It doesn't help that I'm having trouble staying asleep.
It's not that I go to sleep, then wake up, like, half an hour later--but I quite often will wake up every few hours or so, in spite of knowing that I need more sleep.
Worsening the barrier: after I've gotten six hours of sleep, I hit a wall when trying to get more sleep. I'll wake up, do the mental math, realize, "...Six hours?!? That's enough normally, but I'm sick! I need more sleep!", try...try...keep trying...but...
...NOPE!
...I'm awake, awake for good.
When I say that I only need six hours of sleep, this is why I know it to be true--because even when I try to get more, I can't. It's not tied to a circadian rhythm, either--that'd imply that the time I wake up is automatic. Except it doesn't matter. I go to bed at 2, I wake up at 8-9. I go to bed at 4, I wake up at 10-11. I go to bed at 5, I wake up at like noon.
If I'm lucky, I can get an extra hour or two of sleep in, to maybe push it up to eight--after having woken up, and instead of failing, succeeding...for a while.
Mind you, this is also one of the reasons why I don't go to sleep before midnight, quite often--yes it's true that I can't really get to sleep before midnight, but even if I did, that'd cause me to wake up way too early, because...say I need to wake up at 10 and went to bed at midnight; I'd wake up at 8, and that'd be torturous for me. (I'm a night owl, not a morning bird; I don't know how to handle spare time in the morning, whereas I know how to occupy myself when having spare time at night.)
Soyeah.
I need more sleep.
My body's refusing to give me more sleep.
On the bright side, since I'm feeling too sick to attend to obligations for the most part (also not helping there, physical sickness + mental sickness = self-feeding loop, and when I'm sick with something, it therefore mixes with my bipolar disorder, draining away at my mental health, sapping my spare batteries), that's left me spare time to work on pet projects of mine.
Which, yes, means Across the Ages - Mediterranean is something I've worked on.
I finished the Rise of Rome map overlay, and briefly took a look at the maps I'd need later--I even got the art program downloaded.
Except no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the dimensions to fit.
Even if I got Pelusium and Byzantium to both match up, and even if they were at the right angles, the rest of the map's scaling was entirely off, and there was no fix.
I tried partial copy-pastes, to limited success. What it ended up looking like was more or less, me pasting usable pieces of Mesopotamia into the Rise of Rome map, replacing/expanding/augmenting what was there, with me removing parts from Mesopotamia not needed and me copying pieces of Rise I wanted to keep over Mesopotamia in the spots where Mesopotamia otherwise overrode Rise.
Which, mind you, could work--except it rather self-evidently wasn't going to be what I was after.
So I decided to give up on that.
Normally, that level of giving up would condemn the project to death--I can't figure out a way to smoothly recreate a map that uses Mesopotamia's scale, but includes Rise of Rome's rest of the Mediterranean which is expanded in the Middle Ages and through Napoleon with features of Age of Discovery.
My entire goal.
I wanted to do that--and I can't.
Like I said, that's the kind of thing which is usually a deathblow, spelling an end to the idea altogether.
But there's one tried and true method I've yet to employ.
A little thing called "trial and error".
More error than trial, but I am going to, bit by bit, manually, try to recreate the map, as I envision it. I went for 200 x 200 as a starting point, so we'll have to see if this ends up being the right scale. Mind you, I will need to, constantly, be revising these. Not a little, a lot. Every new map, I'll need to make adjustments to terrain--and so much as a single tile's difference could force me to radically alter the entire rest of the map.
Painstakingly, excruciatingly, slow, meticulous, methodical work.
But it is the only way, and I think I can do it.
With difficulty, but it's doable.
Just...not easily.
Initial estimates, by the way: either 200 x 200 isn't big enough, or I am making my Mesopotamia-scaled map too big and misjudged the scaling. Probably both.
This'll take me a while to fine-tune.