Some actual new Sword and Shield content: the Sword and Shield Weather Encounter Tool is here! This tool allows you to set the weather in each zone of your Wild Area and get an overview of which Pokémon you can currently find and where.

It currently doesn't include "special encounters", the preset Pokémon that always appear in particular spots; I'll try to add those for completeness when I get the chance.

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The Evolution List has now been updated with Sword and Shield information. Please let me know if I've made any errors; it's nearly 4:30 AM.

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For a couple of months now there's been an issue with the Favorite Pokémon Picker for some users using Chrome on Android devices - the images would just fail to load, leaving a rather useless grid of gray circles in place of the Pokémon to pick from. After some major headaches reproducing this, I finally discovered that it was about a recent Chrome feature, which for all that the page says about how "if the developer doesn't include the ‘loading’ attribute, then the resources will be eagerly loaded as they always have been" was actually being activated on the page, despite the images being already visible, and refusing to load them.

I've now fixed it by explicitly telling the browser to eagerly load these images, but this is quite frankly just a bug in Chrome and I am pretty annoyed to have had to deal with this.

Note that thanks to caching, the updated script may not load for you immediately; you can clear your cache or wait for it to expire.

For those of you wondering when the picker's going to get the eighth-generation Pokémon: I will get to that as soon as there exists a consistent set of images of every Pokémon (other than party sprites, which are a bit too small to usefully show what the Pokémon looks like at all). We don't yet have Sugimori or dream art for the Galar Pokémon, while rips from Sword and Shield can't include every Pokémon because not every Pokémon is programmed into the game.

As far as I can tell, the most feasible routes to obtaining vaguely consistent images for the picker are: a) we wait for full official art reveals for the Galar Pokémon, and then remove from the picker those Pokémon forms that don't have official artwork; or b) people more knowledgeable about 3D rendering than me rip all the models and textures from Sword and Shield, add Gen VII models for the unobtainables, and then actually create small renders of every Pokémon in an idle pose, suitable for use in the picker (and probably other applications). Option B is very attractive if it's at all feasible. If you or somebody you know knows about this stuff, please do contact me.

Speaking of Sword and Shield, my in-game experimentation indicates that prior to the level restriction on capturing being lifted entirely near the end of the game, the capture algorithm is modified to significantly reduce the chance of capture if the wild Pokémon is a higher level than your active Pokémon - from a guaranteed capture to as little as 20-30%. Looking at the actual code will be needed to tell exactly how that change works, but otherwise the algorithm looks probably fairly similar to Gen VII.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker finally has that progress bar now! I'm not entirely happy with the technical hack I ended up doing to get this working, and I'm probably going to squint at it some more later, but at least it seems to be behaving, just about.

As always, let me know if you find any bugs.

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What's it now, I forget?
Nah, I'm kidding, don't fret.
Happy seventeenth, dear website!
I'm not done with you yet.

Today, my Pokémon website is seventeen years old! That's the age that I was when I started Morphic. Luckily, my website cannot write edgy fanfiction.

For the occasion, I have goddamn finally finished the updated twelfth movie review. Now all my proper movie reviews have screenshots and are a bit better written! I'll do the special reviews as well, hopefully in less time because they're a bit newer, and then finally we can move on to some all-new movie reviews.

I was also going to put up this nice little progress bar feature for the Favorite Pokémon Picker, but unfortunately this innocuous-sounding feature is about ten thousand times harder to implement than I was blissfully imagining when I started working on it, owing to the fact that the picker's information state currently doesn't actually know how many Pokémon were in this round to start with. I thought I had something down that worked okay but no, it's buggy in some weird way and I have yet to figure it out or decide if this is even the way I want to do this feature or if I want to do it in this form at all or just flip tables and do some other form of progress indicator that does not need this information. Sometimes programming is eternal torment. I'm working on it, I swear.

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You can now expand the found favorites list in the Favorite Pokémon Picker by clicking the arrow "tab" next to the "Found Favorites" tab. This should make things a bit easier for those of you with very large lists who would like a bit more room for rearranging your list, and has a fancy sliding effect for those of you easily amused by things moving around on webpages.

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I've made a couple of bugfixes to the Favorite Pokémon Picker (but more actual feature updates coming soon); this should fix some weird jank with the picker scrolling up when you pick in new browsers.

I've also, as you may notice if you scroll down, changed how the front page updates work: instead of showing the updates from the latest month, it'll now just show the last three updates.

This is how the updates used to work back in 2005 after I'd first created the update archive, but then a few months later, because I was handling all this manually, I got fed up with having to move an update to the archive every time I updated, so I started doing the archive move whenever I updated in a new month instead. That went on to be the system I used for the last fourteen years, even after I redid the update system so that no manual archiving is involved anymore (I actually painstakingly coded it to continue to automatically show only the updates from the latest month that's had updates, just to keep it the way it'd been, even though it was significantly more complicated than just showing the latest x updates).

But now that I'm a busy adult and tend to only get in an update or two a month, I've finally decided this way of presenting updates, though nostalgic, is impractical. The feature updates to the Favorite Pokémon Picker that I made last time shouldn't be pushed off the front page because I made some bugfixes after the month happened to roll over. And since now there's no technical reason for it, I could just go back to the system I wanted to have before laziness made me do the month thing. Rejoice, fifteen-year-old me! Your dreams have finally come true!

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I've tweaked the generated favorite list pages for the Favorite Pokémon Picker so that they include the names and placings of the individual Pokémon, which should be nicer for those of you with large lists: you can use your browser's search feature to find a particular Pokémon, and you can better see exactly where each one placed. I also made it so that if your picker is in shiny mode, then the generated link will also show the Pokémon as shiny - if you make a list of your favorite shinies, it becomes more sensible to share it.

I'll probably be making a few more picker updates tomorrow/soon, while I wrap up my new twelfth movie review. Did you know these are based on suggestions someone e-mailed to me? Because you can totally do that.

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Welp, it looks like I somehow managed to break the Favorite Pokémon Picker completely for some users the other day in the process of fixing a different bug. It should be back to normal now. As always, let me know if you have any issues.

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The Pokémon List Generator can now generate Pokémon names in several languages using filters on the name variable - e.g. %[name|german]% will get you Bisasam, Bisaknosp, Bisaflor and so on. A bit niche, but I hope it will be useful to some of you!

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By popular demand, I've added a feature to all my catch rate calculators: you can now see results for every Pokéball at once, ordered by success rate.

Right now this is a bit clunky; if you select the "Show all" option for balls, it just shows the ball-specific options for every type of ball. This is not ideal and not how I want it to look - all the extra fields most of which are irrelevant for most purposes just make the whole thing seem cluttered and overwhelming - but figuring out what the interface should actually ideally look like is being a headache, so I figured I might as well make the feature available already even if it's not perfect yet.

Because of this, the "Show all" option is (for now) only the default in the R/B/Y calculator, where there are no ball-specific options; for the other calculators, a regular Poké Ball is selected by default, but "Show all" is the top option and you can select it.

Alongside this update, I also made it a bit clearer in the G/S/C calculator in particular when the result is affected by the truncation glitch, not just when the game can freeze, since showing it as if it were a normal result was a bit misleading.

Thanks to everyone who's given feedback on the catch rate calculators!

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I've put up my review of Pokémon Detective Pikachu, the franchise's first live-action film! This one's a bit different from my usual movie reviews - this one's still in theaters and I've only seen it once, so instead of the usual detailed synopsis and good/bad analysis, I've written a more standard sort of movie review, plus a spoiler section to discuss the plot in more depth. I hope you enjoy! (The review is spoiler-free up to the "Let's Talk Spoilers" heading.)

Additionally, I recently made a Patreon, mainly because the pricing was about to change so it was my last chance to make one with the legacy pricing. If you'd like to support the site, or anything else I do, you can pledge a monthly donation there. I have no plans of making anything exclusive to patrons, but if you do pledge you can get some drawings and influence over what I do as a bonus. I don't really ever expect this to be a serious source of income for me, but it's there if you feel like chipping in.

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My new review of Giratina and the Sky Warrior is finally up! That took far longer than it should have.

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The eleventh movie review is almost done, I promise, but tonight I looked into some error reports, including one about clarifying a question in my Steel quiz, so I fixed that, and then I realized I hadn't updated the Steel and Flying quizzes since the sixth generation, so I updated them with seventh-generation info where appropriate, and then I saw they were still using this weird separate results page that there was no reason for them to still be using since I ported the site to Python, so I brought the result pages into the main site layout as well. I think they're all around nicer now. This has been your pointless me-updating-things-no-one-cares-about for today!

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As I think most of you figured out already, Sutoraiku High was an April Fools' Day joke, and it has now been added to joke archive with some background and explanations. I will actually be adding at least a bit more to the game, though, since I am a perfectionist and I didn't actually quite manage to finish the game to my liking. The writeup has a link to the tag on my Tumblr where I'd post whenever that's ready, as well as any possible future updates.

I hope you all enjoyed the game! Next up, finally continuing the rudely interrupted work on my new eleventh movie review.

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The Cave of Dragonflies proudly presents my latest passion project! I've been wanting to add more games and such to the site for a while, and now finally we have one... or a demo of one, at least. Sutoraiku High is a visual novel about drama, friendships, prejudice, bullying, total societal upheaval, and high school romance, inspired by popular titles such as Hatoful Boyfriend. The game should be enjoyable for anyone, but especially everyone out there who has always wanted to date a Scyther (or a Scizor determined to overthrow the system).

The current version is only a prototype, with rough unfinished art and containing only the first two days of the story, but I hope to be able to publish a finished version on all major platforms by this time next year! I will accept donations towards the ongoing development of the game in Bitcoin.

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I have finally finished my Let's Go review. As usual, it's a lot of complaining followed by telling you actually I really enjoyed it (but please let me battle wild Pokémon).

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My updated Rise of Darkrai review is up, with less poor writing and more screenshots! It's got a few more good points than I was willing to admit to last time, but unfortunately it's still one of my least favorites, and Godey's Worst Town-Saving Plan Ever still drives me up a tree.

I've also fixed a potential server error caused by giving the Zodiac images a day or month parameter with a null byte in it, a fix that is definitely relevant to honest actors and not just hopeful hackers. (Cool try, bro. No, I was not sticking these parameters into any kind of filesystem access.)

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