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. >>;

I finished NaNoWriMo, whoohoo!

To put a slightly more relevant spin on it, that is a good thing because the basic framework for the story is finished. It's going to require one hell of a total rewrite before it's ready for public viewing, and I'm rather tired of it at the moment and so won't be taking an axe to it until January at the earliest, but hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult and I'll be able to start posting the story sometime next year.

You've probably noticed the two new layouts. Actually, they aren't "new" at all; they were the first two layouts I was working on when redesigning the entire site, but I swapped the colors and images around at the last minute so that they used the more simplistic ones instead. What possessed me to do this when these two layouts are perfectly good and a little more interesting (and not as garish-looking on Macs) I do not know, but all that matters is that I got sick of the previous look and switched back to these today. They still need some minor aesthetic tweaking, but they should be entirely presentable and functional as they are now. If you experience any problems with them or something looks odd, email me and let me know so that I can fix it.

The fall quarter of school is over next week and I have a comparatively long break ahead of me until winter quarter starts in mid-January. Hopefully I'll have time to add more actual content to this place. I haven't added any right now (aside from the layouts), as my current obsession with creating fake Pokémon–and, by extension, the project site that goes with them–is eating up a lot of my attention span, but I hope to get something substantial done over the break. When I've finished the fakemon project site (who knows when that will be) I'll probably move the requested fakemon over there, but they'll stay for now; I might upload some of the artwork of my own and the newer requests later, in addition to anything else I happen to finish or semi-finish.

I did add a shiny Golbat to the sparklies page, though, so if you want one then go ahead and make me an offer.

Most of my dcNET design time has actually been focused on the other sites that will eventually be a part of the network, which means that this one's been left alone for a while. I haven't forgotten about it, certainly; I've just been preoccupied. Hey, it's still progress, right?

Anyway, what I'm actually here to say is that I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, which started today, and since I actually intend to finish it this year I will not be able to update the site for the month of November. The upshot of this is that, should I actually finish the story I'm writing, I will be able to post it in the Fanfiction section here. So... consider the NaNo progress a bunch of updates to the site that are just a little delayed. Or something. And wish me luck!

So I don't leave my two semi-regular visitors hanging completely, however, I have added some more pictures to the Fanart page, two of which are actually *gasp* recent! I added another section to that page for artwork I've drawn for other people: requests, gifts, stuff like that. So, uh, go look at it, and be envious of the people who were lucky enough to get artwork by moi! But look at it slowly, so it'll last you until December. Cool? Cool.

That's right, viewership that consists only of myself and maybe two other random people! I actually added stuff to make some of the emptier pages less... empty!

Firstly, I actually dug up some short Pokémon fanfics and added them to the Fiction section. They suck, but I'm kind of beyond the point where I care. THE FANFIC PAGE IS NO LONGER DEVOID OF LIFE SO THERE.

Secondly, I threw together one of those Advice Sheet majiggers. I had actually drawn a whole lot before but needed to redo them; this is the first one that's finished enough for display. After you've read this advicething I never want to see you draw an animal with sticks for legs ever again. EVER.

Oh and also it looks like I got the styleswitcher to work *knock on wood*. Haven't fixed any of the styles yet but now at least the site will remember whether you wanted to look at dcNET in garish red and white or weird black and gray!

On a more annoying note, the TCoD forums asploded and the person in charge of ASB, Negrek, told me that chances are the ASB league will be restarted. This means nothing to any of you but to me (and I'm the only one who matters, remember?) it means that most, if not all, of the beautiful Pokeymans you can see on the Mah ASB Pokeymans page are going to have to go away D: But I'm leaving the page up until I know what's going to happen for sure, so bleah.

And it's really late (early) and I should be sleeping now so good night and go away.