Eccch, why do things always take longer than they ought to? (Well. Probably because my brain has been about 75% Hamilton, and 25% is not a lot of brain to work with. But it's supposed to be a rhetorical question, damn it.)

At any rate, the revamped Spell of the Unown review is up at last. I'm fairly happy with this one, I think - it's not too much different in substance from the old one, but it explains what I'm talking about in less vague/emotional/hyperbolic terms. If you're browsing on a mobile device, you may notice the screenshots in this one show up bigger than in the previous two; if you have any opinion on whether you'd prefer shrinking them down or making the first and second movie ones bigger too, by all means let me know.

Comment on this - View comments

Happy birthday to you!
You're thirteen, it's true.
Oh, my dear teenage website,
I can't believe how you grew.

Thirteen years ago, Butterfree's Pokémon Site first saw the light of the internet. I am now, apparently, the parent of a teenager. Sort of. Let's hope thirteen isn't unlucky in this instance.

I've been having a pretty busy couple of months (and okay, I may also be having a silly obsession with a ridiculous historical rap musical), and I'm deeply sorry for the lack of updates; I really should have been able to get these silly review revamps done ages ago. And I very much meant to have the third movie one done today, but nope, it just wasn't happening (my friend wrote this really adorable fanfic, okay). I will do my absolute best to finish it tomorrow. Sorry, site.

Instead, you get a new Almighty Random Poll, because the previous one was pretty old. I'm actually kind of curious about this one.

Comment on this - View comments

I've finally finished my updates to the Power of One review, which in addition to gaining some screenshots was very significantly rewritten - on a rewatch I concluded a significant part of my main complaint about it wasn't actually valid (I'm pretty sure everyone decides Ash is the actual Chosen One because he's collected two treasures already, not because he's the Chosen One of the festival per se), so now I complain about a bunch of other things instead, and also I'm not quite as hard on it because wow, I was really hard on this movie. I still don't think it's very good, but at least I can acknowledge that it's really pretty.

I've also added screenshots to the Mewtwo Strikes Back review (and made a couple of other minor edits to it after rewatching the movie), and the reviews now all have previous/next links at the bottom.

Next up, the Spell of the Unown review.

Comment on this - View comments

I've added Hoopa's artwork to the Zodiac images (both the Confined and Unbound forms), and additionally I made a minor fix to the source code to ensure that at least Firefox's "reading view" will actually show the text of my pages instead of just the footer (not that this site has much in the way of clutter you'd want to remove with the reading view, but I felt it was good to make it work anyway).

I'm still working on my rewritten Power of One review. It's technically almost done, but in the process I managed to randomly decide to add some screenshots to it to liven it up, so I'm going to go rewatch the first movie and take some screenshots to add to that review as well before I put it up (and then move on to the other reviews and add screenshots to them as well).

Comment on this - View comments

I've made some major edits to my review of Mewtwo Strikes Back. Mostly it's just stylistic changes, because the writing of these reviews is really making me cringe these days; large chunks of it have been rewritten from scratch, and the rest has been fiddled with to a somewhat lesser degree. This also included updating it to be more in line with the later reviews in terms of keeping the synopsis as a synopsis and not going off on rants about things as they happen, instead leaving that for the Good and Bad sections at the end.

I'm planning to do some similar editing for the other reviews, or at least the earlier ones, in the coming days.

Comment on this - View comments

I got a helpful error report pointing out something I'd missed in the R/B/Y stat modification section, namely that Full Restores will only reset your stats if the Pokémon is at full HP, because then the game will pretend it's a Full Heal - otherwise, the status will be cured but the stats will be left alone. As I was adding that into the section, I also realized that I'd neglected to account for the fact the AI using healing items is not really using healing items, so they also work differently (specifically, they never reset stats). So I rewrote the bit on curing status effects into a single section listing which ways of curing status reset stats and which don't, and also edited the calculator accordingly.

Comment on this - View comments

Even more Favorite Pokémon Picker updates! (I promise I will do something else soon.)

There are now not one but two filtering options allowing you to select your favorites from a subset of the existing Pokémon: you can include or exclude each generation individually, and you can now choose to include only final evolutions.

A couple of notes on this. If you're in forms mode, all mega evolutions count as being from the sixth generation, and all other proper forms in general as being from the generation that introduced that form. Females for those Pokémon with a gender difference, on the other hand, even though they were technically introduced in the fourth generation, are counted as being part of whichever generation first introduced the Pokémon. These choices are somewhat arbitrary, but make more instinctive sense, I think, than the other options - feel free to let me know if you disagree.

Also, if you pick the final evolution option, you should see any Pokémon that doesn't evolve into anything in the generations you're including. Thus, if you include the first generation but not the second, you'll see Scyther, because Scizor isn't included. This does lead to one (and just one, unless I'm overlooking something) situation that's slightly counterintuitive: if you select the first and fourth generations, but not the second, then both Porygon and Porygon-Z will show up, because Porygon's own evolution isn't included. If anyone is actually bothered by this, I can go make it so Porygon won't appear if Porygon-Z does, but somehow I rather doubt it.

There have also been some invisible changes behind the scenes - I think I've fixed a bug that came up occasionally where the picker could stop showing you Pokémon eventually (I think; I've never managed to consistently reproduce it so I can't say for sure, but let me know if you do bump into it), and Mega Aggron used to be misidentified as "Female Aggron" but should now be automatically corrected in your data when you visit the page.

Probably the most extensive change here, though, is that I've overhauled how the picker stores and works with data. Originally, the picker always worked with arrays of Pokémon objects, each holding all the data the picker knew about that Pokémon; this simplified the logic a little at the time, but it meant redundantly storing a lot of unnecessary information in the user's browser. As I added features to the picker, this originally simplifying setup started to just become cumbersome and get in the way, and as I was adding the new filtering capabilities (which added to the information stored on each Pokémon), I realized it was more than time to rethink this. Luckily, the change seems to have gone extremely smoothly, and your data should be automatically silently converted to the new format next time you use the picker. It doesn't appear to have broken anything in my testing, at least, but there may be something I missed, so be on guard for any new bugs.

Comment on this - View comments

I've added a feature to the Favorite Pokémon Picker that lets you control (to an extent) how many Pokémon you see at a time. I'd gotten feedback from several people that they found batches of twenty Pokémon too unwieldy and would often miss some of them entirely, and indirectly I'd seen a lot of people claim some of their favorite Pokémon never showed up, which should be impossible and which I thus suspect was actually the result of them overlooking the Pokémon when it did show up. So now the "Maximum batch size" setting allows you to set the size of the largest batches you can get according to your own preference, whatever that may be.

It does restrict the batch sizes to being between 2 and 20, so if you actually wanted larger batches than before, unfortunately this doesn't help you. The reason for that is actually just that with a batch of 21, the neat little algorithm I use to show the Pokémon in something as close as possible to a nice-looking rectangle would make the display seven Pokémon wide, which is wider than the page design currently accounts for. If somebody really wants bigger batches, I can tweak it to make it work, but I don't think I've seen anyone asking for that yet, so for now I'll assume twenty is an acceptable maximum.

I also added a bit of text below the picker buttons telling you how many Pokémon remain to be eliminated before your next favorite is found. I used to have some numbers there stating how many Pokémon were left in the current round and how many had been picked for the next round, but I took them out a while ago because I realized that without knowing technical details about how the picker's "rounds" work, these numbers would really just raise more questions than they answered. I've seen a lot of people confused by the lack of anything indicating progress or how long it will take to actually see any favorites, though, and I really wanted to do something about that. After adding those numbers back in and typing a long paragraph into this update about how they might just make people even more confused, I realized I could just, y'know, put a number there that hopefully isn't confusing, doesn't involve rounds, and actually indicates progress in a pretty straightforward way.

If anything still confuses you about the picker, or for that matter if you have any other feedback, by all means keep it coming. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how much people seem to like using this thing, and it's pretty fun to work on, so I expect I'll be continuing to add features to it if there seems to be sufficient interest.

Also, as always, if you discover any bugs, please let me know.

Comment on this - View comments

I have put up yet another Morphic extra, entitled "Dave and Mia Discuss Family", for those who care. This time it's a post-fic AU, and lest you think that means it's happier than the end of the original fic, NOPE.

Comment on this - View comments

No, there has not been a corporate takeover. No, I am not planning to move into the uninformative-list-articles-full-of-stock-photos market. I will be writing lengthy wordy mathy overenthusiastic rambling forever and you can't stop me.

The style I made for the joke, however, was actually pretty decent, especially since it's the first style to work properly on phones (because the last time I made a style was 2008 oh my god help). So that style now has a permanent home in the style switcher, as "Modern style", with a couple of edits: it now shows the style switcher, and the top banner is not ridiculously humongous. It is also now the default style for users who have not set a style, but if you don't like it, you can switch (the previous default style was Articuno).

Finally, I've added a section on this year's joke to the April Fools' joke archive, and I updated the style switcher page with information on the new style and updated style tags (because Internet Explorer 6 is not actually relevant anymore). If for some reason you preferred the style with the ludicrously huge top banner, the actual intact April Fools' Day version of the style is also there under Deprecated Styles.

Comment on this - View comments

We are proud to announce that THE CAVE OF DRAGONFLIES® has been acquired by Daybreak Recreation & Activities Group Productions, Ltd. We are incredibly excited for this opportunity to give back to the community and help this great website respond to the changing demands of the modern Web.

We have begun by releasing a brand-new, responsive mobile-first design across the website, to better reflect the web design sensibilities of the modern age. The new layout includes stronger branding and a sleek, modern, professional look and feel that users will appreciate, as well as scaling elegantly down to mobile devices.

Rest assured that we will continue to produce the quality POKÉMON™ content you have come to expect from THE CAVE OF DRAGONFLIES®. Moreover, we will strive to engage an even wider and more diverse audience than the website has previously reached by emphasizing shareability and enticing titles. Today we are proud to release a new original article that we hope will get you excited for the new direction the site is headed, entitled, "You Won't Believe These Bizarre Glitches Elite Hackers Have Discovered in the Pokémon Games".

Stay tuned for more exciting updates, including brand-new ways to engage with all of THE CAVE OF DRAGONFLIES®' 150+ pages of original content across a wide variety of social media and new and intriguing monetization opportunities. We hope you are as excited about our plans for THE CAVE OF DRAGONFLIES® as we are!

Comment on this - View comments

You're just dying to know more about D/P/Pt honey trees, aren't you? I knew it. Thanks to xfix (who has been regularly sending me game mechanics corrections for a while now - thanks!), I've added a bit about the 0.93% chance that there are only three Munchlax trees and a calculator to determine two of your Munchlax trees from your visible trainer ID.

Comment on this - View comments

Remember Morphic? That fanfic I finished in 2010 and then wrote a bunch of ridiculous extras for? I wrote a new extra for my friend elyvorg's birthday on February 6th, "Jack and Gabriel Discuss Death". It's a bit more serious than the other extras.

Comment on this - View comments

After looking through my referral logs and reading some of the discussions where the Favorite Pokémon Picker had been linked, I made a couple more edits to it addressing some recurring issues:

• The short explanation text is now a bit clearer about the fact that the Pokémon you pick are not supposed to immediately appear under your "Found Favorites".
• It also now explicitly notes that if you just keep on pressing "Pass", you won't actually get anywhere.
• After one too many people claiming one of their favorite Pokémon just never appeared or didn't appear until way late, I added a feature allowing you to check exactly what happened to any Pokémon you specify. (Odds are you accidentally missed it and selected something else from the batch it was in, but on the off-chance you actually found some kind of bug, it'll detect that too.)
• Because people were trying to share their favorites lists a lot and the only way they could do so was by taking screenshots and cropping them manually which is pretty inconvenient, I added a shareable favorites list link that will appear once you have some favorites. For the moment, if you want to share it as an image you'll still have to screenshot it yourself; I may later make a feature that automatically generates your favorites list as an image, too, but right now this will have to do.

Comment on this - View comments

I've added an oft-requested feature to the Favorite Pokémon Picker, "Forms mode". In forms mode, all aesthetically distinct Pokémon forms - that is, all variations with separate sprites in the OR/AS Pokédex - will be considered separate entities. Note that this includes for example gender differences - if you're seeing Scyther and are sure you just saw Scyther a couple of batches ago, it's because male Scyther (short abdomen) and female Scyther (long abdomen) are both in the running.

This does not affect your current picker state; forms mode is optional and off by default, and although I've changed slightly how some data is stored to accommodate forms mode, the change should be fully backwards-compatible.

What is more problematic is that I also added Hoopa, since it was officially released the other day (I've also added it to the Zodiac, although it's still missing Global Link artwork, and other relevant pages I could recall), which means everyone's existing picker state is now missing a Pokémon. To resolve this, I decided to have a confirm box pop up when your state is loaded and it detects that some Pokémon are missing, allowing you to either simply add the Pokémon to your not-yet-eliminated list or reset your state completely (in practice, you only want the latter if you actually like Hoopa more than some of the Pokémon under your Found Favorites). So don't be alarmed if that happens. Presumably something similar will happen when the final Gen VI Pokémon and Gen VII are officially released.

Comment on this - View comments

It's 2015! This past year hasn't been the most active for this site, but nonetheless, all in all, I did get some pretty noteworthy new material done - the sixth-generation Zodiac, What Trainer Class Are You?, R/B/Y stat modification, the Favorite Pokémon Picker, the new type quiz, and of course the sixth-generation capture mechanics.

As always, I'd like to thank some people for making my 2014 lovely:

• elyvorg, for watching Breaking Bad with me, making me play some delightful video games, gratuitous Skyping, and housing me even while she was busy doing Real Science. I wish I could have stayed longer. Also, for being a fellow Cylon.
• opaltiger, for making me smile every time he appears on a British quiz show, dealing out four Cylon cards instead of two in the Battlestar Galactica board game, and spontaneous e-mails. It may not be obvious enough how much I appreciate you but I do.
• Dannichu, for being continually amazing, having me over in both May and October, attempting to show me Happy Valley until the Internet cut out, actually showing me The Thick of It which is pretty great, and generally facilitating Expogoing.
• Negrek, for Dave and Mia Discuss The Quest for the Legends.
• Music Dragon, for the QftL DVD commentary.
• magical, for magically finding the X/Y capture routine.
• Altissimo, for testing things, talking, and doing a massive project the fruits of which should hopefully be finding their way onto the site soon.
• Metallica Fanboy, for running some really great mafia games.
• Zowayix, for getting me to look into R/B/Y stat modification, which I'm linking again because I still think that's one of the most delightfully messed-up things I have ever done and I am on a quest to convince everyone in the entire world that it's cool.
• Vondell, for being a very cool person that I feel cool by extension for having had on my forums more than a decade ago, and for consistently posting both things that make me laugh and things that make me think on a daily basis.
• Hacker Monthly, for publishing my R/B/Y capture mechanics, being pleasant to work with in the process of editing it, and sending me a couple of free copies of the issue.
• Ashley Cope and Tracy Butler, for authoring my favorite webcomics and drawing these lovely sketches.
• Shadey, for being the snuggliest husband.
• My dad, for long programming discussions.
• You stray people still following this website after twelve years, for being awesome.

Hope your 2014 wasn't too bad. Happy new year, and may it be productive and include hoverboards.

Comment on this - View comments