what is UP gamers it's your girl iso here with a hot fresh new NANOWRIMO-WINNING PROFILE YEAH BABY!!!!!!! Check it out here!: https://toyhou.se/24571870.arietis

I'm really excited about this!! I've been participating in NaNoWriMo every single year since 2010 and never even got halfway, so the rapid pace at which I made progress this year kind of shocked me! I think I really underestimated the amount of effort I tend to put into profiles, I'm just thinking about that first year I tried NaProWriMo and only gave myself 1000 words per profile completed and like. lmao. No wonder I burned out on it so fast!! Granted I think the profiles I made this month are a bit out of the norm; all of them have considerable amounts of backstory that were all doozies to write! Kinda the peril of having immortal OCs and setting that have several established historical events. Nonetheless, I'm happy I managed to get some stuff out after the severe drought my account's suffered over the past year or two!

If you haven't seen the other two profiles I wrote for NaNo this year, check out Humilia and Scorpius! I worked pretty hard on them, so I'd appreciate you checking them out! Thank you to everyone who has so far, and to everyone who's interacted with my bulletins; it really helped a lot with motivation!

For fun and posterity, here are my final stats for NaNo:

Honestly I kinda have to credit my victory this year mostly to having three-day weekends now... you can see pretty extremely obvious rises and falls that line up with my work schedule; during the work week I'd generally be pretty dead, especially later in the month, and then on the weekend I'd write so much that I could mostly coast through the next work week without falling below par. It was a system that worked, but it definitely left me really burnt out! I've never lasted more than a week or two before, so I finally got to experience just how taxing it can be to force yourself to spend almost every free moment at least trying to write. I had a lot of other things I wanted to do and keep up on throughout the month, but I just never managed to write enough on most days to feel like I was safe to engage in any other activity, even smaller things like responding to nice comments and being timely about minor IRL obligations. Pretty much the only non-NaNo thing I let myself touch this month was doing Neopets dailies, btw be my bestie on there already if you aren't also please look at baby alison. Thanks.

Anyway, it was definitely stressful enough to the point where I'm just relieved to be done and be able to do other things! I had a lot of plans to do other writing-related things once I finished, but I'm burned out enough to where I think I'm gonna just let myself chill for a couple days lmao, so apologies if I still end up being slow to reply to stuff! Definitely curious about how I'll end up tackling next year; it's too early to tell if winning means I'll feel pressured to actually win every year now or if finally winning once means the pressure will be off. But that's next year Iso's problem. Anyone else do NaNo or something adjacent this year? How's your experience gone? I'd love to hear about it and also I believe in you!!!

On to actually talking about Arietis! She should hopefully be a nice palate cleanser after the lengthy tales of agony and woe that were Humilia and Scorpius, though her profile did end up being longer than I thought! Just kind of the consequence of making profiles for the Siderean gods, I've found... I have enough important world events that kinda have to be addressed each time that it means they're always going to be doomed to be a bit pagestretchy! It was kinda funny to have Arietis' just completely gloss over some of the events that were big deals for Humilia and Scorpius, though. Risen Star?? Who's that?? I don't know them.

That being said, she's a character I like quite a lot, being one of my many exercises in "make a funny joke character and then think too hard about them, how they maintain their silliness in a cruel world, and how their actions affect those around them". She's been the most straightforward of the gods for a long time and still is, but it's nice being able to get some of her depths out there on paper. Virtual paper?? You know.

For once I didn't make any tweaks to my profile layout, so no updates on that front! I think the only other Toyhouse-related update I have is that people randomly started posting in my I Want To See A Story Where... thread again, and it's a thread I'd really love to see take off because I wanna see more lits!!! Consider subscribing and posting in there; my current request hasn't gotten any hits in 12 hours, so if you don't have anything applicable yourself you can come up with your own request! I know a lot of cool writers follow me and I bet you guys know some cool writers yourself, so consider spreading the word!

With that being said, I think all I have left is to address what's next! I have... quite a lot of things I want to do now that I'm free from NaNo's clutches, and I have no idea what I'll do when! Here's a list of some of my current priorities, in no particular order:

• Reply to stuff!!
• Catch up on Toyhouse things!!
• Play Bug Fables because a friend of mine kindly bought it for me on the condition that I liveblog it intensely, which is basically my hobby in life so ez
• Play this other game I told a different friend I'd play after NaNo.
• Go through and proofread/edit the profiles I wrote this month.
• Cement what I want to do with the flex tab on my new profile, code the layout of whatever I'm slapping in it, then implement it for at least the NaNo gang. Probably do the above in the process!
• Possibly figure out and add collapsible headers in longer sections to make the History tab on my meatier characters less frightening. At minimum I think I'd like to maybe have the RP History section initially collapsed, likewise maybe the same for the Likes/Dislikes part of Personality. Kinda think I might want to expand it into a whole "Preferences" section where I have little tables to plop their opinions on things like love, death, etc., which would either be under a subheader like Likes/Dislikes and that whole zone would be auto-collapsed or it might be something for the flex tab...??
  
• Implement the various tweaks I made to my profile layout during NaNo to the other characters with the same layout style.
• Convert characters with broken profiles into my most recent layout type, which I have been needing to do for like- holy fuck 7 years? Anyway (continues not doing that)
• Go through the Siderea world and edit things to crosslink to other pages/profiles for greater ease of navigation and ~exploring~. Ideally also add anchors and some form of TOC since I found myself wanting to just link to specific sections a lot in my profiles during NaNo.
• Go through said world and either edit things to have updated information or, more easily, provide some kind of little box at the top of pages with outdated info saying what information should be disregarded. Kinda want to do a full redo of the god page
• Work on the various zodiac pages in said world to at least have some bullet point/TL;DR info.
  
• Make a Christmas list and finally take pictures of my pants sorry mom   
• Make worlds for my other settings to copypaste existing info into and at least have exist to attach characters to.
• Make Siderea world pages about death, media (AKA specific in-universe books/movies/tv shows/etc. bc I keep thinking about that), religion, locations, Asterismorum, god-affiliated organizations like Nepsis and the Mayblossom Society, etc., I am definitely forgetting something or another that I keep thinking about...
• Figure out some way to convert the Asterismorum wiki page into a decent-looking world page but also kinda solidify it more.
  
• Work on cementing how the Siderean calendar works. Also the Dream Sea. Also Leonis and Virginis' lineage. And Ishtar's posse. And Orion and Rigel's followers. And-
• Also probably make some page somewhere about anima mundi, prima materia, and viriditas bc god damn this month made me realize how badly I need something I can just link to when those come up.
• Catch up on RP stuff since I've been neglecting that for a month...
• Draw some low-effort High Quality:tm: refs for the different Siderean zodiacs to put on those pages and also just kinda define what the baseline of each zodiac even is.
  
• Make any amount of story progress in Genshin Impact lmao or at least get myself into doing daily stuff or at least keeping up on events as they come out... got back into it for like a week and then NaNo happened rip
• make more god bios   
• take my a/c out of the window it literally snowed yesterday but ughhhhhh it's such a hassle man. on the note of apartment complaints, resume begging my landlord to fix the washer and dryer pwease
  
• Diagnose my OCs with Neopets, the most important thing on this list am I right fellas
• Make more threads here!! I've got a couple ideas for discussiony/show-offy threads, though I'd have to do some skimming to see if they're already covered!
• Be more active in threads here!! And just in general!!!
  
• Convert a bunch of in-profile images and all of my music embeds to some other file hosting service since IIRC Discord is doing stuff to mess up off-site embeds soon and sta.sh breaks images a lot + doesn't do music. I actually knew about that before I continued relying on it during NaNo, but it was like Right before that I heard and I didn't want to distract myself from prep SO
  
• ok i am listing just like everything i feel like doing in life in general at this point i will stop myself here.

That's a lot, and there's def more casual fun stuff I want to do, too, plus things I've probably forgotten! If there's anything on here that you have a vested interest in me accomplishing lmk, but otherwise I intend to put very little pressure on myself for at least a couple days and mostly focus on reading, funny casual OC content, and perhaps a Wee bit of video gaming.

Okay I am done thanks for reading!!!!!!

NANO FREAKING WRIMO'D, BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...Of course, I won't actually consider myself done with NaNoWriMo until I finish the profile I'm currently working on, which is Arietis'! Conveniently I'm actually very close to being done and could absolutely crank the rest out tonight if I wanted to, but it's 11 PM and the work week begins anew tomorrow, so I'd rather just let myself relax and go to sleep soon instead of ending up sleep-deprived trying to rush to write the rest, upload all of her images, and make my obligatory advertising-slash-updates bulletin. Expect to see the profile uploaded probably tomorrow evening, possibly Tuesday at the latest if work knocks me out! Thursday at the absolute and utter latest since that's the last day of NaNo!

And, uh, that's all! I'll reflect a little harder and post other updates + my delightfully messed up final NaNo graphs and stats in the Arietis bulletin when that's done, so for now I'll just say I'm really excited to have finished NaNoWriMo for the first time ever despite doing it every year for over a decade! Even if perhaps it's cheating to write character profiles instead of an actual novel, but shhhh 🤫

and now to never fucking do it again holy shit my neurodivergent ass was Not made to perform a singular task for an entire month and ignore everything else in pursuit of this goal god damn (i will forget this by next year and do it again.)

part 1: it's scorpin' time

(crawls out of my grave) Holy Fuck Help me. i mean hello again everyone welcome to my bulletin! i have completed another profile. why did this one take me like two weeks you ask? haha. hahaha. Maybe You'll Find Out! anyway please perceive scorpius he is my favorite little meowmeow, and as mentioned last bulletin he even won first prize for being resident favorite isonut among my friend group...!

This one was, as we say in the industry, "a doozy". I knew Scorpius was going to be a long profile, but I kind of underestimated the level of words that occurs when someone is like the main character and is also immortal in a setting where you have several important world events planned out. Oops! I think this is by far my longest profile, but I hope someone out there will dare to give it a read anyway!! It's really just the history tab that's massive, but hopefully it'll be interesting enough to get through...?! If you read any amount of it at all I'll still be really grateful, though!

I'll freely admit this one's gonna need a look-over in December when I can afford to do editing and stuff, because I chipped away at it over a pretty sizeable period and I think there wound up being a lot of word repetition and clunky sentences and whatnot, not to mention failing to go into detail on things that probably could have used more detail although I suppose it's wordy enough so Perhaps Not. It's tricky when you don't have a ton of other pages you can link to yet, so you have to kinda explain a lot of concepts and stuff within the profile itself! Also tricky when it's NaNoWriMo so you're trying to churn out as many words as fast as you can without looking back there are probably 1000000 typos and I am sorry. Least proofread profile of all time in human history I think.

ANYWAY if that's somehow not enough Scorpius for you, you're in luck! There's even MORE Scorpius!! I wrote a little story about Scorpius' canon son Scorpius Junior a couple years ago, and now that one of the characters in the story has a profile I can legally upload it! It's a short and silly little thing, so hopefully it'll be a nice little treat after the main course, or perhaps a snack to satiate you if you are terrified of the gigantic beast spilling over the dinner table oh my goodness: https://toyhou.se/~literature/210786.scorpius-jr-origins

part 2: other toyhouse things

If you take a peek at Scorpius' profile, you'll notice I made a couple more tweaks to my profile layout! I've always been bothered by my layout not having a link back to my profile or anywhere else to see who the character belongs to except for the legends who click the credits tab, but I'd tried and failed before to eliminate and edit the right CSS to get that little section back without breaking anything else. I in my infinite wisdom decided to burn valuable writing time trying to work on that again and fucking around with the code inspecting thingy Firefox has and wrestling with it for hours and hours to no real available so what's there is just kind of the best I can do! I was hoping to have something smaller but things just wouldn't align right and I can't get it to go Up more and I am growing weary merely thinking of my travails. So hopefully it isn't annoying looking because I don't want to go back and get rid of it!!

Everything else is pretty minor! Noted very swag person @Kolo helped me figure out how to make the nav section friendlier on mobile and I noticed some other HTML error that was making the Basics table weird, so phone users should have a slightly nicer experience now! The only other changes are in the Stats tab; the type now has hovertext explaining that type combination's weaknesses and resistances, and all of the stats and ailments now have explanatory hovertext!

Finally, the big question surely everyone on this humble planet is asking... who's next? I dunno! I was going to say "someone shorter for sure" but I honestly don't think I have any other OC who would have a profile as long as Scorpius' at this point lmao. Like... maybe if I redid Dicro's and went all-in on his RP history tab and also ironed out all the specific things that happened in his original Competition, noted thing I've needed to do for over a decade but still haven't done??

It'll almost certainly be another Siderean god since getting more Siderea content is my highest priority, but we'll just have to see how I'm feeling tomorrow! To categorize the rough likelihood:

• Could use some more planning but it's easy enough to write a profile for them right now as-is and just add in any further developments later: Arietis, Tauri, Geminorum, Aquari
• The above but I kinda feel like I should make a world page about death first so I don't have to explain 10000 things in the profile itself like how space is just like so absolutely fucking haunted just absurdly haunted like literally all of it but I guess that would be good for my word count?: Librae and shockingly no one else is in this hyper-specific category
• Has some more pressing backstory details that need to be ironed out but they might be reasonable to handle during writing itself you feel me??: Sagittaria (pre-god life stuff), Capricoris (same), Ophius (when they and Cetia became gods exactly, more about their time with Asclepius) Cetia (great cetan exodus stuff... like surely shit happened throughout that, there ought to be important cetans in her life for good and ill)
• Has some glaring holes in their backstory that I'd definitely burn a ton of writing time trying to fill: Cancri (her catasterism is my immortal enemy), Leonis & Virginis (their CHILDREN iso they HAD CHILDREN why do you NOT KNOW WHO THEY ARE YET), Piscium (the Sandalphon Incident:tm: needs more defining but it's important!), Arachne (who is arianrhod. when did arachne start happening.)

If you have any preferences let me know, but either way it is a mystery what my vibes will vibe with after going to bed.... I'll also probably take a small break to try and catch up on a couple things and reply to stuff tomorrow anyway, so who knows! But maybe not actually bc the weekend is the only time I really have the time and energy to write so I might not take said break until the work week...?? idk man it's 2:30 in the morning don't trust anything I say.

Also I'm gonna plug the OC Situation Creator because idk I just feel like it! Put your OCs through a silly romp!! Or maybe a surprisingly dark romp. You won't know until you check it out!!

part 3: other not toyhouse things

First off, NaNoWriMo! I'm really glad I decided to try NaProWriMo again this year because Uhhh wow! This is the most I've ever written for NaNo! I'm currently at 35k words, and my best effort before this was 23k and also ten years ago! I've never even gotten halfway through before, and now I'm almost 3/4 of the way done and feel like I have a legitimate chance of winning for the first time! Incredibly funny to think that this massive word count is split between two character profiles on toyhou dot se, but that happens when you tackle two characters with lengthy histories! Def something I'll do again next year if I don't have a story concept in mind again, and I'll likely make some kind of thread to advertise it!

Second, I made a Status Cafe account! Dunno how often I'll use it but I really like the idea of using it around NaNo so my failures to produce profiles within a week aren't so mysterious! Just a nice little progress tracker kinda thing. I plopped a little embed linking to it on my profile underneath my big round me face and didn't edit my featured OCs section in the process despite it not being May and thus purple OC season! (it's currently brown oc season, if you're curious)

Finally... Neopets... ?!?!?!

If you haven't heard, Neopets is having kind of a renaissance because it got bought out by someone who actually gives a shit about it, so there have been a lot of neat changes, they brought the games back, etc.! I've had more recent alts but it made me really want to get back into my original account, but because I didn't know the defunct email address my mom used to make the account for me when I was 9 years old I wasn't able to when I sent in a ticket a couple months ago. BUT my friends started playing again recently and I decided to try again, and it turns out they changed their policies for giving back old accounts or something so the amount of info I had was sufficient enough evidence to get back into my 20 year old account I am pretty sure I have followers who are younger than my Neopets holy shit!!!

Anyway, if you play at all (or would like to start) and want to be Neofriends, you can find my profile here! I've deliberately left as much stuff untouched as possible (my gallery is the only thing I plan on changing up to match the new themes I want to include and I already changed the shopkeeper accordingly), so enjoy the pure essence of mid-2000s Iso! Join my epic Mario guild. Uncover my old Sonic fan characters. There's simply so much lore...!

I think that's it! I am going to bed now it is 3 AM.

EDIT: on the off chance anyone is checking my profile wondering if i have died, i moved on to scorpius next and it's becoming even longer than humilia's profile. Help

(crawling out of the pit of my own words) Jesus Christ Fucking Help Me. i mean hello! welcome to my bulletin.

so you may be wondering "what the hell iso, weren't you gonna upload one profile per day, and here you are bringing me but one on the 4th day of november, what am i paying you for??" well first of all you aren't, bitch. and secondly if you click upon the profile in question and its remarkably satisfying id number, you will be confronted with the fact that there are way more than 1,667 words in that puppy. more than 6,667, even. i am three full days above par. this profile has at least 11,848 words in it. i am 1/5 of the way done with nanowrimo here on the 4th day.

SO yeah needless to say I decided it would kind of be rude to myself to only plop in 1,667 words for every profile I complete when I put WAY more work into profiles than that! I would much rather write 50k words worth of profiles than push myself to try and write 30 profiles in 30 days and burn out from inevitably failing that. So that's my plan now! I definitely feel a lot more energized now since for the first time NaNoWriMo feels genuinely achievable for me, and even if not then at least I'm working on bios! I imagine future ones will be shorter, of course, since I went for an absurdly meaty character first... but then again I always end up thinking that and then make every profile 1000000000 words long SO

Anyway! Humilia! She's a character whose popularity among my friends surprised me because she hasn't seen much RP action and I feel like I don't really talk about her much or post funny memes that I tag her in or w/e, but that becoming apparent + wanting to get the last of the Siderean Creators out of the way before getting furry in earnest made her a shoo in for first profile! Even more than that though was the fact that I actually already had the coding for her done and she was sitting around as an empty WIP profile for months, so I didn't have to waste time looking for backgrounds and picking out colors and what have you!

And now updates! They're all profile related!! Extremely observant Iso profile readers may notice some differences between this profile and the last one, Esva's, and I'd love to get feedback on them:

- The hovertext! I learned the magic of the abbr tag and started using that instead of making a tooltipster thing that I needed to make custom CSS for and that didn't even turn your mouse into a little guy with a question mark upon hovering!! I'm not sure if people prefer tooltipsters (which is preserved in the pronounciation section if you want to compare) or abbrs (all of the other hovertext in the profile), so I'd love feedback in this respect! Tooltipsters have bigger text and look cooler, but have transparent backgrounds and get kind of unwieldy for longer bits of hovertext. abbrs, meanwhile, have the cool hover thingy and will adapt with your browser and whatnot, but the text is smaller and less fancy. Also I dunno if either of them even work on mobile?? But I suppose my layout isn't all that mobile friendly, anyway...

- The music changed places! Before it was at the bottom of the Nav thing, but now it's hovering around in the bottom right corner of your screen! And it has hovertext now!! I was originally going to leave it in the same place as it was before, but doing that meant that if you hit play the tooltipster would forcibly stay active and it would always activate upward no matter what I tried, so it would block the Credits section which I didn't like! I dunno how people feel about it, though. Is it too awkwardly placed? Is it too small? Does it take too much space on mobile for the poor souls who struggle through my profiles on that?

- Changing where the music was left a gap in the Nav... so I made a flex space for future use! I dunno what I'm going to put there yet, but I didn't want to burn valuable NaNo time on figuring that out! I do have some ideas, though! I know some people have dedicated sections for forum posts and/or Q&A kind of things, which I actually used to do once upon a time! That could be fun seeing that I'd like to be more active after NaNo! But I remember it also being kind of a hassle feeling like I needed to edit things in every time and hoard every post I made for characters who didn't have that profile version yet.

Another idea was turning it into a game stats/equivalents thingy like in another old profile type, since I'm always associated with associating my donuts with other things! Kinda impressed those FEH hotlinks still work. Another was having a playlist tab, but my life struggle is that I associate every song in existence with like the same handful of OCs and everyone else is lucky if I deign to offer them scraps lmao, so there are certainly some where I could have a big meaty set of lyric snippets... and then a ton that would just be empty or have, like, one song, maybe.

But, I dunno! Would love to hear what fun bonus sections other people have for their characters, if there's anything pressing they feel like my bios are missing, etc.! Or if they prefer the music player where it used to be and thus the flex space would return to the void from whence it came!

- There's hovertext on some of the stats/ailments that aren't as traditional or obvious that explains what they do/are! I dunno if people think maybe they should all have hovertext for the sake of consistency or if they look fine as they are? Or if there's anything else in any tab where you think hovertext would be helpful!

- No more pictures in the Attributes tab oh no!! Well, technically this isn't an always kind of thing. But as mentioned last bulletin, my upcoming profiles will mostly be of characters who don't have a lot of art, dollmakers or otherwise, and some don't even have ironed out designs in my head despite how often I think of them! So it just doesn't make sense to force myself to try and figure out how to make 3 distinct pictures that all have distinct hovertext when I'm just kinda dealing with doodles at best and mostly just dollmakers that are seldom 1:1 and are sometimes more of a placeholder than anything!

I think that's it in regards to profile stuff! Not sure who I'll do next... was thinking about Astrid (En2rety Istra) because they're kind of a Big Deal, but I don't think I'm psychologically ready to take on a profile that would probably be even longer than Humilia's so soon lmao, especially since there's some stuff going on in RP now that I'd kinda prefer to let finish so I don't have to add a bunch of stuff into the profile later. Which reminds me I think I ought to add a little "last updated" thing to that since I never end up updating those...

ANYWAY it'll almost certainly just be a Siderean instead, tempted to go Scorpius bc he's my fav but he would also possibly have a profile longer than Humilia's and it feels kinda sacrilegious to upload the gods out of zodiac order. Most likely candidate is Arietis since she's the first one and blissfully simple god bless her little empty head, not a tragic backstory in sight. But we'll see where the vibes take me! But not tonight bc my skull is exploding from staring at a screen for so long and having intense emotions about my sad, sad little intense emotions goddess.

That's it! As always feel free to point out typos/grammar stuff because I did not proofread even slightly bc NaNo, like usually I'll do one sweep but not this month baby!!! Ideally I'll go back and give things a peep once I'm done with NaNo one way or another, but you know...

"i'll have another bulletin up in a day or two" what is a 5 but a 2 upside down?? ah shit i got distracted watching infomercials on youtube and now it's 6 days. Anyway. what's up gamers it's your girl iso here with some Hot Life Updates

Part One: ah fuck it's NaNoWriMo

ah fuck it's nanowrimo. i dont even have a project up yet but you can become my pal here. i've been figuring for a while (since i got jumpscared by november like 2 weeks ago) that i'm gonna just do NaProWriMo again bc i've been needing to work on profiles for SO long and i would really like to be more active in general!! i might just have it be, like, a "just write" in general thing bc i'd also like to get various worldbuilding info pages up, and those are basically bios in a way.

"but what worldbuilding pages do y-"

Part Two: IT'S FURRY TIME BABY

WELCOME TO SIDEREA MOTHERFUCKERS YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So dedicated Iso bulletin readers are probably vaguely aware that I've had this setting called Siderea for several years now that has, like, zero content uploaded on Toyhouse at all. A legitimate reason behind my inactivity is that I keep getting annoyed when I want to use my favorite OCs in forum games or discussion threads or whatever else only to remember, oops! I don't have profiles for most of the characters that have been rotting my brain from the inside out for the past 3-4 years! There are other reasons that are bigger factors for sure, but that feeling of not being able to participate the way I want to and getting that sinking feeling of how "behind" I am whenever I think about it is absolutely one of them. But then whenever I think of doing one, I realize there's so many little concepts I'd have to define every time and profiles would have to be so much longer if I wanted to be thorough especially for the first batch of profiles because there would be no other existing things to link to and this and that and yadda yadda...

To compensate for the fact that I just don't have any characters uploaded and it'll take a hot minute before I do even if I complete NaProWriMo flawlessly (which I most certainly will not!), I decided that maybe it would be a good idea to just... put some lore up! I've been making little (and sometimes not-so-little) lore posts over the past couple years for my friends and I's little RP forum, both just for fun and to have something I can just link to when I bring up jargon, etc. I didn't consider transferring any of this stuff over here because I didn't have any specifically Siderean characters uploaded plus, more importantly, I would either have to copypaste things with WYSIWYG and fix a bunch of formatting OR just have everything be ugly bc I didn't want to deal with tediously changing BBCode into HTML...

Then it hit me that there are probably sites that convert BBCode for you and sites that add in ps and brs for you and I was right!! So yeah lmao I've been chipping away at converting things over, debating which posts were outdated enough to skip, and also working on the template for the zodiac pages over the past couple of days so I'd have some passable content to post!

There are definitely a lot of flaws here: all of these posts were made for a specific audience with a specific background of knowledge, so a lot of these posts will just drop references to RP stuff or other things that are common RP knowledge but very much not common Toyhouse knowledge with 0 explanation. In the interest of time (namely getting things out before NaNo starts) I didn't add any cross-linking except to edit any links that were in there to change them from forum links to Toyhouse links, and likewise there's no handy hovertext to quickly define any concepts or in-jokes (learned about the  tag recently wtf this makes life so much easier than coding hovertext myself. awesomesauce). All of the posts were also written really casually and fairly quickly with little to no proofreading, and needless to say I didn't do any proofreading in the process of porting them over. Expect to see a lot of typos, grammatical errors, clunky phrasing, and Possibly some broken code here and there.

As always you're welcome to point any of these out to me, BUT it might not be the best use of your time since I obviously plan to redo a lot of pages in the future! Once I have enough profiles up (or, more likely, I burn out on making them and drop NaNo lmao) I'll go back through everything that's currently up and get to adding links to things, which should make organically navigating the world through what interests you most a lot easier! But if you dare to tread this treacherous land... you're more than welcome to!

If you'd like to receive updates on things that have been added or changed, subscribe to this thread! For wholesale new pages and things like that I'll make bulletins like I do for new bios/lits, but otherwise I don't want to spam my bulletins with more minor updates/tweaks - at least not when I'm planning to do a lot of that during a short time period! If you read stuff and have comments, questions, suggestions, want to toss in a vote for a character you'd like to see a profile of or concept you'd like to see a page on, etc., you can post in this thread! Or in here, on the comments of the world itself, fuckin wherever really I'm not picky I will just be excited someone is saying words!!

Because there's kind of A Lot there, here are probably the most important pages for anyone curious/bored enough to do some perusing:

• The main page ofc, which provides kind of a TL;DR of the setting!
• The zodiac overview page, which sums up all of the species and is also the only page with crosslinks because it's the only finished page that I made wholesale for Toyhouse!
• The gods page, which definitely has a lot of outdated things (Arachne is completely missing, you will note on the vast majority of pages that Ophius' name used to be Serpentarius and this world is actually the first time I'm using their new name, a lot of the weapons work differently now, etc.) but is still kinda the best source there really is atm for understanding the "main characters" of the setting.
• The Creators page, which is way more up to date and about the other three characters who color basically every aspect of the setting and whose names you'll be seeing constantly on like every page! It Does bring up a lot of RP stuff in it but that's mostly bonus content and not stuff you really need to know to understand Siderea things.
• The timeline page is a bit rough and has a lot of links that are actually dead links bc converting wikitext (there is a wiki. it's pretty barebones tho i dont even have the stuff from the world in there oopie but i mean feel free to look around that too i suppose there's Some information that isn't in the th world even!) to HTML is... interesting, but it helps provide a lot of context to various events that get mentioned!
• The dictionary page could use some new entries, but is a handy tool to have around!

• The Archangels are pretty important figures! It's also a great example of how you will find a lot of weird placeholder images throughout this world like how Jeremiel's placeholder icon at the time was just me looking up like goth anime boy emo angel or w/e and Uriel's is an emoji with MS Paint on top. I will change these... someday.
• The Facets are also pretty important figures, and it's one of the more recent and thus up-to-date pages!
• Before the Catasterismi randomly turned into me going into way too much detail about god backstories, so it's a good place to learn more about them!
• Due to its nature of being a summary of a story I didn't write, Age of the Risen Star gives some insight into character dynamics.

• Hallows and Animals (that's the only page I've explained faunals on Oops. the Actual furries)
• Liminal Parasites & Corruption
• Shapeshifting
• Cores & Filigrees
• Time
• The Incarnation Program

I think that's all the most important stuff! Like I said I intend to go back through these and fix more glaring errors and add links likely once NaNo is over or I'm just done with it, and ideally every page will someday have some level of HTML implemented to make it look nicer/make navigation easier! If you read any of it now, though... thank u you are so nice to me (little pleading emoji)

OH and tangentially related I crossposted two not-Siderea-specific-but-still-important pages that could be helpful resources! They're about the Greater Soulstream and the concept of magic, respectively. Give 'em a look! The latter even specifically mentions Siderea stuff...!!

Part Three: This was all lead-up to understanding that Scorpius was voted best OC 2023 and everyone was SO right for that (wild cheering and applause)

So a couple months ago I did a popularity contest on the aforementioned friend forum because I was overwhelmed by An Urge in the middle of the night. There are a lot of OCs on this list who don't have Toyhouse profiles and haven't even been mentioned anywhere on here, but nonetheless if you're curious you can see how things turned out here! A lot of things surprised me about this and it was really cool that a newer character I hadn't used too often but who is nonetheless one of my top 3 favs (alongside Orchid (dammit wtf happened to his background image. Bitch. maybe i will remember to fix it someday) and Astrid (who is high on my NaProWriMo priority list because Hoo Boy)) wound up beating characters with way more historical relevance.

Mostly I'm mentioning this because I am advertising that it's an extremely cool and swag thing to do and I would love to see people host some tournaments for me to vote on!! I included a little section for random comments which led to getting a lot of delightful OC questions to answer, such as what their 3rd-favorite ungulates are, how I would feel about being snowed into a cabin with each pairing, what they would get at McDonald's, and entirely too many questions about their sex lives. All this could be yours for the low, low price of make a ton of Google surveys...!!!

I thought about having polls up here as well, but the whole thing was kind of impulsive and I didn't want to figure out the logistics and also like half of the characters involved didn't have Toyhouse profiles. Maybe next year? Or I'll just do some kind of Toyhouse-specific contest someday? Prolly not until well after NaNo and ideally after I've been a bit more active so my characters will actually be recognizable to people, but you know.

"But Iso you are so cool and epic and I want to meticulously rank your OCs!!" So true but! You fool. You absolute buffoon.

You can.

Shortly after the tournament concluded a friend of mine taught me how to make a character sorter since I did an interest check during a post-tourney survey, and so I have inflicted this meaty fellow upon the earth. Check it out... if you dare! There are a little over 400 OCs in it (I was being conservative and restricting myself only to OCs who had some form of avatar - placeholder or otherwise - and trying to be somewhat picky on top of it) so for the love of god don't hit start without doing some filtering!! Doing so will take around 3000 matches, and even my bravest of pals who dared these wilds and hit tie a bunch of times on people they knew nothing about and had no strong opinions on the design of still took two hours to finish.

The category that probably makes the most sense to try out would be, well, the Toyhouse one! That one helpfully restricts the sorter to only showing characters who have profiles on here, placeholder or otherwise. If you do any amount of the sorter, I'd love to see your results! If you're curious about my favs, you can see my results here!

Part Four: IDK the rest of the bulletin

My segue kinda kept me from talking more about NaNo, but I'm still kinda debating what exactly I'm going to do. Either way it's going to be a rebel thing for sure, but I dunno if I'm gonna do a "one profile/page = par" kind of thing or do some kind of "just write in general" sort of thing and see if I can find an HTML remover and do draw word count to see how much writing I do when I'm not just trying to write a story. I do so much infodumping and RP stuff that I'm kind of curious to see how that would turn out! Though I feel like if I counted RP stuff and actually made sure to post a lot and other people posted enough for me to post I would blow 50k out of the water easily bc due to the nature of a lot of my threads they get really fuckin wordy so. Idk. These are problems for future Iso and by future I mean in less than 2 days.

Essentially I dunno if I'm gonna actually have a profile out every day or specifically push for that, but if I don't do that then expect my backup to be making more stuff for the Siderea world since I have a ton more infodumps/pages I'd like to make! If you have anything you'd specifically like to see, feel free to comment here or wherever else!

Also as avid Iso bulletin readers and link-clickers may have surmised by now, after years of back-and-forth I've decided I just kinda fuckin don't care about having nice art for characters I upload here anymore. Like I do because I want them to have an appealing enough avatar to make people click on them, but the fact of the matter is that I just don't really draw and therefore make refs, tend to end up giving up when I try to make refs bc there are a lot of things I don't have a good understanding of how to draw and not a lot of time/patience to step back and go do that first, and even if I did make refs I no longer have the financial means to commission people to make pretty art of them like I used to back in the golden days of yore where I had a job but not bills.

The whole reason I've been so backlogged on uploading OCs over the years is directly because of this fixation on having Clickable Avatars and I just don't fuckin care anymore!! I just want to have info about my OCs somewhere public and shove them in people's faces!! People will probably click on them anyway if I participate in forum stuff and if people go "ew cringe" when they look at my character page and mostly just see Picrews and other dollmakers well who fuckin cares I did not sign up to Toyhou dot se to become internet famous or whatever. So get used to seeing a lot of dollmakers and inaccurate doodles and also probably me deleting the little pictures in the Attributes sections of profiles for a lot of new characters bc they do not have many pictures. Thanks.

On the note of Toyhouse, as alluded to throughout I'm trying to be more active in general! Have been focusing on trying to catch up on various lits/bulletins while juggling NaNo prep stuff, though unfortunately a lot of that will probably get put on the backburner or at least slow down during November. But on the plus side I usually don't last long during NaNo, so I'll probably get back to catching up on things soon enough...!

I have no idea how much stuff I'll go through before getting lazy and contemplating exploding my notifs again, so if you have any particular profiles or literatures you'd like people to read - even if it's like 2 years old - feel free to link them so I can check them out and put them in my lil ark adrift on the sea of my executive dysfunction. I really like reading people's things and validating writers by slamming that little star button so don't be shy if you have stuff you're proud of!!

Speaking of literatures, I've only written, like, one thing since my last magnum opus and I can't post it since it has RP spoilers we won't get to for who knows how long!! Oopsie. But if I make profiles for Scorpius or Andromeda OR Metatron or Sariel/Leiras (it's complicated.) I can upload the two short stories I have for those guys...! Well the latter is incomplete so idk if I'd do that. Like not "I just never finished the whole story" but "I didn't even finish the first chapter and it ominously ends with the words 'Sleepy hole' just dangling there". But you never know...!

And finally, I guess I should provide some life updates! Not tooooo much has changed for better or for worse, but I got a new position at work! It's a sidegrade rather than an upgrade since it's the same amount of hours and same amount of pay, but I'd consider it an upgrade in a way since it's a position where I no longer have to worry if I'll be able to hang in there. I dunno if I've mentioned it here before and if so not for a while, but I have early-onset arthritis and was previously in a pretty physical position. It was getting really, really rough on me and causing me a lot of agony about my future since I didn't know how much longer I'd be able to go on for. When my boss took me aside to tell me my current position was going to open and that I should apply I straight up thought I was about to get fired or at least get scolded bc I was at a point where I couldn't get through a full week of work without calling in, so an almost entirely sedentary position has kind of been a complete 180 for me lmao

There are some consequences, though! Not walking as much as I used to + my hours being redistributed (I get Fridays off now which is sick but I work longer the other days) I think is contributing to some lethargy and I kinda just spend half the day napping against my will when I get home. And... okay I guess that's basically it! It's really cool not going into big meaty credit card debt because my paychecks are constantly extremely short because I ran out of vacation time in spring! And I get to put a lot of stickers on things which is viscerally satisfying! Good end :)

Otherwise Uhhhhhhhhh I guess I started playing DND? Kind of? My friend @Exuro started running a campaign for our friend group a while back and after lurking for a while I jumpscared everyone by joining with Rigel, which will be a really funny name to hear if you read enough Siderea pages! If you're curious how former final boss and world-ender pony is doing, he almost got literally killed by a rug. He gets crit a lot. He has no rizz so he keeps getting mind-controlled by things which is really funny for a guy who Should be immune to that kind of thing but isn't for the sake of gaming. He stopped everyone in the middle of the desert to infodump at them and then threatened to kill them bc he reached C support with everyone and that's the price you pay for befriending him. Also he and Jerry are besties :D and it is really funny that every time an opportunity arises for Rigel to find out Jerry is associated with Asena (who he loathes with every fiber of his being) something will happen or the scene will change. 10/10 stuff consider enjoying a campaign with pals who are very lax about rules and willing to baby your clueless ass and make your pre-existing ocs work   consider a horse who is a shadow sorcerer with tank stats it owns

And Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I guess that's probably it???? Aside from ummmm I still love my gf as always :) I guess I can legally make profiles for her for NaNo couldn't I.....!??! Idk if I will but if I ever Do finish any profiles for her I would nefariously make a bulletin for it on this account to advertise it!! ok bye

EDIT: i forgot to add a +1 to aries in the poll i am a FOOL. its not my fault i dont think. cant help being an aries

EDIT 2: OH I FUCKING FORGOT TO MENTION THAT. i gave all of my folders little icons to differentiate them. thanks

well, that's all. thanks for listening! see you all in my next bulletin several months from now   

j/k i will probably have a hot new State of the Iso Address:tm: in the next day or two if i don't keep napping all day the second i get home from work as i have a lot of epic updates and promises of activity that i almost certainly will not keep. i just wanted to share this accomplishment(???)(help)

EDIT: NO FUCKING WAY

hello gamers it is that time of year, early bird registration finally fuckin opened one (1) day before the event so i can at last embrace my inner desire to bite things and be a vampire. Let's Tussle: https://artfight.net/~Isoprene

i feel like i might be more active than usual bc i've discovered the life hack that if i have a tiny youtube video open it's easier for me to focus on drawing...? so i've been drawing almost every day trying to make some refs although i havent actually finished any as of posting. but. YOU KNOW. so ill probably have some new characters uploaded throughout the event lmao. rn i'm trying to get langelotte and justine up bc i mean, cmon, vampires vs werewolf, gotta upload on-theme am i right folks??

on the other hand july is a terrible time for art fight for me bc it's super hot so i don't want to do anything and i'm bad at being productive so perhaps i will only draw a small number of things. but you never know until you try my friends

oh yeah also attack my girlfriend and her extremely cute ocs: https://artfight.net/~rozalyst

In other news! Uhhhhhhhhhh I redid Poe's profile a bit recentlyish? So I guess I'll post IC with him since it's worth a reread if you've read it before! I should probably update it even more someday bc I didn't really get into his graduation which is kinda importantish, but that just means I'll be able to trick people into clicking on him again someday!!!

I think that's pretty much it. Not too much exciting stuff in Isoland, I haven't really been active since I am an old woman who is incapable of physically functioning after work these days lmao, so I mostly just turn into a puddle when I get home and haven't done much in the way of writing/ref-making/profilery aside from chipping away at two different profiles every now and then. I did actually write a story recently... but it has some RP spoilers so I won't be able to post it for who knows how long so rip. Dicro Figures It Out will just sit there at the top of my newest lits list forever, permanently making a really weird fuckin first impression for people who look at my profile, but would I truly have it any other way.......?????????

okay that's all for real now back to crying as i desperately try to add tags to art fight characters

hello gamers as per usual my last bulletin was a LIE and as you may have noticed i didnt make any damn bios after that. classic iso! i did keep up on lits for a little while though but i have 1714 things in my character inbox again as of posting so you know how it is.

ANYWAY none of that matters what DOES matter is that i wrote a funny story a month and completely forgot to crosspost it until now. lucky you that means i actually proofread something i put on here for once..... special privilege for my loyal toyhouse followers. give it a peep!: https://toyhou.se/~literature/168100.dicro-figures-it-out

other than that Uhhhhhhh well i remembered to update my lil featured character thing finally. it's pink this month. awesome stuff

one day i'll get around to siderea bios but if you would like to diagnose yourself with a zodiac god and learn abt them in advance i did Considerably tweak this one quiz i never linked on here i think a while back and also made a second, much lighter one based more on aesthetics and likes and stuff. give them a peep as well!

i think that's all i have to say. stay tuned next bulletin for (vanishes for several months)

also fire emblem engage is good and i like it btw. pandreo best boy

edit: actually you know i shouldnt quite say that and just leave it there. the story has a comical number of scenes where ppl die extremely slowly after throwing up an entire fabric store's worth of death flags but like thats what i love about it. it's just so earnest. it's trying so hard. its got so many cliches but the voice acting and often productions values are so killer that damn it it makes me feel anyway ok. it's a funny little guy full of funny little guys and also the gameplay is my by far and away favorite in the series and i am in the midst of a second playthrough already (although i am uncultured and have only played fe games from awakening on so take that as you will)

pandreo best boy for sure tho

the great al2rety bio-ing begins now.

now you would think that perhaps i would start with coris, the "main character", or perhaps sitar who is about as important. or maybe even "the pope but he got cucked by god" (forgot him in my bullet point list in the last bulletin sorry) since he's a relatively big deal on the purple hell side of things (spoilers.)

no. you fool. my first choice was obviously going to be the funny little side-ish character who wears jorts. please enjoy esva, i love her. this probably is not very surprising considering we're like the same guy (girl who is not very smart but is full of love, and anxiety)

critically, uploading esva means that at last i can justify uploading esva goes to bed, my aforementioned magnum opus, okay i've hyped it up too many times it's just a silly little story i had too fun writing. if you read it i hope you have fun reading it as well!

next up will likely be coris and sitar, but both of them are liable to be Meaty - especially the former i think it's literally impossible to write a profile for any dicro variant in a timely fashion there are SO many words to say about their disastrous little brains - so i'm not sure if i'll actually end up finishing either in time for nanowrimo. not really the end of the world if not, but if i do they'll likely end up being my last profiles for a while since the aforementioned nano starts next week and then pokemon comes out just in time for me to have run out of writing steam SO. see you in december fellas.

after that i think a big update for orchid's profile is in order, and then i think istra really needs an update or maybe i'll do astrid if i can ever muster up the spoons to make a passable ref for them since they're A Big Deal, and maybe i should finally buckle down and cope with the ordeal that will be giving dicro an updated profile, or maybe azior of all people bc him being the poster boy for the post your newest character thread has led to him having the most favs out of all of my characters by a significant margin which is really funny and i'm happy for him but damn all these free clicks are getting wasted on barely having any profile to read... honestly we'll see.

(i'll try to do some catching up on lits here and there at least. i have 132 to read in case you were curious how bad my backlog is)

lastly, it's 11:30 pm and i need to go to bed. good night, friends

and it is that the second baby in our baby profile wombo-combo now has a completed profile. you may leave any celebratory gifts in the box(-chan)

box-chan is a profile i'm really glad to have up bc box-chan is the perfect example of how sometimes shit just happens in rp and it becomes inexorable, permanent canon and that is why i love roleplaying. like yeah i'm rping as a stabbed box full of dead butterflies what about it??

technically still waiting on a couple links to update but once that's done with i'll prolly post both lil strawberry & box-chan in this thread per my Profile Completion Norms so like comment and subscribe ring that notification bell etc. on the note of links i got one of my friends to upload a couple placeholders so there's a lot of new scattered links to check out if you like reading about random oc opinions! with a couple more pending alongside box-chan's so perhaps better to check in later...

Other updates! I would ideally like to catch up on things and Experience Donuts so I'm thinking that I'm probably gonna just go through my inbox and delete everything other than literatures (local writing reader) and try to keep up on characters from there while slowly chipping away at lits. Got caught up on a couple of forum posts I was hoarding, but that was Uhhhh significantly smaller than almost 10,000 characters so you know. Will I pull this off??????? Probably not. But now you know I thought of catching up, and knowing about an idea is like 1% of the battle.

Last bulletin I said Mr. Sharpe would probably be next, which may or may not be true anymore. I might still because it would probably be somewhat shortish, but I think I've decided on an actual novel for NaNoWriMo. Ideally I'd like to start getting Al2rety profiles up to this end, since it'll be about them! And who doesn't want to hear about winning character concepts like:

• Orchid, but divorced!
• Istra, but worse!
  
• Bunny, but a reality-sundering sword imbued with countless sacrificed souls!
• nice girl who likes denim :D
  

So they'll be my next priorities probably maybe possibly! Plus if I upload them I can upload Esva Goes To Bed, my magnum opus, my life's work......................

EDIT: ok i spent over an hour deleting over 9000 no meme real number character notifications to preserve 134 literature updates. worth it. also i am watching people speedrun pokemon so i had entertainment otherwise honestly i dunno if i would've ever mustered the spoons here