Banner

Welcome to the Operating Superstars project!

Intro

This project is a take on the niche but popular concept of personifying computers and operating systems and is based in the MMO and computing history-inspired digital world of Techlandia.

The eponymous Operating Superstars (OSes) are one of the paths that inhabitants of this world can take; they have a lot of recognition but also challenges due to their roles: The positives and perils of publicity (counting competing for coolness to their communities), mounting of malware mishaps to be managed, troublesome technical tribulations... The list lengthens but the OSes are revved up in their resolve for the challenges ahead!

Much of the worldbuilding is revealed through a collection of short stories and webnovels as characters' adventures continue, but can also be introduced through drawings and Mastodon posts. Most of the information, including character and team articles will be on the project wiki.

These stories focus on different teams of OSes or individual characters across different time periods about their life in Techlandia, and sometimes of ventures into another universe... Chapters vary from slice of life to action, to investigating mysteries in the past, present or future that reveal more about the setting.


Setting

Techlandia is the world that this project takes place and is a conworld loosely inspired by computing history with areas that are usually loosely based on computing companies or organizations. Occasionally, humans have arrived here and the introductory story of this project stars one of those humans whom decided to stay.

The Sectors article on the wiki has an overview of each of the named sectors and the teams of OSes that they hosted.


Scope and tone

There's a growing cast that spans several teams and sectors representing many computer and OS line-ups. However there are limits to which companies, line-ups and specific characters that'll be featured for story reasons or for practical reasons to keep the development sustainable. See the disclaimers for more information.

The tone mixes comedy and drama, and can within the same story but tries to avoid mood whiplash within the same chapter. There's overall more of a focus on comedy, and some planned storylines will be serious but are not intended to be completely bleak. There's hope; characters representing hardware or OSes that are long obsolete continue to have relevance instead of being left behind and forgotten.

OSes have counterparts in the other universe explored in this project. It's a cyberpunk dystopia and "obsolete" characters struggle against being forgotten and it gets into more serious issues that warrant content warnings, but it's not going to be completely bleak. The tone is intended to focus on perseverance against the odds. Reading back and forth between them (when there are more stories for the latter) may be jarring, so reader beware!



Latest chapters

I Was a Software Developer Until I Got Taken to the Computer World of Techlandia!


Image Description: An illustration of Valencia from a side view. She is standing behind a podium and shouting. Her left hand is firmly flat on the podium top and she is shaking her right hand which is curled into a fist. The caption reads '...or as my mentor would say, to be just a square working for The Man!'

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.



Same Place, Different Universe


Image Description: Terrell grinning at the camera while he had a top hat placed on him. He is still wearing his usual outfit which is much more casual and he is seated in a gaming chair or office chair. Mi-ho is standing behind him, dressed in her stage magician performer outfit which has a silver jacket with a white shirt, green brooch, black vest, silver sunflower-shaped skirt, long black boots with yellow straps, an orange top hat with a black headband, black ribbon and yellow sunflower brooch. She is posing and waved her hands in a gesture for a magic trick. She and Terrell are in the recording room and the back wall is in the background. The caption at the bottom of the image reads 'Doesn't he look fancier now?'

Chapter 4: We'll Dazzle the Audiences!

Regina needed to step away from the stream she started in the last chapter. In the meantime, Mi-ho and Terrell stepped in... (Kiah and Regina also got into arguments)

Update log

Chapter 4 of Same Place, Different Universe has been published! This story overall has content warnings for some heavy subject matter, but this chapter doesn’t have those subject matters and is all silliness! It’s a breather before things will get more serious again.

Mi-ho performs as a stage magician, which is built off of a reference to how the demonstration of the original iPhone was held together with a lot of tricks to make sure it'd go perfectly. Terrell is her volunteer for this performance, but I think because of his personality, he’d often want to be the volunteer! He might be often enough that he and Mi-ho could be a stage magician duo.

Kiah appears in full-color after her introduction to this continuity through the first WIP of the chapter. This update moves chapter 3 off of the front page, but the description for it has been moved to the archives. Several articles on the wiki will be updated including for each of the characters that appeared in the chapter. Since the process of updating each article with the latest refinements is still on-going, those articles will be updated with them.

I also found, or remembered some more sources I thought were interesting and will add them in the updates.


19 Aug 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.


14 Aug 2025

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...


11 Aug 2025

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.


7 Aug 2025

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.

5 Aug 2025

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.


Image Description: A 3D render of a desk. The body of the desk is white and it has a sleek top that is black with a gold, blue and purple terrazzo pattern. The desk has a glass panel in the front where items would be displayed behind it, but it has an opaque stylized gradient. There is a cash register on the desk. On the wall behind the desk are shelves with a display of fabric samples with scattered crystals. The shelves are made from a dark wood with brighter orange interiors to draw the eye towards the items.

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.


31 Jul 2025

From the latest update I posted on Mastodon:

"I vectored and started shading each of the illustrations for chapter 12 of my webnovel I Was a Software Developer...."
Two out of three are nearly complete, and I hope I can get these finished and publish the chapter within the next few days! After this, several articles on the project wiki will also be updated with information from this chapter. I also want to look into adding another section to the home page that showcases the latest chapters of ongoing stories.

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.


29 Jul 2025

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.


28 Jul 2025

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.


27 Jul 2025

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.