Some thoughts.
- You're not doomed if you just have a laptop. I stream from what is now a fairly mid-range laptop and, though I have a capture card for consoles, I still primarily play PC games. Granted, not new AAA titles, and I do aspire to one day have enough saved up to get a beastly box so I can play those, but I don't think I'm suffering for lack of things to play currently.
- Please don't buy game keys from sketchy key reseller sites. If you can't afford a game, get a different game, dip into your backlog, or just wait a week and Steam and/or GOG will have another sale.
- Regarding costs for a rigged model, I've currently engaged a talented artist and a well-recommended rigger for an eventual model and the total costs are going to come out to around $700. It's not going to be mind-blowing but it should turn out more than fine for a newbie like me. You can go cheaper than the four digits she cites if you don't absolutely need to engage high-demand artists and riggers. (Protip: Artists in developing countries will typically have lower rates than those in expensive ones, but it's not like they can't draw as well. My current Murray art was drawn by artists in the Philippines and Mexico, and I'm very happy with them.)
- Similarly, when it comes to microphones, I've gotten great results by basically doing everything the guy recommends in this video, including buying the $50 mic he recommends - though I found mine on sale for only $40 at Walmart. (I don't have the boom arm yet, partly because my current set-up doesn't have room for something like that, but I expect to get it soon.) Some of those OBS tweaks really do great to fill out the sound of an affordable mic.
- There's a lot she doesn't touch on: Stream layouts, scheduling, making videos/clips, how to use OBS without doxing yourself and/or going crazy (the more I use it, the more I'm awestruck people have made multi-million-dollar careers using that piece of garbage). But I guess this is a good start to actually getting a model on screen, which I haven't yet - but that's because I chose to first
- GO LIVE. Don't wait until you have a sweet model and a bitchin' gaming PC and an amazing mic. Just do it. You'll learn along the way and you can acquire the expensive stuff as you go - or you can flame out and decide it's not for you, in which case you'll have done so before you've dropped several thousand dollars on it.
Yes, I think it's still doxxing, even if nobody cares anymore. I don't think her brother had to do that, and I think her brother
probably shouldn't have done it. I guess it is kind of a weird situation in the end.
Good point. I had forgotten the extent to which she had taken some of the horny-on-main stuff she had been doing (partially because EIEN has been like "hold my beer"). When you frame it that way I can agree that some of this backlash becomes all the more inevitable. That said, whether she was doing it or not, these people should have still known better.
I see the similarities in the model, but other than that I agree - Gura has never been all that coombaity from what I've seen. It always gives me pause when people call Gura a loli character since I think that word implies a level of sexualization, and I don't see anything sexual about Gura at all in either her design or behavior.