The Quest for the Legends

Okay, so as I said in the Quest Blog recently, the lack of forum activity makes me saaaad. You know best what would make you more active here, so, well, what do you think could be done about it?

My observations on the subject:
- I believe the forum largely died with the "Your Own Fanfiction" forum, or at least I got the impression that that forum was fairly active before the forum crash. So where are all the fics?
- At some point somebody suggested some sort of a forum RPG - how many of you would be interested in that sort of thing?
- Would you be more active if there were a forum for general discussion unrelated to fanfiction?


Any thoughts?

Theoretically, yes, but I'm probably too lazy to ever actually do it.

I have a different team on each of my Pokémon games, and after finishing the game, I generally start training up more Pokémon that I like (either aesthetically or just because I enjoy using them). Right now my Diamond "team" rotates between Infernape, Staraptor, Luxray, Roserade, Gastrodon, Scyther, Butterfree, Jolteon, Leafeon, Espeon, Charizard and Lucario, though I possibly forgot one.

opaltiger is the guy who made the second post on this page of this very thread. :P He's male and his name is not capitalized, by the way. Notable among my Internet friends because he visited me in real life last summer.

The reason I have the Chaletwo and Chalenor stylesheets is that they are light and dark, allowing the user a preference of whether they like to read light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background. Other stylesheets would not actually fit in and serve rather little of a purpose.

On here I always use Chaletwo style, but the style I use on the main site varies. Often I just use the default style, unless it's something I really don't like, in which case I generally switch to Roar of Time, Torkoal Lava or Articuno Snowflake depending on my mood at the time.

Lastly, I seem to remeber someone stealing your sprites (you had it on your FAQ at one point) and when I went there, all the pictures were taken out. I know its a little late to be asking this now since this question is a bit outdated, but did you hack them?

…what? No. o_O

You'll never get new sections by modifying the URL here, because there is an actual script that handles returning the right page, and I don't update that script until I actually put up the new pages for real.

Not specifically to make it impossible to see sections-in-progress; it's just because of the way the minipage is made.

The Marquee of Doom is an original script, so you can make one by learning Javascript. :P

Oh, and I figured that Tyranitar was a bit like 'Longshot' form the Avatar series. So I thought I would confirm that.

Heh. No, Tyranitar is nothing like Longshot.

Are you still working on the new Dragon styles?

Funny you should ask, since I'm in the middle of making the Polaryu sprite trace that's going on its style as we speak.

Speaking of Taylor, I just went and modified his bio a little. Mostly I added a paragraph on his participation in the League, but I also tweaked a lot of the rest to be clearer and less repetitive.

Well, they're not exactly main characters - seeing as right now Leah has appeared in one chapter and the others haven't appeared at all, it would be a bit odd to make bios for them, wouldn't it? But perhaps they'll play a bio-warranting role later on, hmm? :P

Will suicune and enteis ressurection be put in the fic.

Always with those questions making unwarranted assumptions! Who says Suicune and Entei ever get resurrected in the first place? Who says it will happen before the end of the fic? You can't assume like that and I can't answer it without thus spoiling those details.

Sorry for the downtime. To make up for it, you get two new Scyther spin-off bios, Nightmare's and Stalker's. Of course, Nightmare's is half about Razor and Stalker's is half about Shadowdart, but shush.

Yes, I know I'm not doing it in the correct order, too. I've just been itching to write Stalker's bio for a while.

I get off my lazy butt and use the random-Pokémon spam verification instead of the cheap "Type 'Chalenor' into this box" that I've been using so far purely because it seemed to be adequate? With spambots getting smarter, I always expected them to figure it out eventually. It's an easy fix; the comment system is pretty much the same thing as the guestbook on the main site with minor modification, and the guestbook already has random-Pokémon verification.

EDIT: Wait, whut. Was there no spam verification on the chapter commenting to begin with? Silly me. No wonder they got in.

EDIT2: …wait, I think I accidentally deleted a non-spambot comment or two. Damn it.

One thing I've been toying with the thought of making for a while, either as extras to appropriate chapters or as a section on this minipage, is a series of articles detailing in-depth how some aspects of this fic's world work. Possible subjects could for instance be souls, the Destroyer's power draining, Chaletwo's physical anchor to Mark's brain, perhaps something about the Scyther swarm, even little stuff like the League system, or some reader-suggested topic, if you're curious about something in particular.

Obviously all significant information in such articles would also be revealed within the text of the fic, but less important tidbits that have no place in the story could be brought to light there, and perhaps some information that will only be revealed later in the story might come up. Besides that over the course of a 76-chapter fic, some information inevitably ends up kind of scattered, and collecting everything about some set subjects in one place might help readers keep track of it (and, in the case of less fundamental stuff, stop me from contradicting myself in the future).

Would you be interested in this sort of thing? What sorts of subjects would you like to see written about?

The chapter is nearly done, I swear. It's just hard to get it to end and I need to be getting to bed since my first day of work is tomorrow.

On the other hand, to practice my AJAX and jQuery skills for said job, I went and randomly made inline editing of posts possible here on the forums. If you click the Edit link on one of your own posts and have Javascript enabled, the post will turn into a textarea and you can edit it right there instead of having to load a new page. Of course, if you don't have Javascript enabled, it'll just take you to the old edit post page and that should work exactly like it used to.

(The coding of this forum is really messy. I kind of want to redo it, or at least reorganize it. But I have better things to do first.)

I also rewrote the About section because I needed to update the age of the fic anyway and then I just felt like it.

EDIT: This is an edit done with the new inline editing thing. Whoo.

Oh, yeah, and feedback on that would be very much appreciated, especially if it's buggy or something.

ANOTHER EDIT: Fixed the BBCode parsing on the blog, which caused line breaks not to be parsed correctly in a post that had been edited inline.

So here it is, that Spirit spin-off one-shot. Nothing spectacular; it's just a brief account of baby Spirit's testing, plus a little bit of seven-year-old May and her father.

I've also finished tagging all my relevant posts in the Quest for the Legends forum as well as some of the Quest Blog forum. I'm thinking about organizing the tags somehow, maybe splitting them into character tags, other fic-related tags and unrelated tags or something like that, to make the searching easier to do.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but I randomly decided that in addition to how far into the next chapter I am, I'm going to have a quote from what I've written so far in my signature. With this, I also decided that it's about time I allowed blog browsers to see that stuff without finding my posts at the forums, so my signature is now displayed on Quest Blog posts.

EDIT: On second thought, I put the signature on the main blog page at the top instead. Seemed kind of redundant to have the same signature showing below every post on the page.

This minipage isn't actually coded with includes, and with the large number of pages that would have to be converted and added to the system it has going on, it would be a bit inconvenient. Plus, it would seem to give them a more 'official'-looking status, which I don't really want.

In one of my ever-classic moments of working on everything except what people actually want me to be working on, I randomly made the Goofs and Inconsistencies page I mentioned off-handedly a while ago that I wanted to make. Hopefully it will amuse some of you.

If you remember more goofs that I didn't just fix, by all means point them out.

Yes, I've been writing the chapter too. I know progress is slow, but I've had work and friends taking up a lot of my time.

I went and put up the Power article under the new Worldbuilding Articles section. I ended up not capitalizing it, because it just bugged me, and reworded some other stuff. Again, if you have suggestions for stuff that ought to be touched on, speak up.

(If you missed it, chapter 55 is up.)

I've updated the character bios for all three of the kids. The most interesting one is Alan, who has a bit in his character ramble now about the reasons for his departure.

Do you have some sort of counter that tells you how many people have read your fic?

No. Best I can do is FanFiction.Net stats.

So you know chapter 57? The thing I haven't been talking about or making any real headway with for a couple of months?

Basically, I've been having something of a confidence crisis recently, realizing suddenly that this chapter is going to be awful and the whole chapter plan sucks and I can't write and so on. And it didn't help that I was stuck on a really stupid part of the chapter, one of those places where I need a transition from thing A to thing B and it just can't seem to work out in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous. So I haven't been getting a lot of writing done.

Well, the other day I realized it was almost June, and since the fic's ninth anniversary is on the nineteenth of June, I should probably hurry up with the chapter to try to get it out on TQftL's birthday. At first this resulted in about two new sentences of the chapter, which I promptly deleted after deciding they were awkward. Then earlier I got past that annoying little part and started writing again, and then all of a sudden the characters swooped in to the rescue by suddenly making the chapter interesting! I love it when that happens. (Oh, Chaletwo, in my Morphic-extra-writing spree I'd almost forgotten how much I utterly love you and all the new things I keep discovering about you.)

It's still a sort of a talky in-between chapter, but at least I like it a lot more now and don't feel like I'm a horrible writer making a chapter out of uninteresting chatter anymore, so I expect this time I will actually be able to find the motivation to finish it. If everything goes according to plan, you only have two weeks to wait now. Look forward to it.

Oh, and somebody a while ago suggested I should make some sort of a plot recap thing, so I've been drafting up a page that would go on the minipage somewhere containing a basic summary of both the main plot and the current status of that and the ongoing subplots, so as to make it easier for readers to refresh their memories on what's going on after a long wait between chapters. This would be updated every time there is a chapter update to feature information as of the chapter before the latest one, so as to allow you to read/skim it before you read the new chapter. Sound good?

So here's a plot recap page, covering chapters 1-55 of the ILCOE. Once chapter 57 is put up, it will be updated with stuff from chapter 56 and so on, ensuring that the page will never contain spoilers for the latest chapter (so that you can use it to refresh your memory before you read a new chapter).

Tell me if you think something worth mentioning is missing. This is just off the top of my head. Also if the organization is way confusing. It's hard to tell.