Negrek
Website: Thousand Roads
Commenting on: 08-15-15

Yeah, it turned out to be a caching issue. My bad!

I seem to recall Lugia being referred to as the "Guardian of the Sea," which I took to mean that he was generally in charge of stopping tomfoolery like what the birds were getting up to, and that to be referred to as such he must have demonstrated that role at least once or twice in the past. Whether the birds had a run-in with him before, I figured they would understand he was on his way to make them simmer down. But! It's been a long time since I actually watched the movie, my recollection may not be all that accurate, and I'm not feeling inclined to re-watch it at this point. :P

[19/08/2015 23:58:55]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 08-15-15

Are you sure you're not having some caching issue on your end? The stylesheet floats them, but the screenshots are a new class that I added for this, so if your browser is loading an old version of it, that could explain it.

(Alternatively, the images are only floated if the window is wide enough - if you shrank your browser window in between, that could explain it.)

Fixed the typo, thanks. God, I must have read the thing over at least a dozen times and yet somehow that slipped through. (I also noticed almost immediately after putting it up that I was using "throughout" twice in very close proximity in the "Good" section.)

Eh, what bugs me is mostly that the birds attack Lugia in unison without him attacking them or otherwise getting involved first - they just jump to "Oh, Lugia's here, so let's forget about our conflict and just bring him down, quick!" I guess that could make sense if they have prior history with Lugia and know that he's going to try to interfere somehow, but there's no indication in the movie that the birds fighting like this or Lugia popping out to stop them is something that ever normally happens; there's this one prophecy about it, and that one time it happens Lugia fails pathetically at stopping them by his own power, so if that's the case I can't help but wonder how Lugia ever managed to stop them the previous times. Meanwhile, if they just thought of him as another competitor, it seems odd for them to all turn to singlemindedly attacking only him instead of each other.

[18/08/2015 03:55:56]

Negrek
Website: Thousand Roads
Commenting on: 08-15-15

Am I going nuts, or did the screenshots used to be wrapped with the text, and now they're not? They do look nice, but I think it's a bit awkward to have them all left-justified between the paragraphs as they are now. Also, from the second movie review:

"The legendary birds all frantically attack him for some reason, and he defends manages to dodge and defend himself for a while, but eventually the birds manage to hit, and Lugia falls limply into the water, having accomplished exactly nothing."

Extraneous "defends." It's also a little weird to have the two "manages" so close to one another, and it's a pretty extraneous word anyway. It would work fine as:

"The legendary birds all frantically attack him for some reason, and he dodges and defends himself for a while…"

FWIW, while the birds' aggression and territoriality does get turned on/off in odd places, I never found it strange that they go after Lugia the moment it appears. Depending on how intelligent you want to make them out, I always assumed they either saw Lugia as a potential competitor, another big, powerful pokemon who might be taking advantage of the chaos to try and claim an island or so for itself, or they're aware of Lugia's role as mediator and want him to buzz off so they can finish their fight. It's not that they're aware of the prophecy per se, but rather that they've probably had brushes with Lugia in the past and know that it's going to try to shut the battle down. If they genuinely dislike each other and/or have a strong desire to expand their territory and/or have a strong desire to prove themselves the strongest then I think it's understandable that they want Lugia to butt out so they can keep fighting–not forever, but until things are resolved by one bird winning or some new equilibrium being established.

[18/08/2015 02:50:51]

Kevin

I know they're not sprites, but would you consider adding the XY models you used for the Favorite Pokemon Picker to the Pokemon Sprite Packages page?

[17/08/2015 16:06:47]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies

That could potentially have been a neat idea for the pre-Gen VI Zodiac, but unfortunately I don't want to make any arbitrary distinctions in the Zodiac, and excluding Sylveon seems pretty darn arbitrary. Why exclude Sylveon? Because it's the newest one, yeah, but the Zodiac shouldn't make any distinctions based on what generation a Pokémon is from - generations are a fact about the video games released in our world, not a fact about the Pokémon.

And heck, why Eeveelutions? Why do Eeveelutions get days of the week and not some other Pokémon? Why are Eeveelutions special? It becomes a very transparent sort of "because that's the only thing that fit with the number of days of the week", which is another flavor of arbitrariness that I want to avoid. If two Pokémon don't have analogous roles in the Zodiac, it's because of some meaningful fact about those Pokémon, not because I just felt like it or because it fit better that way.

This is just how I decided my Zodiac should work, of course - feel free to assign Eeveelutions to days of the week for your own system! (Although shouldn't Thursday be Jolteon, since it's named for Thor the thunder god? Freyr was a fertility god, too - it might make sense for Friday to be Leafeon. But that's just my thoughts.)

[14/08/2015 11:00:42]

Merula

hoi,

I had an idea for the pokemon zodiac of yours.
you can give each day of the week a eeveelution. without Sylpheon and Eevee

Maybe like this:
based on the where the days named after.

Monday: Umbreon
thuesday: Flareon
wednesday: Jolteon
thursday: Leafeon
Friday: Veporeon
Saturday: glazeon
Sunday: Espeon

maybe it is crazy but maybe not.

[13/08/2015 20:44:28]

ozzi9816

I've used this site for a while now and it is very useful. Sometimes I also like to just browse around and see if I can find anything interesting. Thanks for keeping up this great site.

[11/08/2015 05:34:33]

Negrek
Website: Thousand Roads
Commenting on: 08-08-15

Beware feature creep. ;)

[10/08/2015 02:52:50]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Eh, to each his own. Personally I thought the old version was repetitive, overly wordy and unfocused.

[03/08/2015 19:18:35]

545
Commenting on: 07-15-15

This paragraph was much more powerful in the old version:

Though Mewtwo is the antagonist and gets regretfully little development during the actual film, his character is really quite compelling. He wants to believe he's equal to other living creatures, but feels inferior because he's an experiment, a creation of humans rather than of God, if you will. Since the only thing he is confident in (really, the only thing he truly knows about himself) is his powers, he latches on to this concept of strength as a meaningful measure of his worth as a living creature; this is also reinforced by what Giovanni taught him in the time he spent with Team Rocket. To prove himself, he decides he must show he is stronger than the original he was created from, thus vindicating his own existence: if the clone is more powerful than the original, the clone has to be at least as deserving of life. With this deranged worldview, he creates more clones, partly so that he won't be alone in being a clone and partly so that they can also show themselves to be stronger than the originals and strengthen the idea of clones in general being superior.

I feel the newer version of that diminished the point, whereas the old one drove it home succinctly.

[01/08/2015 15:19:26]

Alxprit

As a note for the Espeon and Umbreon page, perhaps you could mention for Gen 5 that the time when Day becomes Night depends on the season. Autumn and Spring are normal times, while Winter has an hour earlier night and Summer has an hour later.

[31/07/2015 13:28:46]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 03-09-15

I don't know xfix very personally, actually - I just regularly get good error reports from them.

[31/07/2015 09:34:32]

Disaster Area
Commenting on: 03-09-15

I dunno maybe fansites themselves are a bit past it but on the competitive side there's still forums growing and the like. Pokemon Perfect is one that's been around for a while and is very competitive (focussed most on gen 1) and I made a forum to work on a fakemon project (called BAM - Build A Metagame), I think it's just that fan sites are generally with different purpose to previously, as lots of other means exist of quelling other Pokemon-fuelled desires. And Smogon covers pretty much everything anyway. Still love occasionally popping onto your site, with the odd fun tool or feature, and the RBY info is well-documented, better than I think most players were conscious of until the past year or so when we really dug deep. Also I see you know xfix.. I know them but not all that well, just curious where do you communicate? On simulators, or just via your website? Oh also I'm the person who contacted you ages ago on twitter about spriting (as BAM_Server or something)

[29/07/2015 22:50:01]

Kevin

I happened to look at the Espeon and Umbreon page, and this isn't exactly a correction, but your Eevee will immediately evolve upon leveling up with a Sun Shard or Moon Shard.

I think the happiness is just required (though I can't confirm that), but your Eevee just starts off liking you enough to evolve anyway.

This is kind of important because, as is, it is somewhat misleading in that it sounds like it'll be a while before evolving into them, which could influence someone to not use it.

[26/07/2015 03:35:01]

Shadow
Commenting on: 07-15-15

You make a good point about the purpose of a synopsis. And I understand wanting to revise - I'm always updating my own writing.

In any case, it's the Good and Bad sections that are my favorite part, and hey, I shouldn't really be complaining about someone else's projects. Thanks for posting reviews!

[22/07/2015 22:52:58]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Shadow: Well, if you don't think there's a lot of reason for you to read the synopsis, you can skip it! That's kind of the point - to not make people who remember the movie just fine have to read a synopsis of the whole thing in order to see a significant part of the commentary. As far as I'm concerned, making the synopsis more skippable (for people who aren't interested in the actual synopsis part) is a good thing.

I don't think I removed anything terribly interesting, anyway - the synopsis does still contain extensive interpretations of why Mewtwo does what he does throughout the film, and what I did take out completely was mostly stuff I now think was kind of inane or irrelevant. (Some was just moved into the more extensive good/bad sections, which is a better place to go into stuff like why the crying scene doesn't work.)

But I get it; I've been unhappy when people change things I liked just fine before. There's always archive.org if you want to read writing that I find too embarrassing.

[22/07/2015 22:11:59]

Shadow
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Aww, I liked the synopsis with all of the comments within it. I've seen the movie a million times, so I don't have a lot of reason to read the synopsis unless it also has opinions; it was fun to read your opinions on details that weren't quite big enough to make it into the Good and Bad sections.

[21/07/2015 22:25:49]

Zowayix
Commenting on: 07-04-15

Always love to see updates to crazy game mechanics articles. Eagerly anticipating an article covering non-Gen I Safari Zone mechanics.

[05/07/2015 22:43:55]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies

It doesn't change the layout at all, but I do have a couple of conditionals inserting some chunk of HTML only in certain styles. Modern style adds a viewport meta tag because it's a responsive layout and the others aren't, Articuno has an added bit of credit in the footer for brushes used in the style, Modern again has little Pokémon party icons next to the Zodiac date in the header (I could have just put them there and then hidden them with CSS in all except Modern, but this was quicker than having to edit all the other styles), and a few styles add some scripts to the page (the drop-down styles have one for compatibility with old browsers, and Modern has a tiny one to fix a CSS issue that would otherwise be weird).

[01/07/2015 22:15:53]

Zim

This is a bit of a silly question, though I need to ask it, as I'm making something similar; Does your style switcher change the HTML layout at all?

[30/06/2015 17:40:16]