Switching Gears - 2025 Q2 Review

Hey folks! It's that time again, and we're here to bring y'all some important news and updates ^^

Updates and Releases

Components v2

Sheep, Form Fox, and Ticket Golem all got a bit of a face lift this quarter: they're now fully using Discord's new Components V2 implementation.

For most commands, the changes shouldn't be too noticeable, but this update allows us to take full control over what our bots' embeds look like. This means we can put buttons, select menus, and more than just a couple images inside them- something that previously was impossible. Hopefully the new coat of paint looks nice!

Form Fox Actions Update

Form Fox received a major feature update this quarter, adding in Actions! Admins can use these to give their forms some extra functions: send a message when a form is accepted, open or close a thread, add roles to users, and do plenty of other useful mod tasks all centered around form-based events.

You can check out the available actions by using /actions add!

Transparency

As per the usual lately, we wanted to leave a note here about what's been going on for us lately.

Long story short: we're not doing okay, and we're not really sure what to do about it. We're still struggling with our living situation and in need of a job or other income order for us to get out of here. Like before, we're just not really sure what to do or where to go from here, and at this point we have to change something.

Housing

We're currently still in the house that we've lived in for the past 5 years, but with recent circumstances, it's been very difficult for us to stay here. If we haven't mentioned it already: we broke up with the partner we've been living with the whole time, and it's taken a massive toll on us. We've been processing a lot of trauma and negative feelings centered on this relationship, and in a lot of ways we feel used up, thrown away, and replaced. It's hurt us to the point where we're having regular breakdowns over the situation. It's just been so, so much to deal with.

We have some places in mind that we can move to, but we're still in need of a steady income to make that happen. Speaking of which:

Finances

We're still jobless and without any stream of income other than the ~$50 USD we have from Patreon. We've opened a GoFundMe, but have so far gotten less than $100 in donations. We've applied to over 100 jobs in the past few months, and we've gotten nothing yet- except for a single lead that seemed to fast-track us through the interview process, only to then end up ghosting us.

The application process has just contributed to our breakdowns at this point. We don't know how to improve, and we don't know if we even need to in the first place. We know that the job market is in a terrible place right now, and we just don't know what we can do about that except keep trying.

Health

All in all, when it comes to our health, it's bad.

To be completely honest, with the physical front: we're to the point of stress that we regularly feel nauseous; our fatigue hasn't gotten better, and seems to be slowly getting worse; and we've started another chronic pain flare up.

Mentally? I don't even want to get into it really I think it's safe to say that those breakdowns have been very difficult for us and I'd prefer to leave it at that.

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So, what do we do now? At this point, we only really have one thing left in mind:

Switching Gears

We've spent over seven (7) years on coding. We've made bots, apps, tools, APIs, libraries, and websites. We've messed around with games, even. And this has been really fun for us- we love coding, and we have for over half our life at this point!

... But the truth is, it hasn't gotten us anywhere. If anything, the time that we've spent trying to make our coding projects into something that we could get a full-time income from has just made our health worse and taken time away from building other skills. We've sunk far, far more into this than we've gotten in return.

Truthfully, we never wanted to charge people for using our bots or programs or whatever else we've made. Truthfully, we've hated the idea of implementing anything premium from the start. Truthfully, we don't feel comfortable asking for money from people. But because we live in a society(TM), over time we've felt like we needed to do something to get an income from these projects. And it just... hasn't worked. At all.

On top of that, our brain fog and other cognitive issues caused by our fatigue have made it increasingly difficult to keep up with the coding we need or even want to do. We're proud of the work we put in to Form Fox's latest update, but there have been a handful of bugs we've been made aware of that we just aren't capable of fixing right now- we can't focus for long enough or think hard enough to figure out the problem and make a solution. It's been an extremely frustrating ordeal for us.

So, at this point, we need to go back to focusing on other things. We need to switch career focuses and start building other skills so that we can do something else. We have some things in mind, but we aren't sure how well these will work out either. It's scary, and it's frustrating, and we just don't know what will happen. But at this point, something has to change, and we're going to try everything we can to make those changes.

Going Forward

In light of all that, here's our current plan:

Maintenance Mode

All of our bots will be in an effective maintenance mode. Like during our hiatus in the past, we won't be adding new features, and we won't be fixing very many bugs. We'll keep the bots running for as long as we can, which effectively comes down to however much we're making on Patreon (or, if we can get a job).

If, for whatever reason, we stop being able to afford keeping our bots alive, then we'll look for folks who can help us with hosting them. If that doesn't work, then we'll be forced to shut them down- but they'll always be available for self-hosting from our Github.

Premium and the Dashboard

We will be removing all previously implemented premium limits. This means you'll once again have unlimited saved colors for Sheep and unlimited forms per server with Fox. We no longer feel comfortable keeping premium up at this point.

For some extra statistics:

• No one subscribed to Form Fox's premium.
• One person subscribed to Sheep's premium.
• We made less than $30 in the handful of months that our one subscriber was active.
• We cannot receive that money from Discord because it doesn't meet the minimum payout requirement.

There's no point in leaving it in, so we're planning to remove it when we get the chance. This should be done soon!

As for the dashboard: we do want to make that happen someday, but for now it just isn't in the cards. It's a pretty massive undertaking that requires a ton of work: we have to set up secure APIs for each bot, create interfaces for managing each bot's features and configs, and make sure that everything runs smoothly. We've planned out a lot of it, and we've started the work, but we don't have the bandwidth to keep working on it at the moment.

Art, Streaming, and Content

Art is something that's been part of us since long before we got into coding, and it's still an incredibly important outlet for our thoughts and emotions. At the very least, we want to continue making art, even if it's just an occasional vent piece or headmate portrait.

We can't make promises, but we want to potentially work on streaming again as well. We've been wanting to stream for a while, but with our fatigue getting to the point it's at, we've been finding it harder and harder to put the energy we need together for a stream. Plus we've had a host change, so we're in need of making ourselves a new Vtubing avatar (which is a work in progress, albeit slow-going right now).

For other types of content, expect to see more writing from us. Writing is another art form that we've had with us for a big chunk of our life, and we've always been told that we're good at it- so, we're planning to put that to the test and see if it can get us anywhere.

In the process of looking for careers, we've also discovered instructional design, which is something that we've always had a big interest in but never had the terms for. We were always a mentor to our peers as a teen, and we even became an official mentor on our robotics team; as an adult, we've created a handful of resources intended to teach people about plurality and give them some direction to do more research. We love teaching others and sharing the knowledge we have to the best of our ability, and that's what this would give us the opportunity to do.

To be clear: no, we're not going to start selling courses to people. We do need to build a portfolio, but we plan to release anything done for that portfolio for free (or under a name your own price label). If we do find a career in instructional design, it'll be through helping others to create courses or building educational material for a company. We're not a guru and we never intend to become one, trust me

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That's just about everything we have to bring up for now methinks. As always, if you like what we do and want to support us, please consider becoming a patron, buying us a coffee, or chucking a few bucks at our GFM campaign. Every little bit helps, and we're saving every cent we get until we can move out of here

We hope everyone has a safe and pleasant July!

- Dusk