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 it's 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: