And if you're going to get offended about me saying that because you're not a Christian, neither am I.

Well, I can't really do anything other than just wish you happy holidays for now, unfortunately, because the time I had to do something special for e-Christmas was all spent on writing. I couldn't get chapter 37 done, but instead finished part five of The Fall of a Leader which you can read if you're interested. Stuff is in store for the website, I promise. I've just been busy with things like cleaning my room.

Comment on this - View comments

I added a couple of new D/P changes and fixed a couple of mistakes in some others. Otherwise I've been trying to write so I can finish chapter 37 of The Quest for the Legends before Christmas, but I doubt I'll succeed, unfortunately. See the Quest Blog for details.

Comment on this - View comments

Someone pointed out to me today that I'd accidentally given Anorith and Armaldo two separate days in the Zodiac when they should have shared one. Thus I had to mess around with it a little more to fix that, and the fix included combining the days of Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan and giving Phione a Festival instead of just a day. The days affected by the change are the following:

• April 25th (used to be Day of Phione, is now Festival of Phione)
• April 26th (used to be Day of Finneon and Lumineon, is now Festival of Shiny Phione)
• April 27th (used to be Day of Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath, is now Festival of Shadow Phione)
• April 28th (used to be Day of Politoed, is now Day of Finneon and Lumineon)
• August 15th (used to be Day of Hitmonlee, is now Day of Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan)
• August 16th (used to be Day of Hitmonchan, is now Day of Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath)
• August 17th (used to be Day of Pinsir, is now Day of Politoed)
• August 18th (used to be Day of Heracross, is now Day of Pinsir)
• August 19th (used to be Day of Shroomish and Breloom, is now Day of Heracross)
• August 20th (used to be Day of Croagunk and Toxicroak, is now Day of Shroomish and Breloom)
• October 21st (used to be Day of Anorith, is now Day of Anorith and Armaldo)
• October 22nd (used to be Day of Armaldo, is now Day of Croagunk and Toxicroak)

Yes, I know, it's an awful lot of days to be affected, and I'm sorry if suddenly your birthday has your least favorite Pokémon on it instead of your favorite. The good news is that I will never need to do this again, because I made a couple of scripts to check for me whether a) any Pokémon were missing from the Zodiac, b) any Pokémon (other than legendaries) were repeated in the Zodiac, c) any Pokémon placed on the same day were from different generations, or d) any more Pokémon on separate days should actually be on the same one. All of them returned negative, so the Anorith/Armaldo split was the last problem with the Zodiac that I'll have to fix. Whoo.

I also fixed a problem in the image generation script that would fail to make the Nidoran images work correctly.

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, so I revised the mathematical approach to EVs and natures to make it a bit clearer what I was talking about, and added a special section to the end of it called "Why This Does Not Work in Practice", mostly just to make it clearer that I don't actually think it does work in practice. I actually did this a couple of days ago, but I wasn't going to upload it or update about it until I was done with the new horoscopes; however, I ended up deciding that I'd just take a little more time with those, so I took them down and just uploaded this. Hopefully the horoscopes won't end up like all those sections that I said I'd briefly take down for revision and then never brought back.

Comment on this - View comments

I figured out that problem, and the zodiac images are officially here (see the image that should be beside this text for an example of what they look like). Enter your birthday into the form and get every possible representation of your birthday Pokémon, Reign and Season (you can choose between the Pokémon of your birthday if there are many of them, and between any multiple forms that said Pokémon might have). Then you can show off your birthday on your website or at the forums you go to.

Additionally, because it would have been extraordinarily lame for everybody born on any of the three festival days of a particular legendary to have a virtually identical Zodiac image, it is now so that Day 1 of every legendary's festival is represented by that Pokémon as it ordinarily is, Day 2 by the shiny version of that legendary, and Day 3 by the shadow version of that legendary. Shadow, you ask? Well, shadow like the XD001 Lugia of Pokémon XD. And no, there are no official sprites of those, so I spent literally a full day spriting shadow versions of every single legendary myself, which you can see all of in my sprite gallery if you're interested. Of course, it goes without saying that if I catch anyone stealing my shadow legendary sprites (well, at least the ones I made a bunch of scratch edits to - some of them looked evil enough already) that person will be impaled on an Internet spear.

So yeah. I hope you enjoy it, what with the freakishly long time it took to get it all working. Oh, and don't direct link the Zodiac images - they're generated by my server on the fly, and if people were direct linking them all over the place it would probably slow the site down. Save them and upload them to your own website or image host.

Comment on this - View comments

The outlining guide has been tweaked a little bit to make it clearer and not quite as rambly about mathematics that were probably scaring everyone away. I also added a section about "The Golden Rule of Outlining" there and a small rant on how spriting is expotentially harder the larger the sprite is in the pixel-over section.

I've been playing around with ASP.NET image manipulation for the whole zodiac thing, but I'm a little stuck and have not gotten an answer to my cry for help on the official ASP.NET forum. I'll probably get some response soon and then I can continue working on it.

Comment on this - View comments

Aaaand I did it. The spriting guide has been slightly reorganized, and a special in-depth outlining tutorial that I've been meaning to write for months (which I took more or less all day to write instead of studying for my physics test) has been added to it. Aren't I sensible?

I hope that somebody other than me can actually understand a word of what I wrote. If you do understand it, at least, I believe it should be pretty helpful about how outlining works in all sorts of detail that is generally just a matter of feeling how it looks right and how it doesn't but I attempted to teach in words anyway.

And this is the first major addition of content on the main site in... a while. I hope it's worth the wait, as well as the shading guide I'm planning to make too.

Comment on this - View comments

Two tests done out of four. Japanese was the first test, and that went great. Then I had Icelandic today, and that wasn't so bad either. Next it's physics, with all of its ridiculous emphasis on cramming the perfectly obvious into our heads while skimming over the more difficult parts, and then sociology on Friday. And then it's done. Fear not; the updates are coming!

At least, aside from posting the second part of my NaNo on the Quest for the Legends minipage, I randomly looked at the spriting guide and realized that some of those example images really needed to be magnified if anybody was to see what was going on in them, so I did that. And I tweaked some wording and stuff in the actual guide, too, to clarify things better and update some references to official sprites being 64x64 to clarify that that refers to the Advance sprites and the D/P ones are 80x80. There is a certain part I really want to add to the guide, and I may do that later. We'll see.

Comment on this - View comments

Yup. NaNo finished, first part posted (see the Quest Blog), and I'm ready to start doing something for the poor, neglected main site again.

...except that I have tests on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

I'll try to find the time to do some stuff such as to revamp Hellfire style and maybe Shiny Umbreon style too, but I may not be able to do this until after my last test, which is thankfully on the seventh. Meanwhile there are so many things I need to write (NaNo editing, The Quest for the Legends chapter 37, Morphic chapter 6) that I may be busy with those in my free time. But you will get your updates, and you will get your fancy Zodiac signature image thingies that I promised. And you'll get new horoscopes too, as a matter of fact. And a new splash as soon as we hit 1,500,000 front page hits. So yeah. Lots of things on the horizon! And then maybe I'll get around to finishing that HTML guide and writing guide that have been down for revision for I-don't-know-how-long.

Comment on this - View comments

The script that handles the automation of the addition of names to the Hall of Fame has been slightly modified so as to both remove any square brackets that may be placed around a name as a result of misunderstanding and to go through the list and check whether the name being added is already on the list before adding it. I hope this makes me less likely to be forced to go through the list regularly to fix such mistakes (which, incidentally, I also did before I made this change).

I also, as a matter of fact, updated the list of 'universal TMs' that almost all Pokémon that can learn at the bottom of the fake Pokémon guide, and fixed a mistake in the Zodiac history where apparently I managed to fail to remember that 11 - 3 equals eight, not seven.

Yes, my updates are being small and boring this month. Cheer up; NaNoWriMo is almost over.

Comment on this - View comments

After an error report pointed out that in my little round of updating everything to accommodate the fourth generation I had missed the TM/HM list at the bottom of the fake Pokémon creation guide, I quickly updated that.

I'm still on schedule with my NaNo. :D And I got plotbunnies. Which is good. I promise I'll do some stuff in December. I've been looking into dynamic image scripting to make little signature images with your Zodiac Pokémon (and, the way I'm thinking it, one of your choice, no less - if your birthday is the Day of Trapinch, Vibrava and Flygon, you can choose which one you want on the image). But that's all still in the planning stages and I don't know if I'll get around to it until December.

Comment on this - View comments

Majorly.

In the process of making the Zodiac, I had basically created the entire thing when suddenly one of the people I'd basically shown it to to be 'betaed' asked why Snubbull and Granbull had separate days. Of course, they weren't supposed to, and as such I combined them again.

This did make me rather puzzled, since I thought I had carefully found out that there were exactly 261 non-legendary evolution lines, but I couldn't find anywhere where I'd made the opposite mistake, so I presumed I'd simply counted it wrong and thus put in Missingno. on the former "Day of Granbull", incidentally September 11th, instead.

Well, now Icepool pointed out to me in the guestbook that I had made the opposite mistake by placing Yanma and Yanmega on the same day, namely today.

So I'm afraid I was forced to do something I would have preferred not having to do: editing the Zodiac after the fact. I kept the changes minimal: Carnivine has been moved to the Reign of Azelf to replace Missingno. (which is no longer in the Zodiac), the former Day of Trapinch/Vibrava/Flygon has been changed into the Day of Yanmega (today having been made into only the Day of Yanma), and Trapinch, Vibrava and Flygon were instead moved to the former Day of Carnivine. If you have previously found out that your birthday Pokémon was Missingno., Carnivine or Trapinch/Vibrava/Flygon, then I'm afraid I must stand corrected. And if it's your birthday today (happy birthday), you don't get to call yourself a Yanmega anymore. Sorry. x.x

Otherwise I've been doing NaNoWriMo and trying to catch up. I just had to pop in to correct this.

Wow, I hate Hellfire style. I need to update that thing before my eyes burn out.

Comment on this - View comments

Dear website of mine,
you've been five years online.
Happy birthday, Cave of Dragonflies;
let's hope the visitors won't whine.

Why would they whine? Because I have now put up the new Zodiac in celebration of the site's fifth birthday.

The original Zodiac was created because I realized that there were exactly 365 non-legendary Pokémon and somebody had to do something with it. Essentially, the whole point of the Zodiac was gone when the fourth generation came out. It took a lot of complications to figure out a way to implement all the Pokémon into the Zodiac in one way or another (see the Zodiac page for details), but eventually I managed. However, now we have the Festival days, which make nearly a third of the days in the year a little less special than the others. I am truly sorry about this, but it couldn't be done any other way without starting to hand-pick Pokémon on a whim to be included or not included, and I had already resolved not to do any such thing.

If you preferred your old birthday Pokémon, you are welcome to keep using the old Zodiac. But now you also have a chance to get a new Pokémon if you didn't like your old one. If any Pokémon at all has the same date now as before, it is purely a coincidence, as I did not in any way use the old Zodiac for reference here.

And no, you can not make me change it so that your birthday gets a better Pokémon. I got Lunatone in the Reign of Cresselia; personally, I much preferred my old Anorith in the Reign of Regice, but in principle I do not place the Zodiac Pokémon according to anyone's birthday.

At least I think that if The Cave of Dragonflies could talk, it would be happier with the current Weavile in the Reign of Darkrai than with the old Smoochum in the Reign of Latias.

Happy fifth birthday to the site. Incidentally, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again, so don't panic if it's quiet in November. If you want to see the first chapter of my NaNo, see the Quest Blog.

Comment on this - View comments

Some spam message got posted in my guestbook. I accordingly did what I had been planning to do if the spambots figured out that they just had to take the phrase between the quotes and paste it into the box, namely to make it display a random Pokémon sprite and have you type that Pokémon's name in order to get your message posted. Slightly less convenient when posting in the guestbook, perhaps, but one more inconvenience to the bots that requires them to recognize all the Pokémon if they're going to post spam in my guestbook is more than worth it.

I also finally got my Wi-Fi USB connector. :D My friend code on Diamond is 4296 1090 1148. If you have, say, a Squirtle or Bulbasaur, I'd be delighted to trade you a Charmander or any of the Hoenn starters, by the way. Just contact me. And if you want proof that I do suck as much at competitive battling as I always claim, feel free to ask for a battle as well (but please don't expect me to spend every last moment of my free time battling you over and over).

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, I actually went with a little more of a compromise than I originally did. I had been toying with the idea that it might perhaps be nice to somehow let headlines from the Quest Blog get automatically posted on the main site so that readers could notice them, but felt it would be too intrusive to be putting that somewhere on this utterly unrelated website. Instead, I now made a special button for the minipage and decided I might as well put it on my link menu where it does not get in anyone's way, and thus it is now located just below the affiliates there.

If you hover over the link, whether using a style where the button appears or the text link, you can then see the date and headline of the last update on the Quest Blog (for example, now there is a very interesting entry up, or rather a semi-interesting entry with a couple of very interesting comments, that could sprout some great discussion if somebody actually noticed it). This means that to check whether there is an update on the Quest Blog after checking the main site, you only need to scroll a little down and hover over the link. You will be able to see from the headline immediately whether it is a new chapter (since the headline would then definitely say something like "Chapter 37 up"), and the link leads directly to the Quest Blog so you won't have to click through multiple links if it does interest you. I will, of course, still make note of important updates on the minipage such as new chapters the next time I update the main site, as I originally planned in that earlier update.

Doing this also made me realize that it made no sense to write dates on the main site American-style but on the minipage European-style, and this probably confused some people already and would have confused even more if I hadn't decided to switch over to American-style there too. So yeah, now they're both American-style and everything should be pretty clear.

Enjoy. Oh, yeah, and the D/P Zodiac is almost done - I've gotten the system down completely and now it's just finding a... semi-fitting (*cough* make some Bug, Poison or Fighting legendaries already, Game Freak *cough*) Reign for the remaining Pokémon and then getting the order of everything down for good. And no, you can not e-mail me with your birthday and ask me to put your favorite Pokémon on it.

Aaaand now to write my sociology essay about religion in a multicultural society.

Comment on this - View comments

Dragonfree's Rants is no more.

Well, that's more because I hadn't updated it in years and three of the four rants on it were pretty stupid and forum-specific. So instead I took the one rant I still liked from it, Overrated, and put it instead on the main site under Opinions/Theories and added another rant that I've been meaning to make in some form for a long time, namely about "You know you're obsessed with Pokémon when..." lists. Finally, I revamped both the old "Guessing the Names" rant and the thought about the Mew trick, since I felt that both were rather too aimless before, to make them more focused on their point.

Oh, and I also put up Articuno Snowflake style at the forums a couple of days ago.

Comment on this - View comments

Sorry for the lack of... well, anything. I've been terribly busy recently doing a whole host of things other than working on this website. I have been alive, however, as shown by how much I've been updating the Quest Blog. Speaking of which, the poll results are so split that I think I'll go with a compromise: if I update the story or minipage or there is something particularly important on the Quest Blog, I will mention this in passing the next time I update the main site, but I will no longer make updates specifically to announce updates on the minipage. This way, if you are so interested that you want to be able to read new chapters immediately, you can watch the Quest Blog (and are probably the kind of person who'd be interested in all the stuff posted there that is not a chapter update, anyway), but if you're just a casual reader who doesn't really care, you'll eventually hear of it when there's a new chapter anyway if you just go to the main site. That said, there is sadly no new chapter yet.

On the other hand, there is a new crossword. Rejoice. The results from the September crossword were extremely interesting, however. Firstly, nobody got all 37 words of the crossword right. However, eleven people got exactly 36 of them right, and what's more, all of those eleven people got the exact same word wrong. This one troublesome word was 23 down, "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Most of them confidently guessed Parasect, and a couple said Prinplup, most likely because they were the only two Pokémon that fit whose Pokédex entries made any mention of trees. But guess what? It was Primeape. You were all taking it too literally. And nobody at all got it right. Mwahahaha.

However, the first three with 36 correct to submit were opaltiger and Crystylla (should I tell them not to start doing the crossword until the last three days or so to give somebody else a chance?), Electric Ho-oh and Umbee. Congratulations to them and also to all the other Honorable Mentions for the September crossword, especially of course those seven others who got 36 right.

Now for some good news of what I've been doing: in a random spurt of feeling like playing Ranger, I finished the game and got myself a Manaphy for my Diamond. Yay. I might put up something like a review of Ranger soon. And I finally ordered a Nintendo Wi-Fi USB connector from Amazon, which technically should have been delivered already but hasn't. Hopefully I'll get my hands on it soon and be able to join in on the Wi-Fi madness with everybody else.

Comment on this - View comments

Well, I just updated the Quest Blog, but I don't think I should be reporting all updates on the blog here, which brings us to the next point. Should I keep reporting chapter updates here on the main site or should I just let the blog take over that role entirely so readers of the fic can just check regularly on that and those not interested can avoid seeing fic updates here all the time?

So yeah, I made a Site Poll about it. Go vote.

Comment on this - View comments

And I bring you the Quest Blog, a special blog on the Quest for the Legends minipage chronicling my progress on the fic and general thoughts. It contains a sneak peek of chapter 37. :D

Comment on this - View comments

Ack. Sorry about the complete lack of September updates and especially the crossword, which I finally got around to making now, and thus it is extra-easy (which, since we're dealing with me after all, does not say much). Congratulations to elyvorg, Chrom and opaltiger, Furret and Larissa for winning first, second and third in the August crossword. What's more, elyvorg's solution was the first 100% completed crossword since... quite a while ago, which means either that elyvorg is really good or that I'm going soft.

Anyway, now the September crossword is up. Then I've made minor tweaks, most notably on the menu where I added a new link, cleaned up some affiliates, etc.

Comment on this - View comments

Well, I finally managed to finish the Battle Mechanics section I've been working on all this time. And, um, that's pretty much it. I also grouped it with the Stat Mechanics section on the menu.

Comment on this - View comments

The RPG I added to the Wall of Shame yesterday seems to have been deleted, and in fact I went through all the other thieves too and most seemed to have had something done about them. So something is accomplished by having a Wall of Shame. Who would've thought?

At least, this means I deleted them from the page.

Comment on this - View comments

I've been doing lots of stuff, but never really felt I'd done enough to warrant an update. I uploaded all that stuff now, so it's just minor additions to a bunch of sections like the In-Game Humour and D/P Changes, a new Wall of Shame entry, an example at the bottom of the Stat Mechanics section, and some minor fixes in other sections.

Comment on this - View comments

The August Crossword is up at last. Sorry about the wait.

I also added a few more instances of in-game humour and a Wall of Shame entry considerably more serious than the others that I actually think was part of the reason I decided to create the Wall of Shame in the first place but somehow managed to forget to put on.

Comment on this - View comments

Chapter five of Morphic is up.

I've started the D/P VS Seeker, by the way.

Comment on this - View comments

And I came to the conclusion that fixing the dropdowns in IE was impossible, so I just inserted a conditional comment to remove them altogether for IE. Sorry. Of course, they still work in proper browsers.

So in this moment of deletion, I went on a general deletion-spree in accordance with the poll results. I took down the Fan Art and Fan Fiction sections (specifically, I took them off the menu; your artwork and stories are all still accessible at their previous locations, however), put up a new Fan Fiction section with only my stuff in it, decided that I really didn't think the Quest for the Legends minipage belonged on the main menu anymore since I now even have a special page for my own fanfiction and there is no need to egotrip my fics any further, removed the Submit Fanwork section since it's not going to be needed anymore, modified the Fake Cheats and Babelfished sections to be less encouraging towards submissions (although I am still as ready as always to put something up there if it's pure genius), and then for good measure deleted the Parodies section too because it was dumb and not funny at all.

To replace it, there is now a section about in-game humour in the Pokémon games, which I hope everybody else who loves the way the Pokémon games don't take themselves seriously will help me expand because I know there are so many things I forgot.

And since there is no need for the previous poll anymore, there is now a new Site Poll as well.

Comment on this - View comments

Mweehee. I managed, after some coding headaches, to make a script (after manually compiling a plaintext list of the effort points given by each Pokémon) that automatically added the effort points given for each Pokémon and trainer in the VS Seeker section. :3 And of course, then I added a subsection to it with good "EV Trainers", i.e. good trainers to battle for Effort Points in each stat. Fwee. And of course, this is what the D/P VS Seeker will be like when I get around to making it, too. Except I don't think I'll ever be able to get screenshots of every trainer's location there considering there's no easy way to play a ROM of the game and it would be all icky with inconsistent lighting, so I think I'll leave that part out.

I guess I'll let the poll run at least overnight. Thanks for understanding my frustration.

And now to try to figure out what the heck is up with those drop-down menus in IE7...

Oh, yeah. 1,250,000 front page hits. :3 I was trying to draw a splash earlier, but it looked stupid. I'll make another attempt later.

Comment on this - View comments

In September 2006, I decided that I had gotten tired of having to put up fan art and fan fiction and that I was just going to give it up. However, I felt it would be rude to just do this without notice when so many people had been submitting their stuff, and therefore I made a poll asking, well, should I just stop it? I never expected people on the whole to be anything but indifferent toward those horribly organized fanstuff sections that I'm always too lazy to update anyway.

So therefore, when the results started clearing, I was rather shocked to discover that nearly half of those who voted were ready to threaten me with death if I dared to remove those sections. But okay, fine. I respect the opinion of my visitors. I kept it up, even though I hated to do so.

But look.

There are several very good reasons why I would very much like to be rid of this.

Putting up fan art and fan fiction by hand, as I do it, is boring and tedious. I'm sent Word documents and spend half an hour squinting through them to manually format their italics or whatever else in HTML. I get BMP images and specifically save them in a better format. I reply to e-mail after e-mail asking "Who should I credit for this?" when people forget to give a name. I don't like doing it.

And because I don't like doing it, I procrastinate a lot. When I get an e-mail with a fan content submission, I groan, star it and let it wait for a time when I can be bothered. All fan content rots in my e-mail inbox for a while, maybe even months, during which I bet 80% of the senders entirely forget that they ever submitted something to my site. What's worse, the fan content is added to my "stuff I need to do for my site" queue, which also includes affiliation and site rating requests - that is, it also contributes to delaying my response time for those. I would feel a lot more inclined to respond to my affiliation requests and site rating requests if I did not feel "Oh, but if I'm going to do that, I'll have to put up all that fan content too..." The existence of fan content submissions gets in the way of other things, too.

To top it all, the fan art and fan fiction sections are awful. I mean, come on. They're some of the worst places on the Internet you could possibly put your stuff. It is impossible to receive feedback on your work from them. The only way anybody can figure out when your fanfiction has been added to is to regularly go to the section and check manually, because I don't update about it anywhere. This is inconvenient both for authors and readers. They're extremely ugly and disorganized. The fan art section has no thumbnails, so if you're looking for a good piece of artwork you need to go there and click every single link, which, face it, nobody does.

Meanwhile, there are websites such as The Pokémon Tower dedicated to Pokémon fanfiction and fanart that are infinitely superior in every conceivable way, writing and art websites such as FanFiction.Net and DeviantART with advanced commenting, a large community of potential readers/watchers and the ability to upload your work in real time without waiting for some random lazy webmaster to get around to it, and all sorts of forums (including my own) containing sections dedicated to fan art and fan fiction where you can easily showcase your work and discuss it with others in a much more accessible and flexible way. Frankly, I don't get why the hell anybody would want their artwork or writing in those sections on my site, and the only reason I can possibly think of is ignorance of all the countless far superior options. Well, you know now.

So honestly, I have to ask you: do you really think I should keep accepting the stupid fan content?

In other news, I added the Insta-Level-100 trick to the R/B/Y Tips and Tricks section and did some stuff with the FAQ.

Comment on this - View comments

The June/July crossword has been judged. I'm very pleased with the number of Honorable Mentions. Well, in one way I am. In another I'm thinking "Argh, why do I have to put in this long list?"

Congratulations to Raposa and Romberguy, T Meister and opaltiger, Furret and Crystylla who came in first, second and third, respectively. I will try to get the next crossword up as soon as possible.

Comment on this - View comments

Somehow I managed to forget to add this yesterday, but the mystery of the R/B/Y type advantage messages has been solved, thanks to Captain Mofocious from the forums, along with providing an insight into Game Freak's oh-so-random mind as they were creating the type weaknesses and resistances. Fwee. Do take a look.

Comment on this - View comments

I've been intending to write it for months, but for some reason it was first now that I bothered to whip it up: an AAP article about religious objections to Pokémon.

Then I've also added more D/P changes since a couple of people e-mailed me while I was away and pointed out some things I'd forgotten (like how Pokémon now hatch from eggs at level 1, which was seriously one of the first things I decided to put into that section but still somehow managed to forget for a couple of months).

Comment on this - View comments

And I'm back. Yay.

The guestbook is back up, too. I'll try to get the crossword up as soon as possible.

Comment on this - View comments

All right, then. Off to Vietnam. Will be back on (I'm pretty sure) the first of August. See you then. Or well, not-see.

Enjoy your Deathly Hallows, Potter-fans.

Comment on this - View comments

Chapter 36 of The Quest for the Legends is up like I promised.

Now to go wait in a line for three hours for Harry Potter. :D

Comment on this - View comments

Let me just say that I am very sorry for the lack of real updates in July. As I have said, I have been working, but too little on things that could be put up immediately. And on Saturday I am leaving for the International Mathematical Olympiad in Vietnam and will not be back until the first of August.

However, I did add a couple of D/P Changes since last time, and (rejoice, rejoice) I just finished writing chapter 36 of The Quest for the Legends - however, it's five AM and I'm going to bed now. I'll proofread it and put it up tomorrow, I promise.

UPDATE EDIT: After some consideration, I temporarily took down the guestbook, just because trolls have been running rampant at the forums trying to spoil the last Harry Potter book and I believe I and many others would be quite upset to wander into a guestbook only to discover it's got a huge spoiler in it. I made this decision especially because I got the fifth book spoiled for me in my own guestbook, and would prefer not to have that happen again.

So yeah, no guestbook until I get back (and will presumably have finished the book, as well as most people).

Comment on this - View comments

Today I received an e-mail from Google in my old clunky e-mail inbox! :D And they conducted an investigation and came to the conclusion antialiasis@gmail.com was definitely mine, so I got it back. Take that, hijacker. And Google owns. I was truly starting to think I'd never get it back.

So now dragonfree.tcod@gmail.com will become a backup account for antialiasis@gmail.com so if anything like this happens again I won't have to live with that awful torg.is e-mail unless both of my Gmail accounts get hijacked. Which is highly unlikely, especially since I'm about to make a completely new, nice, long password that I've never used before and never will again for the antialiasis one.

So now I changed all the references to my e-mail address back. The ones I could find, anyway. Yay. :3 (And yes, this means the crossword solutions are all back - however, since it's this far into July already and I've yet to receive a solution with all the answers correct in any case, I'll let you have until the end of July anyway.)

I also added the part about Surf hurting your partner in double battles to the D/P Changes section and slightly modified the FAQ for the ilcoeth time.

*goes to read to all her 95 unread e-mails*

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, Google hasn't contacted me about my Gmail account yet and I absolutely despise my old e-mail's interface (not to mention the complete lack of spam filters), so I created a new Gmail account which may become permanent if Google does not read my abuse report. Please direct all e-mails to dragonfree.tcod@gmail.com until further notice. I have also updated all references (all I could find, anyway - if you find any others, please notify me) to my e-mail address to this one.

This naturally includes the send address for the crossword and error reports, so I hope all you crossword participants have still got your solution to the June crossword somewhere, or else can remember your answers. I'll give you until the end of July to re-complete the crossword; of course, if I get my old Gmail account back, both entries sent to the old and new one will be considered for the judging. If you sent any error reports in July, I recommend you send them again now.

Let's hope this all eventually has a happy ending...

Oh, and chapter four of Morphic is up. It might offend some people, but please just read all those huge honking disclaimers and realize that none of what the characters say or do has anything to do with my own opinion on any subject.

UPDATE EDIT: I finally reorganized and added to the Fic Art section of the Quest for the Legends minipage.

UPDATE EDIT (2): And by the way, if you couldn't tell, this means you also need to resubmit affiliation requests, fanwork, etc. Which may actually be a good thing, because it might motivate me to actually put some of it up to not have 60 mails waiting for me.

Comment on this - View comments

I've been working furiously on the new writing guide, but it's not finished, so nothing to actually update on.

However, the five days passed and the answer to my security question appears to have been changed, so I am assuming that somebody definitely did get into my e-mail. I'm filing a Gmail abuse report right now and am hoping I will eventually get my account back so I can judge the crossword.

Comment on this - View comments

It appears I've gotten locked out of my e-mail. I'm starting to suspect somebody somehow found out my passwords, because this has been happening with various accounts that I have recently - I got my account at my forums back after a short crisis, but my Gmail absolutely refuses to log me in. There is a chance I may have changed my password and then forgotten, so I'm giving it the five-day wait it requires before you can get back in with your security question, but meanwhile, please use my old e-mail, hlinonnu@torg.is, which I cleaned out a few thousand spam messages from for the occasion, if you have to e-mail me.

Oh, and I should probably mention that a couple of days ago I finally added the Emerald cloning trick to the R/S/E Tips and Tricks section.

No crossword yet, sorry. However, I have been working on stuff; it just happens to be stuff in big sections that are down for revision. And then I've been planning ahead for my NaNo for November, since I'm pretty desperate to get to 50,000 words this time, and writing chapter 36 of The Quest for the Legends.

Comment on this - View comments

I'd better explain myself. The reason I've been so suspiciously absent during the month of June (this being only the third update of the month and the only noteworthy updates of the previous two concerning fanfics and the crossword) is that I'm a participant for Iceland in the International Mathematical Olympiad this year and participation includes up to seven hours of training every weekday until the contest. It doesn't help that this means I can't keep up my habit of staying up long past midnight and tend to be tired when I get home, which has led to my general lack of doing anything noteworthy since it started.

The reason I updated now is that at least I did something: it is now possible to actually change your style cookie, for example to Articuno Snowflake style, by visiting the URL http://www.dragonflycave.com/styleswitcher.aspx?style=articuno, with "articuno" being replaced with any of the style IDs. Very small and useless since we have the drop-down, I know. I guess the only thing you can do now that you couldn't before is actually set your style cookie to Oldie style, which you could only do before by manually editing the cookie since it wasn't in the drop-down. But hey, it's something.

Oh, and somebody from the math team dared me to make this, which is a completely pointless HTML table with cells manually colored so that the outcome is an exact replica of my Scorplack sprite, so I spent a couple of hours on that today for no good reason except I felt I had to try that.

I have, however, as usual when I'm finding myself out of time to work on the site, been overflowing with ideas, so when I actually get around to it I'll hopefully get something done. That math training is keeping me pretty busy, though.

That and I've recently become unhealthily obsessed with Pink Floyd and spend far too much of my time raving about The Wall on IRC.

Comment on this - View comments

...The Quest for the Legends! On this day exactly five years ago, I created a Word document named "pokémonsaga.doc" and typed into it "Mark lived in a very small village". Approximately 700 pages, 300,000 words, 120 chapters and eleven revisions later, I still haven't given up on it. Stubborn, aren't I?

For the occasion, I meant to write a fifth anniversary special, but since people repeatedly went conspicuously quiet when I asked for ideas, I didn't manage to get anything of worth done on that. Instead, I revamped the minipage, giving it a style switcher of its own where you can switch between Chalenor and Chaletwo style, Chalenor being dark and Chaletwo light for everybody's ease of reading on the brightness their eyes prefer. Of course, the printable version is still there, too.

Also a happy wedding anniversary to my parents, who got formally married that very day. :P

UPDATE EDIT: Okay, the minipage should be working properly now with no cookies set. You can stop sending me error reports.

Comment on this - View comments

Sorry about the downtime - the server suddenly went down so that we couldn't even access it and I couldn't work on the site, which was especially annoying as I was just making the last couple of clues for the June crossword. Yeah, I made a new crossword at last - I got two solutions to the October 2006 - May 2007 crossword that got more than half of the answers right, and then I was a happy Butterfree so I went and judged that one and made a new crossword - perfectly on time, I might add, but I couldn't put it up until now. v.v Stupid server.

At least, that means the new crossword is here, and it's quite a bit easier, so I'm sure at least somebody will manage to finish the whole thing. Congratulations to Crystylla and opaltiger, Spikefish and Drew108 and David for winning first, second and third place at the previous crossword, especially Spikefish since they were the person who submitted a few days ago with 21 correct, reviving my faith in humanity and prompting Crystylla and opaltiger to go frantic in trying to beat that.

In the fiction department, chapter 35 of The Quest for the Legends version ILCOE and chapter 3 of Morphic are up.

Comment on this - View comments

There is a new, D/P-style Ouen Map on the Quest for the Legends minipage.

Also, I actually got the first crossword solution for the current crossword (the one that's been going on since September or October) that has more than half of the words right. :D I knew SOMEBODY would be able to do it! Now I can die happy. Or at least make a new crossword happy when I get around to that.

Oh, yeah, and yesterday I added a couple of new link buttons, both 88x31 and 88x16, because the ones I had were ancient. I won't whine to everybody to change it, but at least you know of the possibility of switching to the new Dialga/Palkia buttons.

Comment on this - View comments

The quiz fixes I promised two days ago were delayed by a day, but now they're up, so the Steel Quiz and Flying Quiz are now up-to-date with D/P stuff. Let me know if there are any bugs.

I've also added a couple of things to the D/P Changes section that I originally forgot.

Comment on this - View comments

Indeed. That section would be the D/P Changes section, which is basically a kind of review of all the stuff that has changed between Advance and D/P (except for the obvious new characters/region/attacks/items/Pokémon). I may easily have forgotten something, so do contact me if there is something I didn't mention. It gets ranty in a couple of parts, especially one, so I considered putting it under "Opinions/Theories", but since I've got game reviews under "The Games", I figured this might as well be there too. Sinnoh will, as soon as there are other D/P-specific sections up, have its own submenu, of course, but right now this is directly on the menu.

I also randomly went and made the Rulers of the Universe and Quiz Hall registration automatic once you complete the tasks required to get onto the lists. Obviously, you won't find out the details unless you actually do complete them. Yay for slightly fewer e-mails. In the process of doing that, I also fixed a question in the Flying Quiz whose answer changed in the fourth generation and realized that I need to update some other questions in both the Flying and Steel quizzes to reflect the fourth generation as well, but it's so late/early that I'll just do that tomorrow.

Lastly, I also put up the first two chapters of a new fanfic I started writing recently, Morphic.

Comment on this - View comments

And the next poll winner has had something done about it: I bring you the Stat Mechanics section. I had written up pretty much a third of a Battle Mechanics section, too, but unfortunately Notepad++ decided to freeze so I lost it all. As the content of the old EVs and Natures section has been implemented into this new section, that section is now also gone from the menu.

There is also both a new Almighty Random Poll and a Site Poll.

Comment on this - View comments

Articuno Snowflake style is here. I'll just copy and paste what I wrote about it in the Style Switcher section:

A light blue, wintery style that takes on the challenge of creating an image-based style that nonetheless will stretch to fit any resolution or user font size within reason. I think it came out great, personally. The slogan has been changed to "Where the weak and strong are sheltered from the winter cold..." It is also notable for excessive use of alpha-transparent PNG images. I took the licence to do this as Internet Explorer 7 is out and it supports alpha-transparent PNGs unlike Internet Explorer 6; however, this means that it will without a doubt look absolutely horrid in IE6, so I really mean that [!ie] tag. It also uses snowflake brushes from 500ml Brushes.

Yeah. In the old poll, Articuno style came in third of the old styles to be adapted after Mew style and Houndoom style which have both already been remade. Of course, it recycles practically nothing but the mascot Pokémon from the original, since I went with creating an image-based one, but I did that with Voice of the Forest style too and you didn't complain, so I'll just assume you won't hate this change either. I think it's pretty, myself.

Forum version coming whenever I get around to it. Image-based styles are a major bother to adapt to the forums.

Comment on this - View comments

My Diamond arrived. :DDDDD Don't expect to see me for a while.

There would be a new style up, but unfortunately Internet Explorer is messing it up and that Diamond on the side of my desk looks too tempting, so I'm abandoning my original plan of finishing the style first and using Diamond as a reward.

So... see ya sometime.

Comment on this - View comments

I ran the VS Seeker through the link checker. It found out that eight screenshot links were broken; those were quickly fixed and now all the screenshots in the section should be working. :3

Also, I'll use the moment to vent my frustration over the fact that my most-expensive-video-game-ever Diamond still hasn't arrived in the mail. ;-;

Comment on this - View comments

Well, if you did, you were wrong. Very wrong. In fact, I don't think I've ever worked this much on something for the site between two individual updates.

The Cave of Dragonflies proudly presents the VS Seeker, a complete list of all the FR/LG trainers you can rebattle using the VS Seeker; the final Pokémon they have and their levels; their exact locations on their routes so they will be easy to find; screenshots of those locations just to make absolutely sure; and the money and experience you get for beating each and every one of them. What's more is that this is all original research, so I basically spent most of the past week walking through FireRed, VS-Seekering all the trainers in the game (except the ones in buildings and caves, obviously, where you can't use the VS Seeker) until I had battled each of them twice in a row with the same set of Pokémon (meaning they wouldn't level up any further and I could confidently assert that those were the final levels of their Pokémon) and then screenshotting them on my Japanese LeafGreen (and later FireRed) ROM. Meanwhile I should have been studying for my ongoing tests.

Now it's just hoping that this will at least be of some use to somebody, which it may not be, considering that even those of you who haven't gotten D/P yet have probably moved on to Emerald. But as so many sections of this site (such as the Pokémon List Generator and Evolution List), it was made because I felt there was a need for it - that "Damn, I wish I could quickly find somewhere on the Internet all the trainers in FR/LG that level up their Pokémon so I could train my shiny Gengar quicker!" feeling. I did find a couple of guides on GameFAQs containing all the trainers, but those only listed the route as the location of the trainer and then organized them in some random order, which made them practically impossible to use for this purpose without a major headache.

Now, if you're looking for somewhere to train your level 50 Charizard, all you need to do is look at this convenient list, skip to the "Level 51-60" section and find out that it could be a good idea to battle somebody like Bug Catcher Colton, who has two level 51 Butterfree and a level 54 Beedrill. Or, if you want to see if there's a trainer you can battle with your level 14 Spearow so you can evolve it into Fearow at level 20 (here I'm assuming you actually don't just use the old switch-out-on-first-turn-against-Elite-Four trick, which is probably being far too hopeful), you might want to try Lass Ali, the second trainer on Nugget Bridge, who admittedly carries a level 12 Pidgey but also a level 12 Oddish and a level 12 Bellsprout which will be easy prey for Spearow's Peck and give 315 Experience Points total. Or if you're a little more daring with that Spearow, maybe after it's grown a couple of levels, you can see if you can handle the two level 19 Beedrill that Bug Catcher Brent uses and give 1292 Experience Points total. Or if you're just looking for good spots to train some Pokémon to higher levels before they can hold their own against the second round of the Elite Four, that's there too.

By the way, there are exactly 222 VS-Seekerable (yay, new word) trainers in the game. Unless I missed somebody.

Well, whatever. I think this is extremely useful, but that's just me.

Oh, and it's highly likely that there are some mistakes in there, especially concerning the screenshots - I kept nearly forgetting to screenshot somebody, and without a doubt there are some I really did forget. As always, I would appreciate if you reported any such errors.

Now I should stop stalling with the whole style-making thing. And I'm randomly feeling a lot like making that update commenting system I was thinking about making with something similar to the Cave of Speculative Theories script. But I think it would be a lot smarter to go to bed and try to actually study for my math test on Monday.

Is it just me, or is this update ridiculously long?

Comment on this - View comments

I've finally put up a section I've been planning for quite a while, the Experimentation section. It contains the Mew Trick experimentation that was the subject of the poll and has now been taken out of the R/B/Y Tips and Tricks plus two other experimentation reports, one long and one short, as well as encouraging people to suggest new experiments to conduct.

I was also fiddling some more with the Hangman yesterday (I have this tendency to start fiddling a lot with everything once I've decided to open it and do something) and created a "High Score" feature that basically stores your highest score ever (before you lose and are reverted back to 0) in a cookie so that you can at least compete against your own score.

And yes, I'll get to making those new styles. Eventually.

Comment on this - View comments

I apologize about the recent downtime. Something was up with the London server which was fixed when it was reset. Everything is hopefully fine now.

Anyway, what I did now was go through the Fun Facts, Evolution List and Gotta Spell 'Em All to update everything in accordance with the existence of the D/P Pokémon as I promised to do once the games were out in English. I also acknowledged Diamond and Pearl in the Espeon and Umbreon section and after a bit of thought added including the D/P Pokémon as an option when playing Hangman. I also slightly tweaked the format of the Evolution List and the way the Hangman handles the non-letter characters in the Pokémon names.

If I've still got something left to update for acknowledging D/P, feel free to report it.

Comment on this - View comments

For all you stupid, lucky Americans, that is. Grr. -_-;

Firstly, please take a look at the latest Cave of Speculative Theories article and help so I can get the named D/P sprites up in the sprite packages.

Secondly, I'm sorry I haven't managed to finish the D/P Zodiac. I only need the finishing touches now and the solution to one problem, but hopefully I will be able to finish it soon.

Thirdly, after Silverwing apparently found out that the D/P frame two sprites in my sprite packages aren't transparent, I'll be fixing that today. I'll most likely edit this update when I get it done.

EDIT: The second-frame D/P sprites have been fixed, and since Vespiquen appears to be confirmed, I've also added the National Pokédex Numbered and Named, Sinnoh Pokédex Numbered and Named, and Named schemes to the sprite compilations. Enjoy.

EDIT2: I just changed a bunch of things in the coding on the Quest for the Legends minipage, including a feature to let comments on all chapters of the individual stories (i.e. versions ILCOE and IALCOTN of the main fic and the spin-offs) be viewed separately; mostly it was a coding-wise change. In the process of doing this, I managed to severely mess up the database including losing most of the chapter numbers people were commenting on; I manually put in new ones according to what seemed to make sense according to the content of the comment, but if you suddenly see your comment being applied to a whole different chapter, that's the reason. Won't happen again.

Comment on this - View comments

Faithful to the poll results, I focused on writing, and it paid off: two major writing sprees later, both chapter six of the IALCOTN and chapter 34 of the ILCOE are up. Note, to grasp the full significance of this, that chapter five of the IALCOTN was finished on September 16th last year and chapter 33 of the ILCOE was finished on October 8th last year. As in it's been a while and everybody was going crazy (as shown by those poll results - I'll never properly grasp just why so many people seem to be desperately in love with that fic).

Now that I've fulfilled the first promise, I guess it's style-making time according to the poll. Note, however, that technically I shouldn't be updating; I'm getting a new computer which is in fact my dad's old computer where all the local copies of the site files are stored, and that computer has been lying on my floor, obviously turned off, for the past week or so, meaning I haven't actually been able to access the local files. Right now I'm updating straight on the server, and I'd prefer to do as little of that as possible since that means having to move some files "backwards", from the server to the local computer, which is a bit of a hassle compared to the ordinary process. So basically, I don't think I'll actually get to work on that until I've got the new computer all set up.

Comment on this - View comments

Well, not quite, but you will get to influence my priorities by voting in the Site Poll that now replaces the Style Poll (I figured that it was more sensible to split the polls into temporary polls asking for opinions regarding the site on one hand and random polls for fun on the other). To explain the new ideas presented in it (which I sadly don't think are all of the ones I thought of recently, but they're the only ones I can remember now):

The Ultimate Type Tool

That type script I updated about on the fifth with a bunch of options and features which would basically allow you to check the effectiveness of any attack type on any type combination, find out possible type polygons (if any) of any size you feel like, figure out the combined weaknesses/resistances of an entire team of Pokémon, and whatever else I think of putting into it (feel free to contact me if you have a good idea).

The Quest Blog

This would be a blog on the Quest for the Legends minipage chronicling my progress on new chapters or basically anything I feel like talking about regarding the fic, replacing my LiveJournal as a medium for it.

Game Mechanics

This would be a section focusing on explaining the many formulas found in the Pokémon games, with special attention to the stat formulas. It was inspired by a website that apparently claimed base stats were "the Pokémon's stats at level five", one that claimed base stats were "a Pokémon's level 100 stats with no IVs or EVs put into them" and last but not least by Serebii.net's laughably inaccurate IV guide which seems to be misinforming young webmasters in a most unfortunate manner. I guess it would be kinda similar to Serebii's Game Mechanics sections, except it would actually be right.

"Chapter 34" refers, of course, to chapter 34 of The Quest for the Legends version ILCOE, which fans have been anxiously waiting for since... October, I believe.

So yeah, go vote.

Comment on this - View comments

Just a pretty small update. Firstly, if anybody missed the April Fools' joke, it can be found here. Whenever the update page was visited on April 1st, it would redirect to that unless it had ?aprilfools=seen at the end of the URL (which was added to the link on the menu so people could access it from there once they were in). Note that there is an "About TCOD" page, and that on this page it says that "TCOD Solutions" in an April Fools' joke; amazingly few people seemed to think of actually looking at that page.

Anyway, I fixed a small mistake in the Zodiac (which would have come into effect tomorrow by showing the wrong Reign if I hadn't fixed it), added to the Art Thieves, Click Here (and fixed one of the IE7 incompatibilities, namely that apparently its security settings refused to let people input a password in it), tweaked one and added one Fun Fact (after creating a type-triangle/square/pentagon/whatever-generating script which managed to creep out everybody in the unofficial IRC channel when I showcased it and from which the title of this update is taken) and added to/tweaked the FAQ some. I'm thinking about putting some controls on that script and allowing people to use it, making it function as a type chart and calculator of utterly random things like type octagons at the same time. In fact, my head is so full of ideas for this site that I have no time to put into action that it's about to explode. Argh.

I was also thinking about editing the menu, removing the "Tools" section under Webmasters (they aren't really specifically webmaster tools) and instead combining the tools with the Guides and changing that section's name to "Resources" or something like that. Opinions in the guestbook, anyone?

I've fallen a bit behind on my e-mail again thanks to feeling more like doing other things for the past few days, but I won't let it get up to the hundreds again, I promise.

Comment on this - View comments

Firstly, I've read all my e-mail, answered all the affiliation requests, and rated all the sites! Much yay for that. Or well, I've got one left that I forgot first.

This directly resulted in quite a few ideas for "Webmasters" sections and a revamp of the Site Rater section as well as a whole bunch of fan-sent content and a few corrected errors, and more indirectly in some tweaks and additions to the FAQ and the decision to randomize the affiliate list so that all those poor people I've only affiliated with recently will get their fifteen minutes of fame in the top half of the affiliate list. Both Polursine's Theory on Pokémon Evolution and Apocalypse Raichu's Pokémon Genetics Theory have also been updated with corrections and additions from the authors.

Most of the stuff I've been doing is coding-related, actually. I've been moving a lot of code over to the compiled codebehind files, which should be making things a little faster. I allowed selection of "Use Default" as the style on the splash page and made that the default option, which should help with preventing the annoying "the site is all white and it needs colors lol" I get (which I suspect may be partly because people didn't change the selection of "Minimal Dewgong style" in the splash drop-down when they entered). The default styles have also been made so that they will properly carry over to the guestbook and forums, which they didn't before. The randomization of the affiliates I've already mentioned.

I also updated the Pokémon List Generator and Sprite Generator to have the English names of the D/P Pokémon, solving the problem of the inconsistent information by picking and choosing. See The Cave of Speculative Theories for details.

Lastly, I put up one new section: the Wall of Shame. Just me being ticked off at art thieves and getting all mean. The usual stuff.

There are also style bugs in IE7 that I need to fix, but haven't gotten around to yet.

Like my April Fools' joke? I know this update is dated March 31st, but that's because if I update shortly past midnight I count it as the previous day.

UPDATE EDIT: Is anybody else who uses Firefox having their style randomly reset when they view the guestbook? o_O Switch to a style other than Voice of the Forest and view the guestbook - if it's showing up with Voice of the Forest's light green background, please post in the guestbook to tell me.

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, I have now finished reading all my 118 unread e-mails, responding to affiliate and site rating requests and putting up fan-content. Next up are all the mails I read, starred and then forgot to do anything about.

Surprisingly, this has only resulted in the addition of one new affiliate, namely Pokélives Network (there would be another one, but the site appears to be down at the moment). Only shows just how picky I am. :P

So yeah, there's fanstuff up and stuff. Note that if you e-mailed me, I may have read and starred it, so don't assume yet that I'm not going to respond! Please report any dead links or mistakes, because I couldn't be bothered to check all the content I put up for stuff like that.

Comment on this - View comments

The three weeks of no updates combined with some kicking by somebody who had sent in fan-sent content got me to get off my lazy butt and start working on the site - or rather, to finally start going through my astronomical numbers of unread e-mail, starting with the oldest (which were from November - ouch). I found a BabelFished submission e-mail, which admittedly was not put up because it was non-Pokémon, but that made me go and BabelFish some more stuff, which eventually made me revamp the entire section, removing some that weren't all that amusing (sorry!) and the two fanfics that had been BabelFished without having the most interesting quotes extracted from them (as no one can really be bothered to read an entire fanfic of completely incoherent BabelFish translation). I also added comments to some that needed them and generally improved the section. Now, as it happens, this took just about all day, so that's all I really did for the site.

However, I did also put up one fanfic that was submitted in November, and by all means do check out those new BabelFishions, because they truly are among the better ones. Ever wanted to know what would happen to the "I like shorts!" Youngster if the BabelFish got to him? Or to perfectly innocent attack names?

Comment on this - View comments

Gah. It's been, what, three weeks? I've been waaaay too busy trying to write chapter 34 of The Quest for the Legends (and failing miserably). What's worse, there's still no crossword. I seriously need to start getting things done, hm?

Well, at least fans of my writing do have something to rejoice over already, because while not managing to write chapter 34, I did manage to write a new spin-off, this time a one-shot, called Nightmare. Please note that it is pretty difficult to understand if you have not read The Quest for the Legends or Scyther's Story.

Larissa has gotten a little bit of company on my sister site list, now renamed to "Sibling Sites", since Veekun has now joined the ranks. Best and most underappreciated Pokédex on the net, everybody!

Then there have been a bunch of updates to the Pokémon List Generator and Sprite Generator with all the recent flood of English names of D/P Pokémon being revealed. I think that is just about it for the moment, really. I am still working on that HTML guide, and I will try to make a new crossword when I can get around to it. I've been awfully busy with school, my boyfriend and that darned chapter 34 of The Quest for the Legends recently.

Also, I'm finding it very amusing that the front page hits are back at a more slow and sluggish pace than ever now that people aren't refreshing the front page like maniacs trying to get it up to one million. :P Gave yourselves away now, did you?

Comment on this - View comments

Aaaand it's my birthday today. Or well, was. Over here it's technically the nineteenth already. I got Mystery Dungeon Blue. :D So there might be some Mystery Dungeon content sooner or later. Colosseum taught me not to promise sections too soon, so I won't.

To reflect the fact I'm now seventeen, I updated the About Me section (and tweaked some more of it), but the main update today is the Pokémon Sprites section, which has Pokémon game sprites for download. This may sound like a dull feature that everybody has already, but the catch here is that this time you can pick the naming scheme you prefer - if you're looking for R/S sprites numbered by National Pokédex, you can get them there, or if you want FR/LG sprites named with just the Pokémon's name, they're there too. I think this is handier than it seems at first glance.

...Yeah, I spent my birthday sitting here running the Pokémon List Generator about a hundred times to create batch files to run on the Command Prompt to name Pokémon sprites. I need help.

Oh, yeah, I know I need to make a new crossword.

Comment on this - View comments

I've made a page that I've had planned for a couple of weeks now, namely the Mascots section. It contains basic information and biographies about the site mascots and splash pages. I also updated the Site History page slightly to reflect the fact that the site has already reached one million front page hits.

Comment on this - View comments

Aaaaaand it's one million front page hits! :3 Thanks, everybody, and sorry about the recent server problems which I'm sure you've found every bit as annoying as I have.

Don't forget to look at the new splash page, which I personally think is one of the best in the history of the site (or maybe that's just me). Drinks on the house. :D What's even more fun is having watched the hit log file, which shows the progression in the time it takes to reach each 10,000 hit milestone since 900,000 (since that's when I started logging them). It shows the following, at least if I'm doing the subtractions correctly:

• 6 days, 22 hours, 31 minutes and 6 seconds from 910,000 to 920,000
• 4 days, 10 hours, 48 minutes and 58 seconds from 920,000 to 930,000
• 5 days, 10 hours, 41 minutes and 46 seconds from 930,000 to 940,000
• 5 days, 18 hours, 2 minutes and 16 seconds from 940,000 to 950,000
• 4 days, 23 hours, 25 minutes and 31 seconds from 950,000 to 960,000
• 6 days, 11 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds from 960,000 to 970,000
• 4 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 55 seconds from 970,000 to 980,000
• 3 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes and 19 seconds from 980,000 to 990,000
• 2 days, 6 hours, 53 minutes and 11 seconds from 990,000 to 1,000,000

Now, I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that those are definitely the fastest 10,000 front page hits in the history of The Cave of Dragonflies. That's nearly 5000 hits per day in those two days since 990,000. Neeeeat.

Wow, that number looks so big. :3 *admires it* Thank you all.

...and um, there are no actual updates. I've been working on the HTML guide, though. :D;; And I've been updating the Sprite Generator and List Generator with some new English Pokémon names as chronicled at The Cave of Speculative Theories. Which will admittedly probably need some more updating soon.

...Hmm. I made a new Almighty Random Poll, too.

UPDATE EDIT: ...Okay, I remembered this one error report about how switching styles on the front page has recently been incrementing the hit counter by two, so I randomly went and fixed that by pretty much entirely changing how the style switcher works. Or well, not the code behind it, but now the actual style switcher is a "page" on its own that redirects you back to the page you came from after switching the styles. Reduces the load on the top file I include on every page; it contains four enormous arrays now (the Zodiac Pokémon, the default style for each Reign of the Zodiac, the Featured Section and recently the affiliates) and this has made it one huuuuge file.

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, I've taken the writing guide temporarily down for revision. I actually meant to do it before my previous update, but I forgot, resulting in the rather awkward look of it until now.

The only thing that is actually new now, unfortunately, is a theory of Pokémon evolution by Polursine. Otherwise I've just been working on other stuff - I've figured out how to implement the fourth generation into the zodiac, for one thing, and hope to be able to put it up on April 22nd, the day D/P come out in America; as stated earlier I am rewriting the writing guide; and I am finally, finally picking up the HTML guide again after having webmaster's block on it for most of... *looks in old updates* ...a year and a half? Geeze. o.O Well, at least it's returning. Rejoice.

...okay, now I suddenly decided as I was adding Pokémon Acanthite to my affiliates that it was horribly annoying to have to put every single affiliate I get in both there and in the affiliates list section, so I rewrote the affiliate lists both there and on the menu into a server-side list that stores all the affiliate information and is then written out with a loop in both places in the appropriate format. :D And while doing so, I removed a bunch of affiliates that hadn't updated for over half a year. Sorry, guys - if you ever update again, e-mail me.

Which reminds me that I still have 137 unopened e-mails, most of them either affiliation requests, site rating requests or ancient reported posts from the Serebii.net forums. Fun.

Anyway, I updated the secret page as well.

UPDATE EDIT: Okay, I modified the Site History page some.

Comment on this - View comments

...well, no, not yet, but I was just preparing the April Fools' joke for this year and coding it so that as soon as April Fools' Day comes around, the joke will be in effect. Mwahahahaha.

But in the meanwhile, I finally remembered to update chapter two of The Quest for the Legends version IALCOTN to the WTHAIRTSTA version. And I'm working on at least three different chapters of different projects that I'm writing, but haven't finished any. Very infuriating.

Comment on this - View comments

I drew the 900,000 front page hits splash and well, planned the 1,000,000 one for when the time comes because I'm not going to be late with that one. Hehehe.

I need to make new Clue Game clues, post the results for the crossword (even though the highest number of answers was only a quarter of the total, which is still lousy especially considering you've had three months to do it) and try to actually plough through my 111-at-the-moment unread e-mails, but that will have to wait.

I'm also planning to put a few new Pokémon in the Fake Pokémon section - I just need to get their sprites right and make up statistical info. Yay.

UPDATE EDIT: I made it so that the splash page will automatically detect whether there are 1,000,000 front page hits already and if there are, it will show the one million front page hits splash of doom. Basically, the splash will change the second that hit counter reaches one million. >3 Fwee.

Comment on this - View comments

Since a bunch of people got to the end of the Clue Game, I added ten more clues. Mwahahahaha.

There is also now a printable version of the crossword for those interested. Remember, these are your last chances to submit crossword solutions!

UPDATE EDIT: I also added custom 404 pages both to the normal site and special ones to the clue game. >3

Comment on this - View comments

Okay, so I started working on stuff after updating. <.< More specifically, I randomly went through the Quest for the Legends minipage changing and adding things. Those changes were:

• Small tweaks to the Intro, About and What If... sections.
• Updating the disclaimer in the printable versions of the chapters to say 2007 instead of 2006.
• Adding a new FAQ item.
• Removing another FAQ item because it was made obsolete by the addition of a Pronunciation Guide.
• Moving the subsection "Things Worth Noticing" from the updated Revision History over to the Trivia section and then rearranging and adding some more to that Trivia section (including a link to my first ever piece of Pokémon fanfiction, the hilariously awful Molzapart and Rainteicune).

Maybe I'll actually start doing things for some other parts of the website now. Fancy that.

Comment on this - View comments

Third update in two days, w00t.

Anyway, the sprite generator and list generator have now been updated with Perappu's English name (Chatot) and on the Quest for the Legends minipage, I added one more feature to the Ouen Map, namely the area affected by the Effect of northwest Ouen (hover over the bar on the side of the map), and put up the WTHAIRTSTA version of chapter one (with a corresponding update in the Revision History).

Comment on this - View comments

I added some more hints to some of the clues in the Clue Game - hints accessible only by viewing the page source, so don't forget to do that. I also finally made the award for it, as we finally have a couple of winners. This, of course, means that I will be making more clues before long.

I also edited the disclaimers to say 2007 instead of 2006.

Comment on this - View comments

Happy new year, everybody! Continuing the site tradition, I will now post my New Year's Thanks. I would like to thank the following people, in no particular order:

• Dannichu once again, for being generally awesome, brave and a truly wonderful friend. Thanks again for your Christmas present.
• Yet again, my dad, for some programming help and stuff. :3
• Larissa, just because she amuses me endlessly those few times she's actually on.
• My boyfriend, who livens up my day with his otaku-completely-insane-weird-cuteness.
• Game Freak and Genius Sonority, for listening to the fans and creating two video games I am squealing in anticipation to play.
• Lemony Snicket, who kept me amused with The End and The Beatrice Letters, as well as the other authors whose work I've been enjoying this year, such as Eoin Colfer and Don Rosa off the top of my head.
• Jax Malcolm, LaVerneT and other such wonderful people who could be bothered to read my fics and give their honest opinions.
• AK, for putting me in a random Yay-let's-make-stuff-for-people mood. Always cheers me up to know that I am insane.
• A whole lot of people, especially opaltiger and Crystylla, for doing my crossword regularly. (YOU CAN STILL SUBMIT ANSWERS FOR THE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER/DECEMBER ONE!)
• The amusing people who have livened up my day throughout the year.
• The people who have oh-so-nearly a million times visited the front page of The Cave of Dragonflies.
• Uh, that pencil over there?

Now, don't be fooled: I DID update. The Quest for the Legends revision history has been much improved, from containing copies of the first chapters of each revision to having links to all the chapters I could dig up of that particular revision, and with some added information about each revision, three revisions that were not mentioned before, and some noteworthy stuff relating to the revisions at the bottom. Additionally, the prologue of version IALCOTN has been updated to version WTHAIRTSTA (Why The Hell Am I Rewriting This Stupid Thing Again?).

Again, happy 2007. Enjoy the new year, and I hope you enjoyed 2006 as well.

Comment on this - View comments