I've written several million words worth of stories, so it takes a long time to read through them all. As such, I thought I'd post brief summaries so that you can find stories that you're more likely to be interested in, rather than having to just start reading something random and see if you like it.
My stories tend to heavily feature hypnosis/mind control, as well as monster girls. Sometimes the monster races are exclusively female, but sometimes they have males as well. Hypnosis tends to be of the relatively friendly variety, and often consensual.
I don't write explicit sex scenes, though it's sometimes left implied. Some stories go further than others, but any character removing underpants is guaranteed to result in the story skipping ahead rather than going into explicit details of what happens after that.
I focus heavily on "Choose Your Own Adventure" style stories that have a lot of branching. That's in the sense of the old CYOA books where you can make decisions at various points and all of the available options are written. CYOA has more recently come to mean a linear story in which people vote on where the story will go at the end of each chapter, but only one option gets written. In most cases, I write all routes.
More recently, I've been taking advantage of the scripting capabilities of fiction.live. This allows CYOA stories with finer-grained branching and allows doing things that are impractical to copy to this site. From the reader's perspective, that might sound like a distinction without a difference, but it really does make a big difference from the writer's perspective.
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/Mind-control-scripting-stories/nJqPp5qHCkQYBcXwM/home
Collection of links on this site:
https://www.deviantart.com/shall2/gallery/84993124/mind-control-scripting-stories
This is my current story in progress. It is actually a collection of several independent stories. The idea is that you meet a recent graduate of Mind Control University and decide what to do about it. Becoming her hypnotized slave is always a possibility, as is remaining free of her control. The other possibilities vary a lot by story. I only post a given story at the second link when it is complete, but there are others in progress at the first link.
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/Lamia-of-the-Jungle/EKqDzNuZqp4FmhkSz/home
Beginning of story on this site:
You are on vacation in Uganda and stay at a hotel in an area that is rumored to have lamias in the surrounding jungle. You travel into the jungle, find a lamia, and have to decide what to do about it.
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/Mind-Control-University-class-71d-Townie-Power/Df5A63ZscwaCANHaQ/home
Introduction on this site:
The idea was to redo my Mind Control University story with a bunch of scripting code that would eventually allow you to choose a member of the class to help, then capture the rest of the class in mind control battles. I eventually abandoned it because the combat was way too repetitive and just didn't work very well.
You wake up one morning in a different world where there are a bunch of monster girls who can hypnotize people. Usually, the control wears off after nine hours and people enjoy it. Something has gone wrong so that the control never wears off. As an outsider, however, you can escape their hypnosis, and so the locals have summoned you to find out what happened and save their world.
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/The-Hypno-Games/eSSzPJ6qiqAC7466i
Introduction on this site:
You get hypnotized and then abducted by space aliens, where you will be the ultimate prize in a popular, televised game show. Twelve beautiful monster girls compete for the right to hypnotize you and take you home as their slave. Can you escape their control? Do you even want to?
You play as Kaa the snake. What will you do with various humans who venture into your jungle? Hypnotize them and keep them as slaves? Eat them? Or will you merely die trying? Some humans can defend themselves, after all.
You have some free time at the end of a business vacation in eastern India and want to check out the local "jungle". While there, you meet Kaa the snake. How will you react? This story also contains the sort of "nagas" that actually exist in real life.
You're on vacation in Namibia when a lamia catches you in her coils. She announces that she will hypnotize you, and explains that she has to hypnotize people to survive. But she promises to release you unharmed if you cooperate. What do you do?
You travel to a secluded area on the beach, where you find a mermaid singing in the water. She claims to be a princess from an undersea kingdom who has been forced into exile, and she wants your help. What do you do?
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/A-Visit-to-a-Hypnotherapist/TyJeyw5nRWEmDGjiB
Introduction on this site:
You have a beautiful wife and a fetish for hypnosis. You really want to see your wife get hypnotized. So you've arranged to accompany her on a visit to a hypnotherapist so that you can watch her be hypnotized. The branching is simple enough that I could copy the whole story to this site, but I haven't.
You mistakenly end up lost and alone in an Indian jungle. While there, you find a lonely naga who wants your company. Will you oblige? If you leave, you may also find Kaa or another naga. This was my first branching story, so it was quite a learning experience on how to write them better, but the story still works as written.
Direct link:
https://fiction.live/stories/Mind-Control-University-class-71/B9bpoyFLs57iiayoG
Introduction on this site:
Mesmerra, the goddess of mind control, invites forty people from across the multiverse to attend her university for a year, where they will learn many methods of mind control. Students are encouraged to experiment on each other, including capturing their classmates forcibly. The protagonist is there because she really enjoys being mind controlled. This is perhaps a CYOA in the sense of people vote where the story goes next, so most branches are not written. There are a lot of alternate versions for different characters at the end, however.
This is akin to Mind Control University, but has various branches where you can choose different roommates and help your roommate capture others. Most branches are not written, but there was the possibility to backtrack and make a different decision when things go awry. The story doesn't really conclude, but just stops because I stopped writing. It is about 370k words, however, so there is quite a lot there.
An explorer who wanders into the Amazon jungle gets hypnotized and enslaved by the nagas who are there. The nagas' goddess is unhappy with how her nagas are mistreating their slaves, and uses the incident to punish them and force them to behave better. The first four "volumes" were originally intended as the conclusion, but I kept writing sequels.
A man gets lost in a remote area of New Guinea, where a naga finds him and asks him to stay with her and the others in her village. Eventually, the Indonesian government discovers the naga colony and expels them, so they move to Louisiana, in what was originally a sequel. The latter is written in a blog style. This was the first story I wrote.
A woman gets caught in a nasty thunderstorm, and tries to take refuge in a mysterious castle. The castle is already inhabited by a snake-man named Duke, who insists that he is still human. This story is also heavy on turning people into bronze statues and then back into humans.
An indie game developer makes a game whose goal is to teach AI characters in the game to understand morality. The characters in the game also enjoy hypnotizing each other because the programmer likes hypnosis. Eventually, one of them hypnotizes the developer and gets control of him.
The intended villain of a fantasy novel hypnotizes the author, then forces the author to make major changes to the plot so that he won't still be he villain.
A woman on vacation in Kenya is transformed into a naga/lamia when she touches a mysterious artifact. She is very upset about it at first, but eventually gets used to her new body and hypnotic powers. In a sequel, her daughter decades later wants to be similarly transformed herself.
A CIA agent is assigned to work as a personal assistant to the agency's best interrogator. He is shocked to learn that she is a naga who interrogates prisoners by hypnotizing them to tell her everything they know.
A couple on vacation in western Washington comes across two nagas in a forest. The nagas claim that their race used to rule this planet, but a cataclysm wiped them out over seventy thousand years ago. To try to ensure the survival of their species, they were frozen with the intent of releasing them 120 years later. Something malfunctioned, and more than seventy thousand years have passed, and they don't know why. But they still want to survive, and want to coexist with the humans who now dominate the planet. There is also a major, major twist near the end, to the extent that rereading the story after knowing the ending casts the nagas' actions in a very different light.
A man is teleported to a different world, where humanity rules over many different species of willingly hypnotized slaves. At first, he is upset and wants to return home, but the woman who brought him there desperately tries to convince him to stay and marry her.
A man in rural Wyoming is visited by a naga who hypnotizes him and offers to sell him a bracelet that will allow him to enjoy the experience of being hypnotized even after he leaves. This eventually leads to a sequel in which his wife finds out how the bracelet works and wants her own.
This site limits title lengths, so I'll try again. A better title would be:
If you want a future in which it is easy for a skilled artist to get a stable, well-compensated job working as an artist, then AI art is the only real hope that we have of creating that future.
For comparison, modern computers rely heavily on transistors. The transistor wasn't invented until 1947. There were a handful of vacuum tube-based computers before that, but not very far before that.
Even so, there were a lot of computers in the world a hundred years ago. The original usage of the word "computer" today is archaic, but it used to mean someone who does computations. People had jobs working as "computers" to do mathematical computations by hand, that is, with a pencil and paper.
People don't have that job description today, as modern computers can do it far better than humans. But the rise of electronic computers hardly heralded the end of STEM jobs. Rather, quite the opposite happened. There's a ton of demand for competent computer programmers or engineers. If you've got the right skills, there are plenty of companies who will want to hire you and pay you well. You don't even have to be great at it; there's plenty of demand for average quality programmers and engineers, too.
This has been great for the sort of people who would have worked as computers a century ago. It's not just the greater demand and salary for the modern STEM jobs. The jobs themselves are more fun to do, too. Even maintaining some legacy, proprietary corporate software package is a more interesting job than doing endless arithmetic.
So why did that happen? Electronic computers made most of the STEM jobs that previously existed obsolete. How did that ultimately create far more STEM jobs than it eliminated? The answer is that computers were able to make people with technical skills far more productive than before by making it possible to do new and interesting things that couldn't be done before.
Compare that to the situation of people who would like to make a living as artists today. The stereotype of a "starving artist" exists for good reasons. There just aren't that many good jobs available for artists today. Those that do exist tend to be highly competitive, and most people seeking them get paid little, still seeking their big break.
So why aren't there more and better jobs available to artists? The answer is that not very much money is paid for artwork. If you add up the total amount that people pay for computers and software, many people pay far into the tens or even hundreds of dollars per month. Most people pay exactly $0 to commission artwork, and while they may buy a magazine or newspaper that hires a few artists, very little of that money is actually spent on artwork.
AI has the potential of creating far more customized artwork that far more people would find interesting enough to pay for it. It's not going to be higher quality than is otherwise available, but customized pictures or even animated videos that can be adjusted to fit the desires of the end user perfectly could create new markets that basically don't exist today.
Would you pay someone $20 to create a custom drawing for you? Maybe you would, and some people sell a handful of commissions on this site. Still, not very many people would pay that, which is why there isn't very much money in selling drawing commissions. But would you pay $20 for a customized ten minute animated video that was created just for you? How about a $20/month subscription for the ability to have AI alter many other videos out there to make them more to your liking? That sounds like a much more interesting deal, don't you think?
I'm not sure exactly where AI artwork will end up, but new types of products that get a lot more people to pay a lot more money for artwork are essential if you want there to be more and better jobs that hire artists. Money that isn't spent on artwork won't be spent to hire artists. If a lot more money were spent on artwork, then that creates the possibility of a lot more of that money going to pay artists.
But the possibility isn't a guarantee, and that's where copyright law comes in. Some people have made the case that AI art is theft. And it can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Is it legal for you to take a picture from this site, change the resolution and file format, take it to a different site, and claim it as your own? Before you answer "no" to that, consider that it is legal if you also own the original. It's only theft if you don't own the original, or at least have the consent of whoever does own the original.
There is also the notion of "fair use", which does allow you to use artwork that you don't own for some limited purposes. What constitutes fair use of otherwise copyrighted works is complicated, but using copyrighted works that you don't own to create derivative works that compete with the original is not fair use. That's what some people are trying to do with AI art, and that's a problem.
So what is AI art, anyway? The basic idea of machine learning is that humans make decisions and label data about something or other. The manually labeled data is called "training" data. After that, a machine learning algorithm can statistically analyze the training data and learn how to mimic the decisions that humans made on other data. This works a lot better in some situations than others, and machine learning researchers mostly publicize the situations where they got it to work well while quietly discarding the ones where it didn't.
The idea of AI art is to take some art generated by humans, use that as the training data, and get an algorithm to mimic the decisions made by human artists to create the AI art. That's not intrinsically illegitimate or stealing.
AI art only presents copyright problems if you're using training data that you don't own. Which is, of course, basically the only way to make AI art today. But it doesn't have to be that way forever.
Suppose that art companies are formed that can create and deliver AI art (and I expect that animations will come, too) far superior to what we see today and make a lot of money selling that AI art to the general public. That creates a big pot of revenue that they can use to buy legal training data. Maybe that consists initially of finding people who have made some good artwork and paying the artists some money for the right to use that artwork as training data. At that point, it's no longer theft--and artists are getting paid something, at least.
But taking random pictures and using them as your training data isn't ideal. Far better is to commission artwork that is designed specifically to make good training data that the machine learning algorithm can parse well. And how do you get that data? By hiring artists, of course--and lots of them.
Think that the future, big art companies would be too cheap to do that? Competition could force their hand, just as it has in other markets. The current worldwide market for creating movies is on the order of $100 billion per year. The market for computer games is somewhere around there, too. I don't know what the global market is for art commissions akin to what is done on this site, but I'd bet that it's multiple orders of magnitude smaller than that.
If there's $100 billion per year in revenue to be had, then a big company paying artists $1 billion in salaries in order to generate $5 billion in revenue for the company is a bargain. Try to avoid hiring any real human artists, and with inferior training data, your AI generated artwork will be inferior to the competition and hardly anyone will buy it.
So how do we get there? Two things need to happen: one is that we need enforceable copyright laws to restrict how companies can use artwork that they don't own (or at least have a license to) as training data. It's fine to test your algorithms privately, but that doesn't require putting a bunch of derivative works out into the public arena as is happening now.
The other is that we need for tools to develop that make human artists far more productive than before, to make people willing to spend far more money than before on artwork. Human artists working with AI to generate far more easily customizable artwork and far more cheaply is the only plausible path to the latter that I can see.
With the success of Lamia of the Jungle, I'm now planning to make a collection of similarly scripted stories, but each on a smaller scale than that one. The idea is that you start a story and are asked to make decisions at various points. All paths are written, and you click a button to make your decision and proceed with the story. After making several decisions, you reach one of several possible endings. You can see this concept for yourself as implemented here:
https://fiction.live/stories/Lamia-of-the-Jungle/EKqDzNuZqp4FmhkSz/home
Something on that grand of a scale is a lot of work, though. My plan is to make somewhat smaller scale stories that still depend similarly on scripting to write many routes. What I have in mind is on the order of hundreds of possible paths per story ultimately leading to five or so endings. Lamia of the Jungle is large enough as to be difficult to count the paths, but probably on the order of hundreds of thousands possible paths leading to thirty-four endings.
The mind controllers that you'll meet will mostly be the cast of MCU class 71. You can see an early version of this concept here:
That was written back when the site's multi-route and scripting capabilities had far more limited functionality, so I literally couldn't do what I want to do now. Because the stories will rely heavily on scripting functionality that DeviantArt lacks, they can't be copied to this site. Rather, you'll have to go here to read the story:
https://fiction.live/undefined/Mind-control-scripting-stories/nJqPp5qHCkQYBcXwM
That page has a poll at the bottom votes as to which mind controller's route you want to be written first. That won't be meaningful to you if you're not familiar with MCU class 71. The rest of the story should still function just fine, as nearly all of the routes will have you deal with only a single class member in isolation. The necessary background details of her world will be explained at the start of the route, so that this story should make sense even if you know nothing about MCU class 71, or even MCU more generally.
Each mind controller's route will have a single, very long post with a lot of scripting logic to make text appear or disappear. For comparison, Lamia of the Jungle only has two main chapters apart from endings, appendices, and import statements.
Below the main chapter, there will be a poll with all possible route options for the entire route. Only the options that are relevant to the particular place in the story where you are will appear. Initially, they'll all be poll options. The most popular options will be written, at which point, the poll option will be deleted and replaced by a scripting button in the story. The plan is to write all options eventually, and the end result will be the poll options completely gone and all replaced by scripting buttons. The point of voting is to determine the order in which the options are written.
My plan is for a given route to have on the order of a few dozen scripting buttons once complete. For comparison, Lamia of the Jungle has 193, excluding the import statements that allow resetting the story from many places.
In order to make this work, I'll have to plan out all of the choices for a given route before posting the route. As such, there will be no write-in options allowed. My past experience is that I'll probably make a handful of changes to routes once it comes time to fill in the details, but not very many. Such pre-planning is essential in order to keep the scope of a multi-route story manageable.
A given live session should involve writing additional sections of text for the most popular poll options in several different routes. "Most popular" is used loosely and doesn't just mean the most votes. I plan to apply an informal bonus to options further into a route, as the option will have been visible to fewer people and for less time, and thus had fewer chances to accumulate votes. Exactly how this is done may be formalized later, but it should only have a slight effect on the particular order in which options are written.
On a given route, you'll play as someone who lives on the same world as one of the MCU class 71 graduates, and often but not always knew her before she attended the university. You'll usually play a male character, but be able to choose your own name.
You'll generally have choices as to whether to assist or oppose the mind controller. Depending on the choices you make, it will always be possible to be mind controlled by her or to avoid it. In some routes, it will be possible to have a romantic relationship and ultimately marry her. In some routes, it will be possible for you to get her into huge trouble for being a mind controller, and sometimes even to get her killed. In some routes, she can get you killed for fighting against her. For some of the more submissive graduates, you'll even have the opportunity to mind control her.
The setting will vary a little by route, but generally be shortly after graduation from MCU. Each graduate will be in a situation mostly similar to that of the canonical ending to MCU class 71:
Lina and Seranailli will stay together on Lina's world. There will be no Daphne route, as she's not my character. Everyone else will get her own route, and there will be few to no other cases of one graduate appearing in a classmate's route. I'm going to try very hard to keep each route comprehensible on its own without needing to know anything about the rest of the class.
In this multiverse, mind control can be either hostile or consensual, and is more powerful if it is consensual. It wears off in days if it is hostile and the subject is fighting to escape, but can last months if the subject wants it to. Either way, it can be extended by reapplying it, but it is only practical for a single mind controller to reapply it to so many slaves at once, so forcibly mind controlling an entire world is wildly impractical. There are numerous methods of mind control, and different graduates are more skilled in different methods.
This post is not marked as mature, but the full story would be. Once again, the story can't be posted to this site. You'll have to go here to read it and vote in the polls:
https://fiction.live/undefined/Mind-control-scripting-stories/nJqPp5qHCkQYBcXwM
It's on another site, and the link is here:
https://fiction.live/stories/Mind-Control-University-Class-71b-Save-Scumming/LkLJ66xmmDHL4Sg4w/home
I'm sure you've seen the "choose your own adventure" stories that people write where they ask for reader input on what to do next. That's what the original MCU was, after all.
But this time, it's not just a single main story. There are lots of branches. No option is ever permanently foreclosed. If something goes wrong, you can backtrack and try again.
The basic idea is that every week, I run a poll asking which option on which branch to continue. Every single option from every single branching point that hasn't already won and been written is eligible. The top three winners (subject to some restrictions to prevent them from being excessively similar) all get written the next week to advance those three branches.
The exact rules of how I'm running it are complicated. You can click the page choice drop-down menu on the top bar of the story to see appendices, and then read the introduction and appendices if you want the full rules.
You can also vote in the polls on that site, and thus influence where the story goes, without having to register. I may or may not eventually copy the story over to this site, as I did with the original MCU. But I haven't posted anything here in a long time, partly because I hate how they redid the site several months ago.
I had been ignoring Eclipse. But I figured I'd live with it and maybe even get used to it. I've adapted to a lot of other sites redoing their look, even if I still hate the changes that Wikia made some years ago.
A site like this has a large volume of things posted by an enormous number of people. Most of the things posted have exactly zero interest to me. There is a search tool to find keywords. The problem is that it can return mostly the same results for years, meaning that you'll hardly ever find anything that you hadn't previously seen.
The previous design had an option to search for text combined with recency. That way, I could find the things that I was interested in that people had posted in the last few days or the last week or whatever. That is, the potentially interesting things that I hadn't already seen.
As best as I can tell, that's gone. There is an option to search for text since the beginning of time, which will rarely turn up anything new. There is an option to search by date, which will overwhelmingly return random things are of no interest to you. But I can't find any way to combine those two features like you could before. And if there isn't one, then the site is dead.
You can still look in groups or have stuff from followed users get flagged for you. So basically, if you know who has made stuff in the past that you liked, you can find what else they've made. But if you're hoping to ever discover anyone new, good luck with that. If you don't already have a lot of followers, then there's little point in starting to post stuff on this site.
This seems like it should be a fixable problem. But people have known since the very early days of the world wide web that the content created by random people just isn't very useful without robust search functionality. I have no idea how the powers that be at DeviantArt didn't get that memo, but if they don't figure that out quickly, they'll kill their own site.