One year at the speed of the Internet is a very long time already, but when I think back on everything I've learned nonstop almost from scratch since starting... it kind of blows me away. I started with a1111, and upgrading to Forge was a big moment for me. I didn't know Forge was a fork of a1111! I thought I'd have to learn something entirely new so I avoided it... It was only in the last month I started using Comfy UI really regularly, and I'm still barely able to string nodes together.
It feels like I'd just really found my footing with Illustrious when Z-Image caught my eye, and I tinkered with NetLumina, Anima, LTX 2, finally Krea 2 just in the last months... New things come out faster than I can keep up with, and anything I ever succeeded at was simultaneous while also trying to learn two of something else on the side.
And of course there was discovering, learning, and trying to make my music and start a YouTube channel this year so I could embed my songs as videos into my articles, that has been a side hobby of its own I had to study and become competent at very quickly alongside the rest.
(I made this around two years ago on another website... At the time, I thought it was amazing!)
The friendships have been the biggest, and most meaningful part, but also the hardest to learn for me. I never really got close to people outside my family before... I think I always had a surface-level likeability that helped me avoid making very many enemies, but opening my heart and making friends wasn't easy. I'm still kind of gushing and awkward with people... but I'm trying.
I overthink things. I prefer to spend weeks undisturbed, tinkering and analyzing, and Discord was something, like all of this, where I wound up thrown in head first and had to learn as I went rather than slowly. I was on there for weeks before a friend pointed out I could watch ads to earn orbs for cosmetic upgrades! ๐ Until civit, I never once touched any social media... I wouldn't touch facebook or x if someone paid me, and I still don't have a Bluesky or Tiktok or anything like that. It was really a huge shift for me, going from proverbial shut-in to meeting so many amazing people so fast, and somehow, even managing to befriend them! Really, I'm so happy... but I can't even begin to say how fast it all happened.
Part of me wants to look back now and relive the whole year, moment by moment, discovery by discovery, meeting by meeting, miracle by miracle... But that would go on forever, and take up way too much of everyone's time. Here, I just want to reflect on what mattered on the day I'm celebrating- first creating my account here. Going forward I'll ramble and reflect about individual moments in image posts while I work on new things, and if anyone cares they can read them, but without getting pinged like for an article.
How I started with AI, and discovered civit at all, began like this...
A few years ago, when AI-generated images taking over everything people post online wasn't commonplace yet, my brother Dae (@The_Wall_of_Goat) had been looking at recipes and complained about the obviously AI-generated pictures, because how could you decide if it looked like something you'd want to make when the photo isn't even of the actual result? Our mom asked what he meant by AI-generated, and he said, by using a computer to make a picture that never existed in real life. During the course of the conversation I got out my phone, looked up a free AI-image website, and made an image using the prompt "cat on an airplane with a martini" as an example.
The image was pretty bad, highly saturated yet flat colors, AI weirdness like a second cat leering through the plane window, a glass that slightly hovered above where it sat... but it proved a point, that you could get a picture just by typing something. That site didn't allow downloads without membership, but I took a screenshot... which sadly I couldn't find when writing this.
At the time, we had a laugh over it, and thought no more of it. Then about a year later, I was getting art for baddie and NPC characters for one of our family TTRPG games by 'borrowing' whatever an internet search gave me, and noticed how much of the fantasy character art had become AI-generated. And I don't mean the beautiful stuff like here, I mean that tacky 'journey' stuff that all looks the same and simultaneously perfect and yet terrible which the net is flooded with now. I remembered the silly cat picture and thought, hey, yeah, maybe I could do something like that again?
I found a free site, very small, it had I guess one checkpoint and preset "styles", which must have been LoRAs, and used an LLM to turn whatever gibberish prompts you gave it into image prompts for you. The resolution was just 512x768, and looking at them now... they're pretty subpar, but at the time, I was completely blown away. I thought they were beautiful. Suddenly, I could make character art of my unique characters how I imagined them, not just finding something 'good enough' that already existed. I fell in LOVE with making characters, and spent so many hours on my phone carving out the perfect art for each of them. I even used some of those images as my avatars on my email and shopping accounts!
(One of my very first Superhero TTRPG characters- Red Lightning! I really loved this image back then. Looking at it now... I see how far I've come.)
One thing I always feared was that someday that site, a shoestring .org run entirely by ad pennies, might vanish, and I'd lose my ability to make the character art I loved. I looked at other sites, I think this was just before civit existed or was still so small it didn't come up when I searched for it, and there really wasn't anything like what I had available elsewhere, for free anyway. I knew this "stable diffusion thing" could be run on a computer, obviously "online" is just somebody else's computer, but it seemed like insanely complex tech wizardry, and I knew my PC, a dinosaur refurbished workstation with a 4Gb GTX 970, all used parts I got from eBay and refurbished into order myself on a very minimal budget for playing games, couldn't possibly do it.
(Look at that face! But I'm glad I kept these old images. To me, the characters in them are like old, almost forgotten friends...)
For three years I had been trying to save for a modern gaming PC, but life is what it is, and things like a water leak that gave us a surprise $600 bill, a car radiator crack, and so on meant it never happened. Then in mid August of last year, in the very early morning, I got a miracle- my new gaming PC! It wasn't a gift, I was given the opportunity to earn it by doing a product review, as part of a gig I do. I'd reviewed things like boxes of macaroni, camping supplies, even cool dice for playing TTRPG games with, but something like that was absolutely mind-blowing- I can't even describe the feeling. I can say that if not for that, I likely still wouldn't have a new PC, and certainly wouldn't have found civit...
Because I knew nothing about AI image making except the word "stable diffusion" I looked up how to get started with it, and in a very outdated forum read someone's advice that "a1111 is easy to begin with, Comfy is harder to learn but has more features", so I looked up a tutorial for installing a1111, not realizing it's really outdated. It took me four days of fighting Python errors and trying to figure things out, my shiny new RTX 5070 was too new for the default CUDA/PyTorch versions a1111 installed to work with it, but finally I did eventually generate one very bad cat picture with the terrible SD 1.5 checkpoint a1111 downloads when you install it. The tutorial ended by saying "Now, go to civitai to download custom models.", and of course you had to have an account to do that, so one year ago today, I made my civit account!
(I think, one thing I want to do, is recreate some of these old images from that other site again, and see how much better I can make them.)
I didn't think about the username seriously at all, it was just an obstacle to completing making the account, so I tried to just use my first name, Freija. When either that was already taken or too short, I tacked "Foxy" on the end. At the time it was what popped into my head, sounded good, and made me think of Candle Fox from Disney's Kiff, who I adore. In the end it worked out well, my main fursona of myself as a magical reality-painting artist is Freija, and when I started making music and created a digital popstar version of myself, a name was already there, Foxy. I still sometimes have people asking "Why Foxy? Neither of you are foxes!", though ๐คฃ
Originally, I planned to just download what looked useful, not post things. Why would I? But writing reviews was something I did a lot anyway, and it was kind of amazing how people so generously shared what they made for little more than kind words... leaving an image review on a model felt like the least I could do. And of course, the first few likes really started to get addictive... But what inspired me most were the "professional" users, the ones with large galleries, ranking badges, their own models and those colorful frame things. To me they looked like rockstars, I assumed they must be geniuses, and I wanted to know how they got to be so talented! I had a very weak knowledge of tag-based prompting, the free site turned whatever input into prompts for me, and no clue how a LoRA was different than a checkpoint. I was also confused about what SDXL, Pony & Illustrious even meant, I had to study other people's prompts and work really hard to make even halfway good images. But I kept going, and slowly, began to feel like I could make images I actually liked again, but on my own, without relying on someone else's server and an LLM.
My first civit-posted image is in my gallery, but I'll end with it here, to bring it all full circle:
It wasn't always smooth sailing. StabilityAI decided to completely kill SD 3.5 with the ridiculous retroactive license terms and I got the announcement it was being yanked from the site entirely just weeks after joining. Then the no NSFW with blue buzz thing happened not long after. And the credit card companies stopped allowing payments for yellow buzz around the end of the year. Generating locally, and not using SD 3.5, I didn't feel that stuff the way many did, but it emphasizes how quickly things change in this space and added to the feeling of needing to be constantly learning and adapting. And that was just the first few months! There was much more to come, and I did end up feeling some of the splash-damage. Through it all, though, I found a welcoming community who pulled together rather than apart, and finally began to make real friends for the first time in my adult life.
What the next years holds, I can only imagine. But I'm so excited, and above all, grateful. I can't even begin to thank everyone individually or recount the journey itself here in full... only bit by bit going forward in posts. But it was truly life changing in the best way- learning, discovering, and finding my people at long last. At times it was so much at once it was downright hectic, a Neon Rush, but looking back... I'd do it all again for sure, and I wouldn't change anything ๐ฃฒ๐ซโหเฟ