#2 more sections left and the pokemon video is done...

[lesbianpikachu]

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#2 more sections left and the pokemon video is done... #i did kinda get realll lazy for the pokemon sword section but i can gaslight my way into it being intentional #it is kinda funny even without gaslighting though #but yeah hisui and paldea need to be done and then thats it! were done! #honestly im so excited to do the conclusion ive been thinking about it ever since i got a clear picture of what the video is #i think its just going to be really fun to get sentimental ab making the video and everything #and i have the perfect music to make it hit right. i think #also in the emotional arc of the video its in a good place. also i may just drop this stupid thing immediately after its done #i dont think im going to be able to control myself once i can hit the release button on this thing #rendering it will probably take a while though unfortunately #so we'll see #i think this week though.

[n7punk]

"As Many Lives As It Takes (To Be With You)" Fic Notes

After talking shit and increasing the chapter count like five times, AMLAIT is finally done at 13/5 chapters. You can maybe guess there’s a lot going on in these fic notes.

No playlist this time, I didn’t make one assuming it would be a quick fic and just listened to random shit, or watched baking videos, or put in earbuds and listened to silence when I had migraines.

Epilogue life:

So I pretty much put what would be this section in the fic’s actual epilogue, but Catra and Adora end up staying in the apartment for a while. After a couple months of living with a third wheel (who is more like the primary wheel they are tricycling considering who owns the place), it starts cramping on their couple moments. Adora gently prods Catra about the idea of getting their own place, which is an idea that takes several weeks to sink in before she’s willing to explore venturing beyond her safety bubble, but everything changed once and the world didn’t end, so she eventually decides she’s ready. Catra finally leaves that small room after four years. As scary as it is, it feels like the ultimate measure of her growth.

After a few years they move to the outskirts of Bright Moon when Adora switches hospitals, giving them a bit more air and the “best of both worlds” when it comes to being in the city but having a bit more of the freedom/relaxation from their childhood town back. They’re also closer to Thaymor which makes visiting a little easier, and closer to Glimbow and Scorfuma specifically, though they’re farther from some of their other friends.

They both learn to maintain their best friendships even not living together and they regularly visit Adora’s parents, though they never tell anyone else about Catra’s ability. Netossa seems like she suspects something at times, but she never directly implies or asks something, and whatever she suspects certainly couldn’t be the truth.

Chapter 1:

⦁ If you were expecting me to have ever forgotten that tweet ND made about Catra going through all nine of her lives over the course of She-ra and Adora healing her to reset them, then you’re wrong. In a way, this entire AU is ND’s fault. Did you think about that. I have No Responsibility for this.

⦁ Entrapta’s “nerd merchandise” is a premier ball from pokemon because for some reason that was the only thing I could picture for it. It’s not even a regular pokeball I don’t know why!! But that’s what they use.

⦁ Catra technically has binocular vision dysfunction in this due to her right eye being a little out of sync from her left.

⦁ Time paradox is, of course, a portal reference.

⦁ Entrapta’s blanket used to fall off her lap when she was working, which is how it ended up under the table the first few times, and then she noticed Catra balling up there and started leaving it there on purpose, even washing and rearranging it.

⦁ Entrapta’s room is always hot because of the equipment in it and the heat output from her computer and stuff. Luckily, all three occupants of the apartment like it when it’s warm.

Chapter 2:

⦁ Catra watching ice melt is a Booker reference. I love you Booker. But also a euphemism like “watching paint dry,” “watching grass grow,” etc.

⦁ The nightmares weren’t in the initial concept for the fic, but Entrapta helping Catra out with her “condition” was and I found they were a good way to showcase the backstory without actually showing flashbacks or having an entire prologue chapter of trauma after trauma that just would have felt miserable and spoiled everything.

⦁ Catra’s job isn’t necessarily real but is also heavily based on real things. Basically universities sometimes have special collections, archives, etc that are typically “open” during regular work hours, but only by appointment. They might have their own staff or just the librarians see to them. For this fic I basically made up something that might be real, where BMU also allows appointments after hours, but only from grad students, and then professors can come in after hours (or during hours) without appointment as long as there’s staff present. And of course they get away with that by hiring someone cheap so it doesn’t cost them a lot extra to keep it open. Catra has been paid more by other jobs, but she likes this one way better, and she doesn’t have a ton of money pressure living with Scorpia and Entrapta, so she’s planning to keep it. This is also heavily based on one of my first jobs where I did something similar for a university but it had nothing to do with collections or the library. Catra works the same hours I did then.

Chapter 3:

⦁ Bow would have offered Catra his own bed if he thought she would have taken it, but Entrapta — and Catra’s own reactions — made it pretty clear that she was going to make herself difficult to help, so he thought the couch might seem “less pitying,” but he didn’t account for the Adora factor. Everybody forgets about the Adora factor.

⦁ Scorpia mentioning “six years” immediately solidified in Adora’s subconscious that Catra’s injury was from the fall, which is why she jumped to saying she watched it happen. It didn’t even occur to Adora that Catra’s paralysis could have come from something other than the fall until she was in bed like two days later and thought, oh fuck, there could have been something worse.

⦁ Sneaking onto the school roof is the exact kind of shit Catra and Adora would do together, but since she was going up there to have A Moment™️ about one of her deaths, Catra wanted to be alone. It felt like this dark secret that she was harboring and would ruin her life at any moment.

Interlude:

⦁ “It helps a lot even without her talking back or looking at me” yeah sometimes Entrapta is listening and sometimes she isn’t even aware Scorpia is there. Scorpia can unload her whole problem, talk herself through a solution, say “Thanks!”, and then only after she has marched herself out of the room will Entrapta realize she has left and throw a goodbye through the door, still not looking away from her screens. The first time Catra witnesses this she immediately gets a clear picture of the apartment dynamic.

⦁ Catra wouldn’t say her name because it was part of her paranoia over being hunted down somehow.

⦁ “Maybe Scorpia isn’t used to people not immediately loving her.” Yeah could not be further from the truth she was kind of bullied in school, that’s how she and Entrapta became friends, because they were both bad at social cues and stuck together.

⦁ Obviously, Entrapta didn’t mean anything by her questions. When you don’t realize other people would treat someone differently over something, it can seem like innocent curiosity to ask about it. She learned very quickly after meeting Catra that those kinds of things have limits, it just wasn’t something that had come up in her life before and she hadn’t inferred it.

Chapter 4:

⦁ Honestly Adora had to have Mara as family to support her because any less and she might not have made it to be at all together after everything she thought happened with Catra.

⦁ Catra does wear her arm brace in other scenarios — when she’s going to be doing physical activity, for instance, though she might opt for a sling instead/in addition — but as far as wearing it while in the apartment, sleeping like that is the only one. The difficulty of putting it on by herself — and the pain of getting help — are why she almost never uses it, even though it would work for some (but not all) of the things the sling works for, and be less obtrusive too. That’s why Adora being able to help with it later is so helpful.

Chapter 5:

⦁ The thing Adora knows that Catra doesn’t is that she’s absolutely going to break and come back home with her, even if the driving thing was more up in the air.

⦁ I went back and forth on the language to use around Catra’s ears, specifically whether to refer to them as a pair or only reference her single fully-functional one. Ultimately I decided that Catra’s internal dialog would still think of it as her ears pinning back even if only one moves (at all for small movements, or all the way for larger). She spent her entire life thinking of them as a pair, and she can’t feel one not reacting, she just doesn’t feel anything over there, so she defaults to how she used to consider them unless she’s like, looking in the mirror and can see only one move. When it comes to other people addressing them, they see just one ear reacting for the most part and tend to refer to them singularly.

Chapter 6:

⦁ Scorpia got Adora’s number at the same event that she told her about arm-hugs, mostly to puff herself up when she realized Adora could pet Catra, however carefully.

⦁ Scorpia’s pillow said “Not to spoil the ending, but everything is going to be ok” which just irritated Catra every time she saw it, so she hid it. She can’t throw it out because Scorpia’s moms are the ones who got it, but she can do her damnedest to never see it again. It mysteriously reappears when Scorpia is moving out so she can take the dumb thing with her.

⦁ Like every chapter I had a scene that I was like “this is the most fun to write, I love this so much” (which like… really awesome from a writing perspective!) and the cuddling scene was that one for this chapter. I thought it was going to be the phone call, but Adora’s determination to cuddle, her diagram, and Catra’s fluster were just so fun to work with.

Chapter 7:

⦁ Mara calls her loved ones dear because Razz always called her dearie.

⦁ Mara and Adora went all-in on the driving thing because they know Catra well and knows she needs an excuse, or at least an extra push, whenever it comes to emotional stuff like coming home.

⦁ Originally the phone calls were outlined to be one singular phone call, with Catra eventually getting comfortable enough to turn on the video as the call went on, but spreading it out made a little more sense. In the version where it was all one call, though, Catra admitted that she didn’t want them to see her face paralyzed and Adora asked Mara to tell Catra that she didn’t care about her ear. Another reason I cut it is because I decided Catra wasn’t self-conscious about that aspect of her injury.

⦁ Entrapta is thorough. There were two-three months there were she was tracking and timing just about every single thing Catra did inside the apartment. She had monitoring devices she didn’t realize her roommates would want to know about because it just seemed more effective to her than following Catra around all day. Her presence would have skewed the experiment. It’s creepy, but it all came from a place of love and wanting to build a better understanding of what could be effecting Catra’s situation.

⦁ The restraint it took for me to not make a joke about Entrapta knowing when Catra… “takes time for herself” was immense but I kept reminding myself it was a T fic.

⦁ “I was there two months ago” Ha, yeah, this is set in December and… The anniversary……. Adora needed to be home. Her moms are the only ones who can really comfort her when she’s like that.

⦁ Mara really wanted a kid, and Hope did too but less so, and she had a lot more Concerns about it. When they started looking into adoption and found a kid who was human (so Hope was confident they were informed on taking care of her) and had been an orphan for ten years, Mara couldn’t stand to leave her there. They hadn’t really been intending on getting an older kid (I mean, ten is not old, but in Hope’s head they were looking for a baby because typically you Acquire Child at babyhood so that must be how it works) but Adora being older was another thing that made Hope go okay, we can do this (she’s also, to be quite honest, not a fan of babies or very small children). What that meant in the end though was that Mara, in her older twenties, had much less of an age gap with Adora then would be typical. Hope is like six years older and so her age gap with Adora is less noticeably off.

I think it’s a faceblind thing, but I’m absolutely awful with ages. You could tell me Mara is supposed to be early 20s or late 30s and I would have no choice believe you. Regardless, I roughly place Mara somewhere around the 20-30 mark in the show and as having a more “big sister”-like relationship with Adora, so that’s how things got set up in this AU.

⦁ It’s “Bow’s” senior year because Glimmer is a year younger and Adora’s college education was kind of weird so she doesn’t really consider herself as having anything but a freshmen year. Maybe sophmore.

Chapter 8:

⦁ Catra has two bags while Adora has one for two reasons: 1) Adora still has some stuff at home and doesn’t need to bring as much, and 2) Catra’s second bag was mostly dedicated to her adaptive devices and hybrid shit since she knew she might need them for any stuff Adora wanted to do and she couldn’t borrow the shampoo already at the house.

⦁ Perfuma’s nature hike actually originated in this chapter and then I added it in to chapter 6 since I was far enough ahead in writing to do that. Before that the vibe was just “Well obviously Scorpia got Adora’s number from Perfuma at some point,” but this gave a more solid throughline on that. Their interaction at the nature hike is also what led to Scorpia starting to turn around on Adora until she tested her with the phone call.

⦁ The “look” that passed over Adora’s face when Catra joked that she didn’t remember getting tangled in the ribbon was her briefly worrying that Catra actually didn’t remember due to her supposed memory issues following the fall.

⦁ The school where Catra fell is loosely based on the random high school I took my SATs at, where it was actually four buildings with a courtyard and a quad between the buildings and various sports fields. Adora was walking on one of the paths circling one of the buildings when she saw Catra fall from the roof of another.

⦁ Adora mentions hospitals plural because she checked every single one it was even semi-plausible for Catra to be taken to, though there was only one that made sense since it was more than twenty minutes closer than the next one.

⦁ Adora has her childhood twin bed at home and at the apartment Catra has a double bed to give her enough room to comfortably position her arm without worry. It also helps when she does have a nightmare bad enough for her to move around, and when she’s having a day where her fear of falling is intense. She can tuck into the corner between the bed and the wall and know there’s no way she’s going over the edge.

⦁ This fic was supposed to be set nebulously in the fall until I had the Winterfest ideas and lined everything up to make it happen. It still worked out with it starting literally right after Catra’s birthday, but I went back and edited in a line referring to it later so it would build the time of year out better before it got to the Winterfest stuff. Of course, that only matters if you reread chapter 2 after I did it or started reading the fic later on, but it’s there for rereads, at least. It’s one of those unique things about fanfic and how you (typically) post it as you write it, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of second drafts. I really like that about fanfic because of how it forces you to work the limitation (and also I hate rewriting), but I always have more ideas while I’m writing so sometimes it can get in the way of something good.

⦁ The original title of this fic was “As Many Lives As It Takes (To Be With You Again)” but at some point between creating the document and posting the “Again” got dropped. This isn’t relevant to chapter 8, I just happened to notice it while typing the notes for it.

Chapter 9:

⦁ There was a lot more stuff about Catra learning to drive in this chapter initially, but I wasn’t happy with it and found I was skipping right past it when I was trying to reread/edit what was going on in the chapter, so for the final version I cut it. Some things though: Catra’s entire first day of driving didn’t even involve leaving park, it was mostly spent on figuring out how to manage her arm (in the end, putting it in the arm brace was the best way to keep it still and out of the way, even though that was difficult with Adora helping her instead of Entrapta) and stuff like hitting the turn signal with her pinky while turning the wheel. The first day where they actually drove in the street Adora came along — just for fun and not in case you have a panic attack, promise! — but was sworn to being silent in the backseat. That lasted until Mara said Catra was learning faster than Adora did.

⦁ Adora’s not a bad driver, she’s just an anxious one, partially due to Catra’s accident making her all too aware of the dangers. She spent high school watching Catra deal with her paralysis which supposedly came from the car accident, after all, so she tends to be a meek driver.

⦁ When Catra sees things she wasn’t able to IRL in her dreams, like when she sees parts of the incidents that she was actually dead/unconscious for… sometimes that’s accurate. And that’s all I’ll say.

⦁ The dent stuff… with the bumper… might or might not have been inspired by the movie Underdog……… It’s a very comedic origin for something that is so traumatic in the fic but like. I saw that movie as a kid and never forgot that part.

⦁ Entrapta 100% hacked the DMV and canceled someone else’s permit test so Catra could be fit in immediately, she just didn’t tell Catra that. Not that she’s hiding it, exactly, but volunteering that information? No.

⦁ Oh that phone call from Adora’s perspective. Adora basically didn’t know shit about what they did in the logs. She was horrified by what Catra described, but also a little confused, and maybe even put out. Catra had never told her even half the details it was clear Entrapta knew off the top of her head, and she made it sound like it was all very clear and she remembered every second of what she was awake for. Which, well, she did. Because her body was totally fine. Adora was ruffled by Entrapta’s “bedside manner”, and then she heard the hacking stuff which had her like, wait, what? because Catra had mentioned Entrapta was a professional white hat hacker before (sometimes. Sometimes black hat. Sometimes she does other stuff and invents a new programming language) but the whole “instantly pulling up results from the DMV thing” threw her. She was very attentive when Entrapta was running diagnostics and stuff because she didn’t know about things like Catra still being able to slightly twitch her fingers or shoulder sometimes.

⦁ Catra specifies not mocking Scorpia during romcoms because there is no way, ever, no matter what she owes, that she won’t make fun of the dumb romance movie stuff that happens, especially het nonsense when that applies.

⦁ Catra’s fosters did get her “Winterfest gifts” but they were things like clothes and school supplies she would need anyway, just maybe a little nicer or at least less generic than usual.

⦁ Time to talk about what everybody thought happened to Catra! Obviously, people at school decided Catra had died within the first few weeks. At that time, Adora decided Catra must be in a coma or suffering memory loss, maybe awake but not lucid. She thought Catra’s condition being unstable might be why no one would talk to her, but she told herself she couldn’t be dead because then they would just say that. The longer it went with everyone remaining tight-lipped, however, the worse things Adora began to believe. About a year in, she came to “accept” that Catra was dead — outright, or brain dead even if her body was still breathing. Mara and Hope also didn’t know why anyone would “cover up” what was supposedly a very public suicide, so they also believed Catra “survived,” but knowing how far she fell and how bad it must have been, they knew pretty much right away she was likely to be brain dead or not remember anything. They didn’t really ever say what they thought, though, mostly focusing on comforting Adora when she went through disaster scenarios and occasionally reluctantly admitting which they thought was most likely when she got too frantic to be calmed by anything but an answer. Each member of the trio had a different opinion (each of which was an option that everyone else had considered individually): Kyle believed Catra was severely injured and sent away to a rehab facility to recover and perhaps help her overcome her “suicidal tendencies” but was basically cut off from them by the system, Rogelio believed she was in a coma and if she ever woke suffered memory loss (explaining why she never contacted them), and Lonnie thought that she was straight up brain dead before they eventually pulled the plug. Catra’s foster parents, knowing she had run from the hospital, thought she was dead in a ditch somewhere and after a few months decided they were just never informed when she was found.

⦁ Yes it’s late for chestnut season. No I do not care. Chestnut season is a few weeks later in Etheria, okay.

⦁ Both Mara and Hope cook usually, but around holidays Mara takes charge and it’s family recipes 24/7. Mara probably would have baked a pie for the final day of Winterfest anyway, but it wouldn’t have been that one. That one is the most special.

Chapter 10:

⦁ Even if Catra didn’t need her hand for the VR game, Bow’s headset wouldn’t have fit over her ears. There are headsets that would work, just not the one Bow built. It wasn’t a concern for him at the time.

⦁ Glimmer is terrified of horror games for herself, but she seems to forget that literally every time and is always really excited to play, just remembering the adrenaline rush and thinking this time she’ll redeem herself and be totally cool and composed.

⦁ The horror game was going to be the latest Resident Evil DLC (for the Village? I think? Or like the sequel?) but then I was like damn. I don’t know if that’s in VR. But it was literally the only horror game I could think of at the moment despite liking (let’s plays) of them, so I kind of co-opted and mangled the mom-mannequin-dolls section of that.

⦁ The Star siblings were actually at the barbecue in my first draft but it made the scene too crowded when half the attendees already didn’t have speaking roles.

⦁ I kept trying to figure out where to fit in Adora’s school shit and it just never didn’t slow the scene down. I’m not sure it doesn’t here, either, but somewhere in the fic proper I wanted to mention why Adora and Catra never bumped into each other on campus. I had already decided Adora’s school worked out this way before I decided on Catra’s job, but that just made it relevant. Basically, Adora came to Bright Moon intending to get a four year degree and then go into nursing. Mara and Hope were supportive, but a little insistent she go to a four-year instead of a community college for nursing because then she could explore more. They just didn’t want her to fall too into the martyr shit without them there as a support system, but Adora thought they were lowkey hoping she’d change her mind and decide to become a doctor instead of “just” a nurse. Adora was roommates with Glimmer freshmen year and met a few of their eventual friend group there, which she always says made it all worth it, but university was a disaster for her. She would have rather drop dead from exhaustion than drop out, but that was looking increasingly likely as her mental health combined with ADHD to make her a disaster. Her grades weren’t good, she spent time crying in the study rooms at the library, it was a mess. Eventually Glimmer called Mara to make sure she knew just how bad it was for Adora since she knew by then she would play it down. They’d only been friends for a few months and she was definitely overstepping, but Adora’s moms made her talk it out and they decided she would transfer to Bright Moon’s community college, where she could take one less class a semester and graduate with what she needed after only three years of school overall. Adora still kind of felt like a failure, but Glimmer just happened to decide at the same time that the dorms were insufferable and hey, we know we make good roommates already, why don’t we get an apartment between our campuses together? And living with Glimmer meant seeing Bow a lot too, so Adora didn’t have to “lose” the two good friends she had made at uni so far when she left (something she was really worried about). Glimmer and Bow wouldn’t let her hide in a shame corner over “not being cut out for it” either so she still saw their other friends from campus and even made more via mutual friends, eventually ending up with their current friend group, the exceptions being the Star Siblings (from community college), Frosta (from across the streets), and Netossa/Spinnerella (from work, Adora met Netossa during the course of her med studies).

⦁ Adora spent like an hour agonizing over her outfit and asking Glimmer for help, insisting it was just because she wanted to look nice for her birthday and not because she was thinking of putting the moves on someone or wanted to impress them. She undid the top two buttons, and then Glimmer undid two more and called it perfect.

⦁ Hey, guess what, this chapter was supposed to cover twice as much as it did (shocker) and then they took too long making out (shocker) ¯_(ツ)_/¯ This is where I had to update the chapter count AGAIN and when I did that I went back and filled out the scene during the party, which was only written in summary until that point, because apparently I had the fucking room for it in that chapter since the real confession clearly wasn’t happening.

Chapter 11:

⦁ Entrapta is playing Monster Hunter in the first scene, because I’ve had single monster fights last 40 fucking minutes in that game before. I was actually going to make it vaguely be like, a Souls game or something, but then I was like no, Monster Hunter is more her speed, leading to the jokes about how long the fight is.

⦁ Catra’s arm pain is both psychological and magic. Obviously the mechanics of how it hurts without her having any feeling are magic, but the pain comes from her mental state. The more comfortable she is with someone’s touch and the more she trusts them, the less it hurts. It also ties to her general emotional turmoil, which is why it’s still bad when she remembers stressful things, when waking up from a nightmare, etc and why it caused her such pain that first moment Adora touched her.

⦁ Tapetum lucidum is the thing that makes cats eyes glow in the dark (among other creatures) when hit correctly with light. Melog’s was not being hit correctly with light. I refuse to explain Melog.

⦁ The start of Catra’s speech was once the start of the fic, but instead of her telling it to someone, it was just the narration (“It all starts when Catra is eleven and decides to run away to find Adora, but she doesn’t understand it until later. Actually, she never understands it, but the first death she could pretend was a fluke.”). When I had this idea, I started just kind of writing with the idea of well, let me do a few paragraphs on each death and see how I feel about that. I had a few false starts, and then I wrote that beginning bit of Catra’s speech, and then it cut to a new scene to talk about the car. That paragraph ended up being heavily edited down and used in the scene in chapter 9 where she talks about the nightmare. I decided to change direction on that because 1) it wasn’t good, 2) it was wallowing, and 3) I wasn’t actually intending to start the fic that way anyway, it was just so much in its infancy that I was testing some stuff out to see what the backstory was and where I wanted to take it. Because of that false start, though, I then had trouble tracking what had been revealed/implied throughout the fic when it came to the later-revealed deaths and their fallout.

Chapter 12:

⦁ Adora lowkey moved in on a temporary basis, she just needed to be around Catra very badly between the new couple and “died four times” things. She did end up going back to (mostly) sleeping at her place and Glimmer and Bow were very insistent on them spending time together too when she relaxed again.

⦁ I didn’t want to do anything above a T rating with this fic, really, but I did kind of want to make allusions to other ways disability can effect intimacy, hence the allusions to Catra needing toy assistance since her left hand just can’t manage it and her insecurities about “contributing” when it’s time.

⦁ Catra’s ability was so unbelievable and confusing that it wasn’t the kind of thing Adora could just instantly accept as fact and help her work through, so a “trailing” ending was necessary to show Adora coming to that place of total belief with time, and trying hard to support Catra while she did so. And of course I wanted them to get time being totally honest with each other. I had a lot of the ideas for the Scorpia stuff and such that I thought would just be in the “epilogue” part of the fic notes, but then I went no, you know what, this is Important to how I envision the end here, so I made it an actual part of the fic, similarly to how I did the third fic in the Greys/Waiting For My Spaceship To Come Back For Me series. Why am I mentioning that here? Because all of the epilogue stuff was supposed to be part of chapter 12 too and then of course that didn’t work out. And I had to update the chapter count. Again.

⦁ It was really important to me that Catra’s disability didn’t magically get better. The only thing that changed was it caused her less pain, and even that is person-dependent. Her muscle response gets slightly better — sometimes — but that isn’t enough to hold a pen or be useful. There are temporary disabilities, of course, but that wasn’t the kind I was trying to show here and a disability doesn’t have to “go away” to get a happy ending. Catra’s happy ending was finding peace and love despite the things that haunt her, and she can have all that while still being disabled, she can just get hugs from at least one person now. The original outline had a point where Catra began kneading with both hands while cuddling with Adora around when she told her the truth, but I decided that was too much of a miraculous recovery. Even the sudden squeezing of the ball was something I was iffy on, but that was truly a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so I kept it and portrayed it as such, editing the kneading thing down to just twitching, because I did think it was cute.

Chapter 13:

⦁ WAILMER PAIL

⦁ I know I’ve talked a lot about how this fic ballooned, but I haven’t had fun on a project like I did this one, and Hurricane Adora, and the other smaller fics I’ve done recently, in a long time. Let Me Ride too, to a lesser degree, but I haven’t really had a project just flow out and build like this in the last year. The big difference on those last two was I just… did what I wanted. Which I know sounds obvious, but I didn’t sit and try to plot out okay, what is the whole arc for this fic going to be, what do I need to get done to get there. I did that a decent amount of Let Me Ride, which is why it’s a halfway fic here (and look at that, written slower than the others), but for these two I went well, they’re short fics, I don’t need to worry about that stuff and I can just let loose. And then neither ended up anywhere near where I thought they would, and I had an absolute blast. It’s hard to describe, but I just had a lot of fun and felt very liberated with my fics recently. I think I was treating them too much like novels, if that makes sense, and honestly the word count speaks for itself. I wrote less in November AND December combined than I did in January alone (working on LMR + oneshots), and that’s half as much as I’ve written for March alone (February being closer to March’s word count). I had my 4th highest ever word count day (since I started recording them in 2021) on this project at over 8k (for those curious, my highest ever was 12k the day I pumped out most of MNoHL in one sitting). Anyway, it ran away from me, but I was more than happy to go along on the ride, even if the fic notes alone are 7k.

Adora Interludes:

So, this fic was entirely from Catra’s perspective. Which was for three reasons: 1) Adora’s POV has no place in the first two chapters so at that point I was pretty committed, 2) she’s the most interesting POV by far for this fic, and 3) I thought this fic would be short. I don’t normally do long fics from just one character’s perspective, and you’re about to see why, but I thought it was only going to be 20k which was a fine amount for one POV. The longest fic I’ve done from one perspective before this was ASDLM, depending how you want to count it, and even then I included five fucking interludes of Adora’s POV. I don’t usually use one character POV since I find it interesting to go back and forth, but also, it’s so hard to stick to one POV. The reunion happened and I wanted to write Adora talking to Glimbow that night! Catra has her panic attack and I want to write out what Adora is thinking! But it doesn’t fit with the fic. So sometimes I did it anyway. None of these were fully written and polished and were more just me tracking where Adora was at with the big stuff, but I wanted to at least talk about them a little and they didn’t fit anywhere else in the fic notes. I just played it out in my head, sometimes, but I ended up writing down some rough scene outlines with intersperses of actual writing for:

Adora telling Glimmer and Bow everything Catra told her the night after she leaves. Glimmer starts off a little unsure of if they should be mad at Catra or not for never telling Adora she was alive, but eventually she “accepts” it (though she remains cautious of Catra for a few weeks).

Adora’s next call with her therapist, dumping the story onto her and talking a little about the guilt thing.

I don’t think I ever wrote anything down for the convo Adora had with her parents where she told them the story, but I sure thought about it a fucking lot.

Adora having a conversation with Hope over the break, while Catra and Mara are out driving. I would go into more detail, but there was a line that was originally drafted in a previous scene with Adora and Catra that didn’t end up happening, and then I put it in this scene that also wasn’t “real,” so…. At this point I’m just fucking sharing it. Because why not. The scene will be up tomorrow as a fic extra and linked in the meta section. Note that it is a detailed outline and NOT real writing, but I like it and can’t imagine just deleting it once this fic is done, so I’ll just post it here for anyone interested.

Original Outline:

I talked so much shit about the chapter count for this fic and it came back to haunt me. Here’s the thing: my initial chapter count wasn’t that wrong, which I know sounds insane when it was only like 5, but the contents for the fic I was imagining then did take up about 5 chapters. The intro, getting to the party, reintroduction, getting to know each other again, and then getting comfortable and confession.

The first two of those went exactly as I pictured. While I was writing chapter 3, though, the reintroduction went on longer than I imagined just because there was a lot to cover to do it right and it ended up taking up an entire chapter. Around then I started getting so many more ideas for the story. Initially it was supposed to be like, a nightmare/death per chapter, but then I started thinking about Adora telling her parents, and Catra going back home to visit them, and around then was when I accepted the vision for the fic expanded and bumped it to eight-ish with the vision that the visit would take two of those chapters roughly and another chapter would be fitted in for more bonding/growing closer before the confession.

Then I sat down and actually started doing my, like, one sentence outlines for scenes ([phone convo with Mara, rejects facetime], [entrapta/netossa collab], etc) and realized ohhhhh god this is more than three additional chapters worth of material. And maybe I always suspected that, because when I added more chapter headings to the document, I bumped it up to ten rather than eight. I had a detailed outline up to chapter nine, and by the time I was actually writing that far I was like this is going to be fucking eleven chapters isn’t it… but I was still unsure where it was going to fall in the 10-12 range. The epilogue was, once again, an addition, though a necessary one in my opinion, but those ideas weren’t part of the 10-12 chapter estimate.

I didn’t really have a strong vision for how the end was going to go until I got there, so the only thing about the final part of the fic that is different from the “original outline” is the remote log during the visit home (initially that was supposed to happen in person on a night when Adora slept over after they got back, but that just made less sense) and how they ran into the trio. My very initial idea for that was them driving (Catra driving, Adora teaching her, probably later on in the trip when maybe it isn’t all on Mara) and they drive past the trio walking on the sidewalk of a neighborhood and Catra nearly has a panic attack. Adora steers her through parking on the side of the road (ahead of where the trio are walking) and Catra gets ahold of herself as Adora glances back through the back window to see the trio eyeing the car, because they just saw it park a little erratically, and then they realize Adora is in the car. They can just barely see eartips around the headrest for Catra but can’t make much out.

They then watch Adora get out, wave to them sheepishly, make a motion for them to stay where they are, and then she walks around to the street side and opens up the backseat to get out the sling. This was before I had thought about anything and realized the arm brace was probably the best call for driving. Adora then opens Catra’s door, helps her put on the sling while still sitting in the driver’s seat, and holds her hand to help pull her to her feet out of the car, finally letting them see her. This made the conversation more of Catra’s choice, but when I pictured the whole exchange on the sidewalk, I had no intention of it actually being part of the fic. At that point, I hadn’t even decided if the Winterfest stuff was going to be part of it. But once I started writing that stuff, I decided the trio had to be in it too and switched it around to a run-in that made a little more sense and actually furthered Catra’s progression.

Meta:

Interlude: Three Years Ago

Fic Extra #2: Adora’s Interlude: A Conversation with Hope

Fic Extra #3: Timeline

All posts

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Upcoming

I had a plan for what fic was going to be next. Then another fic idea solidified and it was going to be that one. Then I had a new, but also returning, idea. What I’m saying is, I’m indecisive, but for the last month one AU in particular has been calling, and it’s honestly shocking I haven’t done it yet because I’m me and it's, well…

Up next is Superzero.

#amlait #ficmeta #fic notes

[zeravmeta]

For the gaming Ask

23/24/25

23. Favorite genre of video game? Definitely open world/adventure puzzle exploration type games. I grew up with a whole bunch of metroidvania and I love the exploration aspect of it, and going forward a lot of action adventure rpgs have caught on to that type of gameplay style where the player has either absolute freedom to explore everywhere or you have to actively piece together your next locations. As a result I love to play a whole ton of Very old rpgs, one of the most recent I've done being Final Fantasy Adventure. For more modern games with this style I'll actually point to one of my other big childhood games: Legend of Zelda - I really loved Wind Waker as a child, where after you complete the tutorial section of the game you're basically free to travel to ANY island on the great sea, and going forward we had Link between Worlds, where the dungeon system is entirely to your choice of which ones to go to first, and Breath of the Wild where you're literally just plopped into an unexplored world free to go wherever you wish. I also do want to give a proper mention to both Metroid and Castlevania, with my favorite Castlevania game being Aria of Sorrow.

24. Ever cried because of a video game? Which one(s)? There are two that come to mind, but for very different reasons that wildly enough came back to one thing, the music: New Danganronpa V3, and Pokemon Black/White 2. For NDRV3 I remember the ending of that game just hitting me so damn hard because every single aspect of that final trial is such a masterful and impactful finale, and I KNOW everyone whose played that game teared up when Clair De Lune began to play between Shuichi and Kiibo's RCS. I won't spoil any specifics because that's legitimately a game you're meant to experience, and also I would probably triple this post size. The finale of DR1 is hopeful, and the finale of SDR2 is hype, but the finale of NDRV3 is genuinely so emotional during the later half of the trial and even the postgame.

For Pokemon BW2 it actually came down to the special memory events that you unlocked throughout the game, where you just got a glimpse into the wider world of these characters with the aptly titled Emotion playing throughout each event. The one that stood out to me the most was actually the conversation between two plasma grunts where N is listening in, and we see how N struggles with the fact that despite the grand ideologies that he's meant to carry, it's ususally small unimportant people trying their best in whatever ways they can that really impact the world. It especially hits hard because the circumstances surrounding N are very tragic, where the plasma grunts talk about how N is so far out of their reach as a person and how they wish to know him better but can't because he's their great leader, unaware of N who, left behind and alone once again, sadly says "I'm right here..." and then blames himself for being caught up in an ideological struggle instead of actually taking action the way the plasma grunts did in either helping the team or choosing to leave to help pokemon in their own way, be it with or without team plasma.

The soundtracks for these games are legitimately so important to the impact of their events and any good game needs their soundtrack to be as good if not better. A good sountrack can make or break a game, and games that actively incorporate their soundtracks as part of the gameplay experience are the best (Minor shoutout to the Kirby and Castlevania series here, who both have excellent music but didn't really make me cry).

25. Proudest accomplishment in gaming?

So. I once crashed an online economy. This is WAAAY back in the 2010s era of people figuring out the internet and making browser games, and one such of these games was Pokemon Tower Defense made by the now defunct SamDanGames. It was a pretty simple browser game where it was (you guessed it!) a tower defense type pokemon game. Now, what happened was that there was the first and second game, and with the second game the devs made an online trade market account where you can infinitely store pokemon and trade with others. Now, every week the devs would make a mystery gift code to gift everyone a random shiny pokemon that they felt like adding to the game, and they were very generous so you could claim it as many times as you like. So, for years, young lil' ol me would just claim about a hundred of each pokemon and store them, never using them BUT also never trading them out either.

Cut to about 3ish years later, and I have a dastardly idea: The game was more or less reaching the climax and end because we got the final level release, and everyone is preparing for the third launch title of Pokemon Tower Defense. I wasn't really all that invested at that point anymore, but I still made sure to get the mystery gifts every time, and had a substantial amount of rare, shiny pokemon. So, I decided to "open up shop" as they say, and spent an entire night just making countless open trade offers of my actual thousands of shiny pokemon for special game currency that could be redeemed for a bunch of perks.

The next day, I couldnt log into my account because the traffic for the website was too damn high, and one of the devs actually made a post where they were like "we have no damn idea what happened". I remember just laughing so hard at the fact that I legitimately crashed the online economy for this pokemon fangame and it is one of my fondest memories whenever I think about online gaming.

#zerav responds #thank you!

[aharris00britney]

ASKS 19

It’s 6am and Brandon woke me up when he got up to go to work so now... i answer asks bc i cant sleep. 

@mileyzangel said: Can you please make a Harley Quinn hairstyle from both Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey?

I went and watched Birds of Prey the other night and it was really good. Brandon went to sleep I think tfgvhb. But I doubt I’ll try doing her hair from either of the films. @enriques4 is working on one for her Birds of Prey look if you are interested in that <3

Anonymous said: is tiny living worth it? im leaning towards the gameplay although i love cas. is the gameplay as bad as people say?

I honestly don’t think the new beds do anything. They’re... there. Lmao I think the CAS and buy items are very nice. If we get some cc murphy beds then that would make them a lot more usable tbh.  

Anonymous said: how do you and ayoshi keep making some fantastic collabs?? y'all are literally the first people i go to when I make a fresh install and I can't wait to see what you do next

Anonymous said: AxA CC KINGS!!!

Anonymous said: you guys didnt have to snap like that on AxA

Anonymous said: I LOVE EVERY SINGLE PACK U AND AYOSHI DO PLEASE KEEP MAKING MORE

Anonymous said: another iconic ah00b x ayoshi collab YAS LESSGOOOO

We put a bunch of cc ideas (hair and clothes) in a discord server we have together and then work on the stuff together on call usually so each item is the way we both want me. Like for example i’ll be meshing the Ivy top while he works on texturing the ribbed version.  We also only do collabs when they happen, we didn’t plan AxA 2019 or this new set, mainly just made cc starting in May and wrapped it up in July to release in August. Then this time we started making stuff late December and got most of it done by the time I got done with my break. Having a planned collab/deadline makes stuff less stressful and the stuff usually turns out better imo

Anonymous said: hi! ur sims are so prettyyyy what skin texture and eyes do u use?

Anonymous said: hi! wcif the eyes of the sim in the edit that Dogsill edited for you please? thank you!

Anonymous said: Hi! I really love the way your sims looks so, I was what skin and eyes you use?

I actually am changing my default eyes so I need to update my resource page soon ;n; but the skins they use are all listed for each sim on the resource page here

Anonymous said: you always name axa packs by the year but this one was named after a season those that mean.... 👀

We are wanting to do something in the fall, just not sure how our lives will be then ya know? There’s a chance that this will be the AxA 2020. Since we weren’t sure I didn’t want to label it that if 2 AxA’s release this year lmao

Anonymous said: what game is the pokemon thing you're playing!? pls help a guy out i'm in love with the art style

Pokemon Sword and Shield (I have shield) for Nintendo Switch. I’ll prob post more pics once I get some new shinies :P

@kristabunny said: lol is it bad that when I saw your Santana hair I read it as Satan Hair XD

tbhhhhh it was lowkey referencing that lmao. I made the hair in October for a speed meshing video and since it was around Halloween I was like “lemme give her an almost demonic name” also Santana from glee is a queen

Anonymous said: Tbh I absolutely adore your female cc but I LIVE for your male cc!!!

Thank you! lmao the only thing I can take full credit for is the AxA male hairs. I mesh the clothes for packs but ayoshi does the texturing for them.  

Anonymous said: Could you have a go at the updo Dua Lipa has on the cover of her Future Nostalgia? The high bun with a flick in it and the strands of hair down the sides. Thanks if so :)

I’m not the biggest fan of the hairstyle tbh ;n; but we will see. (Physical is a serve, just saying)

Anonymous said: So ive never played pokemon before until my friend gave me a copy of pokemon moon. I love cats so of course my starter was a litten, but i had no clue about evolutions or anything like that. I was heartbroken when my cute litten turned into some big man cat :(

omg noooo ;n; yeah Litten is a cutie... incineroar is... well I got used to him tbh and kind of like him now? I absolutely hate scorbunny’s evolution (and most of the SWSH starters final evolution) so I think that made incineroar slightly better in my eyes. My shiny litten will be staying a kitten however :)

@multifandom-slytherin said: Hello! I love your cc! Would it be possible for you to make the bangs from your Bree Hair a separate accessory that you can put with other hairs (for example the BG low ponytail)? Thank you so much!

Anonymous said: have u considered making or allowing someone to make an acc version of your handmade bangs?

I have thought of doing accessory bangs tbh, I just like... don’t like using accessory bangs myself. So I’m not sure if I’ll end up doing it. I might try it for myself and see how many hairs they work with, and if it is a decent amount I’ll release. 

Anonymous said: First off I want to say how amazing all of your hairs and collabs are! Second I was curious if you ever thought of going back to your old hairs and updating their thumbnails / display indexes so they matched your stuff now?

I really really wanted to have all my 2019 hairs updated by 2020. It was only January 2019-April 2019 that needed updated (thumbnails and display indexes). But I just lost motivation for doing it. I will focus on it next time I have a big break from school. Also planning on updating select stuff from 2018 and 2017. 

Anonymous said: please put Sophia Barker in the gallery. PLEASEEEEE it's the most beautiful sim I EVER seen! >:3 PLEASEEE!!!!!!!!!!

She should be on there? I think? Make sure you have CC enabled and if you can’t find me through the gallery her tray files are here

Anonymous said: Hi! After the recent patch I started having a small issue with Bree hair(without bangs), when I zoom out it looks like a completely different hair, something similar to that one basegame hair that's layered with tips pointed outward but longer. Thought I'd let you know, maybe others have had a similar issue or maybe I need to change a setting or something. Love your work so much!

Really surprised this is the first time someone told me about this lmao. The hair should be updated now on SFS/Patreon <3

Anonymous said: I tried to look around for this on your "Asks" portion before bothering you (so sorry), but do you have a link perhaps for all the lips you use on your models? Are they in game or a cc you create? Thanks so much! Love all of your work! I'm super new to cc stuff and I found yours like 2 days ago and have been going nuts with downloads lol 

like presets? None of my cc models use a lip preset. I do use this slider on some of them though. For lipsticks, that is listed for each model on my resource page <3

Anonymous said: i’ve been looking for a hair like lexi that i actually like forever and now i find it but it’s for paterson peeps and i’m like actually broke and i’m like :/

im sorry ;n; at least it wasn’t too long of a wait? :/ I hope you liked the hair

Anonymous said: I can't find your jisoo ponytails in your downloads?

they’re in my retired section... may they rest in peace. scroll to the bottom of my downloads and youll see ‘RETIRED.’ click that for the retired download page. 

@eclypt-0-sims said: Hi, I recently started making MM hair and I know you're probably an expert at this but; every time I go into CAS to test a hair, all of my accessories clip with the hair. Like the hair texture would cover some glasses if my sim was wearing glasses. I don't know how to fix it, someone told me to delete an eye weight in blender but I don't really understand weight painting that much, any suggestions? love your content btw

this is a late as hell reply i’m sorry. I think that you have texture where the glasses texture would be. Hair texture should only be in hair section or hat section (if you don’t want it hat compatible). Here is a UV map layout that I use for making hair textures. It shouldnt have anything to do with weights

Anonymous said: Do you use reshade when you take previews for your cc? and also is the tropical punch ombre overlay a palette or did you make it?

I do use reshade when I take cc previews. It adds a bit of saturation to my sims and gives them some shadows under their chin/clothes. Nothing major. Also, myself and @imvikai came up with the tropical punch palette together.

@little-eris​ said: You probably have answered this before but who drew your tumblr icon? I’ve seen the same art style with other simmers 👉🏼👈🏼 it’s super cute!

thank you! here is their twitter 

Anonymous said: The male sim in your Tiny Living review looks soo familiar; was there inspiration from anyone IRL? The person he reminds me of isn't even famous so I don't even know! He is very pretty though *-*

He was a gallery sim that I just revamped a bit so I’m honestly not super sure lmao. But he is very attractive yes I agree

that concludes this ask ceremony please collect your things and move to the exit to your left. fvghbjn if you sent something I didn’t answer and it was off anon I’ll get to you soon (person who asked what beards I used for AxA... I see you)

#asks #not me spending an hour doing this #im actually kinda tired now but do i sleep #or do i just stay up... i have class at 12 #it is 7am now

[super-famicom-star-inactive]

Friday Special #5

December 18th, 2020

Welcome back to another Friday Special!

For this week, we’ll be looking into the history of cheat codes and what happened to them.

So what exactly are cheat codes? What qualifies as a cheat code?

In the most basic definition, cheat codes are usually a set of numbers, words, or phrases that, if a video game allowed them, would allow certain abilities or rewards to happen based on the code entered. For example, rewards could be something like infinite lives or all weapons/costumes/etc. unlocked.

According to history, the first recorded instance of a video game cheat code was in the video game Computer Space alllllll the way back in 1971. It was installed into the software and could only be accessed while holding the two buttons to the left while the machine was booting up to make your score start at 14. This tidbit of information however is difficult to prove as it only worked on a handful of machines.

Cheat codes were not always about given more “freedom” to players.

Did you know that they originally started out as developer tools?

Other early examples of cheat codes were ones like Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-based adventure game where if you inputted XYZZY, it would teleport the player between two places, or for a game like Manic Miner where if the player inputted the number code 6031769 (sources vary between some saying it was creator Matt Smith’s phone number and others say the last few numbers of his driver’s license) into the title card and press enter, it would allow the player to shift between the six levels of the game.

The original purpose of cheat codes were meant for developers to quickly move from one section of the game to another as well as video game reviewers to properly see through the different parts of a game to review and score it properly in gaming magazines.

Cheat codes at the time were pretty simple and not given much thought.

Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked when the Konami Code was first introduced.

Just about everyone and their mother knows about the legendary Konami Code, but just in case you don’t, it was a special code combination first introduced in 1986 for the game Gradius as a way to test the game during the early stages. The code is:

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start

It was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto (he passed away back in February of this year, rest in peace) and although it didn’t gain popularity then, a little game called Contra was where the Konami Code really started to send shockwaves all across the Western gaming world.

In the original Contra, if the Konami Code was used, your three lives were boosted to thirty, making the impossible game more manageable to play. The code became so widespread with immense popularity that Hashimoto insisted that from then on that every single Konami game would input the cheat code in its programming.

This kickstarted what would become a more modern definition of what cheat codes would be.

The Konami Code would be so famous it even found its way into non-Konami titles such as Bioshock Infinite, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and even Fortnite Battle Royale. Several famous Konami IPs that feature the code include the likes of Castlevania, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and even DDR (Dance Dance Revolution).

So what are some other famous types of cheat codes?

Sometimes the cheat code in question can provide some content that has been hidden away. Take the debug mode in the first Sonic the Hedgehog game for instance. The way to access the debug mode was to input the following code:

Press ↑ C Button, ↓ C Button  ← C Button → C Button on Title Screen

A ring chime can be heard

Hold then A Button  down and press start button

The game begins with Debug Mode

The debug menu became a rather popular feature for SEGA Genesis players, mainly for the chaos that ensued where you could alter parts of the game without bricking your cartridge and console.

Now to the more controversial stuff.

When Mortal Kombat was first released in arcades back in 1992, it was immediately hounded by enraged parents and politicians alike for its graphic violence and abundance of blood for the famous “Fatality” scenes, thus paving the way for the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) rating system for video games. When the game started to get ported to various consoles, Nintendo of America, being the same stickler for family-friendly content, censored the blood in the SNES port. SEGA, on the other hand, decided to use the cheat code route, and while the blood is censored upon boot-up, you enact the cheat code to bring back the blood. The code below:

ABACABB

This code famously became known as the Blood Code and this along with other factors made the SEGA Genesis version of Mortal Kombat so popular.

Wait! What if a game can do cheats but not just by using button combinations?

This is where cheat code devices come in.

The first recorded instance of a cheat device was in the form of the ‘Multiface’, which found its home on the likes of consoles like the ZX Spectrum. There were different variants over the years that added better and better quality to the device itself. Due to its success, similar devices made their way to the market like the ‘Freezer’ for the Commodore systems and the ‘Darth Vader’ unit (yes, it was actually called that) for the Atari 2600.

If you owned an NES/SNES/Game Boy/Mega Drive at the time, you would’ve heard about the Game Genie, which was the next major cheat device to be created. The player would put the game in the Game Genie slot and then insert the device into the console itself. You could then up your game depending on what game you had. Although they are a by-gone relic of gaming history, it still paved the way for similar devices.

When you think of the name Action Replay, those who had an original DS or a DSi probably had one of these devices, however the device is actually much older than that, dating back to its original release back in the late 1980s with its first appearance on the Commodore systems. It has since release on consoles like Nintendo DS, Gamecube, Gameboy Advance, Playstation Portable, and even the Xbox 360 and Playstation 2!

If you were a kid in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, you would’ve had the Game Shark. This cheat device was primarily known for its appearance on the Nintendo 64, but it was also widely used for the original Playstation and Playstation 2 as well as the original Xbox and Game Boy/Game Boy Color. You could even bypass the region-locked security using it, which can allow you to play any game from any region.

So what happened to cheat codes, and why don’t we see them anymore?

Well, they didn’t go away completely, as they can sometimes be found in some video games, rather they just fell out of style. See, as we approach to today’s gaming culture, cheat codes are nowadays hidden behind higher-level programming and it is no longer able to be manipulated by average players. This was done as video games became bigger and more complex, going past just some programming and the developer tools were now locked away so that the game doesn’t get altered so much it crashes. This started to become more prevalent in the mid-2000s and onward. As mentioned before, cheat codes originally started as a way for developers to go across different levels in order to fix coding or bugs. They are still being used, they’re just not for open use like they used to be.

Cheat codes have changed the gaming world and are still remembered fondly by players even to this day with the rise in retro gaming in recent years. Here’s to hoping they can come back someday.

Thoughts From The Head

Cheat codes have always been a part of my gaming experience growing up for as long as I can remember. I remember the Book Fairs that my elementary school hosted every year and I remember getting some cheat code books for games. They have unfortunately been lost to time but i do miss them fondly.

I also have memories of cheat devices, the Action Replay for the original DS for example. I used that sucker to use the ‘Complete Pokedex’ cheat for Pokemon Pearl as well as ‘Infinite Health’ cheat in Kirby Super Star Ultra. That was later unfortunately lost as my dad tossed it out, saying “it wasn’t good for anything”. Jokes on him, that device alone is easily $30-40 online, and higher in some cases.

Thanks dad.

I do have a cheat device in my possession for my original Playstation and it’s the original Game Shark. I received it for free at my local video game store since they had no real use for it and it was “Flashed” which meant that it was slightly different and was capable of playing burned and imported games (which I had). I have not had a chance to test it yet because I do not have a game to really test it on yet (plus the text is kinda odd, see photos). I will try to give it a shot this weekend and see if I can come up with anything.

#Sorry didn't realize that the schedule wasn't set right #Tumblr scheduling on desktop is odd sometimes #my voice! #friday special #retro gaming #gaming #irl #cheat codes

[crystalmaeson]

Official Readme by Maeson

Pokemon Crystal Maeson - Public Version 1.0 - Internal Version 15.0.3

IT IS RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS WITH NOTEPAD++, BUT YOU DO YOU.

o--------o |Sections| o--------o

[1]  Installation [2]  Introduction [3]  General List of Changes [4]  Patch Differences [5]  Pokémon Changes [6]  Type Changes [7]  Move Changes [8]  Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits [9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes [10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns [11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House [12] Visual Changes [13] Credits

o-----------------o |[1]  Installation| o-----------------o

Patching a game is usually a very easy process, specially with IPS Patches.

There's a variety of programs that work with IPS files, but the most famous one is named Lunar IPS, also called LIPS.

This hack is to be patched on a Pokémon Crystal 1.1 ROM file.

More specifically, this rom: Pokemon - Crystal Version (UE) (V1.1) [C][!].gbc CRC-32 : 3358E30A

You open your patcher, and then point to it to the IPS patch and the original, unmodded ROM. It will apply it and inform you when it's finished, it should be quick.

Now, there's two versions of this hack, and each one has also two varieties.

CHOOSE ONLY ONE. To know which version you want, check the details at the not-surprisingly-named "Patch Differences" section.

And yes, the patch weights almost 75% of the original game.

o-----------------o |[2]  Introduction| o-----------------o

Hola, welcome to another ridiculously long readme of mine.

I go by the name Maeson and I made other hacks for a handful of other RPGs. For the most part what I usually aim for with these hacks is to create a different experience, tweaking what I can to give games that I've played time and time again a gameplay facelift to keep them fresh for me, sometimes also trying to improve aspects of a game that I think could make it more fun, varied, better paced or just more challenging after many playthroughs and knowing stuff by hand.

These hacks are made for me in first place, so they're shaped in a very personal manner and of course through my own tastes and ideas, but it should goewithout saying, I hope.

But anyway... What can I say about Pokémon?

My feelings toward the main series of Pokémon have changed a lot since its inception. Just like millions of other fans of video games, I lived the Pokémon craze back in the day, and I grew playing most of those games. I was there without fail up until the fifth Generation, then I started to get tired of the series gradually, and I sort of stop caring with time.

Thing is, I really didn't stop liking the Pokémon themselves, and I still enjoy spin-offs like the Trading Card Games or Mystery Dungeon games, and some like Pokémon Conquest and Pokken are quite cool crossovers, so there's still some appeal to me, even if it's waning with each day.

And hey, then you get things like Pokémon Snap, which it's one unique and very memorable game, one of the very, very few games about photography. it's a really chill, fun time overall.

...What it does not appeal to me all that much since a long time, though, is Game Freak and The Pokémon Company. The choices and "philosofies" they've been doing and following for several years now have been some of the most frustrating ones I've seen besides Square Enix, and their interviews equally leave some wonderfully baffling pearls of "wisdom".

They've done a remarkable job at making me wanting to distance myself more and more throughout this last decade, to the point that I lost pretty much all my appreciation for the franchise.

And it's not just with the main games, their choice of pushing aside console spin-offs for more and more mobile based Games As A Service (that usually failed and died quickly) also left us without many interesting games that could at least keep us somewhat happy.

And the less we talk about the lies, misinformation and the worrying use of younger audiences as a shield to deflect criticism from their business decisions, the better.

I... Just can't support or stand that anymore. I feel drained.

And I would have been completely away from this franchise, barring some old games, if not for one day finding that a collective of people were working on disassembly projects of older games.

I found them to be really interesting, and my mind kinda played with the idea of having a version of one of those old games with changes that I've been wanting and waiting to happen for many years. Who knows, I could even *attempt* to improve what was already there and even add more stuff to it.

Checking the available games with disassembly, I chose Pokémon Crystal, as it seemed the most complete and evolved project of all, in combination with also being one of the longer games thanks to the large post-game it originally had, plus being an earlier Generation game also gave me more room to do changes and improvements.

So little by little, with no idea of assembly, I kept hitting walls and messing around for a time, and what you downloaded is the result of spending the free time I had working in it... For quite some time. In fact it has been over 2 years of constant work, this started in 2018.

The aim of this hack is simple:

Create a new "balance", make the game more challenging, and iron out stuff I find could be improved, or I have the ability and knowledge to do while I add more value to certain aspects of the game. Make a version of Pokémon that I'd like to replay and have every monster be a fun addition to the team and a foe I just can't roll over with little to no thought, so I want to try all of them.

If you were expecting a new story, or a new region, or whatever pipe dream that most probably would end up incompleted and not stable, sorry to disappoint, but you won't find it here.

And no, I don't really care if this hack doesn't have an "epic" name. There's so many other more important things to care than that...

o----------------------------o |[3]  General List of Changes| o----------------------------o

Here you have a quick list with some of the biggest changes all around, but there are sections for most of them to talk more in detail.

· Attempt to reach a new balance. This has been said above, but what   it actually means is that elements as Types, Moves, Pokémon Stats and   such have been changed deeply to move away from the conventions of the   original games, making many species feel entirely different gameplay-wise.

  Among other things, this means no more disappointing creatures with bad   typing and many weaknesses, or low Base Stats filler. It also means parity   between the Types, with each one having the same number of Weaknesses and   Resistances. The intent is for every Fully Evolved Pokémon to feel useful   or, at the very, very least, usable in a way where you don't feel handicapping   yourself to the point you ask yourself if it is even worth doing it.

· Moves and TMS have been changed a lot in order to accomodate the Physical & Special Split,   each Type now has both Physical and Special moves of different Power tiers.

  Many old attacks have been removed and many others have been added. What moves each   evolutionary line learns also has been changed, in order to make all Pokémon have   decent movesets depending on what their archtype is.

· DVs (IVs on later generations) No longer matter on Stat Calculations. This means that   every member of the same species will have the same potential. This also means you can   have female Pokémon with good Attack, and Shiny Pokémon with good stats, what a novel concept.

  This way any monster you come across will be equal, so you can focus on having   fun, while still having to care of it by training, feeding him vitamins and fruits,   choosing the best moves for it in a given situation, making a balanced team, and   you know, the actual RPG bits instead of the RNG ones.

  If you liked the eugenics experiment experience the original games give you,   sorry but that's not here. I apologize for nothing.

· Trainers changed all around. Better AI than in the original game, more varied teams,     their Pokémon have Stat Exp, meaning that the further you go, the better trained their   Pokémon are, and better trained your own monsters should be. I also removed several   limitations imposed on NPC trainers to make them factually inferior to you. This is   made trying to make the game more challenging instead of the usual cake-walk.

  There's no ridiculous stuff like giving Hyper Beam to everything or illegal moves   for NPC trainer's Pokémon (although bear in mind, many Pokémon have changed types,   and many have changed movesets so their moves are the new "legal" moves, but   again, nothing impossible for you to have or to add fake difficulty).

  If you're asking yourself this, no, in this hack NPCs do not change Pokémon constantly,   that tends to drag the game too much. They still do it occasionally, but not at every   time Type matchups that go against them.

· Quite a few changes related to Items, from how strong some Healing Items are, to changing   Kurt Balls, changing the effect (or power of the effect) on several Held Items, new   types of berries, and others.

  Healing items are no longer useable in battle, neither for you or the NPC Trainers.   Battles must be won only with your Pokémon, their held items, and strategy.

  ...Or well, over-levelling through mind-numbing grinding.   We can't exactly get rid of that.

· Added a whole LOT of improvements here and there to make the game flow, feel and   play better.

  Things like changing how Item Storage works to have more space overall, much faster   egg hatching speeds, making every monster available in this hack, having the Pokédex   show you a bit of meaningful game information, as now it shows a species Base Stats   and also the Shiny variations, make saving a faster process, making TMs infinite   (but not abusable), improving the scrolling while moving around making the game   feel and look much better, large improvements on the Battle Tower, expanding the   Trainer House to be more interesting end-game stuff, adding Rematches, making   PokeGear rematches better, a way to change PC Boxes remotely, move tutors and   quite a few others.

There's many things more, but that's what the individual sections are for.

o-----------------------o |[4]  Patch Differences | o-----------------------o

Now, there are four patches, so let's explain this quickly.

First, we have the Original versions, and the Alternative versions, these last ones offer a tweaked experience in case you want to play this hack again with some differences.

In which ways it is different?

Well, the Starters have been swapped, so when you begin a new game, you get to choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

MUCH bigger difference, though, is that all the Gym trainers, the Leaders, other important NPCS and the Elite Four no longer have their teams limited to following the thematic "Type" standards.

Other trainers such as the Rival also have different teams, (and like the original patch, he develops a different team depending on the starter they steal).

Without that restriction each of those trainers have way more varied teams, making the game less predicable because you can no longer coast on the Type disadvantages most of the Pokémon of a Gym Leader share.

This of course changes how you make your teams. You no longer "have" to bring "this or that Type" because later on the road there's a Gym weak to it. It's more about making a team that you feel it can withstand anything it may come.

The order of certain Ingame Trades have also been changed.

There's other smaller changes to make the bigger ones sit well, such as small text edits or change the order of the Pokédex.

But Original and Alternative are divided in two too, one that I'll call "Intended Versions" and the other two are "Items in Battle" variations.

The "Intended Versions" disables healing Items in battle and it forces Set options, meaning you don't get free switches after knocking out a foe Pokémon. You can't change the option, because it's not even there anymore.

That's how I'd like people to play my hack, but knowing how some people can be, there's an extra patch, "Items in Battle", that gives you the possibility of using Items and to change the battle option, but there's a price to pay.

If you choose to play with enabled Items/Switch in battle, a few Items will be unavailable to you, the price of several Items will increase, and the HP they restore will be lowered. Also, NPC Trainers will also use Items.

That's simply because Items can be easily abused, and that is the opposite of what I wanted in this hack. If you choose the "right" to abuse Items during battle, then I have the right to make adjustments to annoy you with your choice.

It's not like Hyper Potions will heal 1 HP or anything crazy like that, but because in my hack you can't use Items in battles, they're more powerful than the usual vanilla items so you could recover better between battles.

The items you lose access to are all new, by the way. A set of consumable Held Items that raise a stat whenever the holder is attacked or under other circustances, similar to the berries in the Third Generation, albeit they're activated differently.

Another change is limited access to a team-healing item that I made, and restores all your Pokémon to perfect shape. Intended to be used in a pinch, like being lost in a cave, or between hard fights, but you can only have in small amounts. In the Original patch, you can carry 3 of them, but only 1 on the "Items in Battle" versions.

You're free to choose how to play. Of course, you only apply one patch.

If for some reason you started a game with one version, for example, with the patch for Items in Battle, and you later on want to go to the No Items in Battle version, you can actually use that save file and not start again.

But I recommend you to save first in a Pokémon Center before doing so. Once you did that, patch a clean ROM and rename the .SAV file into whatever the new patched rom is. Now you can continue with your game. Remember to always make backups before doing anything of this sort.

I do not recommend changing between the Original and Alternate versions.

Lastly, trading and battling with vanilla Pokémon Crystal is not going to work. Not only many of the fixes made already impossible to be compatible with Vanilla Pokémon Crystal, but the gigantic load of changes I made to the game would render any attempt become a glitchy mess.

But you can trade and battle with other copies of this hack, and the four versions of the patches should be compatible with each other for both trading and battling. I'd recommend using the No Items versions because it gives you access to those extra Held Items, though.

o--------------------o |[5]  Pokémon Changes| o--------------------o

Probably the most obvious and central change, these creatures are the core of the franchise after all.

As you may imagine, there have been changes to most aspects of them. While some of those have their sections to talk about, Base Stats are probably the most important one here.

That is because for the most part there is parity in Base Stat Total for all evolutionary lines in this game.

Pokémon to me has become a rather painful series of games to look back, because there has never been that much of an interest to improve or balance out their creations to make a more varied, balanced and fun experience, and when they try to do something is more on the lines of "adding" to fix instead of improving what's there already.

And don't get me wrong, trying to get "perfect balance" is impossible with such a large amount of creatures, but at the same time, Game Freak has done very, very little in this regard, most other developers would at least try something, specially if they had the decades of game releases Game Freak has had.  

But back on track. This is why in this hack, almost every non-Starter, non-Legendary fully evolved monster has a Base Stat Total of 650, making each all of them feel have the same potential overall.

This means there will be no "early useless Pokémon", nor so called "Filler".

And yes, this means your beloved Tyranitar, Dragonite, and such have the same potential as a Raticate or a Wigglytuff. On the other hand, this also means you don't need to train a Pupitar or Dragonair to ridiculous levels to have them evolve into their final forms.

If you ask yourself "why such high Base Stat Total", well, its simple: The higher the roof, the more space you have to scale stats. The more space you have to scale stats, the better you can "personalize" stats for the different species.

Besides, the Base Stat Total stops being important when everybody is at the same "level".

Now, that's for "normal Pokémon". The first two Generations had two trios of "pseudo-legendary" monsters, those being Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and Raikou, Entei and Suicune. These critters have 660 Base Stat Total.

Starters also have a total of 660. This is mainly because starters are usually the back bone of most player's teams (although I usually roll without them), and I saw fitting for them to be slightly stronger. But fear not, because those extra points don't really make much difference, as they're used to make them more well rounded instead of just dumping them on their highest stats.

Finally, true Legendary Pokémon keep their 700 Base Stat Total of the original games. To this day I never used legendaries beyond wanting to see their back sprites, never cared about them, so they have the least number of changes, really.

Some other changes are:

·Many Pokémon had their overall archetypes changed besides their Stats improved.  Furret is now a Fast Special Attacker, for example.

·Almost every Pokémon now has a 50% Male/Female Ratio, except for the Nidorans,  Tauros and Miltank. Pokémon like Blissey, Chansey, or the Hitmon-family  now can be both male and female. Magnemite, Voltorb and such are still genderless.

·The two Legendary Trios have genders and can in fact breed, thus they can be  seen almost as normal Pokémon.

·The Pokédex had the entries for each Pokémon modified. This is because now it shows  actually useful information instead of the continuously repeated "scientific" info  that usually is full of lies and ridiculous stuff that could make an Indian Elephant  have a headache, but hey, it may not be the Pokédex info, it may just be a bit too  close to a Magcargo and it's experiencing how one feels being next to the Sun.

 Happens to us all sometimes.

 Now, the first page of each species shows its Weaknesses and Resistances while  the second page of each one now points out the Base Stat spreads it has,  which is a much, much more useful ingame data, specially when this hacks  aims to change heavily most things related to battling and "the RPG elements".

 Oh, and by the way, if you press Select while looking at a Pokémon's Data,  you'll activate "Shiny Mode", and every Pokémon shown will be seen with their  Shiny Colors!

·Talking about Shiny Pokémon, those are far more common. While I personally don't care  too much about them, specially nowadays when they've become so... Uneventful and common,  not to mention how much they've been related with hacking and cheating, Pokémon being  shiny lost appeal to me, yet they're still a big thing for many players, so why not make  them easier to obtain?

 The means for finding a Shiny Pokémon in Generation II were rough. REALLY rough. With  the way it works now, you should find quite a few of them throughout your adventure, and  also finding female shiny Pokémon should also be a more common occurrence than before.

 You're bound to find a fair share of them. This being a modded game, it doesn't really  matter if they're not as rare or hard to find.

 NPC trainers will have Shiny monsters here and there, so you should also have the chance!

·As you already know, wild Pokémon may be holding items. In the original game,  many species had nothing with them. Now, most species have them, and the variety  is much, much bigger. Not only that, the chances for finding Pokémon with items  has increased.

 Now there's a 50% of not having an item, 40% of having a "common" item, and  10% of holding a "rare" item. Better than the 2% on the original.

 Lastly, I've made another improvement in held items. Now, whenever you battle  with a wild monster that has an Item, an little icon (similar to the one in the party menu)  will appear on the enemy's HUD. Specifically between the Pokeball icon that appears  when you fight a monster that you already have in your Pokédex, and the Gender icon.

 Again, only for WILD creatures.  If monsters have items in trainer battles is a secret to everybody!

·A big one, already mentioned in the introduction:  DVs (or IVs, if you rather call them that) NO LONGER FACTOR INTO STAT CALCULATIONS!!

 This means that now only Base Stats and Stat Exp matter in each Pokémon statistics.  Oh, and by the way, the formula to calculate stats has changed very slightly.  Remember that +5 bonus at the end of the calculations? Now it's a 6.  That means that a 100 Base stat (Not HP) of a fully trained monster is 300 and not 299.

 This also means you can now have Female Pokémon with good Attack power, and Shiny  Pokémon no longer are weak, two rather big things for me at least.

 No more you will have to waste hours of your life breeding and abandoning  dozens if not hundreds of Pokémon for good DVs (what a great lesson!).  NPC Trainers also get good Pokémon too, making things better for everybody.

·Evolution has been streamlined and homogenized. This means that Pokémon that  evolved by trades, special events, and such have simpler, more direct ways  to do so now. But also, all Pokémon evolver on similar levels.

 After all, if they are supposed on equal footing in Power, they should  also be on the same level on this matter too.

 Here's a few examples:

 Pokémon with three stages evolve at levels 20 and 32.

 Pidgey evolves to Pidgeotto at level 20, and to Pidgeot at level 32.  Chikorita evolves to Bayleef at level 20, and to Meganium at level 32.  Dratini evolves to Dragonair at level 20, and to Dragonite at level 32.

 Pokémon with two stages evolve between levels 22 and 24.

 Rattata evolves into Raticate at level 23.  Venonat evolves into Venomoth at level 24.  Rhyhorn evolves into Rhydon at level 24.  Hoothoot evolves into Noctowl at level 22.

 Of course, there are a couple of exceptions. Caterpie and Weedle  are still the fastest evolving lines, and of course Pokémon that  evolve through stones can do so anytime you want.

 Oh, and by the way, in this hack, you WANT to evolve when Pokémon want to.  You won't get much from stopping an evolution, and with Pokémon that evolve  through stones and such, you should do it before too late.

 This is because many species learn better techniques at the same level they evolve,  and it would be a waste to not learn them.

 You can find at which levels are recommended Pokémon to evolve through stones in  the specific Pokémon Stat list txt. But if you want to make it easy:

 If the Pokémon has two evolutionary stages > Use the stone at Level 22 or 23.  If the Pokémon has three evolutionary stages > use the stone at level 30 or 32 (to reach the last stage).

 That said, if you feel like not evolving for whatever reason, you've not lost everything.  The game has a Move Reminder, and you'll be able to remember freely any move from a species  learnset.

 Oh, and the Time Capsule seems to work as long as you of course follow the rules.  But a few notes:

 Any Pokémon you bring from Generation 1 may have their moves changed upon  arriving your game. The moves may turn into a very uncharacteristic one for  the Pokémon, because I repurposed many moves into new ones.

 The stats of the Pokémon will change from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and most notably,  the HP of any Pokémon that reaches Gen 2 will not be fully healed, because  of the change in stats, but there's no problem at all as far as functionality,  just heal.  

 That said, have in mind there's NO NEED to use the Time Machine.  You do so under your responsibility.

o-----------------o |[6]  Type Changes| o-----------------o

Yet another big shake to the, in my personal point of view, rather badly balanced formula.

I'm not going to discuss or waste time with this. This is how it works here:

Defensive wise, each type now is weak to two other types, while resistant to three, one of them being itself. There are NO immunities. Every type is equal as far as weaknesses and resistances, except for Normal.

Normal has no weaknesses or resistances, period.

Offensive wise, each Type is effective against two Types, and is resisted by three, one it being itself. Normal does not hit for Super Effective damage nor does it get resisted.

So, among other things, Ghost will get hurt by Normal and Fighting moves, Normal will get hit by Ghost, Dragon is no longer weak to itself, and Ice is not such an awful and pathetic defensive Type that exists to be mocked.

Oh, the Fairy Type has been added too, but how it works doesn't exactly resemble the original game, just like the other Types.

Now, because I know how certain part of the community can act (and let's not kid ourselves pretending it doesn't happen), to make myself clear and blunt:

 I don't care if you think Type X should be weak/resistant to type Y.  I don't care if you don't want to learn new Type Matchups.  I don't care what Game Freak does with types now or in the future.

I'm not Game Freak and I have made this wanting to break away from their norm, I don't have to follow any rules, not theirs, not yours.

Making a more even ground for all types, trying to make each monster good, so I could play with all of them and have fun was one of the important things for me, and to reach that goal I made as many changes as I saw fit.

You're free to stop reading and go look for another hack if this will bother you that much.

End of the "serious" moment. Good? Great, let's continue!

With this change, every Pokémon will always have more good points than bad points, not to mention that the maximum number of weaknesses a Pokémon can have is 4, and if it has 4 weaknesses, to compensate it will have 6 resistances.

Another thing I want to point out is that the number of Normal Type Pokémon has been lowered. While there are still a bunch of them, it's a way lower number, making many of these previously Normal Pokémon have completely different Type Combinations. I mean, I'm sure you won't miss all the Normal/Flying types. I hope so at least.

If you think Normal Type not having weaknesses could be "broken", far from it, specially since, as I said, in this hack having *more good points* is a given for any non-Normal Pokémon. But of course that's just talking. They can make for great members, in one of my several test-playthroughs, a Furret was one of my best Pokémon all thoughout the game.

There is an image in the RAR file with a Type Table to show you how Types work now, but beyond that, in Violet City's Pokémon Academy, there are two books that teach you the differen Types and their strong and weak points.

And then, if you're so lazy to figure it out, the weaknesses and resistances for each individual species is listed on the Stats text file.

And theeen, if you're even lazier than that, you can also check the Pokedex Entry of a given *captured* Pokémon, as it gives you useful info such as this.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you have a number of ways to find out how types work. Use them to your advantage.

Oh, lastly, in this hack there are NO Pokémon with double weaknesses. I've never liked them to be honest, and to me just show how unappealing some types were designed to be that they make such awful combinations.

I still remember how excited people were for Aurorus until they saw its typing, and then it all turned into either jokes at its weaknesses or pure disapppointment.

No fun.

o-----------------o |[7]  Move Changes| o-----------------o

Alongside the previous two changes, the Moves have been changed A LOT too.

Instead of just "copying" what Game Freak has done in later generations, this hack had in mind to actually modify moves in ways to make them more interesting based on the limitations of the GBC games, and also another little thing:

There is a Physical/Special Split in this hack, so one of the big changes of this hack was to give each Type a number of both, Physical and Special moves to cover different Power levels so Pokémon can have good STAB moves that go along with their stats.

After all, that was probably the best thing Generation IV did for me. While it took some toys from some Pokémon (like Elemental Punches from Alakazam), it really was a big change for the better for most species.

So for example, we have Rock Slide for Rock Pokémon with high Attack, and Rock Launch for Rock Pokémon with high Special Attack. For this, many old moves were removed and reworked into new moves, mostly moves that were redundant and exactly the same as other moves (Like Whirlwind and Roar, or Wrap and Bind, they're the exact same thing).

While this gives every type and every Pokémon solid Stab moves, the limitation of 254 moves makes it so I can't add many "wild" and unique moves, but oh well, it's already much, much better than what it was originally on Generation II.

...No, really, I forgot how rough and unfair the move list was in old Generations, with some Types having almost no good moves at all, or moves that Pokémon couldn't take advantage of because their Stats and their Types didn't match. Hoo boy...  

Another big change is that most attacks now have secondary effects, and very often, the lower the Power of a move, the higher is the chance to inflict those secondary effects.

For example, Fire Breath (New move) has a 15% Chance of causing Burn and 70 Power, but Flamethrower only has 10% chance of causing burn and 95 Power. This makes moves with lower Power a bit more useful.

As you may imagine, Pokémon Movesets have been changed tremendously, not only for those critters that had their Types and Stat distributions changed, but also to accomodate all the modifications related to Moves.

Movesets in this hack are in no way attempting to copy later generations of official games, specially since Generation 2 Movesets were incredibly sad to look back.

Instead, they're focused on attempting to give what that certain species needs. So no Pokémon will be let without good STAB moves, and you also won't see Pokémon that are obviously Physical attackers getting Special moves or viceversa.

A handful of moves also got their priority changed.

Safeguard, Haze, Mist, Transformation and Bide now go before other moves. This change actually shakes up battles a bit, it was fun to see the AI read my moves from time to time and prevent Status, and hey, with Transform having priority now Ditto is more usable too!

A list of the moves, what they do, and their other data is in its own TXT file, although with ingame descriptions, it is not necessary.

As far as TMs and HMs, things also have changed.

TMs no longer get consumed when used, so they have infinite uses. The Moves they teach have also changed for the majority of TMS, with most of them teaching both Physical and Special "end-game" moves. There's also a total of 55 TMS now.

None of them can be found in shops, you must find them by exploring or obtained from an NPC.

HMs have also changed a bit, making them more useful. Cut now is a 70 Power Normal move with a High Critical Ratio, and Fly is a strong move with 110 Power that causes Recoil damage. Flash causes damage and can lower Accuracy. Strength is now is Fighting type and causes Flinch. And Whirlpool is a bit more powerful and now takes more HP at the end of turns, so its a rather cool combo alongside Toxic on bulky Pokémon.

Also, HMs can be forgotten like normal attacks, so you can swap attacks easily in case you want, and unlike in Gen. 1, because you can't drop them, you can't get stuck.

Or rather, you wouldn't get stuck, because there's another change. These moves:

Headbutt Rock Smash Cut         Surf Strength Waterfall Whirlpool

Don't need to be known by a Pokémon to be used in the overworld! You only need a Pokémon capable of learning such move, and the needed Medal in the case of the HMs.

That only leaves Flash and Fly out of that list, right?

About Flash:

I also added an item that will let you light dark caves so you don't need to have a Pokémon with Flash, but you get it quite a bit later than the HM. Just look around Mahogany after things calmed down.

It can be assigned to Select for quick use, too!

About Fly:

There's a small sidequest you can do later in the game that will net you a special object. This item will let you use a different version of Fly. Mechanically, it's the same, you can fly to places you've explored. Animation-wise is different, though.

Because all of this, you no longer need to have any HM on any Pokémon unless you want it (because most of them are actually respectable attacking moves), which gives much more freedom to parties and movesets!

o----------------------------------------o |[8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits| o----------------------------------------o

TLDR VERSION: Use Vitamins, use Fruits. They improve your Pokemon's stats, and          you need to take care of your team to withstand other trainers          which have properly trained monsters. Use them intelligently,          don't waste them with Pokémon you don't want to have in your team,      at least early on when you have limited resources.

         Vitamins are no longer as limited in effect, or as expensive.          Fruits are new, and are twice as good as Vitamins.

Pokémon games have a system in which, through adquiring certain points through different means, a creature can improve its Stats. In Generations 1 and 2, these are called Stat Experience. This is a system Game Freak has never informed the players about at all, and the games never came even close to mention it in any trully useful detail, so bare with me if this is your first time with this stuff, although I doubt you found this hack knowing nothing about it.

Stat Experience points can range from 0 (Empty) to 65535 (Maximized). Unlike later generations, In Gen. I and II, you can maximize the experience of all the stats.

Stat Experience points are divided and exclusive for each stat. HP, Attack, Defense and Speed have their own Stat Exp Table. Special Attack and Special Defense share the same Stat Exp Table. So reaching 65535 Stat Exp in each Stat will make your Pokémon perfect stat-wise. Even Pokémon at Level 100 can get Stat Experience, but to gain the effects, they need to be stored on the PC so their real Stats can get updated with the current Stat Exp. they have at that moment.

The ways you get Stat Exp are these:

By battling -Each time one of your Pokémon defeats another, the Base Stats of the enemy's species          is added to your Stat Exp in each stat. This is the slowest way, but it's also free,          and will raise your stats by just playing through the game.

     If you defeat, let's say, a Caterpie, it has these Base Stats:

HP 75, Attack 60, Defense 70, Speed 95, Special Attack 90, Special Defense 70.      As I said, Special Attack and Defense use the same Stat Exp Table. The game takes      the Base Stat related to Special Attack, so in this case, your Pokémon will be      awarded 90 Special Stat Exp Points, alongside the rest.      Training only through battles is not only pointless when you have other means,      but also incredibly tedious. While in my hack Pokémon have higher stats that make      training this way faster, battling for Stat Exp should only be relied on when      you've already fed your Pokémon Vitamin and Fruits, to get those last Stat Exp Points      needed for a Perfect Stat.

     But of course, any Stat Exp gained through battles is benefitial, just don't battle      *only* for the Stat Exp unless, as I said it's to finish Stat Exp training!      By the way, there's a special condition named Pokerús, which is a benefitial virus      that will double the amount of Stat Exp you get from battles. This is very rare      to get, and you will be noticed by a PKMN Center Nurse. The games don't tell you  what it does exactly either...

     It can be very useful, and it propagates through your Pokémon team, and disappears      after some time. If you ever get Pokerús, try to keep a Pokémon with active Pokerús      on your PC so you can pass it to other Pokémon. But as I said, it's very rare!

By Vitamins -Vitamins in the original game were pretty useless. They raised very little, and they      could only be used up to some point, which is less than half way the Stat Exp total.

     In this hack, though, they're much better, and even necessary, as the people living      in Johto and Kanto have *actually* trained their Pokémon properly and they have Stat      Exp, so they'll be stronger and more challenging, and after a certain point, all      trainers you'll find will have maximized Pokémon, like any trainer worth their salt      would be doing.

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp Points per use, and they can be used until the      Stat Exp of the Stat that you want to raise reaches 51.456, at which point, the      Pokémon wont get any benefit from it (it won't be wasted, so don't worry).

     To make it easier to understand, let's put it this way:

     An untrained (either just catched, or just hatched) Pokémon will have 0 Stat Exp on      everything. If you feed it HP UPs, it will be able to eat 6:

     10.240 1 HP Up      20.480 2 HP Up      30.720 3 HP Up      40.960 4 HP Up      51.200 5 HP Up > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one.      61.440 6 HP Up > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!               You can get the rest by battling.

     If you're used to Effort Values from Gen 3 onwards, let's make it even easier:

     The way it works, each modern EV means 256 Stat Exp, so if it's easier for you, just      divide Stat Exp by 256:

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp, that means 40 EV.      The limit of Stat Exp is 51.456, that means 201 EV.

     So with a Pokémon without EVs, you can go from 0 to 240 EV through vitamins.

     You can obviously give Vitamins to a Pokémon you've been battling with no problem,      but an untrained Pokémon is better to use as an example.

     Their price is much lower so you can keep up with enemy trainers, although they      cost enough to make each purchase a bit of an investment early into the game.

By Fruits   - Fruits are almost exactly the same as Vitamins, but they give twice the Stat Exp.

     Each one gives 20.480 Stat Exp (Or 80 EV if you want it that way), and the limit      is 41.216 Stat Points (or 161 EV). This means that your Pokémon can eat up to      three Fruits in a stat to jump for 0 Stat Exp to 61.440 (or 0 to 240 EV) and      almost maximize it. Let's again use an example of raising HP with Fruit now:

     20.480 1 Salty Fruit      40.960 2 Salty Fruit > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one      61.440 3 Salty Fruit > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!

     Thus, fruits are much better overall than Vitamins, but they're scarce, and should      be better used for Pokémon you know they have little to no training in a certain Stat.

     You can combine Vitamins and Fruit without problem, but if you do, first use your      Fruits, then the Vitamins so you don't waste Fruits unnecessarily.

Why the limit - If you're asking why the limit is 51.456, or 240 EV for Vitamins, and 41.216 or 161 EVs for Fruits, it is simple to answer: If you feed a Vitamin/Fruit to a Pokémon in a way that would go over 65535, a bug would happen and the Stat Exp of that Pokémon would roll back to 0. I think it's obvious why that would suck. So, by putting these limits you're safe from that to happen, but you also get very close to maximize a stat. It's the best balance I could achieve.

o--------------------------------o |[9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes| o--------------------------------o

Already said that under the hood, there are many, many other changes. Some (not all of them, not by a long shot) changes are as follows:

· The Clock Reset function now has a much easier button combination to open it.  The combination is like this:

 1: Hold    Select + Down  2: Release Down while holding Reset.  3: With Reset Held, now hold Up too.  4: Release Select. The Reset Clock menu will open.

 It requires less buttons, making it easier to do, or able to do at all  depending where you are playing. You still need to input the password,  though, removing that would let you abuse certain things very easily.

· Prices for several things have been lowered on the "Intended" Versions of this hack.  Because you no longer can abuse Items to progress, I saw no real reason to  make you pay as much as usual. You're still going to need them, because the  need for healing between battles is still a thing.

 Another reason to do this is because you will also spend much more money than  usual on Vitamins and other stuff to properly train and prepare your team.  

· Catching Pokémon grants you Experience now! The Exp. is the same as if it was  defeated, and every Pokémon that fought in said battle will get a share of it.

· The Odd Egg will always give you a Shiny Pokémon between 7 ramdonly selected  species, and both genders. Each Species get a unique move, instead of all of  them getting the same (now non-existing) move.

· Talking about Eggs, Pokémon now hatch much, much faster, so there's less  walking up and down through Goldenrod. Not only that, but Egg Moves also  changed all around. Pokémon also lay Eggs faster, and Nidorina &  Nidoqueen can now breed, alongside both "legendary" trios.

 Now each basic species has between 3 or 4 Egg Moves for the most part  they are different from vanilla, and basic Starter Pokémon have 5 Egg Moves.

· Trainer AI has been much improved. Now they know much better what they do, and they  can priorize stuff like Status Effects, they take better advantage of weaknesses and  resistances.

 They also carry Items with them, if you play with the patch that lets you  items in Battle, of course.

 Trainers also have properly trained monsters, with Stat Exp increasing throughout  the game. Feeding your team vitamins and fruits is now important to stay on toes  with them. Of course, there is more variety in species of monsters used by NPCs,  their levels are higher, and team sizes have increased a bit.

 Making each trainer a full 6 Pokémon team would drag the game, though, and probably  couldn't fit, I already was suffering the lack of space with what I added, because  when adding Stat Exp, custom Movesets, and such the space gets used way too fast.

 Also, the game was very, very unfair to the NPC trainers.  Not only were they hard-coded to fail more often, have mediocre AI, and Low-Level Pokémon,  you also got your Stats and Types boosted as you got Badges, so they became completely  inferior and disappointing... At least, if you want to have any challenge.

 That's why any bonus that Badges give you was stripped down. No Stat Boost, no Type Boost.  This will make the game far more fair and chalenging, in turn making it more enjoyable if  you look for having to think and put a bit of effort, which is, you know, the point of  this entire hack.

 Another thing changed is the money that many types of trainers reward you by beating them.  In this hack you have many more things to buy as mentioned above, from Vitamins, to  Held Items, to Decorations, and more Healing Items because of the higher difficulty,  so a better income was needed.

 On the other hand, if you lose, which is much more plausible now, you won't get your money  halved. Instead, you lose money depending on the number of badges you have, like more recent  games. It's much more fair early on, specially in this hack since it is expected of you to  buy vitamins and held items for your monsters as you go through the game, besides all the  other items.

· Stat increase percentages have been changed.

 Stat-improving moves like Accelerate or Meditate, and Stat-decreasing moves like  Growl or Scary Face can go from Level 0 (normal stat), to Level +6 or -6,  depending if it increases or decreases a stat.

Before o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  28%  35%  45%  50%  66%  100%  150%  200%   250%  300%  350%  400%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o Now o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  30%  35%  45%  60%  75%  100%  130%  160%   190%  220%  250%  300%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o

 This has been changed for one main reason: to make better balance between critters,  Stats are now higher. With stats being higher, stat-increasing would get too broken,  specially with +1 bonus being a whole 50% increase. So bonuses are softer now, but  so is stat-reducing -1 Level, so it's not too harsh.

· Item Storing Changes

 For starters, there's two new pockets, one for Berries and Fruits in which 13 kinds of items go in it,  the already known berries, plus the new Fruits used for powering up your monsters. Fits all of them.

 The other new pocket is for Battle items, specifically Held Items. There are several dozen of them,  and having such type of items be mixed with consumable and healing items was a bit of a mess,  even more if you have an organization obsession and want everything neatly grouped.

 Every item of this type fits in this pocket, that's over 50 different types of Items!

 Apricorns are now stored in your Ball Pocket, and there's space to have every ball plus Apricorn,  so they will never become a nuissance to you by filling your bag like before.

 Item Pocket now can store 35 different objects instead of 20, and because Berries/Fruits, Apricorns,  and Held Items do not take space in this pocket anymore you have much more freedom.

 There's one catch, though, now you can only store 30 types of items in the PC, instead of 50.  It won't be much of a problem because you don't need to store any Berry, Fruit, Apricorn, Ball,  or Held Item, so I think it's a good compromise.

 Another change is, as mentioned above, about wild Pokémon. Now, many different species will  hold items. These range from Berries and Fruits, to sell-able Items, Apricorns and a few others.

 This not only will make getting new monsters more interesting, but will also make way, way  more useful the move Thief, and also the new Peck, which also has the effect of taking the  item the foe holds.

· The Pokegear Map has seen a huge facelift. Not only is a bit prettier to look at,  it's also more informative, with standout places or landmarks pointed out in the  map. I even added different little icons to quickly see which poblated areas are  Towns or Cities, just because why not.

· A new Building in Goldenrod has been opened. This place will sell to you all  the Decoration items you previously would get through Mystery Gift or through your Mom.

 Some of the dolls also have been changed, to offer something new, because the game  now is not limited to the original Pokémon icons for the Party Menu. This is also  true for the bigger dolls.

 Talking about that, your Mom will no longer buy you Decoration items, and the items  it buys are now much more useful and simply put, better than Super Potions and such.

· A Move Reminder has been added to the game, but unlike how Move Reminders work  in vanilla games, here it will let you remember moves from a species, as many times  as you want, for free.

 This is because this hack, having higher difficulty than your usual Pokémon game, may  require you to reshuffle your Movesets or try different strategies, and I WANT you to  do so, punishing you with constant farming of Items to change Movesets so you can try  different things sounds very counter-intuitive to me.

 To make this even more useful, each fully evolved creature can remember a number  of Moves from prior evolutionary forms too.

 The types of Moves they'll retain from earlier forms are usually moves related to  Stat changes, Status Effects, and Attacks that may have special traits or effects.

 Basically, Pidgeot won't be able to remember Wing Attack, which is a simple, straightforward  Attack move, but it will remember Quick Attack and Peck, the first one having Priority,  and the second one having the new effect of stealing Items from other Pokémon.

 You can find the Move Reminder in both Johto, and Kanto.  In Johto, he lives with the other useful NPCs, Name Rater and Move Deleter in Goldenrod.  In Kanto, you can find a similar group of NPCs in Lavender Town.

· Pokegear Rematches are now much stronger, they have more Pokémon and more varied,  and often enough their Pokémon have nicknames.

 To give you an idea, many Pokegear trainers will end up with teams of Lvl 80 Pokémon!  So be very careful when fighting again these trainers, they may surprise you!

 Also, a big change in how they work: Originally, if you didn't rematch a trainer  and you kept playing, when you came back to it, it would challenge you with a very  outdated team.

 This is because they only get better if you fight them earlier each time.  This is no how it works anymore. They upgrade their teams as you advance through  the game, and you could very well meet them for the first time after battling them  originally and find out they have a full team of very strong Pokémon.

 This makes Pokegear rematches far, far more interesting and better paced.

 Talking about rematches, I added end-game rematches to the game.    Once you beat Red for the first time, a whole bunch of new battles gets unlocked:  The Pokémon League levels get bumped, with some changes on their teams.  Counting your Rival's rematch, levels range from 80 to 85.

 All Gym Leaders end up their training, and they await you to fight in Lvl 100 Rematches.  If they didn't have originally, every Leader will have a full team, and all of them have  some changes to their teams.

 The default trainer in the Trainer's House in Viridian City also goes from Lvl 70, to Lvl 100.  And there's a few extra Lvl 100 battles that I'll let you discover, although they're  not precissely hidden!

 If you ask yourself why Lvl 100, well, that's to make sure you don't win by overlevelling them.  Once you beat Red, you also unlock a way to Level Up your Pokémon much faster.  Just check the Battle Tower once you do so, although be warned, it requires some effort!

· Buena's Password had its rewards changed, now it's more useful overall.

· Ingame Pokémon trades are different, and they ask for hard-to-get monsters, but give you  very nice ones in exchange, I hope you like them.

· Bill's grandfather has seen some neat changes. His time killer of seeing Pokémon you bring  to him stays, but not quite the same as it originally was. Now he'll tell you riddles that  talk about a certain Pokémon, and if you guess them correctly by showing him the right  species, he'll gift you some very neat Held Items for your pals!  He put quite of effort in those riddles, they even rhyme!

· Fishing has been tweaked a bit.

 Now the chances for Pokémon to bit are higher (who wants to press Select several times for nothing?)  and the Pokémon available by fishing are much more varied, yes, even the Old Rod.

 Levels are also higher. Old Rod ~10, Good Rod ~20, Super Rod ~40.  

 Talking about the Old Rod, now you can get it sooner, before even getting the first Medal.  The Fishing Guru has moved to the gate that connectes Route 31 with Violet City.  This expands which Pokémon you can get early on, and more options is better.

 ...Unless you're me, then it just makes it harder to choose which monsters you want to have.

· Fruit Trees now give 2 Berries/Fruits/Apricorns each day!

· On Violet, Azalea and Goldenrod cities you can find the new Berry Scouts.  These green-cladded folks will sell you the basic Status-Healing Berries,  in order to help accomodate you a bit on the higher difficulty of this hack  compared to the usual stuff.

 The price on the "Items in battle available" patches are a bit higher.

· While there's absolutely zero intention of creating a new "story" or "region", there  are new maps here and there. For Example, there's an actual Viridian Forest again,  with trainers, Items and such, even!

 Other maps got extended a bit here and there, maybe to hide something...!  Some areas also have changes made to look or feel better to explore.  Others have been extended to feel more like a full place.

 The Gyms also had changes. It's interesting how... "small", and simple most of them where.  I expanded most, give some light puzzles to most of the ones that didn't have anything  going on (I even rescued unused map movement for one of them!) to make them slightly  more interesting.

 Of course, please don't expect Zelda-level dungeons or anything like that.  ...Although that could be a pretty cool thing as its own game!

· Because I made quite a few changes in the Types of the Pokémon,  I reformatted Bill's PC a bit. Now when browsing around your monsters,  you can see their types on the upper left side of the screen.

· I changed a few textbox frames, some to fix them up a bit,  and two of them are entirely new. I like Frame 5 myself.

· The order of the Pockets in your Bag differs when youre outside  Battle and when you're in middle of one.

 This is to make the Poké Ball pocket right next to the default  Item pocket, instead of being 3 pushes away to the right.

· Status Effects no longer are shown with 3 letter "words".  Now they have their own little Icons, which make things cleaner  both in Battle and specially on the Party menu.

· Of course, I decapitalized all the text I found.  What a tedious thing...

· Smashable Rocks now can give stone-type Items alongside  being a way to find certain Pokémon.

· Once you heal Moo Moo, one of the twins opens up a  little shop!

 She'll be able to make Berry Juice for you, and  you have two ways of doing it, for convenience.

 Talking about Held-healing Items, RageCandyBar have  been also reworked to be eaten during battle.

 They're more powerful than Gold Berries, but less  than Berry Juice.

· Many things have been fixed. For example:

 Daisy's Haircut was buggy and could in fact reduce Happiness, has been fixed.  Magikarps in Lake of Rage were in fact smaller than normal and not bigger,  and other Magikarp related bugs also existed all around. Fixed.  A bug where Defense could be lowered by attacking a Substitute with a -Def move existed, now is fixed.  A bug where Mirror Coat and Counter would damage foe after they used an item existed, now is fixed.  A bug that made supposedly fleeing Pokémon not able to flee is fixed. Now Fast Balls are more useful.  A bug that made a foe under Nightmare's effect still be hurt if it was healed with items is fixed.  A bug where the HP Bar would deplete way slower than intended existed. Yes, you're reading right.  The speed at which the HP Bar emptied, specially at higher levels, was not intentional, making  high level battles way, way slower. This has been fixed and is much better, albeit not Gen. 3 "fast".

 Other bugs and stuff has been fixed too.

There's more things I could put here, but when you spend so long doing something you start to forget each individual thing...

o-------------------------------------------------o |[10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns| o-------------------------------------------------o

Yes, every Kurt Ball has been replaced. Why?

Well, actually, for the first year and a half of "development" of this hack, Kurt Balls were pretty much as they were originally, with exception of changing one for more utility, improving their effects to make them overall better and fixing the quite-a-few glitches related to them.

But during the many tests I (and a few friends) did, all the feedback I got is that they did not use them much, if at all, because how situational they are, and because you can only get them in limited amounts.

So I decided to create a new set of Balls with very simple yet very effective effects. Each of these new Poké Balls offer a x3 Catch Multiplier if used on a certain Type of Pokémon, with each new Ball being useful for 3 different Types each.

For example, the Poké Ball made with Red Apricorns (named Red Ball to simplify things), will work best while trying to catch Fire, Fighting or Ground Pokémon! Other example would be the Pink Ball will do so with Poison, Psychic, or Fairy ones.

There's no tricks, nor complexities. If the types match, you get a stronger effect than an Ultra Ball. This makes each one way more versatile, every Apricorn as useful as the rest.

Descriptions of each new Ball points to which types are most effective.

Now, because I want people to use these Balls more often, there are a few more ways to obtain these Items. The first and most simple is getting Apricorns from Trees, from which you get two for every one each day.

Pokémon themselves also carry Apricorns, as many species hold them randomly.

But I also added a new face to Johto, a traveling monk! He's easily recognizable thanks to his sandogasa (a traditional traveling hat). Because he travels around Johto, each day you'll find him in a different spot, and each day will offer to trade 5 Apricorn of a certain color for one specific Item. The Items he ask for can be obtained from wild Pokémon, and sometimes found somewhere lying on the floor.

For Red or Green Apricorns, he asks for a Tiny Mushroom. for Blue, Yellow or Pink Apricorns, he asks for a Pearl. For White or Black Apricorns, he asks for a Stardust.

Tiny Mushrooms can be held by Pokémon such as Paras, Ledyba, Oddish, Vulpix and others. Pearls can be held by Pokémon such as Shellder, Horsea, Seadra, Octillery and Corsola. Stardust can be held by Pokémon such as Geodude, Jigglypuff, Phanpy, Staryu and Tentacool.

Of course those are just a few examples, there are more. I hope with all this, Kurt's custom Poké Balls are more useful all around.

o--------------------------------------------------------o |[11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House| o--------------------------------------------------------o

The Battle Tower was the first time Game Freak offered anything sort of similar to a Challenge Mode inside the main games. We got Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, which were great little things, designed to be a battle simulator, with different rules and difficulties, among other things like mini-games.

But the Battle Tower was a bit... Lacking. And HARD.

This is because, for one, the trainers you met here had a quite low variety of Pokémon, so it kinda became a bit boring (I guess Game Freak knew most Pokémon had middling stats!).

On the other hand, the monsters here sported pretty much PERFECT stats, and with strong moves along with them.

This last sentence is worth noting because in older generations, training your Pokémon to their fullest potential, A.K.A. giving them the max Stat Exp. was a total pain and a ludicriously slow process. And trying to get good DVs (old IVs) was a much, much, much worse process than that.

You couldn't make use of ANY mechanic to get Pokémon with good DVs, they were random, and unlike more recent Generations, you could not improve a Pokémon DVs by using items or such. You had no control besides soft resetting ad nauseam. If it sounds bad it's because it is.

So to have a chance not only you needed High DV monsters (pretty much impossible by normal rules), but also fully trained and with the best moves possible.  And you only got ONE SINGLE TM for many moves, and Pokémon learnsets were for the most party pretty lacking if looking at them from a competitive point of view, so you were screwed there, as you may imagine.

All in all, it was often seen as unfair and just not very fun. And if you wanted to try it anyway, add to that that the rewards were laughable. Vitamins that you could buy, and didn't help you at all because they became useless quickly, they only helped for less than half of the Stat. Exp total!

But here's the thing: I love the concept! The idea of having 3 monsters each, with the same level, where only your strategy, knowdlege and adaptibility can take you out of trouble, sounds great!

Even more, maybe if you got something worth your time as a reward it could be even more fun!

That's why a good chunk of the effort of this hack was about trying to balance types, moves, Pokémon and such. And also why the Battle Tower got so many changes!

So let's list the changes:

For starters, each of the ten Levels of the Tower got their Pokémon changed, both to update the new stats, but also to give much, much needed variety to the types of monsters you would see, as originally the game sported just a small number of different species.

Instead of 7 battles per round, now you have quicker rounds of 3. This makes for a much more brisk pace, a far less frustrating event if you lose, and easier to pick up and play.

About difficulty, it should still be a good challenge, although this time, there is some balance, as now you can properly train your monsters through vitamins and fruits, TMs hold a good selection of high-Power moves and they're infinite and of course DVs/IVs are the same for everybody.

Oh, and you can remember old moves, too!

There's also two Shops available for players, in which you can buy a selection of Held Items so you can prepare yourself to challenge the Tower, or to progress through the game, as trainers will start using Held Items more and more once you reach this point in the game.

Up to that point is the basic stuff... But the Battle Tower has also opened several shops and services, and there's even a bit of a progression system built into it, too!

Whenever you participate in the Battle Tower and come out victorious, you'll be rewarded a new type of Item: Battle Medals!

You get three for each victiorous round (so each three battles).

These objects are, basically, the coin of exchange for almost any service inside the Battle Tower. They are stored in your Item Pocket and can be used in a variety of ways.

For one, they're pricey objects, each one sells for 12.000P, thus they can cover costs for training Pokémon. Selling all 3 you win nets you 36.000P, which is pretty good if you realize you can buy enough Vitamins to fully feed a Pokémon in three different Stats (or four if you use Special Atk/Def Vitamins!).

So two good rounds of Battle Tower lets you set up the Stat Exp. of a Pokémon really, really quickly! Or you can buy other stuff with it, too. But that's just a bonus compared to their real use!

In the Main Hall of the Battle Tower, a new Receptionist hangs out close to the Battle Tower's usual lady that takes you to the battles themselves. This new NPC can reward you with a Silver or Gold Trophy in exchange for a number of Battle Medals. They're shiny decorations for your room... And hold some use.

The Battle Tower has been expanded and now there are new rooms that host several services. One of them, and one I'm rather excited to manage to put in the game is a Reward Shop that exchanges Battle Medals for Special Eggs!

Do you remember the event Pokémon from the Stadium games?

They were gifted to you after accomplishing something, and in Stadium 2, they had moves they couldn't learn normally. It was a nice little thing, and always made me feel curious about Pokémon with Moves that couldn't learn normally. You know, what new strategies could I come up with and such.

This service is located in a room behind the Main Hall. There, a Receptionist will take one of your Battle Medals and will gift you an Egg with a special Pokémon that knows a unique move!

There's a total of 50 different species you can get through these Eggs, and the one you get for each medal is selected at random. And every species has the same chances, no dishonest stuff like 0.0001% to get a certain Pokémon, like a Gatcha game.

Oh, and if you're one of those, don't waste your time resetting trying to get Shiny Pokémon from these Eggs... Believe me, it won't work.

Another service is the inclusion of Move Tutors!

There are two Tutors and each one can teach 4 Moves each. Seven of those are unique to Tutors, with an Eighth Move being Toxic, a TM you get veeery late, so I added it for earlier access, as some Pokémon (like defensive ones) do benefit from it or need it to work well.

Tutor Moves can only be learnt by Fully Evolved Pokémon, and you can do so only in exchange for one Battle Medal.

The move selection is composed of Non-Damaging moves to give more utility and so they can be applied to all Pokémon in one way or another, unlike damaging moves, and I would have liked to have more, but I hit the limit before the entire game gets corrupt, so these will have to do!

Both of these features not only offer much, much better rewards for your victories in the Battle Tower, ones that not only can be enjoyed throughout the rest of the game making it more entertaining, but also give you a chance to get a few monsters earlier and gives new possibilites to make teams to challenge the Battle Tower too.

...And that's not all you can do here now!

Besides normal Move Tutors, the Battle Tower has also hired a very special NPC: The Egg Elder... Or in other words, an Egg Move Tutor!

Basically, in exchange for 3 Battle Medals, this old man can teach a Pokémon an Egg Move that its evolution line can learn through breeding with other Pokémon!

And yes, any member. Pidgeot and Pidgeotto can learn moves that a bred Pidgey could hinerit, so no worries on that front!

This way you won't longer feel like your early-game teammates (or any Pokémon for that matter) feel gimped or "lesser" because don't have this or that move only available through breeding.

In a way it's like every species has its own specific Tutor Moves!

But let's continue.

The receptionist in the main hall (the one who gives trophies) also offers a new Key Item: The Box Changer. It does what it says, it gives you the ability to switch the Box on Bill's PC anywhere you want. Just remember that you still save your game when changing boxes this way.

Once you reach the "endgame", meaning, after defeating Red, two other Receptionists will open up new services. And are neat ones!

The first one is a Rare Candy shop! You will be able to exchange one Battle Medal for 5 Rare Candies. This will let you manage the Levels of your Pokémon faster, either to battle the new Lvl 100 Rematches, or to Level up your monsters to reach the Levels required for Battle Tower Rooms.

The other, it's quite different but way more interesting too.

You see, a new group of candies capable of changing the Level of a Pokémon to a fixed one now exist! There's Candies for Levels 10, 30, 50 and 80!

No matter what Level the monster is, it will change into the Level of the Candy!

If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 4 Pokémon, it will become Level 30. And If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 82 Pokémon, it will also become Level 30!

This is mostly for a reason: To be able to use your favourite pals in any Level of the Battle Tower!

Once a Pokémon Level goes up, it no longer can access the Battle Rooms of lower Levels, and if you wanted to use a monster of a specific species you already raised, you were forced to train another one. But no longer you will need to do that!

Now any Pokémon can battle in any Battle Room by using these new Candies in combination with Rare Candies, and you can perfectly control the level of your team for this challenge while also needing a bit of a resource (Battle Medals) to make use of it.

Not to mention, Level 80 Candies can make HUGE time savers for training Pokémon for those Level 100 Rematches, specially if we're talking about bred Pokémon, or Pokémon from Battle Tower's Special Eggs!

Now, be warned, you CAN NOT make use of all these features from the beginning!

Remember those Trophies I talked about? Yeah, they do more than look nice in your room. Each one unlocks features of the Tower!

Once you win the Silver Trophy, you unlock: Move Tutors  (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Rare Candy Shop  (You need to beat Red too). Level 30 Candies (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 50 Candies (You need beat the Elite Four too).

Once you win the Gold Trophy, you unlock: Egg Move Tutor   (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 80 Candy   (You need to beat Red too).

So yeah, you must prove yourself and get the Trophies to use all the Battle Tower has to offer.

But don't fret! There's not really much grinding to do. You'll see that the number of Medals needed to obtain each is pretty reasonable for what they unlock.

The game does not ask for hundreds of them for each, not even close! I know how tedious is to collect Battle Points for an Item or one-time use TM back in Generation IV.

And hey, if for some reason you still need a bit of a push, you can win Battle Medals by participating on Buena's Password.

They cost 2 points, you can get one Medal every two days. It's a much slower pace than actually fighting, but it certainly adds up if you play often.

And you also get a handful of them in Kanto, a certain NPC will gift you a bunch if you manage to do something, and some Gym Leaders will gift you one too.

Lastly, also in Kanto, there's the Trainer House.

Originally it was a cool little feature in which you could battle the Pokémon Team that a friend had when you two did a Mistery Gift.

Because I don't expect people going around doing IR connections with a Romhack, the Trainer House has been changed around.

I really don't want to say much, but here's this:

Normally, you can battle a special Trainer daily in this building. But once you've beaten the strongest trainer in all the land, levels are raised, and you can take Lvl 100 battles... With the difference that the Pokémon used in these new battles change depending on the day of the week!

And if you win, you also obtain Battle Medals!

It's a little extra end-game thing alongside the other end-game additions.

o-------------------o |[12] Visual Changes| o-------------------o

Many, many visual changes have been made throughout the game to make the world a bit more cohesive, to make Pokémon look better, or to simple improve stuff here and there.

Pretty much every Pokémon not named Unown got their colors changed, for ones that look better, closer to the original colors of a particular species, and also got their sprites touched up and cleaned up.

Because the games were originally designed to be displayed on the tiny screen of a GB, the graphic artists would try and take advantage to use the 4 colors available to a Pokémon sprite to give it more details. With the advent of the GBC, now they could use colors too, and because the screen wasn't backlighted, they needed to use stronger, more saturated and often darker colors.

The issue is that nowadays these games are pretty much always played on backlighted screens that are also much, much bigger than the original Game Boy's screen, so these graphics that originally looked fine now I don't find they've aged as well with the ways we play them today.

Now, let's be fair here. This is not a criticism for the sprites or the artists. These sprites were made to be seen under a specific hardware, and they worked with what they had, and the gigantic jump in design quality from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is to be applauded.

But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that there's nothing that says they can not be revised and/or improved. That's why I took the horridly tedious job of cleaning up every single sprite (and each of their animated frames) to make them look more clean when played on bigger screens.

I also took the liberty to tweak many of the colors used for Shiny Pokémon. This is something I've seen many people point out throughout the years, and it's true that the use of color for Shiny palettes leaves quite a bit to be desired, with many Pokémon being painted with what I saw called "Puke Green", and others having really dark and simply not appealing combinations of colors that sometimes would make the sprites look worse.

Several of those examples could be Blastoise, Raichu, Aipom or Golbat, and this last one even gets its shading screwed up. Or something like Rhydon, that looks exactly like the official art, while its normal color is much darker; with Pokémon like Phanpy, Sunkern, Xatu, Scyther and others looking very similar to their default colors.

Just have in mind I'm working with the limitations of the GBC and 4 Colors per sprite, so I do what I can do, although it's surprising what nice colors the GBC can display compared to the ones they used, but of course, I'm not doing this to be seen on real hardware, so I do not have that limitation.

You can check a couple of examples in the pictures inside the RAR file for both, sprite improvements and Shiny changes.

I also improved all the Back Sprites too, to keep consistency. And some Pokémon got entirely different sprites, such as Mr. Mime, or Wigglytuff, as there was better designs elsewhere, like Mr. Mime's Silver sprite. It's so much better in my eyes. And yes, they have animations.

Oh, and a handful of Pokémon got redesigns here and there. Don't panic, the changes where made only to humanoid Pokémon to remove incoherent stuff like Machoke and Machamps' underwear or the boxing gear of Hitmonchan.

This is because as time has passed it "snowballed" into a gigantic ball of nonsense. Now, it's not that I hate Pokémon with human-made things on them, for example we could make logical arguments on why they have them in the first place.

Very early Pokémon (back when it was Capsule Monsters) had a lot of very... morally dubious stuff in it. Trainers had whips, the monsters were sold in cages and there was a pretty clear aura of animal abuse in it all. The artwork was intriguing... And a bit worrying.  

When you find out about that stuff it can make sense that humans would put things to restrict their Pokémon like the "strength-reducing" underwear for the Machop tree. Who knows, maybe that's why Pokémon such as Primeape have what looks like shackles on their limbs too.

And back in generation 1, there was only ONE Hitmonchan, given to you by a human. We can simply think the objects it wears are given to it by that person, and it would make sense. Jynx is also another Pokémon which can only be received once, also given by a human and looks like one, maybe there's something going on too.

And all those examples would be fine but then they're turned into nonsense when you can find these Pokémon living in nature with all that stuff on them, or they magically appear when evolving. It just feels... dumb to me, it is something that I could see other developers adress in different ways, but here they just where completely forgotten.

Because this thing is tailored-made for me, I decided to change it.  

And talking about Jynx, when the beta sprite leaked from Red & Green leaks among others, it was pretty exciting to see that this Pokémon once upon a time was very different, with more of a yeti-like design, which can be traced to  japanese Kaiju tv shows, like many early Pokémon designs such as Nidoking (look up Baragon). It apparently had a name that was a very easy to see nudge at Ultraman.

You can read about it here (and also see a bit of the darker Capsule Monsters stuff I mentioned above, but you can also search for early concept art):

https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/

During the development of the hack I went so far as to create sprites to change Jynx into this Yeti-thing, but as time went on I did not feel very satisfied, it felt like a random addition that felt out of place.

I thought of going back to the original Jynx, but I ended sending the entire evolutionary line away and substituting it with another Ice Pokémon from the third Generation.  

...Anyway, moving on from that, each species has its own unique icon on the menu and the overworld too, which is a great thing to give flavour to the game, and seems like a new standard for Pokémon Crystal hacks (with good reason).

The overworld also got some big changes to improve visually, and sometimes, gameplay wise. Besides visuals, some places also changed in design a bit, for a number of different reasons.

For example some Kanto cities had their design changed to look more on par with Johto, as if you compare maps between places, and Gen. 1 and 2, you'll see they kinda look off and weird, as if it didn't have the same time and effort put into it compared to Johto (they didn't).

Places like Celadon and Fuchsia City for example look rather different, although they keep their overall structure, they just got a bit more going for them.

Also there's a few improvements on sprites. For example, I drew new sprites for when you're surfing, similar to those in Gen 3 with your character over a undefined Pokémon. And yes, they're different for both the male and female player characters.

There's also HUGE CHANGES in how information is displayed in several points, with the biggest improvement being the Pokémon's Stats Page. It took me quite some time to get it to look nicer and more organized / easier to read, and I even expanded it by adding a fourth Stat Screen to show some extra "for fun" info.

The font was also changed for a thin yet wider one, to make it less empty between letters, and also more consistent with the different characters, like numbers.

Also, HUGE, HUGE thanks to HyperDriveGuy's amazing work and effort, a way of improving the scrolling and movement on the overworld to make it much more smooth and, to be blunt, less disgustingly choppy if you're used to smooth scrolls.

This change to me is like magic, it makes the game feel so much better! To be fair, finding this improvement refueled my interest in continuing this hack, so thanks again HyperDriveGuy, your work is not just great, it also really did drive this guy forward, pun no intended... Or maybe a bit.

That said, coding this introduced some bugs, some of them harmless, and others being progress-halting or even game-breaking. But fret not, as I managed to fix them all with a bit of work, some trial and error, an a lot of luck, but it was all worth it because the result is a much more fluid experience that translates into a more fun game.

Overall, the game uses much less aggressive colors too, because 99% of the people that may play this (which that would make a total of 4 to 5 individuals, probably) will do it on a lighted screen. Also there's little touches here and there.

Another tiny change that makes a bit of a difference in the long run is battle effects. Most of them on Gen 2 used the same palette: Gray tones! Well, that's not that way anymore.

Most of the effects now have color added to them, and make battles look a bit more fun. A few effects were changed visually, even. For example, Pokémon no longer see "chickens" when confused. Now Pidgeys fly around their poor heads!

The Trainer's card also got a bit prettier, specially the Badges section. Oh, I also added a third page to your Trainer's Card, showing your progress through Kanto's Gyms. You only need to press Right while on Johto's Badge screen when you get at least one Badge from Kanto!

Asymmetrical Badges also spin correctly. Funny enough, the game has coded that function in, but it is only assigned to a medal that was symetrical (Clair's badge). Sounds silly, but once you start seeing Game Freaks coding it's... Actually par for the course, in a way.

o-----------------------o |[13] Tips and Questions| o-----------------------o

Tips: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What type of beginning you want? Each starter is going to change your early hours.

Taking in mind how things work in the Original version of this hack, Cyndaquil would make your first steps more easy than the other two, as his Fire/Rock typing would make him effective against the first two Gyms, while Chikorita's Grass/Ground typing would make it a bit harder than normal. Totodile, with its Water/Ice typing would be a medium difficulty.

But of course, the point of the game is to make more friends and balance your team! You could also ignore the starters and make your team without them. That's how I usually roll.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get an Exp. Share very early on.

Once you brought the Egg to Prof. Elm, and you're ready to go away on your adventure, go back home and leave 2.000P with your mother. Once you battle once (With Youngster Joey on Route 30), she will call you, telling you she bought something for you. It can come in handy this early!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about saving with your mother, she will buy many useful items, so it's in your best interest to send her money from the beginning!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ During your first few Gyms, look for people in green clothes near the towns and cities' main Sign. These people will sell to you Berries to heal Status Effects!

They will come in handy to prepare against the trainers and leaders there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't waste your Fruits and Vitamins without having in mind what team you want! This becomes more important the further you go, because NPC trainers will have trained Pokémon either you've raised your own properly or not.

As you get more money, or get more fruits you'll be able to quickly prepare Pokémon, but early on you need to think ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about team, while I tried to make all Pokémon good and be on the same Level, that doesn't change the fact that having a balanced team can make things smoother.

Making a team of only slow, defensive Pokémon, or only quick but frail monsters can make things harder for you at certain points. Although, of course, you could just play with your favourites and tough it up. That's what I usually do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Take advantage of Pokémon such as Meowth or Spearow, capable of learning stealing moves! They will help you to get ahold of many items, that you can either use or sell to make a profit.

Also, be aware of said Pokémon, as they may steal something you have!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experiment! Because TMs are infinite, HM moves can be forgotten easily, and you have access to the Move Reminder freely, you're given the chance to try all sorts of combinations for a given species. Not to mention, the further you advance through the Battle Tower, the more options you'll have through Move Tutors and the Egg Elder to teach new moves, thus increasing the number of strategies for each species!

You'll only need to watch out for "Event" moves, such as the Odd Egg Pokémon, or the Special Eggs gifted in the Battle Tower, as each have a unique move and you cannot remind it if forgotten.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check the Game Corner on Goldenrod when you arrive!

They've expanded the number of prices you can get. For one, you can get HP restoring Berries there, with Golden Berries being really useful early on, and they're not that expensive.

Even more, new species of Pokémon have been added, and they're Pokémon hard to come by during the early parts of the adventure! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can you get every single Pokémon in the game? How can I get Mew?

Yes, of course, what would be the point of a Pokémon Hack if you couldn't get every monster available in it by yourself?

There's a lot more variety early on, both so you can get your team-making juices boil sooner, and because different people like different monsters, and having a bigger variety helps with making more people happy.

Although for Mew, you'll have to buy my exclusive and new Park Ball Plus and send it to your game through my exclusive Park Ball Plus-To-GBC Link Cable(tm), or upload it to my exclusive service PokéMaeson Hostage Holdings, previous payment of course, and then you can connect your game magically to it through Infrared connection.

Really, it just works. Wait, are you going to play this on an emulator? Tough luck then, no Mew for you.

...Nah, it's somewhere in the game, you just have to find it, like the rest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are you going to do more Pokémon Hacks?

Niet. Nee. Ahneo. Tidak. Nej. Nope.

...What I mean is, don't count on that. The amount of time I put into this is so big that I could have made several other things, the testing has been killing me the most. I have   reached the point of burnout, I've been working on this almost on a daily basis for years. You can't imagine how many times this thing has been reworked and changed over time. Beyond that, my love for the franchise has pretty much being forced to disappear.

And even if I wanted to do more, I wouldn't be able to use any other disassembly project thanks to current DevkitPro versions being incompatible with 32 Bit systems; I'm not going to get a new computer only to do more of this, and going back to the older "Hacking Tools" is not a very welcoming idea, mostly because they're so much more limited and risky to use.  

So, sorry but no, I have no intention, I have no energy, I have no passion for it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

o------------o |[13] Credits| o------------o This wouldn't exist without a lot of people involved with the Pokémon Rom hacking community.  

Thanks and Credits to every single person on PRET, a community dealing with disassembly for many Pokémon games. These projects look like THE WAY going forward, how awesome they are.

Check it Here: https://github.com/pret -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to Rangi42, and all people on places like the Skeetendo and Pokecommunity forums, and many others that shared their findings and information about ASM, going so far to make great tutorials to teach stupid people like me how to do do a whole lot of things, fix several of the bugs in the game, and many other things.

Check it here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal   https://hax.iimarckus.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and of course, credits and thanks to Rangi42 again for Polished Map, an amazing utility for map editing, very complete and absolutely essential.

Check it here: https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to the TPP Anniversary Crystal 251 Project to create the code for the Move Reminder, which I adapted to my hack. I couldn't even have known where to start with it, and my hack is only better thanks to it. Also for giving me an idea of how to make Caught Data be shown in the Stats Page. My approach to how the information is displayed is different, but again, without TPP I couldn't have know where to start.

Check it Here: https://github.com/TwitchPlaysPokemon/tppcrystal251pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to HyperDriveGuy for its example and implementation of "60 Frames per second" project, which created a new way of programming a Run Button, but even more incredible, it made the scrolling of the game as you walk, run, and ride so, so much more smooth. It's amazing.

Check it here: https://github.com/hyperdriveguy/pokecrystal-60fps-example -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Chamber, Soloo993, Blue Emerald, Lake, Neslug and Pikachu25 for their Pokemon Icons. While I did a number of them myself, I also used a good amount made by them, and also remade some of them from their initial work, so they deserve the credits!

You can see their work here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/screenshots/minidex.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/pret/pokecrystal/screenshots/minidex.png

Also, if you play my hack and find any of the icons or tweaked sprites I made good enough to use it yourself, go right ahead. Just give credit and you're good to go, don't even ask. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits and Special thanks to Vice04 for helping me test my hack over the years. May you never be assaulted by Level 168 Slowbros ever again.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music Credits:

Credits to FroggestSpirit for "Hoenn Wild Battle" and  "Hoenn Trainer Battle" themes.

You can find FroggestSpirit music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/froggestspirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm for "Hoenn Rival Battle", "Route 101", "Cipher Peon Battle", "X/Y Rival", "Hoenn Champion Battle" and "Shoal Cave" themes.

You can find Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to TriteHexagon for his Night Theme music for cities and his tutorial on how to implement them in the game. His ASM files and his Soundcloud can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/u/TriteHexagon https://soundcloud.com/user-930339535 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, it's way too much people hacking around the world!

#Pokemon #Crystal Maeson #ROM hack #Maeson #RPG

[zrbillings]

Pokemon Sword & Shield - Review

So it’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed anything (years in fact) and since video reviews take such an exorbitant amount of time and COPPA has made Youtube this very scary place right now; I figured why not do what I know and write a review.

So with that out of the way, let's talk about Pokemon Sword & Shield. These games appear to be super devicieve you’re either in #gamefreaklied #bringbackthenationaldex camp or you’re a ‘defender’. I find that I have a bit of a unique perspective on the game so I wanted to share my thoughts. I’ve just completed Pokemon Sword, and just so you out there in internet land know my qualifications because to Pokemon fans that seems they only real way to justify having a different opinion.

I was born in ‘91

Pokemon Blue was my literal first GB game.

If point 2 wasn’t enough I collected everything Pokemon and grew up watching the show, often playing the games while I did.

I’ve completed the National Dex

I’ve completed the Kanto Dex like 3x over.

And I’ve played various other spin-off games i.e. Colosseum, Stadium, Gale of Darkness, Trozie? Trozae?

And if you couldn’t put it together I’ve played through nearly every mainline game the only exceptions being. Alpha Sapphire, Diamond, Fire Red, Let’s Go Pikachu, Sun, Ultra Moon. Basically at some point if I owned one version that’s all I needed.

Okay! So with all that out of the way, let’s talk about these games. Plain and simple if you just want to know if it is actually bad, no it’s not, it’s good, one could argue great, I wouldn’t, but you could. If you like Pokemon, get over the National Dex and “It ShOuLD LoOk BEtTeR” and play it, it’s fun it’s Pokemon with some new gimmicks. 3 out of 5 I guess if you want to be critical. Okay so for the rest of you, the ones who are more critical and want to know what SUCKS, and what ROCKS. Keep in mind going forward I’m not addressing the whole stupid delemma of cut Pokemon or graphics, at least not in depth, you want to talk that crap just @ me I’ve got the time. So graphically it is undoubtedly the best looking in the series you literally cannot argue that, should it look better? Well, I don’t know, I think to expect it to makes you look stupid no matter what reasoning you want to bring to the table. Pokemon has literally NEVER shown interest in pushing graphics, they’ve almost never made massive leaps forward, the amount of times they have can be counted on one had, so to have expected more that’s on you, not them. I find them to be gorgeous, yeah there’s things here and there that could be better, but if you go looking for a problem in anything you’ll find it, you could find ugly stuff in Skyrim too, or even Final Fantasy 15. Characters are definitely more expressive than they’ve ever been, the towns are stunning and I feel unlike some of the more recent games definitely come off as more memorable even if you can’t name them, you can instantly picture them. Animations, while I totally agree should be better, shouldn’t have been expected to be more than they are, again this is Gamefreak they literally improve at a snail’s pace justified or not. That being said, while Pokemon aren’t particularly animated in battle, the game overall is the most animated in the series, and here’s why. Again characters are far more expressive, and are constantly moving even in battles when a Pokemon attacks the trainer makes an action, you have overworld Pokemon, you have each and every Pokemon able to do a handful of different animations in Pokemon Camp. You have the world itself that is filled with movement i.e. NPCs, scenery here and there, a good example being the town Ballonlea the Fairy-Type gym location in case the name doesn’t sound familiar. So yes while the animations aren’t particularly impressive, I would say they’re still the best in the series AS A WHOLE (can’t believe I need to specify that). The big draw of this game is the open are called The Wild, this is sort of what people who hate these games wanted an entire game to be like, but better. And I think while they could be bigger, they feel the right size in correlation to the size of the rest of the map, there’s plenty to explore and it is genuinely fun to roam around in especially online. That being said, the game definitely (at least for me) chugs a bit while online, but I wouldn’t say it ruined the experience at all for me. It was so cool to see other players setting up camps and running around, I will say however that while these things are cool, they could have been developed further. You can’t interact with these players if you engage with one they just give you a stock response and then hand you some sort of cooking item, which okay getting cooking items this way fantastic! But why not let trainers customize their greetings? A little especially while in camps? There’s just more they could have done here, I can understand not wanting to create a system where interacting with someone dead stops them in place in order to trade or whatever, that could get really annoying. But I find, there’s not enough here that really push this feeling of a shared space, like why not have brought back Secret Bases again? And had your friend’s bases show up that way if you did want to hang out and chat (through the terrible Nintendo App, or whatever superior option) you could! Like can you imagine? Instead of just having to camp outside and hang out with friends having like your own space to hang out, battle, trade. You could have made this space like an area where if you interact with a trainer a menu for those sort of things could be triggered. The Wilds overall are fun and they’re cool to explore for new Pokemon, I just feel they could have been experimented a little more with. I won’t prattle on any further, but just saying I’d love to see Gamefreak take this and push it harder next game. As an ending note I do fine the placement of The Wilds fine, at first it looks odd, but once you start playing given it’s function it makes sense, I think if the whole game were The Wilds like some people desperately want, you’d run into a lot more problems, with things like trainer placement, and how to limit progression, not saying it can’t be done, just that we’re a ways off from anything like that happening yet. I will say this though (sorry last thing I swear) I DO NOT like how the progression system of The Wilds works, the moment you enter it you can explore 90% of it, which fine, EXCEPT! The problem becomes that while you can explore nearly every nook and cranny of it you can only catch Pokemon in designated areas because if a Pokemon is over a certain level and you don’t have enough badges you just straight up can’t catch it. Which okay I can understand, but then I SHOULDN’T EVEN BE ALLOWED THERE! For example (and why I’m bringing this up) there is an area where you must cross a bridge to get into the next section of the lands, cool I think this is great it visually queues us, “hey this is a different section so logically the Pokemon will be stronger here.” The problem! Is while we in theory can piece this together literally nothing stops us from crossing, the reason this bothers me is because on the literal otherside of the bridge is I SHIT YOU NOT a MF Snorlax! Just chillin, doesn’t wander just stands there, while okay this is a great reference to other games. WHY WOULD YOU NOT! Just put him sleeping on the bridge like in every other game in this scenario, it bars the pass and players don’t waste their time exploring an area before they can get the most out of it. Plus! This game rewards you special Acorn Balls at each Gym, if you don’t know what these are they were in Gold and Silver they’re special Pokeballs that in this game are one of a kind that have awesome effects, the one I want to reference specifically here is the Heavy Ball which works better the heavier a Pokemon is i.e. “this ball was invented for catching Snorlax.” So it baffles me how Gamefreak didn’t do something like the last Gym before you’re able to wake up Snorlax and pass the bridge allows you to get a Heavy Ball thusly not only letting you finally progress into this new area, but also gives you an item as a sort of reward. Wow, sorry moving on. I find where this game really misses the mark is the story and the characters, outside Hop (who is insufferable early on) are really bland and sort of lackluster. I feel like this is a bigger thing to be upset about than animations and Pokemon count. Hop is one of the only rivals to truly go through a character arch which is amazing! He goes from this arrogant, insufferable, condescending, ass, to someone who just wants to be the best, but doesn’t act like he already is, he knows where he’s at and strives to be more. This huge development really, really shows how poor the rest of the cast is, the professor this time is boring, not even a professor really at least not like were used to. The champion is fine, but lacks any real charisma like the game wants you to believe he has. The other rival Bede is...under utilized? Like he comes around and it’s like, “finally! Gary Oak 2.0!” and he just sort of disappears about half way through the game and then pops up at the end. I’m not going to go through the whole cast, but everyone is more or less this same sort of doesn’t bring much to the table. As dumb as Team Yell are I actually like that they’re not the evil baddies of the game, they’re not even Team Skull level, they’re just kind of a bit of inconsiderate fanboys, they work well as a level progression block? System? Their use for impeding your progress until you’ve done the right thing works well is what I’m saying. The big thing with this game is it really lacks an evil team, it’s like The Aether Foundation all over again, except infinitely worse, while The Aether Foundation sort of slowly unravels at some point, the ‘evil team’ or in this case just two baddies, kind of feels like it comes completely out of left field and only happens because Gamefreak wanted a cool way to introduce the legendaries. It just felt super random and unsatisfying and that the motivations really didn’t make sense and happens right in the middle of the Pokemon League so it kills all momentum, and any tension the league did have. Which is another thing the league is shit, it’s bad, the idea is really good, it’s inspired by the show it feels like a proper tournament, but since you can heal and swap out Pokemon between each match there is 0 tension, and since the story just decides to interrupt it, it just doesn’t feel satisfying. Beating the champion doesn’t feel like an accomplishment because you’ve already beaten the big baddie just before him, and all the other trainers before him in two different sessions, it doesn’t feel like you went through this gauntlet of really tough trainers to reach him and prove yourself, it feels like no matter what you were always going to beat him, the game did literally everything it could to make sure you beat him! I felt fucking bad beating him, because it was so easy, I literally gave him a handicap, I used 0 healing items and beat him with two Pokemon to spare and that was also because I gave him another handicap where I didn’t switch out once I threw out a Pokemon! Gyms are back, but they kind of feel like they belong in Sun and Moon because you have to do ‘missions’ before each one before you face the leader which is fine, but I personally could have done without them, for the most part they're just glorified obstacle courses. I guess they feel like the same old stuff, but I think it’s the nature in which they’re handled that actually bother me and less of having to do them myself. I think in a way given how this Pokemon League is set up it would have made more sense to just completely do away with them, maybe put something else there in its place. The gym leaders are all really colorful and actually really well designed, they all have their own very defined personalities which is cool, It would have been cool to have actually seen more of them somehow. The last thing I’ll talk about as this review is already overly long is Dynamaxing. It’s fine, I will say that if it were up to me I would have changed how it’s handled, I think the raid battles are great, they’re really fun they make grinding for levels a fucking joke and I love it, it helps you find really cool Pokemon and strong Pokemon for your team it makes Online feel like there are actually other trainers out there in the world taking on this gym challenge besides just you, it’s cool, but I feel outside of the raids there really pointless. Each Gym Leader uses it always with their last Pokemon, and it never feels like it matters so long as you Dynamax yours at the same time and have type advantage it’ll feel like KO-ing any other old Pokemon except it’s big af.If it were me I would have changed it to Mega Evolutions, because they actually feel like they matter and then they could have introduced new megas and I’ll do you one even better! What about when after you beat the Gym leader they gave you the same kind of mega stone that they used! Maybe in place of TMs, or in conjunction with them rather than them giving you Gym uniforms you’re never going to wear. That’s more short and sweet two cents on the Dynamax system, it’s great for raids pointless for everything else. Kind of like the clothing in this game, and that’s all I’ll say about the clothing that and I think the uniform thing was dumb and should have only been used for the Pokemon League rather than every single Gym battle. And that’s it! That’s my very thorough review of Pokemon Sword & Shield. Like I said at the beginning, these games are fun no doubt, but they definitely aren’t even in the top 5. I think there’s a lot of wasted potential or cooler directions they could have taken these. There are definitely cool things like the different gyms for the two versions, The Wilds are fun to hang out in and run around, the new Pokemon are actually really cool, I love that they added more regional variants and not just for Kanto Pokemon, the towns are very visually memorable. But outside that, I’m kind of hard-pressed to think of much else, I can’t speak on the post-game either, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any if at all. This game simultaneously feels like the largest Pokemon game to date as well as one of the smallest.

#pokemon #bring back the national dex #gamefreaklied #pokemon sword and shield #review

[his-tori-an]

This week I had the opportunity to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace, and was very excited to see how they portray a Roman site to the public and engage their visitors. I went with my grandma, who I remember a few years ago saying to me “I don’t like museums”, although she seems to enjoy them much more now when we go together, especially if there’s something pretty to see and take photos of. We had an amazing experience there and I’ve picked out a few of the things that stood out to me to talk about; the museum area, the walk across the mosaics and the gardens. I will be writing about the “hands on” area in my next article, and following this I’ll be summing up my thoughts about how they have portrayed their site and how -theoretically- we could portray Malton Roman Fort (where my department have been excavating) to visitors if it were to be an attraction and museum in a similar way.

A picture of me standing in front of banners showing different types of artefacts

Content warning: images of and discussion of human skeletons

(And yes, I’m wearing a Pokemon T-shirt in the featured image, I had to stick an awkward photo of me in here somewhere)

My grandma looking at a model of a Roman bathhouse

History of the Site

Fishbourne Palace, located in West Sussex, is the largest surviving Roman building in Britain and dates to about 75AD. Most of the palace was excavated in 1960 by Sir Barry Cunliffe after it was accidentally discovered by a water company laying a new line over the site. The palace is so big that a museum has been built over the site to try and preserve as much of the building in situ as possible.

In size, it is approximately equivalent to Nero’s Golden palace in Rome and in plan it closely mirrors the emperor Domitian’s palace (the Domus Flavia) completed in AD 92 on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Fishbourne is by far the largest Roman residence known north of the Alps. At about 150 square metres, it has a larger footprint than Buckingham Palace.

Museum

The museum is the first part you will see on your visit, it is laid out with information on walls in a numbered sequence which gives a background to the Roman occupation of England and the context of the site. These exhibits are very text heavy, and are balanced by the display of artefacts and images & diagrams.

  Panel 1 was about the discovery of the site

Panel 2 explained stratigraphy and the display demonstrated this.

Panel 3 was about the site

Panel 4 explained the Roman invasion with diagrams

  As well as these more factual exhibits there are interactive activities such as building a Roman road and identifying gods by matching pictures together on a low table. The scale model of the site in the first room attracted my Grandma, allowing for a more tactile experience than viewing a local map. 

A scale model map of the area. On the glass there is a diagram indicating where the modern road is.

There were also a lot of kids when I went who were all fascinated by the example weaving activity, the scale model map and the bust of Vespasian, shouting “That’s what he looks like!!”. It is so important to have such tangible links for people to be able to relate to people in the past and see even emperors as “human”.

A bust of Vespasian

The curators of the exhibition have clearly put a lot of thought into weaving multiple themes into one, for example the “imported elegance” panel, which displays wall plaster from Fishbourne, explaining how the elaborate finishes would have been done by a skilled craftsman probably from Italy, and displaying two images of wall paintings found in Italy which compare to the evidence from Fishbourne.

Panel 24: Imported elegance. The display shows wall plaster from the site, and shows wall paintings from other sites which are similar.

The final parts of an exhibition are just as important as the introduction and can leave a lasting impact on the audience, and at Fishbourne the final space has three panels, “Disaster”, “Burials”, and “The Jigsaw”.

The disaster panel explains how between 270 and 280 AD the palace was destroyed by a fire, and how it cannot be certain if the fire was accidental or deliberate, but notes that pirates were raiding the south coast at that time, a neat way of painting a picture and explaining a narrative whilst not asserting facts we don’t know, a lot of archaeologists I know would say that if we’re not sure on the facts we shouldn’t tell stories, which are vital to public engagement and understanding.

The accompanying display is a show of the destruction, with puddles of melted lead, buckled window glass and broken and discoloured pottery which has been repaired and reconstructed for the exhibit. Personally my eyes are drawn to the reconstructed pots more than the disarticulated glass. On the top shelf by comparison, there are lots and glass from the late third century that survived the fire, it’s a massive shame that my photographs didn’t survive however.

The human remains in the museum lie in a glass case.

The burials section is in association with the human remains that lie in the centre of the room which is captioned with “a pagan burial, oriented on a north-south line and discovered in the demolished ruins of the Roman Palace”, which is on the opposite side of the room to the rest if the information. This is probably due to issues to do with space, but it did confuse me having the information, remains and the explanation all in different places.

The panel explains how the ruin was salvaged after it burnt down and that people would take things of value before further demolishing the building. They say that later, probably towards the end of the Roman period, shallow burials were made in the rubble, and one grave was in the north wing which was much deeper and is still there now.

Human remains in a grave cut into the floor

The ethics of displaying human remains in museums is contentious, and I won’t go into full details here. I think it is a lovely gesture to have left the skeleton in the north wing in its final resting place. The sign accompanying the burial simply says that there was no dating evidence in the form of grave goods, but we know that the graves were cut after the palace was destroyed. I was left feeling a little bit frustrated about the lack of information about the burials, although I’m aware that specific information is missing from our records as archaeologists, even more general information about human remains and osteology would benefit visitors. All in all I felt like this lack of information translated to a lack of “respect” for these people as individuals, and that they were seen as artefacts only.

Panel 34: The jigsaw

(Sorry for the image with me in the background.. I guess we can say I’m a treasure?)

The final panel is a neat conclusion to the exhibit, displaying modern and medieval artefacts which were found in the excavation such as coins and pottery which got there through ploughing, and captions this with the story of how the site was uncovered by workmen in 1960. Finally the last image of the exhibition is comprised of images of trenches, finds, archaeologists and analysis overlaid with a jigsaw which is a beautiful and emotive image. This choice to focus on archaeology and archaeologists as well as Roman history is masterfully played out, integrating the modern process of excavation neatly with the archaeology itself.

Image with a jigsaw overlay of archaeologists working on different aspects of the Fishbourne excavations

The Mosaics

Cupid on a dolphin mosaic

Walking around the bridges to see the mosaic floor was by far my favourite part. It was amazing to see the beautiful mosaics, each one different, laid out as though in the villa. The open layout of the room gave an immense sense of space and a feeling of awe, which is a key part of engagement at any heritage site. It is also almost entirely flat or ramped sections, making the exhibit one continuous experience.

My grandma looking at the mosaics

Practically, each mosaic is separated and labelled in a numbered sequence, meaning that you can walk around the room in a loop following the trail and and back at the start, although the route is not necessarily fixed. Each information board is located where you can see both it and the mosaic at the same time, with a description of the art style or purpose of the room and a reconstructed diagram of the art. Of course, at a basic level it is very important to be able to see both the information & diagrams and the mosaic at the same time to be able to understand and compare the information to reality and encourage learning and critical thought.

A shell mosaic

Something which I only spotted on my second visit was “the digital palace”, an amazing model which lets the user explore a reconstructed villa, clicking to walk into different rooms and looking around in 3d using the mouse. This was on understated computer desk in the middle of the exhibition which the user had to sit down to use, hopefully the museum will be able to find a way to make this technology easier to access for everybody to see and enjoy on a bigger screen!

  The computer desk with “the digital palace” on the screen

Computer screen showing a digital model of a roman room, it says “Room N1, Hypocaust Room

Information and instructions about The Digital Palace; a representation of the North Wing made by Anthony Crew.

At the far end of the room there is a viewing platform displaying a slideshow of old and funny images of the archaeological process, and the options of three films called “1960s excavations”, “New Discoveries” and “Mosaic Care”. The use of audio and video technology allows a different way of presenting the archaeology than in the rest of the exhibit which gives the audience a different way to learn that appeals to them most, not to mention being very valuable for visually impaired or hearing impaired visitors. My only concern was that there were no chairs, meaning that visitors must stand to watch the films, which can be difficult or offputting- I also found the soundscapes coming from the viewing platform to be a bit odd.

The Hadley Trust viewing platform showing Barry Cunliffe working on the Medusa mosaic

Garden

The garden didn’t engage me as much but my grandmother loved it; she said she enjoyed the “colourful part with flowers and the pretty green shaped hedges”. It can be difficult for people without an interest in history to engage with museums, but the way the garden was portrayed clearly made an impact on her and she said that she would be happy to revisit based on that. It was designed to look like the grand garden of a Roman villa, with a beautiful scented lavender bed funded by the friends of Fishbourne Roman palace.

View of the gardens; a big grassy space surrounded by hedges laid out in angular patters.

The best part of the garden for me was the themed Roman flower beds. I thought it was an incredibly creative idea, with each flower bed representing a different theme, including medicine, herbs, beauty and all sorts. It smelled and looked incredible and that sensory experience made all the difference to me in enjoying the garden. I’m not sure if my grandma noticed the themes but she loved the flower beds in the same way as I did, noticing the strong scents and bright colours.

A flowerbed with a panel which says “medicinal plants”

Collections Discovery Centre

This building is separate to the museum, opened by Tony Robinson on Time Team in 2007, allows visitors to see artefacts in a more peaceful and very well lit modern area separate to the main museum. There are interactive drawers where visitors can open them to see collections of pottery, glass, bone and more and curated displays behind windows. Visitors are able to look through the window displays and see the store room and scientific research room, adding a new depth to the museum which isn’t just about the Roman history but also the archaeological process and storage of artefacts, which Fishbourne highlights very well. 

  A window into the conservation laboratory

Artefacts in drawers which visitors can open.

  Artefacts in drawers which visitors can open.

A window into the conservation laboratory

The Sensitive Store is behind a window display, which displays a variety of artefacts

All in all our visit to Fishbourne was very enjoyable, and I was inspired by the way in which they portrayed Roman history and culture to a modern audience. I’ll be posting soon about their “hands on” area, which was an incredible way of engaging all ages and types of audience in hands on activities related to archaeologists and archaeology. Following that I’ll be using this research to construct a theoretical plan of how we could portray Malton as a site if we were to have a visitor centre or museum, so stay in touch and make sure you subscribe to email notifications!

Let me know what you think in the comments or tweet me @EdgyTrowel!

This article was written by myself with help from Chloe Rushworth, you can check out her heritage blog and posts about the Malton dig here: https://archloology.wordpress.com/. Photos by myself and my Grandmother.

I visited Fishbourne Roman Palace: Here's my review on how they engage their audience... This week I had the opportunity to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace, and was very excited to see how they portray a Roman site to the public and engage their visitors.

#archaeology #children #featured #marketing #museum #Museums #student #tourism #travel #University

[ghostmartyr]

Pokémon SoulSilver Randomized Nuzlocke [Part 2]

Standard Nuzlocke rules apply

Non-standard rule of only being allowed to catch something if it has a Type in common with the most recent thing you caught applies

Randomizer only touches wild pokemon; everything NPCs have remains the same.

So far, we have the first badge, and just caught our first official teammate for our starter. He is Fludd the Whiscash, to accompany Chance the Dewgong. Next pokemon has to be Water or Ground.

May I have the good fortune of finding one.

Fludd is Gentle and alert to sounds. He doesn’t have much in the ways of experience or moves yet, but we will soon see to changing that.

Route 33 has Shuckle! Adorable!

Fludd’s only offensive move being Mud-Slap is proving a trial of patience.

Wild Bastiodon appears. This is the route of tanks.

We’ve talked to Kurt, kicking off the Rocket plot of this section, and I think once Fludd is 10 or 11 we’ll continue down the Slowpoke Well. Where there will be non-Slowpoke things waiting for us.

I really just want Fludd to know something better than Mud-Slap.

..Water Gun is not terrible. Helps that the route I have chosen for training is beset by constant rain. Every single Shuckle having Berry Juice is not on the list of things that help anything except Shuckle delaying the inevitable.

I lied. Fludd is 13 before we start thinking about other things.

My current other thing is going to be Ilex Forest instead of the Rocket plot.

For reasons of pretty.

We find a Charizard!

That is very much not Water or Ground.

Cyndaquil is not Water or Ground either.

Hey, Fludd learned Mud Bomb. Yay.

Okay, fine. I guess we can save the Slowpokes if we really have to.

I love how as technology advances, video games get to be prettier. It makes me happy in my feelings places.

I also love how Kurt really doesn’t do anything. He tries. Then he falls and can’t get up. Then we go in and do the job he wanted to do.

Mawile is down here. Nothing I can do there.

The Grunts go down like Grunts, and then it’s Proton time!

Proton!

That guy!

He’s got... aquamarine hair! That’s like a personality!

Fludd beats him down, too. Party as it stands is Fludd at 16, Chance at 20, and Sleet and Cloud at 5. With only Fludd and Chance really counting as full party members. That will change slightly when I need something to Cut stuff.

Which will be right after we deal with this Gym.

-many weeks later-

-cough-

Anyway, Gym!

This will mostly be Fludd’s show, since he could use the levels. If anything happens to know Absorb, we’re bailing, but he should mostly be okay.

Upgraded Gym aesthetics are always good.

Almost as good as playing a Pokemon game without feeling compelled to give every single fight full play-by-play detail. Assume if I magically teleport through the plot that I did everything perfectly and expertly. All a result of my personal talent, not overleveling my precious pokemon in hopes of keeping them from dying from my stupidity.

Oh heck, whoops. One of the pre-Leader battles is a double.

Sleet is in the second slot.

Let’s not.

Good news! Sleet is still level 5. She still appears to be a casual passerby of this party, not an official member. This matters.

Bugsy looks so happy. Good for him.

(Unlike some Johto Gym Leaders.)

This will be more entertaining later in the game, but I think Pikasprey has brought up how this region’s Gym Leaders really are the most irresponsible about their job title.

Ultimately, Chance will take out Bugsy’s Scyther. Because it’s level 17. Like Fludd. And U-turn apparently really, really hurts.

No, Chance, you may not learn Rest. You’re a starting party member. That means you have nothing but attacks, and we compensate for our lack of strategy with levels.

Badge get!

But suddenly....!

-zooms through the battle at the speed of sound-

Good job, team!

Now we get to do a Farfetch’d puzzle that I am absolutely not terrible at.

Glory to Cut. Which we will be unceremoniously dumping on Cloud. Hi Cloud. This is your team. This is your role in it. Thank you for your contribution.

Oh.

Huh.

You’re part Water, aren’t you?

tfw I can actually catch something in Ilex Forest. Maybe I even will.

CAUGHT!

New member of the team, your name is now Downpour! Downpour is Quirky and highly curious, and we already love him. Even with the inevitable switch training about to go down.

We’re all just so happy that this place has been given level 6 Charizard to mine.

The truly nice part about being such a disaster in playing this part consistently is that Kurt gives me free balls. What, you forgot to play for a month? Your reward is not knowing what’s going on! Also free catching tools! You Win!

I also think that me being aware of EVs is the worst thing that ever happened to my enjoyment of pokemon playthroughs. I’m just left looking at wild level 6 Charizards with Sp. Atk signs in my eyes. What do those look like? The world may never know, but they are now part of my balanced breakfast.

Also, Nature Power becomes Rock Slide in Ilex Forest.

Downpour is going to be the most overhyped Special Attacker of its kind.

Assuming I ever find a Water Stone.

This is one of those changes from the originals that I’ve never fully understood or cared for. Except at the end of the day, I am a complete sucker for people you’ve helped along your journey all reuniting and recalling what you’ve done for them.

I just really miss the Eeveelution coolness of their dance hall.

And I don’t know why this one needed any help at all. Is that a lore thing? Are all your interactions with them just secret character tests?

Downpour is 19, which feels like good enough for venturing into Goldenrod. I really shouldn’t be living the life of mindlessly murdering wild Charizard for EVs for hours on end. Let’s just try to put a cap on it.

Forbidden Day-Care lore.

Lyra’s grandmother ships us. Awk.

I’m accepting everyone’s number in this. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that before, but unlike in the originals, I don’t think there’s a limit on numbers on your phone, so might as well hoard them up.

Geez I feel old.

Vote now on which NPC pokemon person gets to stay in your phonebook. Maybe if you’re lucky you won’t abandon the one who hands out random evolution stones. :)

Oh, hello. I can catch you.

Do I want to? I’d be back to Water/Ice, and right now I have the option of picking up a Grass thing somewhere along the way... hm.

On the other hand.

Cloyster is cool.

POKE BALL, GO!

Damn it, poke ball.

Heavy Ball?

Damn it, Heavy Ball.

And now I am out of Great Balls.

Poke Ball. How do you feel about a redemption arc.

The Poke Ball declines. I have one Fast Ball, and one Heavy Ball. The odds of me getting a new friend out of this are dwindling. The route’s death appears to be at hand.

One Fast Ball.

Yeah, it breaks out.

Okay, Downpour. Kill the non-friend.

With Chance’s help, because the non-friend knew Supersonic.

Bye, Route 34. You’re dead now, and I need to buy catching tools before I forget and meeting my next friend turns awkward.

Whatever. I have a bike now.

Failing basic trivia is my favorite part of each Pokemon game.

PSYCH I WON.

My prize is a Radio Card, but the real prize is getting Whitney back inside her Gym. Where I can now battle her if I so choose. If I want to progress in the game. Her Miltank is waiting.

So we’re just going to do literally everything else we can, except not literally; these games have too many things, and I’m not getting distracted by Voltorb Flip.

...What does Nature Power actually do? Because Downpour has been spotted using Rock Slide, Earthquake, and now Tri Attack through it. It’s becoming a staple of his kit. I don’t think I’ve ever bothered using it before. I was under the impression is was always Swift?

Or is that Nature’s Gift? That’s a thing, right?

Bleh. Fighting first, looking up vitally helpful information later.

The grass has Hitmontop. Not Grass or Water, so it must die.

Wait what the heck. I was out innocently Headbutting trees, why are you here?

This is intensely awkward. My usual mode with these things is that something only fits the requirement of my Nuzlocke team if it’s been Randomized, and for whatever reason, the randomness doesn’t touch Headbutt encounters. Exeggcute is part Grass, but it is not Randomized. Sleet and Cloud are more proper team candidates.

I’m just going to say that Headbutting doesn’t count for a route’s encounter. This run isn’t intended to be overly difficult (this is not the grindlocke); the aim is fun, and I have more fun not using the standard encounters for the game.

What I’m saying is the Exeggcute dies.

(I’m just never going to be able to get a Psychic Type in this.)

My thing at the moment is beating up pokemon in the wild because I’m not sure how to deal with Whitney. Stress-grinding. Chance can’t fight the Miltank. Rollout against Ice sounds like a nightmare. But Chance is also the only female on the team, and my teams have terrible luck in love, which Whitney like exploiting.

Fludd doesn’t really have moves. Water Pulse is nice, but Mud Slap is his only other attack. Downpour is theoretically a cool option, but I don’t know what Nature Power does in the Gym. These kiddos do not have movesets that play well together. Tickle spam would be ideal, but Fludd doesn’t have a physical attack. Only Chance does, and there we have the Rollout problem.

This team could have some nice synergy (for once I almost think I might want to have someone with Rain Dance), but right now they just don’t know enough, and I do not like heading into Whitney this way.

So let us continue to explore the countryside in hopes that a solution is found.

Yanmega is not Grass or Water. Neither is Pikachu.

RIOLU.

You’re not, either.

Neither is the Zubat in the next route. Bonsly looks like it should be, and yet. Volbeat is a nope.

You, on the other hand.

Okay okay okay. Downpour. Do not ruin this for us. I know you want to kill it. We can feel it in your heart. However, we could use a friend. We could use another link in our chain.

...Actually, Fludd, how about you lend a hand with this.

SHARPEDO GET!

I dub thee Hurricane. Hurricane is Modest (dang it) and alert to sounds.

To use, or not to use. That is the question. Physical attacker? Good. Yet another pokemon with a generic shrug at the difference between physical and special? Hm.

I think Hurricane is a reserve. If we’re leveling you, little guy, it’ll be a bit later. We’re happy to have you, but you don’t fix anything well enough that I think I want to train you up just yet.

On to the park. Where the Dunsparce lurk. More Smoochum. Zubat.

I found a Dig TM. That might go to Fludd. ..Or is Fludd going to learn Dig naturally? Fludd will learn Magnitude in a few. I can wait. I don’t remember if this gen allows multiple uses of TMs or not. I could look that up, but effort.

Er. On that subject, though... internet, where can has Water Stone?

“ Johto: National Park (Come 1st in Bug Catching Contest), Route 42 (PokéGear Phonecall) “

Uh.

Oh no?

Wait!

“ Johto: Pokeathlon Dome“

Hope.

Yikes. I wanted to avoid that, having no touch screen, but Downpour, I’m not abandoning you so easily. We’re a team, man. A team. We’ll get you your usefulness.

Welp, I’ve defeated all the trainers I can.

I guess.

It’s time.

Downpour is level 24, Chance is 25, and Fludd is 23. Fludd’s going to be taking the early parts in the interest of balance. For Whitney herself... I really don’t know. I’ll play it by feel. I do want to make sure Downpour uses Nature Power before that fight, though. I don’t want to go in without knowing what it does.

It does Tri Attack in here.

...Yeah, I’m looking it up. What the heck does Nature Power actually do? Besides use moves that are strongly connected with things occurring in nature?

Finding the gen four version is too much trouble. Let’s just proceed knowing limited amounts. Yay for Tri Attack.

-makes an unhappy face best represented by toddlers-

One Clefairy and one Miltank.

This is not a scary thing.

See? Fludd already massacred the Clefairy.

This is fine. It will be fine.

Fludd stop flinching.

Aaaaaand there’s the Attract. The Miltank’s been using Stomp only, so it should be safe for Chance to go in and get a few hits. Fludd used Tickle a few times to counteract the Stomp being annoying.

Chance. Sweetie.

Stop. fucking. flinching.

FUCK YOU AND YOUR SUPER POTIONS, WHITNEY.

YES. IT’S DEAD.

YOU ARE NOT THE ONE WHO SHOULD BE CRYING HERE. MY SOUL IS IN DESPAIR, WHITNEY. YOU AND YOUR STUPID MILTANK. EVEN WHEN IT ISN’T USING ROLLOUT.

I sort of ship the flunky that tells you not to worry, Whitney will give you your badge after she stops crying--with Whitney. Just because. I spend a great deal of time in my Pokemon playing shipping random NPCs.

Pokeathlon opened, time to. grind for the Water Stone.

If my memory of this is correct, before you beat the Elite Four, there’s a different evolution stone available for purchase each day. Today’s is a Moon Stone.

Oh, this is going to be hell!

tfw you remember the Jump course being the kindest so pick it but none of your team is actually good at jumping so you’ve got to bring in the reserves.

Hurricane, Cloud, Sleet? Your time is now.

...

..

.

These games are not meant to be played on a touchpad.

Yikes.

Oh my fucking gosh this is hell do not want.

Well.

I lost.

Yay for 325 points.

LET’S KEEP GOING, SHALL WE????

Where’s my mouse...

Let’s try Power on for size. Chance, Downpour, Fludd, go for it.

Oh look I lost.

Downpour, you better appreciate how much I love you.

LOOK WE WON THE STAMINA ONE.

I’m not documenting this further. Know that I am miserable, and this is not meant, in any way, to be played with a mouse. The levels of unfortunate are everlasting and I am sad.

-the next day-

I have to wait another day for a Water Stone, but I have enough for it, so now we can move on to fun things. Like the game. The game. Which is fun.

tfw Jirachi is secretly an odd tree.

Route 37, have ye any Water or Dark?

Chimchar, you are found lacking.

Ah crud.

Totodile is not lacking, but I really don’t think catching it is a good idea. Pure Water locks me into Water. We might end up there anyway, but I’m not in such a hurry to commit just yet. I can kill a route to keep some variety alive.

Sorry, Totodile. :(

Ecruteak means Bill, which means I could go back to Goldenrod and find out what his Eevee has become. Let’s do that before we think about anything fancy like plot progression.

Sleet, into the box with you. Maybe you’ll come back if I don’t like whatever Bill’s offering.

Carnivine. Interesting. Uh. How about... Drizzle? Drizzle. Cool. And. Uh. Sleet. You’re staying in the box. Sorry, but level 5 things that are filling out party count are really just going to end up as very sad sacrifices. We’re avoiding that for now.

-another day passes-

(without me getting balls from Kurt, whoops)

WE DID IT.

Now to find out that Downpour’s spending another twenty levels not needing it because moves matter more than stats. To the internet.

...Oh.

Oh, Downpour.

Oh, no.

You, uh.

Kiddo, you’re going to be needing some help as we move forward.

But the good news is that means we’re evolving you now! Yay! Power boost! You go, you funky little duck frog thing.

Maximum cuteness achieved.

That’s a good stopping point for this round, I think.

#Pokemon #Nuzlocke #Nuzlocke Challenge #playthrough

[jess1820]

ti amo nyc! seeing phoenix 3x with feenix friends (jul 5 - 7 2018)

So! 3 days of phoenix with wonderful people in new york (my first time in nyc!), I don’t even know where to begin x.x (Pictures are on IG, video on YT). The Speciale shows are beautiful and incredible, and the boys put so much thought, detail, and love into it all. It was one of the best experiences in my life and it was so fun seeing everyone at the shows!!

under the cut is pretty much a rambling summary of the shows (amazing and adorably decorated), cute moments, and when we met them (ft. my fav convo with branco abt pokemon and witnessing brotherly tension) 

💘 @andersfel @funkyphoenixfan @thesunwillshineagain

7/5 | Night 1 💗

the show The show was amazing! It had been 7 months since I had last seen them. We were between Deck and Chris, I settled for the second row (I could have squished to the barrier but it was more comfortable to just be behind a little). That day was super humid and hot, so this show was probably the most sweatiest, but so satisfying. It was such a fun time! We got consolation prizes which is always super great! And countdown for Mads aaaaa (it was her 21st birthday, guess who (Chris ofc) sung to her 😭!!!) It was such a beautiful moment. They played Goodbye Soleil first and she was a bit down, but once it finished, COUNTDOWN happened! She was so happy it was the best reaction (what a complete 180 lol). Telefono was such a tune to hear live, I loved it! They were using the telefono booth instead of the red telephone (after the show you could get a polaroid in the booth for $1, such a cute idea whaaaa!!).

I thought for the Speciale they chose to use different guitars (Chris’s mint green, Branco’s array of guitars (black and red) instead of the og guitars (telecaster and cream bullet), but turns out they just didn’t have their regular guitars in time because their gear was still being held by air france until the 4th show lol.   

after the show

thomas After the show, we went outside to wait (we should have wandered the disco afterparty that was happening inside! The boys were hanging out meeting fans). About an hour later, Thomas came outside first wearing a white tee and backpack on. It was a small group outside so he went around to everyone, signing stuff and taking photos, and he hugged everyone too! He was so nice and gentle as usual. He left shortly after because he said it was past his kids bedtime and he had to put them into bed, something sweet like that 😭. Romy was at the show (with we think, Cedric’s daughter?) and they were helping run the merch stand! It was too cute!! They were so sweet. They were also in front of the barrier at some songs on the far right jumping and having such a good time during the show! It was so pure. (And I guess Vee is bffs with Romy now hahaha).   

deck Ok next up, Deck came out and was very chatty and goofy. He didn’t go to the afterparty. Vee said something about him being a charmer and he imitated playing a violin to be romantic, oh, he is so precious. Deck was really examining the Rally single I brought to get signed and he was like oh this is very rare and was looking at it, front and back. He was so nice and so cute 💘.

branco (and chris) Branco came out next and was so pretty wearing a koi fish print shirt. He has the best shirts. B was very friendly. Mads brought up the Coco thing (he signed as Coco on her INBLT booklet from the Manila show) and we got to hear him talk about his nickname again, it was so sweet and precious (his nieces call him Coco if you need a refresher). I love hearing him speak in general aaaa (you know me). Gotta say I also loved hearing him yell “Monsieur Mazzalai” at Chris because he was the last one needed to sign Mad’s awesome jacket. Chris made a face at him 😂. I had a few minutes with B and I am v happy he signed his name with the music note doodle! Sadly I didn't have the time to get to Chris bc he had to leave in a separate car (the rest of the boys got into one van, I remember Branco had a whole foods market bag aha). I did get to watch Chris run to the car with his suitcase which was funny and adorable, I love him. 

7/6 | Night 2 💗

the show They did long distance call!! Aaah! I was finally at the barrier, right between Thomas and Deck (literally the center can you believe it). The show was amazing as usual and they had balloons that would rain down on us in italian flag colors. It was at this show where a lot of balloons were falling onto the stage so Deck was using his bass and hitting the balloons (og it was so precious). He was having so much fun. I got a Deck wink during the show too aaa 💖 . Also, they played Lovelife with Giorgio Poi which was really cool! The boys had told us yesterday that they had a special planned for tonight, and this was that! And, I got to touch Thomas’s hair lol he was in our section a lot! 💘

after the show

so many faces We stayed for the afterparty because the boys had told us last night to stay and meet them here. It was funny because we were all awkward at the party so we followed them around like children while other people were actually partying.

We saw Sofia!!! She was gorgeous, literally radiating. It was unreal to see her in person. Cosima was with her! We also saw Chris’s girlfriend! Ah they were so cute (they were getting sake, dancing by the DJ, it was adorable). Chris was going around everywhere, drinking a lot of sake and beer lol. I flagged him down once to say hi and he said hello and he pat my back and LEFT 😂. So I had to flag him down again to ask for rally to be signed. It was a bit uncomfortable to follow them around and when there’s a moment/you get the guts to say hi they are either with someone else or with family and you’re just standing there so awkwardly lol. It’s easier to talk to them when they’re outside vs inside with music playing and it being a bit dark. I think we all agreed on this.

branco I also spotted Branco too! I found him near the back by the merch and asked for a photo again. My phone was such a failure that it took a while to get a photo so when it was done he asked if it was okay, twice 😭 (it’s still a bit blurry but I think it’s cute). Sweet bb koala you are so precious 🐨. 

7/7 | Night 3 💗

the show We were back at the barrier for the last night (for us), back to the right side between Deck and Chris. We got to hear playground love (waaaaaaah) and tuttifrutti! Playground love was so beautiful og 😭.

Throughout each night during sunskrupt, Branco would take a water break. A massive water break. He would drink water, keep the bottle at his lips and look into the screen, pondering life, then take another long drink of water. It was so long we were laughing and watching him drink water each night 😂 It was such a thing. I was that dork who took photos of this moment hahaha.

After playground love was countdown (when Chris came out, he brought his own guitar instead of picking up the one that was on stage, already tuned I think). Going into countdown, he had to put a capo on the guitar and tune it a bit, which took a very short amount of time but it was still something he had to do, and he was like ah merde! It was really funny and cute to hear him swear on stage since it was dead quiet 😂 

cute speciale things I tried their phoenix sake and took a polaroid in the telefono booth! It’s so cute. I also tried their childhood sandwiches on a “DAMN good baguette” (yeah they advertised it like this) and I gotta say, it sure was tasty. I didn’t get to try the gelato. Everything was so cute, they had ti amo balloons and a disco ball. They had a DJ too (I remember seeing Hedlund and Daniel Glass DJ-ing). The super mercato was so cool but I heard it kept breaking. Luckily I was able to get the pins and patches I wanted! (Though I didn’t notice they had a blue ti amo patch until it was too late!) The merch table also had a lot of cool merch and some old stuff from Bankrupt!. The entire vibe of the place was amazing. Every glass surface was graffitied with phoenix ti amo nyc 💘.  

after the show

chris and branco (ft. the greatest conversation) The afterparty this night felt a bit more natural for us. Maybe because we knew what to expect, but overall it was just more comfortable. At the party, we saw only Chris wandering around. We spoke to him and got to tell him we were all friends online and he was really surprised (it was cute). He was v thankful for us cheering so much! He was so smiley aaah. Mads finally was able to give him the cutest phoenix doodle she made (literal cutest he found himself and kept pointing to it 😭). I also remember a bit where Vee was talking about Deck’s spider pose and Chris was asking how to do it and then he tried to do it 😂 Chris is the best hahaha

After the venue kicked us out/ the party ended, we went outside and found that Branco was already outside talking to other fans. I was being silly on this last night and was speaking (was I loud?) about how cute he was to my friends and saying dumb things like look at those eyebrows and those cheeks (everything abt him is so cute ok i love this koala) and he stared into my soul 3 times (while talking to another group of fans) 🙈 and I didn’t know what to do im sorry for staring at u B 😭 💀 (you’re so pretty god!!)

Ok once it was our turn to talk to B, we talked to him abt…..pokemon 😂 (I don’t want to say too much but supposedly he has pokemon go and I love pokemon so you can imagine why we went down this path). It was a perfect opportunity since Vee also likes pokemon and her backpack featured the eevee evolutions. He was like ahh pokemon…. We asked him to pick a favorite from the backpack and I think he was confused (it was dark) and he pointed to eevee and named it as pikachu. The way he said it was so cute oh my god. He was like that’s pikachu (he said it twice). We were telling him that’s eevee and then he was saying that he is very old from another time, the shakespearean time. I think Vee then said he’s immortal or a vampire and he didn’t deny it. (idk why) I had to bring up the old cringe photoshoot they did where he looks like a vampire and he was watching and listening to me so intently as I was describing it. Mads saved it and just said it was posted on their IG and he was like ahh. (He probably was like these girls are so weird). Then he said that he knew the pokemon names but in french and so he pointed to vaporeon and said that’s aquali. It was SO CUTE. WOW. I can still hear his voice saying aquali. Literally so precious. 

Switching topics, Mads was asking if he saw the super cute doodle she did that she gave to Chris and I think he said he didn’t, but Chris said he showed him? (this part is a little fuzzy for me). Branco said that Chris never lies, called him over and then they were discussing if Chris had shown him/if Branco was present. Chris said that Branco probably forgot, then shortly after they started to speak in french to each other and we felt like shit was going down right in front of us omg (brothers fighting?!). At the end of it Branco opened his mouth without saying anything, then closed it, speechless (or, I thought of a cat showing its teeth lol) it was insane.  

Aaaaaa if you made it here thanks for reading 💗 It was such a cool time seeing phoenix with the feenix gang from online! I hope we all get to do it again in the future ✨ You all made this experience so memorable. 

#laurent brancowitz #christian mazzalai #deck d'arcy #thomas mars #wearephoenix #phoenix #ti amo nyc #jess and the frenchie baguettes #branco #yo we all have to do this again sometime it was the best!!! #i love and miss you all waahhh #andersfel #funkyphoenixfan #thesunwillshineagain

[watersplxsh]

Knowing your partner well makes writing together a lot easier. tag this with people you enjoy roleplaying with,  but want to get to know better.

BASICS  !

name :   Roiaru, or Roi for short (sounds like Roy; kinda boyish but i like it;)

age  :    25+

pronouns : she/her

zodiac  sign  :   gemini

taken  or  single  :   Taken

THREE  FACTS  !

1.   My first experience with rping was actually in the comments sections on Deviantart where I would rp zombie OCs from the Left 4 Dead games. I joined an actual DA rp group sometime after that with a squirrel boy named Rory. I usually consider that my first real rping experience, but I guess the whole zombie thing was where I really started at.

2.   I play a lot of video games (and frankly I own way too many). I have a solid library on most systems I own (which is also way too many). My absolute favorite games tend to be nintendo ones like Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Kirby, Fire Emblem etc. etc., but i also play games like Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Halo, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, (i’ve recently been exploring Monster Hunter and have been meaning to try Dragon Quest games too), etc. etc. My favorites tend to be RPGs and platformers, though I do dabble in other types of games occasionally. My least favorites tend to be heavy shooters like call of duty, battlefield or gears of war, or racing games like forza. Also sports games : / don’t touch me with those, i don’t like sports.

3.   I have one cat, and her name is Abby. She’s grey and looks tabby-like, but we don’t know what sort of breed she is because she was a stray that my grandpa kind of brought home from the lakes one time.

EXPERIENCE  !

platforms  used  :  I first started rping on Deviantart (as mentioned above) and I stayed there for many years. Much later on, I did jump into rping on tumblr and also in private forums. Since then I’ve just kind of jumped back and forth between tumblr and da chat rping.

Years of experience  :  About 7 or 8? I’m really bad at keeping track

MUSE  PREFERENCE  !

female  or  male  :  I have a clear leaning towards male muses, it’s something i’ve been meaning to fix..

least  favorite  face(s)  :  irl face claims kind of weird me out a little sorry to say;;

multi  or  single : I prefer single blogs, I think they’re easier to keep track of weeps

WRITING  PREFERENCE  !

fluff  /  angst  /  smut :  I love mixing fluff and angst omg.. i like my character’s low points to come with some high notes you know?

plot  /  memes :  Definitely both? Though I suck at plotting because I’m an indecisive weenie, so honestly a lot of my more intricate threads have actually started from memes LMAO

Long /  short replies : Happy medium? If I keep it somewhere in the middle, it feels like there’s substance without it being too wordy.

Tagged by: tagged by @s-e17 @herosname

Tagging: im a dumb who hasn’t been around all day so idk who has done this already? @ my mutuals who haven’t and would like to!

#This is pointless ☔【ooc】 #Beep beep I’m a sheep ☔【mun speaks】

[svetlanabelikova]

JOURNALING V

content warning:

weight loss/talking about weight

medical/surgical discussions

it has been awhile since i updated anyone casually interested in this part of my life, hasn’t it. 

well, part of that is b/c i’ve been busy. holidays and everything, also i’ve started a work out routine, but i’ll get into that in a moment. also i didn’t have any doctor appointments for like, literally 3 weeks straight, which was nice. much better than speed running it like i had been.

today is 11.11.19, (make a wish if you believe in that sort of thing) and i’ve decided i no longer want surgery.

let me back up here.

so, let me re-read my last post just to remember what i need to fill in... ah yes, the fun i had w/ the x-ray. that feels like it happened months and months ago.

well, since then , i’ve been trying to get my life a lot more organized. i’ve started a (bullet) journal (mostly b/c i love watching the aesthetic set-up videos on youtube) and in it have been tracking my progress by the numbers. for the first few weeks of trying to lose weight, i was weighing myself every other day, sometimes more than that. i became obsessive and felt like the numbers weren’t enough. i wasn’t losing enough and one weekend i had gained back like 1.7 lbs or something. but seeing any increase in the numbers upset me. even though when we are talking about 1 or 2 pounds in someone that’s got over 300 of them, it isn’t the same as if someone is more like a buck fifty. 

being able to put it down somewhere physical and then keep a log so i can see the numbers adding up or going down in a catalog has been very helpful for my mental health. having just the numbers on a paper has allowed me to watch my weight go from 349 in the beginning of october to where it currently is (or was as of 11.6 i only weigh myself every other wednesday. why wednesday and why every other week, i don’t know. it just seemed like more than once a month but less than every week. a good distance between not enough and too much) which is 329 lbs. 

when put to paper, 20 pounds in a month is, i think, great. i know everyone says “oh the first 10-12 pounds comes off so easily!” but not from where i’m standing. i have been working for those 20 pounds. 

speaking of working, let’s dig into that piece of proverbial pie i teased earlier. 

i have a work-out routine. which is the first time i’ve said that in,,, probably ever. i know while in school i technically had one in p.e. class but let’s be honest. i did not give it my all and would take any opportunity to skip if i could. now it is just me, alone w/ my dark synthwave music and the pedometer built into pokemon go.

yeah, i could download a real work-out app that would track this stuff for me, but my phone’s memory is full to bursting and listen, i need to walk my buddy and eggs. i’ve got friends on pokemon go that need gifts and it is already built-in w/ this new adventure sync, so might as well use what i have.

so, i work out every monday, wednesday and friday night. i usually leave the house a little before 9pm and try to be back a little after 10pm. just about an hour. in that hour i walk down my street (which is pretty long imo), around the corner to the pokestop at the park, around the park, back down my street and return home. in the beginning i just walked around my street, or just to the stop (which is 0.7km from my front door) but as i’ve built up stamina, i’ve been able to walk all the way around the park. actually my goal for november, is to start walking around the park twice a night, at least once a week. 

on average it is about 3,400 steps(or roughly 3.5 kms) and an hour of activity, 3 nights a week. i doesn’t seem like a lot but:

1. it is an hour of cardio every other day that i was not doing before, and 2. additional movement that adds up

i walked a combined 40,881 steps in october 2019 while working out. that is on top of whatever else i did while shopping or playing w/ the kids or what have you. 

and i plan to add more. i found a great video on youtube that is all about basic, beginner yoga for curvy people. the instructor talks about doing yoga to your size and abilities and not letting anyone tell you that you can’t do yoga b/c you’re fat. i don’t buy into the idea that yoga can directly help you loose large amounts of weight, but what it will do is help build up muscle in my legs and relieve tension in my back, which will then allow me to walk longer and w/ less pain. after forty minutes or so of fast walking, my knee starts to scream and my back burns. hopefully by adding in this yoga that concentrates on thighs, calves and back, where most big people have issues, it will help me target issue areas, deal w/ them in a low-impact way, then save energy and build up stamina to push myself in other ways.

i also want to eventually start adding weight training into my work-out routine.  gods, it still sounds so bougee to say i have a ‘work out routine’, but there you have it. 

i’ve also begun to overhaul my eating habits. for breakfast, 6 days a week, i have a protein shake. water and soy milk mixed w/ a plant-based protein powder and an additive of instant coffee. sugar free, dairy free. and awful. i hate them. i’ve tried a few different ones and they are all fucking awful, but i drink them anyway. 

i also usually eat a salad or soup for lunch. i’ve been finding a lot of really great salad combinations on top of rediscovering my love of salads. when i first went vegetarian, i was big into salads but eventually, it became easier to buy those premade, frozen veggie-friendly meals. like all that Amys’ food or the MorningStar brand (which still conjures ideas of satan-worshipping vegans, but hey, i can dig it). i’m trying to find pre-paired salad meals. i found this really good asian inspired salad that had friend wonton strips and a wonderful sesame seed sauce. so good. each bag can make 3 lunches for me, so it is great to stretch them out. also did you know that most cans of soup are technically 2 servings? i didn’t.

that was probably my biggest problem w/ food that i’ve addressed: what constitutes an actual serving size? 

before last month, i assumed a serving size was what looked right. like in the case of the soup, i assumed if it all fit in a soup bowl, it was 1 serving. 1 can of soup can fit in 1 soup bowl so it would make sense, right? nope. 1 serving of canned soup is actually about half the can or roughly 1 cup of liquid. which doesn’t seem like a lot. 

so i’ve stuck to salads. 2 and a half cups of salad is like, i don’t know, 35 cal. so, i can go hog wild, prepare a giant ramen bowl full of salad w/ carrots, onions, a sprinkle of slivered almonds, a splash of lite raspberry vinaigrette, and some sliced, uncured ham and that is lunch, baby!

dinner is pretty untouched, other than i eat on children’s plates now. i heard somewhere from some dietian on a show or something that eat on smaller plates, like children’s plates, helps trick your mind that you are eating more than you actually are. your eyes see a plate full up w/ food rather than eating a little food on a large plate, it is the same amount of “little food” but looks more filling on a little plate. i don’t know if it is true, but i feel like it helps me portion food out better. if a helping of potatoes can’t fit in the little sectioned off children’s plates, it is probably too much potatoes. rip

dessert has been downsized, if i have it at all. 3 thin oreos rather than like, a bowl of cereal. a 1/4 of soy ice cream rather than however much i can pile into a small bowl. 

so that is the update: breakfast is a protein shake lunch is soup or salad dinner is served on a child’s plate dessert is 3 thin oreos. 

maybe this week i will start keeping a calorie count, just to get an idea of what my average is compared to the 2,000 cal/day suggestion.

ok, so that was already a lot, but i did mention that i had suddenly taken a large left turn when it came to the surgery. my last journal update was all about how i was excited to blind, no walkthrough, speedrun this so i could get cleared for the surgery on like january 1, 2020. well, ha ha, nevermind. 

this latest class i went to was enlightening. i mean they all have been so far, for different reasons and in different ways. the first class was about what kind of choices we had. did we want to take mediation? did we want to go to food addicts anonymous? did we want surgery? so this new class i went to on 11.7, was a follow-up to the surgical path.

i was already on the fence about disfiguring my insides. the idea of slicing off 2/3 my stomach rearranging my intestines already sounds horrifyingly frankenstineian to me. it sounds like something midevil doctors would come up w/ while snorting morphine or something. but, i was assured that it was the best option, that it was incredibly safe, it was done all the time, it had great success, etc. 

i allowed myself to be talked into it. i relented and bought into the dream they were spinning for me. 

not after this class. the amount of insanity that is involved, even beyond, again, the whole cutting off and throwing away 2/3 of your stomach, there is some buck wild rules you have to abide after the surgery. i wrote them down (which i was the only one that did. in a class of 9-10 people, i was the only person taking notes and the only person horrified by what i was hearing):

- lose hair first 3-9 months (me, a person w/ thin hair: oh yikes) - will need to take as many as 12 vitamins a day (me, a person that hates taking any medication) - will not be able to take any medication other than liquid/pills will pass thru tiny stomach too fast to be effective (me, a person that hates liquid medication w/ a passion), only tylenol allowed; all medication from doctors must be liquid or chewable - 70% of patients need a follow-up surgery (WHAT) - no smoking (that’s fine) no alcohol (hang on....) after surgery. ever - ideal meals after surgery: 60-100g protein, 40-80g produce, no carbs, no sugar (wait...) - eat a meal every 4 hr.s or so (that seems like overkill) - no carbonated drinks, no drinks w/ sugar/cal (but i love my fizzy drinks :c this is bullshit) - chew each bite 20-30 times, every meal should last a half hour (that’s normal for me anyway, i’m a slow eater but idk how i’m supposed to chew soup 20-30 times) - 30 min.s of activity/day (got that covered, chief) - go to support groups (no thanks, don’t wanna listen to other ppl complain and the idea of being open to other ppl,,, in real life, where they can see me? absolutely not, how dare you) - 64oz of liquid/day (is that not normal? i already drink that much, if not more) - only able to drink a shotglass amount of liquid at a time or risk vomiting (WAIT) - drink every 15 min.s, possibly even during the night (HANG ON) - no drinks w/ meals, stop drinking about 30 min.s before meal and don’t resume until 30 min.s after meal otherwise it will wash food away too quickly to be absorbed by tiny stomach (HOLD THE HECKIN’ PHONE)

at w/ that, the instructor ended the class b/c there were no questions. i was in shock. all i wanted to do was be like those tik tok kids that recreate meme images but i wanted to become the living embodiment of this gif:

literally, i looked over at my mom, who was sipping on a soda and scrolling through facebook for most of the class and went “nevermind, i don’t want surgery”.

i think she thought i was joking. she laughed and waved it off, but the... the existential dread i felt in that moment. this,,,, this was what old howard was shooting for when he wrote about all that cosmic horror. this feeling that i was the only one seeing the insanity in that classroom.... i was the only one that realized that it was madness. how would a person drink 64oz od liquid a day, broken down into 1oz at a time, but not w/n an hour of eating and also having to eat every four hours. that means you’d have to somehow shove 64oz, broken down to 4oz an hour, for 3 hours, then not drink anything for an hour, over only 16 hours. you couldn’t drink anything for 4 of those hours while you eat your tiny baby meals for your tiny baby stomach. i’m not great at math but it doesn’t seem physically possible to me and yet everyone in the class were just nodding their heads like “yes, of course old chap. perfectly reasonable.”

i’d rather continue to starve myself, and work-out. theoretically, if i continue to lose about 20 pounds a month, i will lose my goal weight by may 2020. sure it would be faster w/ surgery. it might be technically easier w/ surgery but everything in my mind tells me that the surgery is wrong. that it isn’t sustainable. i don’t want this surgery and i certainly don’t want the second stage of this surgery 10 yr.s down the road. if you think cutting 2/3 of your stomach out is upsetting, the image of the second step surgery in which they take that rough banana shape of a stomach and stretch it out into what is effectively, A STRAW. 

A STRAW.

and once more: A STRAW!!

i could get behind having a banana-shaped stomach, but a straw in which the food literally just,,, falls through you is grotesque. 

gonna be a big, fatty NOPE from me, chief. hard pass. 

#;journaling series #personal

[cosmosogler]

it’s already tennnnnnnnnnnnn

i uh. am still very burnt out. worse than yesterday. i feel dumb. like my head is a bucket full of goop. silly putty.

i woke up kind of on time. i felt very, strange when i woke up. i felt like i knew exactly what to do. but what i knew to do i don’t know. i went back to sleep for ten minutes. my arm’s got what seems like an irritated patch. i was thinking road rash, but looking that up, it’s not that severe. but it’s been bothering me. it’s near my wrist where i used to hurt myself a lot. i don’t any more, but the skin still gets irritated pretty easy i guess.

anyway, i went in and taught my class. after that my brain died. i took my office hour to mostly have a lunch break and only spent a half hour (out of the 50 minutes) grading. i also helped out the students a little bit. my tuesday office hour is in the practice lab so i get students coming by to practice for their lab sessions sometimes.

after that i spent just over two hours grading i think... i got a section done? i think? i don’t remember. and i filled out my paperwork for next semester with the registrar. as i was heading up to her office i was worried i would start crying if i sat down. i didn’t but it sure felt like i was gonna. after that i went to coffee cookie hour with jennica and taylor and luis and rebika. i gave rebika so much sass that she left though. i felt kinda bad but i joked that i couldn’t tease her if she wasn’t around. i was a little nicer to her after that except when she asked me a really rude question before i left for the night. i’ll get to that.

the undergrads had baked “trick” cookies and “treat” cookies as a special thing for halloween. i had one of both. and also a sugar bone.

oh i was wearing spider earrings today to be super spooky. and also my “Cool Dude” shirt because it is technically a costume and also because it makes me feel better about myself.

the “trick” cookie was baked with sriracha. i figured it out pretty fast. one of the professors commented on it later and i laughed and told him what kind of hot sauce it was.

the undergrad sam sat by me and luis and jennica again and started calling me cute repeatedly. i started getting kiiiinda tilted. 

“yeah, i’m super cute, i’m not an actual person with real feelings like sadness,” i grinned at her. 

she turned to luis. “she’s super cute when she gets mad and copies me,” she said to him.

“someday you’ll have to stop flirting with me to luis,” i told her. 

she laughed and said that was cute too. i think she is doing it to antagonize me. i am not sure why she is so fixated on such a belittling term, especially since we haven’t really had an actual conversation before.

i looked at jennica, who was dressed up as misty, and also sitting across the table from me. “which story should i tell her to get her to shut up?” i asked. 

“don’t,” she said.

“why not?” i leaned over to look at her phone.

she was all like, “because you’ll make ME sad.”

over the course of the day i had a lot of trouble having actual conversations though. i’d just perked up a bit because i had a cup of tea and mint tea cheers me up a little bit. talking to harrison was a huge slog. not because he’s hard to talk to, but because i couldn’t hold on to a sentence long enough to finish it.

he was super tired too. apparently this is the worst classical homework assignment we’ve ever had, and i still haven’t started on it. quantum’s due tomorrow too and i haven’t started on that either. but we hung out and talked for like an hour from 4 to 5. after that i got settled back in and worked on grading until after 7:30.

at some point i sent an email out to my professors and supervisor at danielle’s request. i’d asked her for help with communicating to my professors that i am really not feeling good and haven’t been for several days and i just haven’t gotten around to doing the homework. she said to email them and cc her so they could ask her questions if needed. so i did that.

i finished another section... i have finished 6, and have 3 left. harrison and suzanne have said that grading this last one is a nightmare but so few people finish that you can kinda just not worry about the last page or two. so that’ll cut down my grading time at least. and i already have a rubric made. 

the last 45 minutes i spent entering my grades into the database. so even if i haven’t finished ALL my work, i have my grade book on the school network up to date with attendance and elearning quiz scores and the 2 labs that i’ve finished grading. so all that’s left for the midterm scores is that last lab. that’s like 3/4 of the things i needed to have uploaded by the end of today... right?

as i was packing up to leave for the evening at 7:40 because i was too exhausted to continue, rebika came into my office looking for something on jennica’s desk. 

i’ve been working in my office instead of suzanne’s the last few days. it’s quieter and cooler so i can wear my sweater. the other office is really warm because it’s crowded most of the time and also because luis is running like three computers at once. 

she asked if i finished the classical. i said no. she asked if i had finished the quantum due tomorrow. i got irritated and said no because i’ve been grading for five thousand years.

“what the f is wrong with you?” she asked. i didn’t look at her and i didn’t answer. 

i mean like, she didn’t literally say “f” she said the full word. i just don’t feel like typing it out.

she started talking again at some point but i wasn’t listening. i biked home and made tempeh tacos and they were super good and i figured out how to get the tempeh the way i like it again. 

then it was 8:45 so i just... i don’t know. talked with an internet friend i guess. watched some youtube videos. not sure how i passed an hour actually. oh, i cleaned snoopy’s litter box, that took a few minutes. taking a break doesn’t seem to be helping me feel any better. maybe a solid meal will help me feel better in the morning. i certainly feel full for like the first time in a week... i’m sad that i couldn’t hit that deadline. i won’t have much time to work on it tomorrow, unless like, i skip e&m, which, i can’t guarantee that i am dropping it yet. so skipping would be bad. but if i do end up dropping it i’m mostly just wasting my time right now going to a class i can’t pass anyway.

stuck.

i’m still having trouble concentrating and processing things that are happening around me. like i literally can’t focus any more even though i still need to keep going. biking is kinda rough like this. my attention to my surroundings limping along with giant holes in my peripheral vision and ability to register sounds.

it’s probably not as bad as i’m making it sound. i got home fine. i’m just not quite sure how, now that i am home.

i can feel myself getting sick. like a mild cold, but still not something i want to deal with. harrison seemed to think it might be allergies, and it could easily just be the sudden change in weather since the cold front blew in. but also, working 9-10 hours a day every day with no breaks is wearing down my gears. like i take breaks, and i try to eat healthy and get enough sleep and shower and take care of myself, but it’s just, it’s too much. the only fun thing i did only for me and only because i wanted to enjoy it was taking a bike ride out to gamestop on saturday to get the event pokemon. even playing smash with my classmates is like, with the intention of calming down for a scheduled 50 minutes so i can get back to work immediately. 

i try to do something like that once a week. going to poker night. riding out to gamestop, or the book convention. but it’s only a few hours out of the week. the rest of it i’m working on finances or restocking my apartment in order to live or doing homework hour after hour after hour. i would like just a day off with nothing to do except hang out with friends and do what i feel like. maybe listen to an episode of taz for the first time in a month and a half. i heard the new arc is good. but i don’t have ANY time to sit and listen to a 90-minute podcast.

maybe even... two days off? is that too much? that seems like too much. i feel like i’d get bored. even though i have like 25 tv shows i’d like to watch, and a short story i haven’t gotten to touch in a month, and stuff to do around town with my friends that we just haven’t been able to get to. hang out by the lake! go for a hike! i dunno, spend some time outside! it’s nice out!!

anyway my writing time is up. i will try not to stay up for an extra 45 minutes tonight. wish me luck i guess.

my classmates have started trying to cheer me up when they see me. i appreciate the gesture... i told them that even i just don’t know what would cheer me up though.

[fedorasaurus]

Dream Journal

As a heads-up, this writeup is long, wordy, and contains some mentions of war and aircraft-related death. It might be the most detail that I can remember from a dream, likely because I began to verbally recall it within minutes of waking up (thanks Flib for letting me ramble about disturbing weirdness first thing in the morning).

September 07, 2017 Part 1: I was in a club or dance party of some kind. The room was very small, maybe the size and dimensions of a trailer. The room was dark besides multicolored lights, but I could make out the appearances of the partygoers without much trouble. The fashion style of their clothing suggested that the time period was closer to the 70’s or 80’s rather than 2017. A few people down to my right was a tall woman with light skin and blond hair in a ponytail. She wore a long, light gray or tan dress with plain features. She danced along with the rest of the crowd, but I think she also mentioned something about having to leave in time to make it to class. A man appeared from where there was now an obvious door across from where I was standing. He was an older gentleman in a brown trenchcoat, thick-framed glasses, and a brownish hat. He might have spoken to the tall woman, I’m not sure. But his presence was her cue to leave the party for class (I think the implication was that this man was her professor). Before she left, she made a comment along the lines of “and North Korea is going to drop a nuke on us.” Immediately after this was spoken, the room went silent. Everyone stopped dancing, and the overhead lights came on. We all stared at this woman, as though annoyed that she had gone and ruined our fun with her fear-mongering. Being reminded of the troubled political climate made me feel tense and deeply anxious. It was a discomfort that remained even after I woke up.

(Part 2 continues below)

Part 2: A second dream that night was set during a vacation or a road trip. I was with Flib, Flib’s sister (D), Flib’s grandmother, and possibly my brother (E) was with us too, though it seemed like the dream was switching between Flib and E being on the trip.

As it started, we were in a souvenir shop, with all the usual knickknacks for sale: postcards, shirts, keychains with names on them, etc. What I was struggling with was trying to find a gift for my dad’s birthday (though IRL his birthday was several months ago). I didn’t think he would like any of these gift shop items, though I almost bought him a dark blue tie that had some writing embroidered on it with a similar shade of blue. I don’t recall what it said. But even the gifts specifically geared toward fathers weren’t especially great, and I commented to maybe D that it’s particularly difficult when my dad says he doesn’t want anything for his birthday.

The storekeeper then showed us into the back room, which was actually a whole other section of the store, and closed the door behind him. This section of the store was more like a comic book/collectibles department. But a bit more disorganized. Dim lighting, racks of books and games, lightweight card tables under which cardboard boxes were packed with miscellaneous action figures and other memorabilia. I enjoyed looking around all the books and collectibles, particularly the action figures, which were all unboxed and dirty, having seen prior use/wear-and-tear. I thought about buying some for my photography, but decided that they weren’t very posable, and moved on to a box containing lots of small metal badges. Something having to do with a fighting game, like an award or something. At the bottom of the box was a diamond ring with a gold band, which seemed out of place, until I recalled that a marriage proposal was part of the fighting game’s plot. I decided that the ring must not be REAL gold and diamond, just a replica for prop purposes.

I noticed that some of the display boxes featured characters from a video game that I recognized, though was not especially well-known. I asked the shopkeeper about it, and he expressed much genuine interest and trivia: “did you know that the main character was also in [other game]?” I was fascinated, mentioning that I hadn’t, and he went on to show me gameplay of the game in question (I don’t recall what he said the title was).

There was the protagonist, albeit in a more casual, less fantasy-oriented design. A black t-shirt had some white wording on it that was difficult to make out from the pixels (GBA-era, though it was being played on a non-portable console of some kind). I don’t know what the game was about; the gameplay I saw just featured the character walking along dark city streets, or maybe it was a cemetery. At some point, I noticed that Flib’s family had continued on to the next room of the shop, and I still had to go back and buy something for my dad! I felt selfish for forgetting about his birthday while being so caught up in shopping for things in my own field of interest.

I was then back with Flib’s family. We were getting lunch (or was it sorbet?) at a restaurant, taking the food out onto a patio to eat. Wherever this place was, it was a large city, maybe New York, though it had no recognizable landmarks. I could hear a low-flying plane overhead, and said to D that the sound made me extremely uncomfortable (this is also true IRL, and also I should mention that I live close enough to an airport that I often see and hear planes at low altitudes). Flib’s grandma mentioned that, oh yes, we were near a military base, and they must be testing out some new aircraft.

No sooner had she said this than an aircraft appeared overhead across the street from us. I definitely wouldn’t call it an airplane, although it sounded much like one. It was more like a big metal cube, with a big round hole where the engine should be. It seemed to be packed with people, presumably military personnel, who just sat in and around the thing, no seats or restraints of any kind. It looked so unsafe that just LOOKING at it made me deeply afraid. The unit wobbled in midair before tilting on its side and descending out of view with a big CRASH. And then another, similarly shaped craft flew out, this one much more elongated, and painted a shade of blue. Like a flying cargo container, I suppose, but with one side exposed for people to sit with their legs dangling out. This one also crash-landed, but very near to the restaurant, perpendicular with/on the street.

I told Flib and fam that I was done, that I wanted to go home, that we need to leave. Even as we went back through the restaurant and returned to our cars (lots of other bystanders were also evacuating), I kept repeating that: “I want to go home, I don’t want to be here, I’m done, etc.” There were two cars parked, one being Flib’s and one being D’s. I asked them which car I needed to get into to go home. We all got into Flib’s car, and started driving away. On a long stretch of highway trimmed in neon lights, two hovering aircraft flew overhead in quick succession, in the same direction we were headed. They were a little like flying saucers, but with like a yellow glass base that glowed gold. A large black helicopter went the opposite way. I was aware that these were all military craft, and that we would die if we stayed near them (whether they were deliberately attacking us was unclear, more just that the very presence of military hardware was a threat).

We drove along a winding mountain road, passing a number of touristy locations (namely a group of trees carved with cartoonish faces). Flib decided to pull off at one of these stops because, “as long as we’re on a road trip, we’d might as well see everything.” Or something to that effect. I disagreed, but got out of the car. It was a clearing in a wooded area, like a park on top of a mountain. People were seated on benches. A restroom or gift shop was nearby. I checked my phone for Pokemon GO. An Articuno raid was ongoing, but would end in about 10 seconds. I asked Flib and D if they wanted to do it. D declined, Flib was interested, but by the time I tapped on the gym icon, the raid was over. Flib made a frustrated sigh at this.

As the first raid ended, another one appeared: Ho-Oh (who, at the time of writing this, is not yet in the game). I asked Flib and D if they wanted to fight it, and they both did not. I asked aloud to the other tourists, and they replied “NO” in unison. Two young men then appeared from one of the hiking trails, carrying a tray of three pizza slices. “Please help us!” they exclaimed with a grin, indicating that they wanted to fight the raid boss too. Thanks to some dream-weirdness, their phones were what was manifesting as pizza slices. No seriously, we knew they were phones and treated them like phones, but physically they looked like slices of pizza. This is the weirdest (and possibly most disconcerting) thing I’ve ever dreamt.

I told them that I could barely keep up on my own phone, much less try to play on three at once. But by now, more people were gathering, taking slices of pizza (which at this point were a whole pie). I joked with everyone, “oh, NOW you’re interested in playing, huh?” As we prepared to start the battle, one of the tourists, who I didn’t recognize but who sort of resembled a high school friend of mine (J), started introducing me to Flib’s family… as if I didn’t already know them. It was very confusing, because I don’t think any of us knew who this woman was.

Anyway, we were feeling good and about to start the raid, when D’s phone announced a news report. The phone’s voice was like Siri, but it spoke in a sassy, sarcastic way, like it was programmed to be a smartass to the user. The report said something about how people were being transported away with severe injuries, and how there was also some kind of wound or virus in the throats of some of the victims. My heart sank, and the fear returned as I woke up. These dreams both had a theme of being unable to catch a break from an impending violent death.

#dream #dream journal #long post #weird #disturbing