Weekly update #01 ~ Easing back into the routine.

Alrighty! (Let's start at #01, make this a proper reset. New tag and all. Speaking of, pretty soon I'm going to be scrubbing through Patreon content to retag, pin, and delete things so we can actually get organized here. But more on that later~)

So after my last update I spent a little bit of time trying to re-acclimate to things. Mostly catching up with Nai and getting an idea of where things stand group wise. It's been.. pretty intense. I get stress migraines and I've had a string of them since I've been back. No really bad panic attacks though! Anxiety and struggles with chronic fatigue carry on as usual =v=. But it's something!  I know I'm not able to get to everything right away so I appreciate you all being patient with me while I slowly get this wheel turnin. 

Also thank you guys so much for the kind words and especially thank you to the folks I got to speak with briefly about dealing with depression. It did my heart good to feel connected. Having that moment of "I feel understood" was something that had me on the verge of tears with relief every single time. I mean I know that it's not such an uncommon struggle, but it's different when you put faces to it, ya'know? It helped me feel like I can at least be a little more open about discussing what it's like for me trying to juggle life and mental health struggles. 

That all being said, there is movement beyond the veil *waggles fingers*. The most exciting thing, in my opinion aside from general reopening of course, is progress on the elnins site. Currently we're working with cy on getting the masterlist moved off of dA (there will still be at least a skeleton masterlist maintained there but the plan is to have it be just be mostly for people who want to favorite the designs on dA. All pertinent stat and ownership information and updates will likely be done offsite). This move is gonna be HUGE for helping myself and the team do more for you guys man oh man TuT.

Also I'm hoping to do some updates about the site from uh, my point of view.. which I'm sure is just gonna be a lot of "THIS IS CRAZY YOU GUYS"... Because I'm still super stoked that cy is helping us with this and I'm gonna have a hard time not being ridiculously excited about.. well just about everything x3. I'm not super savvy with coding stuff, but cy was able to pull all the masterlist data off of dA for cleaning and importing into our site which I thought was basically witchcraft. Of course there was a lot of cleaning because the deeper you dug into the old entries the more variable the formatting and naming were xD;; Basically the wild west as you go further back. The list of inconsistencies pulled from the raw data was.. shocking lmao. tyty Nai for working with me to get that all under some semblance of order. On that front we've made a huge amount of progress and it was surprisingly satisfying to see things fall into alignment with each other. Man I am. Just so happy to be moving this off of dA y'all have no idea. The masterlist has been such a HUGE bottle neck for so much stuff. 

Oh and we've set up a real easy process of linking the elnin site account to your dA profile, and ok I realize I'm probably being really silly about this, but it was literally like... a single click to authenticate and link them and my lizard brain self who is easily impressed by these types of things was blown away. xD

We also have a trello card that Nai is updating [here] that will have snippets of information as we progress. She'll be touching more on broader subjects as they come up through our meetings with cy. (So more general stuff and much less of me being probably too excited by every little thing xD.) 

Aside from progress on the website, I'm also starting the deep dive into reopening group stuff. I'm aiming to get some solid updates to everyone within the next week with more specific details on timeframes (tentatively! I don't want to overpromise so I'm trying to make sure I'm 100% positive on things before any solid dates are shared) and general expectations. I know me falling into a depressive freefall mid revamp really threw a wrench into things and I apologize for that ; ;. I'm doing my best to try and keep the mindset "keep moving forward" and that's where my focus is for now. 

PHEW. Ok. I think I'm starting to hit that anxiety line on typing. Do you guys ever get really anxious typing up big messages? @u@ /wheezing. 

Ahh, shorthand things that are also on my radar for the week:

• Patreon currency updates. Side note, hopefully? we'll be able to automate this. Still unsure if it's possible or not but I'm optimistic, and if we are able to do that I'm definitely going to lean into looking for all the ways we can provide extra site-related benefits to patrons.
• Message backlog. I'll be chipping away at my discord backlog again starting Monday.
• Pending masterlist updates. Another side note, we'll be looking at ways for mods to help me with Patreon things. I'd been historically against it because I felt bad asking for help on something that is more directly funding me x_x But they've been amazing and continue to offer to help offload the extra admin work so I can focus on the bigger projects. So potentially this will mean Patreon things will be processed faster as we explore how this will work best for everyone.

And I think that covers most of what's on my mind at the moment. Oh also, I've been thinking a lot about wanting to start posting art and doing streams for you guys again on a regular basis. I realize belatedly how nice it was to be able to work and chat with a few friendly faces TvT I wanna say maybe.. not for the next thing I work on since that will probably be a lot of me floundering around in photoshop trying to remember what all the buttons do. xD; But maybe for the one after that. HMM.

Anyway. I hope everyone is doing alright and that you are all safe and healthy. Please be careful out there, the world is a very strange place right now ><