Now that I've finally actually completed Pokémon Sun (after stubbornly combining train-everything-new with Exp-Share-off and being frightfully underleveled for most of the game), I am back to doing some actual things. Because it was really bugging me that 1) my Sun/Moon Pokédex sprites were for some reason flipped from how they actually appear in-game and 2) I was using a ridiculous hack to combine the Alolan Pokédex sprites with the OR/AS dex sprites for Pokémon not in the Alolan dex, I've started by fixing that: I now have a unified set of 128x128 sprites under /sprites/gen7/unified, which consists of either the Alolan dex sprite shrunk in half or the OR/AS dex sprite with its background expanded to 128x128 (I use the shrunk Alolan dex sprite for all Pokémon that have one, except for the Eevee evolutions, which appeared unnaturally small because of the way they're shown in the in-game Pokédex, so I'm using their OR/AS sprites instead in this set). They're not stylistically identical, but close enough. Additionally, the Alolan dex sprites have been flipped to the correct in-game orientation, both the original-size ones and the shrunk, unified ones. I'm now using this new set in the Favorite Pokémon Picker as well as the Number Game. If anyone else wants to use the unified set, go ahead.

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The Hangman and Number Game now include Gen VII Pokémon (only non-spoilers for the former, but all for the latter, since there you can control what range of numbers you want to tackle and choose not to go too far). Also, somehow I'd mistakenly marked Magearna's regular form as a spoiler in the Favorite Pokémon Picker, so I've fixed that; if you have a state with Gen VII included but no spoilers, you'll be prompted to add Magearna.

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To continue updating things for Sun and Moon, I've added the Gen VII Pokémon and Alolan forms to the evolution list and the new Sun/Moon type combinations to the Interactive Type Chart.

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The new Pokémon and forms from Sun and Moon have been added to the Favorite Pokémon Picker. Please let me know if you discover any bugs or issues; a lot of this was done manually, so it's possible I made a silly mistake somewhere that I didn't catch while testing it.

With this update comes a small additional feature: there is now an "Include spoilers?" checkbox to let you decide whether you want to include potential in-game story spoilers or unreleased Pokémon. It's unchecked by default; you can decide for yourself if you want to check it or not.

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More Pokémon Go updates, because what do you mean this is a game receiving regular updates: the base stat formula was changed yesterday, so I've updated the stat mechanics page accordingly. I also fixed a bug in the Pokémon List Generator that caused it to error out if you tried to use unfiltered numbers. I'm working on Gen VII updates, starting with the Favorite Pokémon Picker.

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I've updated the Pokémon Go guide and stat mechanics to reflect various new information and updates to the game (most notably, the likely actual formula for capturing). I also fixed the end of Magikarp: the Gathering to actually work, in case you, like the person who reported it, managed to get to the climax only to have a server error thrown in your face.

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Looks like you've turned fourteen,
and got a new coat of sheen.
Happy birthday, dear website!
Can't wait for fifteen.

The Cave of Dragonflies is fourteen years old today, and naturally celebrated this by being down for most of the day while I was off seeing Matilda the musical. In any case, I have fixed it. Unfortunately I don't have any content to update with since I've been on a trip for the last week and a bit; all in all it's been a sort of a sleepy year for the site in terms of visible content - a couple of movie review revamps, a squashing of a glitch, and these Pokémon Go pages - and for that I apologize, but behind the scenes I spent perhaps more time than I've ever spent on the site remaking it from scratch and moving it to a brand-new server, and I couldn't be happier with having gotten that done. Here's to a more outwardly productive fifteenth year of TCoD!

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And now the Pokémon Go Stat Mechanics page is up. Thanks for your patience; now I can get to other things.

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I've updated my Pokémon Go review and guide in accordance with the latest update and the changes it brought (primarily regarding training).

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Well, my simple little Pokémon Go tips page unexpectedly ballooned into a full-blown lengthy guide to most aspects of the game. In any case, it is now finally up. I hope it was worth it.

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I've finally finished and put up my Pokémon Go review. As usual, it is pretty long and rambly. Go has its own section in the menu because I'm planning a couple of other pages on it (some basic play tips and something about the game's stat mechanics); once those are done, I will return to your regularly scheduled non-Go content.

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Day two! So far the transition seems to have gone decently; I've made several bugfixes since yesterday, but nothing catastrophic. Thanks to everyone who's submitted error reports so far!

I figured it's more than time for a new Almighty Random Poll, so there's a new one about, guess what, Pokémon Go. I hope you aren't too tired of hearing about it yet because I am planning on making a couple of pages on it. But just a couple.

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Hello from the new server! If you're seeing this update, you're successfully being directed to the shiny new version of the site, on a new server, running on an all-new backend.

You are probably not very impressed, because the site looks identical to how it did before, but the entire thing has actually been remade from scratch behind the scenes. This does mean that everything is effectively new right now - there might be bugs or other oversights I made in the porting. I'd be extremely grateful if you would report any oddities you bump into - and this very much includes any old links that no longer work, by the way, since I've made an effort to make everything redirect to its new location despite the major reshuffling of the site's URLs.

I'll probably be spending the next few days doing some extra testing, smoothing out any remaining issues and making a number of behind-the-scenes improvements, but after that, I can finally get back to working on some new content. Thanks for your patience during this lengthy transition! Hopefully I will never have to do this again.

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Of course, I'm not actually replacing all the images on the site with my own drawings. The new banner was also supposed to be a joke, but a lot of people ended up liking it, and I kind of liked it too, so while Modern style is back to the way it used to be, yesterday's version (with a couple of tweaks and polish) has been added to the style switcher page as "Sketch style" under Deprecated Styles, and you can switch your style cookie to it there if you want.

As usual, I also made a more extensive writeup of the joke on the April Fools' Jokes page.

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If you're using Modern style, you'll notice it has a new banner featuring the site mascots, drawn by yours truly. Almost everything on this site is created by me, and over the years, I've rolled out my own guestbook, my own polls - ditching the outside art was only a matter of time, and now that I've been drawing every day for three months, I finally felt confident enough to start replacing all the images on the site with my own art. I've started with the Modern style banner and the poll images on the front page, but I expect to get to work on the remaining images on the site (and the other styles) soon.

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I've finally managed to (I think) squash that one Favorite Pokémon Picker bug once and for all; looks like it was happening if you picked while the picker was transitioning between batches of Pokémon, which in practice would probably mostly have happened when people accidentally double-clicked the pick button. Because of a quirk of how the picker is implemented, this counted as picking the Pokémon you'd selected earlier while eliminating the next batch that the picker was about to display. That would have been annoying for anyone, but especially so if this happened on the final pick of a favorite, since then it'd happen just after the Pokémon was added to Found Favorites, thus ensuring those Pokémon would never get de-eliminated and causing the "glitch" I've been battling with.

This, by the way, means that some of those people who complained about never seeing their favorite Pokémon may have been right after all, if they misclicked and eliminated the batch it was in before it got displayed! I was pretty dismissive of those complaints as I was fixated on the theory behind the picker's algorithm and never considered the possibility that people could in fact have been eliminating Pokémon they hadn't actually, visually seen thanks to a UI flaw. I'm sorry for that dismissiveness, I was totally in the wrong, and this was silly UI design that I should have done better from the start. Thanks to everyone who did send those complaints, everyone who reported the glitch, and especially the couple of people who went to the trouble of giving me dumps of their picker state.

I've now fixed it to disable picking entirely while the picker transitions between batches. You may notice things going a little slower now if you do something like just picking madly at random, but since that's not really the point of the picker, I didn't think that was really a use case worth considering. All in all, the fix should generally safeguard against accidental picking and make sure that nothing ever gets accidentally eliminated before you properly see it.

Happy picking!

(For those who didn't see it, I am still in the process of porting the site to Python, so updates are likely to be sparse for a bit, but yeah, this was worth fixing.)

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I've just added a small sanity check to the Favorite Pokémon Picker that will detect and fix the results of a particular glitch that's cropped up for some users, where eventually you'd just get stuck as it stops showing you Pokémon. If your picker was stuck in that state before, then it should now magically fix itself when you visit the page again. I thought I'd fixed this glitch a while ago, but just got a new report about it a couple of days ago; however, it's possible that the glitch actually happened for that person before I fixed it and merely didn't manifest in an obvious way until now, so it could be that it really is fixed. Either way, even if you have an old picker state affected by the glitch, it should now silently correct itself next time you use the picker, and if anyone does bump into it after this point (please tell me if so, since that'd definitively mean the glitch is still around!), then they can fix it with a refresh instead of having to reset.

I should probably note that the site may be a little quiet for a bit, because I've been spending almost all my TCoD time for a couple of weeks now working on porting the site over to Python, and I'll probably be doing that for a while (more on my Tumblr). Unlike your traditional Pokémon website "hiatus" that spells death, I am actually working on this, have every intention of getting it done as quickly as humanly possible, and obviously the current version of the site will remain up for however long it takes (and if there's something like this Favorite Pokémon Picker thing that calls for a swift update, I'll still be doing that over here). This has been a long time coming - the current framework for the site is an unholy, unsustainable mess that's caused nothing but trouble and has been holding me back from doing a lot of cool things, and it really had to happen sooner or later. Don't worry: I am extremely passionate about backwards-compatibility and will be going to great lengths to ensure that all public links continue to work like before and basically nothing changes on your end, aside from some old bugs being fixed and some streamlining (the poll results page will actually be part of the layout, for instance, because I can do that now).

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I've revamped my Voice of the Forest review and added screenshots, as with the previous three movies. Don't worry, I'm still calling it the Conspicuously CG Giant Mecha.

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The final sixth-generation event legendary, Volcanion, was finally officially announced in December, so I've now updated the Zodiac (note that there's still no Global Link art of it, so it doesn't have artwork yet), Number Game, Hangman, Favorite Pokémon Picker, Gotta Spell 'Em All, sixth-generation capture calculator, Pokémon List Generator and Fun Facts accordingly. While I was at it, I randomly reorganized the Fun Facts a bit and added several.

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Happy new year, everyone! The site's been kind of shamefully inactive for a bit; I've had a lot of stuff on my hands (most recently, the Serebii.net forums fanfiction awards). In the new year I hope to have more time, and in particular to try to work on the site for half an hour a day (this has been working very well for my fanfic).

As is traditional, here are some people I want to thank for their positive contributions to my 2015:

• Shadey, for being my favorite husband.
• elyvorg, for coming to visit, letting us visit, playing AAI2, writing adorable issuey fanfics and understanding my AAI2 feels.
• Negrek, for being ludicrously willing to go above and beyond to indulge my ridiculous obsessions, hosting me, showing me around campus, Undertale, writing me the most wonderful presents, theorizing about my silly fanfic, and inviting me back.
• Psychic and T, for being awesome people we finally got to meet, explaining Canadian politics at our five-hour layover in Ronkonkoma, being supportive and kind, and the greatest cake photos.
• Act and Michael, for inviting us to their wedding, and all of the internet table, for being there, being great and being part of a wonderful weekend.
• Dannichu, who I didn't get to meet this year but is wonderful and I can't wait to see her again in 2016.
• opaltiger, for all the random chats we've had, listening to me vent and being someone I can generally talk with about stuff, whom I also can't wait to see again in 2016.
• Espeon, for Nuzlocke comic plans and all our chats, support and sadly ill-fated attempts to organize Expogoing. Yet again, let's definitely meet in 2016, and do those comics, and talk more.
• ultraviolet, for being really supportive and nice at odd Australian hours of the day. I'm incredibly grateful for having you as a mod this year.
• My parents, for long talks about programming and writing.
• Lin-Manuel Miranda, for Hamilton, which I was willing to stand in line for an hour and a half for a tiny chance of seeing, and which I will see in 2016 because Negrek is great.
• Toby Fox, for Undertale.
• The amazing team of fans who fully and flawlessly localized Ace Attorney Investigations 2, which by the way is THE BEST and you should all play it.
• Habitica, for working some magic on my productivity.
• My loyal visitors, who are somehow still here.

Here's to more updates in 2016!

(Also, I tweaked the capture calculators' result bar to not spill ridiculously out of its boundaries on mobile phones. That may have been a good idea.)

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