Transparency Update

Hey everybody. We've been meaning to post an update about how things are going for a bit now, but honestly it's been hard to really figure out what to say or how to say it without coming off in ways that we don't want

The long and short of it is, we're still struggling financially and we're genuinely not sure what to do, how to fix it, or where to go from here. We have some things we're trying, which I'm planning to go over, but we don't have everything figured out yet. We apologize in advance if this comes across as guilt-tripping or anything like that- part of why it's taken a while to write this up is because we don't want that, but we do want to share how things are going

Anyways, let's get into it:

What we're dealing with

I'll keep things fairly simple here, emphasis is for skimming purposes:

• We're trying to get a job so that we can have an income (we have nothing right now)
• We're physically (and in some ways cognitively) disabled though, which is making this difficult
• We have two months before we can't pay rent and will lose our house
• Our partner can't work because of struggling with extreme self-harmful behavior tied to work as a trigger
• The only income we have is what's coming to us on Patreon, and all of that is going towards bot hosting
• The only way we've been able to afford food and rent so far is borrowing money from family, and we've effectively reached the limit on that

I'll try to avoid getting too much into specifics, but this is pretty much where we're at right now. I think it's safe to say that this is rock bottom for us, but we're still fighting and doing our best :'3

Speaking of fighting:

What we're doing to (try to) fix it

This one we will go into more detail with, since it's less depressing for the most part :'D

Here's a list of some things we're working on:

• Art and bot commissions (check out our art carrd and bot carrd if you're interested!)
• Some silly t-shirt and sticker designs (still a WIP, not sure if we want to share these yet)
• Premium for our bots (released, not really working out though)
• Side hustles on various websites (not working out so far either)
• Applying and trying to get a job (... also not working out right now)
• Building a video game (for upskilling + maybe sales later?)
• Working on various other things to try to learn more coding languages and build our portfolio for programming jobs

This past month has been a lot for us, especially in terms of trying anything and everything we can to get some kind of income stream. To be completely frank, it's exhausting, and so far it feels like we aren't making any progress. That said, we're still doing our best to fight and keep our head up, which is still progress in its own right

Our main focus right now is on job applications and trying to grow our skills to make ourselves more appealing for employers- which is professional speak for "we're throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what sticks"
It's a journey, but maybe if we can get things figured out we'll be able to use these skills to help with our bots and other projects. Especially when it comes to the game- we've been wanting to make little games for fun for a while now, and we're taking this opportunity to learn as part of building our skillset

How others can help

If you're interested in helping, here are some things to consider:

• Subscribe on Patreon
• Send us a tip on Ko-Fi
• Buy from our Redbubble
• Commission us!

Like before with our bot hosting issues, if you can't do any of those, that's okay too- feel free to share around our commissions and pages for others to donate to! We genuinely appreciate everything that comes our way, any little bit helps

What comes next

Honestly, we're still not really sure what's going to happen next. If we don't get enough income to at least pay rent, then we're just going to have to face losing our house. Even if we do get enough for rent, in October it's increasing ($1000 total; $200 more than right now) and I'm sure that'll bring its own challenges. We've outlined our income goals here, but as of right now I don't know that we'll be able to hit those before the deadline

If we can't get finances figured out, we might end up disappearing for a little while until we can bounce back. We won't be homeless (as far as I know we have a place to go), but things will be much more difficult and require a lot more of our free time if we do lose this house. A lot of our projects will be on the back burner for that, so I can't guarantee that we'll be around to fix bugs, develop features, or clean up any code. I just want to put that out there so folks know in advance if it does happen

Anyways, that's all for now. We'll be sure to post updates on this as things unfold, which we'll probably be including in our monthly review posts that we're planning to start back up

As always, we appreciate all of our followers, supporters, and users, and we hope everyone has a great day

- Kam