I submitted a thing to another thing

The premise of this blog is taking quotes from pop culture and tweaking them slightly so that they apply to characters from Homer’s Iliad (recently expanded to anything ‘classical’). It amuses me. You should totally follow it. Y’know, if you’re a classicist. The following is something that I actually wrote months ago and had hanging around uselessly until I discovered “OMG there is a Tumblr blog that is literally all about doing this.”

incorrectclassics:

H’okay, so, here’s the Aegean. S’chilling. ”Dang, that is a sweet sea,” you might say. WRONG! All right; ruling out the Hittites invading, a huge barbarian horde becoming crashed into us, the gods leaving, and Thera exploding, we’re definitely all going to stab each other. H’okay. So basically we’ve got Troy, Crete, Lydia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Thrace, the Amazons and us with demigods. We’ve got about twenty-six hundred more than anybody else… whatever. H’anyway. One day we decides those Trojan sons of a bitches are going down, so we launch a thousand ships at Troy. While they’re on their way, Troy is like “shit, shit, who the fuck brought Helen here?” “Oh well, Hector will save us!” Then Helen is like “shit, Paris, that’s my husband; he’s coming! Fire our shit!” ”But I’m tired.” ”Well… have a nap. THEN FIRE YOUR ARROWS!” Meanwhile, Italy is over there like “mamma mia, WTF?” Lydia, Ethiopia and the Amazons send their guys, so now we’ve got heroes charging everywhere, passing each other. Achilles is like “PATROCLUS, NOOOOOOOOO!” Then Hector’s like “well, I’m dead. Better get on with it.” So now Greece is like “fuck, we’re dumbasses,” Philoctetes is like “wait, what the hell did I miss?” Italy is still like “mamma mia, WTF?” China is laughing at us, and some huge barbarian horde is like “well, fuck that.” So. Now we’ve got the fall of Troy. Everyone’s dead, except Aeneas, and he’s like “mamma mia, WTF?” And they’ll be in charge one day. Fucking Romans. But, assuming we don’t all stab each other, us Ithacans just have to work out Ithaca drifting away from the rest of Greece. To go hang with Scheria. Cyprus can come too.
– like, Homer or someone

Which is a reference to this, if you don’t recognise it.

Hawlucha

Right; I’m going to leave Carbink for now and do her with Diancie at the end, by which time I’ll hopefully be clearer on how they work, so that leaves only one Pokémon in the Coastal Kalos subregion: Hawlucha, the… lucha libre Pokémon… which is another one stricken from the list of phrases I never thought I would live to say. Game Freak are responsible for a disconcerting number of those. Funnily enough, though, Hawlucha’s been making more and more sense the more time I spend on this entry, and may even be one of my favourites of this generation now, which I didn’t really expect. Let’s have a look.

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Helioptile and Heliolisk

Now that I think about it, it’s kind of strange that there aren’t really many Electric Pokémon based on real-world methods of electricity generation; for the most part they just conjure up electrical energy through – one presumes – a similar kind of biochemical process to that used by the electric eel, only turned up to eleven. Well, either that or magic. Let’s be honest; for at least some of them it’s probably magic.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Helioptile.

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Skrelp and Dragalge

I’ll be honest here; I’m not wild about these things. My first impression of Skrelp during my X playthrough was ‘so, it’s a diseased Horsea?’ and I’ve not really moved past that in any major way (the fact that Dragalge is equally, at first glance, ‘a diseased Kingdra’ didn’t exactly help). Nothing about them really offends me in any sense, but they’re not particularly ones for the ‘favourite’ pile either. Still, may as well see what we can turn up. Here we go.

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Anonymous asks:

Did you know that Chandelure’s Hidden Ability has been changed from Shadow Tag to Infiltrator? This opens up the possibility of other Pokémon to have one (or more) of their Abilities to be changed (at least, it sets a precedent)! Any specific Pokémon in mind whose Ability/(ies) you’d like to be changed?

Well, it’s worth pointing out that there has never been a Chandelure with Shadow Tag – Dream World Litwick were never released in generation V, and to my knowledge no AI opponent ever used one either, not even Ingo and Emmet, so they’re changing something that only ever existed in unused coding and our own fevered power fantasies anyway. I doubt this is an indication that they’re willing to start mucking around with existing abilities that are actually used in practice, and I wouldn’t call it a precedent for that. (EDIT: However, the fact that Scolipede’s was changed from Quick Feet to Speed Boost absolutely is. Derp. Doesn’t really change the rest of this answer anyway, though.) For the most part, abilities I’d want to see changed are the ones that are just insultingly bad, like Run Away, Keen Eye and Illuminate, and personally I would fix those by improving the ability itself (see e.g. Lightningrod and Storm Drain), not by changing which Pokémon received it. I can’t think of any off the top of my head that I would actually want to redistribute, though there are probably at least a couple out there.

Anonymous asks:

I was just playing Pokemon X, and my Bellossom’s Sleep Powder missed four times, which got me thinking: What if a low accuracy move’s accuracy goes higher (temporarily) when it misses? For example, I use Sleep Powder once, and it misses. It’s accuracy now goes from 75 to 85 (For Ex), so that it gives me (the user) a better chance at hitting, and gives missing something of a bonus. I mean, the Pokemon (Bellossom, in this case) should get the hang of it. Missing four times is kind of ridiculous.

Would you also implement the logical corollary – that moves become less accurate after a successful hit? After all, if you manage to hit three targets in a row with Focus Blast, your opponent is surely going to get the hang of dodging the damn things. In any luck-based system, things sometimes just don’t go our way, and that would still be the case with these revisions – your Bellossom could still miss three times in a row, and although it would happen much less often, that very fact would make it even more frustrating when it did. I don’t think it’d be a harmful change, but I’m not terribly enthused about it either.

Anonymous asks:

Just rereading your comments on Farfetch’d in the “worst pokemon” category, and I thought of how gen. VI boosted him somewhat with the changes to the critical hits mechanics, which makes him one of very few pokemon who can consistently deliver 100% critical hits all the time. Sure, he’s still far from being strong in any sense of the word, but do you think that this at least gave him a niche to excel in? Or is it merely a single step in the right direction, with many more to go?

Explanation for anyone behind on this: critical hits only do x1.5 damage in X and Y, not x2, but the critical hit rate scales more rapidly with bonuses like a Scope Lens or the Super Luck ability, to the point that many combinations will actually give you a 100% critical hit rate. For most Pokémon, using Focus Energy is the way to do this, but Farfetch’d has the distinction of being able to achieve 100% right out of the box, without having to buff himself first, by using his signature item (the Stick) and sticking to moves that already score a lot of critical hits, of which he has four – Slash, Night Slash, Leaf Blade and Air Cutter (the last of which is unfortunately special and therefore doesn’t work so well with the other three). Even his other attacks will still have a 50% critical hit rate.

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Binacle and Barbaracle

Well, this one’s just weird. Don’t get me wrong, though – sometimes weird is really good, and this, I think, is the case with the latest additions to the stable of Rock/Water Pokémon, Binacle and Barbaracle. I have to admit, when I idly dreamed in the lead-up to X and Y about what kinds of animals or plants I would have liked to see Pokémon based on, barnacles were not exactly top of the list. But hey, whatever works.

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