A small one, granted, but a content update nonetheless! I've added a few new arenas to the ASB Stock Arenas page for you to mess around with; I also cleaned it up a little while I was at it.

Nothing else to report for now, sadly, largely because I'm still busy with a lot of other large projects. AO is far from forgotten, however; aside from a possible new affiliate it will be a while before anything noteworthy happens, but I do still plan to knock out some of the stuff on that to-do list, start a few new pages and do a little maintenance work around here, especially in regards to the layouts and similar. I haven't actually started on the fanfic I wanted to write for the Big Bang (see the most recent Insubstantiality update for more on that) and might potentially change the story I'm working on, but by god I intend to finish that sucker before the deadline and post it here and elsewhere.

I can meet them! No, really, I can! Sometimes!

I said I'd get the written version of the ref scale up on the site before my break ends this Tuesday. Lo and behold, I did! If you've been using my calculator then you should read it over–it'll give you a better understanding of why the calc works the way it does and what's going on, which will come in handy when explaining things to the head ref, making calls about tricky moves, and figuring out how to come up with your own rubric should you so desire. Go, go, click, click! (Maybe next I can fix that horrible ASB for beginners page. Ugh.)

Fear not, non-ASB-nerds: I bring something for you, too! There are three new renders up on the free goodies page (Pikachu, Marill and a new-and-improved Lucario), all of which are of vastly superior quality when compared to the old stuff up there. God only knows why I haven't axed said old stuff, but I guess maybe I'm laboring under the impression that someone out there prefers crappy attempts at cel shading to halfway decent art. Must be somebody like that somewhere, right? Right?

The Pepsi Refresh project is still going on, by the way, and Hiram Farm could still use your help! See the previous update for more info on how you can give them a hand.

Speaking of reminders, remember that I will be taking DexGenesis offline completely at the end of next week. If there's something you want to recover, I suggest you do so now before it's all lost to the sands of time. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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.

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).