The snow is falling thick, the trees are crusted with ice, and the Christmas tree is still up. Don't judge me. If my neighbors across the street had theirs up and lit well into March, I don't feel so bad.

After a lot of nail-biting, I went ahead with including the icon threading improvement in the new 515.1601 release, and so far so good. I made changes early in the week that I felt would improve its stability and that appears to be the case. So I think we're really close to a proper test for SendMaps threading.

At the moment, there's one report of map editor crashing that hasn't escalated to an official report and can't be reproduced yet, but otherwise 1601 is looking good. I eventually have more map editor stuff I'd like to get to, but now that things are much improved I'm trying to focus more on the other tasks in my list.

One of those items on my list is a compiler feature I wanted to sneak into this latest release, but didn't have time for: __TYPE__ and __PROC__ macros to eliminate the need for the "pile of dots" used in various SS13 branches. I did a lot of wrestling with that over the last couple of days, and discovered it was a lot more complicated than I'd anticipated. It was a struggle, but I finally got it to work.

This relates somewhat to another bug that somehow snuck in late in 514, and although I have a fix for that bug ready to go, I also need to do further investigation because the reason the bug snuck in relates to the "final" keyword.

Thanks to everyone who's helped support BYOND lately. Your contributions keep this project rolling, and it wouldn't be possible for me to do this without you.

On a more personal front, my wife had her last chemo this week. She'll be moving on to radiation in a bit, and with any luck we can hope this is the last we'll hear of the C word for a long, long time. As for me, I'm still battling back issues but I have a game plan, or will when I can schedule some physical therapy. But enough about all that. I'll see you next week.