General rambly post because I can since this is my page and I'll cry type if I want to.

It's been close to almost exactly two years since I started uploading stuff. It's been a whirlwind of a time, and thanks to everyone on here and on discord who has made it possible and fun and everything else. I started making mods mostly because I was making my own private fork of Lexy's LOTD modlist and wanted to have unique architecture, and I realized how things weren't working together and figured I could fix them....and it kinda spiraled from there. I've made some amazing friends along the way, I've gotten caught up in watching drama, and things have ebbed and flowed (personal life has had some humps and others I'm still dealing with), but here we are. Just had a few thoughts.

First off, for those of you who download and enjoy, I have one request from a mod author to users: be kind. Most of you are. Even folks who make requests are frequently polite. But there's a serious imbalance of exposure that authors have to users - for you, you've just got one little question which you want help with, and it's what you're focused on. For mod authors, it's EVERYONE'S questions, many of which are the same ones, which build up over months and years. Couple that with many folks who don't understand how things work under the hood (to recognize when things can be fixed from load order or something else), along with dealing with language barriers and sometimes younger people who may be less familiar with computers, and it's a recipe for burnout. You may not think that offhand comments matter, but they can fester - we're in a community, and I'm not saying to lavish praise on everyone, or anything along those lines - just realize that folks are working on other things, or may have stuff going on in their lives, or they may simply be "done" with something they're working on, so your question may go unanswered. That's not a reflection of anything other than the nature of the beast. And that beast can be horrible in times like this AE conversion, where even random questions of why things aren't working, because users don't read other comments or google, or anything else, can weigh down on mod authors. I have been lucky enough to dodge that (as I do patches and not the complex scripting that SKSE authors do), but I see it happening. So please, be kind.

As a corollary to this, try not to be Idea Guys™. This is something I have to work on myself when working with other authors. You may have fantastic ideas on how to make a mod (or many mods) better. That's great! But the author you're talking to didn't ask for suggestions and also has many fantastic ideas of their own - you're intending to make a product better, but as it happens again and again, it can be hard for authors on the receiving end to not look at it as criticism of their OWN vision in lieu of someone else's, so to speak. So please, take those ideas and think of them as motivation to learn how to make mods yourself - make what you want to see, and share it with others. It will not only be great, but more satisfying in the long run, and you'll also learn some great skills along the way. :)

And on that note, it's something I'd like to note about patch requests: I just ignore them. I see them, but I almost always ignore them. It's not that the patch  requests aren't necessarily valid, or good ideas, or needed. It's that when I set out to make these patch pages, there was a certain standard that I wanted to adhere to. When making my mod lists, it was frustrating to sift through compatibility patches which didn't say what they did and that didn't have screenshots demonstrating the changes. That didn't note what versions of a given mod they were for, so we didn't know if they were valid anymore. Some of them were only CR on conflicts, without even taking care to make sure there were other incompatibilities beyond straight CR. So I wanted to make pages that provided that information. Mod requests ask for that additional level of detail: most of those patches folks ask for? I could probably crank out in like 2 minutes. Navmesh is more like 15. Only major overhauls take more time (Blue Palace - PCE, for example, took probably a solid week's worth of work). It's the rest of that s*** (the FOMOD, the page, etc) that takes up the lion's share of time in making the patches. So when you're requesting for a given patch, you're not asking me just to make the patch, you're asking for all the extra bulls*** I hate doing :P

And each page I make has that.....and then as I make additional releases as time goes on, the quality of that information drops off. It's probably my largest area of self-criticism: not keeping up to my own standards in that sense. Early on it was important because I wasn't established, but anymore, I think people inherently trust my stuff (which is both flattering and terrifying :P ). After this page goes up, I'm going to have a few things I'm working on, but I'm going to take a step back to try to clean up my older stuff - fix some things which I wasn't satisfied with, take those screenshots, update those descriptions, and what have you.

And on THAT note, repeating something I mentioned on my Eli's page:

Don't take my patch collections or things that I make patches for as indication that they're anything other than things I made patches for - what it all boils down to is that I got into a few niches and made collections for series, and what I tend to check against boils down to "was it in the list that I made for myself at the time."

Some things are in there because I found them easier to patch when I got anal with my load order: for example, ICAIO vs AIO - I found I preferred moving markers and doing NPC conflict resolution instead of having more navmesh conflicts to worry about - but that's not a commentary on the quality of either mod, so don't let my making patches for one dissuade you from using one over the other. Some things are in there because I was curious about them, and having used them, I'm not a fan and they won't be in my next build (but they are right now, so they're getting checked, so I still make patches for them). Heck, that may even apply to some things I ended up making entire collections for, where I might want to swap up for something else in the future. Some have things that have come out since I made my mod list that I'm probably going to swap next time (for example, I'm still making ELFX patches out the wazoo, but I'm excited to try out Lux next time). Don't let what some weirdo decided during a pandemic year he wanted to mess around with dictate what you want to use! And on top of that, I haven't had a chance to look at stuff that's released in basically the entire past year, so there's a HUGE blind spot in what I've made patches for. Don't assume that there's not better stuff out there - use what you want to use :D

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. This page is probably the best place for folks to ask general questions. I'm not putting it up now, but it'll also be the permanent spot for my personal TODO list. Thanks everyone for the wonderful couple years, and here's to some more.