Update

Hello everyone,

First off, I want to apologize for being inactive this past week and a half without any notice. I originally planned to take just a few days off, but things quickly went downhill—PC problems, power outages, and personal matters all happened at once, which delayed my return a lot more than I expected.

To make up for the missed time, I’ll try to upload daily for a week. A new poll will also be going up tomorrow.

Regarding the announcement I had planned for the beginning of this month—unfortunately, that’s no longer happening. A lot’s been going on behind the scenes and I haven’t explained any of it yet, so here’s what’s been happening:

Back in mid-February, I was having a ton of issues while making sets. Whether it was the lack of tokens limiting variety; longer text being written before the style, which caused the style to completely change and made certain characters and outfits not work well at all; having to inpaint almost every single image—sometimes multiple times—to fix constant anatomy issues; the lack of pose variety; or the randomness of getting completely different results with the exact same prompt, it was all becoming incredibly frustrating, and it took a massive toll on my motivation. I was eagerly waiting on the new upcoming version of NovelAI, hoping it would solve all these issues. When it was released in March, it came with some major improvements (such as much more creative poses, easier character and outfit creation, an updated database allowing you to generate new characters and outfits, the ability to control each character individually, etc.), all of which were great. Unfortunately, however, the style mixing was absolutely horrible.

I was not able to replicate the current style I’m using; the closest I got still looked really awful.

So then I spent the next two months testing various new styles and learning how to make a lot of the new positions. I’ve since figured out how to make plenty new creative positions and I even came up with at least two different styles I personally really liked. Sadly, though, because of the new way style mixing works, it favors one of the artists way too heavily, making it obvious what I’m using—which I really don’t like. I want to have a unique style, and not feel like I’m copying an actual artist.

That’s why I was anxious about these changes and why I spent so much time working on them. I’ve generated over 15k images since the update dropped, and there were many days I couldn’t even test anything because I had requests to finish. My original idea was to bring back having multiple styles like I did last year, and let each requester choose the one they preferred. But I was still really unsure about how people would react to such a big change in style.

While juggling all of this, I somehow managed to keep up with regular uploads through March. But by April, burnout started to set in. Memberships had been steadily dropping for over a month, and then, out of nowhere Patreon started flagging and hiding a lot of my recent sets. I reached out to support, but nothing changed. That’s when I also decided to start setting up a Discord server, which only added to everything else I was already dealing with.

And then, on top of all that, the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph hit last week. It was just too much for me to handle all at once.

I’m back now, though, and doing my best to get back on track.

As for the styles and everything I’ve been working on over the past two months, I recently found out they’re releasing yet another new version, supposedly soon (which I honestly didn’t expect, considering it took over a year to release the last one, and it had so many issues). They say this new version will fix the style mixing issues and improve things overall.

So, these past two months of work were basically almost for nothing, which is very annoying, but at least I’m hoping the new version is actually good and that I can replicate something close to my current style while using the new positions and characters—that would be amazing.

There’s no way to know for sure yet, as it hasn’t been released, but it should be out soon. This also means that once it drops, my sets might slow down a bit again while I test the new features, but I’m hoping the delay won’t last long this time.

Anyway, this is the reason I’m not making any style changes yet. If I end up not being able to recreate my current style once again in the upcoming version, I sincerely hope you guys like whatever new style I end up using. Whatever it is, I doubt I’ll like it more than what I have right now. Unfortunately, there are just too many issues with the current, outdated version of NovelAI I use, making the process of creating sets extremely frustrating and time-consuming.

As for the Discord server, I’ve decided to delay it for now and will instead start posting links using MEGA files. Hopefully, that won’t cause any issues, but if it does, I’ll switch to posting on Discord. If you don’t have an account or an alt yet, feel free to create one in advance and link it to Patreon. Alternatively, you could join my SubscribeStar page, where I still post ZIP files—the rules are much less strict over there.

Thank you for your understanding and patience. I know the past month hasn’t been ideal, and I truly appreciate everyone who’s stuck around. I’m committed to keeping this going, and I’m not going anywhere for good unless I let you guys know first. It’s been a difficult period, and I hope something like this doesn’t happen again.