Somebody asked me on Tumblr if I could make the Hangman usable with the keyboard (I made the Number Game nicer to use with a keyboard when I made the last update), so I have now done that - you can guess letters by simply typing the letters, and you can select a difficulty with the arrow keys and press Enter between rounds. While I was at it, I made a few other tweaks and simplifications to the code (which was really, really old; I kind of want to rewrite it from scratch, but stopped myself here). Let me know if anything doesn't work right, as always; I think I tested everything relevant, but you can never be sure.

Comment on this - View comments

I've made a bunch more US/UM updates: the Pokémon List Generator, evolution list, Interactive Type Chart, Gen VI/VII Capture Mechanics, Gen VI/VII Catch Rate Calculator, Hangman and Number Game now all include US/UM information in whatever way is relevant to them, except I've gotten a report from someone that a Nest Ball capture that should have been guaranteed failed, and I've yet to get the chance to properly look into that, exactly how the Roto Catch power works, or whether there might have been any other ball bonus changes - consider that a heads up. (I did, however, add the change that's ensured Heavy Ball Beldum are now legal.)

Additionally, the guestbook's spam verification Pokémon now include all seven generations and use the Gen VII unified sprite set that I put together for the Favorite Pokémon Picker.

Comment on this - View comments

The Favorite Pokémon Picker has now been updated with the new Pokémon/forms added in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. The "Include spoilers" setting is now default off again, and if you have used the picker before with spoilers on, it will prompt you about whether you want to turn spoilers off or proceed with the new Pokémon included. This will probably be how I handle spoilers from now on; I think it's nicer than the previous way.

The unified sprite set used in the picker have also been updated to use the US/UM dex art for all Pokémon available in the games.

As always, let me know if you discover any bugs or oddities.

Comment on this - View comments

The Favorite Pokémon Picker has been replaced with a brand-new version... which looks practically identical at a glance, don't worry. Mostly, the code has been almost entirely restructured and organized, because the old one was starting to get annoying to maintain. With the new structure, it will be a lot easier for me to, say, add more settings in the future, without worrying quite as much about potentially screwing up something else in the process.

There have been a couple of subtle modifications to the functionality of the tool. Changing the filter settings no longer prompts you to reset the picker; instead, any Pokémon that shouldn't be there anymore are simply removed from your state, and any new ones are shuffled into the current round. This lets you switch to or from forms mode, for example, without having to start over from the beginning; the ability to reorder found favorites should carry the rest.

It is now also possible to undo/redo most anything, including resets, setting changes, and reorderings in Found Favorites, and there is a "Show debug information" link to make it easier for you to give me a dump of your state if you do bump into any bugs or errors. Of course, as usual, please do let me know if you have any issues, and I'll do my best to figure them out.

Assuming there isn't anything horribly wrong with the picker that I'll need to fix, next up is redoing my eighth movie review and then continuing with the other movies... with some US/UM updates in between, I expect.

Comment on this - View comments

Now you're fifteen years old,
while I'm sick with a cold.
Happy birthday, dear website!
Here's to more years untold.

The Cave of Dragonflies is fifteen years old today. Man, a decade and a half. I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't decided to make a Pokémon website when I was twelve, but it'd probably be a lot more boring.

The site gets two whole birthday presents this year: first, I've made a new style, which you may be looking at right now if you haven't set a style cookie. It's a modernized remake of the old Voice of the Forest style, gratuitous lens flare and all, and you can switch your style cookie to it here. Essentially, I always felt Voice of the Forest had a nice color scheme and was one of the more visually interesting styles, but it was getting really dated with the fixed 800px width, and it was about time I made some more real responsive styles that weren't just joke banner changes. So here's one, and hopefully I'll get around to making more sometime before the sun swallows the earth. (If you preferred the old Voice of the Forest style, it still works, and you can switch your cookie to it on the style switcher page.)

Additionally, I've held my nose and created a Facebook page for the site. Like with the Twitter account, I aim to announce site updates on it, and if Facebook is your thing, you can contact me there, or you can like or share it or whatever. Raise awareness of cool old game mechanics, or something. I don't know, I am a crotchety old woman and back in my day people shared things by copy-pasting them into instant messengers.

Comment on this - View comments

I've corrected my Gen II Capture Mechanics page (and the associated calculator) to include the +40 Heavy Ball bonus, which does exist in these games (and applies to Snorlax), contrary to what the page originally stated. Because I didn't originally analyze that routine myself, I never actually personally checked that, so of course it turns out to be wrong. I'm guessing the original misinformation came from UPC, but since that's now defunct and vanished into the ether, I can't check.

I also corrected the boundaries of the Heavy Ball weight classes (including for Gen IV and Gen VII), which for whatever reason I'd also somehow managed to get the wrong way around.

Comment on this - View comments

Yet another Favorite Pokémon Picker, because of course once I start I just can't leave it alone. Now, rather than fiddling with nonsense links, you can actually reorder your found favorites by dragging and dropping. Note that if you truly pick consistently, you shouldn't need to do this at all - the picker's algorithm will find your absolute favorite first, then your second favorite and so on. However, we're all only human, and whether by mistake or changing whims, people often end up with lists that they feel ought to be just slightly different. Now you can fix your list manually in a simple, straightforward way.

Of course there are now several other things I want to do with the picker. I think the first among them, though, is going to be a code restructuring that I've been dying to do for a while; other stuff might get done alongside that.

Comment on this - View comments

I've added yet another feature to the Favorite Pokémon Picker. For any generated favorite list with a link in the new format, the list page will have a link back to the picker that will let you pick up where that list leaves off - for example, this link to a list with Charizard, Butterfree and Scyther on it links back to a picker page that will offer to let you continue from that list. In practice, of course, it's not super-useful for you to be able to pick up from my favorite list unless those happen to be your top three favorite Pokémon, but it does mean that if you save the link to your favorite list somewhere, you'll always be able to pick up from it even if you move to a different computer or otherwise lose your state - and if for one reason or another your list ends up being wrong because you accidentally eliminated some Pokémon when you shouldn't have or something like the Zygarde bug messed with your results, it's possible for you to just erase some letters off the back of your link (two letters per Pokémon) to back up without having to start all over.

Note that the only information passed over this way is your found favorites - if you continue from a link, you'll have to do a very long round going through all the Pokémon not in the favorite list, instead of being able to work with the previously constructed tree of elimination. Also, the favorite list does not know what settings you originally used; the picker will turn on forms mode if one of the favorites on the list is a non-default form, and disable major only if one of them is minor, but if you had excluded some generations or types when you made your list, you'll have to edit those settings again after loading the favorite list.

Comment on this - View comments

I've made yet more updates to the Favorite Pokémon Picker, with two changes of note:

• The shareable link to your current list is now a bit more streamlined: instead of containing a plain comma-separated list of the National Pokédex number and form identifier of each Pokémon in your list, it will now just have a nonsense string with two characters per Pokémon on the list. The reason for this change is that two separate people have contacted me in the past couple of days complaining because they'd ordered literally every Pokémon or something close to it, and the resulting URL was so long that the server refused to process it. In the new URL scheme, while it's possible to end up with a link of over 2000 characters (though only in forms mode with major only off), which some browsers may have trouble with, the server should at least always be fine with it. Old-style links will still work as before, of course.
• I've also fixed an insidious little bug involving Zygarde 10%, where it and all Pokémon eliminated by it (or eliminated by them, etc.) could get vanished from your state. If you were affected, your state should silently fix itself when you visit the page again, adding Zygarde 10% to your not-yet-eliminated list and letting you pick it as normal - although of course, the presence of the bug may mean a bunch of Pokémon that should have appeared earlier in your list were incorrectly held back. Apologies for any resulting inconvenience.

As always, happy picking, and please let me know if you discover any further odd behaviour when using the picker.

Comment on this - View comments

I've finished revamping my review of the seventh Pokémon movie, with a bunch of screenshots to break it up a little as usual. I can't wait to get to the eighth (also known as objectively the best one).

Comment on this - View comments

I've added filtering by type to the Favorite Pokémon Picker, by popular demand. In the process, I also made several other refinements:

• It's now easily possible for casual users to finish sorting every single Pokémon in the available list (since with the generation and type filters you can end up with quite a short list), so I actually made the interface account for that, explain that you've finished and let you reset, instead of everything just locking up suddenly.
• Somewhat similarly, I made it so that in those (previously rare) situations where you would previously have been given one single Pokémon which you had to pick (at which point it would automatically go into your Found Favorites), it'll automatically figure it out and just add that Pokémon to your list too. This is functionally identical, just less confusing interface-wise.
• You can now uncheck every generation/type, and it will just show a notice explaining that no Pokémon fit your criteria. Previously, it somewhat clumsily just didn't let you uncheck the last box.
• Alongside all this, I also significantly refactored some of the code in order to make it a bit more robust and easier to add more options in the future.

As with any significant code restructuring, it's possible there are bugs; I've tested it a fair bit, but as always, if you spot any odd behaviour, please let me know.

Comment on this - View comments

The "Final evolutions only" box on the Favorite Pokémon Picker now actually works as intended, after having had a bug with Pokémon that gained final evolutions in a subsequent generation. If you had a previous picker state, the picker should offer to simply add the remaining Pokémon.

Comment on this - View comments

I've updated all the stories in my Fan Fiction section to be within the layout of the site proper, which probably makes for a nicer reading experience than the plain HTML files they used to be. This includes Morphic, which now also has links to the previous and next chapters on each chapter, hopefully making it a bit less of a hassle to read.

Comment on this - View comments

I've revamped yet another movie review, this time the one for Jirachi: Wish Maker. See, I really can do things in a vaguely reasonable amount of time! Maybe I can get the seventh movie review revamp out this month too (but then again, maybe not; I'm getting two friends visiting and going to America in between, so on second thought you probably shouldn't expect it until August).

Comment on this - View comments

Remember how in 2015 (how on earth has it been that long, what is going on) I started revamping my Pokémon movie reviews? I've now finally finished revamping my Pokémon Heroes review, including adding some screenshots to illustrate it. Let's hope the next ones don't take as long.

Comment on this - View comments

When I analyzed the Sun and Moon capture routine, I overlooked a bit that appeared to suggest the ball bonus value for non-Beast Balls against Ultra Beasts was overwritten with 0.1x. I now believe I've verified this pretty thoroughly in-game; more info here. I've updated the calculator and capture mechanics accordingly.

Comment on this - View comments

I've been meaning to redo my free quiz scripts page for years; it was hopelessly confusing, needlessly made itself more confusing in order to support the incredibly far-fetched possibility of someone wanting to run the scripts on the server side with ASP, and the code it gave you was pretty bad. I've finally finished that rewrite now; the new quiz scripts are a lot better and easier to customize, and the instructions are far better organized; the added flexibility admittedly means there may be more instructions all in all than before, but I hope overall it's a significant improvement.

Comment on this - View comments

It took a couple of days longer than I thought, but I've updated all of the catch rate calculators to handle changes in Pokémon data between games better, including properly implementing the stat changes in X/Y and Sun/Moon. Thus, now the Gen VI/VII calculator will have the Fast Ball get a bonus against Pidgeot, while the Gen III/IV calculator will not. It's a very minor thing that affects very little, but it's more robust and makes more sense.

I also fixed a bug that was causing the shake bar to not appear on the R/B/Y calculator if you had checked 'Show detailed report'. Again, please let me know if you spot any bugs.

Comment on this - View comments

I finally managed to get my hands on the Sun and Moon capture routine, and it is... basically exactly the same as the sixth-generation one, as far as I can tell; however, Sun and Moon of course added new Pokémon and new (old) Pokéballs, and the ball bonuses for several older kinds of balls were rebalanced a bit. These changes are now detailed on the joint Gen VI/VII Capture Mechanics page and have been added to the Gen VI/VII Catch Rate Calculator. And yes, it appears it's impossible to catch Beldum in a Heavy Ball in Sun and Moon.

Note that I've actually yet to implement the base stat changes that happened in S/M into it, so there is a chance some catch rates could be affected for some Pokémon; I'll have to look into that tomorrow. As always, please let me know if you discover any bugs or oddities.

I've also finally updated the Pokémon List Generator with the Gen VII Pokémon and all five Alolan Pokédexes.

Comment on this - View comments

Obviously, yesterday's update was an April Fools' Day joke - but the actual Gen VII Zodiac is now up! This time around, every non-legendary final evolution gets its own day, which works out perfectly, because Game Freak loves me. As always, you can generate an image for your birthday:

There is also a writeup for yesterday's joke on the April Fools' Day joke archive page. If the Alolan Zodiac amused you, it is still available and functional here, images and all.

Comment on this - View comments

The new Zodiac is finally up! The Alola region is a little different in a number of ways, so it felt appropriate to make the Alolan Zodiac a little different, too: instead of a Pokémon zodiac, it's a human zodiac, featuring the trainers of the Alola region! I hope you enjoy the new zodiac and backstory, and of course, as always, you can generate an image representing your birthday and show it off around the internet.

Comment on this - View comments

I've updated my Pokémon Go guide and review in accordance with the latest updates. Let me know if I forgot anything.

The Gen VII Zodiac is in progress; I've been a little busy with other things lately, but it's coming along okay and should be up in the reasonably near future.

Comment on this - View comments

Yet more Favorite Pokémon Picker: Ash-Greninja is now included in forms mode; I've fixed an, ahem, bug where Bug-type Arceus was incorrectly considered a "major" form, which it obviously shouldn't have been; and East Shellos and Gastrodon used to show the West form's sprites ever since the Gen VII update, which has now been fixed. If you're playing in "Major only" forms mode, the picker should automatically remove Bug Arceus from wherever it might appear in your state when it loads your state, and the Ash-Greninja addition will give you the usual dialog asking to either add it as not yet eliminated or reset your state. As always, let me know if there are any further issues that I haven't noticed.

Comment on this - View comments

Since I added forms mode to the Favorite Pokémon Picker, several people have asked me for a mode where you can choose between something like a Pokémon and its mega without having to also choose between all the forms of Arceus and Unown. Your dream has now come true with the "Major only" forms mode, which includes only those forms and gender differences that I deemed significant. Unfortunately these choices are pretty arbitrary, but I think it should work well enough for most people's purposes.

I also reduced the amount of text on the page and moved the options into a tab next to Found Favorites, which I hope makes the page a bit less cluttered overall; by all means tell me your thoughts on this change.

Comment on this - View comments

It's finally 2017. It is widely agreed that 2016 was a bit lousy in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully we can make this one better.

On a purely personal level, though, I had a pretty good 2016, and I have some people to thank for that, as usual:

• Shadey, the softest loveliest.
• Negrek, for inviting me back, seeing Hamilton and Flight of the Conchords with me, reviewing every chapter of TQftL posted this year, the continually-excellent Salvage, some really fun drawing suggestions, Intro to Science 101, cheering me up with surprise Salvage extras, poking me about the Dave ramble, and generally cheering on my writing (and drawing) efforts. You are pretty great friend and pretty much made my year on several levels.
• elyvorg, for continuing to be wonderful, hosting me and visiting us, the Week of Manliness, Uncharted, all the long, long Skype chats, Oh! One True Destined Partner, Sir Ressentiment, and Pokémon Go trips.
• Dannichu for hosting me yet again, playing AAI2 with me, Happy Valley, Bake-Off, the Expo, and increasing the concentration of lesbians and the ocean on my Tumblr dashboard by about 2000%.
• surskitty, for generously hosting us, coming along to Flight of the Conchords, finally showing me Spirited Away, Pokémon movies, Saint Young Men, Katamari, and coming to visit.
• Trinket, for visiting with surskitty, providing me with sprites and data that I don't have the know-how to rip, and generally being pretty awesome.
• Psychic for meeting up again (and the entire fanfic meetup crew, for that matter, especially Act and Michael for hosting), drawing suggestions and commenting helpfully on them, and being generally supportive and great.
• opaltiger, for being a great, supportive friend, all the talks ranging from silly to very serious, and keeping Truth going.
• Espeon, for the most glorious drawing suggestions, chats, and general encouragement. I hope you can finally come to the Expo in 2017!
• Umbramatic, for lots of silliness, talks, making some pretty glorious fanwork of my stuff which still amazes me, Bear No Fruit, Liberating Glamour, and other pretty adorable fanfics.
• Chibi Pika, for sharing my fifteenth ficiversary, Palkia Positivity, soldiering on with The Legendarian Chronicles and picking up the pace, and inspiring me to continue drawing with their art.
• ultraviolet and Music Dragon, for starting Telecod, and all the Telecod regulars. I can't overstate how delighted I am at its success and how it's kept the flame of the forum community alive.
• My parents, for everything.
• Game Freak, for twenty years of Pokémon, and for Sun and Moon, which were pretty excellent and more or less exactly what I wanted from the next main series Pokémon games.
• Niantic, for Pokémon Go, which for all its flaws still delights me.
• Habitica, for continuing to keep me motivated.
• Kattholt, the shelter where we got our cat.
• Everyone who made drawing suggestions to my artblog; so many of them have delighted me, challenged me and generally helped me.
• TCoD visitors, for still being here after all these years.

I also made a couple of minor updates to the Pokémon Go review and guide, if you care.

Either way, thanks for being with me for this past year, and I hope you all have a great 2017.

Comment on this - View comments