I fixed another error that was coming up on the Gen IV Locations page for some locations, and I really hope that's the last one, but if it isn't, by all means tell me.

Also, I've switched the HG/SS Play-Asia links for new ones for pre-ordering Black and White. If you're planning to import the Japanese version of one of them and like this site, do it through these links. I mean, why not? You get the game you want, I get a minuscule amount of money. Win-win.

UPDATE EDIT: I've improved the interface of the Gen IV Locations a bit by making the terrain menu hide terrains that don't actually apply to the location you've selected. This is Javascript, so it doesn't work if you don't have it enabled, but of course it's still usable without this feature. I've also been adding Where and Notes for a lot of locations.

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Well, first, the HG/SS Locations now have Where and Notes information for those locations I've written it for so far (all the D/P/Pt locations and some of the HG/SS ones). This will be updated in real time as I get around to entering more information. Also, I fixed a mistake in the code that made for instance Route 4 show an error.

Second, a_magical_me graciously corrected a couple of additional things in the capture mechanics which have now been fixed.

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I'm still working on adding to the HG/SS Locations (writing the Where and Notes information for all the locations across all five fourth-generation games is taking some time), but meanwhile today I randomly went and fiddled with the capture mechanics section for the ilcoeth time: all the technical stuff about Y and wobbles and all that has been moved below the explanation of the formula for X (under the heading "Throwing a Ball"), that technical stuff has been updated with a much prettier simplified formula for Y, and some bits have been generally reworded to be clearer. Finally, I went and commented the catch rate calculator Javascript, for no particular reason except that commenting code is good and I need to do more of it.

Of course, I'll be continuing to work on the HG/SS Locations and am hoping to get a more finalized, easy-to-use version up by the end of the month at the latest.

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All right, I have finally finished the HG/SS Locations section. Which... isn't actually HG/SS Locations so much as D/P/Pt/HG/SS locations.

The table display is mostly the same as in the old D/P Locations; the big difference is that there aren't two hundred tables on one hugeamongous page. The big difference in the backend is that this time it's actually interacting with a database in real-time instead of being a static pregenerated page, which is in all respects more sensible, and that the code is one heck of a lot neater than the headache it used to be.

It's awfully rough at the moment; I'm going to Germany until the seventeenth, though, so I figured I might as well put it up in its current state before I go and refine it later. Among other things, I will be adding the "Where" and "Notes" that the old section had, there will be Places to Train for HG/SS (as its own section, though; I'll also be splitting off the D/P Places to Train into its own section), there will be an additional tool for finding all locations where a particular Pokémon appears (across all five versions) and where it's easiest to find, and I'll be finding some way to make finding the location you want less cumbersome. At least in some browsers, selecting a drop-down box and starting to type a name will automatically select the appropriate option for you, so be sure to utilize that.

Suggestions for other stuff to add or fix while I'm gone would be great.

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The twelfth movie review is up.

I've also been through my affiliation/etc. queue, which also means some stuff people submitted for In-Game Humour has been added, and as usual when I go over affiliation requests, I went and tweaked/added some things in the various webmaster sections. And finally, happily, I've gotten veekun's database working on my computer and will be using that to make that HG/SS Locations section I was talking about, as well as probably revamping the D/P/Pt Locations while I'm at it.

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Morphic it is. Here's Chapter 13. I should warn you this is a very brutal and violent chapter and if you were hoping for sunshine and rainbows you should probably stay very far away from it.

If you read the update heading, yes, this is the second-to-last chapter. And yes, that is a reference to A Series of Unfortunate Events.

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The eleventh movie review is up at last. I've also been adding to and modifying the HG/SS Changes section pretty much constantly since the last update, so if you only saw it then, stuff has probably been added.

Next up is either the twelfth movie review or a HG/SS Locations section. Or chapter thirteen of Morphic.

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And I have finally, finally finished the HG/SS Changes section. For now. I know I forgot a bunch of things, because I kept remembering or noticing things when I wasn't at the computer that I'd forgotten by the time I had the opportunity to write it down, so please contact me and help fill in the gaps if you remember something not there. That's not to say it's woefully incomplete, though - it's long.

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I've added a couple of sample games to the Voltorb Flip guide I put up yesterday, just to demonstrate how the rules are applied in a real situation and give a better idea of how it all comes together.

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My SoulSilver arrived, so I'm afraid I haven't been working on that movie review. On the plus side, however, the HG/SS Changes section is well underway, there are several new bits of In-Game Humour, and I've just finished a Voltorb Flip guide created because most people don't seem to be taking the logic of it more than halfway. This game is not mostly luck, people! My guide doesn't even mention guessing until nine tenths down the page!

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And the promised update to confirm the HG/SS data for the capture mechanics is here, with many, many thanks to a_magical_me. This is actually pretty fascinating stuff; while the workings of most of the balls are technically indeed the same as that G/S/C data and I seem to remember it being previously reported somewhere that the Fast Ball now gives its bonus for Pokémon with a base Speed of at least 100, what we just realized (and tested, mind you) is that unlike the other balls that use the built-in ball bonus multiplier in the formula, the Apricorn balls can never give a Pokémon a better catch rate than 33% at full health! Seriously, go take a look. This is cool and you haven't seen it anywhere else.

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I've updated the Capture Mechanics page, both to add in tentative HG/SS Apricorn ball information (though I'm kind of suspicious of it at the moment, as the only information on the subject I could find looks like it's simply copied from common fandom knowledge at the time of the original G/S/C), refine the catch rate calculator a little (now you can enter any percentage for the current HP as well as specifying 1 HP) and update the D/P/Pt information with corrections from a_magical_me, who actually disassembled the game's capture routine to find out that, gasp, Dusk Balls don't quite reign supreme to the extent the fandom has been trumpeting since D/P came out, and Quick Balls actually only give a bonus on the very first turn of the battle, and actually Nest Balls and Timer Balls have a smoothly changing capture rate instead of it changing every ten levels/turns. Why does the Pokémon fandom always have information confidently repeated everywhere that then turns out to have been wrong all along? You can see why I'm very iffy about those HG/SS catch rates. I would go do some testing myself to try to clear this up, but unfortunately my SoulSilver has not yet arrived. :/ But eh, the preliminary info is at least something, and a_magical_me was going to take a look at the HG/SS capture routine, so hopefully that can be updated to be accurate soon enough.

Ah, well. I think I'm going to go work on the eleventh movie review now, so that might be up in a few hours, but don't count on it.

EDIT: No movie review, but I did update the capture mechanics page again, since it turns out the game really treats the Pokémon's four attempts to break out of the ball realistically: that is, it stops generating random numbers as soon as one of them is greater than Y and allows the Pokémon to break out. This doesn't actually affect the final capture rate, since that still requires the game to generate four numbers less than or equal to Y, but it does affect the chances of each number of wobbles and makes a lot more logical sense than the way I was originally led to believe it worked.

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I've been making some minor modifications, specifically correcting some errors, adding a little bit of In-Game Humour, and adding a section about the pronouns I use for Pokémon to the About the Movie Reviews page. Sorry about the lack of HG/SS Changes; I think it would be better to do it once I have the game, and since Iceland is marvelously behind in these things and apparently won't actually have it until two or three weeks from now, I gave up and ordered SoulSilver from Amazon. It's supposed to get here sometime in the first week of April. Look forward to it.

I've also more or less decided that in addition to the actual movie reviews, I also want to review the two feature-length special episodes, namely The Legend of Thunder and Mewtwo Returns. I'll probably put off those reviews until I'm done with all twelve proper movies so far, but yeah, unless something changes I'll be doing those as well. Before I wasn't sure I could actually do them thanks to my difficulties finding a subbed Japanese Mewtwo Returns (and it would be kind of awkward to review just one feature-length special out of the blue), but since I finally did, it's a lovely excuse to add to the upcoming review queue.

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I've finished the review for the tenth movie, finally. Interestingly, it's actually the very shortest review so far, probably because a whole lot of the movie is padding that didn't really need to be mentioned in the synopsis.

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Since we're getting very close to three million front page hits, I whipped up a new splash that will take the current one's place once the counter gets there. It's not as artistic as I'd have liked, but to make up for it, it does introduce the site's newest mascot.

In other news, HeartGold and SoulSilver come out in the US tomorrow. Whoo. I won't be getting it until the European release, but I'll see what I can do with regards to getting the inevitable HG/SS Changes section up sometime next week anyway (it will have both changes from D/P and from G/S/C!). And I'll get that tenth movie review done, really.

UPDATE EDIT: Since we've passed the milestone, the new splash is here, and I've now added Quentin the Dialga plushie to the mascot page.

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I've slightly modified the style cookie system - namely, the cookie domain is now ".dragonflycave.com", which should mean that once the forums.dragonflycave.com subdomain gets working, the forums will be able to detect your main site style again. Unfortunately, at least for me, this meant my Firefox didn't actually change my style cookie when I switched styles, but instead created a new one (which was then ignored in favor of the old one when it came to actually detecting which style I'd chosen). Fortunately, this has a simple solution, namely just deleting the old cookie; if you're having problems with this, you can do so by clicking here, and afterwards you should be able to select a style again without problems. I recommend you do this now so that you won't encounter the problem later when you've forgotten about it and send me an angry error report.

UPDATE EDIT (02/28/10): The subdomain is now working. Everybody use it to access the forums now!

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After some prompting (read: flood of error reports) by sreservoir, I went and ran the entire site through the W3C markup validator to weed out the numerous typos and other errors that have been left in them over the years. Most of the affected pages just had something minor, but others had pretty bad mistakes, so it's good to have them fixed. Right now I believe the only invalid pages remaining should be Sections that Suck (thanks to containing a portion demonstrating poor HTML) and a couple of pages with embedded Javascripts that I was too lazy to move to an external file for the moment. And a couple get a warning about character encoding stuff, which I should also probably fix sometime but I have other stuff I need to do.

EDIT: Oh, and the new forum server is up and running. Big thanks to Kat of Eevee's HQ. Hopefully there will be no more database errors and blank pages and other server wonkiness.

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In what is almost definitely the most spectacularly pointless thing I have ever done for this site, I just made a snippet of code to automatically convert my numeric age into the wordy equivalent on my About Me page. So instead of saying I'm "20 years old at the moment", it now says I'm "twenty years old at the moment", and next year it will go on to automatically say I'm "twenty-one", and so on. Well, admittedly it will resort back to numbers when I get to a hundred, but the write-out-numbers rule mainly applies to numbers under that anyway, so there's no need to worry about that.

You might think this was just a random spur-of-the-moment thing, but no, the fact it wrote out a number has been bothering the hell out of me ever since I made the script to calculate my actual age so I wouldn't have to manually update it every year and this has pretty much been on my to-do list ever since. I think I've spent too much time telling fanfiction writers to write out numbers with letters.

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I randomly went and looked at the type quiz again, decided it was all awful, and rewrote the descriptions of all the types (plus putting fourth-generation sprites on the description pages instead of the third-generation ones). The actual quiz remains the same, however, so you're still the same type you used to be; the description has just become a lot more sensible and (hopefully) accurate.

Why, yes, it's twenty minutes past three in the morning on my twentieth birthday and I'm messing around with my Pokémon website. Why do you ask?

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Yes, yes, it's been quiet.

Anyway, I fixed an error that would come up if you entered a non-integer into the Zodiac script. I also went through several affiliation requests, and as so often when that happens, this inspired me to add and tweak things in my webmaster sections; in this case, I reorganized the Website Tips and added several, and rewrote the Site Rater page. Then I added Play-Asia links to pre-order the US versions of HeartGold and SoulSilver to the link bar. I don't know how many of you will bother to get it there instead of just physically going out and buying it when it's out, but it's there, and it'll be shipped outside of the US, so if you're too impatient to wait the two weeks before it's out where you live, this is something for you.

Oh, and I made a new entry at the Cave of Speculative Theories, if not a very interesting one, and a new Almighty Random Poll.

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Chapter twelve of Morphic is up. Yeah, Morphic. That thing still exists, believe it or not.

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Aaaand I've finally finished the ninth movie review. Man, this movie is weird.

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Perfectionist that I am, I just made a pointless little snippet of code that makes it so that if you are viewing the guestbook and click a link to an update from an update comment, it will actually detect if the relevant update has been moved to the Old Updates and redirect you to the update in question there if that is the case. It's been bugging me since I first made the update commenting feature.

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I've... reorganized the Site History page, since previously it was seriously long and went back and forth and stuff. Now it's a lot neater to read. In the process, I also went and got a few more 2003 updates to put into the Old Updates.

Otherwise, I've been doing a ton of character bios for the Quest for the Legends minipage, so it's not that I've just been lazy, really.

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It's come to the end of two thousand nine,
a year for the world to remember.
Don't know about you, but my year was just fine,
though it's felt like a hectic December.
Now it's two thousand ten with a fresh new start,
and I think this is worthy of cheer:
I hope you had fun, and with all of my heart,
I wish you a happy new year!

Yeah. Don't ask me why I decided to make a new year's poem, but apparently I did. In any case, happy new year, and I hope your 2009 was enjoyable, or at least satisfying to leave behind.

As always, my traditional New Year's Thanks!

• Dannichu! The London Expo was awesome, but finally meeting you in the flesh was awesomer. Your Christmas present will be a bit late, unfortunately, but it's coming.
• Espeon! Meeting you was wonderful, too. Thanks for the memories, and I hope to see you again at the next Expo. Both of you.
• Psychic! Oh, God, I have had so much fun talking to you this year. We still need to do it more.
• elyvorg! You are generally amazing. If you can make it to the next Expo, it will absolutely make the year 2010 for me. Also, write more LE.
• opaltiger! I may have met you already, but that didn't make meeting you again at Paddington any less lovely. And thank you for all the beta-reading and second opinions for my fanfics you've provided.
• Shadey! I love you. You are my favorite person in the world, and believe me when I say I know some pretty darn awesome people. Thanks for having been warm and cuddly and our three wonderful years. You make me happy.
• Dad! You continue to be one of the coolest people I know. I'm proud to be your daughter.
• You guys who actually did buy something through the Play-Asia links! I never really expected people to actually go and use them, but the fact it happened is pretty darn cool. Thanks for your support; it is highly appreciated, and I hope you enjoy the games you bought.
• Everybody else who continues to visit this website. Sorry about the decline in update frequency this year. I'll try to make up for it.
• Everybody who's done the crossword so far. Come on! I need more entries!
• Joss Whedon, for making awesome shows.
• Game Freak, for making HeartGold and SoulSilver unbelievably great. I don't care about the complainers; I think they're without a doubt the best Pokémon games yet.
• Quentin Tarantino, for providing a name for my awesome Dialga plushie. :P And Inglourious Basterds was great too.

See you all in the January updates once I do something of note.

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