Hisuian Travel Log: Would Recommend
April 04, 2022
Okay a bit of housekeeping before the normal comic blog posty thing. My website is starting to fall apart. Various things in the website that I've been doing for years have suddenly stopped working, and honestly I don't know how to fix them. I am not a very strong coder, a friend of mine made the base code that the website works off of like eight years ago, and I barely know how it works, all I knew was that it worked, and should theoretically continue to work. Well it doesn't anymore, and in weird ways. Like for some reason the blog posts aren't posting correctly. For some reason the program I have used to write my blog posts for years no longer knows what a fuck apostrophe is and replaces all instances of apostrophes with the "I don't know that the fuck this letter is," glyph. It also doe that same thing with quatation marks which had the cool bonus of turning link code I've been lazily copy and pasting for years now throwback errors. So if you've noticed those, that's why. Thankfully I found a work around for apostrophes and quatation marks. I think it has something to do with a communication error between the program I use to type out the posts, and the program I use to post the blog post only using "neutral" apostrophes, as opposed to "opening and closing" apostrophes. I don't know why it doesn't recognise what to do with apostrophes anymore. The only way I've figured out how to get them to post correctly is to go through the blog post in the program I use to post with and manually replace all the apostrophes. However I have found no workaround for special letters, which is really awesome seeing that this comic is about Pokémon and uses copious amounts of an e with an accent mark.
All of that I figured I could just deal with, but now the archive is broken. I don't know why the archive is broken. At first I thought I fucked up the code when I updated it to have a page for 2022, like I did for 2021, and 2020, and 2019, and so on and so forth. The reason why I haven't posted a comic in two weeks is because I've been trying to troubleshoot this to no avail. Even regressing the code back to the state before I attempted to update it for 2022 yields the same error, leading me to believe the code is broken in a way I am not equipped to fix. I don't know, maybe code just can't be expected to be forwards compatible as html, css, and php standards slowly change overtime. Or maybe I'm completely wrong about that too. As I said, I'm not a strong coder. All I know is it's borked, and I don't know how to fix it.
Anywho Chris, my friend who maintains the webspace I use, and is a MUCH more affluent coder than I could ever hope to be, floated the idea a few months ago that I convert the website to a wordpress. In light of everything that's happening now, perhaps it's time to do that. Unfortunately at present I have no idea how to do that, and can only assume it'll be a lengthy task of copy/pasting nearly a thousand comics and blog posts into a new format. Quite frankly the prospect of that has me a bit overwhelmed to the point that I'm hesitant to do anything, but I have to do something, I literally have a dozen comics made, and ready to be posted that are growing less and less relevant as I waffle with what to do.
Well, that's where I am right now. Enough procrastinating. I'm just going to post the comics I have made and will figure out the archive issue later.
Pokémon Legends Arceus is hands down the most innovative Pokémon game in what seems like twenty years. Pokémon has always been a safe formulaic game series, some might say to its detriment. For eight generations they've essentially been making the same game with a few incremental changes. Adding a new feature here or there, like adding new types to help balance the meta, changing the way damage is calculated so that more Pokémon would be competitively viable, fixing numerous programming errors that made several planned mechanics strait out not work, and made psychic type Pokémon nigh unstoppable Gods. But also confusingly removing features here and there, like Mega Evolution, seasons, and adding a day/night cycle, then removing the day/night cycle, then adding back the day/night cycle. Legends Arceus changes so much of the Pokémon formula for the better that I here, a 37 year old man who has bought every single Pokémon game since Red and Blue, say if they do not implement these changes into the upcoming ninth generation, Nintendo and Game Freak clearly do not know what they're fans want. No more random battles. All Pokémon appear on the open world map, battles are initiated by physically throwing a Poké Ball at your target, be it for capture, or to battle it with a Pokémon of your own. No more battle transitions. The fights take place live on the same map. No more Name Raters, or Move Tutors. You can rename your Pokémon at any time from the party menu, as well as change out their move set at any time. You could change their moves out after every battle if you want. If these changes are carried over to Scarlet and Violet they're not doing their job right!
We also have a Patreon I've also been neglecting. If you click on the link and give me a dollar you can see a comic that took me over a week to make, a week early, or maybe a month early. Who's to say if my lazy ass will get back to a normal posting rhythm.