Took a tiny, tiny break from being bogged down in a whole bunch of stuff to make a few brief updates to the porygonfindsskitty game: I added a few more visitor-suggested non-skitty items and finally swapped out those dull squares for poké ball icons. Thanks for the nsi suggestions, those of you who sent them in, and enjoy the little update. :)

I'm sort of tempted to rewrite the game in JavaScript instead of Flash since I've been meaning to get better at that sort of thing anyway. It'll have to wait for when things quiet down, though.

Been quite busy with a few projects that are not, unfortunately, directly related to AO itself, sorry. At least the other network sites are experiencing a brief spurt of activity, or at least behind the scenes preparation for visible activity. The Phoenixdex is getting ready for a big reveal, and there are some tasty ficbits (and a few more still to come!) on Insubstantiality if you're up for some light reading—and hey, maybe I can even finish some of those ficbits up so the full versions can be posted on 649, which has otherwise been ignored hardcore all year. Oops!

In the meantime, though, I did recently gain a new affiliate: scroll on down to the bottom of the page and check out the link to Takharii's Stuff, a neat little website full of checklists and other printables you can use to help you complete your pokédex or your TCG collection.

I'm still debating whether or not I want to participate in NaNoWriMo this year—school's not going to kick my butt quite as hard this fall as it did last year, but I do have a lot of other things I should probably be catching up on with that "extra free time". It might also be an ample opportunity to get some more revision work done on one of my previous NaNos and thus get it ready to be posted here and elsewhere... we'll see what I ultimately decide. Either way, hopefully this drought of actual useful or entertaining content won't last too much longer.

(If nothing else, I'm probably going to be updating the ASB reffing calculator soonish, and I may also have a few additional silly miscellaneous pages to toss up here, so be on the lookout for those... probably in lieu of actual useful content.)

A small one, granted, but a content update nonetheless! I've added a few new arenas to the ASB Stock Arenas page for you to mess around with; I also cleaned it up a little while I was at it.

Nothing else to report for now, sadly, largely because I'm still busy with a lot of other large projects. AO is far from forgotten, however; aside from a possible new affiliate it will be a while before anything noteworthy happens, but I do still plan to knock out some of the stuff on that to-do list, start a few new pages and do a little maintenance work around here, especially in regards to the layouts and similar. I haven't actually started on the fanfic I wanted to write for the Big Bang (see the most recent Insubstantiality update for more on that) and might potentially change the story I'm working on, but by god I intend to finish that sucker before the deadline and post it here and elsewhere.

Got a new affiliate a while ago, Absol's Moonlit Cave. Some of you may remember when the site was around a few years ago—it's making a comeback now, and it's still just as awesome a site as it was before.

Speaking of affiliates, I realize that there were several affiliation requests that I hadn't gotten around to replying to yet. Unfortunately I can't find those emails again, so if you sent one before and are still waiting for a response then send it again and nag me to look at it sooner this time. Sorry about that!

I've been busy with several projects that are not directly related to AO, which is why nothing particularly interesting has happened here aside from that brief spate of downtime. It may be a little while until those settle down, but I'd like to get back to some of that to-do list when they do. I'm also probably going to redo the ASB reffing calculators in something other than Flash (probably just JavaScript) so that it's hopefully a little easier for people to use. If nothing else that should fix some of the strange problems people have been having with it. If you check the Insubstantiality update a little below this one you'll also notice that I'm going to begin work on a new fanfic soon, and that fic will be posted here when it's finished.

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.