You’re a chemist, right? Mind watching a Youtube video called ‘EVERY Steel Type Pokemon EXPLAINED!’ by Lockstin&Gnoggin and tell us what you think? I watched that video and immediately thought it might be something you’d be interested in! 🙂
This is the video we’re talking about
Okay, so, saying that I’m a chemist would be a slight exaggeration; I mean, I have an undergrad degree in chemistry but it is not my professional field. But whatever.
There’s a few, like, miscellaneous mistakes/head-desk moments scattered through the video, like saying that basalt is a metal (it f#%&ing isn’t) or that hydroxyapatite is “a form of calcium” (in much the same way that pineapples are “a form of carbon”). Also Gnoggin says EVERY Steel-type Pokémon but I’m pretty sure he missed Bronzong for some reason? He mentioned it in a list at least once, but I don’t think he ever actually discussed it individually like all the others. I’m nitpicking though; most of the specific things he says are basically fine. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:”


I’m doing Heatmor and Durant together because, although they aren’t part of a single evolutionary family, they do in a sense ‘go together.’ Heatmor is a bloody great anteater that some delightfully mad person has decided to splice together with a blast furnace or something, and Durant is an angry giant ant plated from head to abdomen in steel, and Heatmor’s favourite food. Durant, the Pokédex insists, covers itself in steel plating specifically to protect itself from Heatmor, which makes absolutely no sense in a world of elemental ‘types’ with distinct strengths and weaknesses relative to one another. Why does this make no sense? Because Heatmor is a Fire Pokémon, and relying on metal armour to protect yourself from a Fire-type is tantamount to suicide according to everything we have ever seen about the way this world works. Now, evolution (in the real-world biological sense, not the Poké-world pseudozoological whacko sense) is an insanely complicated phenomenon, this I will grant you, but no-one and nothing is going to convince me that natural selection would actually push a species to become more vulnerable to its own major natural predator.