Eh.  Nothing really comes to mind.  Not a huge fan of crossovers as a rule.

Hey, anything that involves Percy Jackson in the discussion is fine by me.  Piper’s charmspeak is an interesting comparison to make; I think we can all agree that Attract obviously doesn’t compel sexual acts, even where the target’s species would allow it, but at the same time the imagery associated with the technique is clearly meant to make us think that romance or sexuality is involved somehow (same way as charmspeak, really, since it comes from the goddess of romantic love and sexual desire – although the way that series portrays Aphrodite, and that portrayal’s relationship to the original myths, is actually kind of complicated).  It has similar versatility too; same way as Attract can work between Pokémon who would never breed, charmspeak can apparently work on anything that even approaches sentience, up to and including a robot dragon head.  I think the important difference is that Piper can’t easily command someone not to attack her because charmspeak works best if she can phrase it in terms of something the target actually wants to do, or at least could potentially be neutral to.  Attract seems like it’s maybe a bit more forceful in that way, which is weird.  I think it may have a greater capacity to create desires rather than just manipulate existing ones.

What, you mean, like, in the real world?

Um… hmm… well, I suppose my immediate reaction would be to wonder where the hell it came from and whether there were any more.  Those things could wreck havoc on just about any real-world ecosystem if they were able to establish a breeding population.  There’s sort of a worrying tension between reporting it to the authorities so they can take action (which would probably involve quarantining the poor thing and possibly killing it) and keeping it secret (which would be hugely irresponsible and risk catastrophic ecological damage if there are any more that I don’t know about).  In any case, I certainly can’t let it wander about unsupervised.

Anyway…

Probably the first thing to do is figure out what it can and can’t eat (assuming it needs to eat, which for some Pokémon is not necessarily a given).  Most Pokémon probably have fairly high energy requirements, so I’d have to buy a lot more fruit or meat, depending on what kind of diet it naturally has.  Best to set aside a few days to experiment with that and figure out what’s palatable.  Also gotta figure out what it would do during the day while I’m busy; there’s a big park near my apartment that I walk past every day, and it could hang out there, under strict instructions to go nowhere else in the city, at least not at first.  Probably want to stay with it the first couple of days and make sure it knows to treat humans in this world with extreme caution.  Beyond that… hard to say.  It’s difficult to know what to do with someone who’s been dumped in a totally foreign world.  Whatever personal goals a Pokémon might have had are probably not going to be relevant or achievable here, which is unfortunate, to say the least.  Depending on the species it might be okay with just having food and a place to sleep, but some might need to find a way to contribute to the lives of others to be happy.

Do I have to?  Oh, all right; let’s see…

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcUSRT7CFPs

I suppose I would question the usefulness of the conditions they’re analysing.  I mean… a wild Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise randomly meeting up in the wilderness for a free-for-all?  Why would that ever happen?  In practice Pokémon trainers normally care about the role a Pokémon can play within a team, typically for a single battle format.  I’m not especially surprised by the result – as they say, it’s very difficult for an untrained Venusaur to come up with anything that will stop a Charizard because of the double type advantage, while Blastoise is in a very strong position against the other two by having natural access to weather manipulation, which seriously weakens Charizard and blocks out Venusaur’s Synthesis and Solarbeam attacks.  However, I think I would find the analysis more convincing if they didn’t gloss over exactly how they came up with their results in about 30 seconds towards the end.

Well, X and Y kinda do – the history of Kalos, at any rate.  I mean, half the plot is based on a 3000-year-old backstory, and a lot of NPC dialogue dwells on the rights and wrongs of the old monarchy under AZ’s family.  Lysandre’s research notes in the Team Flare lab also contain some interesting speculation about the origins of inequality in ancient society – he thinks it’s all to do with Pokémon training.  I love that stuff because I’m a history person.  Any time they want to do more, though, they won’t hear me complaining.

I don’t know what they’ll do next, but I actually kind of want to see a prequel, because I think Lysandre would make a lot more sense as a character and be a much better fit with what they seem to be trying to do with him if we saw more of his past and saw some of the events that led to him going off the deep end.  That’s just me though.

I assume by “here” you mean here?

Stockholm Syndrome is a term used to describe the phenomenon of coming to empathise with one’s captor in a kidnapping or hostage situation.  Sometimes victims in such situations, after talking to their captors and learning their stories, start to view them as being not entirely bad people, and may begin to cooperate with them or even take action after being rescued to ensure that their captors are treated leniently.  Actual psychological research into the phenomenon is a little thin on the ground (since, for obvious reasons, you can’t really conduct experiments), but it’s a common trope in modern fiction.

In the context of Pokémon, the principle is relevant to questions of the underlying morality of Pokémon training – to wit, is the ‘friendship’ conventionally displayed between Pokémon and trainer really just a manifestation of this irrational tendency to bond with one’s captor?

I know the franchise only by reputation, but I have seen the trailer in question.  I feel like Grass-types get left out of these things not so much because of any sort of systematic prejudice as because most of them are neither particularly iconic (like Pikachu and Jigglypuff) nor particularly badass (like Lucario and Greninja), which is unfortunate, but kind of understandable.  Still, I feel like Grovyle would fit right in…

I’m not really a musical person (understatement of the year, any of my friends will tell you), and I don’t think music really affects me in the way it does most people, emotionally speaking – but yeah, these are pretty neat. I particularly like Bloody Sunday; very solemn, almost haunting.  One could almost use this whole endeavour as a case study in the creation of a religion – and only partially tongue-in-cheek, at that.  Faced with meaninglessness, we create meaning; faced with luck, good or bad, we ascribe it to divine providence… and, of course, faced with the utterly banal, we create art and beauty.  Again… neat.

Are you kidding me?  I still can’t believe they got through Victory Road!  I guess that just goes to show how godlike Zapdos was in RBY – nothing really stops him but Rhydon, Golem or Onix.

I haven’t spent much time actually watching the stream, but a friend has been regularly sending me links to all the interesting nonsense that it generates in its wake.  It’s a very neat exercise in pareidolia, the human propensity for recognising patterns in randomness.  Red’s chaotic flailing and regular tragic mishaps have prompted some very creative interpretations of what’s been going on – the whole helix fossil religion, of course, but also the various ‘heresies’ of that (like dome-worship, or the alternate interpretations of Flareon), the depictions of Venomoth as an all-terrain vehicle, the way the Anarchy/Democracy system has turned into some kind of weird allegorical social commentary… it’s meaning crafted from meaninglessness, which actually says something very profound about the human condition, I think.

And now there’s a countdown to the next game.  I wonder whether the next one will be as popular.  I do hope so – but how will the mind hive find its way without the guidance of the Helix?