EDIT2: There we go! Everything seems to be working now. The styleswitcher is located in the footer for the time being, as I said—I'll find a more prominent position for it later—at the end of the menu and you now have both the Giratina style and a new Blaziken style to choose from. (Okay, not that new; it does borrow a little bit from a much older style from waaaaay back when.)
As always, let me know if something seems broken or mismatched. These styles will both look and behave their best in most modern browsers, though they should at least be functional in older ones. In particular I know there was an issue with Internet Explorer 7 and 8; I'm almost 100% sure I fixed it, but if I didn't (and if you really, really, honestly can't use any other better browser at all) then let me know how it's broken and I'll see what I can do about it.
EDIT: So I thought I'd fixed the layout and styleswitcher issues and so went ahead and set up the new layouts... only for the styleswitcher to stop working all over again. (The links are currently at the bottom of the page until I can figure out a better place to put them, although at the moment they don't do anything.) It's late now, though, so for the time being I'm just going to have to leave the site as it is. Enjoy the new (and long, long overdue considering the site's name) Giratina layout for now, and I'll see about fixing the styleswitcher at a reasonable hour so you can use the new version of the Blaziken layout instead if you want. Ugh.
It's that time of year again, when AO's birthday comes immediately after NaNo or some other similarly large endeavor and I have to scramble to scrape together something presentable for the occasion! I wasn't able to scrape together quite as much as I would've liked—namely, I was at least hoping I'd be able to finish the webcomic rec list—but while this does feel a tad underwhelming for a fifth birthday I do have a few presents and announcements! More than last year, anyway, and a lot more than the first two years where I forgot AO's birthday was a thing!
First, if I may direct your attention to the three posts immediately beneath this one, you'll see evidence of a new little side project of mine. I call it 649 mini, as it's sort of like 649 in that I'm writing something for every Pokémon except for the part where I mean every Pokémon instead of just every evolution line. It is also strictly for drabbles rather than the potentially-longer one-shots that are supposed to be 649's focus. In general I need to get into the habit of writing more often, ideally daily and even when it's not November, so I thought 100-ish words a day would be a nice way to start easing into it. And what better way to give myself motivation then to have most of those sets of 100 words be drabbles about the pokemans? (The self-imposed requirement is 100 words, not specifically "a Pokémon drabble", so things that are not Pokémon and things that are not drabbles but parts of longer works will be written occasionally.) I'm not going to make a separate update every single time I have a new story, because that could turn into 649 updates nearly daily and that will clog the site up like whoa, but I will make a new post whenever I've collected a decent number (say, ten to fourteen or so). Also to prevent clogging like whoa I'll be grouping them into thirteen posts of 50 drabbles each; whenever I add new ones, I'll make an update pointing to the specific posts I've edited them into.
Yes, I realize that the Lillipup and Salamence drabbles were already posted earlier, but they're perfectly good fics that fit the theme and it's always nice to recycle! And hey, at least three-fifths of the stories I posted today were completely new!
Not as major, but I also made a few updates to some of the "sitely" boilerplateish pages. Some of them were a hair outdated, and I wanted to clarify a few things with respect to what the majority of the site's content tends to be (broken promises). There are still a few other things that need touching up, like the affiliation requirements, but that can wait for a bit.
The big thing I really wanted to have ready for today was two new layouts and the re-return of a styleswitcher with which one might choose between them. The layouts are technically done, but unfortunately a combination of styleswitcher drama and some other issues means that I'm not going to have them up by the end of the day (which is in 30 minutes anyway). Soon, though!
This is not directly related to AO or its birthday, but I won NaNo again, albeit just barely and after several setbacks. I ended up working on both the Golden Sun one-shot collection thing and a Pokémon chapterfic I've been bouncing around lately. As usual, neither is in any state to be viewed by anyone who doesn't want the horrible awfulness to inflict physical pain upon their person, but I'll be working on making them decent. The Pokémon fic, semi-tentatively titled A Tale of Arilterra (the originality, it burns), is also something of a... worldbuilding project, if you will, so there might be additional non-fanfic-related content that goes with it in the future. We'll see!
This is also not directly related to AO or its birthday, but rather than take a bit of time to relax after the rollercoaster that is NaNo I'm plunging right into a different month-long project—"ArtMo", an artwork-a-day-in-December challenge that I'm following along with on my Tumblr. You're welcome to check in over there if you want to see what I spew out; most of it will probably not be completely polished artwork as I'm using ArtMo as an excuse to practice, but there may be some things like new Phoenixdex concepts and even, if we're lucky, some previewish stuff relating to A Tale of Arilterra! Oooh, nifty! I am currently technically behind thanks to the aforementioned birthday scrambling, but I'll see about getting the pictures for days 2 and 3 up before I hit the hay. Gotta try a few more things with the layouts first. :/
Dang, man... five whole years. Sure doesn't feel like it, heh. (Maybe it would feel a little more "like it" if I had updated more frequently.)
New layouts will be uploaded as soon as they stop being meaniefaces and actually work! Until then, enjoy, and happy fifth birthday, Altered Origin!