IMPORTANT EDIT: I forgot to mention that the server change also means a slight change in the email servers I'm using. The address is the same phoenixsong at alteredorigin dot net, but I may not be able to receive any emails you send me for a few hours/days while everything changes over. If your email bounces back to you, wait a day or two and try again; if you need to contact me and it's really important, try to reach me at one of the sites/forums on the contact page. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you're seeing this, that means the move to the new server was successfully completed at last. Welcome to the new place! Take a look around and see what's new:

• The biggest one: Insubstantiality (my fandom/fanwork blog) is now accessible on Altered Origin and can be found here. The old WordPress.com blog is still here if you need it (although you shouldn't, because all posts and comments have been moved here), but it will no longer be updated and it has a post with huge angry shouty letters telling you to come over here for new stuff anyway.
• Likewise, 649's stories and information have been moved over here as well. You can now keep up with all that, or at least what little there is to keep up with, over here in the fanfic section.
• The Phoenixdex has also been moved to the new server, though it's obviously still a separate site. I haven't yet figured out how I want to crosspost its updates over here, or otherwise stick an RSS feed somewhere, for those of you who want reminders to check in on it, so for now if you want to know what's new in the world of my fakemans then you'll have to *gasp* actually navigate over to the home page and see for yourself. Oh how grievously I have inconvenienced you.
• The domains/subdomains dementedchicken.net, phoenixdex.dementedchicken.net and 649.dementedchicken.net are all now officially dead and will point to boring landing pages (if anything at all) instead of redirecting you here. Seriously, stop using that domain. This one is prettier.
• New layout, obviously. It's pretty different from the previous layouts, but I wanted something a little simpler and cleaner for a change. Note that it's still a work in progress, and I'll be tweaking it for a little while to come. The other layout (which will be light-text-on-dark-background for those of you who prefer that, like me) will also be relatively clean and simple, but somewhere down the line I can make another of those "artwork" layouts or whatever you want to call them for those who miss their Morty or Sceptile.
• New affiliate, too! We All Live in a Pokémon World is one of the oldest fansites still up and kicking today, and it's full of a lot of interesting reads about Pokémon, its continued appeal and why it's a lot more awesome than people often give it credit for being. (Not like any of you nice people need to be told that twice, right?)
• Update comments are back; the new site does a better job keeping spam out without needing a silly captcha, and it's also a bit more prominent so people actually remember that the capability for commenting is there. Not that I expect people to have much to say about these updates aside from whatever goes on on the blog, but it's there if you wish to avail yourself of it!
• A few urls have changed here and there, namely the links to the individual zodiac pages (though the url for the zodiac landing page, the one all the little images actually link to, is the same), though aside from that I don't think there were a ton of people bookmarking or pointing to any of them. If you did, well... shouldn't be that hard to find again, right?
• Content-wise, I finally got around to moving my (unfinished) HeartGold blog over here, visible right behind this link. Stupid foreign-language shenanigans go?
• I also gave the sparklies page a bit of a revamp so it was a little better-organized and not so much a giant list of tables you had to scroll all around to see. Notably, I've decided I'm no longer being all that stingy with some of my sparklies, so just about everything is up for trade.

I do believe that's everything, then! Thanks for your patience while everything was shuffled around and whatnot. There may be a few hiccups here and there while I tweak or update a few things; if you spot any broken links or if anything else seems off, let me know about it (or use the comments, aherpderp). Enjoy the new site, and enjoy your holidays and the rest of the year if I don't drop in before then!

At long last I'm finally ready to move the domain over to the new server. I'd like to get the move started on Tuesday the 20th or a hair sooner. The domain name changes may take around 24 hours to propagate, though, so Altered Origin and the Phoenixdex may appear to be down until Wednesday or even Thursday depending on how long the changeover takes.

The new version of the site is just about ready to go; there may be a few pages (primarily the Platinum blog) that take a little longer to show up, but just about everything else you're already familiar with, including the moved Insubstantiality and 649, is already there. I only had time to finish one of the new layouts (and even then it's a little cobbled together, eh; it'll get a bit more polish in the days to come), but I hope I'll have time to finish up the other one before/shortly after Christmas.

The big announcement about the changes and what they mean will stay up there at the top until the move is complete.

Apologies in advance if this move takes a while, but it's a necessary evil and will hopefully benefit the site and make things easier for me down the road. There should be a few new little things (like a new affiliate and some other stuff) waiting on both sites at the other end of the tunnel, though!

Turns out that yes, Altered Origin and the rest of its network will be moving to another server sometime soonish.

Things that will be changing, in no particular order:

• The current layouts will be replaced entirely. They may come back, at least in a modified form, at some unspecified point in the future, but for now I'm tired of them and I can do better. Sorry if you were madly in love with Storm at Sea or anything.
• 649 and Insubstantiality will become part of Altered Origin proper. Neither one will be a distinct website anymore. There are multiple reasons for this change, none of which are really worth boring you fine people with. Suffice it to say that there's hardly enough on either one to justify their remaining separate and that I'd like to handle any future fanfics I post in the same manner as the 649 project. 649 will become a part of Altered Origin's fanfic section, and a new blog section will be added to keep the sort of stuff that's currently on Insubstantiality separate from the site news updates. The Phoenixdex will remain a separate website, as it can't easily be incorporated into anything else and it doesn't make sense to do so anyway.
• The dementedchicken.net domain will no longer redirect to this site (and likewise, phoenixdex.dementedchicken.net and 649.dementedchicken.net will stop redirecting to their specific sites). alteredorigin.net and its subdomains will still work, of course, but moving means that I'll have to give up the old domain entirely and just let it die. Hopefully none of you are still accessing the sites with those domains; if you are, stop that. Really. Get used to the new domain and fix your bookmarks or whatever.

As I mentioned last update, I'd really like to get this done by December 3rd; that's not looking terribly likely at this point considering all the changes I'll have to make and the fact that I still have a lot of other work to do, though, so I'll start picking away at the workload now and see if I can't think of at least one thing to add to the site for its birthday in the meantime. Le sigh. Gotta be something interesting that I can finish up in two weeks.

I'll make another announcement whenever the move is getting closer; while the changeover should be relatively quick there will probably be downtime while the domain is pointed to the new server, so be aware of that.

Sorry if you got hit by any downtime while I gave the site a quick upgrade, although I tend to do these things at such an unreasonable hour that I doubt anyone was too severely affected.

While upgrading I decided to ditch the comment form; no one was really using it except for the spambots that would occasionally get through. There's still email and the rest of the stuff on the contact page if you really need to get in touch with me. One less thing to worry about cleaning out, mostly.

As for large changes... there is a possibility that I'll be switching hosts sometime in the near future. Ideally if this does happen it will be quick, painless and have minimum impact for anyone trying to access the site, and the domain name should stay the same and all that. (It is highly likely that I'll have to give up the dementedchicken.net domain name, though, which means that it will no longer redirect to alteredorigin.net. If you're still using that domain for anything... stop that.) It'd be sort of nice if I could get this together in time for the site's fourth birthday in early December especially since working on a crapload of other stuff has left me pretty much no time to come up with any other suitable "gift" updates, oops, but given that I'm still not 100% sure it's going to happen and it'll involve spending money and fiddling with servers and other such unpleasant things, I make no promises there. Hang tight for now and we'll see what happens; I'll make an announcement well in advance if anything big ends up changing.

Speaking of changes, I've been in the mood to try spicing up the current layouts a little... or else just getting rid of some of them entirely and putting up some that are a little cleaner. Technically I could just leave all of these up and put up newer versions in addition to these, but I'd rather just replace them unless someone's dying to keep any in particular. It's late now and I've got other stuff to do, but I'll probably put up a poll or something in the near future and see what sort of response I get before I take a chainsaw to Warbird or Apparitions or anything.

This concludes your irregularly-scheduled 2 AM update. Should be back soon with more details on the layout situation and the possible server move.

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.)