@dragonflycave.com
Official Bluesky account for The Cave of Dragonflies, a Pokémon website featuring game mechanics, catch rate calculators, personality tests, movie reviews, articles, fanfiction and more. Owned by @antialiasis.dragonflycave.com.
The Cave of Dragonflies logo, featuring Butterfree Text reads: The Cave of Dragonflies Where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons
Our second AMA is now live on the Johto Times Community Forum!
This time around, our guest is Dragonfree from The Cave of Dragonflies! We look forward to your questions here:
forum.johtotimes.com/d/180-ama-wi...
The annual New Year's update is up. www.dragonflycave.com/update/01-02...
www.dragonflycave.com/update/12-09... TCoD's URLs are now a bit nicer and more consistent, and I accidentally rewrote a couple of guides (most importantly, the reviewing guide).
Updates are always nice for security, but mainly it was just that it was stuck on old tech - sort of like if you’d been stuck with a really old car, which still works but lacks features and conveniences and it’s much harder to find stuff that’s compatible with it.
www.dragonflycave.com/update/11-20... The site is now finally running on Python 3 instead of 2.7. Ideally this means nothing you would notice, but I feel a lot better now.
www.dragonflycave.com/update/11-12... I've made some smaller updates, most prominently to the Hangman and Number Game.
Finally: why did I never just bring the Pokémon Hangman into the site layout proper. It doesn't even really have the nostalgia thing going for it because I did redo the look of it at some stage; I just redid it still as a standalone page for some reason. I should do that.
I just do not have that degree of investment in Pokémon Go, and eventually basically stopped playing it. For a long time I vaguely meant to get around to updating it all but put it off because of all the work I'd have to redo. I guess I feel better having just put the final nail in that coffin.
Writing guides for a regular game makes sense: people might pick up that game at any point in the future and whatever you wrote still makes sense. For a live-service game, you'd have to stay invested and keep redoing it every time the developer decides to change stuff around.
I had really, really forgotten just how long and comprehensive my Pokémon Go guide was. I'd forgotten half the mechanics I meticulously explained there, even. In hindsight it's a bit painful that I spent so much effort on it for a game that would inevitably go change those mechanics later.
Then I started to hit my stride with it in 2009 (Blue Rescue Team, Explorers of Time, Shadows of Almia), though with some lingering awkwardness, and by 2012's Conquest review I've started producing something I can basically read today and nod along with. It's fun to watch myself improve!
I enjoyed rereading all the game reviews I've done. The oldest, for Pokémon Colosseum, is from 2005, and I was very obviously fifteen and did not really know how to review things. Trozei (2006) and Ranger (2008) are getting better but still a bit awkwardly written and rambly.
I guess the secondary motivation for keeping that page was to not completely retire *all* the TRUTH pages, which were important to the site's identity when I first started it - I was very invested in debunking other sites that were wrong on the internet.
(Originally I had these TRUTH pages for each generation, briefly debunking misinformation I'd seen going around. I kept the R/S/E one at the time because people were still saying Shedinja needed a ball in your bag, but both of the other rumours on there are just completely unheard of today.)
I retired some but not all of my original game pages for the first three generations in 2005. Today I'm not sure why I removed the G/S/C Tips and Tricks instead of just making rewrites, and think I should probably not have retained the "TRUTH of R/S/E" page.
Random musings sparked by going through all my pages for the anniversary update:
www.dragonflycave.com/update/11-02... The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty-three years old today, and to celebrate I went and added some related pages to the bottom of every page within the layout - picked by hand for each one, because I am slightly mad.
I've added some more extra angsty Morphic drabbles! www.dragonflycave.com/update/08-24...
I've made some fixes and adjustments to the capture calculators. www.dragonflycave.com/update/07-30...
www.dragonflycave.com/update/04-21... Boring meta update: I've made a number of updates and improvements to the commenting feature on the site.
Hope you all enjoyed this year's April Fools' Day joke! I've now added a writeup to the joke archive, while the 131,500 words of new content will remain accessible (though off the menu). www.dragonflycave.com/update/04-02...
Yes
Today, The Cave of Dragonflies substantially expands its subject matter! www.dragonflycave.com/update/03-31...
And if you're interested, I was also interviewed for a second podcast released today, Synthesized Sunsets. The podcast is about speculative fiction, and that discussion centered more on Pokémon fandom and fanfic, but also touched upon the website a bit.
🦋Join us as we interview the webmaster of @dragonflycave.com.
🐉 From her journey with Pokémon Yellow to building a fan site that’s lasted 25 years, this episode is a must-listen!
🎧Tune in now on your favorite podcast app or here:
bit.ly/ATPT144
#MyPKMNStory #Pokemon
Just finally got around to setting up the site's Bluesky handle being the site's actual domain, which I should have done a while ago. Hope this doesn't break anything.
www.dragonflycave.com/essays/the-m... I have completely revamped the old Mew trick thought into a new 9000-word deep dive essay into the history, context and inner workings of a truly miraculous glitch.
All in all, it’d kind of be a whole can of worms. I won’t say I’ll never do it, probably the best way if I were going to would be to log the full picker state each time we successfully pick a favorite and work with the individual eliminations, but I suspect it’d be an all-around headache.
Probably, in theory, the hypothetical data would still basically average out to roughly representing what Pokémon are most favored, because most people will probably be using it that way. But then we also open it up to people wanting to game the stats…
Likewise, maybe someone is doing something I’ve actively suggested to people - if they want to pick between a custom subset of Pokémon, use split mode and pick the Pokémon that should be included in the first round, then pick between them. How do we tell if a person is doing that?