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what
what is this
i don't even--
...oh, wait. I do know what it is. After over a year of promises and difficulties, I have finally finished and posted the EV training guide! I'm currently having another of my ugly internet droughts (though we should be changing ISPs soon, so hopefully it will never happen again!), but last night I decided that I need to just get my crap together and muscle through the rest of the guide. Please give it a look, give it a try, and hopefully it wil prove to you that EV training is not the terrifying ordeal or lesson in rocket science most people seem to think it is--if you can count to 42 then you can EV train a Pokémon, so why not give it a shot? And please, after you finish it, contact me and let me know if you have any comments or questions. It's rare that I actually have such a vested interest in being genuinely helpful to other people, so I want to make sure that I've been as clear as possible! Your input can only help me make it even better.
In particular, let me know if you want to see more quick examples of how to EV train specific Pokémon. I was planning to include some but cut them out in the interest of getting this done, but if, for example, you want me to briefly walk you through one way to train, say, a Gengar or a Bastiodon, then I can throw something together if it will really help.
As an extra bonus for waiting so patiently for the guide, I've also dug out more old lineart and added Floatzel and Rampardos pics to the free renders page. Floatzel looks especially cool, if I do say so myself.
Oh, and I've finally updated the HeartGold blog! Twice in under a week, even! It should move along a lot faster now, so keep checking in. You know, if you don't find it painfully boring.
More new stuff and some improvements to old stuff should be coming in the future, which should be easier now that I'm looking at more reliable internet and a break from school. I'll be spending a bit more time trying to get DexGenesis off the ground, for one thing--it seems to have stagnated a bit and my lack of internet has prevented me from really being able to do anything about it, but it isn't dead! Give it a look-see, fakemon fans!
I need to rush to class now, but the next update and some interesting stuff should hopefully come pretty soon! Hooray, better internet!
Happy 21st birthday to me, etc.. Yes, the comic thing is weird and crappy. It was hilarious when I started doodling it while half-asleep in class a few nights ago. Shut up.
Anyway, as for updates: neither the fakedex subsite nor the EV training page is quite ready to go live yet, but I swear to god they're coming along, and nicely at that.
However! For those of you who have also caught the fakemon bug and would like to try something interesting, I'd like to direct your attention right here. That link (which has also been up on the sidebar for a few days) leads to my new forum, DexGenesis. DG is an "experiment", if you will, that aims to see what the members of the Pokémon fanwork community can accomplish if they put their heads together in a series of group projects. We've already got what looks like a fun fanregion started, so join us and contribute!
I have at least two more pictures to add to the fanart page, but I'll worry about that later. I'm tired. Maybe maybe maybe also on tap for "later" is something special, but it depends on whether or not I can actually get it done by the deadline I set myself. (I'd better; it's my present to myself, dammit, and I don't want to not get my presents!)
As a heads-up to those of you using my ASB damage/energy calculators: the energy calculator is bothering me, and I'm finding that I have to make up my own logical numbers for some attacks that it should really be able to handle on its own. I'm probably going to tweak the formula at some point. When that is I couldn't tell you, but hopefully as soon as I get some of the stuff I've been procrastinating on out of the way. >>;
Le gasp! But it is true!
Few things. First and foremost, I won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row:
50254 words of silly, parodyesque Tales of Symphonia "hardboiled detective" fanfic (think The Maltese Falcon on crack and starring Zelos), the vast majority of which are rambly fillercrap but were still a lot of fun and will provide a good foundation for the next draft, which will of course be posted here when it is presentable. I know I said that about last year's NaNovel, too, and I do still like that story and would like to get it spiffied up, but I just haven't had the motivation to so much as touch the thing since I finished it. Incarnadine Harvest, on the other hand, I am really excited about. Since I imagine the majority of you readers are Pokémon fans, not ToS fans, this is probably not wonderful news to you, but hey, maybe when I finish the IH rewrite I'll finally feel like working on At Liberty again--and rest assured that At Liberty is 100% USDA Choice Pokémon fanfic. It has a stoner hobo Armaldo and a Staraptor who makes siren noises in it. It will be fun. Dark and violent, but fun. :)
Second, the stuff I've been promising since forever ago. Ahahaha. Well, of the three main things I've been mentioning--the reffing guide, the Gen 4 Battle Factory page and the EV training page--the EV training page is pretty close to completion. Just needs a few more paragraphs and some more proofreading and cleaning up (with a little beta-reading help from one of my friends; thanks, Negrek) and then it should be good to go. The other two will have to wait a little longer, I'm afraid; without being able to look at game data my progress with the Battle Factory page is entirely dependant on my ability to actually make it to certain streaks with some degree of consistency, and that consistency tends to go out the window somewhere around the midpoint of streak 4. And the ref page... that's more a motivation issue than anything else, I guess. They will get done eventually, I promise, but at this rate I'm guessing only the EV training page will go live before the end of 2009. Sorry.
Third, if any of you have been following my HeartGold blog and it has not yet caused you to rip your eyeballs out, yes, I will be continuing it in an attempt (probably a futile one, given my track record) to finish well before the games' American release in April 2010. I have some final projects to take care of this week, which is also why I won't be able to finish the EV training page right away, but hopefully Chapter Four should arrive sometime around the 15th.
Fourth, I am once again annoyed with the way I have decided to structure my menu and sections. Expect another overhaul sometime between now and January. The links won't change, but where you find those links might.
Fifth, at some point I will probably be copying the updates from the older incarnations of the site over here, just for the purposes of having a more complete archive. On the off chance you want to see those again, well, they'll... be there. Yeah.
Sixth, as you may or may not know I enjoy creating fake Pokémon. For several years I've wanted to get a separate "Fakemon Pokédex" subsite set up so I can display them all pretty-like and with all relevant information in one place. I do actually have the site online on a subdomain and have been slowly filling it with content for the past few months; it isn't currently accessible if you aren't me, however. I was originally waiting to have at least one complete Pokédex finished before opening it to the public, but I've since changed my mind about that and am willing to let you all see it while it's still in progress. It isn't quite ready for unveiling yet, unfortunately. I'll see if I can't have it organized and presentable sometime around my birthday at the end of January. My 21st birthday present to all of you, or... something, I don't know.
Seventh, I am hosting a fakemon-creating contest on deviantART. Enter it! There are prizes and everything, including art by yours truly and some free shiny Pokémon from the sparklies page. Mmm, free shiny battle-ready Togekiss, you know you waaaant one... so go make up a fakemon and earn it!
Eighth, this has gone on long enough and it's high time I got back to those final projects. Adieu, and Happy Vague Innumerable December Holidays if I don't pop in again before the end of the month.
...why is it always two in the morning when I update things?
Remember that picture of Sceptile I added to the gallery last month? You'll be seeing a lot more of it from now on, yup. This new layout has a little less "chicken" in it but a lot more sexy, and actually looks like something a web design student would not be ashamed to say that they'd made--it isn't mind-blowing, but it is definitely pretty damn hawt and I'm proud of it. It even has alpha transparency and rounded borders. That's right, biatches, you heard me. If you are using something lame like a really old version of IE then you won't see any of these fancy new pieces of layout eye candy, but that isn't my problem. Go upgrade your browser.
For those of you who were astute enough to notice the absence of the "Valid CSS" link in the footer, that, like several other validation errors I've experienced, is totally not my fault. The properties needed to display the rounded borders may or may not be "valid", okay, I'll give the W3 that, but the validator's complaining about the rgba values (even in CSS3-mode) and totally shouldn't be because I'm sure did it right. So I axed the link until the validator gets its act together and lerns2read its own specifications.
Back to matters that the non-nerds among you will actually care about. NaNoWriMo is fast approaching and so I'm going to do my best to ignore the website entirely for the month of November. I reached 50,000 words last year and am hoping I'll be able to pull it off again, and that means minimizing my work on other projects, so... yeah. I'd like to try and get at least one interesting new piece of content up before November hits, though. We'll see what I can finish before the first.
EDIT: Why didn't anyone tell me that there was an unfinished section in the ASB for Beginners guide? D: I started adding something to the end but apparently stopped in the middle of the paragraph and forgot about it, and no one said anything about it... huh. Anyway, the section has been finished. Good thing, too, because recently I've been seeing quite a few examples of what it talks about. >>;
Figured out what was causing the thumbnails in the fanart gallery to throw themselves around the page with abandon, so that's been taken care of. There's still a bit more cosmetic work to do, but at least its displaying logically now. Go see for yourself, and while you're there check out the sexy new picture of Morty I uploaded.
I also got my copy of HeartGold in the mail yesterday, so I've been playing that. The first installment of my progress-journey-diary-blog-a-ma-thing has been posted, so check it out here if you're interested in reading it.
Finally got around to adding a script to handle answers to the swap meet puzzle (as opposed to the URL entry method I hacked together before); it doesn't do exactly what I wanted it to, but it works and should do a bit more to prevent cheating. I also realized that I made a few mistakes and so had to adjust a few things. If you were in the middle of solving the old version, make sure you check again to see what has changed.
...and that's pretty much all I have to say right now.
I know you don't believe me when I tell you that I'm working on those other pages, but I am! I really am D:
Hoo boy. Where to start...
Okay. So, as I've said several times before, I am a web design student. That's part of why I put dcNET together--so that I might improve my web design skills. Working with straight XHTML and CSS is great and all, but that's not the sort of website I'd be selling to clients. In the interest of teaching myself how to deal with content management systems and server-side scripting and all that, I'm experimenting with one of those CMSes for this website. I'd actually prefer learning to work with Python over a PHP system like this, but eh, my server is what it is and it's good to know.
That probably means absolutely nothing to most of you! But long nerd story short, that's why there's been a drastic overhaul and the URLs to the pages have changed and all that. I'm still adjusting things, making a nicer-looking layout and working out a few little oddities in the CMS's code, but it's more or less all presentable and functional. And that's not all--there's actually new content! Unfortunately it still isn't the Battle Factory, EV training and reffing pages I've been promising, but I'm going to try and finish the EV training page this weekend and I'm going to finish that damn Battle Factory research if it kills me.
No, instead I've added two other pages/sections and updated another. The fanart gallery now has thumbnails, folders and a Lightbox-style thing so that it looks nicer; there are also some new pictures (may I draw attention to the new Sceptile and Tyranitar in particular?). Unfortunately there's still some cleaning up to do--namely, I have absolutely no idea why it scatters the thumbnails all over the place when there are a lot of them, as in the Pokémon gallery, so I've got to look into that--but overall it's pretty cool.
Next, I've added a sort of... puzzle game thing. It's something I came up with years and years ago, and hopefully it's a lot more interesting and hair-tearing than it was when I was ten. It's under "The Pokémon Swap Meet" in the menu, so check it out. Hopefully it's difficult enough, heh.
Then I copied the contents of my Japanese Platinum Version blog over to the site, just in case that's easier for anyone than going through the original blog. And to kill space. It also kills space. But yeeeeah, if you missed it the first time around then go check it out, it's almost entertaining.
Speaking of game blogs, I was stupid enough to pre-order HeartGold in Japanese and will be doing it all over again. It should hopefully arrive in the middle of a decent-length break from school, so with any luck I'll be able to get farther faster this time. That'll probably end up on the site eventually, too.
So, uh, I think that's it for now. If anything's broken (aside from the invalid XHTML on the calculator and gallery pages, which is not my fault and I'm working to fix it), contact me and let me know about it. Peace out, yo.
You'll notice that the calculator page is under a new section up there *points*. I'm going to be changing how the menu and some of the site pages are structured. This will be gradual as not everything that will be changed is ready to be changed, and I'd also like to keep the top-level menu as uncluttered as possible for you technological dinosaurs that still have tiny screen resolutions, but hopefully in the end it will be more intuitive and convenient. I may change my mind about where some things in the menu go so don't be surprised if the links move around a lot over the next fortnight or so, but I will not be changing the URLs of the pages themselves so you don't have to worry about that.
I swear to god I have not forgotten the Battle Factory, EV training and ASB reffing pages; I just haven't worked on them recently. But they WILL be up within the next few weeks or else I'll... er... have to keep working on them until they are finished.
Oh, and before I forget: shameless plug for the Kutho RPG. We have Pokémon, wanton destruction and ninjas. Really. So join now.
EDIT: Whoopsie, the energy calculator was wrong. After a series of unfortunate events involving a mistake in my math, several typos and more repetitive copy/paste than I care to think about, I have corrected it and everything should be okay now. I highly doubt that anyone who cares has seen it yet anyway, but on the off chance that you did see it and bookmarked the link to the offsite energy calculator then you'll have to update it to the new one. (To prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, make sure you bookmark my page instead of the individual links.) There's one extra row in the calculator now but it's another "no touchie or you'll get mathfail" row so it doesn't affect the instructions. Sorry about that.
I'm so proud of myself. :O
Actually, I uploaded those two new pictures a while ago, along with an update to the stock arena and sparklies pages and a revamp of the hideous Infernape render I had up there before. God only knows why I didn't post about it sooner, eh. Unfortunately I haven't had time to finish anything major other than that stuff--I'm currently trying to help out several different Pokémon fangames and an RPG forum, and I'm still majorly distracted by school and my own fakemon stuff--but I swear that I'm doing my best to get one of those ASB pages done as well as the EV training page and one last update to the failblog (covering Darkrai and Shaymin, as that's about all that I can do that everyone else in America hasn't already seen for themselves in English) and figure out how I want to redo that blasted artwork page. I've also had a few new layout ideas bouncing around in my head, so I might be able to get something done there.
I'm trying, really I am, but I'm only a goldfish h