Economics of Civitai

This is one of four images I created on Civitai for just 33 yellow buzz, which means it cost me just 8 buzz to create this image, which is unfortunately useless, as were the other three images. See, I only wanted one character in the image, but I made the mistake of describing her as "a naked harem slave" and the model focussed on that word "harem" which generally means several naked women. It gave me four of them. And since I had described the slave's posture carefully and thoroughly, the model thoughtfully distributed the arms and legs among the four harem slaves. Plus whatever fraction of a slave that the indescribable lumps of flesh scattered here and there with what I think we can all agree is marvelous creativity displayed by an LLM that has NO idea how human anatomy works, was. Maybe two thirds?

 Let's talk economics. To make NSFW images on Civitai, you need yellow buzz. You can buy yellow buzz at the rate of 1,000 yellow buzz for $1.00 USD. I buy yellow buzz in ten dollar increments, and 10,000 yellow buzz lasts me well over a month ordinarily.  It's not expensive for doing images (videos are pricier). 

Typically the way it works with the inexpensive image generators is, you create your prompt (or download your starting image if you are doing image to image generation like I did in my previous post with the Second Life avatars) and you ask for four iterations, generally at a cost of between 16 and 40 yellow buzz, mostly around 30 buzz. This gives you four varying images, some of which may work well, some of which may not. Most of the time the first iteration is not particularly successful, and another iteration may be called for. Even when you get a usable image, that doesn't mean you're finished most of the time.

Very frequently you get malformed hands/feet/faces or you get weird objects where they don't belong, or you get deformed genitals or ropes and chains going where they should not go, bonds not working, and ball gags... don't get me started on ball gags! NONE of the cheap models get ball gags right, most of the time.

Early iterations can be problematical.

There are fixes for all of these issues. There are programs called loras that work with the models (the programs that create the entire image) to solve specific problems. For examples, there are loras designed to create realistic ballgags, and loras that allow you to pose the images in various kinds of bondage and loras that create characters with certain traits, etc. The loras and models are free to use, but to see if/how they'll work means you have to create the images on Civitai and that takes yellow buzz ka-ching!

And not only are there loras, there are also programs that can improve images. The costs can vary on these: there is "hires fix" one of my favorites that creates the image at a higher resolution and generally spruces it up and fixes minor details (but not deformed hands or anything like that, though it often helps with wonky eyes) but it costs about 16 buzz for a single iteration. (Fortunately, if you do four iterations, all of them look pretty much the same, so there's no point in doing more than one hires fix iteration.) There's also facefix, which replaces the face of your subject if it comes out wonky as they often do. Facefix is relatively cheap, it costs the same as a simple prompt iteration so it's not expensive, but it's very hit or miss so you tend to do four iterations when you do facefix, which works wonders sometimes and does nothing useful other times.

What's more, the cheap Civitai models (and just about every AI art program on the Web) are TERRIBLE at following prompts. Part of it is flaws in all LLM art programs. For example:

I described the male character as standing, clothed, dominant. The program  completely ignored the prompt and showed him naked, kneeling, bound, collared and chained, just like the slavegirl. LLMs like to use the same descriptors for all characters. Supposedly using the word BREAK and keeping your character descriptions entirely separate works, but lemme tell ya, it doesn't. Also, most of the time, Civitai's less expensive models get cocks wrong. They can't draw them at all, they make them look deformed, or they put weird plastic extensions on cocks that you didn't ask for (not kidding!).  

In addition, Civitai's cheaper models will fight like hell to keep from putting female models in some submissive poses. They'll make female characters kneel on their knees as shown above, no problem. But they will be DAMNED if they will show a female character with her hands tied behind their backs. Or kneeling with her head pressed against the ground and her ass hiked up in the air. (Do NOT use the words "doggie style" in your prompt because you'll probably get a furry image.)

Beyond the helper programs (I have no idea what they're called) there are sliders you can push: Denoise, which controls how closely your image follows the prompt (more about the prompt later), CFG which controls how closely your image follows the model/loras, and each lora has its own slider too.

And every time you run an iteration with the models and the loras and the sliders and the helper programs it costs more buzz. And you tend to do that a lot, because the dopamine response when you get a usable image out of all that mess is pretty good. And even if you don't get exactly what you want from an image, you sometimes get images that you can save and use for future projects.

So you can see how it's VERY easy to spend more money on the cheaper models, and have a great time doing it. I know I have.  But there's another expense as well: time. It takes a lot of time to generate those iterations, to write and rewrite prompts, to figure out which loras/sliders/helper programs to use.

The near one-and-done nature of Flux and the other programs are matched or even outmatched in price by the cheaper models, to get an often inferior image, and they take a LOT more time.

Mind you, you can still play with the sliders and the prompts with the more expensive models to get just the result you want, or some approximation of it, but you don't HAVE to in order to get a usable image. But it will cost more money. And you can save all that money and more importantly, time and use it for stuff like... writing fiction.

But there's one reason I stick to Civitai. And that's the lack of censorship. Every other AI art service I have tried, it feels like wrestling an octopus to create NSFW or even NSFW-adjacent artwork. On Civitai if I want a ballgag or a blowjob or even a woman dressed in a skimpy thong, I can ask for it, and Civitai will attempt to deliver it. When I wanted to get a ballgagged woman on Leonardo or Tensor Art (don't even talk to me about MageSpace!) I'd have to describe the woman as having a ball in her mouth, not a ball gag. Then I'd have to draw in the straps, if I got anything close to looking right. Sigh.

Civitai is the place to go if you want to do NSFW or even NSFW-adjacent stuff.

In my next post I'll talk more about the censorship that threatens to engulf the AI art world.

Snapping into the Ready Position

 
The term "bottoms up" isn't about drinking for slavegirls. It's a order. Granted, one they love to hear.

Image source: Kink.com shoot 16841 "Adorable Jessi Palmer is Suspended By Just Her Pigtails and Ankles and Fucked" starring Jessi Palmer and James Deen. I just love they way she pops her butt right up in the air. I can almost hear her saying, "Sir! Yes sir!"

Spring Has Sprung And So Can You!

A beautiful metaphor.

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"The Naked Jungle" Now Available on Smashwords

 

Click here to get the novel on Smashwords in Kindle, Nook and other formats!

Honey Trapp is a natural born submissive, a beautiful party girl who loves doing every kinky, sexy thing that sexy dominant men, including the world’s richest and most powerful men, want her to do. She’s also an agent of the Initiative, a shadowy worldwide secret organization devoted to forcing the world’s governments to combat climate change before it destroys human civilization.

The Initiative offers Honey a long-term assignment that involves three months’ training in the slave kennels of the Bascom Agency, the world’s finest supplier of slavegirls-for-hire to the wealthy and powerful. Honey jumps at the chance to be trained in the closest thing there is to a real slave training school, because it’s sexy fun and great cover for any female spy.

But Bascom’s training regimen is rigorous. The lessons are long and hard and thrust deep into Honey’s psyche and elsewhere The bondage is strict and the sex is raunchy. Can Honey survive and enjoy the many and varied, often arousing training sessions she endures in the Bascom slave training pens? And will Honey survive her first assignment as the personal love slave of the Generalissimo, the dictator of the tiny nation of Las Miserabil in South America? The mighty fossil energy giant Globoil, Inc., is the major source of income for Las Miserabil, and hence, the major source of power for the Generalissimo. And when Globoil’s drill rig wastes pollute the water source of the Arapunga tribe that lives in Las Miserabil’s interior, leaving them sick and dying, no one in power cares – but the Initiative cares.

As an agent of the Initiative Honey will do every sexy submissive thing she can do to help put an end to Globoil’s pollution -- but will it be enough?

This novel is over 40,000 words long.

The Joy of Collars and Collaring 1: A Collar For Everyone Who Wants One

"That enough collar for ya, girl?"

Collaring has a great deal of psychological meaning for many kinky folks. For some it is an analogue for a wedding band for kinksters, symbolizing the collarer's ownership of the collar wearer. And for others, it's just another bit of bondage gear. There are no civic structures for kinky relationships like there are for vanilla relationships (i.e., marriage) so these things vary.

This turned out to be important and useful when I decided to create an alternate world where everyone is into dominance and submission. I figured most would be into maledom/femsub stuff, like here on Earth, but there would also be femdom/malesub relationships, as well as gay relationships, asexuals and so forth. There just wouldn't be any, or very rarely, vanilla sexual relationships. It's not that there is any bigotry against vanilla sex, it's just that most people on Collar World wouldn't find it nearly as fun and sexy as kinky sex.

Plus, I didn't want bigotry to be a major theme in the world. “Bigotry is bad”is a good lesson but one well known to most who are into kinky sex. I wanted it to be more of a thought experiment: what kind of world would a world with just kinky people in it be? How would kink culture express itself if it were the dominant culture?

And that's where collaring comes in. To start with, of course, there's a personal collar, where a Master or Mistress gives a sub a collar proclaiming her or him the property of said Master or Mistress, with text that typically says, “XXX, property of ZZZ.” It would probably be the most common sort of collar, and the most sought-after collar.

There would also be Free Use collars, for women who want to have sex with just about anyone, anytime, with some kind of clearly visible hatching that lets Free Use collars be easily identifiable in a crowd or on the street.

There would also be institutional collars, or work collars, that let people know the wearer is on business. Women who have personal collars might have a work tag they hang from one of their personal collar rings, or maybe they'd wear two collars. It would be a matter of taste and practicality.

But work collars would also serve to let women who want a collar but aren't currently in a relationship go about their day without being collared by Masters looking for slaves.

And there would be asexual collars for men and women who don't want to be bothered, or whom are actually asexual, and Temple of the Collar collars for those in service or claiming shelter at a Temple of the Collar, as in the opening of Collar Dread. (I'll save a full explanation of the Temple of the Collar for another post.)

Of course, most Mistresses and Masters wouldn't wear collars at all. They'd be putting collars on the submissives. The lack of a collar would suffice to declare their status.

The point is, on Collar World most people can find a collar (or lack of one) that they are psychologically comfortable wearing. Everyone who wants to feel owned, and most women on Collar World do, can feel owned, generally by a personal Master or Mistress.

I did do one thing in my Collar World stories that I had to for the sake of their salability in the marketplace. And I made some other changes as a result, but more about that in another column. I think I've laid the groundwork here.

Collar Dread: Making Trouble In Paradise

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So one of the problems of creating a utopia in a story is that they can be dull reading. Happy happy nice nice forever is great for the protagonists, but it's dull for readers. That's why romance novels always have the HEA (Happily Ever After) at the end of the story.

My favorite solution to this problem is the one devised by Ian Banks for his Culture novels. The Culture is an interstellar empire where everybody leads a wonderful life because some very smart, very capable artificial intelligences actually run the society and handle all the heavy stuff like warfare. But the Culture is surrounded by less desirable human civilizations that range from early medieval civilizations to full spacefaring civilizations whose leaders aren't willing to cede power to any artificial intelligences.

The non-Culture civilizations run the gamut from well-run civilizations that get on quite well with the Culture to real  crapsack worlds that the Culture tends to interfere with to minimize human misery. It falls to a section called Special Circumstances to deal with such civilizaitons, and most Culture novels are about Special Circumstances agents having a perilous time dealing with crapsack worlds.

Collar World is definitely a utopia of sorts, and I've had to think how to keep the stories from being dull. The first Collar World story was easy, it was a Young Adult erotic romance that had built-in conflict. Romantic issues can happen even in paradise.

And for my next story, I decided to go with using the very feature that makes Collar World a utopia, the Collar Climax. A deep and life-changing psychological transformation that occurs when a submissive is collared by the right Master (or Mistress, if that is her inclination), Collar Climax has changed civilization on Collar World for the better. It is a combination of going into subspace, falling in love and experiencing an epiphany that leaves the slavegirl feeling calm and clear of thought. It may not make her more intelligent, but it makes her sane, better able to access her own intelligence for her own sake, and the sake of others she cares about.

(Disclaimer: although Collar Climax is based on psychological effects submissives have reported, particularly entering subspace, its long term effects are entirely fictional, so far as I know.)

It occurred to me that deep and long-lasting psychological changes incurred by collaring could be scary. One moment, you are you, the next moment Collar Climax has transformed you into someone else.

And that's when I came up with the idea of Collar Dread. For most women, Collar Dread might exist just as a sense of mild anxiety that you might get with any major psychological change, no matter how eagerly anticipated. But for some it's an overwhelming dread that can lead some of them to extremes, even suicide.

So the protagonist of Collar Dread is an orphan who has turned 18 and had to leave the orphanage, and now faces imminent collaring. For most female orphans this is a happy moment, when she will be able to find a Master of her very own to love her and be loved by her.

But for Arlette Spencer, it was a time of Collar Dread. An orphan, she knew the worst could happen to her, because it had. With a powerful libido, she knew her body's ability to control her. Extremely bright, she feared her mind shutting down when she took a man's collar, becoming a sex zombie, capable of nothing but lusting after the man that owned her.

The story is about Arlette trying to deal with her Collar Dread, finding a way out before she was involuntarily collared or fell to the dark forces that preyed on girls who could not find a collar.

Collar Dread has been one of the best sellers from my back catalog. I'm not surprised.

Keep on Chudding...

And this is why nobody likes Chudwahs...

Study Finds BDSM Is Good For Your Mental Health

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She Had To Ask!

When Master had brought up the topic of "kegel weightlifting" she had had to ask. She had to! And the result was so predictable! Image source: Training of O. com.
Alternatively:
The marketing team was amazed that no one wanted to by Stretcho, the Tampon with the Longest String Ever and a Weight on the End. "It worked so well in the focus groups!" they said.

Daniel Craig: Bondage Master ... Or Is It A Clone?

James Bondage, you betcha! Image source: Break the Logic's photosteam.
Well I don't generally go looking for male celebrity clones, but I found one while looking at some VERY nice shibari suspension bondage on Break the Logic's photostream. The guy who has bound and gagged the woman so nicely is clearly a clone of Daniel Craig's. Now as to why mad scientists created a celebrity clone of Daniel Craig, I think that's fairly clear: it is to cloud the minds of women with fantasies of being bound by Daniel Craig. So whatever you do, female readers, don't fantasize about Daniel Craig tying you up and subjecting you to all sorts of sexual delights. It's what they WANT you to do!

ABC News Brings the Dinosaur Stupidity On BDSM

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A Guy Agog Over Lady Gaga!

Lady Gaga: If she'd stop treating her hair like it was a bad wig and take off the clown makeup, she's be a DAMN fine looking woman. Image source: Publicity photo.
Lady Gaga has announced that she enjoys submitting sexually to men, according to an article in The National Ledger.com, a national ledger of some country or other, possibly the USA.

Gasp!

And I believe her! I mean, she's done her share of photoshoots that involve actual bondage.

Gasp!

Now the question is: Who would want her?

I mean, she's attractive enough when she isn't slathered in makeup, I'm not going for a cheap shot here. But she's a major recording artist, she does tours, does publicity stunts, attends premieres, generally keeps pretty damn busy. I mean, being a submissive/slavegirl takes time! There's the tying up of her! And the fucking of her, and dom/sub sex is not ten minutes and out. There's foreplay. There's teasing. Spanking. Long submissive cock sucking, you want her to have a chance to really WORSHIP your cock, express her feelings of submission and desire as much as she could ever want to, and prolong your pleasure while she's at it. And of course there will be much time spent driving Lady Gaga to the point of orgasm and then making her beg to cum before you even START fucking her, and that's really time consuming because you want her kind of screaming into the gag and crying a little bit with the intensity of her need to cum.

And then after you've fucked her there's the untying of her and the cuddling with her to get her back down to earth, and the thing is, doing this sort of thing properly takes several hours. And this doesn't even include whipping, caning and flogging, which adds another whole layer of time.

And when does a celebrity like Lady Gaga have that kind of time? Who wants to battle with agents, managers, personal assistants and personal trainers for their slave's time? I suppose it might be a worthwhile use of the time for her if she made a sex tape that could then be leaked to the public with the usual faux-outrage that it happened, but who wants to have to treat a director shouting "Cut!" as a safeword?


"What does he mean, 'four hours?' I've got a shoot for Mademoiselle in 45 minutes!" Image source: Whipped Ass.com.
So there are logical reasons why no one would want to accept Lady Gaga's submission, but let's be real ... Lady Gaga has MILLIONS of reasons why a man WOULD be willing to accept her submission. Plus ... a great rack!

A Delicate Situation!

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Kinky Peelings

“All right, I admit it -- peeling potatoes CAN be kinky … Can I stop now? All of them?" (Sighs.) "I had a feeling that would be the answer.”

Hide the Nipple

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Submissives! (Rolleyes)

“Jeeze Louise you dumb submissives, you don’t submit yourselves to the bathwater, you submerge yourselves in it!”

Image from “Eternal” a movie from 2004, I’m betting it’s European in nature, as I’ve not heard a word about it.

Sometimes Wishes Get Rewarded

I'm not sure what it is about this photo ... maybe the casual pose and come-hither look, and the way the 3/4 pose of her head makes her nose look even snubbier than it actually is, or it COULD be the chains, but ... damn!
This is Jakki Degg, who started out as a very popular page 3 girl in England and has gone on to become a general professional model, successful enough to put out her own calendar every year. I came across this photo while doing a search for someone else, and was knocked over by her facial beauty, not to mention her sleek bod.

WJakki is no stranger to bondage gear.
The bondage itself is simple in the pic below, which is the finest bondage image I'vwe seen from the mainstream in quite a while. Degg's wrists are secured behind her back by black tape. But it's the pose that really makes this pic: Degg is stark naked, kneeling, her face pressed against the floor, her butt in the air, gazing at the camera with that gorgeous face of hers bearing a hot come-hither look. Considering Degg's stunning beauty, it's one hell of a great bondage image. And the thing is, it's not at all unusual for models and/or celebrities who don't ordinarily do bondage imagery to do the occasional bondage-oriented shot. In fact, I would imagine it's fairly rare to find a top fashion model out there who HASN'T done at least one image of herself tied up, cuffed or chained.

Jeebus! Oh, to be behind her with my hands on her hips and ...
But when these models do their bondage shots, it's almost always very weak imagery. The bondage is often sloppy, verging on being loosies. But most of all, the poses are most often typical fashion model poses, with the model stretched out and looking very comfortable. They rarely look submissive, much less posed in ways that suggest they are presenting. (A term used to describe primate females who are posing in ways that invite males to have sex with them.) Even more rarely do they pose in ways that both constitute presenting and are submissive.

But sometimes, you do get lucky.