Hello, everyone. I just kinda wanted to make this post in order to fill in some silence between my posts and answer some questions that some of you may have and to kinda realign my own expectations when it comes to this as a "content creator". Even if the art of said content can mostly be made without much intervention on my part.

USER ERROR:

Alright, this one is just a bit more direct compared to the other reasoning that I'll cover. Basically, I get distracted very fucking easily. I think about most of everyone nowadays is like this to the point being able to actually stay productive without falling prey to losing focus through social media or other crap is almost considered a type of superpower in today's society. But, yeah. I am very sloppy when it comes to making certain goals for myself that producing characters in itself is more of a distraction from a more grandiose task that I've possibly been avoiding for a bit. Matter of fact, the reason I've been able to even produce as many characters as I have last year was due to me getting kicked from my college program for an amount of time that impacted my idea of self-worth for a bit, since that was basically my rock bottom. Of course, my lack of focus has also affected how I prioritize certain bot ideas over ones I say I'll do soon and even how I'll prioritize new character ideas to add to my backlog rather than give characters their 10k and 20k milestone pics to celebrate their success. But that last part isn't entirely my fault, as I'll go into that with my next reason.

RISING COSTS OF AI USAGE:

Pic generation on Moescape has gone up a bit over the time that I've been using. At first, you were able to create about 10 pics a day and even more if you didn't mind waiting in a low-priority queue. Now, I can barely have 3 pictures produced per day due to the costs going up. While I know there's probably better options for image gens out there, but Moescape has allowed me to create images with minimal prompting and I do value the high-quality outputs it's given me over the time I've started posting my characters to a public with shared interests.

And on the topic of AI usage: my proxy. I think a lot of people have been experiencing that same crap I have, where Chutes has not been allowing me to actually talk to characters for the most part until recently. This has MASSIVELY impacted my motivation to even get on the site, much less work on my backlog of characters lately. Luckily, Chutes has somewhat been working again as of now, but at a cost of removing any other DeepSeek models and putting a bit of a limit on the one model I still host on there. God, I really should've put money into OpenRouter instead. While these costs aren't the most extravagant, I must admit I don't want to put any of my own money into a hobby I don't really see myself profiting from, so I kinda have to make do with what I can. I'll eventually put some money back into using OpenRouter for my proxy, but I do have to think about saving some money here and there.

SHRINKING COMMUNITY:

This one feels more personal to me. Over the time I've been posting my crap I've been getting closer and sharing stuff with other members of the community. Of course, this has had a bit of a positive effect on my posting and brainstorming. But of course, seeing said community slowly die out overtime also a negative effect on one's own motivation. Over time, I saw my close circle of friends and acquaintances shrink. Some of them had to have lived in countries in which censorship laws rolled out, some of them had deleted their accounts and moved on from Janitor or they simply moved on in life and just don't mess around with this hobby anymore. Nonetheless, as my feed emptied out, so did my motivation to try stay ahead of everyone else and push myself to keep posting. Don't get me wrong, the community is still alive as it is, but I can't help feel as though the "golden age of Janitor" has come and went with how things are.

CONCLUSION:

So... yeah. These are why I have not feel too impassioned to work on any characters as of lately. Honestly, I'm at a bit of a crossroads with how I feel lately. I'm caught between wanting to improve myself in other fields and study now that I'm back in college. And I'll be honest: I'm a complete hypocrite when it comes to AI. Like... the fetish shit is the only exception I care for. My eyes were constantly rolled towards the back of my skull when Sora was popular and my family kept showing me those stupid videos of Peter Griffin shoving a finger up his ass because of how "crazy" it was that you could just make him do that. That being said, I do want to eventually get into drawing to tell stories that show integrity and won't be shunned just because I took the easy way out. But at the same time... I don't want to say "goodbye" to any of this yet. Because it's not like I'm gonna wake up one day and just stop having a fat-fetish. And then there's over fifty generated images I already have on my hard drive that I'd feel bad about closing the page on them without actually bringing the ideas I had for them into reality at one point. Anyways, I guess that's it. I just felt the need to be more transparent with myself and quell some thoughts about this place. I may or may not try to write out a character soon enough to get into the swing of things, I don't know, nor can I guarantee anything. Sorry if you were expecting a certain character from me in the near-future, but they're most likely gonna take a backseat in order for me to work on something else first (as per usual).