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This is the part where I start stealing memes

March 05, 2011 • Posted in Blog and tagged

The part you've all been waiting for, I'm sure. I do have another post still in the draft stages that is sort of like an expansion of this only not really (and which I would, ftr, be okay with other people stealing even though it's not supposed to be a meme), but it's taking a while to write and I've seen people doing this and it looks halfway interesting so.

Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

Upon request, I will post a random line or two from any of these you choose. Assuming that the file adds up to a full line, that is.

My in-progress stuff is kind of all over everywhere, sort of haphazardly organized by file type, so uh I'mma just go dive through a whole bunch of folders until I find stuff that a) is not just a tangle of notes and b) is not absolutely mortifyingly bad. (Assuming anything has even gotten far enough to be mortifyingly bad.) Some of these are old and will probably never be touched again, but I guess I'll shove 'em in here anyway.

All together now

March 04, 2011 • Posted in Updates and tagged

Spent the last several days fighting with stuff in an effort to consolidate the updates for all of my projects in one place, and finally managed to get it working. From now on, whenever 649, the Phoenixdex or Insubstantiality updates, you should see it here as well as any updates to AO itself. It may take a little while for the feed to refresh itself and so updates may not appear here right away, but they should show up quickly enough. The feeds for the non-AO sites are truncated so as not to take up a whole lot of space if you don't care about them (well, they're supposed to be... still need to work on getting the Phoenixdex updates to do that), and they're also prefixed with tags so you can identify which update came from where at a glance. All you need to do to see the full text of the update in question in its proper context is click on one of the title links. Full update archives for each of those can obviously be found on their respective sites.

I also added a new "Site Updates" page that holds only the updates for Altered Origin and is effectively exactly the same as the home page was before. There's a handy link to it right up at the top there so you can "filter" out just the AO-related updates if that's all you want to see. (You'll also have to use that page, or else the direct links to the individual update articles, if you want to get to the comment form. I'll work on that when I get the chance.)

There are still a few kinks to work out, predictably, but this should be perfectly functional for now and will hopefully make the other sites a little easier to keep up with than they were with just the little "last updated" bar that was at the top before. As with anything else, let me know if something suddenly breaks horribly.

stuuuuffff

February 21, 2011 • Posted in Updates and tagged

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.

>GET POKÉDEX: Thoughts on Interactive Fanfiction

February 18, 2011 • Posted in Blog and tagged

Long, long ago (the precise date is unclear, but as far as much of my audience is concerned "back in the days when Jesus battled the dinosaurs" is a fair estimate), a man named William Crowther wrote a little program called Adventure. Adventure wasn't much by today's high standards of gaming. It ran on computers that had little to no graphical capabilities and was rendered entirely in text descriptions, and the only way to accomplish anything was to type simple, imperative commands like "GO WEST" or "TAKE AXE" at a prompt and hope that it understood what you were trying to do. The object of the game was to explore a textual simulation of a massive Kentucky cave system—a slightly embellished simulation, unless it was in fact possible to find angry dwarves and giant snakes in Kentucky in the '70's—and collect as much treasure as you could get your hands on without falling into a pit and smashing your head open. Navigation was confusing, puzzles could be tricky, there were two sprawling mazes to get lost in and the aforementioned pits were distressingly commonplace. But people played it, and they loved it, and the genre of games known as "text adventures" was born.

For a while, text adventures were predominantly commercial affairs, made by companies like Infocom and Level 9 that produced stories and adventures in all sorts of genres–the best known, even to those unfamiliar with this genre, are probably Infocom's Zork games, the ones responsible for introducing the world to the man-eating, light-fearing grues and a few other things that have slipped into common fantasy parody parlance. They dominated the gaming market, people spent hours staring at command prompts and trying to guess what to type to open a locker or catch a Babel fish, and a good time was had by all. But then graphical adventures (like LucasArts's or Sierra's point and click games) found their way into the limelight, followed by games that focused less on complex puzzle-solving and more on other aspects of gaming. Computers got better and better and became relatively inexpensive, and people were no longer satisfied with simple text when the aforementioned graphical games looked more and more inviting and sparkly by the minute. The market for text adventures dwindled, most of the companies that produced it were bought out or went out of business, and the text adventure genre faded into obscurity.

But text adventures didn't just die. Many of the players who loved them so continued to play them, continued to enjoy them because they still exercised a few gaming muscles that the graphics-dependent games of the day never seemed to bother with. There was still something exciting about trying to stumble one's way out of the dark before being eaten by a grue. Gaming companies weren't making text adventures any longer, but its original fans still wanted more–and if they couldn't purchase them, they'd just have to make them themselves.

Nowadays there are online repositories and archives full of amateur-made text adventures, or "interactive fiction" as it's generally called today, and a wide variety of IF authoring systems that make it possible to create IF of your own without having to reinvent the wheel, all available for free download (though there are some commercial works available, and at least one well-known member of the IF community recently quit his dayjob to make commercial IF full-time). Playing IF also usually requires downloading an interpreter, the virtual machine software necessary to play games made in a specific format, though you only need one interpreter to play any and all games in the corresponding format. The interpreter loads the game and displays that infamous, intimidating ">" command prompt, just waiting for you to type your first command and take your first foray into the author's world. It all seems deceptively simple, but a quick look behind the scenes at any decent authoring system will reveal a pretty powerful engine, and taking a few games for a test run can show you some complex, involved games that, when made well, require quite a bit of creative thought to solve–or, in the case of some "non-game" titles, perform feats you wouldn't expect from programs the likes of Adventure. I've only just started dabbling in these sorts of things, and let me tell you, man, mind blown.

New affiliate + sibling site + plans for stuff and things

February 02, 2011 • Posted in Updates and tagged

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.

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