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!)

It's my baby's fourth birthday today, and unfortunately due to final projects and other obligations I was unable to finish the move or get any substantial content ready in time. Sadface. Buuut one of those projects happens to be fandom-related, so in lieu of anything else to show you guys I guess you can see this instead. It's from the webcomic Lackadaisy (go read it plz) and has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon, but as this is "technically not a Pokémon fansite" it still works out. It's an "interactive" voice-acted (all by me) version of one of the extra backstory comics, and it is very silly and not particularly fancy and didn't come out the way I thought it would but oh well! It's done for now. Got more projects to finish.

You can see the project here (requires Flash player). I'll probably make it accessible from the main navigation later when I can figure out what I want to do with it. (And maybe clean it up a little. And maybe make Rocky's voice sound more like it does in my head.)

Ideally the next update will be the announcement of the move and the potential downtime warning, followed by the server move, the new layouts and hopefully something more interesting than bad voice acting. Catch you all later.

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.