"Assembling a cathedral out of a hurricane"

Yesterday I ran what we call in the video game industry a "crunch". Well whats a crunch? Why is it useful? Why is it bad? Is it a bad sign? Fear not readers. I'm going to answer all of these questions.

What is a crunch?
Essentially a crunch is when a person works and pours hours and hours past the scheduled and mandated work to get their work done/make their work better.
Why is it useful?
Crunch, for the most part, makes you get your shit together. Crunch happens usually around a milestone turn in. Be it an internal milestone or an external one crunch is when you devote every second of those days before the turn-in to working. I LOVE crunch because I work amazing under pressure. Crunch, however, takes a toll on your quality of life. Make sure you plan a crunch before a free day. Coma days are amazing.
What is a coma day?
A day you devote to sleeping past 12 hours.
Why is a crunch bad?
During crunch it's possible to completely break your game. Crunch is spawned by a multitude of reasons: Your behind on your work, you want to cram as much as you can into your game, or you need to do other peoples work to do yours.
Is it a bad sign?
Usually crunch is a bad sign. Unless it's voluntary. 

So why am I talking about crunch?
Yesterday I worked a 19 hour work day. With only 3 hours of sleep before then and when I woke up for today's 8 hour work session. I got my work done a day ahead of schedule AND I was able to get it into our build.

So our game has rendering now which is amazing but we're behind. VERY, VERY BEHIND. I've been stressed but now I am trying VERY, VERY hard to keep cool. Today I'm going to rest for a long time before tomorrows work session. I'm crunching again, I WANT a good game.

Hurricane warning:
So today myself, Brian my teammate, and David another teammate had an incident. This revolved around some personal attacks from David to myself and Brian and we weren't going to put up with this. The way we were attacked today is completely un-professional and un-acceptable. I'm dissapointed with not only what happened today but also how it affected our work cycle today. Constant setbacks aren't a good thing and we need to get ready for POC or FF1 is going to end up just as poorly.

I'm just going to use tonight to relax, calm down, and relieve stress. I'm enjoying today as much as I can because I know for the next 3 months I'm going to be SPRINTING to this gold turn in. I want this project to shine like nothing else before it and to pull this off we need to remove blockers like incidents like these and potentially, if it comes down to it, the people behind it.

I've spent two years of my life training to be able to do this. This project is my statement of what I learned and what I can do and I am not going to let ANYONE get in the way of that. If I have to crunch everyday I WILL. I am dedicated to this industry and I want my feelings and goals to be reflected in this game. I hate to sound so cut throat but that's how I need to be.

These two years of my life are GOING to be sent out with a bang. Of this I promise myself and my family who have supported me.

I apologize for this turning into a rant but I've got very, very mixed feelings right now.