Im Too Tired For Bios

i found her as a budew on someone else’s save file after buying a used copy of pokemon platinum. the name “NeverHappy” was a pretty obvious joke about how budew evolves from happiness, and since the previous owner was going to keep her in a box forever, never use her, and never evolve her, she would never be happy. this activated some feral response in my brain and i decided no. she WOULD be happy. i was still replaying through all my old gen 4 games at the time but i traded her off to my other gen 4 files for safekeeping until i could do stuff with her.

oh trust me game. i would.

so you might have thought my plans were to simply evolve her and beat the game with her, get her to level 100, maybe even EV train her - but i had much bigger plans. i was going to ribbon master her. the ribbon master challenge, or the process of “ribbon mastering” a pokemon, is getting every single ribbon possible on a pokemon from the game it was caught in to the most recent game it can be transferred to. if you weren’t aware, that’s a LOT of ribbons. there are 40 in gen 4 alone. i had a lot to do.

(the above clean screenshot was taken by backing up my cartridge save and screenshotting a battle video in emulator. however, i did all of this on my actual DS! i don’t like playing on emulator. not as fun)

i had to beat every contest (normal-master rank in all 5 categories) and do a bunch of other random stuff but my favorite part of the process was defeating the battle tower… 6 times. the battle frontier contains the most challenging battles in gen 4 by far, as opponents have good stats and competitive movesets. there’s 6 battle tower ribbons in gen 4 - two for singles at different points in the win streak, one for doubles, one for multis /w NPCs, one for multis /w another player (i just played with myself on two dses), and one for ranking up in the wi-fi room, which is now accessible again due to fan servers restoring internet functionality for gens 4 and 5.

NeverHappy was randomly caught in the wild and did not have a competitive nature or stats, so i figured that she would just be tagging along in the back while i took out all the win streaks with 2 good pokemon, but she ended up clutching out wins in times of dire need… multiple times. she even ended up being necessary in the wi-fi room to stall out prevalent hacked pokemon like no guard sheer cold machamp, which hits 1 hit KO moves every time, with a gimmicky and convoluted leech seed + substitute strategy.

i could go into all of my team members and the excessive lengths i went to get them all (don’t even get me started on my shiny competitive latias from pokemon emerald) but that’s a story for another day.

by the end of gen 4 i was extremely emotionally attached and she was already becoming one of my favorite pokemon, now with 40 whole ribbons after days and weeks of effort.

i have ribbon mastered pokemon before, so all of my save files in gens 6, 7, and 8 were already set up to transfer neverhappy into and grab all of the ribbons. i had a lot more battling and little tasks ahead of me. it’s really cool how ribbon mastering forces you to interact with pretty much every feature of every pokemon game.

and so i transferred her! gen 5 doesn’t have any ribbons, so it was just an intermediary to transfer into gen 6. at this point, i had also acquired a shiny luxray from pokeradar chaining in platinum named Nightlight, and i was ribbon mastering them together, but once again, a story for another day.

first into gen 6… getting the super training ribbon was really annoying but the battle maison was pretty easy. i had a team in multis with terrakion and a whimsicott with beat up that could 1 hit KO all of the boss battle’s legendaries in one hit LOL

then gen 7… this one went by pretty quickly but i opted to get the best friends ribbon here instead of in XY or ORAS because it was really simple to get with rainbow pokebeans, since all you have to do is max out affection and it only takes a couple rainbow beans to do that in USUM.

and gen 8! you can see nightlight to the left in this picture. by far the hardest part of gen 8 was getting the ribbon awarded for winning a battle in master rank in online VGC against other players. i definitely had to grind that one for a while.

then, she even got an award in BDSP for being a pokemon originating from the original diamond/pearl/platinum games, which was really cool.

oh, and since i had cloned neverhappy back in gen 4 with a glitch so that i would always have a copy of her in her origin games, i was able to take this neat picture! how the times have changed LMAO

luckily she was even a part of PLA’s roster and i was able to take a picture with her there, too… which actually might end up being important since there’s an invisible flag somewhere in the game’s code that gets turned on when you take a picture with your pokemon in the photo studio, which could potentially become a ribbon in the future in another game.

so, trainer Platina from 2016, you were wrong! NeverHappy is in fact happy now and has done more than most people’s pokemon have seen in their entire lifetime. she is my most cherished pokemon and i love her more than i love myself. i think i would die for her

Alligator Loki Infinity Comic #9 (2022)

*decapitation sound*

three times as many stars as-

*decapitation sound*

four times as many stars as-

*decapitation sound*

fives times as many stars as-

*decapitation sound*

So a while back (I can’t remember exactly when but I think it was some time around the 40s/50s), a bunch of penguins escaped. A keeper left the gate open so a bunch of penguins just… followed them. And the people loved it. Look at these adorable birds outside their cage just following that guy around! So they get all the penguins back inside and realise that none of them really ran off, they just followed the keeper and went back inside and crowd thought it was amazing, so why not make it a regular thing? Get enough people there that if one of them goes to make a run for it (which at least one has in the past), they can’t get past the people, and let the ones who want outside have a little wander. So every day, they get a crowd, they open the gate, and whatever penguins want to get out can go, waddle about, squawk at people, and then hop back inside.

We don’t know what God tested and what God registered as true or untrue. 

We don’t know what God entered into the code since the last time we tested. 

We don’t know what God ticketed as an issue and what just God ignored.

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

It's about to hit us here in Oklahoma and the rest of the southern states that are not used to this level of cold.

Please take this seriously if you live somewhere this is going to impact significantly.

I just sincerely hope texas' power grid doesn't fail them again.

but at least a small blessing is that this isn't bringing much precipitation with it and the worst of it will be the wind.

If you are in this swath of area and have never experienced this type of cold before please take whatever precautions you can. in extreme circumstances like this the best way to do that is to isolate activity to one or 2 rooms of the house that have as few outward facing windows as possible, make sure you wear lots of layers and even insulate those layers by putting wadded up paper between them, keep your extremities covered, keep your face covered, if you have blankets or pillows to spare and non-carpet flooring lay those out to help insulate the room, you can hang bath towels in front of any windows to help absorb the cold. Please limit going out to as little as possible, and if you have to make sure anything that can be covered is indeed covered, if you have to wear denim please layer something underneath it, wear ur heaviest fabrics, double up on socks and gloves if you need to, if you can get thermal underwear you can always layer those. When in highschool and had to wait at the buss I would often microwave some potatoes or perogis and keep them in my pockets to warm my hands as I waited for the bus. Keep extra blankets and candles and clothes in ur car. For whatever reason if you get wet and you're outside, please find somewhere to get inside while you dry. If you live in an area that's getting this and you don't have winter clothes like scarves or mitts take whatever thick insulating cloth you can find and use that instead. it might not be comfortable but it will be better than frostbite, I promise.

What a lot of fans, especially more casual ones, don’t seem to realize is that the currency in the Pokemon games it based on the Japanese yen. The symbol for the currency in the games even resembles the yen symbol:

In fact, according to Bulbapedia, the ‘Poke dollar’ symbol was specifically created for the English translations of the games, and the original Japanese versions use the yen symbol.

Now, for perspective, although the exact exchange rate naturally varies, a US dollar is equivalent to about 120 Japanese yen. So, 200 yen is about $1.67. 

A Pokeball in the Pokemon games actually cost less then two bucks. 

There’s a REASON we see so many young kids training Pokemon, especially early in the games. The cost of investing into a Pokeball to try catching their own Pokemon easily falls into the range of a typical kid’s allowance. A Potion for healing after battles is 300 (or about $2.50), but since Pokemon Centers offer their healing services for free, that’s a moot point.

Youngsters in the early game only give within a range from 50-150 of the currency, which is about equivalent to $0.40-$1.25. The first Gym Leader in Hoenn Region, Roxanne, give 1,680 in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, equivalent to about $14. Which is about right for the equivalent of a middle or high school honors student. A later Gym Leader, Winona, gives 4,200, or about $35. The Champion, Steven, gives 11600, or $96.67.

The winnings from enemy Trainers varies, but Ace Trainers seem to give out about 1500 or $14 on average, give or take. Swimmers (especially common later in ORAS), award a range from 400-800, or $3.33-$6.67.

Vitamins (such as Calcium, Iron, and HP UP), cost 9,800 or $81.67 each. An Ultra Ball cost 1,200, or $10. A Paralyze Heal costs the same as a Pokeball, while an Awakening is half that. A Revive is 1,500, or $12.50.

What’s the point of doing this? Well, for one, to get a better sense of the in-game economics, which can be hard to grasp if one doesn’t realize the in-game ‘Poke dollars’ are based on the Japanese yen. And a look at said economics reveals some interesting details.

First, it shows basic Pokemon training and raising is well within the affordability of a ten-year old, or older. Which makes sense as Pokemon is aimed at younger kids, and the develops would want them to have the sense that going on a Pokemon journey is something they could do if they somehow ended up in the Pokemon world.

On the other hand, it also shows there’s really not that much money to be made in Pokemon raising and training, unless you battle frequently and regularly against higher-level opponents regularly and and win. Which is…very much in line with how professional sports work in real-life. Pokemon battling gets compared to a sporting event a lot for a reason. The initial 3-D games were even called Pokemon *Stadium.* Parallels are frequently drawn between the Pokemon League tournaments and the Olympics in the anime. The low money output is probably also why we often see Gym Leaders and the like working other jobs.

Just something interesting I decided to look into. I’m a Pokemon fan first, before any other fandom, and always will be. It’s shocking that I haven’t written any meta on it yet.