Six years, man. Six years I've been poking away, slowly and not very steadily, at this silly little corner of the internet. I wish I could say I had an appropriate gift to commemorate the occasion, but all I've had the time to do recently is a backend thing that probably isn't all that interesting for the rest of you. I made a few tweaks to the site so that fanfics are now considered their own type of post—they're a bit easier for me to sort through on my end, they don't get mixed in with the stream of regular posts anymore, at least unless I explicitly decide to make them show up again (if you scroll through the home page updates you'll notice all the actual fanfic/drabble posts aren't listed), they have a better URL structure (/fanfics/fanfic-name rather than /year/month/fanfic-name) and in the future I'll be able to change the layout of fanfic pages to something a little more custom with minimal fuss—show a different set of tag/category/recent post links, for example, or increase the line length so it's not so narrow. Look, I know it's thrilling but you need to at least try to contain your excitement. Don't need you exploding all over my new fanfic setup.

...then again, six isn't generally as big a deal as five, so maybe the low-key "gift" is not as unfortunate as it could've been. Ah, well. Now back to the struggle to get at least one more new bit of writing done before the year is out so there's actually something to put in this newfangled categorization!

(And do let me know if you notice any problems while browsing through the fics! As with everything nice I try to do for AO I hit a bunch of snags while trying to set this up, and while I'm pretty sure I've taken care of all of them there's always a chance that something is still fouled up. I do know that the links in the previous posts announcing fic updates are broken because I didn't adjust them to the new URLs out of laziness, but if anything else is wrong, tell me and I'll try to fix it!)

If you're seeing this post, the server move is complete! Welcome! There were a few hiccups here and there but I'm pretty sure everything's settled. Thanks for your patience while I packed everything up and moved to my new internets home.

Now that the gallery is no longer messed up I am finally able to update the Fanart page with some pictures of Swanna, Mega Mewtwo Y and Goomy, so if you didn't already see those on my Tumblr you can check them out here. I also added two new drabbles for Fennekin and Espurr, and as you can guess based on their debut and the title of this update that means that 649 mini (and, by extension, the poor, neglected 649) have finally had their names changed. From now until whenever Gen VII mozies on in and messes everything up again, these projects will be known as 718 and 718 mini.

Now to attend to a few other things, relax a little and then commence panicking about what I'm going to do for AO's sixth birthday in a little over a week. Ciao!

Hey everyone! Nothing new to report on the content front just yet, but I am going to be changing hosts for what is hopefully the last time in a good while. This host works just fine for what I'm currently doing, but the new host will give me more space and make it easier to... experiment with certain other projects I've been wanting to try out.

As such, there's the usual chance that things will be down later this week (Thursday-Friday-ish) as domains propagate and files move and all that fancy stuff. Hopefully everything will go smoothly, but if not, you can try checking my Tumblr and see if I've made any progress updates there. Sorry for the inconvenience, and see you all on the other side! Probably with a few new pictures, too, now that the gallery seems to be unborkened at long, long last.

A double apology, first off, because not only has Altered Origin been sitting dormant since April but I somehow failed to mention that the too-often-teased "Big Project" is finally done. And has been for over three months. Uuuuuggggh.

But yes: after nearly two years of hard work, stalling, hard work, complications, stalling and last-minute panic, Pokémon Turquoise is finally open. In a nutshell, it's a forum-based RP in which you can explore the New Logora region from the Phoenixdex and catch all of its fancy fakemon and stuff. It's pretty casual (no paragraph requirements or anything) and easy to pick up, and there's going to be some expansion into additional new regions in the near future, so do come give it a look if that sounds like it'd be up your alley! (I'll also add Turquoise to the Network dropdown in the menu as soon as I can figure out why that's acting up now.)

After five+ months of silence I only have three additional 649 mini stories, but they're finally uploaded: see Ivysaur's here, and Tangela and Gyarados's here. In brighter news, I did make a teensy bit of headway on some possible fanfic ideas a few weeks ago; you can see some excerpts from those in the post immediately preceding this one. How much further I'll get with those, especially the first one, remains to be seen, but in the meantime they're not half bad (if I do say so myself) and they're a little meatier than all those dinky drabbles.

Part of the reason things have been so quiet is that I finally landed an actual job, and on top of the full-time hours it has a lengthy commute that doesn't leave me quite as much free time as I'd anticipated. I fully intend for AO to remain open and sharing some kind of content for as long as possible, however, so I'll do my best to make do with the free time I have and get around to fixing some of the site's issues and, hopefully, getting back on track with something resembling regular updates.

...dammit.

I don't have any excuses, aside from that if it's any consolation the Big Project is tantalizingly close to being done. Actually keeping up with any writing or any progress on anything else at all has been like pulling teeth, although I did at least write six more 649 mini stories in February: Ariados, Pineco, Swellow, Sealeo, Shelmet and Genesect. (Man that is a lot of bugs. Huh.) I was hoping to post them in the usual batch of ~ten, but since it's been well over a month since I wrote those and the other four are nowhere to be found... yeah.

Also, as a sidenote, there still appear to be some issues, mostly on my end, with the fanart gallery (+ the other stuff that uses the same interface like the sparkly lists and the free renders page). It's gotten to the point where I think I might need to change how I'm handling it entirely; I hope not because that's a lot of rearranging and reuploading and rewriting descriptions to do, but it may end up that way. I really need to focus on the final stretch of the Big Project for now, but once I can finally put all this grand opening nonsense behind me I'll hopefully have more time to troubleshoot (and to write, of course). Once the troubleshooting is done I have at least two more pictures to upload to the gallery, too.

In the meantime, if you are continually frustrated by the lack of new things to read, my old affiliate 6th Floor is back under a new name—Lavender Town—and is going strong again, so you can drop by there and check out some creepypastas while you wait for me to not be totally inadequate.