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.

Fourteen new 649 mini drabbles today, almost all actually done something resembling on time, haha. There're some updates to previous posts for Charmeleon, Caterpie, Pikachu, Kadabra and Liepard, and then new posts containing Hitmonlee, Hitmonchan, Furret, Wobbuffet, Skarmory, Tyrogue, Hitmontop, Sableye and Meditite. Whew! Hopefully this is only the first of many decent-sized updates to the thing. The new posts are currently missing tags because something seems to be wrong with the site's backend, so I'll have to fix that as soon as I know what's going on there. (EDIT: Tag problem resolved now, though I did notice a separate problem with the fanart gallery in that its lightbox effect has stopped working. I've switched to a different lightbox temporarily so that the image captions are still visible.)

While I'm here, I'll also say that I'm working on a full-size one-shot for 649 proper. The general idea is that it'll be done by my birthday, partially so it can serve as my gift to myself and partially because I'd like it out of the way so I can start something else a little bigger on that day. I am doing a bit of work now and I do still have to hustle on the Big Project, but it shouldn't be a terribly long story and I'm hoping I can pull it off. (Ideally with enough time left over to actually sit on it for a few days and proofread it properly so that the illogical shenaniganry that was My Oshawott Never Smiles doesn't happen again.)

...guess I'm gonna have to rename these projects soonish, aren't I? Damn you, Gen VI, damn you and the excruciating extra renaming effort you have heaped upon me. :P Hurry up and leak the full pokédex size so I can get that over and done with already.