Thank you all for 1.1k+ followers, #15 Master Generators and *everything* else + song release!!

I am absolutely amazed by how quickly things took off over the last month or so! No amount of words can truly convey my gratitude... so I'll be respectful of your time and try to use as few words as possible. For 1k followers I had planned to do an "about me" article, and share my story and silly trivia (like why FreijaFoxy is Freija and Foxy even though neither of me are foxes!) but one thing after another happened so fast, and now that milestone got rolled into something much bigger... To stay on point, that is now going to be my "1 year anniversary" article, which is coming right up on the 1st of next month! For now, I'd rather focus on where I am in this moment, and my gratitude for being here 💗

Reaching over 500 followers and getting a ranking in writer's in June felt like I was really getting somewhere. Nine months into starting civit and growing slowly I felt really good about where I was, and resolved to do more and try harder. As June saw my follower count go up by a hundred, and then another, I was around #168 in master generators, and things were changing fast- I saw a lot of longtime creators leaving, new ones shooting to the top, and I thought, this is the time to go for it, if ever. I was already wildly successful by any standard I set for myself- I have truly great friends who like my stuff even if it's just weird experiments, my songs are my real passion and although not wildly popular I love making them. I was ranked in writers because of my song articles and a few lore/stories, and I was having fun doing what I enjoy while also seeing more new people liking what I did. It was great, and I held no illusion of reaching the "top" of anything.

Followers don't equal interaction, that's much harder to get, and I have so many awesome friends who really stand by me that as far as matters, I had already "won", regardless of numbers. Everyone wants to succeed, yes, it's great, but I really felt like I already had succeeded. That's something I gained from this that isn't like a ranking badge that's here today and gone tomorrow if I stop posting. It wasn't about proving anything, or fearing failing anything, it felt like "how high can I ride this good feeling and see where it takes me as long as it's still fun?" In early July I managed to get #100 on master generators, and I was so ecstatic. July 12th I hit #59, and I thought, okay, so I'll try for top 50, that's just crazy, but it gave me a goal to work towards. I was busy learning to use ComfyUI and Krea 2, getting my grunge LoRA ported to Krea 2 for the training contest (I want that participation badge!), making songs, reviewing my friend's LoRAs, figuring out and publishing my first animated badge in my "shop", hit 1k followers and was attempting not to be entirely antisocial while genning images every day and ya' know, remembering to eat and sleep at least sometimes...

I did work hard, but I also got lucky having my first ever image on the front page, networked a lot, relied on longtime and new friends, and kept pushing myself to do better. I reached the top 40, top 30... top 25, that one was like, "okay, maybe there's a chance to do better, but don't plan on it"... And two days ago I got #16. Like, for real! Just to be able to get over the hurdle into the "top 15" yesterday I finished the showcase and released the Krea 2 version of my Gradient Wilds LoRA, so I could enter it in the contest and hopefully the attention on the model showcase would nudge me one rank higher... and it worked! But it also showed me just how hard it is to stay ranked like that- I had to pull an ace out of my sleeve to go up just one more, there's no way I can maintain that kind of output.

Getting on the leaderboard, being added to amazing collections, @mentions from amazing people, releasing new models into the highly visible contest gallery, reviewing other people's models and appearing in their galleries, commenting and tipping, having an image featured... There's a lot that helped me have visibility, but I'll never know exactly why some people decided to click the follow button, or why they chose to react to one image and not another. The wildly different reactions to images in the same posts shows I definitely can't predict what is "popular" or not! All I can say is, enough people clicked buttons enough times that I hit 1k+ followers, just passed 100k reactions, and even reached #15 in master generators. Not just emotionally, but numerically, I am indeed "successful" in this hobby right now, and I owe it to every single moment someone else gave me.

Every night I stayed up into the a.m. hours, saying "just one more image..." or something, it was at times a sacrifice. Pushing harder than was really comfortable. But multiply that moment by a few thousand moments from amazing other people clicking a reaction or more to get here, and I've truly gotten back everything I gave a hundredfold. And it's entirely because literally over a thousand people chose to give me their time that I have any "success" now.

In this moment, I'm crowd-surfing, held up into the glittering lights by over a thousand pairs of hands, and it's... Magical. It's that one perfect moment, when you just stop, and breathe it in, and think "Yeah... This is real." and grab onto a little piece of the feeling to keep on a shelf in your heart forever. Whatever CivitAI decides to do to turn the site on its head next, whatever images I make that are popular or not, whatever my rank is a year from now... This is a perfect moment for me.

Thank you. From the top, sides, and bottom of my heart- thank you all! There's no real prizes, no IRL fortune, fame or status... but in a real world that is sometimes really hard to live in, this was a happy place I found where I could belong, make friends, and just be myself. And right now, I don't just feel welcomed... I feel wanted. I don't think I could, or even need to, explain how deep that feeling goes. You can imagine. Everyone here gave me that. All I have to offer now is my unending gratitude... and a promise to keep sharing my creations and cheering on everyone else's.