I live! Lol, apologies for the long delays. It's been a busy year since my last Milker update in March?!
Well, shit. So what had happened was, since my end goal is to build up a Patreon in the hopes of doing this Lewd VR dev thing full time. I figured that by creating an app that supports those inexpensive aliexpress toys for the app known as LoveSpouse would allow me to quickly gain access to an existing audience... Jury is still out, but...
Mistake #1: Since my last updated I've released BuzzyBody an Android Media Player that let's you use those cheap toys with FunScripts (which are basically files of haptic instructions to sync more expensive toys with videos and audio). I started developing it in April, released it in October. I didn't bother y'all with it because it's not commie themed (besides a communist bee as its icon) and I wasn't sure anyone was interested. I released it on a couple of websites and made a post on the LoveSpouse subreddit. This kinda bombed. Whether it's the app's fault or not, I'll never know because...
Mistake #2: I created my reddit ComradeOohAah account 4 days ago last year, and then did nothing with it! Much like here on hexbear, I try to keep my shitposting separate from work stuff. This meant that when it was time for me to post for my app, I had no karma and my posts were immediately relegated to the void. I got very little activity. And what little comments I did get, I couldn't respond to right away because I had to go and build up Karma in other subreddits.
So, since I'm afraid of getting my account banned for spamming, I take the L and decide to add a new feature that would give me a reason to post.
This week I released v0.2 of BuzzyBody, it now can act as a relay between ButtPlug.io's Intiface Control Software and the LoveSpouse toys. This means all those folks out there with cheapo aliexpress toys can now use their toys with all sorts of PC lewd stuff. As far as ButtPlug is concerned, all those toys are now emulated as a Lovense device. Not as many features, but like 20% of the price. This turned out reasonably well. I haven't gotten any additional Patrons off of it (I got one while posting this!), but I got about 26 downloads in the past 3 days. Putting me now at 86.
And qdot, the guy who created ButtPlug.io, messaged me on reddit and gave me props for using the Device Emulation feature! I was very stoked.
However.
Mistake #3: I still have not really built up the ComradeOohAah reddit account, so when I tried to post in the NSFW Oculus subreddit, I got very little traction. 33% upvoted, 0 comments. Maybe because I'm a low karma account, maybe because I'm competing against actual porn sites, idk. Just didn't hit. Admittedly, it's not a VR app, but there are enough buttplug.io vr apps out there that they would benefit from having a cheap toy. Their loss, really.
So my next steps for BuzzyBody is to create a VR version. A very generous friend gifted me some bHaptic TactGloves for my birthday and I'm going to attempt to figure out a way to create a DepthMap from adult 3d 180 videos so that when people are watching these videos they can reach out and "touch" the performers. I'm reasonably optimistic about being able to do that, but who knows the timeline. The second thing I want to do with the VR version is create reactive environments that sync to the user's music and their toy so that the sensations of pleasure in your body have room to build and expand outside your body and into the virtual world. With me, there's a lot of opportunity with this feature to play around with synesthesia and Homuncular Flexibilty, which is kinda my passion. I really want to explore and push past the limits of how people experience pleasure by using technology to expand the mind's boundaries of the body. Once you do that, it opens a lot of interesting doors.
So, that's kind of my postmortem on BuzzyBody, the app you didn't know exists. Oh! And it made me $2 on itch.io. I'm a capitalist now. Sorry, not sorry.
Another, not really a mistake, but it was a hurdle in that I wasn't able to really get any social media up and going until this month. Again, I didn't want to connect the lewd stuff to my personal accounts and risk losing access to all my friends I barely see irl. That meant getting a new phone number, which meant spending money I couldn't spare, etc. I think doing social media and building a brand is going to be the way forward in the future. I'd prefer not to have to market myself like that, but I suspect reddit is gonna be a dead end which means building a presence on tiktok and insta and bluesky and whatever. We'll see. (Insert rant here on how we live in a post-scarcity world with post-scarcity type jobs, but its a capitalist dystopia)
SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE COMRADE XI'S SPECIAL PROJECT?
Well, for one thing, I've been calling it Fresh Bulls Wanted.
Here's my last video from March [nsfw]
And I'm getting ready to start up on it again. Since that video / before I started on BuzzyBody I had added a Head Shake/Nod Recognition ability, rearranged the start menu components into a Consensual On-boarding, and the start of a dialogue playback system for what I have now decided is going to be a good cop, bad cop dynamic for the Comrades in Charge. I'm not going to get to deep into details but I think there's gonna be a CCP General as the judging overseer, and then a friendly, unseen Milker Controller that whispers in your ear.
Big Hurdle #1: This is going to require dialogue, and I think that's what caused me to stall and divert to BuzzyBody. I was talking with a friend of mine recently and I think the major speedbump was my concern of just how much of myself am I willing put out there, you know? It's one thing to do things in private, it's one thing to make something like this with generic dialogue, but if I'm gonna make this something people can resonate with I probably need to put it all on the table, and for some reason that's far more intimidating than openly telling people I'm buying adult toys and building stuff like this in the first place. IDK why. Am I afraid of being judged, rejected. Is it an intimacy thing, idk. Conquering that is the big hurdle.
Big Hurdle #2: I need to learn video editing. I've got a bunch of ideas for making some social media reels and things for both apps, but I know F all about video editing software. So I've gotta sit down with Davinci Resolve or Canva or whatever and learn my butt off.
So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at and how my year went. I do have a Patreon now, and a single (2!) Patron(s)! I'm trying to post far more stuff over on there, if anyone is interested. But I'll try to keep y'all updated so that when Xi decides it's time to put all these gooners in the virtual milking gulag you won't be surprised.
https://patreon.com/ComradeOohAah
http://comradeoohaah.com/
Pinging people who have previously expressed interest. Please let me know if you'd like to be included or removed from the list in the future.