The clean-up has begun to be deployed! All of the updates from before the relaunch announcement were cleaned up and archived in the News Stand. This'll be a short-term measure while I clean up all of the archived updates and split them off into different pages by year due to the length.

With this first step complete, the next will be to deploy the redesigned front page, then to post the split-off archive pages.

Chapter 2 of Architect Deco House Rebuilding has been published!

Chapter 2: Rivals' Arrivals

Four of the five Architect Deco House members arrive at the art event they were trying to get to, and so do their rivals as they compete to get the most votes for their entries to win a grand prize! This chapter introduces them.

Production notes and commentary will now be at the end on a new section on the chapter page. This should be smoother experience to view both of them on the same page. This'd be in place of continuing the Production Notes page because that got unwieldy.

Before I publish the next chapter, I should prepare navigation sections to be used at the top and bottom of each chapter page. The navigation at top would link to the story and commentary sections, and the one at the bottom would link to the first, previous and next chapters. At the bottom are links to the first chapter, the PDC index and to back here, but I could make that look more polished 🤔

Clean-up of the site is still in-progress; the Production Notes, News Stand and WIP Archive pages are being split off into multiple by year because of the huge length of them. A lot of the updates on the front page will also need to be archived. I'll also have to see if the updates I made to the CSS file will display since I made some changes to center images, but it didn't seem to take effect so I added that in the chapter pages.

A new entry for the Travel Logs has been added! It's based on the long overdue need to fix up a lot of the outdated HTML and CSS design.

Log 7: Not Up to Code

This chapter reveals a bit of lore and has a callback: Screwem Associates was a law firm that had a commercial in episode 42 of Anathema to Commonsense. This chapter also reveals that the region that ATC's setting took place in is Amethystia; this region is a subcontinent with a mainland wedged between a cyan continent and a magenta continent and has several islands to its south or southeast. The setting was on one of those islands and that still carries over to the Polished Diamonds Culmination continuity.

While I was writing this, I started planning the redesign and it's in-progress.

Architect Deco House Rebuilding Chapter 1

Fiorina's and Felicity's reactions to their art installation working again at last is like how I feel with completing this chapter. It lives! They and their friends in Architect Deco House successfully powered on their art installation, but challenges will be ahead at the event...

Chapter 1:Success After a Difficult Installation (But Will It Last?)

There are a few more illustrations in the chapter page, and this first chapter shows the direction that I want to go; there is a default art style that is similar to the ATC webtoon, but others will also be used to experiment and set the mood of the scenes they illustrate:

• The illustration of Felicity and Fiorina has a simplified background but was 3D modeled for the perspective.
• The art installation was 3D rendered, though with some of the line-art and lighting effects drawn in.
• The illustration of Rita is in an Art Nouveau style; the line art and base gradients are all vectors, with the watercolor effects being the only part painted in.

This first story opens with some of the characters, similar to how they were previously but also reimagined; Fiorina, Felicity and Alfbern are part of the same friend group as Melody and Kayla and their group is based around performance art and architecture. However, this means I retconned some characters' ages; Fiorina and Felicity would be 21 in the main storyline instead of 23-24 for Fiorina and 25 for Felicity.

The first prequel takes place while these characters were still in high school and will lead into a few time skips that lead into the events shown in ATC. There might be bonuses for people who read ATC before, but you don't have to read it to understand the new format. This is a mostly clean slate.

The page for PDC has been added to the menu with a synopsis for this story.

Polished Diamonds Culmination

WIP 1 and relaunch announcement

"At last. It's working again. We of Architect Deco House succeeded!" Fiorina said, looking in awe at the art installation piece and wiping a bit of sweat from her brow. She chugged the rest of an energy drink and tossed the can behind her, which flew precisely into the recycle bin without her looking back..."

"That always impresses me! How much practice did you need to do for that?" Felicity said..."

"Quite a bit." Fiorina said in a deadpan but boastful way.

"I think I can use another one for the event." Felicity said, yawning.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll get it." Fiorina said and walked over to the mini-fridge; the stock ran low after another night of rebuilding the art installation piece and testing that its machinery worked, but there were still a few cans left. She walked back over and handed Felicity one of them.

"Thanks for handing it over this time!" Felicity cheerfully said. She immediately opened the can and took a large gulp of its energizing contents.

"You're welcome." Fiorina said.

The art installation piece was a sculpture made mostly of metal; the centerpiece of it was a large brass 5-point star that was a few inches deep with a middle section that lit up. Rivets were on each of the interior corners of the star shape. The middle section of the centerpiece had a glass panel that showed the light and other materials inside. When the art piece was powered on, the gears inside the centerpiece could be seen moving, and the crystals and glitter in it reflected the light at many angles. This centerpiece was being held up by a humanoid figure but also looked to be levitating in its hands; a pair of thick metal tubes lifted it up; when the installation was powered on, a line that ran through the length of each tube also glowed.

The humanoid figure was standing and was wearing an outfit with a vest, boots, a pleated skirt and gloves. It was standing on a platform that had a wooden panel and a metal panel on the top side and a row of rivets along its sides. Also on the platform but behind the humanoid figure was a cylindrical column with segments in toroidal, spherical and rounded cube shapes. The top shape was a glass sphere, and near the middle of the column was a rounded metal cube with the power button on the front.

Magical Renegades continues as an illustrated webnovel after emerging from an indefinite hiatus! To distinguish the new webnovel installment from the other installments, its subtitle will be Polished Diamonds Culmination. This title sums up how I feel about Anathema to Commonsense (the webtoon) and what I intend with PDC: I see ATC as a diamond in the rough of what it could've been; there's a lot that I want to keep, and PDC will be a culmination of what I keep from it, material incorporated from spin-offs and new stories.

The stories within MR:PDC will have their own titles. The WIP is for the first chapter of a prequel story that takes place 4 years before the present time of ATC. Everything that's been in ATC and its spin-offs is still canon unless I later specify that they aren't.

PDC takes a fresh perspective by beginning with a new angle; I wasn't dissatisfied with how ATC was going. I liked it a lot, but making a webtoon eventually became unsustainable for me. The events of ATC will be adapted and continued, but I may need to reconsider whether it'll have the overarching plot that I intended.

Regrettably, I didn't finish episode 44 when I intended to. I burnt out from making webtoons entirely and still can't bring myself to make another episode. My other project is mostly in an illustrated webnovel format. That format worked so well that I decided I'd continue MR that way, but simply continuing where the webtoon left off didn't feel satisfying for me. I needed another way.

When I found one, the pieces could be put together for a new lead-in. The new perspective I found was what I needed and I began this last July. Some characters might not be as expected in these first stories, but it gives room for more development for them.

I'm excited about this and overcoming getting stuck, but it's bittersweet because I've been through this before. The fire of determination to tell stories and draw something with them still burns brightly as ever though! The work I did with my other project showed how I can sustain this.

The art style will be experimental. I'm still keeping a 90's anime-inspired style overall with the characters, but I plan to take inspiration from more styles for the backgrounds depending on the scene and the mood.

With this relaunch also came an updated design philosophy. I updated the About page with this change.

I also updated the About the Series page, but still need to update the Anathema to Commonsense page.