me explaining to the other trainers that apricorns are unknown outside of Johto because of deliberate suppression by the Silph and Devon corporations to present artificial pokeballs as the only means of capturing pokemon and establish regional monopolies after they eliminate renewable sources

(via @itsbenedict)

eternalfarnham replied to your post

there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.

not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market. 

sm FUCKING h at y’all granola-crunching conspiracy theorists. you probably also believe Super Potions cause autism.

Ok, but it is a shame that artisanal balls are basically off the market now. Like, you have to ride the monorail and hike through a half dozen routes just to find someone willing to sell you a Fast Ball. Believe me, when your boss at the power plant needs five Electrodes by Tuesday you are not going to want to make the trip to Alola; you’re going to head on down to the Mart and get some Ultra Balls, which will do the trick but aren’t well tailored to the job.

I’m with you that modern catching techniques are better, not to mention more humane, but there genuinely is a loss from more niche balls becoming harder to find. Maybe someday the long slowpoketail of consumer demand will be met, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that Shellder.

look y’all are missing the point. mass production of silph balls crowding out traditional apricorn craftsmanship is, if anything, more a side effect of the real problem: that capture artifacts are too easy to get your hands on these days. $2 basic balls are a problem. before modern ball tech you had to go to an artisan, yes, but part of their job was to care about who had the power to recruit pokémon from the wild, as a backstop against another Knight of Veilstone coming along. there was a time when you’d never lay a hand on a ball yourself until it was clear you respected pokémon, whether tame or in the wild. but now, a “pokémon journey” is open to practically every teenager, even if they’ve got not interest in treating their team with trust and love.

the worldwide rise in the last century of organized crime and apocalyptic cults who use pokémon as their muscle is a direct result of capture artifacts becoming a mass produced market commodity rather than a mechanism for preserving the sacred trust between humans and the wilderness. it’s a miracle that the powder keg hasn’t already gone off by now.

Oh that is rank historical revisionism - what, do you think artisans’ definitions of “respect” were constructed in a vacuum? We already had rhetoric as far back as the warring states period in Ransei about how only the soldierly classes, overwhelmingly descendants of nobility and taught from birth, had the intangible qualities necessary to “bond” with Pokémon. And when we start seeing apricorn balls develop in Johto, which borders Kanto - Kanto, where we know there’s been extensive cultural cross-contamination with Auroran and Dragnoran expeditions - surprise, suddenly only a small population has the intangible qualities necessary to use them, too.

That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.

Do you want more disillusioned kids joining gangs? Because that’s how you get Teams!

Artisanal balls and anyone who supports them are tools of the aristocracy to suppress the common folk. In the days when a ball could only be made by hand by an expert, only the wealthiest could afford pokemon, and as a result anyone not born into the “elites” was forced to be subservient to their “betters” for protection.

The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.

More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.

And as a beautiful side benefit of this, standard of living has increased across the board. Since every household has at least one minor pokemon in the family and there are increasing numbers of professional, working pokemon joining cities and other civilized areas and working to improve them, every aspect of economy and industry has been enhanced by their supernatural capabilities. Electricity is generated cleanly and in abundance for everybody. Pollution is cleaned up almost completely and instantly. The production of farms, mines, and workshops is multiplied, even as safety standards improve. Yes, every few years another potential apocalypse comes about and needs to be prevented by a couple of brave teenagers, but outside of those incidents the world is damn close to utopia.

…that was all fascinating to read and I would like to see more like it, please

for instance; what the hell is in lemonade that makes it a more powerful healing alternative to regular potions

Opium

See, unlike in the real world, the Pokémon world has yet to ban cocaine in drinks.

this website is INCREDIBLE

DONT USE THE PIRATE BAY PLEASEEEE I BEG YOU.

Use 1337x.to rarbg or rutracker, highly moderated public torrent trackers, because Pirate Bay has long been shut down, unmoderated, and cloned by some shady actors AND use Mullvad VPN (or any other vpn but mullvad is the best definitely) to protect your ip address while you torrent, bind it to qbittorrent and do not use utorrent anymore either because it is littered with adware.

OR if you don’t want to pay for a VPN, use direct download or streaming sites. Please y’all just take one pass through on the r/piracy or r/freemediaheckyeah mega threads to find whatever you want for free and also not infect your computer with Trojan viruses.

^^^ yes!!! Thank you sm.

If any of those terms made you go ????? and you think pirating must be So Hard, I wrote a verbose but easy to follow guide a while back for total beginners!

pirate safely friends

​i wish this was in my cart and not someone else’s

you can just take it from their cart. its not their possession if they haven't bought it yet

if i were thrift shopping and you put your hands into my cart to take a unique handpicked item i was intending to purchase i would break your legs

Jason Anderson

British artist Jason Anderson creates colorful abstract paintings composed of pixelated swatches of pastel-toned oil paint. Up-close, the artist’s paintings look like blocky layers of shapes and color; but, from afar, his scenes—featuring cityscapes, roads, trains, and marinas—are revealed.

Anderson began his career as a stained glass apprentice, where he worked on restoring the windows of cathedrals. He soon progressed onto designing the glass murals himself, where he learned how to break down subject matter into “jigsaws” of colored sections. This approach still shines through in his paintings today—complex scenes are brought to life with simple shapes and careful consideration to hue and tone.

These really speak to me.

Why do these cubes make me feel feelings

me trying to explain to my dad that

this

is the single best moment in puppet history (maybe all of @wearewatcher history) because ryan killed the professor last season and since then he's slowly been manipulated by a hologram version of the puppet he 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙨 he killed because👏he👏was👏there👏when👏it👏happened👏 all the while, the ACTUAL professor was chilling with his dinosaur parents, teaching them history and genuinely just being a light to their lives, none the wiser that he'd been replaced. But not only did the imposter professor want to literally skin Ryan alive, he had been giving him PUPPET CREAM the whole time (which I'd headcanonded that he was using to somehow eat him, idk-) and on top of ALL that, now the real Professor had learned a thing or two from his new parents "you know, if you apologized to beef-boy, he'd probably forgive you." and came to genuinely care for, not only them but for Ryan and his future friends too. Then, when it all came to a head, (i.e: the meteor about to kill the dinosaurs and Ryan defeating the hologram) all Ryan wanted was the real Professor back. That THIS was the best form of character development I've ever seen put to screen and the result of hours upon hours of late hours at work to create something truly special.

My dad just trying to watch ancient aliens:

This is actually very normal human behavior. It's just that most people (in the USA) think "Jesus strengthens me" instead of "I am a pikmin, dandori time"

This is literally why stories and fantasy are so useful to humans. We cannot tackle every mundane challenge with enthusiasm, and facing against profoundly daunting tasks can be deeply demoralizing, and you don’t get to feel cool or heroic for filing 400 pieces of paperwork.

We arm ourselves with stories and fantasy, so that the laundry can become a charming hurdle to overcome, and the daunting stack of bills is the leviathan we the brave knights must slay.

Humans have always been like this. So many cultures have stories or mythology or even rituals about literally embodying another being better suited to the challenge one currently faces.

Stories are armor. Stories are fuel.

It's important to drink a lot of fluids when you're sick so that your body has the raw materials to generate gallons of snot.

I learned recently that mucus basically traps the viruses and expels them from your body which is why your body makes SO MUCH of it so now I just imagine drinking liquids as hiring a bunch of goons to take out the thrash y'see nyeehh see we taking back the streets from the bowler hat boys flush em out real good

Perhaps there are many problems which could be solved if you just made enough mucus

Reblog if you are solving problems by generating enough mucus

hello please can I sleep in a studio ghibli bed it’s urgent

Okay there all look great with the EXCEPTION of Howl's bed, are you kidding me

Look at that thang. The duvet, the pillowcases- that shit is embroidered and beaded to FUCK. That's your victorian great-great-grandmother's fanciest display sheets for the decorative guest room nobody ever uses. You roll over the wrong way on one of those appliqué czech glass flowers and lose a goddamn eye. Abrasive as hell. Too delicate to machine-wash, too, so the fabric itself gotta be tough like sandpaper. That, or frayed all to shit, like you shift a little in the night and get sequins falling all over like a drunk queen in a bouncy castle. You know I'm right. Look at him. Look at how he's sleeping and tell me that man's so much as SAT on those sheets in his life. My girl Sophie did her best but we all know that's his fancy interior design hashtag #aesthetic Instagram influencer background room. He doesn't SLEEP there, he sleeps on the couch or on the floor or in the reclined seat of his busted-out Subaru in the garage that hasn't worked right in five years cause he doesn't know what an oil change is. That's the room he uses for makeup tutorials and Shien Hauls (derogatory). Look at that man. Look at him for five seconds and tell me he isn't gonna wake up in an hour crying over snagged hair and floral imprints on his face. What the HELL Sophie baby that blowdried bitch has a twelve step twice daily skin care routine and you're RUINING it. Walked right past his twin size flannel futon in the corner down the hall and dumped him in the biggest bed she could find like a bedazzled roadkill possum. Didn't even put his bonnet on. Sophie I love you so much but first thing he does after he chips his nails clawing his way out of that thing is get your Amelia Bedilia ass. I'm so sorry

This almost compares to that guy who wrote The Rant about hating Olaf

you mean this guy

“Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”

–Terry Pratchett, Snuff

sometimes i forget wizardposting isn’t a regular occurrence on any other website. what do you mean your posts don’t randomly get taken over my evil wizards casting spells on your peunis

prepare thyself

An old MP100 comic inspired from Kotaro Lives Alone. (⁠ノ⁠^⁠_⁠^⁠)⁠ノ🌟

Imagine a bee rn in a hive muttering "the beekeeper is not real because he is not intervening or helping me at all with this disastrous relationship I have with another bee". now imagine that's you talking about the good lord. now imagine a dog with a propeller hat on

Filing this in my memory right next to this thread:

The cis are wild

Cis people are blinded by imaginary gender barriers

my writing fundamentally changed forever ten years ago when i realized you could use sentence structure to control people’s heart rates. is this still forbidden knowledge or does everyone know it now

?????? *raises hand* I’ve been writing for years and don’t know this trick by these words! do tell?

Okay, so a few people have asked for me to cite the dark magics at them, and i’m super happy to share because it’s my favorite thing ever. 

so, let’s see if i can explain this the same way that i learned. read a sentence out loud. you come to a full stop when you hit the period, and you take a normal, breath. but, when you hit a comma, you take a slightly longer pause. and when you hit a dash - you take an even longer pause. 

this is a natural rhythm that we pick up when we’re first taught to read; we do it without even thinking. but when you start to think about it, you realize that it can become a tool.

think of your heartbeat. a period is badump. a comma is badump-dump. and a dash is thump badump. one breath. a longer breath. two breaths.

that means what you read automatically affects the rhythm of your breathing and your heartrate. which means that you can control the amount of physical tension your reader feels… by altering your punction and your sentence structure.

for fast paced scenes, you use short sentences. a lot of hard stops. mostly periods, with just a few comma’s thrown in for the full breath. your reader’s heartrate accelerates. their breathing is slightly and unintentionally, on their end, quicker. you hit the dramatic ending of the scene - and your reader’s body phsyically feels the gasp, the breath of fresh air, of these longer sentences.

now, read that paragraph again ant take note of your natural pauses, and how it subtly affects your breathing. 

the same thing can be said of comma’s and dashes. while they can be used as a breath of fresh air, they can also cause a new line of tension as they lead your reader to hold their breath. during this section, you should use longer sentences; breaking up the harshness of the pauses by using variations of punction. read this paragraph out loud from the start and take note of how long you go between pauses and full breaths. 

and then, comes the biggest trick.

the hard stop.

the paragraph.

because while the periods, commas, and dashes are variations on a short stop, the paragraph is a hard stop. you take a full breath. you pause for a moment, then move to the start of the next paragraph.

which means you can create an entirely new sort of dramatic tension. read the sentences that are in bold. see how you take a naturally longer pause at the end of each paragraph?

see how it makes you feel? 

how it makes you breath different? 

how doing it once, twice, or three times creates a different line of tension? 

this little magic trick can be used to cause a reader’s heartrate to speed up during a fight or chase scene. it can be used to cause their breathing to slow down during moments of dramatic tension, sorrow, or softness. and it can be used to create hard breaks that add a new level of physically felt emphasis to your written work.

i hope these examples make sense! it’s my favorite writing trick!

op turned reblogs off but this post must live. it must live and spread malignantly .

happy Trans Day of Visibility!! Here are two drawings of me.

my ass will see a cunning older man with the kind of heartrending trauma that could burn down cities and a younger man who holds a devotion toward him that could tear apart whole landscapes and it's instantly over for me

WAIT

HOL UP

can you IMAGINE seeing adam west walk into an orgy and just start Being Batman… holy shit

Ye gads. 😂

“Great SCOTT! Where are everyone’s clothes?”

“Riddle me this, Caped Crusader! What kind of suit does no man want to have, but no man want to lose?”

“What kind of suit…a paternity suit!”

every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

Some of the highlights of that video include:

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?