I kinda burned myself out after rushing to get the Phoenixdex open, so that's part of why there hasn't been anything new. I'm working on stuff, though. In the meantime I've added another one of those sexy pictures to the art gallery, so you can go distract yourself by staring at the pretty Lugia for a few hours.

...oh, and I added a new battlefield to the ASB Stock Arenas. I'm planning on coming up with a few more like it eventually; the idea is too much fun not to explore any further.

I've decided to put the Battle Factory page on hold for now; I'm not ditching it completely, as another new project I'm not going to tell you about could potentially make it useful, but it's officially been shoved to the back of my list of priorities so I can work on other things that are more current/relevant/um. This does include the ref guide, which I am coming to realize is slightly more relevant than I first thought it would be, but I am once again upset with the way it's structured and so will be rewriting it *again*. I'm also going to be rewriting a few of the other pages around here, like the "About" pages and what have you, so that they are less ridiculous and embarrassing. Get your laughs in now, kids, they'll be getting an overhaul soon enough.

...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. >>;

...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.

...and so, another month later...

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 human. Curse my attention span.

No, really! There are actually new pages up, one of which is technically useless but hey!

So let's get the useless page out of the way first. I got back into the Pokemasters Forums ASB league recently, and, of course, that means a new team profile page. If you happen to frequent TPMASB as well, would you mind just giving it at least one look and tell me if I got one of my Pokémon wrong? I really don't remember.

The other, less pointless one is a page with some ASB arenas I've created and that anyone can use if they're stuck for ideas. There are currently only two, but more will be added as I come up with them.

School starts again tomorrow and that means four straight hours of math on my first day back, but as long as the math doesn't totally eat me I will keep working on the site.

I've also gotten to the next good stopping point in Platinum; I just haven't had a chance to type it up for the failblog yet. It should be up sometime soon, though.

I swear to god I'm working on something that is actually semi-useful and vaguely informative, you guys! Really! I promise I won't come back until I have something decent to show you!

you'll never see me again