What the Future Entails

Last time I wrote here, I was on the verge of an anxiety breakdown, and I ended up with a four-month long burnout, right by the end of the year, and eating up all of my savings to stay afloat during this time.

I was trying too much, everywhere, all at once, and I couldn't juggle that many hats. Now I'm getting medicated for anxiety, and although it helped for the last few months, for the first time since I got back to work I had an anxiety episode last week.

And it was all because of fucking SubscribeStar of all places.

Let me explain:

How did we get here?

When Twitter became the absolute cesspool that it still is up to this day, I took the risk jumping out, thinking that I'd have enough of a community behind me to support my endeavors in other places.

I can count in a single hand how many people actively follow my work no matter the context, and although I'll always be eternally grateful to those people and I'll always have their names in my mind, my finances took a massive hit. One that I wasn't able to recover from even now, almost three and a half years later.

I'm still struggling month after month, trying to stay afloat with emergency comms, my few repeating commissioners quite literally helping me survive, and with the entire economy in shambles everywhere, depending on other people's large investments like this is more and more unfeasible.

Even my Substar only pays me once every three months, when I'm finally able to get over the 150US$ payment threshold.

That's not enough to pay my bills, not enough to cover almost anything, but it still saves me every month that payment drops by adding more food to the table.

It's the Sunken Cost Fallacy in action. Seven years of commission work. The only thing I have to show for it is three or so people that actively support me, and less than a thousand followers in either platform, both SFW and NSFW.

Speaking of which, separating those two has always been a bad idea, but I had to make sure it was a problem in the first place.

Sirius and the Account Split

Back at Twitter, I had fourteen thousand followers at one point. I always thought the name Shukin had SEO issues, because it's a type of japanese goldfish, and that makes it harder to locate my name whenever anyone tries searching for it on most search engines.

I also got hit in the face with the famous algorithm shadowban, where those thousands of viewers were just not being shown my content whenever I posted, and many experiments proved as such. SiriusKobl was one of those, a random fresh account that wasn't directly linked to me in the first place, and was already racking up the same numbers as my main while still under a hundred followers.

At the time, I was also thinking about streaming, inspired by a bunch of friends that did the jump from art to video very successfully - from my point of view, of course. Fearing being censored or something related to my adult art, I took the decision to jump permanently on SiriusKobl, use that name as my NSFW access, and leave Shukin to build up a cleaner look.

The Second "Success"

I always said that I only had a single successful project in my entire life, and it was my adult art commissioning career over on Twitter before all of this shit started. Using the famous Shotgun Method - you shoot everywhere at once and hope that at least one of the pellets hit the target - I started a random TTRPG Vtuber account using an anime Live2D avatar I've made once for practice.

The three or so short videos I made in that experiment got all around ten thousand views, one of them getting its own algorithm boost due to more than a hundred comments. I couldn't refuse the fact that this was much more successful than what I was expecting, considering the streaming clips have never breached over a thousand each.

So, I got something that worked in my hands, I also got ideas for it, and I can apply them. So what went wrong?

All the juggling over commissions, the guilt over not doing commissions, and the anxiety owed to never knowing when I'd be able to pay for my bills, with everything adding up, got me into that anxiety spiral not even a month later.

Censorship and Payment Issues

Every single year since I started working with commissions, adult artists have a guillotine hanging over their heads, the sudden closure of Paypal accounts and losing your only income avenue is a permanent threat to anyone that works with anything payment processors deem "dangerous".

Ko-fi has been my main source of income outside of direct commission invoices for the two to three years, and both of them are directly through Paypal, that is historically very conservative and against adult work. Stripe is even worse, prohibiting any adult transactions through its platform, so the only popular alternative is also unavailable, if anything happens to my Paypal account.

Many were led to believe (me included) that SubscribeStar, working through high-risk payment processors that are used to adult work, would charge more for their services and take longer for payment to reach you specifically to guarantee that you'd always have a payment avenue to get money to your hands.

And then they updated their Terms of Service to be even worse than Patreon.

And another rambling session-

Okay this one you can skip if you want some actual info of what I'm going to do to change things up so it's better for me, and I'm gonna write this part as a stream of consciousness because holy shit there's a lot going through my head related to the subjects behind this part.

Alright, for everyone that is still reading this part, I'm exhausted of all the fucking drama related to puriteens and stupid fuckers that really think that being "a good furry", whereas "good" means "hiding every single unique facet of this community under the thumb of pure, clean, PG-13 content", will stop fascists from murdering them when they have the opportunity to do so.

For fascists, we're all faggots. Accept it. Understand that self-censorship is the stupidest thing you can do right now. It doesn't fucking matter if you're "just an innocent bean", you're getting killed just like every single other queer people under their rule. Stop doing their work for them, kill the fascist inside your own head.

If no one is being hurt, and it's between consenting adults, it doesn't fucking matter to you. Learn to use blacklists and to mute accounts you don't want to block, but filter your experience.

For those posting adult work, fuckers, add simple content warnings to things that are seen as extreme.

THAT'S IT, THAT'S THE ENTIRE THING YOU NEED TO DO. God fucking damn it I hate this entire censorship crusade, and I'm ashamed that I was once part of it. But we have fascists in the streets actively killing people like us out there, and we have more important things to care for.

Back to the subject!

So, the gist of it is splitting accounts didn't work out in my favor, and adult work is more and more risky, with less and less benefits to continue working on it.

I understand now that every single risk I took over the years haven't been fully productive, and I gotta sacrifice something if I'm to fix this.

Every single therapy session I've ever been to has instructed me to reduce things to their simpler answer, time and again. I tend to overthink things.

Having a dozen different communication channels and sites and accounts in multiple platforms, many different accounts on the same platforms, and juggling all of that has only helped to exacerbate the feeling that I'm holding on by a thread.

I think I'm just not getting enough from creating porn anymore. I kept it on over the last years due to bills, but even that avenue is drying up to the point I'm needing family support to pay what I need every single month for the last half-year.

And I didn't even get into how furry content is such a specific niche that growing on it over other platforms such as Youtube and Twitch is twice as difficult when doing clean work than going for the most guaranteed anime or cartoon route. And that's not only on art, but Vtubers in general. Those streaming friends all switched over, and are getting up to double their support and numbers over a simple thematic switch.

TL;DR

SiriusKobl isn't going to be a thing anymore, I'm once again gathering all accounts under the simple name of Shukin, and I'm gonna turn off all my thoughts about optimizing SEO. No one searches for things anyway these days.

I'm gonna keep all those accounts active, redirecting people to a single community so those that are still interested in what I make instead of just my porn can have somewhere to follow to.

I honestly don't know what's going to come in my future, but holding onto this has been an unbearable weight. I'll finish my current queue starting next week and I'm gonna start limiting which comms I accept.

I've always been unable to refuse commissions due to not having enough demand to pick jobs I wanted to make, and that destroys someone's passion for art. I don't want to do that anymore.

I'll keep y'all posted over my future steps on bsky.

If you got to read all of this, first of all thank you! And wow I admire your determination, there's a lot of rambling there :P