In August 2020, I posted an image to DeviantArt called "In the Gender Machine." Actually, I posted two versions of the same picture, for comparison reasons, because the first one had flaws and I wanted to discuss the corrections and the process a bit.

As of press time, the v.1 image has 242 favorites to date and 36,700 views (or thereabouts). The v.2 image has 314 favorites and 45,000 views (or thereabouts).

To put that in perspective, most of my single non-story images I see people favoriting over and over have done somewhere between 10K and 13K views, and have somewhere around a hundred favorites. The story image I think has done best -- better than any of the PDF stories, which have certain barriers to entry -- is "Overdraft," a single long image which is nonetheless a multi-panel comic. It has 28,500 views and 152 favorites.

In other words, the traffic for the two "Gender Machine" images is way off on a different statistical plane from pretty much everything else I've posted on DA in the six-plus years I've been posting images there.

I'm not going to take the trouble to upload these images to this server so I can show them to you here, and since they are (needlessly) marked as "mature content," most of you won't be able to go see them on DA because you need a DA login to see mature stuff. But they depict a naked human lying on an apparatus. The surface they're lying on is human-silhouette-shaped; that is, it's got arms and legs for the person to rest their arms and legs on (legs slightly apart, arms extended outward). The person's feet are not visible in frame. Their hands are secured in some devices that conceal their hands completely; their face is covered with another device that obscures their head and face completely; their upper chest is covered with a device that conceals whether they have breasts; and there's another device on their crotch which completely conceals their genitals. All of these devices have wires and such coming out of them. There's a nurse standing partly out of frame watching the patient.

They're very clean images by my standards, and the "mature" marker was just me overcompensating for a content policy I was much less clear on at the time. There isn't really anything suggestive in them at all -- unless you happen to have certain particular kinks.

The v.2 image has thirteen comments, which is also an outlier; the average number of comments on one of my DA posts is zero. DA is not a place of people who use words.

The oldest comment, and my reply to it, were shortly after the images were posted. I invited the viewer to compare the two, and a person who was a regular at the time noted his opinions about which was better and also talked render process with me a little bit. He was known to post intelligent thoughts from time to time, and I liked him. He has left DA since then.

The next comment's a year later talking about my rendering woes (that was before I got the dedicated render system) and again, I responded in kind. There's another, brief comment from someone else about render stuff a few months later.

In between those is a comment from someone who, again, I knew to be a regular (and who, again, has since left DA). It says, in full: "Can I be next?"

This is indicative of the kind of comments DA images usually get, if any. Wander the halls of kink there and you see a lot of "me next" and "I wish that was me" and not much else. It's harmless, but, as I say, indicative ... of something I like a lot less.

Because there are two other comments on that piece, one from a year ago, one three days ago. The one a year ago says "What's that machine doing to her pussy?" The recent one says "What is the machine doing to him?"

Putting aside my initial amusement that each of these people jumped to opposite conclusions about the gender of the patient (you can't tell from the image, and I don't state it anywhere), my mental reaction to these comments was not positive. Because, having been on DA for eighteen years, I know them for what they are. They are bait.

The followup to that most recent comment makes that clear. I do like to acknowlege and reply to comments if they're in good faith, so assuming good faith, and not wanting to be nasty about it, I simply replied, "Well, it is a gender machine ..."

Their reply: "Fuck.. so what will happen next?" Now, when I see this, I can no longer assume good faith, nor naivete, nor even stupidity. But I'm going to play dumb. I pretend I think they're asking for details about how the machine worked in the Hotel Eleusis structure, so I say a couple of words about that, and call it a day.

Their reply: "Can I volunteer as next patient? How long does the procedure take?"

And I don't plan to reply to that.

Because, see, what they actually want is for me to tell them a story. A dirty story. They want a story just for them, just to scratch their particular itch.

This is no different from the many "RP requests" floating around DA. I used to actually do filthy RP conversations in chatrooms, y'know. Quite a lot, if I'm honest. And even then, I did notice a trend where one person -- the imaginative person who could use words well, the writer, let us say for simplicity -- had to do almost all the heavy lifting. It wasn't really a conversation, most of the time, it was one person telling a story and the other person listening and occasionally grunting.

When someone on DA asks for roleplay what they mean is they want someone else to create a scenario for them to experience. They don't want to contribute anything of their own. Most of them couldn't if they tried. These are the same people using generative tools to try to make their chosen smut over and over because they aren't capable of dreaming it up themselves.

Which is doubly tragic given how fucking basic their fucking needs often are.

Look, I get that there are people who are not interested in sex. (I don't mean interested or uninterested in having sex, necessarily; I also mean interested in talking about it or learning about it.) I don't necessarily understand those people very well -- to me sex is one of the basic human drives, and certainly the most interesting one by far, so if you're not interested in sex, to me, you aren't really interested in people. But that's OK. That's your prerogative.

I also get there are people who don't have any kinks or weirdnesses. I find this boring as hell, to be honest, but fortunately, I don't know many of those people. Even my boss who looks and sounds like a complete square straight out of the Nice Upper Midwestern Boy playbook turns out to have a secret past of tabletop gaming and RPGs -- he's been to GenCon, for pity's sake!

I actually find these people easier to tolerate than the person who has only one kink -- usually one very specific kink -- and they only ever want the same kink over and over. I want to ask them "Don't you get bored only ever getting off to one thing?"

But still, that's their business. Maybe it's beyond their control. Maybe they're just wired that way and there's nothing they can do about it.

But I'm not going to help them with it. Because I do get bored with telling the same story over and over; in fact, I hate to tell the same story twice.

Eventually I'm going to write that long-delayed essay about What I Saw At DA When Generative Art All But Destroyed The Place. I haven't had the energy. But one thing I can say here is, putting aside all the other problems of generative art -- and let us not lose sight of the fact that those other problems are currently insurmountable -- it has revealed once and for all how little imagination most people have.

Suddenly they have this machine that lets them make their own smut, tailored to their exact needs and interests, every single time. No commissioning. No fishing for RP. No guesswork, no muss, no fuss. Tell the nice prompt what you want and it'll spit it out. By the hundreds.

You know what most of them make?

Hundreds of images of women in skimpy clothing with big breasts.

Some of them make images of women in bondage gear with big breasts. Some of them make images of women in skintight latex clothing with big breasts. Those are the ones out on the edge. That's what passes for "kink" in ninety-five percent of DeviantArt.

There are a few people who have discovered they can use these tools to tell stories, and there are a few of those few who find they actually have a story to tell. But even then, it's the same story. They will literally write the exact same scenario a hundred times. (And apparently enjoy it every time? It baffles me. Do you want to eat your favorite food every day? To the exclusion of everything else you might eat?)

I have a small private collection of stuff I've swiped from DA and other places. The smut in my collection is the handful of stuff that is useful to me again and again -- the things that are not only exciting the first time, but will likely be exciting multiple times. But I have to ration myself. I keep these stories and pictures in reserve for when I need them. Because if I try to read the same story every night it will quickly have diminishing returns, and will stop doing its job as smut.

And I suspect this is the case for most of these people too. They make the same image a hundred times hoping that each one will still be novel enough to thrill them. They ask for the same story over and over hoping each time that it'll be new and different enough to float their boat. They constantly seek out people to pester that they haven't pestered before, because, hey, they're still asking for the same story they always do, but it'll be from somebody new!

I could become very, very popular at DA doing nothing but TGTF stories. Specifically, male-to-female stories; there is almost no demand for the opposite direction (as I've seen myself, the few times I've done F2M and have been met with a resounding lack of interest). I could literally do "rotten guy involuntarily gets bimboed" over and over and over with no variation and they would eat it up every time.

I can't do it. In fact, I've sharply limited the number of TGTF stories I've done in recent years because I won't do one unless I can find some new wrinkle, some different-enough variation in the plot. And there are only so many plots. (They do keep happening, though, albeit slowly. "Sweet Eliza" is a TGTF story.)

This doesn't bother some people. There's an artist on DA who does nothing but plotless TGTF sequences. Her usual post is an image with five or six figures in it -- the same figure, shown at various stages of their gender transformation. (That is, schlub guy standing on the left end of the image, then shown gradually changing to bimbo gal on the far right.) Her images have no words and no stories -- just showing someone going through stages of transformation. Over and over. Again, this is all she does. She usually posts at least one every few days.

She has more than nine thousand watchers and most of her posts do at least 10K views. Often much, much higher.

If I did what she does I would lose my mind.

I don't really have a problem with people reading my stuff to try to get a glimpse of their One Kink. Many of those kinks don't have a lot of material lying around, you know? I've got a few kinks that show up in my work regularly whose audience is very clearly desperate for every scrap they can get. I'm happy to help. (This shows up in things like unusual transformations. If you happen to have a kink for anthro elephant-women, for example, your chosen smut is very hard to find. There's a Sleeper Squad storyline that has a tribe of elephant women in it, and you could hear these people's radar activating when I posted it.)

But those are readers I tolerate. I neither discourage them nor encourage them. I've got one regular who only ever thumbs through my stories for the M2F TG bits and doesn't even bother to look at anything else. More power to him, but I'm also not going to churn out stories like that just to please him (though I know he'd like me to, because he's told me so).

The readers I like -- the ones I actively encourage -- are the multifarious, omnikinky people. There is no thrill better in the world than someone confessing to me "Well, I didn't know I had a kink about this before I read your story ..." I like the ones who are always finding new things to get excited about -- the "well, I've never tried this flavor before but I'll check it out."

And, of course, the readers I love are the ones who actually read the stories and enjoy them as stories and not just as smut. I've got about fifty of those. I'd like more than fifty, but given the sorry state of intelligence these days, I'll take what I can get.