Well, I'm less stabby this week but it's a very near thing, because I was making basically zero progress on the long project until just yesterday, when I got to bash my head against the wall constructively for quite a while before being forced to stop. Just prior to post, I was able to get to the milestone point I was hoping to reach on Tuesday (and optimistically, a couple weeks before that). So... yay? Gads I want that over with.

But while that's holding up the 516 beta, it's more bug investigations and more feature work for me. I actually snuck a cool thing into the next alpha that's been requested before, and I think I have room to improve on it in the future. And since I'd like to have something positive to say, I'll let you in on what it is: split stat and verb panels. Now you can keep verbs in a completely separate control. Eventually I'd like verbs to even be able to split up by specific tabs. For statpanels, sadly the engine has a baked-in limitation preventing me from splitting those up into separate controls by stat tab. But still, pretty cool feature and it's been wanted for a while. This is also the first announcement of it, so you're getting this news at the same time as the alpha team.

Anyway, the next alpha will probably come pretty soon. The next maintenance release I'm less sure of. This was supposed to be a fairly busy week and instead it went all stop-and-go on me. Next week is gonna be nuts because I just—literally just—got to where I can work on the stuff I was hoping to get to early this week. Hopefully it's smooth sailing after that, but that hasn't been my experience. I really don't want this dragging out into the Fair, for a lot of reasons.

Things have gotten a bit expensive, so I appreciate those of you who support the platform as subscribers and/or BYOND Members all the more. For those who don't, it's a small thing you can do to help keep this crazy train rolling, and these days it costs less than groceries and a heck of a lot less than a tank of gas.

Any day now I'm hoping soft strawberry ice cream will be on the menu, and the Fair is not far off. This is looking to be no less a tumultuous month than July, but at least the food should be better. The politics, not so much.