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.

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.

Aha, and you thought dcNET was dead. I fooled all three of you, didn't I? ;)

Long update is long but read it anyway.

Yes, well, I posted that update back in July promising to add at least some stuff that night... and I didn't, because by then the site as a whole was annoying me to the point where I didn't see any reason to update that version of it. Most of it was actually the mess the layouts were in, but other little bits and pieces were bugging me and there were a few new things I wanted to try.

Thus the revamped dcNET you now see before you. I worked on it on and off for those two months and finally came up with something I am semi-satisfied with. Not that I'm ever fully satisfied with anything I do. The layouts, which were previously heavily and poorly modified versions of a free skeleton layout I found, have been redone completely from scratch (except for the drop-down menus, which are modified versions of Stu Nichols's CSS-play dropdowns) and are now 100% valid CSS and XHTML Strict. None of you care about this, of course, but I do because I'm studying web design in school and I feel like valid and compliant layouts are something I should be striving for. They're simple and quite possibly boring and ugly, but they'll do for now and at least the Blaziken layout is no longer eye-hurtingly godawful.

Most of the content so far is the same as it was before–I've removed some of the old fanart pics because they were effing huge, and I may or may not put them back up, but at least when I do they will have been reduced to a reasonable size. There are a few new pictures (and a few new-old pictures) in their place, though. I've also finally gotten around to writing up some of that "miscellaneous fancontent" I never know what to call, and that's probably the biggest and most impressive addition. Currently the only articlething is an "Animé-Style Battling for Dummies" type of thing that I will keep adding to and revising, so if you've ever thought about joining your forum's ASB league you might want to check it out.

Um, what else... there are some free Pokémon images in the new "Free Stuff" section up there, so you can go use those for whatever. I'll probably revamp some of them, but later. I've also gotten a new ASB team following the TCoD forum explosion back in June, so if you're one of those people with no life and you actually found the ASB team page semi-interesting you can go see that. The old page is currently in hiding, but I may put it back up (with moar valid code this time) for nostalgic purposes eventually. Oh, and I've rewritten/revised the About Me/About dcNET pages. Got a more reliable styleswitcher, too. At least, I hope so. God but those things hate me.

Last but not least, I've linked to a few of my other internets thingamabobbies over to your right. Eventually I'll have some actual project websites up there, but for now it's just my dA, my LJ sketchblog and another LJ I set up as a blog for the Platinum version I got the other day. Why watch a boring YouTube playthrough with sound and video when you can read a sarcastic diary-review-rant-blog?! Yeah!!! but um yeah it's there if you want my opinions on stuff in the game and such. It's pretty cool so far.

That's pretty much everything. So, uh, look around, enjoy stuff (yeah, right), suggest stuff... whatever. It's late and I need to go to bed because I have work tomorrow. Today. Um. Yeah it's late.

Phoenix out.

...which I suppose a few do, given that I super-subtly showed people the zodiac images...

Anyway. New to-do list.

1. Kill the stupid index page and replace it with this one (which isn't stupid in any way, oh, no.) (done)
2. Kill the Ingame Pokémon page, at least until I can find a way to make it more interesting. (done)
3. Kill the layouts. Seriously. Especially that stupid Blaziken one, which looks terrible and is in need of major revampage. Okay, maybe not "kill"; I haven't made up my mind about that just yet. But the Blaziken needs major plastic surgery LIEK NAOW. And Houndoom sort of.
4. Maybe find out why the layouts suck in IE 5.5. Not that anyone really cares about IE 5.5 (AND IF THEY DO THEN THEY SHOULDN'T)
5. Update my team roster for ASB (re: Frumious Bandersnatch the M stunky, Schrödinger the F meowth, Dionaea the F bulbasaur, Macronaria the F Chikorita, Gondwana the F Mudkip and Lilith's sig move, Samiel). (done)
6. Find a better styleswitcher. Seriously. (partially done; found one on PokeNova and will try that one) (screw PokeNova's; trying A List Apart's again. Works so far, but we'll see if it remembers the cookies better than About.com's.)
7. Um no wait I think that's everything for now.