The Archives

Same Place, Different Universe chapter 4 WIP 2

It's recording time!...

Regina is back in serious mode! Did someone take the last snack, or interrupted her stream?

Same Place, Different Universe chapter 4 WIP 1

Kiah looking worried after Marcia ran out of stamina and crashed. However, she's ready to offer something that could help...

I Was a Software Developer... chapter 13 WIP

A new scene for a new chapter; there'll be a visit to a crafting shop!

I Was a Software Developer... chapter 12 WIP

It's time! After multiple chapters of preparing for her debut party, Valencia is on stage doing public speaking and a demonstration.

This is how she feels about public speaking... (from chapter 10)

Piper will also take to the stage and rock out to provide live music.

The sketches usually aren't this cleaned up since they'll be vectored over in the final drawing, but I really challenged myself on this!

Chapter 13: Halloween is About Make-believe, So That's What I'm Going to Do!

Damien is reminded about the Halloween party that his former workplace is hosting after he left and hopes for the chance to explain what happened while enjoying the festivities. He and Piroska visit a crafting shop ran by one of Piroska's friends to commission costumes.

Published to home page: 7 Sep 2025

Chapter 12: Wearing It Now Is Bittersweet As I Sacrificed That Path for Another...

Valencia gives her speech for her public debut at last and demonstrates some of her skills! Piper is in a supporting role but also rocks out on stage.

Published to home page: 7 Aug 2025

Chapter 11: Aww Yeah, It'll Be Unreal!

Valencia challenging Damien to public speaking for her rehearsal already sounds unreal (see chapter 10 or the sidebar now for how she feels about it), but Piroska is telling the truth about this challenge! Will Damien accept it?

Published to home page: 31 Jul 2025

The second WIP for Same Place, Different Universe chapter 4 has been posted with a 3D modeled background for one illustration and a character in another!

There's a worldbuilding detail in the illustration of Regina; the wand she is holding stems from the tradition that started with The Awks' founder to carry a pipe, which carries over to other OSes and teams influenced by them; Regina and the other characters representing Mac OS X/macOS versions have their own, each with their own customizations which contrasts with many of the early Awks members and other UNIX-based characters that are more in line with them. She customized hers to resemble a rocket as a reference to Launchpad's original icon.

I hadn't laid out what the recording and streaming room looked like in chapter 3 but this chapter will have an illustration that shows part of it. I think some wall decor could be added to the back wall or it could be an accent wall but I wonder if it’d look too crowded. In the model of the entire room, I also added a desk, monitors and some other things on the desk and lighting in the corners. Although I'm not sure if I'll even need to render them for an illustration, it was still helpful to model the layout.

The two character articles that were mentioned in the previous update have been published! Their actual introductions in this continuity were through To the Visitors..., but appeared elsewhere before it was publicly announced. Say hello to two former rivals (though they still have a friendly rivalry with each other) who competed during the era of hostility that emerged between their teams:

	Kyouko Unzai
	Pleiades Galano

Pleiades' (Macintosh System 7) and Kyouko's (Windows 95 + 98) articles delve a bit into the timeframe that corresponds to the 1990's when the rivalries between their teams got hostile; Defending Waits for Nobody became the most successful team, and Chariots of Colors was at risk of disbanding. After the hostilities cleared, OSes from these teams could easily work together and be friendly again, which To the Visitors... showed.

I tried to write these rivalries between their teams as being nuanced and these characters having their own motives that drove them. Before the hostilities emerged, OSes of CC and DWN had rivalries that weren't as serious as they might've appeared to be, and could also be friends so the emerging of hostilities would be sad for both teams; friends or at least cordial rivals turned against each other. I portray CC and DWN with rivalries that were usually less serious and without grudges, since Microsoft's rivalries with IBM and Novell were much more personal; even in the 90’s, Microsoft still developed Office for the Mac.

The pressure on both sides to succeed could've driven the hostilities to emerge, and so could have CC's desperation to turn around their fortunes after several efforts failed (and many people started to doubt if they’d be able to stay in operation).

This is still a tricky timeframe to write about and details were intentionally kept vague, but Pleiades' and Kyouko's ordeals shape their present characterizations. Pleiades' rebellious and outspoken tendencies could be from her rejecting being a people-pleaser, which she might've been during her failed collaborations.

The art movement that Kyouko popularized is a reference to Vaporwave having a lot of Windows 9x imagery, but sometimes Vaporwave aesthetics have featured early Mac imagery too...

Over the past few days, I updated several articles in the wiki with information from chapter 12 of IWASD, and I created the Archives page today to move the earliest updates from the front page to it to make room for new ones. With this update comes a WIP of an illustration for chapter 4 of Same Place, Different Universe which introduces Kiah (OS X 10.10 Yosemite and 10.11 El Capitán) into the Version 3 continuity.

Kiah has a boisterous attitude but tries to be helpful and always wants to be active with something. At the time this story takes place, she is the one of the newest members of Chariots of Colors but has proven to be successful after a rough start (Yosemite had significant issues at launch, El Capitán was a refinement that fixed them) She might seem intimidating to some because OS X 10.11’s namesake being a rock formation that is very difficult to climb. Two of her hobbies are mountain climbing and hiking.

Two more character articles are also almost ready to be published and I hope I can finish them today or within the next few days.

Chapter 12 of I Was a Software Developer... has been published, and Valencia makes her public debut speech in it! Her speech in this chapter give more worldbuilding details; she explains the ability that defines the Operating Superstars as a skillset. Their skillset reflects the flexibility of computers for programming and their graphical capabilities for various purposes. The "hobbyist and art movements led by them [OSes]" alludes to the Microcomputer revolution, which at the time was still ongoing.

The name of the guild she was in before she joined the PrDP is also revealed; they're called the Flying Crimson Warriors as a reference to the phrase "Flying Colors" having nautical origins, and a shade of red being one of the colors on one of the DEC logos.

Several updates to the project wiki will be coming up with information from this chapter.

Yesterday I published a worldbuilding article for the project wiki:

Debuts

I created this article to be linked from the character infobox to explain the significance of a characters' debut timeframe and to list which cycle every featured character so far debuted, in the Techlandian Calendar.

The infoboxes in each of the character articles will update the Debut field to the cycle they debuted, and the real world date of what they represent being released will be moved to a separate field in the Technical section. I haven't updated them just yet because I'm still thinking over what further details I could add.

One of them I considered is splitting up the Affiliation field into separate Team and Club fields which'd help distinguish them in the infobox. I also considered adding a Relationships section with fields for a character's first mentor, predecessor (when applicable), successor (when applicable), friends and rivals.

Another section will be added in the Debut article about characters that represent unreleased hardware or operating systems.

The first WIP for chapter 13 of I Was a Software Developer... as part of a scene I spent the past few days modeling and adjusting materials.

This WIP features a semi-final design of a desk I modeled scratch and it has a section behind glass panels to display more items. It uses a stylized glass material that is opaque to the viewers since what I wanted to do by showing off crystals and containers of beads behind a translucent glass material.

I even modeled beads and containers and made materials for them when I decided to just use an opaque glass material in the display because this scene already took a lot of time 🥲 I also modeled the cash register to make one that fit an aesthetic style. However there were some rendering errors and one of them I spotted is with how the material for the register rendered and another was with one of the patterned cloths.

If I can't fix them in Blender since my computer has started to get pushed to its limits with these renders, I can manually correct the rendered images.

From the latest update I posted on Mastodon:

Soon after that, I started testing an updated layout that had an extra section to showcase the latest chapters and to move the update log to its own row! This'll give some time to show off the current chapters before the next ones get published.

The first version of this homepage is live! I just made a few last minute tweaks to the CSS, moved To the Visitors... to its own page, and added some material to the sidebar.

I spent today and yesterday re-learning how to make CSS grid layouts. That step was frustrating since I got too rusty with my knowledge about them since I last coded one. I got stuck on some of the details at first, but when I found a great tutorial to follow along with (and was more awake), they clicked together and I could put together the basic layout!

After that step, I've been working on the finer details such as putting together a header image for the top div and tweaking the CSS for it to get it to fit just right, and tweaking the dimensions of the sidebar and the design of the menu.

Hello World! Look what I started throwing together, an actual home page for this project on Neocities! It's simple since most of the information is on the wiki, but it was about time I put together a home page here. I published it in May to publish a story that was meant to be an Easter egg to go along with the Stories page. That story is called To the Visitors that Wandered into the Construction Zone and has been moved to its own page. It also has an article on the wiki: To the Visitors...

Putting together this homepage was something I was wanting to do at some point in the near future. I started putting this together on the 27th and had a pragmatic reason for it: I wanted to publish another WIP on Mastodon that showed images, but the instance I use to publish updates had technical issues with uploading images that day.

This was a wake-up call that I should post updates in multiple platforms; there's also the Wordpress blog which has been *the* project site when it launched in 2023, but a webpage with nothing but HTML and CSS (there's no Javascript or anything else unless I have to use them for features I can't do with HTML and CSS alone) also fills a need for visitors with older computers or slower connections. I also have fun trying to make Old Web-style sites and customizing them, while learning how to modernize them.