iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 05/05/2026

www.dragonflycave.com/update/05-04... The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has a default gender setting (2000% more of a headache than you think) and the options have been organized a bit.

dragonflycave.com

05/04/26: Gendered Favorites

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 09/04/2026

Two more Favorite Pokémon Picker options have been added: you can now include or exclude e.g. legendaries, and you can have forms count as the base Pokémon's generation. www.dragonflycave.com/update/04-08...

dragonflycave.com

04/08/26: Still More

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:...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/04/2026

Since the Pokémon Home artwork is finally out, the new Z-A mega forms have now been added to the Favorite Pokémon Picker. www.dragonflycave.com/update/04-03...

dragonflycave.com

04/03/26: Z-A Favorites

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 01/04/2026

Due to the many changes in my life recently, I have made a pivot towards a new niche going forward - mommy blogging 🥰🙏 www.dragonflycave.com/update/03-31...

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Johto Times @johtotimes.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 09/12/2025

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).

dragonflycave.com

12/09/25: URLs and Guide Rewrites

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 21/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 20/11/2025

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.

dragonflycave.com

11/20/25: Technical Upgrade

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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!

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

(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.)

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

Random musings sparked by going through all my pages for the anniversary update:

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 03/11/2025

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.

dragonflycave.com

11/02/25: Twenty-Three Years

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 02/04/2025

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...

dragonflycave.com

04/02/25: Back to Normal

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...

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 28/03/2025

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.

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As The Pokeball Turns @asthepokeballturns.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

🦋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

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 14/03/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 11/03/2025

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.

dragonflycave.com

When Rumours Come True: The Mew Trick

A deep dive on the Mew trick, its history, how it works, and why it circulated for close to eleven months if not more before it properly made waves in the Pokémon community.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 23/02/2025

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.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 23/02/2025

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…

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 23/02/2025

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?

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 23/02/2025

Lots of people use the picker with filters like final evolutions only, while others don’t - what’s a fair and reasonable way to aggregate that data together? Just giving points to Pokémon that are on someone’s favorite list won’t cut it - then final evolutions have an advantage.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 23/02/2025

There is no data; the Favorite Pokémon Picker only stores your picks locally on your own computer. I could change this but I don’t suuuper want to. One problem is we don’t really know what criteria any given person is actually using - maybe someone is using it to pick their least favorites.

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The Cave of Dragonflies @dragonflycave.com · 16/11/2024

Hello, Bluesky! Follow this account for updates to The Cave of Dragonflies. What sort of thing does this website contain? Here is an article about how I had a glitched Jolteon back in 2003 and how I found out exactly what was wrong with him two decades later. www.dragonflycave.com/kanto/my-gli...

dragonflycave.com

My Glitched Jolteon

Part reminiscence, part game mechanics deep dive, about a harmlessly strange Jolteon deleted in 2003 and the effort to uncover what was going on with him two decades later.

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