Category: Blog-Related Questions

Vox asks:

Could you link the start of the X nuzlocke? I found you via tv tropes…

You found me via… what, seriously?

Well, this should give you what you need: https://pokemaniacal.com/tag/x-nuzlocke/?order=asc.  I should warn you, though, that I never finished that story and currently don’t intend to, so you should be prepared for disappointment.  I don’t think the TvTropes page has been updated in several years, and even then it kinda gave disproportionate prominence to a project that was never really my main “thing.”  I… could update it myself, but, well… it just seems kind of crass, doesn’t it?  Editing one’s own TvTropes page?

Anon the Mon asks:

Are you ever going to release part 3 of your Uranium nuzlocke, or did you forget you started that?

Oh, I 100% forgot I started that and am 100% not going to continue it. Honestly it was a mistake to start a Nuzlocke when what I was really interested in was exploring the new Pokémon. And there were external factors, like the game basically didn’t function on Mac OS when it was released (not sure if that’s changed) and it was a hassle to change operating systems whenever I wanted to play it.

A man from Michigan asks:

Would you like to meet Serebii’s creator, Joe Merrick?

That would be fun!  I mean, there’s probably not going to be a lot of opportunities.  He lives in the UK; I live in the US for now, and would eventually like to return to New Zealand to live and work in the long-term.  There’s conventions and stuff in the US, but I’m usually not in a position to take time off for them.  But, I mean, in principle, yeah.  You kinda have to have a lot of respect for the guy; serebii.net is one of the most comprehensive resources the Pokémon community has, and Joe gives really sober, down-to-earth coverage of Pokémon news.

Also my new ‘boss,’ Paul at PokéJungle, is engaged in a long-standing Twitter campaign of lighthearted trolling against Joe, so clearly I would have to seize the opportunity to join in somehow.

Ash=Cash to GameFreak asks:

Hey, love your playthrough journals, have you ever done one on Pokemon X or Y, if so, I can’t find it here, and are you planning on making one for Sword and Shield?

I did, but it’s part of the 700-odd posts that I haven’t yet re-filed into WordPress’ category system following my relocation from Tumblr.  This link should work, though, assuming I gave all the posts the same tag at the time of writing: https://pokemaniacal.com/tag/xandy/?order=asc.

I’m probably not going to do a full narrative one for Sword and Shield, just because (even though they are fun) they take longer than I honestly think they’re worth.  The one I did for Sun and Moon really started to drag and kept me from getting down to business on the Pokémon reviews, which was a pretty big contributing factor to why I’m still finishing up my generation VII articles now, and probably won’t have time for everything I still want to write.  I’ll certainly write something for Sword and Shield, but it will probably be a much more pared-down “first impressions” sort of thing in the vein of what I did for Alpha Sapphire (you can find that here https://pokemaniacal.com/category/playthroughs/alpha-sapphire-playthrough-notes/?order=asc; Jim the Editor has just gone through these and jazzed them up with some new graphics for my team rosters, which is nice).

Rebecca Panks asks:

Do you ever do play-throughs where you have to stick to particular rules? Like the Nuzlocke challenge? If so, what are your favourites and what are the ones you vow never to do again?

I’ve done a few Nuzlockes.  They have… ended poorly.  One of them featured an Illumise spontaneously exploding.  Sometimes Jim the Editor will pick teams of terrible Pokémon for me (honestly, though, I don’t think I’ve yet had a Pokémon challenge experience that made me really firmly swear “never again”).  Once I even wrote a Nuzlocke story, which I never finished, and honestly I don’t know if I’m ever going to have time to finish it (maybe I should just tell everyone what I had in mind for the rest of the story, I don’t know).  But anyway, if you don’t mind that it cuts off about 3/4 of the way through the story, or think you might want to start bugging me to finish it instead of the other things I have in mind to do, you can read it here.

Continue reading “Rebecca Panks asks:” →

pokemaniacal maniac asks:

fwiw i really really love the first half of the pokemon reviews. I would read entire books about what you had to say lore and inspiration-wise on pretty much every pokemon. i dont play competitively, so the second half is always Just Info to me, but even that has helped me understand the meta as it is, which is also interesting! personally, i would rank the reviews as my favorite thing (and like you said, the sheer scope and the worldbuilding analysis you extrapolate from the pokemon themselves should make you proud) and your If I Ran The Zoo type stuff my second favorite. this is long and rambling but i just have been a long time fan and youre a bright spot on a dark internet and thanks!

[This submission is a response to this]

That’s actually really helpful feedback; thanks!  After frankly kind of flubbing generation VII (due in part to unavoidable real-life circumstances, but also due to mismanagement on my part) I want to revise my approach to generation VIII.  The first thing is that I don’t think I should write a full narrative-based playthrough journal the way I did for White 2, X and Moon – because that’s fun, and I know a lot of people did enjoy them, but it takes so long, and I think the Pokémon reviews ought to be the highest priority.  It would be better, I think, to start those within a month or two of release.  And then the reviews themselves I think have become too expansive, and don’t play to my strengths.  If I could cut down the competitive stuff (there are better places to go on the internet for that kind of advice; no one needs me for that), and limit that side to just discussion of signature moves and abilities, or moves that cast a particularly interesting light on a Pokémon’s character design, then that, I think, would be a worthwhile economy to pursue.  I really want to commit to making sure that this blog’s future includes more of the theoretically dense worldbuilding and games-as-storytelling stuff that inspired “If I Were In Charge,” so trying to slim down the Pokémon reviews and “get them out of the way” is probably a good idea, as long as I can keep the parts of them that my readers value.

N asks:

Did you leave tumblr because they removed the porn?
(But seriously why don’t you like it anymore)

There’s no “anymore” about it; I don’t think I ever really liked Tumblr.  I started using it in the first place back in 2012 because a friend recommended it as (I’m paraphrasing) the hip and happening place to be, but frankly it was never very well-suited to the style of my blog.  Over the course of 2012-2017, it somehow managed to lose functionality and become harder to use every goddamn time the platform was updated.  It’s like the development team were moving backwards in time, starting with a passable, albeit idiosyncratic, blogging platform and gradually breaking or removing every useful capability.  For about a year before I left, I’d had to copy-paste my writing into the post editor via my e-mail inbox because if I tried to do it directly from Microsoft Word, Tumblr would decide to convert the text into an image, for some inane and impenetrable reason of its own.  The final straw for me (early in 2018, some months before the announcement of the pornpocalypse) was when they arbitrarily changed the HTML editor in a way that broke the captions of every single image I’ve ever put in a text post.  WordPress isn’t perfect either: I have to pay for it, I’ll have to pay more if I ever want CSS editing or anything else even remotely interesting, and redoing all the formatting that I lost in the transfer from Tumblr has been (and continues to be) a headache and a half.  The editing process is so much less broken and dumb that it’s frankly comical, though. I no longer feel like I have to fight against a platform that wants to impose a contrary vision of what a “blog” is supposed to be. Also, I have to admit that there’s something appealing and official-sounding about having my own .com domain name.

James asks:

Is VikingBoyBilly still alive?

[For the benefit of newer readers, VikingBoyBilly used to be one of the more prolific submitters of questions to this blog, often in a fairly demanding tone; if you peruse the 2016-2017 zone of my archives you’re bound to meet him sooner or later]

Personally, I choose to believe that VikingBoyBilly is alive and well, but has returned to his home planet in the distant Valhalla system.  His people doubtless missed him very much during his time on Earth.