Progress; currency and holiday

Hey folks,
Just dropping some notes about progress. Three things:

Holiday

I'll be going on holiday with family from 8th to 23rd August 2020; after that I need to re-organise my schedule, then Unicode will be worked on and released.
While I have other clients on their private projects, Unicode is my main focus outside of "main" work, which is only part-time work.

Lacewing progress update

Lacewing ANSI will be getting its final server update today, with fixes to the ping timer introduced by Microsoft shipping a bad version of std::steady_clock. in Visual Studio 2019 Preview.
(I use Preview for Net Core, Blazor etc previews, for another project.)

Unicode has already been in proof-of-concept stage, it just needs all the bugfixes merged over the years. I'm very used to Unicode ports, but there is an added factor: any server-client connection should treat any received data as dangerous until proved otherwise.

So the exts will need Unicode validation, which is a new one for me.

I suppose there should also be Unicode normalisation too; i.e. reducing Unicode inputs to the minimum size.
To explain that, in Unicode it's possible to write á as a &´, two characters, which a text rendering engine will merge, or as á, one character.
Unicode normalisation is about making sure it's minimal bytes used. Fun fact is that Zalgo text comes from abusing the "add this part to last character" part of Unicode.

Conversion fees on Patreon

Patreon came out with a new currency feature, allowing users to be charged in their native currency and me as the patreon owner to foot the conversion fees.

I immediately activated it, although it's a setting that can't be turned off once turned on. 

I've felt bad about how much people in less rich countries have been paying through the nose in conversion rates to get Patron USD to fund me, while the evil Westerners lounge on their gold coins and wait for free Fusion extensions to fall into their lap... so this seems a lot better, now I'm footing the fees instead of them.

I'll check back with you after holiday. I could really use the break; been working pretty hard over the last few months, particularly July.

Thanks for being a patron!
~Phi