really easy because that’s just a matter of not doing as well, then you don’t know when you fail.
People might say “Well, I don’t wanna know when I fail because that’s painful, I’ll keep myself blind about when I fail”.
That’s fine, except you’ll fail all the time then, you just won’t know it.
How I see the future
I plan on making videos in the near future and I will start with short, funny and motivational clips that I will post on YouTube. After that, I would like to work on my short-movie ideas that fill me up with a burning fire of hope and energy that are meant to inspire people to be kinder to themselves. I have already been postponing this idea for years and I’m not planning on giving it up soon.
It might just be that this fire is my call to a greater meaning in life.
My hobbies
I’ve abandoned my hobbies quite a bit, I remember when I was a kid I had no problem thinking about what I liked doing regularly, but I guess adulthood takes a different approach on hobbies.
I play video games often, the game I’m currently playing the most is Dead by Daylight and before that, I would spend my days in Dota 2.
I like helping people quite a lot and I have the nasty habit of helping and giving advice when it’s not asked and get heartbroken because of my own fault.
I want to see people succeed at what they’re doing and I want them to follow their dreams and not give up.
Please note that although shiva.vu is for IMVU content, if there is anything you think I could help you with, write to me at love@kirry.net.
Shiva in the internet world
Shiva is the name I have for IMVU only. Everyone else knows me as Kirry which was my very first nickname and my one true love. My video content will be submitted under Kirry. Below was an attempt from a few years ago (5 or 6) at doing Twitch to prepare for YouTube.
It didn’t quite work out because I did not have the money to buy proper gear and that affected the quality of the stream a lot.
Needless to say, I’m not sure right now if I’ll be back on Twitch, as my goal even back then was to prepare for YouTube.
When I go online, I’ll let you guys know.
The “theme” behind Kirry is almost always a white tiger. No special meaning, it just looks really cool.
Conclusion
Imagine writing an article about yourself and having a paragraph called “conclusion”.
The information I share with you is also the information I need. It’s the tips and tricks I need today, they’re constant reminders of what I should do and how to do it better. They’re a letter to myself. A letter to my young self on how to do things slightly better, to my current self about holding on and being patient and a letter to my future self to remind her that she can, because she did.
“You can. You did.” is a message I wrote to myself in 2019 when I felt confused and angry about life because I did not know what I was doing, what I needed to do and what was missing. I wrote a series of small notes and hid them in a folder, only to discover those a year later. I made the affirmations into fridge magnets and hung them where I could see them every day. Because I needed to read them. I was hungry for so much reason in life, that I had to remind myself constantly of very small things that matter and should matter. “You can. You did.” addressed the fear of the unknown, my fear of taking risks and failing. You can do it. Because you’ve already proven yourself many times that you can.”. That is how the phrase “You can. You did.” came to life.
I’ve added it to this text in case my future self will ever need any type of reassurance about anything in life.
So that she knows that I know she will do it,
No matter what it is, she will face it,
She will win.
Because I won
and so will she.