doubleintegral

This year I have been pursuing some other creative interests: coding, art, music, lots of writing (not inflation fiction), just to name a few. I guess it's my manifestation of a mid-life crisis. Some ventures have been fulfilling, others have been a slog. While toiling away a few days ago, I kind of unexpectedly created something that I think is fucking awesome, so much so that I burst into tears when the realization hit me. Anyone else would be indifferent about it, but it is the culmination of an idea I've carried with me since childhood and is terribly meaningful to me on a deeply personal level. I have thought about it every day and dreamed about it every night since it made the transition into A Thing. Has this ever happened to anyone else? Is this what it's like to feel things? Is something wrong with me? I'm honestly a little weirded out.

Today I finally decided to dabble in AI storytelling just for funsies, not to post publicly or gather ideas from. Between ChatGPT and Google Gemini, I'm honestly not sure which one gets me more. ChatGPT Me: please write me a story about [someone undergoes a series of rather extreme physical transformations] ChatGPT: [spends hours building a very unique world around this premise, demonstrating an astonishing deftness at manipulating characters with complicated feelings and plot events that took the story in creative ways I never conceived] Gemini Me: please write me a story about [someone undergoes a series of rather extreme physical transformations] Gemini: Please seek help immediately.

I've tried to stay positive, but Twitter seems like a ticking clock and I know a lot of people have left DA over the years, with the AI art thing most recently being the last straw for several. What are our other options? I don't want to monetize my stuff, at least not yet, so Patreon doesn't seem like a great fit. FurAffinity, no thanks. Discord moves way too fast for me. I could go to Substack, but is it easy to find other similar content, and be found, there? What does the Reddit scene look like?