Anonymous asks:

They’ll have to make obtaining Alolan forms outside of Alola possible. Although here’s a question I have for you, do you think it’s possible that the Pikachu line is native to Alola? And that Raichu is meant to be a psychic type when it evolves, but without it’s Alolan Diet, ends up being a pure electric type instead?

I’m sure they’ll be obtainable in some way, yeah, same as the regular “Kantonian” morphs are obtainable in Sun and Moon. But that’s not at all the same thing as finding them in the wild with no explanation for how they got there when they’ve previously been specifically described as unique to Alola.

Anyway. Pikachu and Raichu. Unclear. The Pokédex tells us that diet triggers the manifestation of Raichu’s psychic abilities, but doesn’t really give us anything either way on which evolutionary path is the “original” one. Thinking in terms of Alola being an analogue to Hawai’i I’m inclined to see rodent-like Pokémon like Pikachu as introduced by humans, but potentially quite a long time ago – long enough to have adapted in surprising ways to their new environment. On the other hand, we know from direct empirical evidence that all Pikachu, regardless of their origin – Kantonian, Kalosian, everything in between – become psychic Raichu if they evolve in Alola (the only other Alolan form that works this way is Marowak, and that might literally be magic [EDIT: Also Exeggutor]). If we assume something resembling a real-world understanding of genetics and evolution, then that suggests that the psychic abilities are a dormant ancestral trait, present in all Pikachu but requiring some environmental stimulus to activate. Buuut it could also be that components of Pikachu’s Alolan diet – or even something else about Alola – are somehow mutagenic (or some mystical equivalent), and alter their genetics and powers in predictable ways. Or it could be that, as I’m inclined to think for Marowak, there’s no genetic component at all and instead there are Alolan traditions that allow them, basically, to learn magic (because, like Marowak, the Alolan Raichu form is associated closely with a particular cultural practice – namely, surfing). I actually had a massive argument with Jim the Editor over this one. He thinks that the Pokédex must be wrong about diet being a factor, since Pikachu can evolve into Alolan Raichu after spending literally minutes in Alola and without eating anything; I think that this is an edge case that doesn’t reflect the designers’ intent, and is a result of Pokémon’s mechanics for time and eating being extremely unrealistic. Also his interpretation doesn’t really suggest any other answer for why it happens other than Alola being surrounded by a magic field that gives Pikachu psychic powers for some reason. Basically he thinks that if the designers had meant for Pikachu’s diet to be a factor, they should have represented that with a change in the evolution method (he suggests an item called a Thunderstone Cake, or something similar).

So I’m a solid “maybe” on this one.

Anonymous asks:

How reliable was Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian Wars, especially considering that he was Greek?

well I mean it’s not like he isn’t not unreliable

Okay, so disclaimer number 1: people have literally spent their entire careers writing whole books that fail to give a definitive answer to this question. It is impossible for any answer I give here to be anything but a ludicrous oversimplification.

Disclaimer number 2: reliable or not, he is the best we’ve got. There just aren’t any surviving contemporary Persian sources that talk about the war in the kind of detail that Herodotus does, and Herodotus was literally the only person in the world writing something we would think of as “history” in his time. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Dewpider and Araquanid

Sometimes, we all need more spiders in our lives. Spiders kill flies and mosquitos, keep the streets of New York safe from techno-goblins and octopus-physicists, rescue intelligent piglets from the slaughterhouse with their whimsical web messages, and keep you from getting hungry at night by crawling into your mouth while you sleep. Game Freak, bless their hearts, recognise the importance of spiders, and periodically give us more. Thus, today, we come to Dewpider and Araquanid, the alien bubble spiders of doom… Continue reading “Dewpider and Araquanid” →

oh hey, Tumblr changed the way its html editor works so that now, in every post I’ve ever written with a captioned image, the caption appears off to the side of the image instead of underneath and looks like it’s supposed to be part of the body text

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever liked a single change Tumblr has made to literally anything in the five years I’ve been using it; it just gets steadily clunkier and more opinionated about how it thinks my formatting should look. Like, you could honestly just fire/execute the entire development team and revert to the 2012 version of the platform and I think I would probably be happier with that. I mean, WHAT, in the name of all that is holy, was the feature that necessitated automatically translating copy-pasted text from Microsoft Word into an IMAGE OF THE TEXT, something that no one on earth has ever wanted for any purpose, and am I really the only person frustrated by having to work around it by copy-pasting twice via an e-mail program?

whaddya say we ditch this bull$#!t and migrate to WordPress or something; how does that sound

like, I don’t know what else is out there or what would be the best fit but it seems like Tumblr just gets harder to use every six months or so and I seriously cannot be fµ¢&ed anymore

Pokémottos #751 and 752

House Araquanid: Boldly Going

Anonymous asks:

Did you see the alleged starter leaks? They’re pretty clearly fake but still cute and whoever made them did a great job of copying Pokemon’s aesthetic.

I have now. I think maybe they feel so much like Pokémon because the pony is very reminiscent of Keldeo, the bear of Solosis, and the coral thing a little bit of Phantump, albeit with a palette swap. The type changes make it hard to put your finger on what feels familiar about them, though. Pretty clever (assuming, of course, that they are fake – and I see no reason to speculate otherwise).

Anonymous asks:

You know what, there’s kind of a missed opportunity with Diancie. Think about it, Diancie is, canonically, a mutated Carbink, yet Carbink is not related to how it’s obtained at all. I mean, how hard would it have been to have an event-distributed item that somehow evolves Carbink into Diancie? We have a Mythical Pokemon that hatches from an egg for pete’s sake, why not have a Mythological Pokemon that evolves from a regular Pokemon?

I can’t speak for Game Freak’s decision-making process, but that direction is obvious enough and uncomplicated enough that I am inclined to think they probably have some reason for not taking it – most likely because Diancie is portrayed (e.g. in the movie in which she stars) as a special Carbink, with powers to which other Carbink cannot aspire. You might liken it to the rarity of a perfect natural diamond – you can cut and polish diamonds to make them nicer, but ultimately there are some flaws and inclusions that will be impossible to remove, and Diancie needs to be a perfect diamond.

Anonymous asks:

Actually, looking at Wishiwashi’s schooling form, maybe it’s allowed because the school seems to fuse together? With the “main” Wishiwashi serving as the “brain” of the school itself? I mean, it could just be graphical limitations, but the school does look like it fuses into a single organism.

Well, “seems” is the operative word there – the whole point of Wishiwashi’s design is that it’s based on schools of fish that are able to make it look like they’re a single organism even though they definitely aren’t. This rationale might save us from having to explain why Wishiwashi is basically allowed to cheat in Pokémon battles, but I think it does so at the expense of what makes Wishiwashi an interesting Pokémon.

Anonymous asks:

Cruising Bogleech’s pokedex reviews, I learned about the swap of Butterfree’s and Venomoth’s designs (likely by mistake) in Gen I. While I doubt the change to be highly significant, I do wonder how this mistake influenced the franchise. After all, Butterfree is the most iconic Bug pokemon (outside possibly Scyther), one of the beloved first catch of many players, the model for many latter pokemon, and played a big part in the original anime. How much do you think this change affected things?

It’s sort of obligatory for me to point out first that we don’t know this is true; to my knowledge no-one at Game Freak has ever confirmed or denied it, and they probably never will. There’s enough evidence for it that it seems plausible to me, but there are some things we probably can’t ever know for sure – heck, maybe there was a switch, and they did it on purpose, precisely because they preferred the idea of the starting Bug-type ending up as a cute butterfly. But anyway. Assuming it’s true, well… I’m not sure changing two Pokémon affects the fate of the franchise all that much. Venomoth makes just as much sense as a precursor to Beautifly, Dustox, Vivillon, etc as Butterfree does, and Caterpie is going to be your beloved first catch no matter what it evolves into (maybe I’m just saying that because I like Venomoth anyway, but presumably I’m not the only one). Butterfree’s never really been a flagship publicity Pokémon, either. The exception is the anime, where Butterfree is important as Ash’s beloved first catch. I think the biggest difference is that I don’t know if I can imagine the episode Bye Bye Butterfree, when Ash’s Butterfree falls in love and leaves him to go and start a family, being written the same way with a Venomoth, because the emotional moments between Butterfree and Ash might not resonate with a Pokémon so… un-cute. But it’s not as though Venomoth is so thoroughly hideous or alien that it’s impossible to empathise with.