Merry Christmas, happy holidays, season's greetings, whichever you prefer. Have a Platinum sprite generator.

So okay, I actually ended up just slapping together something to generate only Platinum sprites. I'm really not quite sure how to implement all the older sprites into it without it taking up a lot of space for stuff most people have no use for - the D/P sprites, perhaps, but I can barely imagine being able to put all the previous sprites in there without it taking up too much room for it to be really worth it. Suggestions would be nice.

In any case, this is also nice test run of the new way of formatting the sprite generator, so if you have something to say about that, by all means say it, too.

(Also, how much do you want back sprites in the sprite generator?)

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Just wanted to pop in and say that this is pretty awesome. It's a bunch of guys trying to catch all 491 legit Pokémon within 72 hours of gameplay in the same house on newly restarted cartridges while collecting donations for charity. And some of them couldn't play Pokémon to save their lives, but that only makes it more fun.

Yes, sprite generator! I'll get to it!

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So what have I been doing this time instead of the crossword and the sprite generator? Well, I completely randomly happened to look at the old R/S-style Leta family back sprites that were still in the Fake Pokémon section, and thought, "I should make new, D/P-style back sprites, since the front sprites have been updated."

So I did that. And then I figured, "Hey, I never made a second frame for any of them! I should do that." So I did. And for the back sprites too, because Platinum has back sprite animations after all. (Well, Letaligon's second frame for the back sprite is really lazy, but eh. Might redo it later.) And when I was going to make one for Letaligon, I thought, "This sprite is kind of silly because it makes it look so small; maybe I should dust off that alternate Letaligon I made, in the pose of the original R/S-style sprite, and try to make it look like it's not falling over." So I did that, too.

And then I've been writing The Quest for the Legends; I made an extra and I'm eight pages into chapter 46. See? I've been very productive! My productivity just doesn't like the sprite generator. Or the crossword. Sorry.

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Yes, sprite generator. I know.

I'm having exams right now, but the last one is on Tuesday. I'm also trying to write chapter forty-six of The Quest for the Legends, which has been taking up a lot of my time. Along with general lack of motivation. I'm in an annoying mood these days, where the moment I start thinking "Okay, I need to do something about the sprite generator now," my mind immediately goes blank and then into let's-think-about-this-later-mode.

Yesterday, however, I actually updated The Cave of Speculative Theories. Fancy that.

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Okay, so I finished going through all my starred e-mail since March. That means a bunch of Babelfishions, In-Game Humour and three new affiliates; it also means that you might now actually get a reasonably quick response if you send an affiliation request, so hurry up before I fall behind on them again.

I'm thinking about making those new awards I was sort of planning a while ago. And yes, yes, the sprite generator, I know.

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My past two weeks have kind of sucked, in that I've been absolutely incapable of doing anything useful; I kind of went into hormonal overdrive and could not stop clinging to my boyfriend like iron filings to a magnet (it was our two-year anniversary on the eighth, but this was a bit excessive even for that). It didn't help that I became very obsessed with the Canadian TV show ReGenesis, which we have been marathoning, and at the same time I was getting the last few Pokémon I needed to complete my Pokédex on Diamond. That's not to say I wasn't having quite a lot of fun with that, but I got absolutely nothing done of anything I ought to have been doing, such as that sprite generator, going over more affiliation requests, or even trying to write those 50,000 words of my fanfics.

Then yesterday evening, as we finished the last episode of ReGenesis, I was finally back to normal and could go home and do stuff. So today I've been writing, and I finished chapter nine of Morphic. Hopefully I can get to site work now.

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Today in two thousand two
is when I created you.
Happy birthday, dear website!
I hope you still love me too.

The Cave of Dragonflies is six years old today. Thus, I meant to finish the new sprite generator, but the fact this will require me to re-download a bunch of D/P sprites managed to demotivate me (plus that I stayed the night at my boyfriend's place and thus didn't really have the time).

I also meant to go through all my starred e-mail (i.e. all the affiliation requests, content submissions and such since March); I've started that, but I don't think I'll finish it all today, particularly with me already behind on my pseudo-NaNoWriMo writing sprint. So instead, so the site wouldn't be all sad and lonely on its birthday, I just continued what is becoming an annual tradition of exercising my dubious poetic skills to write some silly alternative lyrics to "Happy Birthday".

...on second thought, I updated the Site History. It hadn't been updated in ages. Actually, that thing might need major revision; it's way too long. Maybe I should split it up into sections or something.

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There is a new section on the mechanics of Pokémon captures. Unlike Serebii, it uses the correct formula. :o And it has a calculator to find out the odds of catching a Pokémon and how many balls it takes. I also made some updates in the stat mechanics and battle mechanics sections.

There's also a bit of In-Game Humour I put up a little while ago and didn't mention.

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Well. The site is down. If you've found your way here, congratulations; note, however, that the forums and guestbook don't work, since while all the files are made here and then transferred over, the forum and guestbook posts are inserted into a database by the server itself and thus are only there. Well, the site was down, but now it's back again after we got the server rebooted. I still don't know what the problem was, but hey; everything is working again.

At the very least, I fixed some of the Platinum sprite packages, which were variously using incorrect sprites of Pokémon with multiple forms and/or missing the new Platinum forms altogether. I'm going to have a lot of fun making the upcoming Platinum Changes section (whenever Platinum comes out in English). And then I'm going to try to do some experimenting with honey trees and the PokéRadar, and yes, I'll make the new sprite generator.

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Magikarp: the Gathering, formerly referred to by the working title "Magikarp Quest", is up. I hope you enjoy it.

Why, yes, I have noticed it's the day of Magikarp and Gyarados. It is not a coincidence. Why did you think I randomly set a release date for this? :P (Too bad nobody noticed.)

Seeing as it's one of my bizarrely difficult games, I'm going to make a thread at the forums for the community to get together and solve it; you can go there if you want help.

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The Platinum sprites, in all naming schemes, are up at the sprite compilations page. As far as I know I'm the only person on the Internet currently offering them all transparent with their frames separated, so I hope the insane amount of time that went into this is appreciated. I've also added the Platinum Sinnoh Pokédex ordering as an option in the List Generator. I'll be implementing Platinum into the Sprite Generator somehow as well, but I'm thinking about completely revamping that thing and foresee that taking way too long if I tried to do it now.

Magikarp Quest will almost definitely be up on Monday as planned.

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:D

That means the new splash, which I finished a few days ago, is automatically up (first pixel art splash! :o). And... nothing else. Yay.

Still working on the epic game, whose working title is now Magikarp Quest, and sticking to Monday as the planned release date. Let's hope I will not be as late with it as I usually am with these things. I'm having a four-day weekend now, so I should have plenty of time. And Xikaze has agreed to draw an illustration. :o

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Scyther Slash style has been remade, since as with Shiny Umbreon style I didn't like it enough to remake it as a forum style in its current form. As always, the old version is still available as a deprecated style with the ID old-scyther. I like how it came out. The affiliate bar puts random spaces between the links in Internet Explorer, but I really can't be bothered to figure out what's up with that.

I guess I should hurry up and finish that new splash I'm preparing. And by the way, I hope to release that game I've been talking about on October 13th.

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Thunderyu, Volcaryu and Polaryu have been updated with the new D/P-style scratch sprites that I made recently on the fake Pokémon page.

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Here's the Pokédex Checklist, which will get you the most efficient method of obtaining a member of every evolution line you don't yet have. I did a lot of stuff by hand in that thing, so don't be alarmed if I made some silly mistakes. Also, the information for Feebas could be wrong at the moment; I'm looking into it myself for some good data right now.

What is it with me and lazing around all summer only to suddenly start churning out huge and important sections when school has started again? It's a fairly consistent trend in the history of the site, and yet it makes no logical sense. The mind boggles.

UPDATE EDIT (09/06/08): Right, so when I originally made this update I wasn't able to upload it because my computer refused to connect to the server. Eventually it turned out the problem was ZoneAlarm Pro, which incidentally does not work with the Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector and thus has given me a world of trouble before. And when I tried to uninstall it, it froze my computer. Fun. But now that I did get rid of it, here's the update at last.

FURTHER UPDATE EDIT (also 09/06/08): I just realized I made two very silly mistakes with the Pokédex checklist that I really should have noticed in those three days of having it all to myself. Oops. They've been fixed now. If you generated your list already, be aware that there might in fact be a better method than the one you were given after all.

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The new HTML guide is up. It is insanely long and detailed, but it's well worth it if it gets people to make div layouts and use valid HTML.

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I finished chapter eight of Morphic yesterday.

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I've put up that parallel section to the D/P Locations, the counterpart for fishing and surfing. I've been toying with the idea of a tool that basically gives you a checklist where you check Pokémon you have yet to obtain and it gives you a printable list of where to go to get all those Pokémon (perhaps sorted by method - here's everything you can get by fishing, here's the stuff you get by surfing, this you have to trade for, and this you can get by using the PokéRadar). Like half of all the game sections on this site, it would be made because I'd love to have something like that myself now that I'm in a random burst of completing my Diamond Pokédex. Any thoughts?

No, that game I've been talking about is not forgotten. I've been plotting it out. It is going to be epic. Epic.

(Incidentally, I've been working on the HTML guide too. You know, the one I took down for revision a few years ago. And also incidentally, I put up chapter 43 of The Quest for the Legends a couple of days ago. And I'm working on a new style. If you could not tell, I'm trying to convince you that despite not having updated in what's nearing three weeks, it does not make me lazy. Make of that what you will.)

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Oops, I just realized that after I removed the Zodiac so it wouldn't get in the way during the creation of Roar of Time style, I forgot to put it back on. So yeah, it's there now.

And amusingly enough, by a complete coincidence, it happens to be the Festival of Dialga today. o.o (Oh, and I forgot to warn you yesterday: Roar of Time style will be messed up in Internet Explorer 6 because it uses a bunch of alpha-transparent PNGs, which it doesn't support. Hence the [!ie] label in the style switcher. If you're still using IE6, you shouldn't.)

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Didn't I say at some point a while ago that I wanted to remake Shiny Umbreon style? Well, if I didn't say so, I did. I was thinking about remaking it as some sort of a mix between Shiny Umbreon and the old Deep Sea style that used to be on the site ages ago.

Well, as you could probably guess, I did just that. What made me finally do it was the fact that I was up to Shiny Umbreon style in the forum style remaking queue, and I didn't want to spend time making a forum style only to then remake the style on the site (as happened with Hellfire style), so I figured I should do this first (after asking a few people their opinion). So yeah, Roar of Time style is here, starring Dialga this time because I like Dialga. I like it, mostly because in addition to liking Dialga I also really like dark blue. But eh.

What's with those wave patterns, you ask? Well, uh, just... assume that they're ripples in the fabric of space-time or something. <_< They looked cool.

And yes, I'm still going to make that game.

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Okay, the theory on Pokémon gender ratios and genetics is FINALLY up. I hope you can actually understand a word of it; it's pretty technical. But I like it.

I also took those fan theories down, since they pretty much all conflict with this theory or the one I'm going to write next (about Pokémon evolution and Pokéballs, which incidentally will also replace my really old Pokéball theory, which has also been taken down).

Hopefully I'll get to finishing that game soon.

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All right, I'm very sorry about the complete lack of anything recently. I've been way too busy with math training and obsessing over Phoenix Wright for my own good.

I was in the middle of making a new game for the site, but unfortunately I spent the weekend lazing around with my boyfriend and so didn't finish it. In an hour, I'm leaving for this year's International Mathematical Olympiad in Madrid and will be back on the twenty-second of this month; I'll finish that game then. And that one theory I've been talking about for way too long. At least once that's over I will have no more math training and I have already finished all the Phoenix Wright games (and Apollo Justice), so there will be nothing keeping me from working on the site then.

Oh, and I actually updated the Cave of Speculative Theories.

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So. The forums are officially back up (not that a bunch of people who were stalking the URL haven't been posting on it anyway despite my repeated attempts to emphasize that I was trying to test things). Only one style and no Mafia yet, but hey, people are impatient.

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All right, I feel I should make some clarifications concerning the forums (see previous two updates for the details of what happened).

Yes, I am going to make new forums. This really ought to be obvious.

When I say "the whole database was wiped", it should also be obvious that yes, this includes your user accounts, and yes, you will have to re-register.

No, I do not know precisely when this will be. My dad is home now and hopefully we can renew the vBulletin license later today. Then I'll need to run the installation, remake a couple of the more essential hacks, recreate all the forums (probably with some tweaks), recreate the important threads (with help from Google cached versions of the relevant pages), remake a couple of custom BBCodes, and recreate the styles; then I can probably open the forums and make some sort of a 'Hack Wishlist' thread for people to request which hacks they would like to see again. Depending on how much I have to do, it could be anytime next week.

All banned members will be able to rejoin with a clean slate, although they will obviously be banned again if they continue to break rules.

Believe it or not, I don't actually personally care that the forums were wiped. It's irritating how much work needs to be done to get them up again, but seriously. My post count? I don't even know what it was. My posts? Normally I'm just fine with not having an archive of everything I've ever said. (The only posts I really miss are the posts in the Crushes thread in which I talked about my attempts to flirt with my now-boyfriend and the elaborate Mafia rules that I'll have to recreate from memory.) My fanfics? Both saved on my computer and posted elsewhere. Okay, I would wish that I had a couple of the exclusive hacks saved just to save time in recreating them, but that's pretty much it. I suppose I might feel different if I participated in roleplays or ASB, but I don't. The most upsetting part of the database wipe, to me, was that it deleted all of the recent entries in the Quest Blog on the Quest for the Legends minipage, which were a lot more personal. There is no need to feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for the people who actually lost something that really was important to them.

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Okay. So. The whole database was wiped. There do not appear to be any backups.

So everything that was on the forums is gone (including the styles, hacks, and so on). Everything that was in the guestbook is gone. Now, it will take a bit of time to get the forums back into shape, seeing as I need a fresh install of vBulletin, and it is further delayed by the fact that my vBulletin license expired a few days ago and my dad is away - he'll be back on Saturday, and then we can renew the license and start working on that. Hopefully. I'll have to remake all the styles, though, as well as installing all the hacks again and remaking a couple of my own little hacks created specifically for the forum. So that could take a while. Just please be patient and rest assured that I'm getting an automatic database backup program to prevent this from happening again.

On the other hand, the guestbook, being far simpler and my own script, was relatively simple to bring back - without all the posts, of course, but I just had to recreate the database to get it working again. So the guestbook and guestbook-powered update commenting are back (as well, as, incidentally, the forum and comment system on the Quest for the Legends minipage, which were a bit more complicated to bring back but I did anyway since it's the fic's sixth birthday today, and I really wish I could have spent it posting a Laughing Cupboard thread at the forums and finishing chapter 42 instead of messing around with MySQL).

To look on the bright side of the forum loss: this will provide some nice cleanup, hopefully fix some bugs, and get me to actually get all the hacks working properly in 3.7 (not to mention that if I need to recreate all the other styles, it's a perfect opportunity to remake Hellfire style and adapt Torkoal style to the forums).

I'm sorry about this.

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Apparently something went horribly wrong with the MySQL on the server, and my attempts to fix it screwed it up even more. So uh, the guestbook and forums are non-working for now. If you have experience with this stuff, by all means contact me.

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So with opaltiger's help (he came over to visit), there is a new not-so-monthly crossword. It's kind of like the previous one except harder - and speaking of which, the previous one was apparently so easy that a whole bunch of people got the whole thing right. Congratulations to Spikefish, Phoenixsong and Neon Flygon for having been the first to solve it. In order not to make the list of Honorable Mentions waaaaay too long, I listed only everybody else who had 30 correct.

So uh, enjoy.

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I whipped up a short guide on the Ribbon Syndicate in Diamond and Pearl and how to get into it. And I added a bit of in-game humour about the Ribbon Syndicate and its elevator woman and spa treatments. Can you tell I've been using that place quite a bit lately? (Stupid Buneary.)

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I added a couple of sections to the reviewing guide, first one under Constructive Criticism about criticizing an author's early works, and then one after the Reviewing for the Author section about responding to reviews. I hope you find it informative.

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I'm in quite a working-on-site mood these days, aren't I? Now I randomly modified the guestbook to add a crude update commenting system - basically, you can now comment on specific updates or view comments about specific updates. This also prompted a revamp of how my updating works; while they're still written manually into the front page file, I've now made some functions that write out the update header and comment links for me according to the date which I now only put in once. (Otherwise I'd have to put it in in four different places, which I would undoubtedly keep forgetting or making a typo in.)

The update comments appear on the normal guestbook view too, so this is just a convenience for making sure comments on updates don't get lost in the random chit-chat.

I also think I fixed some bizarre error in Torkoal style in Internet Explorer 6; being, however, that I don't actually have IE6 on my computer anymore, I haven't been able to test this thoroughly.

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I randomly wanted to make a new style for the site, and the outcome was Torkoal Lava style. (Sorry, everybody who was hoping for remakes of some of the styles that used to be on the site - blame Xikaze for suggesting it and making me think it would look good.) I kinda like it; I'm using it for now until I get bored of it.

I also fixed a couple of mistakes in the status effects section.

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I just finished an epic section on the status effects that is now under Game Mechanics on the menu. I'm reasonably certain this is the most complete single page of information about status effects anywhere on the Internet. It's all gotten from a mish-mash of sources plus some of my own testing, so there might well be mistakes in it; as always, I'd appreciate if you reported those.

Surprisingly enough, that is not the big section I said I was working on. That's even bigger.

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I rewrote the reviewing guide from scratch. It gets across the basic gist of the old one but also has a ton of things added to it, including an entire section about "reviewing for readers". I also got a bit carried away writing lengthy and elaborate example reviews of nonexistent fics. Hopefully it will help aspiring critics.

Hi there, sudden influx of Icelanders. I looked like I was out to get your children in that photo, I know. I'm pretty sure that was the one I asked him not to use. Oh, well.

Also, 1,666,666 front page hits! :o I'm a third of the way to five million. Yay. Alternatively, you could say that I just missed the chance to switch to Hellfire style while having a hit counter number containing two 666s. Shame.

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Boy, am I ever on a writing spree. Chapter seven of Morphic is up, and by the way, if you're a fan of the fic and missed it, chapter 40 of The Quest for the Legends is up as well.

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See for Pokémon Platinum stuff.

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Hey, guys. Been a while.

So. Why hasn't there been anything new in some three weeks or so? Well, firstly, I've been sick. Very sick. The sickest I've been in my life, in fact, although having a good immune system, that's not saying very much. I've spent the past week and more having a headache 24/7, coughing my lungs out every now and then, getting an uncomfortable racing heartbeat every evening and hardly sleeping at all (although I did manage to cough out the pointless little feature of making shiny Pokémon appear occasionally for spam verification in the guestbook, which I'm sorry to say is the only thing I really did for the site in the meantime). Meanwhile I've had to write an essay about exoplanets. It was an extremely unproductive week for me in general.

Now, before I got sick, I was trying to write chapter seven of Morphic and trying to find out everything I could about gunshot wounds in order not to make myself look like an idiot to any reader coming from a country in which firearms are actually legal. That is coupled with the fact that that theory I've been talking about turned out to need to cover a much greater subject than it was originally going to. Basically, I suppose I can tell you now that it was supposed to be a theory of Pokémon gender ratios (i.e. how the heck Bulbasaur can be 87.5% male and so on) explained with genetics, but just as I was finishing it I realized that I was making unacceptable assumptions about Pokémon genetics in general, and I basically had to start from scratch, make a whole theory about how their genetic code is built up and how Pokémon sex cells are formed and then deduce the gender ratios from that. I've got the basic idea down in my head, but I've yet to write it. I probably will do so soon, honestly.

Then there is another big section I'm working on, and that's going to take a while to finish in general because of its very nature, so you need to stay patient for that.

So yeah. This is just to say I'm still alive, apologize for the lack of stuff and talk about more stuff to hopefully get you interested.

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I should have done this long ago, but I've finally updated the fake Pokémon page with the D/P movesets of the Pokémon on it, which have more attacks including some fourth-generation ones.

I also got a pointer about a training spot for the Vs. Seeker in D/P, which has duly been put up. And I fixed an error in the Flying quiz that made it impossible to get all of the questions right. Oops?

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Yeah, there's a section now about the five types of content you can have on a website and what kind of content you'll want to have on your website if you want it to generate any interest. First webmaster section I've added in... a while.

I'm also thinking about tweaking the awards now to something utilizing the whole Five Kinds of Content concept to some degree. It would help me determine more easily what kind of award to give.

Yes, yes, I know, no crossword and no theory yet. I'm sorry. At least you've been suddenly getting near-daily updates in April so far. Be happy.

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Chapter six of Morphic is finally up. Yay?

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There's a new question in the FAQ and a new entry in the Wall of Shame.

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Yeah, that whole thing about how I was going to get a theory up yesterday was meant to be an April Fools' joke. Or rather, talking about getting it up wasn't, but I was planning to try to whip up something extremely obscure and amusing to write a theory about. I toyed with the idea of writing something about Pokémon world politics and how communist they clearly all are, but I just didn't get around to writing it. There is also an actual theory coming soon, however. And hopefully I'll manage to get the crossword done at last.

But now I just finished that "Places to Train" section I mentioned for the D/P Locations, so you can go look at that.

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The theory isn't here yet (I'm hoping to get it up tomorrow), but I have a great excuse for not having been working on it!

Ahem.

The Cave of Dragonflies presents the D/P location analysis, where all the wild Pokémon found in each location in Diamond and Pearl are listed in all possible detail. I was going to have a "Places to Train" section and maybe also a tool to search for where to find some particular Pokémon, as well another section for the Pokémon found while fishing or surfing, but that will wait a bit. I'm fairly certain this is the most detailed D/P wild Pokémon location information page on the Internet; after all, it, like so many other sections on this website was made because of my inability to find it anywhere else when I needed it.

Before you start gawping, I did not write that down manually: the actual data behind it is taken from what Eevee of Veekun ripped for his Pokédex. But it did take me ages to tinker with the presentation, and the presentation is more detailed than in his Pokédex (not to mention the manually-written "Where" and "Notes"), so I deserve some credit too, right? :D;

Unfortunately the page breaks the layout if you try to open it in Voice of the Forest style (and the old Hellfire style, for that matter), so if that's what you're using, you should either switch styles or view the same information here on a virtually styleless page.

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Well, I'm back from Switzerland, and I added a couple of questions to the FAQ under The Cave of Dragonflies.

That theory I talked about should be coming fairly soon.

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So I was playing around with Photoshop and figured out how to make some decent-looking flames, so I decided I might as well try to do something with good old Hellfire style, whose unprofessional and tacky look had been bothering me for a while. So yeah, there is a new Hellfire style up. It's very unlike the old one (liquid instead of fixed-width, uses drop-downs for the menu, has completely different-looking flames, has a normal-looking affiliate bar on the right and a random fixed Houndour background image in the bottom right) but it does keep up the hellfire theme and personally I think it is better in just about every conceivable way. Now, having been a webmaster for as long as I have, I'm well aware that there are going to be people who loved the old one and absolutely hate the new one, so the old Hellfire style still works just fine as a separate style and if you like you can switch your style cookie to it.

This made me add a section, "Deprecated Styles", to the style switcher page, basically to keep styles like Oldie style and the old Hellfire style apart from the current styles.

I might also create a three-column version of the new Hellfire style (or possibly two-column with the affiliates at the bottom) for those who dislike drop-down navigation.

I also added a question to the FAQ, the last one under "The Cave of Dragonflies", and updated the Theory of Incense Breeding. There is probably another theory coming soon, by the way. And well, actually, I'm thinking about taking Dannichu's breeding theory, Apocalypse Raichu's genetics theory and Polursine's evolution theory down for a number of reasons:

• I stopped accepting fan content a while ago. It seems weird to have a few random pages of submitted content still there. This is a pretty minor reason, though.
• It seems like half of the time I get an e-mail mentioning these theories, whether positively or negatively, the author mistakenly believes that I wrote it despite the italicized names of the real authors noted at the top of each page. So basically I keep getting either showered with praise I don't deserve or attacked for opinions that aren't even my own. Both feel considerably awkward.
• It seems kind of stupid that my site, which contains some of my own theories about the Pokémon world and is generally pretty much in its entirety written by me, contains these other theories, parts of which I distinctly disagree with. Even if it were clear to everyone who read them that I didn't actually write the theories, having them on my site definitely does seem to imply that I approve or agree with them, which, well, I largely don't. I've been kind of uncomfortable with that from the beginning, actually, but had them up anyway because I was letting people submit fan content.
• Following that: although I haven't personally made any plans to create a Pokémon breeding theory of my own as I just figure they do it the same way we do, Pokémon genetics and evolution are subjects that I myself have wanted to write theories about for a while. Obviously it would be kind of odd to have two completely different theories about Pokémon genetics or evolution on my site, one of which is mine and the other not. And that probably-coming-soon theory I mentioned above does slightly touch upon Pokémon breeding such that it would be rather incompatible with Dannichu's breeding theory, as well.
• The breeding theory in particular was written in 2003 and can well be considered outdated at this point since it revolves around the three fairies, Mew, Celebi and Jirachi. We now have Manaphy and Shaymin as additions to this group, and technically it would make the most sense if they also had some role in the process following the original theory's logic. This doesn't entirely invalidate the theory, but it shakes its foundations in the same way as the fourth generation shook the foundations of my Zodiac.

But well, yet again I'm going with a site poll to see what people think. Go vote about the fate of the fan theories. And Apocalypse Raichu and Polursine, you can of course contact me with any input on the matter. I'll contact Dannichu myself.

I'm still not done getting through all the affiliation requests, unfortunately. I'll try to finish it before my Easter break is over, but on Thursday we're going to Switzerland and will be there until Tuesday.

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Gasp! I am actually going through my starred e-mail and responding to all those award and affiliation requests (two new affiliates so far) and putting up all that in-game humour and a few Babelfishions (and one fake cheat, too, actually). I didn't really intend to update until I was done with the whole thing, but I still have 40-something e-mails left and I just feel like uploading what I already have.

Aside from that, I've revamped the affiliation rules and removed the section with the awards The Cave of Dragonflies has won, mostly because it was more or less the epitome of pointless - I don't apply for any awards anymore, and most of the rest was just what random people had whipped up in Paint and then decided to e-mail to me. So sorry, if you sent me awards they're never going up.

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I made some tweaks and improvements to the Number Game after getting a very helpful e-mail with suggestions and tweaking some stuff on my own:

• The "Next" and "Random" selection is now in the form of radio buttons, with only one actual button.
• The "Show Pokémon" button has been removed and instead pressing the "Guess" button when there is nothing in the textbox yields the same result.
• Changing the "Next" or "Random" selection now resets your score just like changing the range does.
• The first number you get in "Next" mode after switching to it or changing the range is now always the first number in that range.
• The Nidorans are now in as "Nidoran male" and "Nidoran female", which I think is more natural to type.
• The page now actually explains the carefully-elaborated method by which you can play it quickly and straightforwardly using only the keyboard that I for some reason forgot to put on the page yesterday despite having specifically added a couple of auto-focusing lines to the script in order to make it possible.
• The game is now case insensitive. I got a very amusing hatemail demanding this be done coupled with some death threats and had half a heart to specifically keep it case sensitive to spite him, but I figured that some people have argued fiercely that there is no reason to capitalize Pokémon names and I might as well avoid having anybody start complaining. Besides, of course, those few ambiguities we have: "Ho-Oh" or "Ho-oh"?

So I now think I know the numbers of all the Pokémon up to 301. Yay.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this yesterday: with the addition of the Number Game, there are now 100 sections on The Cave of Dragonflies. "Sections" here refers, basically, to sections that can appear as the Featured Section, or in other words to all non-portal pages of this site currently linked to from the menu (this is counting, by the way, the submenus that don't work in Internet Explorer). There haven't been that many in a while. Blame my tendency to take half of the sections down in a fit of deciding they're horrible and must be rewritten.

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This is random like I-don't-know-what, but on spur-of-the-moment inspiration I created The Number Game. It's basically a game that gives you a National Pokédex number and you guess which Pokémon it is, and it is very much designed to help those who want to be able to say all of the Pokémon names in order off the top of their heads achieve their goal. In two rounds of testing it I have now officially taught myself the numbers of all the Johto Pokémon in addition to all the Kanto ones I knew before. So yes, it's very effective if you actually feel like trying it.

The scoring could probably be improved somewhat. If you come up with a system that would make more sense and be more likely to give the user exactly what he or she would want, by all means contact me.

Also, I was thinking about adding a mode to the game where you're shown a Pokémon sprite and are supposed to type its name correctly (aimed to improve the fandom's spelling of Pokémon names), but I'm not sure if anybody who doesn't spell them correctly already would actually care enough to play a game specifically to improve their spelling. Wouldn't mind opinions on that (such as in the guestbook), either.

Crossword hopefully coming soon.

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Now that I got my umpteenth error report about Dark/Psychic/Fighting being a type triangle, I've put a special notice in parentheses into the Fun Facts section itself to specifically state that Dark/Psychic/Fighting is not a type triangle and link to the FAQ entry about it that has been there for months and is now under "Mistaken Error Reports" (the section people are explicitly told to take a look at before submitting error reports). Of course, this will probably mean that thousands of people will e-mail me to ask why Water/Ground/Electric isn't on the list, but at least that will make me slightly less likely to tear my hair out if only because I don't hear about that as often.

I also got a couple of legitimate error reports which have been fixed, and made a couple of additions to the Ranger review.

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I finished the review of Pokémon Ranger that I've been working on for the past couple of days. More than half of it is an explanation of the mechanics of the game, actually, but hey.

I'll try also to review Mystery Dungeon, XD and Pokémon Battle Revolution soon, but we all know what happens when I say I'll get something done "soon".

(Oh, and I also tweaked a bit of stuff in the Fun Facts.)

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In my irritation with the fact that my old What Pokémon Are You? is still being linked to all over the Internet and few people probably bothered to read the notice on the top of the page saying that there was a new one, I made it redirect to the new test by default, but make it display a notice stating you've been redirected and can still take the old test if you want with an additional link.

I also added a bit more information about inducing happiness evolutions in Diamond and Pearl to the Espeon and Umbreon guide now that I've gotten both of them myself.

UPDATE EDIT: Looked through the Wall of Shame, realized that they'd all been deleted except one which was really old anyway, and just replaced the whole thing with one new thief. I'd have had another one which was hilarious: they stole the Art Thieves, Click Here (oh, the irony), incomplete HTML guide, Marquee of Doom and Contact Me sections, among other things, and put them into Eevee's HQ's layout, as well as having PurpleKecleon's picture of Eevee from Veekun (the one in the background on the site) on its splash page, and most bizarrely of all, its forums contained elaborate post-by-post copy-pastes of a number of threads from my forums and at least one of my LiveJournal entries. Unfortunately, however, it seems to have been deleted already. Ah, well. Maybe it was the person's idea of an extremely weird joke, but it was all surprisingly elaborate for that, since the person had gone through all the copy-pasted content and replaced specific references to me, Icelandic or The Cave of Dragonflies to other references. Either way it was very amusing. Too bad you couldn't see it.

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Well. I have a bunch of homework for tomorrow, and my brain chooses tonight to be in the un-homeworkiest mood in the world. So I've been sitting here for the past, uh, four hours or so doing just about everything other than reading about World War I or doing German grammar exercises. This has included randomly reading over a few sections of this site and fixing lots of little mistakes and odd wordings, clarifying, etc. The most interesting did was add a question to the FAQ (actually, I added a couple of questions the other day without updating about it, too) and split off a few questions from the Cave of Dragonflies section, including the new one, and make them into a special section called Mistaken Error Reports, which should make it easier for error reporters to see if they're making a common mistake since they'll only have to look at a few questions.

Also, in my random fit of Monty Python-obsession, we have a new Almighty Random Poll that lives up to its name.

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So I'm officially eighteen years old today. I now have all my civil rights according to Icelandic law except the right to buy alcohol and own firearms. Since I'm not particularly interested in either, I'm good. Whoo.

In celebration of this occasion I went into the About Me section to change my age there, and ended up rewriting the whole thing, condensing it to make it shorter and a little less rambly as well as creating a script that will now automatically update my age and note when it's my birthday. This is up there with the most pointless things I've done for this website.

(Obligatory note that Monty Python's Life of Brian is awesome. British humour > all. Always look on the bright side of life~ :3)

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Okay, I'm fairly sure now that the weightings should be perfect and all bias for or against certain results in the test now is purely a matter of people tending to swing this way or that. I'll keep logging the results for a while to make sure I haven't made any terrible mistakes, but otherwise I'm fairly sure this is working as intended, so you can go now and get your final results. I've put the new quiz on the menu now and, although the old quiz still exists, there's a link from it to the new one. Enjoy.

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Whoo. That log file got down nearly six thousand results from the new What Pokémon Are You?, which helped me create the weighting mask which should now make it so that Togetic will no longer come up 25% of the time.

I'm putting it through a second testing phase now to see if there are any obvious things wrong with it now. Otherwise, this will be the final version. You can all take it again now and get a (hopefully) more accurate result.

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Well. The reason I haven't been updating is that I've been working furiously on a new What Pokémon Are You? quiz. The old one had 18 different Pokémon you could be, which was the highest number I'd ever seen in a Pokémon personality test and one of the highest I'd seen in any non-clinical personality tests in general; this one doubles it to 36. Most of the Pokémon that you could get on the old test make a return here (all except Ditto, Electrike and Zangoose, I believe); however, you should not expect to get the same one if you take the new test, because in addition to the questions and answers being different and the calculation of your Pokémon being rethought from scratch, most of the actual personalities associated with each Pokémon have changed too, to varying extents.

Now, this is still in a kind of testing phase. Unlike the old test, the likelihood of each possible result varies dramatically, and I don't want everybody to be getting the same Pokémon, so for now, all the results that anyone gets are being logged into a file that I can view. I'd like to request that you all take the test - first honestly, and then maybe a couple of times using the "Randomize Choices" button at the bottom of the page. Things almost definitely will be tweaked from this; the question is just how, and it's you who can help me figure that out. If you have specific feedback to give, I'd of course appreciate if you contacted me.

The old quiz is being kept on the menu for now while the new test is being finalized.

And no crossword yet, sorry. Which is a shame, because this is entirely my fault; the January crossword had the largest number of 100% correct solutions ever in the history of the crossword.

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Well. That was fast.

So yeah, if you haven't noticed already, some visitors apparently decided to refresh like crazy in the past 24 hours and put that hit counter up by about 15,000 front page hits in the process, pushing it up past a million and a half. So that new splash I talked about yesterday is now actually showing. I thought I was nicely early with it, but apparently it was a last-second thing.

At least I updated the Mascots and Site History pages with the new splashes. I really need to start putting more stuff on that Site History page.

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I've colored the 1,500,000 front page hits splash that I'd made and edited the actual coding so that it will show the new splash the moment that hit counter gets to a million and a half, similar to what I did with the (current) one million front page hits splash. It's not a particularly interesting splash or anything, but people have been complaining that it hasn't been changed in nearly a year, so I'm just not going to make people have to wait for something celebrating a hit milestone that's already come.

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Well, it's been ages since the Almighty Random Poll was changed and the Site Poll was kind of outdated, so I changed them both. Admittedly the new Almighty Random Poll isn't all that interesting, but meh.

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The D/P Vs. Seeker is here. It has every trainer that you can rebattle in the game (there are 224, two more than in FR/LG), the final levels of their Pokémon, the effort points and EXP both for each Pokémon and in total for each trainer, and some recommendations for training spots and EV training. Go spread the word of its existence to everybody you think might have some use of it.

And you thought I was neglecting this site, huh?

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Phew. The January crossword is finally up, along with the results from the October/November/December one. Congratulations to Spikefish, elyvorg and Lunar Espeon and fnph for first, second and third place, respectively.

The January crossword should really not be very hard, so I'm expecting at least one person to finish the entire thing.

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Happy new year, everyone. No update, because I've been frantically writing chapter 37 of The Quest for the Legends (which will be put up later this evening, by the way, so if you're interested you should watch the Quest Blog carefully) as well as working on that fic forum I put up and have been obsessively working on. As soon as I've finished this chapter, by the way, I'm converting the guestbook to the Quest for the Legends forum system like I did with the comment system there, which will not only make it much nicer for everyone involved, but also stop it from being as slow as it's been lately.

Okay, so I resolve to finish all of the following in 2008:

• The D/P Vs. Seeker
• The revised writing guide
• The revised HTML guide
• The revamped What Pokémon Are You? that I've been working on in the past few days
• The Ultimate Type Tool that I was going to make and then forgot about
• Going through all my e-mail again to respond to all those affiliation requests and put up all that in-game humour
• The next crossword

Okay, now I have no excuse. Look forward to it.

Now for some yearly tradition: the annual Cave of Dragonflies New Year's Thanks! Looking back at 2007, I would especially like to thank the following people:

• Dannichu, for putting up with me and still considering me a friend despite what a lousy one I've been in return. Also for the most genius birthday present I've ever gotten and being generally awesome. Dannichu, you rock.
• opaltiger, for being a great friend to laugh with, randomly deciding to send me a book in a fit of generousness that I've sadly yet to repay, and participating in my crossword.
• Crystylla, Furret, Larissa, Spikefish, Pelipy, elyvorg, Lunar Espeon, Raposa and Romberguy and all those other crossword regulars. You're the reason I'm feeling all guilty about not having made a November or December crossword and really want to make it up to you.
• Shadey, the most adorable boyfriend in existence. <3 Thanks for everything we've done together in the year.
• My dad, one of the most intelligent and interesting people I know. Your help with everything has been invaluable, and so have all the café trips and the accompanying discussions.
• Fluffy, for going through all that trouble to get my Diamond for me.
• Psychic, for being amusing and brightening up my day a few times. We need to talk more.
• Everybody who reads The Quest for the Legends and has put up with all the ridiculous waits between chapters.
• Everybody who visits this site and has put up with the decline in update frequency that I've been covering up with updates that say nothing but "Uh, hi, I haven't updated anything, bye."
• Everyone else who deserves to be on here that I've forgotten to mention.

Happy new year again, and I hope you have a wonderful 2008.

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