Aborigen

Someone said, and I repeat it because I like it, that freedom isn’t the absence of boundaries. True freedom is what you conceive to do within boundaries. That was the idea behind Size Riot: challenging people to write in themes they weren’t familiar with, limiting their stories to 2000 words, all part of building stronger writers.

I like some self-imposed limitations, because I’ll geek out on a product if I like it too much. There’s a big bag of popcorn I get at Menards: Herr’s Fire Roasted Sweet Corn® Mexican Street Corn Popcorn. Doesn’t matter how big the bag is, it’s one serving if I don’t watch myself. It’s important to have some brakes in place.

The opposite is true of writing: if I’m uninspired to write, it’s sometimes helpful to set a timer and tell myself, Look, asshole, all you have to do is write as fast as you can, badly or otherwise, for ten goddamn minutes. Think you can do that? And then I do. That’s helpful.

However, if I had a paid account for ChatGPT 4o, I probably wouldn’t go to sleep at night. I’d probably start on an idea at 9:30 a.m., then when the crepuscular birds started raising a racket outside my window, I’d realize that I have three hours in which to catch up on sleep before a team meeting.

Creating with ChatGPT

I don’t have a paid account, but ChatGPT does offer free doses of 4o for a limited span. You can write quite a lot during this period—I tested this tonight and generated 5,500 words within 20 minutes. By contrast, when I’m really inspired, I can hammer out 2,000 words in one hour, John Henry-style.

After a certain character count it reverts back to the crappier, uncooperative 3.5 version. So, there, no matter how much fun I’m having developing an erotic scenario, it has to end and there’s no choice but to wait four-and-a-half hours to do it again. I have to get out of my chair, I have to find some food and hydration. It’s a good system.

ChatGPT has updated with several useful features, like a new privacy mode: whatever you write or paste in there doesn’t go toward their teaching model. It’s just erased. Yeah, sure, you’re very reasonably saying, but this is what I believe until a hacker much smarter than me detects otherwise.

Another feature is narration. It used to offer five voices that would read the output generated by ChatGPT, unless it’s the smut I’m making it write. I put in a prompt; it generates some text; I click on the little speaker icon and hear a pretty sophisticated voice program recite it. It used to have five voices: Juniper, Ember, Breeze, Cove, and Sky. I don’t know what they were going for, but to my ear, Juniper sounds like a cheery, young Black woman; Ember’s a young Black man in marketing; Breeze sounds short; and Cove owns Bitcoin and has advice for new Christian entrepreneurs.

Sky, you might recall, was modeled after Scarlett Johannsen’s role as an AI assistant/love interest in the movie Her. I’d heard Sky before the news came out that Scarlett was deeply upset that ChatGPT disrespected her wishes and used her voice without her permission. I hadn’t known about the association, and I’d assumed that Sky was an intentionally ambiguous, androgynous voice. But Sky has been removed and it’s too late to see if this is true.

Preserving the Sound

Anyway, so last night I was writing up a story, and like I said, the narration option is never an option when you’re writing questionable material, which is all I ever do. Color me surprised, then, when I saw the little speaker icon appear after a long passage in which the shrunken protagonist has been ordered to lick clean a pertinent area of female anatomy.

Right? How did that slip past the radar?

But it did, and then I was faced with the task of trying to grab the audio. My super-computer, ramped up for graphics processing, doesn’t have a microphone, internal or otherwise. When the narration was playing, my computer couldn’t detect it. Windows Voice Recorder couldn’t hear it, and even Audacity couldn’t pick it up, no matter how I toyed with the inputs. I wasn’t about to do something inadequate like hold my phone up to my speakers, because I really wanted a clean track.

Not realizing how late it was getting, I actually asked ChatGPT to recommend some programs to save the audio from itself, and it suggested OBS Studio, a FOSS recording suite designed for streamers. I downloaded it, played the audio, and yes, OBS’s sound levels showed that it could hear it! After that, I just needed a YouTube tutorial to explain how to interpret and work within OBS Studio…

Ultimately, yes, OBS recorded an MKV file for me, which was actually a blank screen with a clear audio track (blank, because my computer doesn’t have a camera either). This I dumped into Audacity and leveled out for the MP3 I was hoping for. Well, now I have a new recording tool and I’ll figure out if it’s useful for anything else for me. And I’ll share it here, once I remember how to edit noises in Audacity because I may have been writing myself into the story.

Future Projects

The other big thing I have to do is find a new theme for this blog. I’m not happy with the one I’m using, I preferred the previous one, which was deprecated and unsupported.

I’m also making progress on restoring the Size Riot writing contest archive. I’ve recently completed Cocktober 2019, which means there’s one year (four contests) of stories left. I apologize to everyone who was left high and dry when I took the whole project down from Google Drive, but I think now you understand why that was important.

And I haven’t forgotten about the subscriber-only stories lingering in my blog. After Stripe suspended my account and scattered my subscribers, there was no way for anyone to follow the few series I’d been developing. First priority is to get the completed series edited and laid out in book format for sale on Smashwords. Second priority is to finish the series in progress and likewise post them for publication.

I have lists of my paid subscribers from Patreon and WordPress, and these people get free copies of whatever I complete. I’m deeply grateful to you for your support, and I’ve never forgotten you.

After that… I dunno. I’m kinda saving the podcast for winter, when I’m locked up in the apartment anyway. Once in a while I think about staging some photocollage, but I’m increasingly discouraged by social media and question my compulsion to share it where it would only get ignored or stolen. Occasionally I work on an idea in Daz, but again, that only goes so far. I knock out a dozen scenes, file it in my Render Library, then forget about it. I’m still doing the newsletter, but it’s a dry season for anything giantess-related.

And I feel like there’s something else I’m forgetting.