#athenacodes

hi friends,

i really appreciate all of you who have been so worried about me and have been reporting a certain site to me as having ripped some of my content. i will look into it when i have time, but i'm secretly also hoping that this post will work as a means to persuade them to remove it before i have to reach out directly or do anything further.

i know my lack of response was taken poorly by some and i just want to apologize. the truth is, since april i have been dealing with some very heavy real life things and they have kept me offline for the most part, or at the very least without any muse. i've said a few different places what these things were but, for any who did not know, both of my mothers passed away sixteen days apart on april 24 and may 10 of this year. following that i also had a few health emergencies that have led to a bone-deep fatigue i haven't quite figured out how to deal with, much less shake off to get anything done.

i'm sorry i haven't posted anything / been around in quite some time and that requests for my assistance or other messages to me have been unanswered, but i just truly did not have the spoons. life happened and, for quite some time now and probably a good while longer still, i left the rpc in total.

i have barely functioned as a human being for months and am just now beginning to again, so i ask for your understanding and compassion with this. i don't mean to let anything go missing or have long response times, it's just where my life is at right now.

i am sending my love to all of you, but this post is a notice of my former, current, and potentially indefinite hiatus. i wish i could offer more, but i just can't right now.

the few who i had discussed coding things with prior to, i have reached out to about still doing those things if needed, but otherwise i will no longer be available for any coding requests. i will still make time as i have it for coding help, but that will be more easily requested via discord than here on tumblr.

if i find muse somewhere, i might post tidbits here and there, but i will largely be moving into solely working on personal projects for fun as the mood strikes. i had been working on a few things to offer the community and if i get the muse for it maybe i will finish them but also maybe i won't. i will not be making any promises about anything further coming from me, because the truth is i may never share anything again and i may drop four things tomorrow, i just don't know. i will keep what i have offered up and the rules of its usage will remain the same but otherwise...

i guess this is, at least for now, a means of saying goodbye. thanks for allowing me to be a part of this community and for the support i've received over the years, from all the coding conversations, to the design discussions, to the debates over best practices as they served the roleplay community, and so much more. you all were what made it worth still doing, even with the negatives that came as well and the hate that was thrown my way over the years.

honestly, this was my favorite hobby, and while i hope one day i will be able to find that joy here again, i just have to finally acknowledge that i have lost it, at least for now.

any coding requests that come in after this message will most likely go without response, and that isn't to be rude or leave you hanging but i just don't have the spoons right now. i really do wish i did.

for what it's worth, i still think there's something really special and beautiful about the rpc, about the coding community, about all of it. i'm really glad i got to be a part of it for as long as i have, in a more public/community wide way than i may ever be again. i send my love to all of you.

thank you, for everything,

the truth is how long a skin is going to take is largely dependent on the skin itself. i've never had two skins or even two templates come out at exactly the same amount of time and effort put in, even if i were to make an exact replica of a previous skin it would end up taking less time. instead, here's some things that go into how long a skin will take.

Experience. Honestly, how long you've been skinning on that platform specifically will be a determining factor. If you're skinning for jcink, how long you've been working with jcink will factor in. The longer you've worked with it, the easier to manipulate and understand.

Skill. Literally just how long you've been coding and how much coding you do. I would argue that how much you've coded recently would go here as well but that's just because coding is easier the more frequently you've done it, in my opinion.

Project. What you are working on itself and its level of complexity, how much you have to learn to achieve it, what all you have to implement, change, manipulate, test, all of these things will factor in to how long it takes you. And If the project is for someone else? You need to double or even quadruple how long this takes for checking if something is okay, giving previews, following mock ups, discussion, changes, and everything else.

Time. How much time you can put in will determine how long it takes as well. Depending on who you are, this can be a negative or a positive. For me, if I have more time to sit and actually just focus on coding, I'm going to get more done in shorter periods of time. That said, for someone else they may be used to coding in short bursts, so trying to code longer can feel like pulling teeth. It's all coder dependent here.

Muse. It sucks to say but how much a coder is feeling a project and how into the project they are is going to factor. If I'm excited about something, I can get it done faster. If I'm working on my own project, I'm going to be speedier. It is what it is, excitement and muse is fuel in coding just the same as it is in writing.

Executive Function. I didn't really know what to name this one but hopefully once I explain it'll be easier. When coding, you have to decide when you're done, when you've done enough, when to code and when not to, when to take breaks. It's freelancing, and you have to treat it as such. This is very much easier on some than others. This is probably the hardest of all the others for me personally (shoutout ADHD) but others may find it much easier.

I do not do skin commissions and I never will, tbh.

For the skins I have/am working on, I'm honestly not sure. It really depends when I finish them and what the end is as well as what all is included in it.

I know this is sort of a non-answer, and I apologize for that.

If you're looking for something specific, let me know that and I can give you a better idea. In addition to that, if you want a template commission or skin edits/add ons I can price that out but I always do sort of a base price for each element you specifically want and then round down a little bit from there for it being a package. For instance I'd probably say something like if you want just one posting thread template, three USD for that commission. But If you want five, only ten USD.