Sorry about the downtime that hit AO and the rest of the sites on my server for about a day. The short version is that I had some software uploaded on a different domain for testing purposes that I intentionally left outdated at first; after a while I no longer needed it and just forgot about it. Apparently that version of the software was vulnerable to some file inclusion attacks, and someone hacked into it and started sending tons of spam emails via my server. My host shut the server down for a while so they could resolve the problem. As you can see, everything is back up now and should be back to normal.

The domain/site/etc. that was affected didn't have anything of importance on it, and everything else appears to be untouched. Altered Origin, 649, the Phoenixdex and anything else important I had hosted on this server are currently fine; they were just inaccessible for a while. Nothing that happened should have affected you in any way, and you should be able to continue using the AO network sites as normal.

I know several of you were trying to access the site while it was down and were unable to; again, sorry about that. Lesson learned, and it shouldn't happen again.

Apparently I have a Tumblr now. I'll be using it mostly for small things like pictures or fakemon previews or what have you; longer stuff, and probably most fanfic-related stuff, is still going to go on the WordPress blog (though, as an aside, I am tentatively considering switching back to LJ for reasons). Follow it if you want, I guess; I'll probably follow you back, at least if I know you. Still kind of figuring out how it works.

I'm not going to bother adding it to the Network Updates thing up there, since it's mostly going to be little things and will be updated more frequently than my main blog, at the very least. But it is in the menu now and it's, uh, there if you want to look at it or something.

Actual progress on actual site-related stuff pending.

While I was ultimately unable to get as much AO-related work done over the break as I would have liked, I do have a few simple things for you. The biggest of these is the addition of a third section to the Zodiac Pokémon section: the Unova zodiac. I've been spending quite some time in front of TV sets in my White Version trying to compile all of the "Personality Assessment and Horoscope" shows, and after finally finding September, November and December last night (whyyy does this show come on so infrequently compared to stupid Koukan Talk and Eyes on Unova whyyy) I was able to put these together today. It's silly and purely for fun (not that I take real astrology very seriously either), but if you'd like to see which Unova Pokémon you are you can go check that out.

Those of you who liked the plain Suicune sketch that has been sitting in the gallery for a little while now may be pleased to hear that I've finally gotten around to coloring that in; it's also visible in the gallery now.

I also found a way around the bizarre problem with my affiliate buttons occasionally not displaying, at least for me; the buttons should be working again and there should no longer be any extraneous text. If you still can't see the images, let me know. I still have no idea what the hell all that was about so I don't know that I can fix it, but I can try and find some other workaround in the meantime.

I've been having second thoughts about whether or not this other new game I wanted to add to the site is really worth it (no, not the interactive fiction stuff—that's just on hold due to lack of time/attention span); I would still like to give it a shot, though, so I may put up a really simple test version at some point in the near future. We'll see how that goes.

Need to post more often, man.

Anyway! Two things. First of all, I've finally updated the About page, on the off chance that you care; still have a bit of information to flesh out here and there, but it'll do for now. Second, and more importantly, I added a new page: Projects. It has a list of (most of) my current fanprojects on it. Confusing and counterintuitive, I know, but bear with me here.

Right now it really is little more than a list of titles with some cursory descriptions here and there; as I get more work done on these projects, though (this includes writing more posts about them when I get a chance), I'll be adding links and subpages and stuff to it. It would also be cool if maybe you guys could mention the stuff that looks interesting, whether that's settings or characters or the whole thing or theoretically whatever, and ask me to tell you a little bit more about it. Again, eventually I will be doing that anyway, but while I'm flailing around looking for inspiration it would be awesome if I had some... prompts, I suppose you could call them? Then maybe I'd post a profile or a character sketch or a drawing or something featuring whatever it was you were curious about, assuming it's not too spoilery (though I am making an effort to avoid drawing attention to potential spoilers in the first place... assuming the project isn't so jumbled that I don't actually know what is and isn't a spoiler at this point).

I was going to come up with a more "organized" way to go about these suggestions. Originally it involved a train station. And maybe I'll still show you a bit of that train station later, but for now I need to think a little harder about what I'm doing with this stuff and spend a bit more time with summaries and crap. In the meantime, go look at the new page and tell me what intrigues you (hard as it will be to choose given the staggering variety of subjects currently available). Or something.

Sorry I haven't done much recently; while this school quarter wasn't as bad as last one *shudder*, it still hit kind of hard in March and so I haven't had a lot of time for anything fun. I have a little less than two weeks off starting Wednesday, though, and in addition to catching up with some other stuff I have to do I promise (no, seriously you guys, hold me to this) that I will get the site moving forward with new stuff, with getting around to affiliation requests/trade offers, etc.. No progress on the interactive fiction The Thing I mentioned, but hopefully I'll have time to do more there, too; in the meantime, though, I'd like to get that other game thing I mentioned done.

The primary reason I'm posting today, though, aside from the quick apology, is to say that it appears as though my affiliate image buttons are sort-of-broken for absolutely no good reason. I have them all saved on my own server, I haven't changed the way I link to them, I can still see the images on the server/can see them if I go to them through the browser URL bar, I can show other images just fine... and I can see them in some of my browsers but not in others. I cannot even begin to fathom why this is (and it may in fact be something very easy to fix or only an isolated case on my end), but I don't have time to look into it seriously right now and so have just thrown some quick text links in next to the images. If you can see the images, oh well, they're going to have some text next to them for a bit; if you can't, now the links work and it doesn't look like the section is completely empty. Affiliates, I'm sorry if you happen to be experiencing whatever the hell problem I'm having and it looked like the buttons were down. I'll fix it as soon as I'm properly able to.