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.

Spent the last several days fighting with stuff in an effort to consolidate the updates for all of my projects in one place, and finally managed to get it working. From now on, whenever 649, the Phoenixdex or Insubstantiality updates, you should see it here as well as any updates to AO itself. It may take a little while for the feed to refresh itself and so updates may not appear here right away, but they should show up quickly enough. The feeds for the non-AO sites are truncated so as not to take up a whole lot of space if you don't care about them (well, they're supposed to be... still need to work on getting the Phoenixdex updates to do that), and they're also prefixed with tags so you can identify which update came from where at a glance. All you need to do to see the full text of the update in question in its proper context is click on one of the title links. Full update archives for each of those can obviously be found on their respective sites.

I also added a new "Site Updates" page that holds only the updates for Altered Origin and is effectively exactly the same as the home page was before. There's a handy link to it right up at the top there so you can "filter" out just the AO-related updates if that's all you want to see. (You'll also have to use that page, or else the direct links to the individual update articles, if you want to get to the comment form. I'll work on that when I get the chance.)

There are still a few kinks to work out, predictably, but this should be perfectly functional for now and will hopefully make the other sites a little easier to keep up with than they were with just the little "last updated" bar that was at the top before. As with anything else, let me know if something suddenly breaks horribly.

Still trying to get back on top of all the stuff I've let slip. This includes the affiliation requests I've received over the past few weeks—I'm really sorry it's taking me so long to reply to those (to all of my emails in general, actually), and I'll get back to you as soon as I can get a proper look at your sites. I do have one new affiliate to mention today, though. 6th Floor is a relatively new but definitely original site that focuses primarily on collecting and sharing Pokémon creepypastas and their related material; go check 'em out. We'll see if there aren't a few more shiny buttons to stick at the bottom of the page shortly!

I uploaded a new picture to the Pokémon section of the fanart gallery a few days ago. It involves a really, really terrible pun that I suspect I should be slapped for making, but I guess it's pretty cool.

I finished that post about The Thing for Insubstantiality; it's kind of sort of really very long, but go check it out, pretty please. I really want to know if I'm the only person who thinks this would be an interesting idea. (The Phoenixdex and 649 have also been updated recently, just in case you're following those.

Aaaaand that's all I have to say for now.

Two shiny new buttons at the bottom of the site! I am, how you say, flattered!

Indigo Plateau is a site that's been around for a while in various incarnations, if I recall correctly, and recently they've put a lot of work into creating an awesome and promising Pokémon community. They also have several other projects and articles posted or underway, and in general the place is definitely worth a visit if you're looking for something more than Yet Another Bad Serebii Clone.

I hardly imagine I have to give the second one much of an introduction, considering that I'm pretty sure most of my recurring visitors first found Altered Origin through the forums there, but for the sake of those who have been living under a rock and don't know what The Cave of Dragonflies is I'll sum it up anyway. TCoD is a large, long-running fansite with a ton of original content, both serious and informational and fun and creative, and is home to some of the best-known Pokémon personality quizzes and (and possibly also some of the best-known fanfics) on the internet. The aforementioned forums have also pretty much been my Pokémon internets home for... oh, god, going on five years now. It's an honor to be affiliated with Dragonfree, and you are seriously depriving yourself of a lot of awesome stuff if you've managed to avoid visiting TCoD thus far.

As for AO itself, well, there should hopefully be a lot of interesting stuff on the horizon. There is, of course, the ever-present Unexplained The Thing, which in light of recent Unexplained Research I have decided I am ready to start speaking a bit more openly about; it's not necessarily that it's supposed to be a huge secret or anything, but I wanted to be sure of a few things first and I generally don't like talking about stuff until I'm properly committed to some solid course of action. I'm halfway through writing up a nice, juicy blog post about it for Insubstantiality, so look forward to that sometime soon; it's something I'd definitely like to get some opinions on if you're so inclined, because it's about rather a lot more than just me and my stuff. At this point I will go as far as to say that The Things (as there are actually two I'm sort of poking at at the moment) will be games of one sort or another; one is probably better described as an oddball, glorified quiz, but... meh. Wait for the blog post, I'll speak more coherently about it there.

Speaking of games, a recent read through the swap meet puzzle has given me a new idea for another one, possibly even one that will be updated on a regular an irregular basis instead of being a one-off thing like said swap meet if it's not too much trouble to keep up. (I'll probably also set aside a little time to come up with some more non-skitty items for porygonfindsskitty, by the way, just so there's a little more variety in there. Or you could suggest one yourself if you wanted.)

I'm also doing my best to shore up the plot, storyline, etc. of at least one of my fanfics, probably Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen, so I can finally get another working draft started as soon as possible; I probably won't start posting it anywhere until a reasonable enough draft is actually complete, as I don't want to risk getting people's hopes up if I end up taking too long to figure out where stuff is going, but the fact that this story has basically no middle has driven me crazy for long enough and dammit I want to get started. So there's that, as distant in the future as it may or may not be.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I don't have the attention span of a goldfish and that I'll be able to churn this stuff out right away, even with a slightly lighter school workload than the hellish mess I put up with last quarter, but funstuffs are definitely on the way. This includes some of the stuff on the to-do list, of course; the "cosmogony" I recently added to the list needs to be finished pretty soon in particular, as it also happens to tie into Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen‘s background.

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.