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

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

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

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

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

Chapter six of Morphic is finally up. Yay?

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

That theory I talked about should be coming fairly soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossword hopefully coming soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well. That was fast.

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

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

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

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

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

And you thought I was neglecting this site, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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