Old Updates

Here, you can read all the updates on this site since October 25th 2003 and some of the ones from September and August 2003 - the site has been around since November 2nd 2002, but unfortunately most of the updates from the first year were never archived. Be advised that some links might take you to outdated sections or something else that has been taken off the site - I do not necessarily endorse the content of any such sections.

View updates from year: 2024 - 2023 - 2022 - 2021 - 2020 - 2019 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005 - 2004 - 2003

12/25/09: Curse

So I have just finished a new one-shot fanfic, Curse. It's, um, completely in the holiday spirit and nothing at all like my usual morbid fare. Totally. What do you mean, you don't believe me?

UPDATE EDIT: I also decided to move the Play-Asia links down where they're less "HEY LOOK AT MY ADS". And tried to reword it to sound less like "BUY HG/SS NOW!" and more like "IF YOU WANT HG/SS YOU CAN BUY THEM HERE!"

Oh, and please forgive if the site ever acts wonky just after I update. My Internet connection has been acting up for the past couple of weeks, and it can prevent the files from being uploaded correctly and me from managing to load the page to realize they didn't.

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12/24/09: Merry Christmas, Buy Stuff

Merry Christmas, and on this oh-so-materialistic holiday I have given in to temptation and decided earning some money off this website might not be so bad after all.

I haven't quite sold my soul entirely yet - I still hate web ads - but I figured a couple of Play-Asia affiliate links allowing you to buy HeartGold or SoulSilver in Japanese if you feel like it while incidentally earning me a small portion of the price while doing so really aren't that bad. Right?

It's sort of experimental at the moment, and there's a Site Poll about it. If everybody hates it I will stop it; it's just one of those things that struck me as a potentially not too bad idea at two in the morning. And I am probably being very annoyingly apologetic about this.

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12/14/09: For Real This Time

Okay, now I really fixed the Ultimate Type Tool by rethinking the custom type storage again. There is a function that is supposed to convert whatever types you currently have to the new format, though for technical reasons it can't retain the type relations between two custom types so you'll have to put those in again, but I am too lazy to go through the trouble of trying to make myself an old-style type cookie just to test it, so just tell me in case there is something wrong with it despite how neat and clean and awesome the handling of the custom type stuff is now.

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12/10/09: Type Tool Fixed

So I fixed the Ultimate Type Tool. If you look, you'll probably wonder exactly what's different, since the tool still does more or less exactly the same thing, but actually I rewrote most of it to be one heck of a lot more efficient at what it does, plus that with the new design, it should no longer break under certain conditions after creating multiple custom types, which it has been doing since I first made it but I was too lazy to dig into getting it to work properly. I might go later and try to streamline the code a bit more, but right now I have a test I need to study for, and this should be fully functional and glitch-free, so.

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12/06/09: No More Reset Hits

I... think I've fixed the problem that's been causing the front page hits to be reset to zero twice in the past couple of days. Also dealt with a couple of error reports and may have preempted the infamous "Too Many Connections" error. Let's see if it happens again.

I've finished Buffy, but now we have Angel, so... I'll work on stuff at some point?

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11/26/09: I like to ramble.

I've just put up a section called About the Movie Reviews, which is exactly what it says on the tin and a strong contender for the most pointless and rambly section on this site. I just felt like going on a bit about why I decided to review the movies (because other reviews of them have an annoying tendency to be either shallow and superficial, stuck on the Pokémon concept, or a patronizing embodiment of everything that is wrong with how society views children's entertainment), why I watch the Japanese versions (the English voice actors are bad and I like subtitles), why I have those lengthy synopses (because I like them and would want to read them if I were you) and my methodology in writing them (I watch them three times!), as if anybody cares.

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11/23/09: Back

So the site is back up. It looks like it was a combination of system updates that hadn't been installed and some humongous ancient log files that I've deleted now. Everything should be fine.

Be sure to read the previous two updates made during the downtime, since while the site was down I actually did a bunch of stuff (rare, that). I even made a new site poll, but you won't have any idea what it's about unless you read the updates. So go do it.

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11/20/09: Getting Things Done

Apparently my site should go down more often, because while I've been unable to sit around refreshing my forums, guestbook and Quest for the Legends minipage all day it I've had a bout of sudden productivity. First, I finished going through all the affiliation requests, resulting in a grand total of one new affiliate, though another was a very borderline case that might be added soon too. Then I also went through all my other starred e-mail, which was mostly some error corrections and in-game humour; several of both have been added. And then I went and added the HeartGold/SoulSilver sprites to the sprite compilations, named and/or numbered by National Pokédex. I do not yet have them numbered by the HG/SS Johto Pokédex order, but I've been wondering if that many people would honestly use that. Feel free to contact me if you would want those. I have, however, added the HG/SS Johto Pokédex order as an option to the Pokémon List Generator.

Oh, and I slapped together a HG/SS sprite generator. It's pretty much just like the Platinum one, except with HG/SS sprites. I'm thinking about trying to combine them and the D/P one somehow, but it could be messy.

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11/17/09: Aaand the site is down.

Whenever this actually goes up, sorry about that. The server (you know, that marvelous thing that keeps bringing us database errors) has apparently decided that it likes shutting its actual web serving off for no discernible reason.

This has a bit of a backstory. You see, I had no Internet for several days last week, because apparently the fiber-optic cable providing us with an Internet connection was removed or something. So we had to contact the phone company to get us a new Internet connection, with a DHCP router instead of the static IPs we used to have, which also means that I no longer have the ability to throw things I want to show people up on jupiter.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree to make them immediately accessible online. Also thanks to this change, I was cut off from my remote folder on the site server through which I update the site, since it was set to only allow folder sharing from my computer's static IP. So yesterday (the sixteenth), I went to access the server on Remote Desktop to change these IP settings, first trying to allow it for the whole range of IPs my computer could be, but that didn't work and I still couldn't access the remote folder. So I temporarily changed it to allow folder sharing with any IP, just to see if the dynamic IP was actually the problem. It still didn't work. My dad theorized it was because of some firewall settings on the router. I went to change the IPs back, but then the remote desktop connection had been cut off, and I couldn't connect again, and all of a sudden the site was down. Marvellous. So then we submitted a support ticket to the company that runs the server farm to have it restarted, and we waited for more than twenty-four hours for anything to happen, and then finally just earlier the site came back! ...but then I went to try to the remote folder thing again, since my dad had disabled the router's firewall thing, and it still didn't work. So I went to log onto the server through Remote Desktop to fiddle with some settings, but then after I logged in, while it was loading my personal settings, I lost the connection with the server again, and the site was down again. Right now the server has every indication of having shut the serving randomly down again, and I don't have the faintest clue what is going on with it anymore. Whenever you actually see this, the server is presumably back, but yeah, this is what's been going on.

As for me, I've been working on the ninth movie review, watching a whole lot of Buffy, and going through the affiliation requests and error reports that I've been starring over the past few months. I'm not too far behind on the affiliation requests right now, amazingly enough; I had a spurt of going through some a couple of months ago too, so although I didn't quite finish them then, it was oldest first and in this affiliation-spree I started with submissions from early September, so it's not that bad compared to sometimes. Of course, so far (I'm up to mid-October now) it's been all rejections except for one tentative I-really-want-to-affiliate-but-I-have-pet-peeves-and-am-torn thing that the webmaster will have to get back to me on. As always, going through affiliation requests has inspired me to add to my webmaster sections, here the Affiliate with TCoD page (added a bit of a very relevant rant about reading over your own pages instead of just leaving them to rot with oodles of painful mistakes you'd notice immediately if you just bothered to take a look at them) and the Website Tips (added a note about specifically not asking for affiliation with people until there actually is something on your website as well as a new layout tip and a bit about direct linking).

I also happened to read over my Making Fake Pokémon guide and realize that not only had the main text of it not been updated since the third generation but I also just wasn't very satisfied with it in general. Which brings us to the next point: I want to rewrite the entire guide. There are several reasons for this:

  • As I said, it's outdated. I redid the bit about evolution methods to reflect the fact that leveling up with an item is not a new method of evolution anymore and that there actually is an item called "Razor Claw" as well as inserting some references to how my examples of move level patterns and the moves I gave the example fakes are from the third generation, but I'd prefer to make things actually reflect the current generation of Pokémon instead of just excusing myself with "This is old." As for why I can't just update those bits instead of rewriting the whole thing? Well, then I'd have to remake the movesets for all those eleven fake Pokémon, and I'm just not very keen on that, because there are eleven of them after all and it's kind of annoying. Which brings us to the next point...
  • The ratio of rambling on about my example fakes to actual guide content is way too high for my current tastes. I mean, really. Eleven examples just to teach you how to make fake Pokémon? Jesus Christ. What's worse is that because they're all one evolution line, they don't even give a useful, versatile sample of different concepts in Fakémon creation; in a rewritten guide I'd like to have one completely original example, one counterpart to an existing Pokémon, and one (pre-)evolution of an existing Pokémon, just to be able to discuss the differences between how to approach these three kinds of fakes and illustrate different methods of doing things. The Malkee line is just really not very well suited to being an example here.
  • Also, I must confess that much as I like some of my general concepts with the Malkee line, the general Eevee-ripoffishness kind of makes me cringe, as do some of their names and the lack of any actual design for Malkee. I'd be glad to be rid of those.

However, because I have been a webmaster for a while, I already know that the general visitor response to this will probably be "OMG NO! I LOVE THE MALKEE LINE AND THE FAKE POKÉMON GUIDE IS AWESOME AS IT IS! IF YOU CHANGE IT I WILL KICK PUPPIES!" So I'm offering you a say in it. Please vote in the new Site Poll.

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11/02/09: Seven years!

Oh, TCoD,
We've had seven years of thee.
Happy birthday, dear website!
Thou art ancient to me.

The Cave of Dragonflies is now seven years old, and I have been running it for more than a third of my life. Whoo. It has never felt weirder to contemplate the fact that once upon a time I did not have a website.

For this occasion, I did the impossible and revived the crossword. Thus, there's a brand new one, more ridiculously difficult than ever, and the June 2008-October 2009 crossword has been judged at last, as if anybody actually still remembers what the heck they submitted. Enjoy. :D

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10/31/09: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew

I got the eighth movie review up. It's the longest review yet and I ramble and fangirl a lot, as promised.

The London Expo was great; I now have a Dialga plushie named Quentin Tarantino. And a Gurren Lagann T-shirt. And a newfound obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yeeeeah. It's Dannichu's fault, I swear.

This Monday, it will be seven years since this site went online. I will try to do something for the occasion.

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10/17/09: The History of Pokémon Training

I rewrote the History of Pokémon Training article from scratch. As with most of my previous rewrites, it largely says the same thing, but presents it better, and I have tweaked some details and added in additional ones. Now it is not only a speculative look at how Pokémon training came to be, but also contains an evolutionary explanation of why Pokémon like fighting so much, and also mostly explains the current version of my Pokéball theory, which I will hopefully be writing a full account of sometime soon, bundled with a theory of Pokémon evolution since they rely on the same basic principle (I know that sounds odd, but bear with me).

Oh, and I made a Twitter account the other day, which I can not promise I will update much or talk about anything you're interested in on, but hey, I thought I might as well mention it.

Also, I will be attending the London Expo next weekend. If you're going and might be interested in saying hi or seeing how dorky I am in real life or how weird my English pronunciation is, I can try to wear some sort of a conspicuous T-shirt or something.

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10/08/09: Destiny Deoxys

Aaand the Destiny Deoxys review is finally up.

The eighth movie is my favorite, so I'll probably have a lot of fun writing that review. It will fangirl and overanalyze!

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09/30/09: Sibling

We have a new sibling site, Studio-Revolution.net. Do take a look (and join the forums, if you think the idea of a forum whose rules, policies, categories, etc. are all made from what the members request is interesting).

I have also just modified slightly how induction into the Hall of Fame works, mostly to reduce the number of error reports I get from people doing it wrong. It's still similar, though. And the Marquee of Doom now makes the "cursor" change into / when it's writing italicized text, if anybody other than me actually notices or cares.

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09/20/09: Honey Trees

The Destiny Deoxys review is in progress, but meanwhile, enjoy the new section about honey trees. It is both a practical guide and a mechanical explanation. It is also actually correct, unlike every other attempt to explain honey trees on the Internet at the time of writing (since those that had gotten it almost right had made one silly mistake and one understandable oversight that resulted in the claim that, for instance, Heracross appears 28% of the time in Platinum, which anyone who has ever slathered a honey tree will know is laughably incorrect). Hope it's helpful and/or interesting to somebody other than me.

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09/11/09: HeartGold and SoulSilver

Still haven't done the Destiny Deoxys review, I'm afraid; I've watched the movie twice, but there have been some distractions, namely writing and now HeartGold and SoulSilver, which if you didn't know it were leaked yesterday and are awesome. I went and updated the Cave of Speculative Theories for the occasion, if you're interested, although the article is rather rushed because I'd rather be playing the game than talking about it.

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09/02/09: Jirachi: Wish Maker

08/29/09: Pokémon Heroes

Another movie review! Who could have guessed?

But yeah, the Pokémon Heroes review is up. I think it's probably my most interesting review so far as well as being the longest. This is largely because I actually also watched the English dub, and as it happens the dub of this movie is very dramatically worse than the original. So I end up lengthily complaining about the dub while also explaining the major differences and their significance for those of you who have only ever seen the dub.

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08/26/09: Voice of the Forest

Yet another movie review, this time for the fourth movie (I'm sure that will come as a great surprise). I had a lot of fun writing this one. It probably shows.

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08/25/09: Spell of the Unown

And the third movie review is now up too. I don't like the synopsis as much as for the other movies, because the movie is generally good but I didn't feel like overanalyzing it as much as the first movie, but at least the The Good and The Bad sections are longer and better and probably more interesting.

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08/24/09: Morphic chapter 11

Chapter 11 of Morphic is up. It took me less than two months to write a chapter of Morphic? Gasp! But yeah. It was written in pretty much a one-day writing spree, is pretty short (six pages, although Morphic's chapters are rarely very long), and feels even shorter than it actually is because it's only two "scenes", but I hope readers enjoy it anyway. It's got Mia in it. And a conversation about birthdays.

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08/22/09: The Power of One

The review of the second movie is up. It is less overanalytical, since as far as I can tell there isn't a lot of depth to overanalyze, and more critical, featuring a rant about why the Chosen One plot does not work and the poor construction of the plot. Yes, I do think this movie was a lot worse than the first in just about every conceivable way. Sorry if it's your favorite.

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08/17/09: Mewtwo Strikes Back

Aaand the first of the sections I mentioned last time is up: a review of the first Pokémon movie. It is heavily overanalytical (or, in other words, I insist that Mewtwo is put together as a deep, complex character and everything he does in the first half of the movie is a direct result of his twisted psyche) and really long, but I had a lot of fun writing it.

I plan to review all the Pokémon movies in order (I've already rewatched the first four once), so if you have ideas on changing the format of these reviews or whatever, by all means speak out before I've got them all done.

I also added a couple of questions to the FAQ.

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08/04/09: More Stuff

First, I added the Pokémon Center trainers and Battleground rematches to the Platinum Vs. Seeker like I promised. Then I happened to go and update the Fun Facts; at first it was just to add some notes to the top in response to a number of recent attempts to submit more facts for it, but then I ended up restructuring the entire page to split it into sections and adding a couple of new ones.

I have a series of new sections planned, by the way, with the first mostly written and hopefully coming up soon. They're going under "Pokémon" on the menu and will have their own submenu. And speaking of submenus, I went and enabled those for Internet Explorer 8, since it can actually handle them correctly unlike the previous incarnations of IE. This then also got me to actually happen to look at Spectrum style in IE 8 and realize that the menu looked severely messed up, which I managed to fix pretty easily in a way generally beneficial to the style's previously rather hacked together CSS. Of course, then I discover that the submenus in Spectrum style don't appear to work in Opera for no apparent reason, throw my hands up and give up trying to be cross-browser.

(Yes, I'm trying to make up for the sad lack of updates in June and July. :<)

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08/01/09: Platinum Vs. Seeker

Why yes, my last update was hinting at the fact I was working on the Platinum Vs. Seeker.

The section is actually unfinished at the moment: I will be adding all the Pokémon Center battles and Battleground rematches as well as more high-level training spots, but figured I might as well put it up as is since it's useful without them too.

I also added yet another bizarre Platinum change that I discovered while making this.

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07/28/09: Platinum Change

I just added a new Platinum change. See if you can find it and then speculate about why I would happen to have discovered this particular change now. :P

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07/07/09: Um.

Sorry for the lack of updates, especially since this is not even technically an update. The thing is that I'm still having problems accessing the actual server and until we can get that fixed, I won't be able to actually update the live version of the site. Yes, annoying.

But if you've found your way here anyway, I've finished chapter ten of Morphic now. You know, Morphic. That fanfic I was writing that I last posted a chapter of in November? Yeah, that one.

As for why I haven't been updating otherwise, well, my time seems to have kind of run away from me. Mostly it's my being unhealthily obsessed with Flight of the Conchords, formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular folk parody duo, and both their TV show and various hilarious songs. Listen to Albi the Racist Dragon, seriously. And if you're old enough to appreciate it, Business Time.

UPDATE EDIT (07/09/09): Okay, we got the server fixed and this update is live now, so yay for that. I also remade the About Me page because I randomly felt like it; it still says a lot of the same things, especially at the beginning, but I added some bits in and took some out.

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06/16/09: Back

So I'm back. Have been for a few days, but that blasted Pokédex checklist query gives me a headache when I try to do anything with it and I've been focusing on writing and preparing for the seventh birthday of The Quest for the Legends (I finished chapter 48 in a writing spree on Sunday night, if you missed it).

At least now I have something of an excuse to post an update, because while working on the birthday preparations, I got carried away editing my old Volcaryu sprite; it still has the same legs and arms and mostly the same body and tail, but the head, neck and wings were all basically remade, making it more of a new sprite than an improvement on the old one. I think it's a lot better than the previous one, at least. So that's now up on the fake Pokémon page, together with the shiny version.

Oh, and we really needed a new Almighty Random Poll, so I made one.

In other news, I bought a laptop in the US, which is good news for the site, because now I can actually get something done while at my boyfriend's house or what have you (see: the aforementioned Sunday night writing spree, which took place at his house while he was sleeping).

I think I'll take a short break from the Pokédex checklist script so that I can actually do something I can finish for the site and stop feeling guilty about it.

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05/22/09: x_x

Ugh. I don't know if you believe me, but I've been working obsessively on the D/P/Pt Pokédex checklist for the past couple of weeks, but no luck. More specifically, I am trying to make it faster and more efficient than the old one, which was absolutely terribly programmed. First I tried one method, fetching pretty raw results from the database and then letting the script figure out the rest, but ended up finding that there seemed to be no way to get that to return what I wanted without going back to basically what I was doing in the old one. Then I decided I might as well use this opportunity to actually learn to write some complex MySQL queries, and thanks to my lack of experience with using subqueries, I still haven't managed to get that right. I'll have to look into it better; I will manage it eventually, but as it happens I'm graduating tomorrow, and on Sunday I'm leaving for America. I doubt I'll have the time to finish it before then.

Well, I'll be back on the tenth of June. Behave while I'm gone.

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05/06/09: D/P/Pt Locations

So instead of just making a Platinum Locations section, I entirely redid the D/P locations to both include Platinum info and be set up completely differently. The result is the D/P/Pt Locations section I just finished after spending more or less all my free time working on it for the past week. Hopefully the presentation is now more intuitive and easier to understand (though I still recommend reading over "How to read this section" so I won't get fifteen billion e-mails asking me why the percentages add up to more than 100%).

I'm going to redo the Pokédex checklist script as well, both to include Platinum and hopefully to be both faster and give more accurate results. Then there's just the Platinum Vs. Seeker...

UPDATE EDIT 05/07/09: I added some information about Feebas tiles under "Notes" for Mt. Coronet after happening to glance at an old error report that brought up the lack of such information in the old section, which reminded me I meant to add that. Since now the notes for both the Trophy Garden and the Great Marsh list the random daily Pokémon possible, searching the page with Ctrl+F for any non-legendary Pokémon it is possible to find in the wild anywhere other than honey trees should now always get you accurate information, and if you get no results even when the page has fully loaded, it should be safe to assume the Pokémon is not found in the wild at all.

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04/21/09: Platinum Changes

I've finished the Platinum Changes. The section includes a hopefully complete list of the actual moveset changes made in Platinum and much more. There are probably errors and things that I forgot when writing the section, so please point them out if you see them.

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04/07/09: Going

We're going to Switzerland (yet again) tomorrow, this time with Shadey (:D), so I won't be here. We'll be back next Tuesday.

I'm working on the Platinum Changes section (it's got things that Serebii missed and is more sensibly organized!), and Eevee is going to lend me his Spline database for making a Platinum Locations section once he's done extracting the location data. Platinum Vs. Seeker should be coming sometime after that, followed by an experiment with honey trees that I meant to do on Diamond but gave up because you could only buy one Sweet Honey at a time.

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03/28/09: Explorers of Time review

Aaaaand here's the review of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time.

I also got Platinum today after getting my boyfriend's father (who lives in the US) to buy it for me. Expect the Platinum Changes section soon. Also, I'll try to finish that crossword.

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03/20/09: Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia review

After playing it obsessively for the past few days, here's a review of Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia.

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03/15/09: Lots of Stuff

Yesterday I decided to get myself up-to-date on the Pokémon games by buying both Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time. For a boatload of money, mind you, thanks to the economic mess that is Iceland today. I've been meaning to buy the former for ages, seeing as I rather liked the original Ranger and things like getting Darkrai (if they ever revive that event) are nice; the latter I actually didn't really plan to get until I finally got myself to pick up the original Mystery Dungeon again to finish it the other day, giving me an excuse to indulge my curiosity about those intriguing plot points I hear of.

So now, in addition to making yet more Sections that Suck, this time 'Not-So-FAQs', and rewriting the Is Pokémon Childish? article (like with the animal cruelty article revamp, it mostly says the same thing, but it's presented differently), I also finally went and wrote the Mystery Dungeon Blue review that I never got to write thanks to wanting to finish the game before reviewing it. Enjoy my late-to-the-party-ness. Reviews of both of the newer games hopefully coming soon.

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03/05/09: More Sections that Suck

I added one more class of Sections that Suck. This time my victims are annoying Do Not Click Heres, as if I hadn't ranted enough about those in the Website Tips section. Actually, I edited that section to remove a couple of items and instead just point to Sections that Suck, since I felt I was repeating myself a lot.

In relation to that, I took down Art Thieves, Click Here. I really, really should have done that long ago. Making Sections that Suck is having the most wonderful effects of rationalizing away the nostalgia that tends to make me keep things up long after I've realized they no longer have any place on this site. I still love the Marquee of Doom, though. And that made me go and edit that to be more up-to-date with my current writing style, too, although the content has not been changed much; it did lengthen the marquee by about five minutes in all, however. (Note that you might have to refresh the page before it will reload the actual text of the marquee.)

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02/28/09: Splash prepared

I made a splash for 2,500,000 so it'll go up automatically when the time comes. I'd appreciate if you did not go into refreshomania to see it, though. Let's not skew the counter.

...damn it, now I'll be late with this crossword even if I make it the March crossword. :<

(I also went and edited some of the stuff updated last time more at some point, if you happen to be interested.)

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02/18/09: Birthday and stuff

It was my nineteenth birthday today, and I had fun. Loyal as I am to this website, that didn't stop me from finishing the updates I'd been making. I've been in this crazy content-writing mood, which I'm very glad for since I've been noticing an annoying lack of it recently.

So basically, I made Sections that Suck (more coming later). I know it was second on the poll, but the design changes are going to take a lot of time to finish, and I was in a really great ranty sort of mood. If you have any of the kinds of sections mentioned, please don't take it personally; it's just my opinion.

And, well, in the interest of trying to be as little of a hypocrite as I could, I went and tweaked and edited a whole lot of stuff in the spriting guide, especially the scratch sprite part, and made a new in-depth guide as mentioned in my previous update, on shading. (It's less mathematical than the outlining guide, I promise.) Then, when I made more of Sections that Suck, I went and looked at a couple of my AAP sections, decided that the AAP FAQ was rather painful so that I removed it (and instead stuck the really relevant parts on top of AAP: The Cause, which was also edited), and then rewrote the entire animal cruelty article from scratch (it still says a lot of the same stuff, but I just really hated the writing in the old one). And I took down Stop the Flaming, because as Sections that Suck points out, it became really obsolete about five years ago and I need to stop inspiring people to copy it.

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02/12/09: Not dead!

No, I didn't make the crossword, but I actually have been in a productive (though not crossword-productive) mood; I'm well on my way with another in-depth tutorial for the spriting guide that I've been meaning to write for a while and have been preparing to get the sections on the poll done.

As for the crossword... uh, I'll maybe get it done sometime?

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02/04/09: Ugh.

Uncrosswordiest mood in the world.

Sorry.

I'll try to finish it in the weekend or something? In the meantime, I'm writing.

UPDATE EDIT: Okay, so I figured I had to do something since I'd promised and all, so I replaced both the Almighty Random Poll and the Site Poll (it was about time). While the Almighty Random Poll is just the first thing I could think of, the Site Poll is actually useful, so go vote in it.

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01/28/09: Fixes

It was pointed out to me that the guestbook was failing to show when a post was an update comment; it was a minor, silly failure to recognize the year 2009 as valid that I fixed. Then I got a couple of other error reports about the Fun Facts, which made me add an option to the type tool to find all type combinations with a certain number of weaknesses/resistances/etc. to set the record straight with the number of types with one weakness. (I used a version of the type tool script to find combos with one weakness before, but then had managed to overlook the possibility of double weaknesses, resulting in a few missing combos that obviously should have been there.)

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01/27/09: So.

Okay, I've been editing various pages since I last bothered to write an update about it. Just to list the more notable ones (i.e. not just fixing reported errors) briefly:

  • Fancy a Challenge? - added stuff and basically revised most of the page.
  • Status Effects - added a special section at the top for things that affect all major status effects, and added some things I missed. Actually, I may have done some of this earlier. I can't remember. But I did edit something on that page, because the last modified date is the eleventh.
  • In-Game Humour - been adding various submissions.
  • Website Tips - added a few.
  • Affiliate with TCoD - realized that I really needed to emphasize more that 90% of all my denied affiliation requests are denied because they don't have enough noteworthy content.
  • Fun Facts - realized that I had somehow forgotten Water/Ground in listing type combinations with only one weakness.

Then we have the Babelfished page. It's had a few things added to it (including one about Omanyte swimming in ancient heroin), but primarily, I officially cut off submissions to it entirely. Now, technically I did that a while ago, but thanks to the wording in that section in particular, it really didn't lessen the stream of submissions by much, and I've realized that that page is just way too long already - I really doubt a lot of people bother to read all of them anymore, since the humour of something like that tends to wear off fairly quickly. Sorry.

Now. I realize that I haven't made a proper update in nearly a month. If you're dying to know why, it's because my creative juices have been very dry this January, coupled with several obsessions (in just this month I've watched the entirety of Boston Legal, amounting to over seventy hours) and the pheromone Shadey seems to give off that makes me unable to leave his presence once I am in it and babbling incoherently about the fluffiness of his hair. (Predictably, I'm going to his place again later, in the vain hope that I will not latch on to him again after school tomorrow and start marathoning some other insanely long TV series.)

However, at the risk of going all sentimental, I would like to emphasize that I am and will be extremely devoted to this website. Even when I'm not updating directly, I'm always reading error reports, trudging through affiliation and site rating requests (there are three in the queue right now), watching the guestbook, and complaining to Shadey about my inability to work on it at his house. I am not a webmaster who just disappears, even if I don't seem to post anything on the front page.

I'm going to try to make a crossword for February. Think I can make it?

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01/01/09: Happy new year!

So. I looked at my update from the first of January 2008, and realized that I'd promised to finish some sections in the new year. Let's look at that list again...

  • The D/P Vs. Seeker - finished in January
  • The revised writing guide - ...darn.
  • The revised HTML guide - Ha! Finished in August!
  • The revamped What Pokémon Are You? - finished in February
  • The Ultimate Type Tool - Hmm...
  • Going through all my e-mail - Done, last in November
  • The next crossword - Well, I made that next crossword...

Now, the writing guide is huge, and there was no way I could finish the whole thing before the new year. And the crossword, well, I did make that one, and the January crossword isn't supposed to go up until January anyway. But the Ultimate Type Tool was different. It was something I really wanted to make when I was originally conceiving of the idea, and I'd used the script that I was going to base it on a few times since. So, well... I made it. There were some complications with the type creation that prevented me from getting it up yesterday, but up for the new year still counts. Right?

Basically, you can find stuff regarding type weaknesses and resistances, and generate type polygons to see how I was right all along about the only possible triangles being Fire/Water/Grass, Rock/Fighting/Flying, Fire/Rock/Steel and Grass/Poison/Ground, and then you can create your own types and do exactly the same thing with them included. Have fun.

A couple of days ago I also fixed some stuff in the status effects section - I moved things that apply to all major status effects to the top for less redundancy, and added some abilities and moves that I'd missed the first time around.

But! I have not forgotten the New Year's Thanks! I would like to thank the following people for the year 2008:

  • Dannichu, who is still awesome. :D
  • Shadeeeey. <3 Never in the history of boyfriends has there been one quite as dorkily adorable as you.
  • My dad, who is still one of the most interesting and intelligent people I know.
  • opaltiger, for coming to Iceland and being generally awesome.
  • Psychic, for having been pretty great to talk to over the year. :3
  • Lunar Espeon, for being a generally nice guy.
  • elyvorg, for writing Lost Evolution, which is pretty awesome.
  • Joss Whedon, for creating Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (whyyy has my DVD not arrived? D:). And Firefly, for that matter.
  • Everybody who traded with me when I was completing my Pokédex on Diamond. :D
  • Readers of The Quest for the Legends, who are still reading it after all those years and through all those waits! You people astound me, but I love you so much. <3
  • All you regular visitors who've gotten the site over 500,000 front page hits in the year. :o
  • My parents for giving me a new monitor for Christmas. Which has not been set up yet, but hopefully that will be soon enough.

Happy 2009, everybody. Always remember, if you're worried about the economic crisis, that it is much worse in Iceland!

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Page last modified February 22 2018 at 00:36 UTC