What the heck is going on DO???? 2025 isn’t good!

Also known as “2025 is being A Year™”, and I’m not even from the US. Before I get in to anything, life can and will change at any moment, for all I know tomorrow I may get good news, but I am working on what I have to hand currently.

This will be a long post, so I’ll just shove a tl;dr here:

I’m having to put my entire life in storage and live out of a suitcase for a undetermined length of time, and subsequently lose access to my entire source of revenue as that includes my PC which I need to make art greater than doodles let alone anything else.

Of course it’s more than that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have a tl;dr that doesn’t even include 9 months of the year and that tl;dr only formed within the past two weeks : )

A red hedgehog vampire looking dejected off to the left of the image while sitting on boxes, its cape draped over the back of the same box it is on.

To be honest, the first 9 and a half months of the year, and why my art output was so god awful is pretty easy to detail. I’ve complained in public about a chunk of this already so I’m going to stick it under a spoiler, but it is important to know “why is 2025 the way it is for you DO?????” If you only want the new stuff click here.

Before October 2025

In late 2024 I started the process of getting an ADHD diagnosis, which was itself a struggle as the waiting list to even get a diagnosis, let alone medication, was “several years” though the figure I heard thrown around was approximately 10 years for my area. (Fun bonus fact, when queried via a FoI request in 2023 the response was “Demand has massively outstripped commissioned capacity” for mental health services as a whole, not just ADHD, as my local NHS trust does not have any mental health services and commissions it from a NHS Trust next door : ) Yes, even crisis support, that was a fun thing to find out when I was at my lowest in 2021)

As such in order to get this done in a timely manner I invoked what was available at the time (who knows in 2026!) the NHS “Right to Choose” model, and went with a private provider commissioned by the NHS that I spent a lot of time pouring over the relevant page on ADHD UK to work out who I wanted to go with. It was great, I went with a provider with a low wait time AND can issue NHS prescriptions, score!

…

Except of course they were immediately over subscribed and it took months for them to send my the pre-appointment questionaries, but only after I spent most of a day on hold on a phone to them to finally talk to them. Then due to how shoddily their site was set up I didn’t know if the forms submitted so I then spent three full days calling them because the way their calling system was set up meant if you were on hold too long you would eventually be moved to the back of the queue again. Eventually I got an appointment for a diagnosis but because they never told me how it’d be done guess who ended up on phones again… SIGH.

Eventually I got my Inattentive ADHD diagnosis (though what they sent to my GP they didn’t properly indicate on the form and it says ‘I can/cannot diagnose the patient as having ADHD”, which is very funny) but had to go get blood tests etc. from my doctor… I got all this done and spend Too Long on the Phones Again and find out they needed specific “I’m a medical report” being sent over to them. I didn’t hear anything so chased them up… …and my email got bounced by the NHS mailer daemon because the RtC Provider’s mailbox was full. So I just GAVE UP trying to get medication and honestly am at the point of just asking to be put on the NHS waiting lists again because now I have medication and they’ve fucked that up royally too. Yippee!!

In amongst all of this too was getting a sleep apnoea diagnosis! … I still don’t have that : )

All on top of a shitty summer (some would argue good but I don’t deal well with heat in buildings that act like solar furnaces : )

Understandably when you spend so much time chasing medical professionals it leaves you little time to do anything else! This is why I fell so behind on commissions, this is why my art output even on personal work went through the floor. It’s also why I’ve gotten really hard to get a hold of. It sucks!

But that’s all known. I’ve not been quiet on it so lets move on from that.

In mid-October we got notice from our landlady that she needed to reclaim the property due to a bad marital breakup that required her to sell her own home and needed somewhere to move family in to. Unfortunately as annoying as that is, I do understand the situation. This was with an unusually long 2 months notice instead of the 1 month she could’ve actually done because she misread our tenancy agreement.

So my partner and I had a look in the area and found a place we’d like to buy! And we can! And it wouldn’t be that big of a move! Score! So we got that ball rolling and the seller even offered to short term let the property if the sale didn’t complete in time and we were all working on that.

Last weekend I even took the time to contact my remaining clients to say I’ll be looking to work on their pieces because I wanted to try and have an empty plate, or at least have approved preliminary sketches to work on while we had no internet due to utility switching…

…Of course life can never be that simple.

On Monday the 24th of November we got the formal news that the Building Management company has told the seller that they (which was sadly their right as per the leasehold contract) reject the short term let insisting that they must only ever be 6 months minimum, even though our sale isn’t projected to take that long.

(Cropped art by Bloo)

We even contacted the management company on Monday, who the employee who spoke to us literally went “Yeah it makes sense to do that to help make the sale go easier” so we went back to the Sales Negotiator working for us (US peeps will call this a real estate brokers IIRC?) telling them the management literally said this to us on a phone.

Tuesday they came back saying that the management company still refuse the terms, to which we call them again and get a different, but consistent with what the seller had been told, answer so we broach a different plan which all parties seemed to okay with of a “long term” rental with an early break clause. Except of course… NOPE. On Thursday we are informed that Building Management still refuses.

This has thrown plans entirely in to the air, we’ve now gone from a relatively relaxing move to within 48 hours having to scramble to arrange storage and an AirBnB for us to live in for… an undetermined amount of time. We have a “potentially 3 months more” estimate on a sale that all parties did think could possibly be done in time as there was no chain involved (if you don’t know what “no chain” means in property buying, it’s referring to a chain of sales. E.g. A wants to buy from B but B needs a sale to complete from a property they’re buying from C before they can complete the sale to A, and etc. This can be long and incredibly messy and can cause entire sales to fall through from time in the chain. No chain means there’s no wait list, the seller doesn’t need a another transaction to complete, and neither did we as buyers.)

Sadly for me is that part of cramming things in to storage is that the small AirBnB we’re moving in to cannot fit me setting up my computer, and thus I need to hand that off to be unused for a while, hopefully for only a few weeks but could be months. While I have a mobile computer, a Microsoft Surface, even though SAI2 (my preferred art application) is fantastic in this regard for memory management the device is sadly nowhere near powerful to do anything more than doodles (it struggles rendering a twitch stream let alone rendered coloured art). And streaming? That’s completely out.

I won’t even be able to play games that aren’t on my Switch! Bleh!! I’m going to lose a lot of avenues to even be social with my friends such as not being able to do VR, or game with friends, or do much of anything! It sucks!

I will be keeping everyone up to date on matters, especially my clients and patreons because while I don’t have any charged clients yet (I charge after a sketch) they still deserve to know everything that is happening.

I don’t want to beg for money because we’re not currently feeling like we’re that badly financially fucked, but I am going to leave my Ko-fi here, originally I put up a low goal with the idea to cover smaller costs of the move like mail redirects or movers fees etc. whereas now it’s a “???” goal with “???” things I need. I massively appreciate that I’ve had a couple friends already help out way more than I ever could and I want to make it back up to them but, I really wish I could give any certainty to anything right now…

Alternatively there is my Patreon if you want that instead, which has years of art and like on it, and normally I’d be like “and I post it there first :)” but at the moment I don’t even know what I’ll be doing with that given I’m hardly going to be able to achieve a monthly goal of a rendered piece a month now…

Here’s to 2026 being hopefully fucking better for my Bun and I.