So tomorrow, the new GDPR privacy regulation takes effect in the European Economic Area. This is a very good thing and I'm thrilled about it, but it does appear that thanks to how Google Analytics works (persistent individual cookie identifiers that Google also uses for ad targeting etc.), it is probably about to become illegal unless you make the user explicitly consent to having their data collected.

For most websites, this is going to mean they add an annoying popup asking you to agree to your data being shared with Google. I think this is silly and annoying, and that absolutely nobody in the world has any reason to go out of their way to agree to let Google know they visited this Pokémon website. All I've ever used Google Analytics for is satisfying my personal curiosity about some statistics and aggregates, which would become sort of pointless when only people who can be bothered to agree to a ridiculous popup are included in the aggregate data anyway. So instead, I've just ditched Google Analytics. Maybe I'll find some kind of server-side analytics solution that does not have any weird privacy implications to satisfy my thirst for statistics later.

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This morning I got some automated server error e-mails about Magikarp: the Gathering, involving a chance that visiting the "save point" while not actually playing the game would break the page. I have now fixed this, and while fixing it I got a bit carried away and made several other tweaks to the game: some minor text/instruction changes, the notice telling you when you're playing the game and how much time you have left is now a bit fancier and nicer-looking, and the bits where Butterfree talks to you are now, in Modern and Voice of the Forest (Celebi) style, formatted to look kind of like speech bubbles. (They're a bit nicer in the other styles too, but I don't quite have the patience to implement the speech bubble thing for each one individually right now, besides that it wouldn't work quite right anyway in the old browsers most of those styles were designed to work in, so this'll have to do.)

The new ninth movie review should be actually coming soon; I've just somehow managed to have all my free time evaporate lately.

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