...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:

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.

...but at least I do have a new page! While procrastinating late last night I found Instacalc, which may or may not be old news to most of you but is still one of the most amazing little toys I've ever found on the internet. And I hate math. It's fun to play with, and after spending some time fiddling with it I decided, for the hell of it, to whip up damage and energy calculators based on my ASB reffing scales. It's another one of those things that probably isn't very necessary right now, but it will probably come in handy if a project I'm helping ever gets off the ground. The calculators should be simple enough to use, so if you're a ref-in-training looking to get approved (or if you're just curious and want to see my reffing scale in variable and equation form) then here you go.

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.