State of the Blog: August

I SWEAR THE LAST ONE IS COMING OKAY

seriously though Meltan is coming on Wednesday and then we’ll be DONE! Done with generation VII! Except not really because I still want to write articles on all the major characters and the Alolan forms and some other stuff and frankly I don’t know if there’s time for all of it before Sword and Shield come out but DONE!

This month, we’ve had reviews of Magearna, Marshadow and Zeraora, as well as a retrospective on my generation V reviews. I’ve also answered readers’ questions on, among other things, the logic of creating a slimmed-down type chart and the problem of why all Pokémon dads are terrible. For the month to come, I’ll be working on articles on… hmm. I suppose I need to make up my mind about that. Well, unless something truly outrageous happens, for the moment let’s say I’ll be doing my now-traditional character profiles of the villains: first Guzma and Team Skull, then Lusamine and the Aether Foundation (I don’t know if there’s going to be time for Team Rainbow Rocket, so we’ll leave them until the end). After that I’ll aim to have something on Hau for the first week of October. Jim the Editor and I are also working on another of those dialogue-form retrospective things, which will materialise at some point in the next week or so. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while and there’s something in particular you’d like us to revisit next, let us know in the comments. In addition, I currently have no reader questions awaiting an answer, so if you’ve been sitting on something you want to ask me about, now’s the moment to check out the question box!

I am also going to be starting a Thing, which I hope will become a weekly thing, this Friday. I don’t want to talk much about the nature of this Thing, because I think it will work better if I let it speak for itself. For now, let’s just call it an experiment in interactive storytelling – something I haven’t done before that I hope will be fun, and involve my readers in its creation.

I think that’s all for the moment. Special thanks are due as always to my patrons on Patreon – Bradley, James Crooks, Esserise, hugh_donnetono and Hamish Fyfe – whose generous donations pay for the cost of maintaining this site on WordPress. If you enjoy my work and want to support me in my “deranged libertine writer” lifestyle, consider signing up to toss me a buck or two every month. And of course, slightly less special but still deep and heartfelt thanks go to everyone who reads this blog – you are the proverbial wind beneath my metaphorical (FOR NOW) wings!

Anonymous asks:

How do you get the inspiration for the Nuzlocke character’s personalities?

I had a procedure, actually. I have ceased to follow it, because it got restrictive and I pulled better ideas out of the aether, but I used to have one. What I used to do was every time I caught a Pokémon I would use a random number generator to roll a D&D-style alignment for them (Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic + Good/Neutral/Evil) and that combined with their nature was their personality. Like, Ruby is Bold and Lawful Evil, which hopefully makes sense, and Spruce is Rash and Chaotic Good. Melissa was Jolly and I had no idea what to do with her until I rolled Lawful Neutral for her and thought “well, okay, obviously she needs to be in fanatical service to a terrifying amoral entity.” It made sense at the time. Luna was Impish and Chaotic Evil and come on that writes itself. Now though I mostly just do whatever works in the context of the story, because there’s enough already there that it’s a better source of inspiration than a random number generator. Usually I pester Jim the Editor about it and we talk about it and eventually I come up with something that’s at right angles to whatever either of us originally had in mind.