You know, in the old days, having “followers” was a big deal. It meant someone was willing to pick up all their stuff and literally follow you around, listening to your wisdom and carrying out your whims. There was also the other kind of follower, which was the kind of person who followed you from a distance while wearing concealing robes, blending into crowds and ducking out of sight every time you turned around – but you often didn’t know about those until it was too late. If you had the good kind, it meant you’d really made it (come to think of it, if you had the bad kind it often meant you’d made it as well, but not always for the reasons you might have hoped). Today any old schmuck can get a dozen of the things. You need to have a few more than that before you can claim to have done anything interesting.
Tumblr tells me I now have three hundred followers. I have successfully conned three hundred people into listening to my awful bulls#!t on a semi-regular basis! I am genuinely surprised to learn that there are that many people in the world. That is probably more people than I would be able to feed if you all came to my apartment (please don’t do that as I doubt you would fit and also I don’t own a couch). And that’s just the people with Tumblr accounts – the vast majority of the questions I receive are anonymous, so it’s possible there are a lot more of you; I don’t really know. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not very influential in the grand scheme of things but considering that I originally started this blog basically for the amusement of my friends, many of whom don’t even play Pokémon, I think that’s pretty good, don’t you?
I am certain that if my mentors in the classics department were aware of my double life, they would immediately kick me out and ship me back to New Zealand for the audacity of drawing self-worth from anything other than research. However, I had an odd realisation the other day: that the questions I answer for my readers are far more numerous and often more difficult than the ones I answer for my students. I think I may actually be making a greater contribution to society by nattering about Pokémon on the internet than I am as a PhD candidate (being an academic, of course, is not a real job – it’s a demanding hobby which you sometimes get paid for). So, you know, I think I’m going to keep doing it. After all, three hundred people on the internet can’t be wrong!
Pokémaniacal 