First it was how it interacted with the shareable lists (in order for your list to be shared correctly, we need the shareable list URL to include the default gender setting... and not just the default gender setting, but also the included forms and major only settings, since otherwise it wouldn't know whether gender differences were included separately); then I realized the results would be counterintuitive if you had the default female setting on and then went on to change the included gender differences setting; then I got preoccupied with trying to implement all that in a sufficiently tidy way for the generic open-source picker script (which I really have been meaning to update).

At any rate, the default gender setting has now been added, and the way it works is as follows:

• When you have picked female as the default gender, and a given Pokémon's gender difference is not included, the 'main' item that represents the species as a whole is displayed as female instead of male. It still represents the species as a whole, will be labeled with just the name of the species, and has the same shortcode as if the default gender were male.
• Regardless of which is set as the default gender, if a given Pokémon's gender difference is included, then the male and female form will show up as separate entries, with what would otherwise have been the default species entry now representing specifically the male form, similar to how it has always worked. However, because it seemed appropriate to the same spirit and had been bugging me personally, both will now be labeled with their gender: where previously, if you included all gender differences you'd see male Butterfree labeled as just "Butterfree" while the female Butterfree was labeled as "Female Butterfree", they will now be explicitly labeled "Male Butterfree" and "Female Butterfree", specifically when they are both included as separate items. (This should apply both to the image alt/title texts and to the written labels on the shareable favorite list page.)
• When you have picked female as the default gender on a non-untouched state and then change other settings in such a way as to add some gender differences to the Pokémon pool, you will be prompted for whether you want the current placement of the species to apply to the male or female. In other words, if you for instance already had the species entry for Butterfree (which is being displayed as female) on your favorite list, and then add gender differences which would make that entry represent the male Butterfree, the prompt allows you to swap it out for the female Butterfree, so that you will end up with female Butterfree in that spot on the favorite list while the male gets treated as a newly added form (otherwise, the Butterfree on the favorite list turns male, and the female is newly added). If the default gender is set to male, then it always works like it used to: the default Butterfree becomes the male, and the female is added as a new form.
• Similarly, when you have picked female as the default gender on a non-untouched state and then change other settings in such a way as to remove some gender differences from the Pokémon pool, you will be prompted for whether you want the generic species entry for those Pokémon to replace the male or female. For instance, if you already had female Butterfree on your favorite list and male Butterfree in your currently evaluating batch, then the prompt lets you choose whether you end up with the single generic displayed-female Butterfree entry on your favorite list or in your evaluating batch. If male is the default gender, this will always work like it used to work – the female Butterfree disappears and the male stays.

This isn't 100% ideal – there's still a certain asymmetry between the genders, but it would've been hell to make it completely symmetrical while still remaining backwards-compatible. I have been waffling on whether I should always give the prompts when you add or remove gender differences from the pool, rather than just when the default gender is female, but I really prefer to minimize that sort of thing, and the main purpose of the prompt is to make it very explicit what's happening if you do choose to have it modify your state to swap the male and female around, which there's basically no reason for you to do if you've got male as the default.

Anyway, this all came with a couple of other changes:

• As I mentioned, the default gender setting necessitated sharing the values of more settings with your favorite list link. That was probably a good idea anyway, since it allows it to be unambiguous exactly what forms you were including, rather than trying to guess based on your list (it will still try to guess as backup if there's no explicit shared setting).
• Since there were getting to be a lot of settings, I figured I'd try to organize them a little better. The picker's options are now split into three sets, "Display options", "Pokémon filters" and "Alternate forms", which should hopefully make it easier to find the setting you're looking for at a glance.
• Finally, I noticed I had the female partner Eevee from Let's Go listed as a Gen VIII form, but by now it's officially just been made into a regular gender difference for all Eevee, and being Gen VIII was inconsistent with how gender differences are otherwise always treated as introduced with the base Pokémon and would have required sharing even more settings with the favorite list just to determine which Eevee to display in case Eevee was on the list. All in all, I just figured I might as well treat it like other gender differences at this point and labeled it as Gen I instead.

Hopefully this all works smoothly as it should. Let me know if you have any issues, as always.

A couple more Favorite Pokémon Picker options have been added, since I'm on a roll. First, another very common feature request: you can now individually include or exclude regular Pokémon, legendaries, mythicals, Ultra Beasts, or Paradox Pokémon. Let me know if I accidentally miscategorized anything; I did this manually, and according to how they're categorized on Bulbapedia because I gather that's based on whatever the official word on that Pokémon is (even if I personally think it's kind of dumb to call something like Type: Null a legendary Pokémon). Koraidon and Miraidon count as legendaries and thus not as Paradox Pokémon because it seemed inane to implement the ability for a Pokémon to be multiple categories just for those two.

Secondly, something brought up by Risan in the guestbook today that struck me as reasonably straightforward to do and intuitive: you can now choose whether a form's generation is treated as being when the form was introduced or when the base Pokémon was introduced. Right now, gender differences will still count as being when the base Pokémon was introduced regardless, rather than having a whole pile of them in Gen IV, both because I have a hard time imagining a situation where you'd truly want them to all show up under Gen IV and to let the default setting behave the same as it used to, but if someone wants to e-mail me and argue I should change that, feel free.

Also, the alternate mega forms of Tatsugiri and Magearna are now classed as both Mega Evolutions and aesthetic variants, so that you need to have both enabled for them to show up; I'd forgotten that was a thing I could do with the form classifications.

Unrelatedly, I have also been making some accessibility-related tweaks, most noticeably darkening the link color for Butterfree style. Let me know if anything's weird.

And finally, because this is the sixth update in a short time, I figured it was a bit of a shame that these frequent updates are pushing the previous, still very recent updates off the front page, so I tweaked it to a hybrid of the old-TCoD approach of including the latest month of updates and the new one of including the latest three: now it'll include at least three updates, but if there are more than that in the current month, it'll show everything since the beginning of the month.

The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has an option to include shiny Pokémon as separate Pokémon. This has been a common feature request, mainly stopped by the technical aspect of how doubling the number of Pokémon would be problematic for the shortcodes used in the shareable list links. I have now made a change to the shortcode parsing, so that if xx is a given Pokémon, the shiny version of it is identified by .xx, and added a setting to include them as separate entries.

This is separate from the existing shiny mode, which simply involves displaying every Pokémon as shiny – the old shiny mode is still what you'll want to use if you want to find your favorite shinies, while the new mode is for if you want to be able to pick Charizard and Shiny Charizard independently, sort of as if they were two different Pokémon. Most people will probably not want to turn this on, but I've had enough requests for this over the years to know some people really wanted this.

Once again, let me know if anything's not working as it should!

If you have a saved state, it should automatically enable base Pokémon if it detects you had some base Pokémon in your state, so it should not affect your existing state. Continuing from a saved favorite list will assume you do want to include base Pokémon in the settings unless the list contains 10+ Pokémon and all of them are alternate forms; obviously the line I chose to draw there was kind of arbitrary.

In any case, as always, let me know if you do bump into any issues with it!

What with the game having been out for months now, I figured there wasn't too much point marking any of them as spoilers – although I will if anyone requests it. I did unmark the previous spoiler Pokémon, as well as re-adding Eternal Flower Floette (which used to be present in the picker back when Gen VI came out and then got removed when we transitioned to later generations that had no artwork for that form at all – if you had a shareable link to a favorites list from Gen VI that originally had Eternal Floette on it, it will now show up back where it was, since it has the same shortcode identifier it used to!). Finally, I reclassified Tatsugiri's forms as major forms, since I happened to notice it was pretty incongruous that they were classed as minor while Original Color Magearna was considered major. (Tatsugiri's alternate mega forms, on the other hand, are considered minor aesthetic variants.)

I tried to test it decently in both normal and shiny mode, but as always, if you bump into anything odd with it, please let me know. Happy picking!

For good measure, I also fixed the issue where a couple of the Caterpie illustrations on the actual 'post' came out awkward on mobile – the text will now only wrap around them on bigger screens.

From now on, follow me on my journey for the adventure of a lifetime as I strive to raise my little sweet pea with all the love, attention, and experience that she needs to grow. Read more →

• I now explicitly reserve the right to reject websites with obviously AI-generated content out of hand. I kind of hate to have to set rules about this at all, but it is what it is.
• I've updated the section on how affiliates get removed (and extracted it into its own subsection on the page). It used to say that I remove affiliates that haven't updated in three months, with exceptions for sites that have been revived after going a while between updates before. In practice, I hadn't actually enforced that theoretical limit in years; the hobbyist fansites that are running today are mostly run by busy adults for whom updates are normally a fair bit slower than back in the day (mine included!), and three months are no longer anything like an indication the site is dead and gone, besides that there are just much fewer Pokémon fansites out there and I'm happy to keep linking to some of the ones that exist and remain online with good stuff on them, even if they aren't being actively updated. So, in other words, if the implicit requirement of updating at minimum once every three months might have previously scared you away from applying to affiliate, that is now explicitly no longer a requirement.
• Instead, I have made explicit the real criteria that will make me remove an affiliate these days: going down or defunct altogether, or making some sort of dubious pivot towards advertising casinos or cryptocurrencies or AI-generated slop, etc. (you cannot imagine how much I hate to have to set rules about that, either).

I feel a lot better with the rules officially updated, at least – and if you're a real human running a passion project Pokémon fansite in 2026, by all means do apply for affiliation if you haven't! I used to be a bit of a hardass about it back in the day, but these days honestly I'm just really happy to see new Pokémon fansites at all.

2025 has been a pretty big year for me, from Pokémon Sleep legitimately improving my sleep schedule to publishing my first non-Pokémon fanfic to visiting Japan to having an actual child. Updates on the site were a bit on the sparse side in all that, but the Mew trick essay that I published in March is one of my favorite things I've ever done for the site, and in the second half of the year I managed to pick up the update frequency and get a fair amount of good, necessary or just useful housekeeping work done on it that I'm very glad to have completed, so all in all, I'm reasonably satisfied with how things have gone for the site this year in spite of everything.

As usual, even if I didn't get the New Year's update done until the second of January, I'd like to extend some thanks to some of the people who helped brighten my 2025:

• All of the lovely internet friends that I've chatted with over the year; I couldn't possibly name all of you here and don't dare try lest I manage to forget somebody and make them feel bad for no reason in the process, but you know who you are and I appreciate you all
• Dannichu, Jackie and Chibi, for coming to visit in person and being lovely company as always
• elyvorg and seatherny, for VCs, cats, birds, crochet, and In Stars and Time
• Negrek, for greatly increasing the number of movies I've watched and the amount of time I've spent on actual writing during the year
• Psychic and Teagan, for Japan tips and VCs and of course the regular Pokémon baking that makes me smile
• Altissimo, for continuing to send me corrections and creating such an ambitious resource for Pokémon data
• The Johto Times staff, whom I feel privileged to work with on a great newsletter
• The Thousand Roads and Cat Café Discord servers, where I love to hang out
• My husband Shadey, for being a lovely husband and a great dad
• My daughter Caterpie, for being a relatively well-behaved baby
• My cat Birta, for tolerating this new creature who keeps occupying my lap
• My parents, whom I love and appreciate
• As ever, those who support me on Patreon
• TheScythe and Jolt135, for their invaluable contributions to Pokémon fandom through popularizing the Mew trick in 2003 and for now in 2025 finding, reading and leaving comments on my Mew trick essay, which truly meant a lot
• Game Freak, for making a series I continue to love in spite of its flaws
• Everyone who visited the site or is in general visiting and creating old-school fansites in 2025

Hope 2025 was good to you, regardless of everything going on in the world, and that your 2026 will be better!

Long story short, I have now made it so that the site's URLs should always end in a slash if they don't end in a file extension. The slash-less version will seamlessly redirect to the version with the slash, so hopefully you shouldn't notice much of a change.

Alongside this, for boring technical reasons, I also updated a large number of links to other pages across the site, where I was still linking to old pre-2016 .aspx URLs. These URLs already seamlessly redirected to the new URLs for those pages (and they still do), but I'd meant to get all of those updated to link the actual new URLs instead of the redirect soon after the Python migration, and then it only ever happened for a few scattered pages when I happened to be updating them for something else, so it was well past time to actually finish that.

As usual, I tried to make sure I didn't break anything, but do let me know if you notice anything off. While doing this I did notice a couple of things that were broken and now no longer are, and I made some general tweaks - most prominently, some screenshots in the spriting guide are now just shown on the page rather than being linked.

A couple of things then went beyond tweaks: I got carried away making rewrites to the ancient Proving Sprite Theft page and the Reviewing Guide. The former was distinctly outdated and just written in a very teen-me sort of way (it's not really a page I'd make today, especially since spriting is not nearly as popular as it was, but rather than remove it altogether I tried to just keep all the advice that was there while updating it a bit), and the latter was something I'd been wanting to rewrite for a while for many reasons, most prominently that I'd grown to find some of its takes and presentation downright weird. Hopefully now they both make a bit more sense for a modern audience, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

I also fixed a couple of typos and such. Can't believe how often I managed to read over the Jolteon article apparently without noticing a missing 'the'.

• The Pokémon Hangman, a game of great sentimental value to me ever since my dad helped me make it as my first introduction to JavaScript back in 2002, was always kind of randomly a standalone static page, which meant it arbitrarily stuck out, did not adapt to your chosen style, and also really didn't work great on phones, where you had to zoom in awkwardly to even read the instructions and the letters you had to press to play were way too small. I was reminded of this in the process of putting together the anniversary update, and now I've finally just brought it into the site layout properly as well as updating it a bit so that the clickable areas for each letter are much bigger, making it play better on a touch screen. I kept the old charging-Pikachu images, and because those were designed for a white background and I no longer have the original files, I ended up putting the game itself into a little white rounded box. Unfortunately this means it doesn't quite adapt to your style in the ideal sort of way, but I hope you'll agree it's a definite improvement.
• Meanwhile, the Number Game has also been updated, this time with some user suggestions: in addition to being a bit more permissive with Pokémon whose names contain special characters, it now shows the number of the Pokémon you guessed if you get it wrong (assuming what you typed is a real Pokémon) – and there is now an additional game mode where it will show you a random Pokémon from the range and you guess its number. Alongside this, I made some tweaks to the look and functionality of the game that streamline it a bit and make it easier to use – the guess input and the buttons you click to proceed are now on the 'card' directly and shown contextually, rather than having two different buttons you need to alternate between, and the settings are placed below and you don't need to click anything to start with the default settings.
• I added a bit more information, in particular on Pokémon Legends: Arceus and on where you can find Espeon and Umbreon in the wild, to the Espeon and Umbreon page.
• I updated the Fake Cheats section with a bit more of a preamble, since it's now being a bit more prominently linked and all, and today not everyone will have the context to understand what's being referenced anymore.

There'll probably be more little updates of a similar scale upcoming soon before I get to the next more major additions, since as I mentioned, the anniversary update did a lot of making me want to tweak things. As usual, let me know if you bump into any issues.

The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty-three years old today! It's been a very eventful year for me (I have a non-website kid now), but I still managed to make time to get the Mew trick essay out the door, which is one of my favorite things I've ever made for this site, so I'll count that as a big win.

For this anniversary, in the continuing spirit of doing something oriented towards meta features on the site, I've done something I've been musing on for a little while. After all these years, there is a lot of content on this website – and both because of how much there is and simply because of a shift in how people tend to use the internet, I suspect it's not very realistic at this point to expect a lot of visitors to be going through the menu to find out what else is on it, once they're here. Once a given bit of content is off the front page (as the Mew trick essay would be with this update, if I hadn't linked to it in this update too), it may become hard for new visitors to actually learn it even exists. Meanwhile, while a lot of trends in modern web design just irritate me, I've noticed that having links at the bottom of a page that offer other related pages to check out are often something that legitimately piques my curiosity and hooks me in to read more, when I would probably not have bothered to browse through the menu or archives looking for more. Often, on the modern ad-encrusted web, what those links lead to is actually just some clickbait or uninformative slop, mind, but the principle of offering the reader other stuff they might be interested in after they're done reading one thing is perfectly sound and useful.

Obviously, these sorts of links are generally generated by algorithms based on keywords and trending statistics. But on a hand-made site like this, I started to imagine: what if I just genuinely hand-picked some other pages to link to from each page, making it more likely that someone reading something like the Mew trick essay will find their way to the glitched Jolteon essay or the in-depth article about how R/B/Y's random number generator affects capturing? I'd like people reading one thing I've made to get to hear about what other similar stuff I've made, if they might enjoy it, even if there isn't any obvious natural reason for the main body of the page to link to it.

What I ended up doing reuses the scaffolding of the Featured Section feature, which was already subtly featuring a single random page as the top link under Site on the menu, and thus reuses the same descriptions for the related pages – though I ended up rewriting a lot of those descriptions, because I originally made the featured section feature nearly two decades ago. (That's 2006 – and if you can believe it, every page of content I've added since 2006 has had a description written specifically for the purposes of this feature from 2006 that most people probably barely notice.) Each page of content on the menu defines a set of four related pages to link to, chosen by hand based on whatever I felt might be most likely to appeal to someone reading this – though pages that for one reason or another don't have their own defined related pages will display a selection of four pages picked at random out of the 'featurable' pages. I had some fun picking out what pages to feature where – there are some amusing picks here and there, like the Mew trick article linking the fake cheats, some of the site's oldest content – and it was also a bit of a nostalgia trip just going through a lot of pages I hadn't actually looked at in many, many years. It has also given me a great urge to fix and rewrite various things that I wrote very badly sometime in 2004, mind – but I stuck mostly to just adding the related links for now.

While doing this I also got sidetracked with redoing how the menu works, as well as doing some database updates that should have fixed some incorrect names in the Gen IV Locations among other things but could possibly have broken something; please let me know if you notice anything off anywhere. I also fixed some minor things here and there that I happened to notice, added notices to my Pokémon Go pages to note they are out of date (which pains me a bit, but I don't actually play or keep up with what's going on with it very closely anymore, and realistically I just cannot commit to trying to keep them updated again when the game might completely redo major mechanics at any time), and added Legends: Z-A information to the Espeon and Umbreon page.

All in all, not the most exciting update if you're a devoted fan of the site with an encyclopedic knowledge of what pages exist on it already, but hopefully a good one for new and occasional visitors. I was vaguely hoping to do a few more things that I didn't have time to here; I might get on that in the coming days.

• Previously, there was a bug which meant if you had the "Show all" option selected in the ball field, then setting your Pokémon would populate the "Pokémon's form" dropdown with the forms of that Pokémon instead of the forms of the Pokémon you're trying to catch, which would in turn cause problems if the Pokémon you were actually trying to catch didn't have a matching form, locking up the calculator. This should now have been fixed; the "Pokémon's form" box should always be filled with the forms of the Pokémon you're trying to catch.
• The "Pokémon's form" box was also kind of awkwardly positioned, closer to the options for your own Pokémon than the one you were trying to catch. I did this originally in order to place all the options that appear only for some balls and not others below the ball dropdown, so that you get to them after selecting the ball, but I think the placement probably made it ambiguous what Pokémon it even referred to, so I have moved that box up below the Pokémon selector. I may reconsider this later, but it's the best I've come up with for now.
• I similarly moved the "Your Pokémon's level" field so that when "Show all" is selected it will show up alongside other fields related to your Pokémon.
• I have also added a checkbox to specify whether the Pokémon is currently a Water- or Bug-type if the Net Ball (or "Show all") is selected, to account for the possibility of moves such as Soak. The checkbox should be automatically set according to the selected Pokémon/form when you adjust those, but can then be manually adjusted.
• Safari Ball and Sport Ball can now both be selected in the Gen VIII and Gen IX calculators.

Let me know if you bump into any further oddities. I may fiddle more with the form later but at least hopefully this improves the functionality for now.

• I've fixed a bug where the previously unseen second page link for page comments would actually go to the second page of the guestbook, not the second page of comments on this page. It should now navigate as you'd expect.
• Page comments are now shown in reverse chronological order, with the newest first, like guestbook posts and update comments - previously they were in chronological order, with the oldest first, which meant that once there were more than twenty comments on a page, new comments would not be visible by default at all, which didn't really make a lot of sense.
• Following from that, the comment form is now above the current list of comments. This was kind of inevitable - it was just weird once the latest comments were at the top that you'd have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to leave your own.
• It is now possible to reply to a comment, including guestbook posts, update comments and page comments, using the "Reply to this" link at the bottom of each comment. This will always post your comment to the same page/update as the original comment, if applicable, and include an "In response to" link on your comment leading to the comment you were responding to.
• Back when I first made a guestbook, it was pretty standard in website guestbooks that you could enter your e-mail address and this would create a mailto link that would allow other users to e-mail you. But honestly this has not been a good idea for a very long time now, with bots harvesting e-mail addresses anywhere they can find them to pump spam their way, and I doubt this was ever seeing any legitimate use. The guestbook now no longer has mailto links for users who enter their e-mail address; this means the e-mail address is no longer made visible anywhere.
• Instead, you can still enter your e-mail address, but if you do, it will only be used to alert you if I respond to your comment. I mulled over whether it made sense to make it e-mail you if anyone responds to your comment, but ultimately I didn't want some bad actor to be able to make the site send fifty e-mails to someone overnight by responding to their comment fifty times. Chances are if you're on this site and making a comment you may be interested in whether I respond to it, but it's probably less likely that you care if someone else does; obviously, if you are interested, you can still check back manually.
• Alongside this, I made some light UI improvements to the post form: the required fields are now marked, and also marked as required in the browser so that the browser will validate that they're present without having to submit the form; the e-mail field is now an actual e-mail input; the fields now have placeholders; and it should now be a bit clearer that the website fields are for entering your own website/blog/social media profile if any, not The Cave of Dragonflies. I would kind of like to make the form not quite as bulky (I have a certain worry that people might miss the existing comments just because it's so far to scroll past the form), but that might be a change for another time.
• The spam verification Pokémon is no longer regenerated on every pageview of a page that has a comment form; instead, you'll see the same one until you actually go to submit a comment (or regenerate it with the "don't know it" link). This avoids pointlessly regenerating it on every pageview where you probably aren't even about to submit a comment, but should also fix an issue I'd bumped into myself where visiting any page with comments while writing a comment or guestbook post in another browser tab would cause an error about tampering with the verification Pokémon when the comment was submitted.
• Finally, one cute little addition since I was doing all this fiddling: your spam verification Pokémon is now saved and shown as a little party sprite in the top right corner of the post (inspired by a similar feature on Thousand Roads). Unfortunately there are no shiny party sprites, but if you got a shiny, it'll be shown with a yellow glow around it, recording your good luck for posterity.

Phew, that was a lot and probably more work than a feature to comment on a Pokémon website really needed, but I am at least feeling better about several things about it now. Let me know if you bump into any issues.

All in all, I added more than a novel's worth of text to the site for this joke – all legitimate content originally written for my personal Tumblr or my Breaking Bad commentary blog. So if you enjoyed it, follow me there for more like it, I suppose! The Cave of Dragonflies, however, is and will remain a Pokémon website – I don't call it my definitive primary fandom for life for nothing.

So, The Cave of Dragonflies is now officially a Pokémon/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly/Breaking Bad/Groundhog Day/Jesus Christ Superstar/Chess website! Each of them now has a section on the menu with a bit of content to start us off with, plus a place in the top banner of the new style, Expanded style. I will be working on a better selection of styles to fairly and equally represent all of the site's subjects (all of these new top-level categories make the dropdowns a little more challenging), but I hope this one will do for now!

Other upcoming updates include an all-new zodiac incorporating the characters from all six, some even longer essays on Groundhog Day and Chess, and of course further expansions of the website to cover Brennu-Njáls saga, Uncharted, and Icelandic industrial performance art collective Hatari.

With that, I also figured I'd do a little reorganization: the Mew trick essay and my glitched Jolteon essay from last September now live in their own "Essays" submenu under "Pokémon", as well as being under the "Kanto" submenu because ultimately they are also both specifically about the first-generation games. The Mew trick thought was always kind of the odd one out under "Opinions/Theories", and now that I've got two of these big illustrated deep dives, I figured it'd make sense to group them together. I'll probably be adding more things under there before long, though I think (think!) those wouldn't be quite as lengthy.

Hope you all enjoy the new essay – and if you know anything I've missed about the history there, by all means do let me know!

On New Year's Day, I like to look back and reflect on the year and the people I'm grateful for, so here's a non-exhaustive list of some of the people I'd like to thank for 2024:

• All of my greatly valued internet friends, for the many conversations we've had and laughs we've shared
• Jackie, Chibi, elyvorg and Dannichu in particular, whom I got to see in person this year, for their lovely company and great times together
• Negrek, for our regular watch-togethers and invaluable writing sprints, and particularly facilitating me finally finishing and publishing Groundhog Dave
• Psychic and Teagan, for continuing to do adorable Pokémon baking streams, newsletters that made me smile, and recommending The Beekeeper, which was a silly, glorious time
• Altissimo, for continuing to loyally send me corrections to the Gen II Locations and creating her own resource
• Darren of Johto Times, for continuing to publish fascinating interviews and stories from the early days of Pokémon in a newsletter that I'm honored to be a part of, and for adding TCoD's Bluesky account to a starter pack that really gave it a head start
• Quiara, for sparking the R/S/E Roulette article
• Damian001, who added an archive link from 2002 to the Bulbapedia article on the Mew glitch in October 2023, which at the beginning of the year led me down a rabbit hole that eventually resulted in me finally uncovering what was going on with my glitched Jolteon back on Yellow, two decades ago
• The staff and players of the Heartache RPG, which I'm continuing to enjoy
• Game Freak, for taking their time with the next Pokémon games
• The Thousand Roads community, still my primary home on the internet
• The participants in the Thousand Roads book clubs in particular, with whom I've enjoyed reading and discussing Homestuck and now the Pokémon Adventures manga
• Likewise, those who followed my own liveblogging of Njáls saga, which gave me a chance to geek about a piece of my culture this summer
• My husband Shadey, whom I've been with for eighteen years now
• My parents, still lovely people I'm thrilled to spend regular time with
• My grandpa and my grandma, whom I love dearly
• My cat Birta, for being so cute that I love her even when she is continually trapping me in awkward positions
• My patrons, for their generosity
• Everyone who actually read Groundhog Dave, my R/S/E roulette article and the glitched Jolteon essay - I may not have published all too much content this year but I'm deeply fond of all of these, in their own completely different ways
• Capcom, for finally officially localizing Ace Attorney Investigations: Prosecutor's Gambit, one of the best games in the Ace Attorney series
• Sergio Leone, for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, my current obsession, and indirectly causing me to get a whole lot better at drawing realistic humans
• Ashley Cope, for making me cry multiple times with Unsounded this year
• Everyone still creating and visiting old-school fansites in this day and age

I hope you all had a decent 2024 and that your 2025 turns out well! Here's to more neat content in 2025.