Sadly, that R/B/Y Safari Zone mechanics section was an April Fools' Day joke from beginning to end. (Not just the capture bypass, nervousness factor and encounter bias, note. Every word of it was a lie. Bait and rocks do not work like it said, either.) If you missed it, you can see it here, and of course, it has been archived in the April Fools' joke section with its predecessors.

But fear not; the real Safari Zone mechanics section should be coming pretty soon. The big hurdle in my way was that there were holes in the only analysis of how it works in R/B/Y that I knew of, but I've already dug up the relevant routines in the assembly and patched up the big questions. I have one thing left to confirm and then I can start writing the text of the page. Whoo. And I, at least, think how it actually works is pretty interesting, even though it doesn't involve precise button presses.

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Because I never do anything in the order I say I'm going to, I finished the R/B/Y Safari Zone Mechanics. It's only for R/B/Y because as I was researching this I discovered a lot of quite surprising things about how the Safari Zone worked back then, and I thought it warranted a section of its own. (Seriously. The game tries to calculate how nervous you are.)

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In addition to adding several more B2/W2 changes that had somehow managed to slip my mind, I also updated the In-Game Humour section for the first time in years after discovering an Airplane! reference in B2/W2. Since I was updating it and adding something from the fifth-generation games, I also went through all the submissions I'd gotten and added them as well (well, the ones that qualified and were sufficiently specific, at any rate). Whoo.

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I added a couple of B2/W2 changes that I forgot the first time around. Thanks to the people who pointed them out.

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B2/W2 Changes! This should not have taken so long, ugh. There is also probably obvious stuff I'm missing. Sorry for the delay; I've been sick and having job interviews and family gatherings and so on and so on and it's been maddening.

Right now I'm actually probably going to go and rewrite most of the HTML guide because I was looking at it a couple of days ago and realized with horror that it's awful, but then I can go and continue with all those other things I was going to do.

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I added a couple of B/W Changes that I missed, as well as making some revisions, tweaks and corrections to the Status Ailments page. Still working on all that other stuff. B2/W2 changes should be coming soon.

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So I am working on both the Safari Zone mechanics and the Interactive Type Chart and a B2/W2 Changes section, and they're all taking ages and needing a lot of work while opaltiger is busily cracking a whip over my head to make me write in all my free time... and then I happen to look at an error report I got a while ago about the Marquee of Doom stopping in Chrome for somebody just before the prize appeared every time, something I didn't manage to figure out at the time and starred for later, and naturally this means I spend hours recoding/rewriting the Marquee of Doom instead of doing any of the things anyone actually wanted me to do.

The good news is I did figure out what was wrong with it in Chrome - it seems to be a bug in the browser, where if it happened that the width of the marquee on your screen was such that at some point a word would wrap to the next line with the cursor after it but could fit on the previous line if the cursor weren't there, no more text would appear until the next explicit line break. For the person who submitted the error report, then, this happened just near the end and prevented them from getting the prize. Ouch. But I also figured out how to work around it, so it should work fine now.

While I was at it, I also adjusted the marquee so that spaces, punctuation and line breaks have a slightly longer wait after them than regular letters, giving a somewhat more natural illusion of typing (I sped up the letters, though, so it should be net faster overall for an average section of it). The script is better now, so it should (not that I've run any benchmarks) run faster on older computers. (Because I am a nerd, I did run benchmarks, and yes, it's a lot faster doing the actual typing now, though of course it still includes deliberate delays between letters so on a system where those dominate the running time of the script, obviously there won't be much of a difference.) And because I can't not do so, I rewrote the text of the marquee - it's mostly the same attempts to bore you, but with somewhat different text around them, which was also the basic gist of the last rewrite of the marquee. I'm not sure I'm that fond of this version so I may go and rewrite it some more, but I will try to actually work on the things I'm supposed to be doing instead of that.

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Happy new year, everyone. Hope you've had nice holidays; mine were hectic enough that I didn't get much done, but oh well. I'm going to finish that type chart as soon as I can.

So, to follow tradition, my New Year's Thanks!

• The London Expo crew, including Dannichu, opaltiger, elyvorg, Cirrus, Espeon, Mhals and surskitty, for making it so worth it buying flights to England twice a year. You are such lovely people.
• Shadey, for being the softest cuddliest.
• My parents, for lunches and walks with accompanying discussions.
• The QftL readers who cheered me on for NaNoWriMo, for making me actually finish the bloody thing at last. Whoo! opal gets a special mention here again for having roped me into doing it in the first place (though he has yet to show me pictoral evidence of the actual pom-poms he promised to use).
• opal and elyvorg (again), for theorizing on my silly fanfic and making me feel like an evil mastermind.
• Psychic, for continuing to be wonderful.
• elyvorg (yet again), for being amazing, watching ReGenesis and The Prestige, showing me The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! and other delightful things. This makes up for the fact she has still not written any Lost Evolution, which makes me sadface.
• magical, for looking into game mechanics with/for me.
• Chibi Pika, for being my fanfiction psychic twin, drawing the most amazing things, more theorizing, and being hilarious.
• Polymetric Sesquialtera, for immortalizing my screwing-around with the G/S/C capture algorithm.
• Negrek, for finishing Clouded Sky in the most Clouded Sky of ways.
• Everyone who's still here, for still being here.
• Derren Brown, for breaking my brain. Wait, I probably shouldn't be thanking him for that.

And that's all for now, though I probably forgot some people who have been particularly amazing and apologize in advance for that. Happy new year again, and may the next hold many actual updates.

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