So when I put up the R/S/E roulette article, I had to slightly rush it to make it by April 1st - there were some things I wanted to get into better but just didn't quite have a chance to finish if I wanted to get it up in time. I figured I could get into those things afterwards and then put up these minor enhancements to the simulator when I got the chance.

This somehow turned into a whole new rabbit hole about the roulette. One of the things I didn't have time to get into was exactly emulating how the game went about randomizing for the simulator - something I believed was a minor detail whose effects would disappear in rounding anyway. Once I did get into it, though, it turned out (which I'd missed) that the calculations for the starting angle and the fuzz range were both using the final bit of the same random number, meaning they were actually highly correlated with each other - and also, after doing more thorough in-game testing which I'd also been hoping to do and getting some suspiciously consistently off results, I realized I'd missed C silently converting a float to an integer thanks to being too used to programming languages where you can't do that (note to programming language designers: this is terrible).

All in all, this meant some of my numbers were off, and that the article now needed much more nitty-gritty about precisely how the randomization works. I have now updated the article and corrected the errors in the text and in the simulator. The main upshot is that under most circumstances the slot distribution is actually slightly asymmetrical, thanks to the fuzz range being correlated with whether the starting angle is twelve o'clock or three o'clock on the one hand or six o'clock or nine o'clock on the other, and that the correct bet timing under ideal circumstances is actually specifically when the bet slot is approaching the bottom of the wheel, not the top, which will let you win 40% of the time (every time the twelve o'clock starting angle is chosen).

Additionally, I've added some new features to the simulator that I'd wanted to add:

• You can now click the "Set bet/occupied slots" button in order to be able to use the simulator wheel like the probability-based wheel a bit earlier in the article - click the white part to set a slot as occupied, click the colored part to set a slot as your bet. The ball will bounce realistically to one of the adjacent slots at random if it lands on an occupied slot, and the probabilities shown per slot on the simulator wheel will reflect the final probabilities for each slot with bounces taken into account (including accounting for which rescue Pokémon will actually be picked, given where the ball is on the wheel when it gets stuck).
• You can now make more granular choices about what to show in the simulator. You can set the starting angle to be random, a specific angle, or all four possible starting angles, and separately you can choose whether to use random fuzz, a specific fuzz value, or simulate either the lowest, highest and medium fuzz or all possible fuzz values.

I am also finding myself gravely wanting to restructure this code which is a series of additional functionality incrementally bolted onto what was originally just meant to be a simple little calculator that'd show your possible fuzz ranges, but at least I can do that after these necessary corrections.

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Hope you all enjoyed this year's little gag. While the style and casino rebranding were obviously a joke, the roulette mechanics were very much not! R/S/E roulette really does involve Taillow and Shroomish cheating for you if you have them in your party and an elaborate chaotic decision tree determining that rolls are more consistent if you have Taillow and Shroomish with you and play in the morning. I have been dying to show you all this madness for over a year now of intermittently working on this article and the simulations in between having to do other things, and truthfully there are still a few more things I want to do for the simulator, so you may see a couple more updates to the article.

I've now reverted the style back to normal and added a writeup about this year's joke to the April Fools' Day joke archive, with a lot of rambling about the 4+-year history of my analysis of R/S/E roulette. Thanks once again to Quiara for prompting all this, and to all of you for your patience!

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Welcome to THE CASINO OF DRAGONFLIES. After a couple of years of growing pathological obsession with the game of roulette, and the many e-mails I have received with offers to make me rich if only I would add links to the top casino games to my Pokémon website, I have finally faced the depths of my addiction and embraced the site's destiny. Click here to play and learn all about THE BEST ONLINE ROULETTE GAME trending casino gambling.

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I've put up another new Morphic AU extra that's been a long time coming, Groundhog Dave, featuring Dave in a time loop on the day of chapter 13 of the fic. Please mind the content warnings on this one, since it's heavier than usual; it includes strong and demeaning language, gun violence, character death, suicide and suicidal ideation, and existential horror. It also spoils the ending of Morphic, and will probably not make too much sense without having read the main fic.

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Another year comes to an end! I hope, despite everything, you've had a decent 2023 and your 2024 will be better.

This year I would like to extend some thanks to...

• ...all of my lovely friends, who make me happy by existing, especially those I got to hang out with, have voice or video chats or in-depth conversations, or roleplay with this year including Jackie, Chibi, elyvorg, Psychic and Teagan, Negrek, seatherny, Murkrow and opaltiger
• ...Altissimo, for working on an amazing and necessary Pokémon data resource and sending me corrections
• ...Darren of Johto Times, for reconnecting, starting a fascinating newsletter on the early days of Pokémon and its fandom, and even giving me an interview as part of it
• ...Ayano of Blue Moon Falls, for a fansite with great original content that keeps impressing me
• ...Ottercopter, for encouraging me to enter the Unsounded fanworks contest
• ...all of the staff of the Heartache RPG, which I look greatly forward to continuing to enjoy this year
• ...Game Freak, for the Scarlet and Violet DLC unexpectedly having the most interesting character-based storytelling in any Pokémon game
• ...my husband Shadey, the love of my life
• ...Birta, best cat
• ...my parents, who I feel very grateful for
• ...the Thousand Roads community, my primary internet home
• ...my generous patrons
• ...everyone for your patience with my still-not-quite-finished writeup on R/S/E roulette

Happy new year! I will see you next update... hopefully the roulette.

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