Time for feasting and glee
now that you're twenty-three.
Happy birthday, dear website!
You're so important to me.

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.

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I've put up another little Morphic extra, another set of three hurt/comfort-themed prompt bingo fills. As the theming suggests, they're all very angsty.

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I've made a couple of adjustments/fixes to the various capture calculators:

• 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.

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The Mew trick essay got its 21st comment a couple of days ago (from TheScythe!), and this ended up prompting me to make a number of updates to the commenting feature and thus the guestbook and update comments as well:

• 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.

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Hope you all enjoyed this year's April Fools' Day joke! I have now added a writeup to the joke archive and reset the changes back to normal – but the actual content remains online for archival purposes, because why not; you can still access it all here.

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.

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Welcome to the new, expanded Cave of Dragonflies! I've been thinking lately about how, well, Pokémon is still one of my passions, but so are many other things, and when I spend a lot of time making stuff that's not about Pokémon, the website languishes a bit in the meantime. So really, the sensible thing to do here is to expand the website to cover all the other stuff I make!

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.

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Hello, all! I have finally, finally finished what I've been doing for the past few months, namely writing up a new incredibly lengthy essay on the Mew trick. It essentially expands massively upon the old, slightly aimless thought on the Mew trick that I've had on the site since 2005, borrowing material from some Tumblr posts I made last year but also fleshing it all out further into a deep dive into the glitch's context, history, origins and mechanics. Plus a load of footnotes! And screenshots, and a Mew illustration just because!

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!

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Happy new year! 2025 sure seemed like a faraway, distant future when I started this website, but here we are, still kicking in the final year of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

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.

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