Anonymous asks:

do you have a crush on a pokemon character? and if you don’t, who’s the most fitting to have a crush on? (i know this is weird but meh whatevs) p.s. i’ve been shipping you with silver huehue

…you’re right, this is weird.

Anyway, the first answer is no, and the second is that I’m… not really sure what you mean by “most fitting”? Like… I guess someone who is roughly your age, for starters? And, uh… has a good moral character? Hell, I don’t know; it’s not my job to tell people who they can and can’t write erotic fan fiction about.

Anonymous asks:

It’s coming into winter time so I thought I’d ask, can you ice-skate? What is your favourite winter-time activity?

Something I’ve realised since moving to America is that, in the part of New Zealand I come from, we don’t really have winter. We have more of a long, wet autumn that sort of shades back into spring at the other end (more tropical parts of the world have a rainy season and a dry season; Auckland has a rainy season and a rainier season). The notion of specifically wintertime activities isn’t all that important to you when you’re from a place where it never snows, I think (and I definitely cannot ice-skate). Although I suppose if I had to say, I’m very fond of winter desserts. There’s no reason you can’t make apple pie or rice pudding at any time of the year, but those hot desserts are so much better when it’s cold outside. I should really go and find my mother’s recipe for chocolate self-saucing pudding one of these days…

Anonymous asks:

Would you rather be a Pokemon trainer or a Pokemon ranger?

Well, to be perfectly honest I don’t think I have the constitution or physical stamina for the kind of $#!t Pokémon rangers get up to. Trainer can be a hobby, while ranger is a job, and an extremely demanding one at that. In terms of the relationship the two groups have with their Pokémon, though, there’s actually a lot about the rangers’ way of doing things that appeals to me – like the stress on the more temporary, favour-for-a-favour nature of their relationships with most Pokémon, and the resulting emphasis on the more personal ties they have with just one partner. I think the rangers’ training style gets around a lot of the more ethically blurry stuff about living with Pokémon, which is probably a good thing. It also helps that they have a formalised code of ethics about how to treat Pokémon, but that’s more to do with them being all members of a centralised organisation with a definite purpose.

Anonymous asks:

If you had to make a team of pokemon that best represents your personality, what pokemon would be on it and why?

Well, I asked Jim the Editor, who as my best friend has an informed but more impartial perspective on the matter, and he came up with the following:

Growlithe, because I’m loyal to my friends and quite stubborn, but my “bark is worse than [my] bite,”
Kangaskhan, because I’m caring and nurturing,
Gogoat, because I’m empathetic and, again, stubborn,
Omastar, because I’m bad at dealing with change,
Farfetch’d, because I’m clearly horribly ill-equipped for life, but somehow manage to stumble through by blind luck,
and Unown, because I’m obsessed with dead languages and obscure knowledge, and also because “from the outside [I] seem mysterious and interesting but once you get to know [me] [I’m] simple, boring and don’t do much ;-)”.

Cell Block Chacha asks:

So between your experience in New Zealand and what you’ve got so far here in America, which place would you say is more LGBT friendly? Just asking out of curiosity as a gay American myself.

Eh. I don’t think I’m really the best person to ask. Like, I come from New Zealand’s biggest city, so I grew up in an environment that was quite socially progressive even by our standards, and now I live in Ohio, which is… probably not the very best America has to offer on that front? But on the other hand, most of the people I actually have anything to do with are academics like me, and academics pretty much everywhere are overwhelmingly liberal and have no patience for discrimination (my department has… at the moment, I think like seven or eight openly gay or bi graduate students, including me?). I don’t really get out much, and since I don’t have a boyfriend there’s really no reason a stranger would know I’m gay unless I choose to tell them, so it just doesn’t come up. That’s… that’s probably not a very good answer. In strictly legal terms New Zealand is certainly very progressive as far as that goes, more so than most parts of the United States, but I don’t actually know how we’d compare to somewhere like California or Massachusetts.