Early 2025 Updates and Releases

Hey folks, welcome back to another monthly quarterly roundup :'3

Things have been a bit hectic in our life again, but we did manage to get some stuff done at least. That said, some of that chaos has put us in a bad spot, and we want to discuss that, too.

The good stuff: updates and releases

VTS Deck

We finally released our Vtube Studio tool, VTS Deck! It's made to handle hotkeys in VTS, allowing you to make visual buttons to click when you want to run a hotkey instead of trying to figure out keyboard shortcuts for all of them. It's free, and it's made for folks who don't have access to a proper stream deck. Check it out here: github

Website code

The current version of our website code was made public this quarter! If you're interested, you can take a look at it here

Various streaming things

We also worked on some streaming-related stuff, like adding channel points rewards and various art. We're still on hiatus, but we're hoping to be able to stream again eventually ^^;

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The bad stuff: finances, health, and moving out

Everything below this is negative and talks about our financial situation, mental & physical health, and other circumstances going on in our life. If you're only here to read about our projects, then we totally understand, and you don't have to read what's below. We're just putting this here for transparency; please don't feel pressured to help. In the future we'll most likely be using a disclaimer similar to this to discuss negative things, just to be safe.

Moving out

This is going to be sudden news for a lot of people reading this, but we finally have to move out of the home we've been in for the past five years. Our partner and us have decided that we need to separate to continue growing in ways we need to, and since her name is on the lease, we have to find somewhere else to go. We have a hard deadline of the end of the year to find a place that's healthy for us to stay in, otherwise we'll have no choice but to move back in to a house that is an active detriment to our mental and physical health back in our home state.

We don't really know what we're going to do or where we're moving to, but before we can start to think about that, we have to have a fairly stable income to guarantee we can stay at whatever place we get and manage bills/groceries/etc.

Finances

Goals-wise, we're currently looking to receive at least $2,000 USD per month in order to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and other necessities. In all honesty, we have no idea how much everything will cost when it comes to rent, utilities, and so on, but we're hoping that $2k will be a good starting budget at the very least. This will probably change as we go forward in the case of unexpected expenses.

Income sources

Jumping off from that, we've been trying to figure out how to reach our goals in a way that's healthy and safe for us. Working a traditional job takes a massive toll on our mental and physical health- working remotely would help, but getting into remote roles is a nightmare and a wild goose chase between all the scams and hoops you have to jump through.

Right now, we're looking at opening up commissions and finding creative things that we can use to supplement our income. We're not entirely sure what we're doing yet, but we're potentially opening up PNGtuber+ and/or portrait commissions. We didn't want to mention this in the more positive section because it's still up in the air, and because it's still something that will most likely take a toll on us, not to mention its connection to everything we've mentioned so far.

Physical and mental health

To be completely honest, we haven't been doing great for a while now. This quarter wasn't nearly as productive as we were planning it to be, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that our depression, burnout, and fatigue issues have been beating us into the dirt lately- and now we have a breakup and moving out to deal with.

We've been seeing our doctors fairly regularly, we're on medication to help, and we've been seeing a therapist... but none of these things have fully fixed the problem for us, and all of this has been making it harder for us to think straight, concentrate, and function.

Given everything going on, I'm not sure how active we'll be outside of trying to figure out our financial and health issues. We're not really sure what we're going to do right now, but we're trying our best to get through it.

In general though, we're just really not doing okay. It feels like we're just drowning in everything. But the only way out is to keep swimming, so I suppose that's what we'll do.

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All that said, thank you so, so much to everyone that has helped us through trying times like this in the past, and everyone that continues to support us today. We genuinely do appreciate it, and we wouldn't be where we are without the help we've received from everyone

If you aren't supporting us yet but would like to, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, donating on Ko-Fi, or even just sharing our posts and projects around. Every little bit helps us to keep making the things we love, and it genuinely means the world to us.

We hope everybody has a good day

- Kam