Still trying to get back on top of all the stuff I've let slip. This includes the affiliation requests I've received over the past few weeks—I'm really sorry it's taking me so long to reply to those (to all of my emails in general, actually), and I'll get back to you as soon as I can get a proper look at your sites. I do have one new affiliate to mention today, though. 6th Floor is a relatively new but definitely original site that focuses primarily on collecting and sharing Pokémon creepypastas and their related material; go check 'em out. We'll see if there aren't a few more shiny buttons to stick at the bottom of the page shortly!

I uploaded a new picture to the Pokémon section of the fanart gallery a few days ago. It involves a really, really terrible pun that I suspect I should be slapped for making, but I guess it's pretty cool.

I finished that post about The Thing for Insubstantiality; it's kind of sort of really very long, but go check it out, pretty please. I really want to know if I'm the only person who thinks this would be an interesting idea. (The Phoenixdex and 649 have also been updated recently, just in case you're following those.

Aaaaand that's all I have to say for now.

Two shiny new buttons at the bottom of the site! I am, how you say, flattered!

Indigo Plateau is a site that's been around for a while in various incarnations, if I recall correctly, and recently they've put a lot of work into creating an awesome and promising Pokémon community. They also have several other projects and articles posted or underway, and in general the place is definitely worth a visit if you're looking for something more than Yet Another Bad Serebii Clone.

I hardly imagine I have to give the second one much of an introduction, considering that I'm pretty sure most of my recurring visitors first found Altered Origin through the forums there, but for the sake of those who have been living under a rock and don't know what The Cave of Dragonflies is I'll sum it up anyway. TCoD is a large, long-running fansite with a ton of original content, both serious and informational and fun and creative, and is home to some of the best-known Pokémon personality quizzes and (and possibly also some of the best-known fanfics) on the internet. The aforementioned forums have also pretty much been my Pokémon internets home for... oh, god, going on five years now. It's an honor to be affiliated with Dragonfree, and you are seriously depriving yourself of a lot of awesome stuff if you've managed to avoid visiting TCoD thus far.

As for AO itself, well, there should hopefully be a lot of interesting stuff on the horizon. There is, of course, the ever-present Unexplained The Thing, which in light of recent Unexplained Research I have decided I am ready to start speaking a bit more openly about; it's not necessarily that it's supposed to be a huge secret or anything, but I wanted to be sure of a few things first and I generally don't like talking about stuff until I'm properly committed to some solid course of action. I'm halfway through writing up a nice, juicy blog post about it for Insubstantiality, so look forward to that sometime soon; it's something I'd definitely like to get some opinions on if you're so inclined, because it's about rather a lot more than just me and my stuff. At this point I will go as far as to say that The Things (as there are actually two I'm sort of poking at at the moment) will be games of one sort or another; one is probably better described as an oddball, glorified quiz, but... meh. Wait for the blog post, I'll speak more coherently about it there.

Speaking of games, a recent read through the swap meet puzzle has given me a new idea for another one, possibly even one that will be updated on a regular an irregular basis instead of being a one-off thing like said swap meet if it's not too much trouble to keep up. (I'll probably also set aside a little time to come up with some more non-skitty items for porygonfindsskitty, by the way, just so there's a little more variety in there. Or you could suggest one yourself if you wanted.)

I'm also doing my best to shore up the plot, storyline, etc. of at least one of my fanfics, probably Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen, so I can finally get another working draft started as soon as possible; I probably won't start posting it anywhere until a reasonable enough draft is actually complete, as I don't want to risk getting people's hopes up if I end up taking too long to figure out where stuff is going, but the fact that this story has basically no middle has driven me crazy for long enough and dammit I want to get started. So there's that, as distant in the future as it may or may not be.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I don't have the attention span of a goldfish and that I'll be able to churn this stuff out right away, even with a slightly lighter school workload than the hellish mess I put up with last quarter, but funstuffs are definitely on the way. This includes some of the stuff on the to-do list, of course; the "cosmogony" I recently added to the list needs to be finished pretty soon in particular, as it also happens to tie into Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen‘s background.

Ayup. Today's my 22nd birthday, and I spent pretty much the entire day trying to address the issues with the styleswitcher. Thankfully, I am the sort of nerd that derives some sick, masochistic pleasure from spending hours doing that sort of thing, so it's not like it was a bad day! For the most part, everything seems to be working now—the switcher should remember your style between visits, and it even changes the layout without having to reload the page you're on, though there may be some brief lag or hiccups while trying to load a style for the first time. The downside is that it won't work if your browser doesn't have JavaScript turned on; I'd wanted to go back to my old PHP styleswitcher, but that one and all the others I tried absolutely refuse to work with the site now, so meh. The styleswitcher can now be found at the top of every page. There are still some kinks to work out here and there, so bear with me; as usual, if anything is horribly, horribly broken, drop me a line and let me know.

The astute visitor will notice that there are four little pokeymans icons in the switcher bar, which is one more icon than there were links in the older styleswitcher. I finally got around to making a style based on that picture of Morty+ghosts in the gallery; it's not super-super different but meh, I wanted a darker style and one with the nav on the right and it works well enough for that. If you're using a really old and crappy version of Internet Explorer then you should probably stick with Storm at Sea, though—Apparitions should be perfectly functional as far as utility goes, but it looks absolutely disgusting in older browsers and that's not my fault so do yourself a favor and either upgrade to IE9 beta or stick with the pretty Lugia style instead.

(I still have a whole bunch of other ideas I'd like to try, but I am going to do my best to restrict myself to two more specific layouts for here and then use the rest of those ideas on other projects. Argh.)

You've also probably noticed the "network updates" bar at the top of this page, which should serve as a nice reminder of when I've updated my other projects so you don't miss out on whatever fascinating idiocy I've recently puked up. (The layout restructuring also means moving my affiliate section down to the footer on all layouts instead of just on Warbird; they're not gone, you just have to scroll a little more to find them.)

I finally got around to updating the zodiac images. They're now a little smaller and arguably a little sleeker-looking, and some of them are sporting new faces to accomodate the fifth generation. I even added an Ophiuchus image for those of you who were paying attention to the recent internet superdrama about the zodiac "changing" and getting a "new sign" added; astrology is silly nonsense and a little actual thought and research will tell you that Ophiuchus is neither anything new nor anything that actually affects most people, but I felt like being passive-aggressive about it and hey, it looks kind of cool. Use it if you want. The old zodiac images will still work and are still accessible, just in case you think they're ugly or now hate me forever for making the Ox Baffuron instead of Miltank.

Aaaand that's about all I've gotten done for... a while now. I have been intensely distracted by rather a lot of stupid stuff to the point of neglecting my usual fandom haunts and pursuits; most of this distraction did have to do with either improvements to the Phoenixdex or else the super-secret The Thing I keep mentioning but never explaining, so it's not a total loss and will count for something down the road, but I imagine that several people are more than a little upset with me right now. Sorry, Negrek/Kusari/Dylan/Lunar/Maple/Metallica Fanboy/Meowth/Jax/school/Internet. I will attempt to get back on track now. Or, well, whenever it's not my birthday anymore.

Well, that's it, then! The site has officially changed names and domains. The Demented Chicken Network is dead, long live Altered Origin. The domain change was uneventful and took a matter of a few moments, as expected; thankfully there was no downtime. You can continue browsing the site as usual. That notice up there will stay at the top of every page for a week or so just to remind people to update any links/bookmarks/references they have. I'll also be emailing my affiliates to inform them of the change.

There are obviously still a lot of references to the old name everywhere, and it may take me a little while to find and destroy all of them. Give me a few days to clean up what I can, in addition to fixing any links I need to. If you still see a mention of the old name somewhere and it's been about a week, though, I probably missed it and I'd appreciate it if you could bring it to my attention via email or whatever.

I don't have that new stuff quite ready yet, but I'll try to get to it this weekend. I also got an interesting idea that fits in nicely with that project thing I'm being so obtuse and vague about; it'll still be a while before you see either of those things because I have quite a bit to read up on before I can start, but they should be fun when they're ready. Will probably also have some layout updates and things to go along with whatever I finish this weekend, and hopefully a styleswitcher fix shortly afterward.

EDIT: Derp, forgot two pretty important things! First of all, I'm changing my primary email address to phoenixsong@alteredorigin.net to reflect the name change. The old address will automatically forward emails to the new one just in case, but please use the new one from now on if you need to get in touch with me; I'll only be replying from that one. Second, while I'm in the mood to get rid of stupid names, the "Inane Nonsense" section has been renamed "Miscellany", which is not quite as interesting but makes me feel less like a five-year-old. (A five-year-old that knows the meaning of the word "inane" for some inexplicable reason, but a five-year-old nonetheless.) Cheerio.

Turns out I didn't have as much school to deal with as I thought! Hooray for snow days, I guess.

Anyway, down to business. I'd like to get started on the domain change as soon as possible, meaning probably this weekend. It may be done as early as tomorrow (Saturday), or it may be as late as Monday depending on how things go, but I'd really like it to be done no later than then. Consider this the official name change and potential downtime warning—I don't anticipate any problems, but just in case, the site may be inaccessible for parts of this weekend/Monday, and there may be some broken links both here and probably on some forums for a while until I fix what I can and alert other people to the change. I apologize in advance if this inconveniences anyone, but hopefully any problems that arise shouldn't take long to sort out.

That additional content won't be ready by the time the change goes down, but I'll try and find something else to add instead and will get to that other thing when I can.

649 and the Phoenixdex, as mentioned earlier, won't be changing over (and therefore have no reason to go down; if Altered Origin is borked you can still go to those sites to entertain yourselves) until a little later when I have more time to look at the process involved with moving them. The new blog thing won't be affected or changing at all because it's not hosted on my server and I have no control over the domain unless I spend unnecessary money. All three of those have been updated recently, by the way—it has been suggested that I find some way to announce updates to my subprojects on this site, but I'd rather not waste entire news updates doing that if I update one of those and don't have anything to say relevant to AO itself. After the domain switch I'll probably spend a few hours figuring out a way to do that, probably just an additional content area at the top of this page or something.