Sorry if you got hit by any downtime while I gave the site a quick upgrade, although I tend to do these things at such an unreasonable hour that I doubt anyone was too severely affected.

While upgrading I decided to ditch the comment form; no one was really using it except for the spambots that would occasionally get through. There's still email and the rest of the stuff on the contact page if you really need to get in touch with me. One less thing to worry about cleaning out, mostly.

As for large changes... there is a possibility that I'll be switching hosts sometime in the near future. Ideally if this does happen it will be quick, painless and have minimum impact for anyone trying to access the site, and the domain name should stay the same and all that. (It is highly likely that I'll have to give up the dementedchicken.net domain name, though, which means that it will no longer redirect to alteredorigin.net. If you're still using that domain for anything... stop that.) It'd be sort of nice if I could get this together in time for the site's fourth birthday in early December especially since working on a crapload of other stuff has left me pretty much no time to come up with any other suitable "gift" updates, oops, but given that I'm still not 100% sure it's going to happen and it'll involve spending money and fiddling with servers and other such unpleasant things, I make no promises there. Hang tight for now and we'll see what happens; I'll make an announcement well in advance if anything big ends up changing.

Speaking of changes, I've been in the mood to try spicing up the current layouts a little... or else just getting rid of some of them entirely and putting up some that are a little cleaner. Technically I could just leave all of these up and put up newer versions in addition to these, but I'd rather just replace them unless someone's dying to keep any in particular. It's late now and I've got other stuff to do, but I'll probably put up a poll or something in the near future and see what sort of response I get before I take a chainsaw to Warbird or Apparitions or anything.

This concludes your irregularly-scheduled 2 AM update. Should be back soon with more details on the layout situation and the possible server move.

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.)