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.

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.

Apparently I have a Tumblr now. I'll be using it mostly for small things like pictures or fakemon previews or what have you; longer stuff, and probably most fanfic-related stuff, is still going to go on the WordPress blog (though, as an aside, I am tentatively considering switching back to LJ for reasons). Follow it if you want, I guess; I'll probably follow you back, at least if I know you. Still kind of figuring out how it works.

I'm not going to bother adding it to the Network Updates thing up there, since it's mostly going to be little things and will be updated more frequently than my main blog, at the very least. But it is in the menu now and it's, uh, there if you want to look at it or something.

Actual progress on actual site-related stuff pending.

Need to post more often, man.

Anyway! Two things. First of all, I've finally updated the About page, on the off chance that you care; still have a bit of information to flesh out here and there, but it'll do for now. Second, and more importantly, I added a new page: Projects. It has a list of (most of) my current fanprojects on it. Confusing and counterintuitive, I know, but bear with me here.

Right now it really is little more than a list of titles with some cursory descriptions here and there; as I get more work done on these projects, though (this includes writing more posts about them when I get a chance), I'll be adding links and subpages and stuff to it. It would also be cool if maybe you guys could mention the stuff that looks interesting, whether that's settings or characters or the whole thing or theoretically whatever, and ask me to tell you a little bit more about it. Again, eventually I will be doing that anyway, but while I'm flailing around looking for inspiration it would be awesome if I had some... prompts, I suppose you could call them? Then maybe I'd post a profile or a character sketch or a drawing or something featuring whatever it was you were curious about, assuming it's not too spoilery (though I am making an effort to avoid drawing attention to potential spoilers in the first place... assuming the project isn't so jumbled that I don't actually know what is and isn't a spoiler at this point).

I was going to come up with a more "organized" way to go about these suggestions. Originally it involved a train station. And maybe I'll still show you a bit of that train station later, but for now I need to think a little harder about what I'm doing with this stuff and spend a bit more time with summaries and crap. In the meantime, go look at the new page and tell me what intrigues you (hard as it will be to choose given the staggering variety of subjects currently available). Or something.