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.)

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short version is that I had some software uploaded on a different domain for testing purposes that I intentionally left outdated at first; after a while I no longer needed it and just forgot about it.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.

Sorry I haven't done much recently; while this school quarter wasn't as bad as last one *shudder*, it still hit kind of hard in March and so I haven't had a lot of time for anything fun. I have a little less than two weeks off starting Wednesday, though, and in addition to catching up with some other stuff I have to do I promise (no, seriously you guys, hold me to this) that I will get the site moving forward with new stuff, with getting around to affiliation requests/trade offers, etc.. No progress on the interactive fiction The Thing I mentioned, but hopefully I'll have time to do more there, too; in the meantime, though, I'd like to get that other game thing I mentioned done.

The primary reason I'm posting today, though, aside from the quick apology, is to say that it appears as though my affiliate image buttons are sort-of-broken for absolutely no good reason. I have them all saved on my own server, I haven't changed the way I link to them, I can still see the images on the server/can see them if I go to them through the browser URL bar, I can show other images just fine... and I can see them in some of my browsers but not in others. I cannot even begin to fathom why this is (and it may in fact be something very easy to fix or only an isolated case on my end), but I don't have time to look into it seriously right now and so have just thrown some quick text links in next to the images. If you can see the images, oh well, they're going to have some text next to them for a bit; if you can't, now the links work and it doesn't look like the section is completely empty. Affiliates, I'm sorry if you happen to be experiencing whatever the hell problem I'm having and it looked like the buttons were down. I'll fix it as soon as I'm properly able to.

Erk, only a few days before my break ends and I've only just started the ASB guide. Whoops. See the title for the explanation. Damn fancy shiny new game news distracting me from everything, feh. I'm still going to try and have it done as soon as possible, of course, as I do have the old guide and several other things I've written as a decent baseline. Now that I have a few other obligations cleared up I should be able to get some work done.

Also re: title, there might be something else on the horizon (I bet you can't guess what it might be, because I'm totally not predictable like that). I still haven't actually committed to doing it yet, and if I do I still have a few decisions to make as to how I'm going to present it, but... yeah. There's also that. :p

Next update will come in a day or two and will contain moar ASB nonesense! Maybe! I hope!

I'm still here, I'm still here! The school quarter is winding down and some final projects are dragging me down with them, so I haven't had a great deal of time to update lately. I don't have a lot of time to update now–I'll wait until the quarter is over to bring up all the stuff I need to, and as you can imagine with a gap this long that's rather a lot–but I'm just posting this news item really quickly to let you know that I *do* have some new stuff planned in addition to everything else I wanted to say. One of my school projects is easily adapted into what should be a pretty entertaining game; it's all programmed and everything, and I just need to add a little bit to it before it's ready. I'm hoping that I'll be able to add it to the site sometime next week, at which point I'll also be able to cover everything else I wanted to say. Hang tight until then, and I'm sorry for keeping you all waiting for a month.