Updates for The Cave of Dragonflies.
So the other day Altissimo asked me about confirming some mechanics in the disassembly of the HG/SS Pokéwalker accessory, and I was promptly nerdsniped. I've now put up a new article about the Pokéwalker's battle mechanics, fully explaining how the Pokéwalker's simplified battle system works and how to optimally strategize for the best possible chance of catching the Pokémon in the end. It has a…
Just a bit more Favorite Pokémon Picker. After the last update, Torch commented suggesting the ability to choose whether to use male or female as the default gender when gender differences are not included. This sounded like a neat simple thing, and would address something that'd been kind of bugging me too about treating the male as the default, so I started doing it... and then immediately…
And I'm not done! A couple more Favorite Pokémon Picker options have been added, since I'm on a roll. First, another very common feature request: you can now individually include or exclude regular Pokémon, legendaries, mythicals, Ultra Beasts, or Paradox Pokémon. Let me know if I accidentally miscategorized anything; I did this manually, and according to how they're categorized on Bulbapedia…
How about that update streak, huh? The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has an option to include shiny Pokémon as separate Pokémon. This has been a common feature request, mainly stopped by the technical aspect of how doubling the number of Pokémon would be problematic for the shortcodes used in the shareable list links. I have now made a change to the shortcode parsing, so that if xx is a given…
It is now possible to include or exclude base Pokémon under the 'Include forms' setting in the Favorite Pokémon Picker. This makes it possible to, for instance, use the picker to select your favorites from all the Mega Evolutions without also seeing all the Pokémon from the sixth generation – something I imagine many people might want to do right now. If you have a saved state, it should…
Since Pokémon Home has finally added compatibility with Legends: Z-A and given us official artwork of both the normal and shiny versions of the new Mega Evolutions introduced in the game, I have now duly added them to the Favorite Pokémon Picker as well. Since I originally added the Pokémon introduced in Legends: Arceus as its own halfway 'generation', I did the same here for consistency. What…
Glad you all enjoyed yesterday's April Fools' Day joke. I have now undone the style override and added a bit of a writeup on it to the April Fools' Day joke archive, as well as adding the style made for the occasion to the style switcher page. For good measure, I also fixed the issue where a couple of the Caterpie illustrations on the actual 'post' came out awkward on mobile – the text will now…
My life changed completely when my little one was born. Motherhood alters you permanently; my daughter gave me many sleepless nights, but she also gave me a new kind of joy and love – life's greatest test and greatest fulfillment. From now on, follow me on my journey for the adventure of a lifetime as I strive to raise my little sweet pea with all the love, attention, and experience that she needs…
A minor update: I have been making some tweaks and additions to the affiliation requirements. In particular: I now explicitly reserve the right to reject websites with obviously AI-generated content out of hand. I kind of hate to have to set rules about this at all, but it is what it is. I've updated the section on how affiliates get removed (and extracted it into its own subsection on the page).…
Happy 2026, everyone! It's likely to be a big year ahead for Pokémon, what with the franchise's 30th anniversary in February; I'm looking forward to whatever we're getting. 2025 has been a pretty big year for me, from Pokémon Sleep legitimately improving my sleep schedule to publishing my first non-Pokémon fanfic to visiting Japan to having an actual child. Updates on the site were a bit on the…
Another kind of technical upgrade: something that has been bugging me for a little while now is that the site's URLs since I rewrote the backend in Python in 2016 have been a little nonstandard. The FAQ, for example, was at https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq, but if you went to https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq/ - which is a more common way for URLs to look if they don't end in a file extension -…
I've just done a long-overdue Python upgrade for the site, which also came with upgrading various libraries and so on. I believe I tested most everything reasonably thoroughly and everything ought to be working like it did before, but it's entirely possible I missed some edge case somewhere, so let me know if anything seems off or if you get any strange errors anywhere. I also fixed a couple of…
I've made some smaller updates, some already pushed to the site at some point since the anniversary update: The Pokémon Hangman, a game of great sentimental value to me ever since my dad helped me make it as my first introduction to JavaScript back in 2002, was always kind of randomly a standalone static page, which meant it arbitrarily stuck out, did not adapt to your chosen style, and also…
Time for feasting and glee now that you're twenty-three. Happy birthday, dear website! You're so important to me. The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty-three years old today! It's been a very eventful year for me (I have a non-website kid now), but I still managed to make time to get the Mew trick essay out the door, which is one of my favorite things I've ever made for this site, so I'll count that…
I've put up another little Morphic extra, another set of three hurt/comfort-themed prompt bingo fills. As the theming suggests, they're all very angsty.
I've made a couple of adjustments/fixes to the various capture calculators: Previously, there was a bug which meant if you had the 'Show all' option selected in the ball field, then setting your Pokémon would populate the 'Pokémon's form' dropdown with the forms of that Pokémon instead of the forms of the Pokémon you're trying to catch, which would in turn cause problems if the Pokémon you were…
The Mew trick essay got its 21st comment a couple of days ago (from TheScythe!), and this ended up prompting me to make a number of updates to the commenting feature and thus the guestbook and update comments as well: I've fixed a bug where the previously unseen second page link for page comments would actually go to the second page of the guestbook, not the second page of comments on this page.…
Hope you all enjoyed this year's April Fools' Day joke! I have now added a writeup to the joke archive and reset the changes back to normal – but the actual content remains online for archival purposes, because why not; you can still access it all here. All in all, I added more than a novel's worth of text to the site for this joke – all legitimate content originally written for my personal Tumblr…
Welcome to the new, expanded Cave of Dragonflies! I've been thinking lately about how, well, Pokémon is still one of my passions, but so are many other things, and when I spend a lot of time making stuff that's not about Pokémon, the website languishes a bit in the meantime. So really, the sensible thing to do here is to expand the website to cover all the other stuff I make! So, The Cave of…
Hello, all! I have finally, finally finished what I've been doing for the past few months, namely writing up a new incredibly lengthy essay on the Mew trick. It essentially expands massively upon the old, slightly aimless thought on the Mew trick that I've had on the site since 2005, borrowing material from some Tumblr posts I made last year but also fleshing it all out further into a deep dive…