Coming below, but first, if you want to send me some buzz, you know what I'll use it for! I put a serious dent in the blue buzz with this last glut of loras, but I'm pretty diligent about dailies, if I slow my output down to 2 a week I'll hold steady.
But I wanted to say up front, aside from tips I ALWAYS really appreciate when anyone uses my loras and posts, or even comments. I want you to know I'm not trying to be a snob, I'm always good for at least a reaction, I just DON'T get these notifications at all. Probably 2/3rds of the time, I only discover someone posted to my lora because I'm going back and checking my own writeups. I know I've got a few steady followers who engage with my stuff and have really helped me out other ways, and I want to shout out to them that you're still appreciated even if I'm an absent minded social disaster (and I am).
Oh, and you want to give me some feedback on stuff you'd like to see, I will definitely read replies. I can't guarantee you I'll actually do the thing you ask me to do, but it doesn't cost you more than a few keystrokes. If you know about style or multiple character loras in particular, pointers would be appreciated.
Ok, well, I'm gonna run a bit of home stuff by you, cuz it balances me to get it out, but some of it will tie back to civitai. If you want to skip the next 5 paragraphs, I don't blame ya, just the way I operate.
I'm still dealing with kidney stone stuff, nothing debilitating, but it does suck up alot of money and time. I've been working out pretty regularly for me, I'm down twenty pounds from last month or so, how ya like me now? I gotta be hardcore though man, I eat one bowl of cereal and I put like 4 lbs back on. Its a bit easier for me, cuz of course, I'm unemployed and it means I can put off the job search proper. I'm normally a brainy pondering sorta guy, but I don't like to engage my brain on this subject. So for the time being, its easier for me to pretend I'm a jock.
Its not the job searching or interviewing, necessarily bothers me, its having to answer all the tech stuff. Why's your A++ TWENTY TWO YEARS old, why don'tcha have a Bachelors, why don'tcha have an MCSE, well, because those cost alot of time and money and its the same ol stuff and lets be honest, I'm never going to need it for the stuff you're gonna underpay me for anyway.
Hey, I know how that sounds, but I can only tell ya what I've observed since the early 2000's, save the fairy tales for HR who needs me to teach them how to open Outlook. I'm a big believer in Socratic honesty. Job searching is like dating. If you want a rocket engineer underwear model who isn't a serial killer, my dear little 6 on a good day, you're gonna have to do better than low forty grand or grow some realism. I could take lower than that but I'll never hear the end of it at home, that's more a motivation to me these days than personal pride.
One more very relevant thing. I kept my writing on a USB drive, had a backup, local copies, all that good stuff. It died recently, and...my last backup was TWO YEARS ago. Yes, I know. I know. I swore up and down that I took a recent, and maybe its still hiding out here, SOMEWHERE, but just like things I thought I actually wrote, maybe I just dreamed it up in the bathtub. That's how it goes. I'm not sending it off for recovery, aside from the cost, I don't need some rando reading my stuff. Hey Jeff, come over here, ya remember Power Rangers? Come read this, its steamy! I recovered some of the more critical stuff, and for the most part I can remember general dialogue and plot, but for sure, whatever odd scenes and loose notes I worked on are gone.
The upshot is, I work on this and that, skip around, and procrastinate, so the damage isn't as devastating as it could be. Aside from loose notes, and all the organizing I did (which IS painful, cuz a paragraph of good dialogue can get you through a scene), if we're talking stuff I actually wrote and finished, we're probably talking 2 weeks of steady writing. Alot for sure, but I could probably reassemble half of it from remaining notes. Very painful, like I said, but not to where I just throw my hands and give up. I can still finish out my B-team stories easy enough cuz I haven't been working on them. Course, I have to find and work a job, thats gotta be my priority. Until I do that, stuff'll just have to stay in limbo.
Well, with that in mind, loras, thats what you want to know about! I had a really good week or two where I was churning them out fast, but thats not really what I want to do. If you're that way, that's fine for you, but I'm more of a 2 loras a week kinda guy.
With all my loras, even the ones that work pretty good, there's always a learning curve, and I feel like if I don't learn them and just move on to the next they're kind of wasting there sitting out there with one or two galleries and thats all. People need to see what they can do, because I don't mind telling you, most days when someone posts a lora with no samples, I don't want to be the one to have to reverse engineer it. And I'm a big believer in telling stories visually. Writing one of my chapters is usually a 20+ hour commitment, I always enjoy the end result because I feel like I got it out of me and then I can read at least (I got stuff that hasn't broken 20 views, and who knows there). But with AI, somebody can look at 5 or 10 pics, maybe they start piecing together the character or coming up with their own story for it, thats valid too, and definitely doesn't take as long.
I've enjoyed doing the Grimms Fairy Tale run, they were relatively easy and I think they're pretty decent. I could do some more, but I gotta ask myself beyond maybe one or two more, am I doing these to be a completionist or doing them cuz I want to actually see the characters. 500 buzz (plus whatever I spend to learn and populate) is 500 buzz man.
My OC's have been hit and miss, some better than others. I'm usually able to get something from them, and course, draft results. I would think the sora based samples (see the pic on this article) would produce better results, but what can I say, ultimately, my loras are like the breakfast I made myself. It looks like potatoes and eggs, it tastes like potatoes and eggs, but if you put it in front of some restaurant goer, they'd ask for their money back probably.
Anyways, I've got Red Dead, Resident Evil and Castlevania OCs to do, among others, that's at least 10 loras there. I'm done with my Skyrim OCs, we never got a Kahira lora, but if I want to gen her I'll try to do prompts or use chatgpt, the last thing I need is civitai getting stupid about minors again, even on civitai blue. Maybe I'll just post one of the soras of her one of these days on an article.
My Londley Crest style lora didn't come off, maybe it was my samples, more likely it was me. I DON'T know how to do these sort of things. It may even work in some secret way (beyond using draft), or work better with other loras. Some people seem to like it, it shouldn't surprise me other people are better with it than I am, so if somebody got some use out of it, I'm happy. I have a few samples I can post to it, but they're still not what I intended.
I'm kind of thinking if I should do a Red Dead style (in the style of western paperback novel covers), or a Castlevania style (I did alot of these side characters in a very Ayami Kojima-esque style thats not quite the same as what you see out here. But I'm wondering if its not better to do them as character loras instead. I have had some success recently doing two character loras, not quite, but almost, and applying what I've learned there, what if I did these loras of maybe 10 characters, 4 samples a piece maybe with their own keywords, would that work?
And course, I still have my old lists I posted on older articles, at some point I'll run through those. Anyway, lemme know what you think!