Hello!

If you know me you will know that I like Pokémon a lot; just ask my daughter Eevee (kidding.) And you will also know that I enjoy doing silly things with computers. And last year I got into adding ASCII art to PowerShell Modules what I’ve written, and one piece of art was adding an ASCII forme of Aegislash to PoshSSDTBuildDeploy. I sourced the image from this amazing python module.

However, the module on pypi little out of date, and did not include Generations 7 or 8. But because this module is awesome there is an option to rebuild the database, and so all was going to be well in the world. That is until I found out that the website that the base images are downloaded from had gone through a re-design, breaking the make_db function! So back in December I made a start on updating the script. I thought it would take a day or so, but come to find out that the re-design of the website was more than I realised, and so after a day of wrangling I put it aside and did not get round to returning to it until last week. Thankfully I managed to complete the changes within the time I estimated (a first), and so I opened a PR on the original repo and got it merged in. So now not only is the make_db script fixed, it is also updated to Python 3, and the module on pypi includes all 890 Pokémon!

Look! An Impidimp!

There is though, one final challenge; a growing number of Pokémon have alternate formes: be they mega evolution, regional formes, or inhabiting household appliances, these formes have distinct stats and appearances. And so work is currently in progress to get those available via the module, and then pretty soon everyone will be able to have all the formes, but for now, seeing as it is Spring here in England, here’s a sneak preview of Mow Rotom in ASCII.