You know that feeling you get, when it's like "Gosh there's just really not enough hours in the day"? Yeah... I get that a lot anymore. I got curious, and did the maths; if I was making $5 an hour working on Gaia, mind you this is below minimum wage and I did absolutely nothing else, I'd have made $7,500 last month, having put in over 1,500 hours of work on it. I really wish those were made up numbers, I really do. xD So I thought to myself, okay, maybe it's time to take a break and do something else, right? Fun trivia, I normally don't take breaks. When I'm working on a coding project, I will generally just keep going on it until it's done. Gaia's the first code project I didn't finish within a month. Even the Battle Suite only took me a month or so, and I'm really not done with Gaia yet, getting close though. The reason why is because, I'm ADD and forgetful as hell. I've said here before I think, that I will hyper-focus forever and then get distracted with something else for months on end and completely forget what I was doing with current project. I was very serious. So to combat this... I just don't take breaks. I don't walk away from it for longer than a day.

I took my birthday off, at least, and then had another day where the universe decided for me that I was taking a dang break (it gave me a literal one-day cold; I was absolutely miserable for that one day, spent most of it sleeping, and then felt perfectly fine the next day, that was a trip). The life-partners also have a habit of occasionally video-calling me when everyone's off work (cept me... I'm always working...), and I can't ignore them, because it's rude and I care, so I will basically gradually come to a code-stop on my own via distraction with conversation. Tricky fish. TRICKY FISH. IT LOOKS LIKE A DOLPHIN NO IT'S A SHARK.

(Okay, it's not that bad and it is very effective, as it gets me to take a break without distracting me with something else that will engulf my life.)

So anyway, I had a lot of trouble getting the theme system operable in Gaia's Alpha 8 (it does sorta work now, and you can customise the CSS fonts and colours without having to directly edit the CSS file, and the browser's not caching things it shouldn't, woohoo). It was a massive war. Oh my god like, I don't think I've ever gotten so pissed off at code as I did during that war. I'm serious, if my desk wasn't trapped between bed and wall, and heavy af besides, I'd have literally thrown it at some point. I was so mad. So then I was like okay, I think it's time to take a step back, here. So I did. I have done nothing the last few days, kind of a miracle, but post on varying sites and shoot the shit with my friends, and I noticed at some point, my stress levels...? Yeah they were getting worse.

I'm like okay I'm pretty sure, you guys, looking at my life-partners, you're supposed to feel better after a break not worse and they were just like ??? and I was like ??? and then it hit me.

I was getting more stressed out... because, I was taking a break.

Yep! So that's a thing now. Apparently if I take a break, and do truly nothing code-related, I get more stressed out because I have stuff to do and am not doing it cccc: Fun facts to know, I guess. xD It was actually pretty bad, had me sleeping really lightly, and only getting like 2-3 hour naps every 5-6 hours, so I'm kinda glad that is over, I can't function that way. I really can't, I was constantly tired. But today, I'm back to working on Gaia, and I'm not exhausted, so apparently I just literally can't take a break for longer than a day. I can feel that I am physically tired, but my brain's overriding it. So, yeah, so everyone knows, I'm okay, I was apparently designed to code for 16 hours straight every day. xD My brain doesn't like unfinished projects, is probably what the deal is. That's why I do things so quickly, I noticed it when I was a teenager. I couldn't leave, like character apps or whatever undone, it just bothered tf out of me. I couldn't, still can't, let PMs and like threads sit for too long without a response. It's actually kind of wild, and really annoying.

What are breaks. Arc really don't know her.

Anyway, I've got like a handful of things to do in Gaia's admin panel, and then I'll be working on getting the front-end stuff operable again. Everything's coming together much nicer in Alpha 8, and the stuff is organised better, and URLs make more sense. It's all mostly quality-of-life improvements in the back-end right now, you know for code maintenance, rather than anything the users will really notice, but I also think it's running quicker in places it wasn't before. All the database junk is back there in the controllers, not the models, and the models collect the information for the template and then trigger said template, so there's really clear logic organisation here. I also got something working that I didn't think I was going to be able to before beta, so I'm super excited for beta, there's gonna be a hidden treasure in it. xD Turns out the WYSIWYG editor also has an autosave function, so it'll save textarea input for 20 minutes in local storage. But it's not good enough for me, so I guess I get to rewrite it.

And now... I go eat. xD Also, seems spring's come up north of the equator! Yay!