After well over a year since the last blog post, I am returning to post once more. Truthfully, this post was supposed to be created several weeks ago… or maybe two months ago. However, that draft turned out to be very depressing and painful to read, and for reasons that will ultimately become clear in this less depressing and pessimistic version of this post, I scrapped it.

Still, it must be said that the main objective of this post is not to WOW you with my writing skills, rather, I intend to INFORM you with more SPECIFICS as to what I’ve been doing and how I’ve been doing whilst doing those things. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, keep reading, if it’s not interesting to you yet, please stop reading this post and return to wherever you came from. But, before I can get to the NOW, I will start with a bit of the past.

As previously stated in my last post, I started working on site-related things not too long after finishing work on Stars Bleed. However, I wasn’t very clear as to what that entailed. And, in reality, I was working on edits / publishing the book while also working on “The One WILL Become Whole Once More” on-and-off / starting the CoS path as well. So there was more to that than what I had alluded to, and even that isn’t quite the WHOLE of the story… if you get me. : ) Expanding upon that, I also was forced to put off work on “that” image for some time, (while working on edits), to abduct my girlfriend from a few states away. And then my car was destroyed by a deer’s successful suicide attempt (rest in pieces…). And I had recently started my work as a cheese minion (servant???). These were good times, but they were dark times as well.

Living at my mother’s house while searching for a place to rent while working and then working on my book while working on the site while trying to make sure my lovely mother and lovely girlfriend did not murder each other while I was away… was very fun.

However, after finishing TOWBWOM (big image acronym), completing the start of the CoS path, and publishing Stars Bleed I was able to start thinking about where I would focus my efforts. (Although as I said in the previous post, I did keep editing a bit more after the publishing had been finalized, but that was only for a few odd months, and nothing too extensive.)

However, there’s even more to it than that. Before I move on in this story, I must point out that I hit a considerable roadblock when creating the start of the CoS path, since I intended to make it more personal, in line with the intended goal of having the terminals reside within “angusnicneven dot com”, but it was a difficult task to pull off. And though I had considerable time to continue working on things past the puzzles which were stopping people from seeing my unfinished pages, I had finished very little. And then, (coming back to the point before this aside), when I finally did finish the first part of the path, I didn’t have much of a clear route towards bridging the gap between where I left off and where I wanted to take the path.

So, I had that to finish, I wanted to add more to the site elsewhere, and I needed to continue writing books.

Thus, I started with the rough idea that I wanted to do pretty much everything at once, but without the book part. I would put most of my creative free time into working on some sort of ambiguous update, and I wanted to add at least a few short stories into the mix for additional storytelling.

But, at that point, all I had for ideas were:

- CoS path completion
- Make an area?
- Make another area???
- Add to existing stuff???
- Make short stories???????

As you can see, this isn’t much to go off of. And indeed, it wasn’t very helpful. Thus, the whole year before and after I moved from my childhood bedroom and into an apartment, I made random images here and there and attempted to imagine a compelling way to expand the site while also introducing more lore / story elements where I could while also doing things differently than I had before while also using the same basic elements and not relying on some amazing code.

At some point in September of 2019, I came into contact with “zy”, and our friendly talks also turned into a partnership where I started commissioning him for sound files for this upcoming update.

This is still ongoing, as my simple funds will allow.

However, I had gone a long time without releasing any content to the site at this point, and I had worked several months on the short stories. Basically, not releasing the update is what caused me to get annoyed and release the last update early, which was supposed to be a part of MoC. However, I rationalized it because it was only a small part of what I was going to release in the end, and I also was able to upload the end of the CoS path which I had promised people would be able to access if they got past my annoying puzzles. (And it was a reason to release the discord server that people had been bugging me about / I had been considering for some time.)

So, that last update (the addition of the Purpose short story, the Svoyoss short story, the 999999 dancehall, all of that…) was “partially” made in the spur of the moment to accompany a few key pieces of information (like the short stories). It’s true.

After the release of this content, I took a month or so off from making things, but returned to creation soon after. And I continued to work when I could find the time or otherwise will myself to do so, all the way up until this day, and into the foreseeable future, as I am still working on making images here and there.

And so, I’ve wrapped up the general gist of what has occurred since the end tail of 2017 until “2021-ish”,

Speaking frankly, it has been very depressing at times to reflect on what I’ve done (some things!!) and where I’ve gone (nowhere). Certain images / parts of this project have gone slowly as I met difficulties. Sometimes it’s because I suck at art (and being consistent), or sometimes I have doubts about putting this much effort into what is, arguably, a waste of effort, considering that there’s no real return on .pngs, vs. having another book written. And it is pretty painful to have people ask me what I’ve been doing / asking about the next book and all I can repeat, over and over again, is that I’ve been working on some sort of stupid update for my website.

However, everyone has their ups and downs. It’s to be expected that I would run into problems after spending a few years doing stuff in my free time with no real return other than the love of looking at my own images.

But you didn’t read this far to hear about that sort of thing. Instead, like me, you probably want some good news! No… the update is not days away from being completed. I wish that were the case. Still, it is getting closer.

This is where I come clean, and reveal that aside from what I described earlier, I have also been slowed down a bit because now that I finally have enough content and direction to see my goals more clearly, I also have added a few things to the workload to make the update “better”.

Even the title of the update, Moon of Codes, is an area / concept that I had not planned initially, had no idea of what it would be nor its relation to anything, nor did I have any idea of how much work it would take to complete. It wasn’t until the end of 2020 that I finally understood where I would add it, and how I could work to realize the path and method to get to it. (and then I spent over 2 months on one image for it, because it was a good idea and it tied into things that I discovered along the way, but it took way too long because I suck, but I needed it done anyway so it took a long time.)

And yes, I chose “Moon of Codes” as the name of this update because I love that song… (Integration under the moon of codes). Also, it sounds cool, and who doesn’t love the moon? Not anyone important, anyway.

Here is where I say that, in case you haven’t seen it already, I have updated the “progress” page with a few more bars. I probably???? won’t update them before the update is done, but I wanted to better show the things within the main progress bar that I am working on.

Additionally, I would like to reveal that my “refined images” folder contains over 1,100 images within it. Now, numbers aren’t everything. The images also have to look good, and I have to organize them into sections and folders and what have you, but it is something that I look at to gauge my progress in a vague, image-centric way. For reference, I added 286 images in the last update, not counting the probe images nor the “extra” puzzle images.

And for even more reference, my site had around 874 total images (not counting probes), after the Depth 000 update. There are around 28 speed variations of the 00 watcher included in that count, 17 “simple” doll images for the doll page, and likely 20 or so unused or otherwise useless frames sitting in the images folder, so you could reasonably say that there were more or less 800-ish images after that Depth 000 update, (that’s when I added Terminal 44527!). If you include last update’s count with this update’s count (which you should!!), then this update contains roughly 1,412 images. 1,412… so far.

(There’s also 541 images that are not update ready, yet could be made to be update ready should I choose to find a place for them, and for some of those images, they shall find a place to call home. (Also, there are several, maybe 10 or so, images that are still in WIP form which may or may not survive the process of being finished, but “probably” will. I did not count these towards this ultimate count, but I could.))

But I don’t want to get your hopes up. The update won’t change your life. I think it will be cool, and I hope that you think it will be cool as well, but in the end it’s just an addition to my site.

After I have completed the Moon of Codes update, I will focus on writing my books and finishing the stories within.