Cynical Sweets!

sassylesbiandave:

pancakestein:

omfg

Thoughts on Basic Pokemon Mechanics

I kinda get irritated when people harp on the Pokemon game franchise with the only argument of “it’s for little children and I’m so mature and I can’t play it because it’s so childish and lame and blah blah blah”. I grew up with Pokemon so naturally I’m a little offended, but I also understand the deep complexities of the mechanics in the Pokemon games. Sure the storyline may be a little childish but that’s to be expected, as children are the targeted demographic for these games. But when you really get down to it, the games get absurdly complex in the manner if mechanics.

Pokemon games are wonderful because they have such a diverse and imaginative cast of little monsters that are specified in every regard. There is a listed average for height, weight, there are set colors and shapes for each monster, there are listed footprints, all that fun stuff in order to relate these monsters as closely as possible to real world field guides. And the basic concept of these games is simple: play field biologist for a professor and gather as much information as you can about these creatures and while you’re at it become the greatest Pokemon Master known to mankind. You accomplish this by capturing specimens in small containers known as “Pokeballs”, which you can buy in pretty much every town. Simple enough. So you go through the whole region, capturing all these little specimens, documenting their specific traits and information, and then become a bigger household name than Richard Nixon. Again, simple enough.

But the mechanics get crazy intense.

The first and most noticeable are the typings. Each Pokemon has it’s own type, and has certain attacks that have types as well. During the course of a typical battle, there will be dialogue boxes that say things like “The attack was super-effective!” or “The attack wasn’t very effective…”. So, since becoming a household name requires winning a ridiculous amount of battles, you have to become smart about these things. So we think about which moves are super effective, which ones aren’t, and try to apply that knowledge to the next battle. You try and anticipate what type the opponent’s monster is and try to exploit their weakness. And this should be easy because you’re busying yourself being an amateur biologist and you already have a lot of knowledge about these monsters. Fair enough. This sounds pretty simple until you look at the complete typing chart. Double-types have always been present too, so this isn’t a new thing. And all of this information is crammed into the heads of the players, whom respond to prompts as quickly as they can.

And then we get into it a little bit deeper. Each monster can only learn four moves that they can use. Moves are classified into Physical, Status, and Special. Physical moves are moves that involve physical contact with the opponent such as Bite, Karate Chop, Seismic Toss, Sky Uppercut, along with many others. Status moves affect the status of the opponent. This means that their statistics will drop or yours will raise depending on the move. For example, Swords Dance will increase your attack stat will increase by two stages or how the move Smokescreen will drop the opponent’s evasiveness stat by one stage. And then there are Special moves, which make contact with the opponent without actually making contact. These moves often have other little benefits to them as well. Moves like Zap Cannon will fire a pretty painful shock to the opponent, and it may paralyze them for a while, and the move Shadow Ball will hurl a ball of dark energy at the opponent and may or may not lower their special defense by a stage.

Not to mention, that each move has it’s own base power, and a set number of times that you can use it. These two characteristics are usually inversely related; the more powerful a move, the fewer times you’ll be able to use it. Status moves don’t typically do a whole bunch of damage, so those usually have a high amount of times it can be used. However, the number of times the move can be used rarely, if ever, goes up past 50. So even battles for long stretches of time can be troublesome because if your Pokemon runs out of usable moves, they’ll only be left with Struggle, which hurts the Pokemon as well.

(I’ll finish this later)

Thoughts on Remoraid

I love Pokemon. I really do. So, in honor of me finding out late as per usual that a new Pokemon game is gonna come out soon, I’m gonna talk about one of the earlier Pokemon that I really don’t like probably because of how confusing it is.

Remoraid. Holy hell do I not like Remoraid.

My main gripe is that it can learn pretty much every single beam move just because it can. Sure you can use TMs to make other Pokemon learn some Beams but Remoraid can just learn them. I can understand a few, sure, but Remoraid can learn Bubblebeam, Aurora Beam, Psy Beam, Signal Beam, Ice Beam, and Hyper Beam for no good reason.  The only Beams it can’t learn are Charge Beam and Solar Beam because of it’s type affinity. It’s a stupid fish, it doesn’t need all of these over powered moves.

And the physiology is confusing too. The evolutionary situation is similar to that of Slowpoke and Shellder. You have a Mantyke and a Remoraid, you level them up, and then they both combine like some kinda super-robot from the Power Rangers, and they evolve into a Mantine. That makes sense, right? Mantine has Remoraid on it’s underside so that’d make a lot of sense. NO. The Mantyke evolves into a Mantine by itself and leaves the Remoraid untouched. So okay. The Remoraid must evolve into a sea serpent like Magikarp or Feebas, or turn into a bigger similar-species like Carvanha or Wailmer, NOPE. This fish. This overpowered fish evolves into an octopus. Words cannot even begin to describe my confusion.

Although I suppose, taking in Mantine and Remoraid’s symbiotic relationship, the abundance of Beams could make sense. Y’know, have the little Remoraid act as turrets to fire lasers at stuff like the Death Star invasion scene in Star Wars. 

But I still really don’t like Remoraid.

Thoughts on Sleeping

I dunno about you, but I always feel really tired during the day. Around 1PM, I am just falling asleep all over the place. I pretty muchhaveto snap out of it though, else my already sub-par grades will suffer. (The only reason they’re sub-par is because I was sick for two weeks!) And during these drowsy spells, I can’t help but think back wistfully to my glorious kindergarten days. That wonderful time in the afternoon where the lights would dim, we’d all bust out pillows, and dream for a spell. And of course, being the rowdy children that we were, we never wanted to sleep. But now with all of this homework that I get from all seven of my hour-long classes, getting six hours maximum before work starts to affect my sleep which is pretty much always…

… I seriously believe that there should be an optional nap time for high school students.

It sounds stupid I know. What high school student would want to take a nap for an hour? Probably all the students that are overworked with homework, the students that had to work late last night, the students who eat a little too much during lunch, the students who had insomnia last night, the students who are just a little sleepy, or the students who just want to unwind from all this stress going on.

And yes, a lot of that is stress related. But you know what? Being a teenager isn’t a walk in the park. We’re growing and have unstable emotions, we have seven mandatory classes a day with extra work afterward, we are forced to think about our future and pressured into challenging ourselves and after all that we only have about a third of the day to ourselves.

Now, there have been countless studies about sleep and who needs it and how much and so on. It’s a common misconception that as a person ages, they need less sleep. Children sleep about 10 hours, adults need about 7.5, and most adolescents sleep about 6 hours more or less. Shockingly, they actually need about 9 hours of sleep to function at their peak. Not to mention, adolescents experience a “shift change” so to speak, and function better in the afternoon and at night time than younger children. There should be a time where a student can catch up on sleep, especially with all of these biological changes going on.

Another thing I have to mention is that naps are good for you if you plan them out right. My dad for example. He goes to sleep at 8PM, wakes up at 3AM, and gets to work at 4AM. He does his job efficiently, drives on home, and when I get home at 4PM, he’s taking a cat nap on the couch. And when he wakes up, he’s wide awake, he’s alert, he’s up and raring to go drive his car places. Let’s contrast that with me. I go to sleep at 10:30PM, wake up at 6:30AM (same amount of sleep), I get to school at 7:30AM, I struggle through the afternoon, and when I get home I am completely miserable. I get to sleep, and I am just as sluggish the next morning, and the slow feeling just keeps piling up and piling up.

But I don’t get to take naps. Because I have homework I have to do and by the time I’m done it’s way too close to my normal bed time to take a nap.

And probably the thing that bothers me the most about not being able to have a nap time is other people saying “where would we even we don’t have a room like that in our school I don’t think we could even make a nap room how would that work”. The room where the Leadership class is conducted is filled with couches. There is LITERALLY a room filled with like 10 couches, and there are students saying that a “nap room” is impossible for the school. Funding sure that’s a obstacle, butnot knowing how to even make a nap room when there’s already a room filled with couches.I think my lack of nap time is driving me into a fit.

Not to mention, sleep is a necessity. We absolutely need sleep to survive. Sleep deprivation can kill in the worst of cases. A lot of high schools have pushed back start times from the inhumane 7AM to the lovely 8AM. While this is a nice little change, I still don’t feel that this is enough time for high school students to truly be awake and alert for the full day. The morning time isn’t so bad. It’s that afternoon crash where the only think you can possibly think about is taking a cat nap.

The biology of adolescents is different than that of adults. With all the different work piled on top of us as well as this biological change, this drowsy spell can seriously put a damper on adolescent’s health.

Sure, high school will probably never get an optional nap time due to the complexities of how it will be designed, funded, constructed, who it will impact, and if tax payers really want their money going toward a buncha dumb high schoolers sleeping while they should be studying. But hey, I work hard, I deserve a cat nap every so often.

… Can you tell that I’m really tired right now?

Thoughts on Origami

I love origami. I truly do. I honestly have nothing bad to say about it except for the fact that it can get REALLY FREAKING COMPLEXICATED AND IT IS VERY FRUSTRATING. But most of the time, it’s a pretty relaxing activity for me.

You wouldn’t beleive how many times I have gotten in trouble during one of my classes because I wouldn’t stop folding paper and because aparrantly I was disrupting the class. Now if I was distracting the teacher with my AWESOME MATHEMATICAL PROWESS then I could understand. But disrupting the class? Come on. I sit in the corner in the front row.

I find origami very theraputic and quite relaxing. Except for the strain I unintentionally put on my back when I’m folding for long periods of time, that’s not relaxing. I guess something so simple as folding paper into who knows what is just a nice way to relax the mind while still doing something that defies what you’d expect.

Seriously, think about it. You fold a single square sheet of paper, without cutting or gluing, into a freaking rabbit.That’s a pretty intense thing. That takes a lot of thought and a lot of equations and theorizing in two AND three dimensions. It’s mind-numbing in the sense that it takes so much thought, that it renders every other thought not regarding what you’re working on completely uselesspretty much.

I think it’s amazing thinking about this process of turning paper into shapes. Creating these and showing them off to my peers, and watching their faces light up as they try to decipher how I managed to do that is the reaction that I live for.

But going even further, I’ve been into modular origami. Which folding one piece over and over and then fitting them together to create something new. This is the thing I got in trouble for today. I was trying to make a Sonobe Box and even though I’msuper fast at folding this module hang on teacher lemme fix these together real quickthey still don’t like it too much. A girl can’t help being stressed out and me getting in trouble for that makes me even more stressed and I just can’t deal with it very well.

And even further than that I’m doing a teaching project for math class and my topic is origami but that isn’t too important right now.

I could just go on and give a crazy detailed history about origami and the influential people regarding it but I’d rather not. I could also go into detail about how origami is used for teaching and is used in therapy, but I’ll also decline for now. Maybe when I’m not in school I’ll dig around for links to articles.

So I realized that these monster posts don’t actually count for the assignment becausethe assignment hasn’t even started yet auuughhh I’m gonna kill my blog like this.

So look forward to more of my incessant ranting. [sobcry]