Tired of My Day Job. Sigh.

For the past few days, my day job has required a lot of my time.  Which I really hate.  It means I've been dead in the water on creating content for both of my websites and my deviant art page and the single outstanding commission that I have.  All stopped while I deal with stuff at work

My day job involves work as a software engineer.  It's not what I really want to be doing.  I do want to continue to do programming.  But I'd rather be doing something like indie game development than being in the daily grind at an enterprise software company dealing with all the stuff you have to deal with there on a day to day basis.

My pipe dream is that I quit that job and am able to focus on creating content for my two websites coupled with doing some indie game development, and that somehow those two things will be enough to pay the bills.

I'd certainly be a lot happier if I could do that.  Now if you crunch the numbers on things, it's unlikely that those activites (my websites + some indie game development with me as a one man developer) would make enough to live on.  But it doesn't mean I'll give up the dream.  I still want to at least try on the side to do it.

But weeks like this, where work at my day job ramps way up, are discouraging.  Because weeks like this stop me in my tracks on the website front and on the stuff I've been doing to get more into indie game programming

A couple of years ago I bought a cheap Mac Mini and loaded it up with XCode and dabbled with some IOS games programming for fun. I  made a little cat game that I never put into the app store or anything like that.  But I really felt like a fish out of water doing that type of development. I love the ipad and ipod touch as an end user, but I am just not a Mac guy.  I felt awkward on the Mac.  And I hated XCode and Objective C.  Historically, and at work, I'm a Java guy.  I've used IntelliJ and Eclipse for development.

So I ended up selling the Mac and punting on my little cat game.  Fast forward a couple years and the environment for games development for ios and android has gotten better.  There are several options out there, but the one I've been playing around with lately is Corona SDK. 

Corona SDK allows you to code in a simple scripting language called Lua and then deploy for IOS and Android.  For IOS you still need a Mac in the toolchain if you ever want to make a game that you're going to deploy to a device (rather than the simulator).  But at least you can develop on a PC.  For people who do love being on Macs and who love XCode and Objective C - more power to you all.  I just can't deal with it.

So my plan for the next few months is to continue cranking out stuff for my website but also try to gear up to do some android and ios development using Corona.

I've been reading a pretty interesting book about game design.  The book doesn't really get into the nuts and bolts of mobile game development from a programming perspective, but that's ok - I'm reading separate materials for that

Instead it delves into how to make a fun game that is unique and engages players.  The book is called The Art of Game Design : A Book of Lenses  and I'm about 2/3 of the way through reading it.

Sometimes I wonder whether people would be interested in an erotic BE adventure game.  Or FMG adventure game. I could certainly create one of those.  It wouldn't be possible to put them into the apple app store - they don't allow anything that even seems like porn in any way. But I wonder if in the jailbroken repositories - like Cydia - whether such a game could exist.  Or in the android marketplace or somewhere like that.

At any rate, the game development I've been thinking of doing is more mainstream than that (not involving adult erotica) but maybe I should look into that...

Sure would beat going to my day job. Sigh.  Well, I'm off to work now - hopefully will get some time to work on my websites later tonight

Minka is Truly Inspiring

Oh. My. God.

There are many women who inspire the characters in my comics.  I've been a fan of a lot of big boob models over the years, and thinking of them has definitely had an influence on the stuff I have made

One definite inspiration for my characters has been the incredible Minka.  Specifically, there's one vision I have of her that tends to play back in my mind when I'm making some of my comics.  I replay in my mind her appearance on a professional wrestling show in 1999 - WCW Monday Night Nitro.

Minka appeared on that show one night, and it was something to behold .  It wasn't just her massive tits - although those were captivating.  It was her whole attitude.  The statement of confidence that her body movements made as well as the unabashed flaunting of her monstrously sized augmented breasts.

She strutted up to the ring, and entered.  Then started a sexy dance/bounce walk with her arms in the air, those massive monster tits thrust forward.  A smug smile proudly formed on her lips.  It was though she were saying, look at me, all of you in the arena.  Look at my fucking HUGE tits.  These other valet girls you're used to seeing on WCW Nitro?  You thought THEY had big tits? Please.  Look at THESE.
She sauntered around the ring in a confident arched back tit strut, shaking her massive boobs back and forth.  I'm not sure how the referee managed to avoid having a heart attack watching her.  She projected a vibe that seemed to say, yes they ARE fake. And fucking HUGE. And I'm PROUD of them.

She's always embodied for me the supremely confident uber titted woman.  A woman whose thin frame coupled with monster sized tits leaves no doubt in anyone's mind that Minka has big implants.  They aren't natural. She CHOSE to get them. And now men are captivated by them.

Over the years I've seen a lot of Minka photos and videos.  And her real life situation might not be as idealized as my vision of her has been.  Mainly meaning that although my notion of her is a supremely confident super boobed goddess who does WHAT she wants WHEN she wants to, some documentaries and interviews have given hints that her husband/manager is in the picture.

Camera Flash Highlights Minka's Nipple. What a goddess!

There was one documentary in particular - one where there was a segment on her in Las Vegas, then a segment on Crystal Storm, and one other model - where they interviewed her husband and her.  And it seemed like he was calling some of the shots about Minka's life and work rather than her being the driving force there.

As with many things, fantasy idealized versions of the world can be preferable to actual reality.  So in my mind, Minka really is that smug smiling, back arching, supremely confident calling all the shots big fake titqueen.

The Big Fake Tit Strut

And her spirit definitely infuses many of the comics I make.  As much as it is fantastic to see Minka topless, I actually sometimes even prefer seeing her in a tight shirt.  I was a member of Minka's website back in the late 1990s, and I remember a photoshoot where she was wearing a white tshirt that said Helmy on it that was stretched over her humungous tits.

I think Mimi Miyagi was also in that photoshoot, and it accentuated Minka's tits even more to see just how much they absolutely dwarfed Mimi's boobs.  Seeing them stretch a tshirt nearly to the ripping point was really amazing.

On your Knees before Minka's Huge Tits!!!!

Anyway, she's been inspirational for my work.  Maybe some time I can do a comic where the character really does resemble her more closely - an asian with massive fake tits. 

BEGiantess

So far I've been blogging a lot about the creation process I've been using for strongandstacked.com and a lot about big boobs, big muscles and big butts

I think its time to start blogging a bit about my other website. BEGiantess.com

HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

As I related in some earlier blog posts, strongandstacked.com was spawned out of the success I'd been having creating BE and FMG animations on deviantart.com. I was merrily creating content for both my deviantart.com page and for the newly created strongandstacked.com that included BE comics and animations, FMG comics and animations. But I'd get the occasional request for a giantess animation.

I did one or two of those, but always coupled the giantess growth with breast expansion.  After doing those a light bulb popped up for me over my head.  What if I started making a lot of material specifically tailored to giantess fans?

I'd been wondering about creating a second website after starting up strongandstacked.com.  In the back of my mind was the hosting scheme that I was using for strongandstacked, and the thought that maybe I could make a much better profit margin if I looked into a different hosting a billing solution for a new website.

Strongandstacked.com was (and is) hosted by dianathevalkyrie.com.  They provide the hosting, they pay the yearly fee for the domain name, and they take care of billing.  They do all that, but what they charge is half the take of any subscriptions to the site.  So for every member out there who is paying 10 dollars per month, five dollars goes to me, five dollars goes to dianathevalkyrie.com. A fifty / fifty split.

I naively thought at the time - wow, that's a monster cut of what's coming in.  Half! Surely I can get a better profit margin than that if I look into hosting and billing alternatives.  So why not try that with a spin off website from strongandstacked ?

And what better genre for the new website than Giantess + BE?  I mean I'd already created a lot of BE material.  Giantess growth should just be a piece of cake, right?  Just make the girls grow bigger.  It was easy to do in Daz Studio.  Just crank the scale up.  I knew I wanted to couple the giantess growth with big boobs because I'm a boob man.  I'm not really interested in giantess who grow tall but who don't have big boobs

In fact, at my core, I'm not really a giantess fan.  I'm not averse to them, but for me the core mechanic at work is breast expansion.  Now there is an aspect of giantesses that I have grown to love apart from the big boobs - and I'll get into that.  But when I was first brainstorming about BE Giantess I thought, it'll be all about the boobs with giantess growth kind of thrown into the mix.  And that should satisfy giantess fans.  How hard could it be, right?   As usual, I was pretty naive, and it was a lot harder than I thought

CREATION OF THE WEBSITE

I decided to go with www.247-host.com as the hosting provider for BEGiantess.com.  I went ahead and registered the BEGiantess.com domain myself, for like 20 bucks per year out of my pocket.  And then I paid for some hosting space on 247-host.com, like 100 bucks per year.  One key thing was that I needed a hosting service that would accept an adult themed site.  It took me a while to find one that would

The next piece I needed for the new begiantess.com site was a billing provider .  It was even more of a challenge to find a billing service that would allow adult websites .  Paypal will absolutely NOT allow payments to adult themed websites .  And if you try to use them and they find out you're an adult site, they'll permanently ban you from paypal. I knew I didn't want to compromise my personal paypal account, and its actually difficult to set up a proxy one plus even if you did, they won't allow billing for adult themed websites.

So I found another provider named Verotel .  At first I was really happy with them. They made it very easy to plug their billing stuff into the begiantess.com website . They had some analytics and tracking of visitors and signups that was good. And their fee was reasonable. I think they took something like a 15 percent cut.

So I was off to the races with my newly created begiantess.com website.  Right away I realized I was a bit over my head as far as creating material in a timely fashion for both begiantess.com AND strongandstacked.com at the same time (I still am.... )

And there were other challenges I faced as well.

UNIQUE PROBLEMS TO CREATING GIANTESS STUFF

Originally I'd thought, ok.  How hard can creating giantess material be?  I just make the woman grow to 50 feet tall and give her huge tits.  Then it should be pretty much the same sort of process I use for creating big boob or muscle comics at that point, right?  Wrong

Point of View

First off, there's a big challenge in trying to create a camera angle that shows both the magnificence of a fifty foot tall woman with wrecking ball sized boobs AND simultaneously show the tiny man she's interacting with.

This is something that's unique to giantess work and that I hadn't really anticipated or thought through.  If you focus a lot on the giantess from a very wide pulled back camera angle, you see her, but the tiny man is kind of a non descript little stick figure from that distance.

And if part of the fantasy is having readers project themselves into the shoes of the little man, its kind of hard to do when you can barely see him!  Alternatively, if you zoom in with a POV shot on the little man, you get to see him, but now you're only seeing the giantess' foot, or her hand.  Or maybe her tits.

So I had to get used to (and still am getting used to) the placement of cameras in such a way that you come up with an engaging shot that manages to capture the entire majestly of the giantess and yet doesn't obscure her little plaything.  I alternate angles sometimes, but mostly I focus on the giantess with pulled back shots

It would be interesting to hear if people like that or not.

Sex

When doing sex scenes involving normal sized women - even women with gigantic tits or muscles, its fairly straightforward to be able to move the virtual models into position.

When doing a sex scene between a big boobed fifty foot tall woman and a normal sized man... that's definitely another story!

I found quickly that I was struggling to figure out how to do this.  A normal sized cock pushed into a super gigantic pussy?  That didn't look plausible.  Or at least when I tried setting it up it didn't.  So what to do?

Blow jobs.  That seemed like it would be possible for a giantess. Like sucking on a straw.  Tit fucking.  Kind of possible.  Using a man as a human dildo.  Depending on the size of the giantess, definitely possible.  And a good technique for a dominant or cruel giantess to employ against little men.

So I played around with these things.  And even tried the normal man cock in the giant pussy type scenes too.

But suffice to say, setting these scenes up is not at all like setting up sex scenes with normal sized girls and is something I still am trying to master...

A GIANTESS FETISH OF MY VERY OWN

Initially I wasn't really much into the giantess aspect of things when creating material for begiantess .  I mean I loved big boobs.  And the thought of being a man between two massive tits on a giantess - sure that had some appeal.  But the intrinsic giantessishness of the whole thing - that really didn't do a whole lot for me

Over time though, I realized that there is one aspect of giantesses which does resonate with my taste in other fantasies.  I do enjoy dominant, powerful woman who can use their bodies to dominate and control any man.  I enjoy that with big boobed women who use their tits either to hypnotize and allure, or as actual bludgeoning instruments.  I enjoy it with women who have huge muscles, who can use them to physically overpower any man.  And I came to realize I enjoyed this in giantesses too.  Their ability to use their huge size to toy with little men who couldn't possibly hope to match their superior physical power.

I try to mix things up a bit and do some gentle giantess stories as well as dominant ones.  But its the dominant ones that really resonate with me personally and I've kind of gravitated toward doing those lately more than the gentle giantess comics

THANKS FOR NOTHING, VEROTEL

So as time went on, and I was creating giantess material, I thought that the decision to have a website apart from dianathevalkyrie.com for both hosting and billing had been a good one. And then I was given a rude surprise in April 2012 while on vacation back east

While on vacation, I happened to check my email.  And found this charming note waiting for me there :

Dear merchant,

You have been a beloved Verotel merchant for the last couple of years and we thank you for that!

However, we want to bring you some news about MasterCard and VISA and their new registration requirements.

These requirements include:

We need to identify you. This means that we need a copy of your identification;
We need to register you with the credit card companies. A total of EUR 500.00 application and registration fee applies for your registration;
We board your account under a new service name: Verotel Basic. This is the new name for smaller accounts like the one you have;
You need to sign a new Verotel agreement that outlines the do's and dont's within the new registration requirements of both MasterCard and VISA.

We have investigated your account and found out that your total revenue per week is less than EUR 100.00.
We can understand that you cannot afford the EUR 500.00 application and registration fee. Therefore we have terminated your account per today, April 19th 2012.

You may decide to pay the EUR 500.00 application and registration fee. For your account that means that we would like to receive this amount up front by wire.  Please do not forget to include your Verotel ID in your wire.

Please refer to the PDF file for the banking details.

If after one year your account is in good standing and has an average volume of more than EUR 100.00 per week we will not charge you for the following year.

If you decide to pay the amount of EUR 500.00 application and registration fee please contact us immediately by email (compliance@verotel.com) and we will re-authorize your account again. Your payment should be available in our bank account by May 1st at the latest.

Please note that all moneys owed will be normally paid according to our terms and conditions.

Please note that the application and registration fee are VISA and MasterCard fees per merchant; not per website.  So if you have websites elsewhere please consider the possibility to add these website(s) to your Verotel Basic portfolio.

We hope to continue to do business with you and are looking forward to your decision.

Kind regards,


Verotel Merchant Services BV
J.W.A. Zuurbie

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Reading that I was in a state of shock.  No grace period. No warning. My account hadn't been in bad standing. I simply hadn't been bringing in a high volume of money.  And therefore on a single day, they pulled the plug.

I was vacationing back east with my family.  Away from my computer.  Wouldn't return to California for a week. And had to deal with this.

THANKS DIANAVALKYRIE

It was at this point that I had the realization that the 50% deal that dianathevalkyrie.com was giving me for strongandstacked.com was a GOOD DEAL

The security of not wondering whether a billing service would dump me was well worth their cut.  And so it was that I went to the dianathevalkyrie people, hat in hand, and asked whether I could migrate BEGiantess.com over to them and away from Verotel and from the 247host.com hosting service

Thankfully, they graciously agreed .  I would caution anyone out there from ever using Verotel.  I still cannot believe how unceremoniously they dumped me and with zero warning or grace period. They simply pulled the plug one day


BEGIANTESS NOW

Right now I'm not giving BEGiantess the level of effort I give strongandstacked.com.  But I want to change that.  The number of subscribers to strongandstacked is a lot more than the number of subscribers to begiantess.com

But its kind of a chicken and egg problem.  If I dont put more effort into BEGiantess, it won't get more subscribers.  So I need to do that.

I'm going to be blogging more about begiantess as well.  This blog has up until now mainly focused on strongandstacked.  But I want to get BEGiantess blogging into the mix as well

Mistress Rhiannon

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More Dynamic Clothing over Sphere Tits

Been playing around more with dynamic clothing stretched over the spherical tits I created for Sindee Spheres.  Seems like its actually working out very well.  And so I'll use this technique in the BE comic I'm working on for the next Strong and Stacked update.

Here are a few more pictures of the tests I've been doing with the sphere tits and the dynamic clothes:

BEGiantess, Spherical Tits over Dynamic Clothing

The weekend is underway and I have begun working on two things.  

BEGiantess Update 
The first thing is an update to BEGiantess.com. I'm working on a new issue in the Big Decisions comic series . The overall storyline for the series involves a timid woman who finds herself becoming more and more dominant and powerful as she changes into a powerful huge boobed giantess.










Dynamic Clothing over Spherical Tits 
The second thing I'm working on is a new BE comic for strongandstacked.com. In preparation for this I'm currently playing around with getting dynamic clothing stretched over the spherical tits that I used recently for Sindee Spheres. It seems to be going ok and looks good so I'm going to use that in the comic - dynamic clothing combined with the Sindee Spheres style spherical tits

Comics Length, Amount of Sex, Hanging Plotlines

BUXOM BRAWLER, DAY JOB, HOW LONG SHOULD A COMIC BE

Buxom Brawler coming in for a landing!

I just finished a comic and posted it as the latest update to strongandstacked.com.  It's the second issue of Buxom Brawler.  Working on it over this past week took longer than I had hoped.  Mainly because of the interference of external things, foremost among them being the demands of my day job.  I'm a software engineer and this week there was just a lot going on at work.  My dream is to be able to quit that job and just focus on my websites and doing some other programming that I would find more fun.  But that's way out on the horizon.

For now I'm trying to carve out more time for working on the websites and I hate when my day job gets in the way of that.  At any rate, I was using my quadcore to create Buxom Brawler Issue 2 and I went ahead and tried out a simple scene to use for full fledged raytracer rendering rather than a flat background or the backdrop prop I'd mentioned in some previous posts.  My hexacore would be able to do this no problem, but the quadcore kind of struggled with it.  Given everything that was going on this week, I managed to output about 10 images per day.  My method was to have the quadcore running and then go through this process:

1) Set up a pose and camera angles (typically takes maybe two minutes or so)
2) Click button to start rendering using raytracing (typically takes about four minutes to complete)
3) While quadcore is grinding away raytracing, switch to hexacore and do some work for my day job
4) After four minutes, go back to step 1.  So the whole sequence takes roughly six minutes to create one image

Now mind you, I'm not sitting at my day job in the office cranking out pictures of big boob muscle women :)  But I usually don't leave for work until fairly late in the morning to avoid traffic, and so I work from home a bit until around 10am. During that time is when I'd be able to do the above sequence over and over.  From about 7 am to 10 am.  Given that I also have to eat breakfast, shower etc let's say I get about 2 hours with the above sequence to create content.  That means I'm creating an image every six minutes for two hours, so 20 images every two hours.  But I forgot to add that there is an occasional step 2b with the above work which is : Daz Studio crashes with out of memory exception every so often.  So let's say really I create 15 images every two hours.  And with all the work for my day job last week, that's about all I was able to do.

Ginger Guns. To Be Continued. Hopefully.

The format of the comics I create is that they have two images per page.  I have tried to shoot for creating comics that are 20 pages in length, and it would be interesting to hear from people whether that size seems about right for an update.  It means that at the pace described above, it takes me roughly 3 days to create a single 20 page comic.  Now actually, that's just cranking out frames.  There's another piece to this, which is initial scene set up.  So that might take a day.  So let's say 4 days for a single 20 page comic.  That is a fair chunk of time.  And, as described in previous posts, I am working on speeding things up by starting to use my hexacore and some other things.  So maybe I can get things down to 3 days per comic

Does 20 pages seem like the right length for a comic?  I could create shorter comics and have more frequent updates to the website.  Is that a trade off that people think is worth doing?

HANGING THREADS IN MY COMICS, HOW MUCH SEX SHOULD THERE BE

When I'm working on a comic, there comes a point where I start to feel the time pressure of not having updated the websites in a while.  And what often happens is that I'm getting close to the 20 pages mark for a comic, and realize that ok I need to get something up on the site. That moment doesn't always correspond to a nice stopping point for the plot of the comic.  And so there are many times where I get to page and then hastily try and drag the plot to some sort of either cliffhanger or stopping point of some type and slap on the bottom of the page "To Be Continued..."

Another To Be Continued That's In Limbo

The problem is, sometimes, many times actually, I don't continue.  When I start working on the next comic for the site, I switch over to something brand new or else I pick up a thread of a comic series from a long time back that I hadn't worked on for a while.  The result of this is that I have a whole lot of "To Be Continued..." state comics on the site.

So one thing I wonder is whether people would rather that I try to tie up those story lines instead of cranking out new characters and new comics.  There are some series that did get a healthy number of issues.  Miss Titz.  Ms. Muscles.  But there are plenty of other comics where I wrote one or maybe two issues, never really brought the story line to a conclusion, and left them hanging in limbo.

When working on a comic, my rough thinking is something like this.  If the comic is an issue number one, it usually starts with a woman who is not yet extraordinary in her boob/muscle size.  I don't want to have too many pages go by in the comic before she starts to get bigger, only because I think people don't get fired up looking at skinny flat women for too long in the comic.  The name of the site is "Strong and Stacked" after all :)  (Or for Begiantess, I don't want too much of the comic go by before giantess growth starts happening).  Once the growth starts, and she gets bigger boobs and possibly muscles, I try to steer the comic toward a point where sex can happen.  My websites are supposed to be sexy sites after all.  I don't always get to that point before I hit page 20.

Which actually brings me to another question I have.  How much sex do people want in the comics?  Is growth the big thing and actual sex in the comics is a nice to have but can be infrequent?  Do people want a lot more sex?  Sometimes I get to the sex portion at a point well before page 20, and then there's a lot of sex.  Sometimes I don't and there's only a bit of sex. Other times there is no sex at all in the comic if I don't get to it before page 20 hits.

So I do wonder about these things.  Should I spend some time going back and writing sequel comic issues to try and tie up and resolve hanging plot threads in old comics rather than creating new characters and new story lines?  Should I try to get more sex in the comics than I have now?

WHAT IM DOING THIS WEEKEND

It's Friday and today I actually have a day off from work.  So I'm planning to kick off my early starting weekend with these goals for stuff:

1. BEGiantess Update.  I need to do an update for begiantess.com.  It's been too long
2. Animations!  I am going to enlist the use of my hexacore in this.  It's been wayyyyyyy too long since I've posted animations so I am going to try to do some of those this weekend
3. My Final Commission.  I mentioned before that I'm not going to do commissions any more. But I have one in the pipeline - the super sized tits one. And I need to do that.  I may be able to combine this with number 2 above, because it is an animation.

Ok enough blogging.  Time to start working on this stuff.  I may blog a bit during the weekend too. That's all for now