Hey guys. I don't have anything substantial to add just yet, though I am determined to get the written reffing scale done before I go back to class; just working through a backlog of non-dcNET obligations first. In the meantime, though, it would be awesome if you guys could do a friend of mine a favor and check out this link. It leads to a page of the Pepsi Refresh Everything competition, benefiting a project called Hiram Farm. The idea is that you can vote for a project once per day in a bid to boost its rankings. The top ten projects in each category get a grant from Pepsi to help get them off the ground or reach a certain goal. Hiram Farm is a project run by this friend's father, intended to provide a constructive place for autistic adults to spend time. It'd be a big help to them and their community, and if they can place in the top ten they win fifty thousand dollars, so it'd be pretty awesome if you could give your support and vote for them at least once, if not once a day!

Unfortunately voting does require that you sign up for a free account on the Refresh Everything website, but it only appears to need that so that it can keep track of the number of votes you've made per day. You can uncheck the boxes that ask if you want newsletters–I haven't been sent anything so far–and if it really bugs you you can always use an old email address or something, or sign up for a quick free one you can use for junk stuff.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give Hiram Farm. Here's the link again, just in case you missed it: Hiram Farm @ Pepsi Refresh. (Oh, and if you've got a Facebook page or Twitter account and can spread the news to your friends, that'd be cool too!)

Small update today. I added two old pictures to the Other fanart gallery and one to the Pokémon gallery, all depicting original characters from fanprojects that I hope to god I will actually get around to completing and sharing. Go say hi to Virgil, Vail and Icarus for me, k?

Aaand we're back to updating in the wee hours of the morning. Yay?

Let's get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. After spending some time really thinking about it, I've decided that it'd be for the best if I closed my forum, DexGenesis. I'm not going to get into the gory details here–if you want to know more, you can see the post I made on the forum itself (note: link now broken, sorry). In a nutshell, it just wasn't something I felt I could honestly devote my time to, ADD as I am with most of my obligations, and therefore it wasn't fair to everyone else for me to just leave them there and more or less ignore the place as I have been. I still think that the basic idea is sound, and I would like to see some community-generated regions and similar projects get off the ground; they should just be run by someone who's a better admin than I am. Ah, well. You live, you learn, and now I can do a better job of keeping on top of the other things I need to do (or trying to, anyway) without feeling guilty. Note that I will be deleting DG eventually; I'll leave it up for a little while so that any interested members can save any posts or other information they need to, but I'd rather like to be able to reclaim that server space and subdomain slot. If you think there's anything you want to back up, please do so as soon as possible.

On a lighter note, I've finished that game I mentioned last update. If you look in the Inane Nonsense section of the menu, you'll see a little thing called porygonfindsskitty. It's a very simple game that doesn't take long to play, but it should be good for a few chuckles (especially if you're bored or need to be cheered up, but even if you're just curious about it). Perhaps the best part about it is that the list of items in the game is extensible, and apparently I'm terrible at coming up with them because I only have 100 when I'd intended to release the game with more. If you think you can be more entertaining than I am, I welcome your item submissions; see the bottom of the porygonfindsskitty page for more info on that.

The rest of the update is really just minor stuff. I'm sending off another affiliate application or two; I've fixed the ASB calculator page so that you don't have to click an additional link to get to the calc any more; I'm trying to get the written version of my reffing scale up before my woefully short summer break ends in mid-July; I'm probably going to be drumming up a better layout in the near future. I also have plans for a few updates to the Phoenixdex, and I'm hoping against hope that another project I've actually been working on on-and-off since 2007 will be able to get off the ground.

That's all for now, folks. Phoenix out.

I'm still here, I'm still here! The school quarter is winding down and some final projects are dragging me down with them, so I haven't had a great deal of time to update lately. I don't have a lot of time to update now–I'll wait until the quarter is over to bring up all the stuff I need to, and as you can imagine with a gap this long that's rather a lot–but I'm just posting this news item really quickly to let you know that I *do* have some new stuff planned in addition to everything else I wanted to say. One of my school projects is easily adapted into what should be a pretty entertaining game; it's all programmed and everything, and I just need to add a little bit to it before it's ready. I'm hoping that I'll be able to add it to the site sometime next week, at which point I'll also be able to cover everything else I wanted to say. Hang tight until then, and I'm sorry for keeping you all waiting for a month.

EDIT: ...have I ever actually had more than one thing to report in a single day before? Wow. Anyway, dcNET has its first affiliate: Floatzel.net! In case you haven't heard of it (and if you haven't, why not?), it's a big, booming site with a lot of great content, covering Pokémon, Mario and several other topics. Among its attractions are a popular series of "Let's Play" videos and the most hardcore Pokémon fan quiz I think I've ever seen. Give them a visit if you haven't already.

First of all, I finally got around to cleaning up the last of the sitely pages that was in dire need of a makeover (under "Main" to your left). Nothing drastically new or fancy there, but now they're more up to date and I am less embarrassed to say that I wrote them.

More importantly, I've made a pretty big update to the ASB reffing calculators. They've been woefully bad (especially the energy calc) for the longest time now. I was originally just going to fix the formulas in the Instacalc calculators that were already there, but in the end I just decided to put the poor things out of their misery. I've completely redone them in Flash; they are now more intuitive, cleaner, slightly less ugly and, best of all, impossible for you to mess up by accidentally changing the name of a variable or erasing too much in one of the fields. The damage calculator is more or less the same, but I have changed the way I calculate energy so that it actually makes half an ounce of sense. If you've been using the old calculators, stop that and go play with the sexy new ones instead.

I will probably also be adding a written version of the scale to the site for reference (after all, it's not that great an idea to use a scale without knowing how it actually works).