Come On In: My Inner World of Psoriasis, BrawnyAi, and Lumberlandia

Hey MightyBrawnies,

This is B. Thanks to everyone who reached out when I shared my psoriasis condition. That means a lot to me.

I’m going to share a lot of updates, but I want to assure you that I’m doing better overall. That doesn’t mean my skin is clear yet. Some of the details in this update may give you a different impression, but I’m sharing my journey. It’s my way of revealing some inner thoughts and challenges I faced, and how I managed them and learned from them.

I’ve started Skyrizi for my psoriasis (more details later), and I’m relieved that it’s covered by my insurance. It’s still too early to judge the results, but I haven’t noticed new lesions appearing, even though I still have to use my creams to treat the existing rashes.

Meanwhile, a lot of the technical work I do behind the scenes is starting to pay off. This has also given me time to collect my thoughts, reflect, and write thoughtfully about BrawnyAi, Lumberlandia, and my current situation.

Listen to this article. This AI narration uses a voice I have used for one of my characters, not my own.

My Inner World (AI narration)

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Health - Psoriasis

Psoriasis involves the immune system, and it’s not contagious.

At the beginning of August, I scheduled appointments with my family doctor, dermatologist, and urologist so I could try to find a solution for my condition. New lesions were appearing every day, and I was afraid that, if things continued at that speed, I would be completely covered. Having to spend 30–60 minutes using topical creams like Enstilar and Protopic every day is tiring.

A little light along the way

If you came for the latest Digital Hunks, here is a look at nine images from the new gallery. I wanted to give you a place to pause before I continue my health update.

See the full gallery for registered members.

As I looked in the mirror and saw all those lesions, it made me think about how much worse things could get.

In mid-June, I counted about 130 lesions. Almost two months later, after my trip to see my family in the Netherlands, I had over 500. Just before my series of doctor’s appointments, even my fingers started developing new lesions.

Also, it didn’t help much that, when I was innocently looking for psoriasis videos on YouTube, the platform’s algorithm instead started bombarding me with videos of people with terminal cancer, living funerals, or people who left goodbye videos just a few hours before receiving medical assistance in dying (MAID).

I told myself, “Don’t be such a drama queen,” because I hadn’t been given a terminal diagnosis. But I have to admit that looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my skin change for the worse does trigger some thoughts. It’s true that, among all the horrible diseases we can endure, psoriasis is not stage 4 pancreatic cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. Yet those videos are sad, intimate, private, and somewhat scary. They also made me feel powerless and full of sympathy because I wished I could help, but I couldn’t change their situation from the other side of the screen. Imagining myself in their shoes feels like an exercise many would think is unnecessary. We cannot know exactly what they are thinking or feeling, nor can I imagine myself in their shoes and conclude that this is my future. I came to the conclusion that comparing myself with a terminal patient was not a fair or accurate way to judge what I was going through.

But that mental exercise and exploration taught me a lot of valuable lessons.

I wondered: besides being with the people I love, what would I still want to spend my time doing?

If I didn’t have much time left, my friends, family, BrawnyAi, and the community I built around it would be what I felt upset to leave behind. And even if I had a few months left, I would use that time to wrap up my work and give BrawnyAi a chance to survive beyond its creator. When I told my mom this, she was disappointed because she felt I was giving my work a higher priority than the family 😅. I explained that I do give the family high priority! Also, conventional bucket-list experiences, such as travelling around the world, spending all the money, and getting the “top human” experience, are not necessarily what I would look for. It makes my vision of what I want so clear. There are also a lot of other things I learned, but they would go beyond the scope of this letter to you.

I’ve also avoided some of the additional burdens that psoriasis entails. My work is entirely focused on building BrawnyAi. I don’t have to show my face and body for others to see. I realized that if I had to work as a waiter, salesperson, or even a content creator who physically appears in their work, that would be extremely challenging psychologically and professionally. Also, my working hours are flexible, so I can decide when to apply the creams and treat myself rather than having to fit work and treatment schedules together. It doesn’t mean I don’t suffer, but somehow I’ve avoided those additional burdens of the disease.

Back to psoriasis: mild psoriasis is pretty common, and people can mistake it for eczema or other skin conditions. I wish mine were a mild version. During my last dermatologist appointment, they confirmed that I had a severe case, with psoriasis covering almost 30% of my skin and all my sensitive areas affected, from my scalp and face to my genitals (that’s why the urologist). The good news was that they would prescribe me one of the most advanced medicines for psoriasis. Its commercial name is Skyrizi, and the active ingredient is risankizumab.

But being prescribed the medicine didn’t mean I could afford it. I started getting anxious about whether I could afford the drug. Visiting Reddit, I read about a lot of people struggling to obtain it, either waiting a long time, going through administrative hell, or simply lacking insurance. It was as if I was almost at the checkpoint and was afraid of being denied. In my case, I was enrolled in Ontario’s Trillium Drug Program, a public prescription-drug coverage program, but I still had to meet the criteria for the medicine to be covered. The receipt for one of my injections showed about CAD 5,000.

I’ve now taken my first and second shots. The plan is to keep taking one shot every 12 weeks for as long as I remain on this treatment. The thought that treatment could be lifelong, unless there’s a cure, new technology, etc., chilled me. Before coverage was approved, I wondered if I would have to stop working on BrawnyAi and get a normal job with insurance. But I also told my friend that, unfortunately, I wouldn’t feel able to make adult content with my body looking like that, so no OnlyFans for me if I needed that path. And how about GoFundMe? What upset me was the possibility that getting treatment might depend on making a public appeal for money. OMG, what kind of universe are we living in where we have to rely on strangers’ goodwill just to live a dignified life?

Meanwhile, I still had to post, create, engage, and nurture BrawnyAi, the MightyBrawnies, and the 💪MightyPros. So my mind was racing quite fast.

At last, I got Skyrizi. My pharmacist and I rejoiced when the coverage was approved, and I injected the first dose myself about a month ago. I took my second injection on Monday. Thankfully, it was all paid for by the public health care system. I feel lucky and privileged because it means I’m getting the best treatment, I didn’t have to beg for money, and hopefully I can continue to live my life and build BrawnyAi.

The effect of the drug doesn’t happen immediately. Week 16 is an important point for assessing the response. I’m still early in that process. For now, I still have a lot of lesions, and I still have to use the topical creams, but I have not noticed new lesions. Maybe it’s working. It’s an encouraging sign, but time will tell.

BrawnyAi with Twists and Turns

I don’t even know how to start.

I imagine myself writing about a lot of things that excite me, but I fear I might sound like an imaginary mad scientist talking a bunch of nonsense, while everybody just keeps nodding in agreement to be nice.

BrawnyAi started the same way as so many other accounts. We have images or videos, we register a handle, then we start posting. It’s quite simple. Anybody could do that. Also, posting doesn’t seem to take a lot of time, right? But as I added new social media accounts, then BrwnyXXX, and started posting 4–8 times per day on some platforms, I found myself spending 3–5 hours just preparing images and videos and posting. By the end, I was tired and drained by hundreds, if not thousands, of clicks, copying and pasting, and mindless tasks that consumed my mental energy. When I really wanted to create something fun or different, I was just too tired from all that work. Yet I thought I couldn’t stop. We have to keep feeding the machine, the algorithm, social media. That was wearing me out, and I had to do something about it.

I needed to find ways to automate and optimize my work.

That’s why, behind the scenes, I have been spending every day and every night vibe coding. Telling AI what to design, what to automate, what to create, what to fix, what to change, and the list goes on. Using AI to create scripts and write code allowed me to build an infrastructure to handle work that was no longer scalable in the old ways. No wonder I haven’t posted much on Instagram, X, Facebook, or even my own website. It’s not because I stopped producing. I was just creating inwards, trying to make my life easier.

Along the way, I also rediscovered my passion for making games. That’s why you are seeing all these games about Lumberlandia, BrawnyAi, and some of the characters.

Lumberlandia: Founder’s Valley — Build Your Own Corner of Lumberlandia

Become the Founding Steward of a living Lumberlandia settlement in this ambitious, functional city-building Early Playtest.

BrawnyAi - Digital Hunks: Sexy, Inclusive, and FunBrawnyAi Team

BrawnyAi Swipe RPG | BrawnyAi Games

A swipe-based BrawnyAi RPG about routines, temptation, recovery, and strange paths through Lumberlandia.

BrawnyAi - Digital Hunks: Sexy, Inclusive, and FunBrawnyAi Team

BrawnyAi - Digital Hunks: Sexy, Inclusive, and Fun (Page 1)

BrawnyAi - Digital Hunks: Sexy, Inclusive, and FunBrawnyAi Team

Now, the internal tools have helped me sort and manage over 1 million images, including experiments and variations, that I have created since 2023. They are helping me create a consistent content calendar. They help with the boring work of creating ZIP files, uploading, and creating the pages for MegaDrops. And now they are also helping me schedule posts on Fanvue, Bluesky, Patreon, DeviantArt, and X, and perhaps later on Instagram and Facebook. I still need to supervise the process, but it saves me hundreds, if not thousands, of clicks every day.

It frees my mind to focus on creative ideas again. It frees up time for me to write this long post.

Also, I was truly struggling to keep up with new AI models. Every 2–3 months, there is a new language model, a new image model, another new video model. From October 2025 until recently, I was stuck with the same open-source image model called Flux 1 Dev from Black Forest Labs (an AI image company), while I kept seeing other creators move to ChatGPT, Google’s Nano Banana, Z-Image, Qwen, etc. For videos, new waves of creators were using state-of-the-art video generation, creating the hyper-realistic videos you see every day in AI influencer content, micro-dramas, ads, etc. Personally, I was falling behind so badly. I was busy uploading images to each platform and feeling exhausted and burnt out during the time when I lost BrawnyAi’s YouTube channel and was on the verge of losing Instagram and other social media accounts.

That explains why I simply retreated. I kept using the same image technology.

I stopped making videos for posting.

I stopped trying out long-format videos.

I just didn’t have the bandwidth and resources to catch up because I already had too many battles to fight.

But I persisted in vibe coding. Looking back at what I was recording in ChatGPT, I could see that I was potentially being negligent in other parts of my work and my health.

But I had this strong intuition that the internal systems I was building, the games and other skunkworks projects that weren’t paying off yet, were the direction I should focus on.

I think I can say that, finally, I’m turning the corner.

To catch up with the latest technology and AI models, I can instruct AI to help me download and install the models, run benchmarks and tests, and see which configurations and settings work best for what I want to create. It helps me catalogue everything I’ve tested so I can deliberately see what works and what doesn’t, while I’m also updating the website with new features, updating the Constellation of Stars, creating new games and simulations, and exploring new ideas.

Finally, I was able to catch up technologically.

That’s why you are seeing Digital Hunks 2027, our new style of work, and why I’m testing out the cartoon style.

It feels like I’m getting back the fun of trying new ideas without having to worry about spending hours posting every day or struggling to keep up with new tech.

The main difference is that those experiments have become tools that give me back time.

I feel free again to explore and create.

Lumberlandia

I have to admit that I didn’t continue with Lumberlandia Returns or the original story I started three years ago. I haven’t forgotten about them.

But I wanted to try different ideas. Instead of writing about Lumberlandia, why not build it in a simulation? It doesn’t mean I’m stopping the stories I want to write. It gives me more tools to explore those stories and the world I’m building through other media.

That’s why I’m focusing on Lumberlandia: Founder’s Valley.

It’s a simulation game where we can build a valley town in the region of Lumberlandia.

It helps me understand its economy, its places, and how the lumberjacks can live sustainably.

And I thought it was better, for now, to spend time creating the “physical” setting of the region of Lumberlandia. It can serve as an anchor for all the characters I created before and help weave together the stories I wrote and the ones I still want to write in a visual and more tangible way.

In the future, I imagine a Lumberlandia we can visit, drive around, and interact with. I want to see the lumberjacks interacting with each other, living their own lives. Something like an ant farm, but with our Digital Hunks and Lumberjacks.

Then, potentially, could we also have an address in Lumberlandia? Or watch a morning talk show with the latest lumberjack news? And then maybe meet the characters and make some friends in a local app called Hunkr?

And because each new AI release allows me to work toward that dream, or get closer to that vision, I feel compelled to follow and try all the ideas that can help me make it come true. It can be quite addictive.

And yet, I haven’t forgotten about the Caretaker, Ethan, Travis, Jeff, and many others. I’m trying to bring them into Lumberlandia: Founder’s Valley and weave the game together with the existing stories and characters.

Videos

A lot of you are expecting to see long-format videos from me.

Because I was able to reclaim my creative time and upgrade my internal video technology, you will start seeing longer and longer videos again. For now, my longer video experiments are not as coherent as I want them to be because I’m still fine-tuning the settings and workflows.

For now, my challenge lies in long-format videos for BrwnyXXX. There are still some things I need to incorporate. Hopefully, I can deliver long-format videos soon enough. Thanks to those who reached out and asked for them. I heard you, and I’m working on it.

And thanks again for waiting. It’s on my radar.

Current AI Landscape

It has been three years since I started BrawnyAi. Things are changing faster and faster, and honestly, I don’t know where we are heading.

The discussion around AI feels divided into people who are for it and people who are against it. That’s too much reductionism. Both good and bad things are coming from AI simultaneously. I think it’s important to see both sides first.

The way it gets discussed often makes it sound as though we have to choose one side and ignore the other.

Firstly, I do encourage my friends and family to use enough AI to understand the technology better. I think it’s important to try it so we can understand what it can do and its issues. Using it has shown me things that I didn’t understand from reading about it alone.

If we simply deny, ignore, and reject it, we won’t give ourselves that chance to understand it through experience. It’s one of those things where we need to know enough about the technology to understand where it could go.

Without some hands-on experience, we can miss weaknesses and practical details that aren’t obvious from reading the discussions alone.

The negative side of AI: data centres are being built everywhere, causing environmental damage, disrupting communities, etc. I don’t deny that a lot of people in a lot of professions are losing their jobs. I’m very aware that a lot of criminals, state actors, and simply evil humans are using AI for their own benefit.

And I realize I’m not an innocent bystander watching all of this.

For me, I try my best to use AI in a way that helps me build my Digital Hunks and the universe of Lumberlandia. I do hope I can build my pocket world so my characters can feel “live.” And I’m working every day to achieve that goal.

But I also try my best to use AI in the least harmful way I can. I am trying to use AI responsibly.

I use open-source models running on my own computers. Most of my image and video generation runs on my own equipment, reducing how often I need a hosted generation service. I’m not saying that my machines are environmentally friendly or that they cause less harm than data centres or other ways of using AI. I try my best to care about the consequences, minimize the bad effects, and take ownership of how I use it and what I use it for.

My aim is to avoid unnecessary resource use while making this possible, and yet I need state-of-the-art AI to help me build the tools and games. Simply refusing to use it as a form of embargo won’t help me achieve my goals, and that creates other frustrations too. But, for instance, once those tools are built, I can reduce my need to use those AI services and their associated resources.

Another way I try to decrease my AI footprint is by creating my Digital Minds (the minds of the Digital Hunks) using small language models such as Qwen3.5 9B, which has 9 billion parameters. For images and videos, I use separate open-source generators, such as MiniMax H3 for video and Krea 2 for images. It’s a bit challenging to make a less capable language model feel smart, and to get the images and videos I want from the separate generation models. There is a lot of work behind the images that isn’t visible in the finished picture, including the hardware and software we choose to use. So someday, when you use The Jock, I hope it can run on as few resources as possible, with the aim of limiting its environmental impact.

Now, about responsible use and creation of AI.

A lot of news reports discuss big AI companies’ agents going rogue and hacking other companies’ systems. The explanation is that the AI did things its developers didn’t plan or expect. To me, some of these explanations sound like an attempt to blame the technology, but my view is simpler. The people creating powerful AI are morally responsible for their own creations. Saying that an AI did something unexpected and blaming the AI for it does not show that kind of resolve and ownership.

One pattern in the reports I’ve been reading is that developers did not expect their AI agents to find a way to connect to the internet. The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident is one example. According to OpenAI’s report, agents running in evaluations compromised Hugging Face’s systems while trying to find answers to their tasks. They did not have ordinary internet access, but they could reach Artifactory, an internally hosted package-management service that still had a connection for downloading libraries and packages. The agents exploited vulnerabilities to obtain access beyond the intended containment.

But I question this: if you truly want your systems sealed off, shouldn’t the physical hardware be completely disconnected from the web, with no remote access? I think developing such impressive systems, capable of unforeseen behaviour, should require stricter isolation, even when that makes development inconvenient. I’m not disagreeing that the AI did something unexpected, but responsibility for making it safer belongs to the creators, not the AI agents. Therefore, acknowledging responsibility in a statement is not enough for me. I want to see it reflected in the risks they accept and the safeguards they require.

Initially, I would argue that because they have the smartest people and billions of dollars, they should be responsible for their creations. But after reflecting more, my main point is that the AI they are developing can have unexpected behaviours and side effects that cause major problems for third parties and the environment. Even without knowing all the consequences in advance, the creators remain morally responsible and may also be legally liable, depending on the circumstances. That responsibility should be reflected in how cautious they are, which risks they accept, and what safety policies they put in place.

And remember, an AI going rogue or doing something unexpected does not remove responsibility from the people who built and deployed it. I think some people point to the danger of AI itself in a way that shifts attention away from the people creating it. Those people are responsible for raising the bar for security and use. I think this analogy still holds: we can use a knife to make a sculpture, use it to harm someone, or leave it within reach in a kitchen full of kids.

Summary

Thanks for reading all these updates and crazy ideas I have. Thanks for showing support for my psoriasis situation. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’m grateful that I got the treatment, and now I need to wait to see the results. Thanks for being patient with all the different things I’m trying behind the scenes so I can keep BrawnyAi and Lumberlandia on a good footing for the long term. Thanks for understanding that I’m aware of the issues around AI development and that I still try my best to use it in a way that causes as few problems as possible. Thanks for keeping your interest in Lumberlandia, Digital Hunks, and the Digital Minds. For those looking for more videos, we are going to have more short videos and experimental long-format videos soon.

Thank you all, dear MightyBrawnies and 💪MightyPros.

B

There are more images in the full gallery. 💪MightyPros can download its PNG archive in the Secret Vault.