Cybersox-XIII

Sorry to interrupt your regular viewing/reading pleasure, but some of you may have already noticed that the first chapter in my popular Alex the TA series has suddenly disappeared. It was a big surprise to me as well, as I received word that it was being pulled without prior notice, for the stated reason that DA had determined that one of the characters was under the age of 18. Which, of course, is totally bullocks given that Alex is a T.A. in a college and the title, the image, and the story all made that abundantly clear. Well, apparently not to whatever Zombie AI had their digital finger on the delete button. I've petitioned for DA to get someone who can both see and has a functioning brain to review the issue, but I'm posting this so I don't get a billion posts asking about what happened, as well as to demonstrate the kind of BS that artists who post on DA have had to deal with since they were bought by WIX. As to what prompted this latest pulling... I can only guess, but it's no secret that DA has a host of trolls who seem to exist only to cause problems for others. If DA would actually post the names of the complainers that I and other artists have had to deal with, I suspect we would see the same bad actors repeated over and over again, but, of course that will never happen.

So, if you have a comment, or would like to complain to DA, please post it below, on my matching Journal page, and/or send them an email directly. But please, do keep the discourse civil without name calling or profanity. I realize that the people who are running DA now are coming from a different culture with different sensibilities (WIX is based in Tel Aviv, Israel) but I really believe this is all the result of them being completely clueless about the nature of what they bought and hiring the cheapest help (my guess is probably AIs at this point) who have little interest in sustaining the very creators that keep them all employed. Though, really, when the name is Deviant Art, what in the heck were they expecting? We're already burying everything behind multiple filters and a huge number of the most popular creators have left or abandoned their sites. After 16 years here I really don't want to join them, but if I have to move everything to sites like Literotica or ONLY FANS, that's what I'll do to keep showing and telling the material that I want to keep creating.

Since I’m constantly being asked about when Story X or Story Y is going to be continued, I finally got the bright idea that it would make more sense to do it as a single post here rather than responding on multiple threads because… well, frankly, what I post here has always been more of the outgrowth of a hobby than any kind of business, and taking the time to address individual queries as they come up eats into the limited amount of time that I have to actually write and create. Yeah, in these days of everyone posting every second of their life on some form of social media, I’m a bit of a dinosaur. In point of fact, I feel pretty lame when it comes to how infrequently I fav and comment on stories, art and other postings by the DA creators that I regularly watch. I have problems answering emails too. Sigh...

Anyway, to get back on topic - I think the real question is "Why do I have so many unfinished stories here?"

Ultimately, there are three and a half basic reasons:

1 – First and foremost, a lot of my stories simply never started out with the intent to become part of a continuing narrative. Usually I’ll just have a random idea for a single image or bit of prose and start to work on it, only to realize halfway through or sometime afterwards that there’s more to that scenario that I want to explore. However, since they weren’t plotted out in advance, I’m frequently making most of it up as go along and will often get to a certain point where I’m not sure what I want to happen next. So, at that point, it will go into a bit of a holding pattern while I work on something else to clear my head... and then THAT idea will capture my attention and the cycle continues. If I’d been doing this for a Patreon type site I’d like to say that I’d probably have been more diligent on keeping things rolling, but as this has mainly been for fun and a chance to stretch my creative muscles, I didn’t see a point in forcing the stories.

2 – And then there are the times where I DO know where I want the story to go, but that direction is one that I perceive is going to become an issue with the bizarre way that the Wix-installed management has handled what is and isn’t allowed to be shown on this site. Because there’s very little that’s as exasperating and frustrating as having something that you’ve spent a lot of time working on and that other people seem to have enjoyed being pulled at random. Which, of course, is what happened to Part 9 of the Alex series, Parts 5 & 6 of the Destiny Cummings series, and a number of other stories/illustrations. (In fact, the entire INTERNATIONAL TALENT HUNT series originally began as a running commentary on the weird discrepancy that having naked women collared, in bondage, tortured, or even hunted like animals is all totally fine by Wix’s rules, yet anything that possibly resembles someone actually touching their own or someone else’s genitals in a sexual manner can get pulled.) So until recently, when I’ve found a story going in those directions, I’ve simply stopped posting it on DA, even when I’ve continued to develop it for myself.

2.5 – Oh, and as an addendum to 1 & 2 above, there are some stories that, for whatever reason, just never seem to get much traction here. Obviously not everything that anyone makes is going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but if I’m seeing fewer views, or even a lot of views but not a lot of response in terms of comments or favorites, a good portion of the incentive for making new stories in that same continuity… or at least posting them here… tends to go away. And yes, that makes my comment in the first paragraph about not posting enough comments and Favs myself make me feel even worse and rather hypocritical about even vaguely suggesting that maybe more feedback would help spur specific storylines on. (But it doesn’t make it not true, either.) .

3 – Finally, there are unforeseen technical issues that take time to figure out. I’m pretty much self-taught when it comes to CG and Photoshop, so there are a lot of times when I know what I want to do, but don’t quite have the skills to pull it off... yet. This has been especially true of a lot of the earlier stuff that I’ve posted here, and while reason’s #1 & 2 were also in play, it’s one of the major reasons that the Alex series was left hanging in limbo so long. Simply put, since I hadn’t originally planned for there ever to be any need for them beyond that first initial image, the models were only designed to the point that was needed to work for that one composition. And that ultimately ended up to be a constant pain going forward, especially since the skin textures I chose to use for Alex herself were originally made for a much earlier generation of CG figure (Victoria 4, versus Alex’s Genesis 3 Female,) and really didn’t fit perfectly. Some of those problems were temporarily circumvented when the creator of the V4 texture that I’d used released a G3F figure with their own, much better, conversion of the same mats to G3F UV maps… but other issues only got worse, partly due to the continued evolution of the Iray rendering engine in DAZ Studio making some problems increasingly evident with each new software upgrade, and partly as the result of story developments that ultimately required some radical physical alterations to the textures themselves that, at the time, were either at very limit of my abilities or well past it. I won’t bore you with the technical details here, but it had really got to the point of limiting how I framed my characters in a shot and what kind of the poses they could be in before things started looking funky. Well, at least to me, which in turn made working on them less and less enjoyable. (And then, of course, I kept getting distracted with a lot of other ideas and work beyond DA, especially when I bought a new main computer at the beginning of 2020. Sometime I think I have A.D.... ooo look, a bug!) But anyways... so even though I’ve kept working on the older projects, it wasn’t until recently that I’ve really felt confident enough in my skills to go back and seriously start to tackle the issues with Alex, Goldie, and a number of other major characters.

But I think I'm there now.

So, the GOOD news is that one of my major goals for this year will be to bring the Alex, Destiny and Goldie stories all be coming back in the relatively near future, and I’ll be putting up some “progress report” images as they come along, just to keep myself honest and on course. That said there’s still going to be a lot of other story stuff that will mixed in at the same time, as well as some extensions of things where I've only released the first one or two parts so far. In some cases I've got a pile of pictures with no text, in others I got a bunch of text with no pictures. Sorry, it's just the way my brain works... oooo look! A bug!

CybersoxXXX

Yes, I'm still around, but the last year got crazy, first with a huge changeover at work, then with COVID and doing all my work on the new computer that was supposed to be my new render machine, and finally with trying to move all of my old projects and assets from the computer that they're on now to the new one... which is why I'll be posting some new images of some other things I've been working on that were made with assets that are already on the new system as I slowly move all of the Alex, Goldilocks and Destiny assets over. I'm also in the middle of writing a new introductory chapter to the Alex story, cleaning up/expanding the chapters that have already been posted so that they'll be up to the standards of the latter installments, and, yes, have now drafted out the story out quite a bit beyond what's been published here. With that in mind, I'm hoping some folks out there might be able to help with some of the clean up. With some of the deleted chapters, I'm pretty sure that the versions that I have in my files aren't the final corrected ones that were posted here, and it's driving me crazy. If anyone happened to have copied them from the DA pages before they were deleted, it would be a huge help if I could get copies of those to make sure that the new releases already have all the fixes in them, it would be greatly appreciated!