Halloween Costume Conundrum

It is a week before Halloween as I’m writing this. I have two Halloween parties on my calendar (on separate days) and am struggling to come up with a costume idea. I have my old fallback, which I haven’t worn since 2019, but it’s incredibly warm and not super great if I’m going to be indoors for the whole party since it involves wearing my heavy winter jacket. The last couple years, I’ve gotten by with some simple things, but they all took a little bit of planning to execute and I barely have enough executive function left at the end of my work days to keep up with my blog posts. I’m not going to spend any of that on figuring out a costume that I will inevitably need to order online after doing some lengthy shopping around since finding anything for a person built like me (tall, heavy, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered) is incredibly rare in the first place. I mean, I can barely find socks in stock that fit me outside of the incredibly basic plain white type. There’s no way I can buy any ready-made put-on-a-single-thing type costume and expect even the largest size to fit comfortably even if it is advertised as fitting someone with my general proportions. Well, at least the ones listed since few of those kinds of costumes include shoulder/chest measurements in their sizing charts, which is usually where things fall apart for me. So buying anything easy is out and most of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years that I could slap together into some kind of closet costume just doesn’t fit anymore: a problem I encountered and partially solved last year, except that none of that clothing is good for anything other than actual casual wear. All the random odds and ends one accumulates through the years that can sometimes be compiled into some kind of rather mundane costume don’t fit my shoulders anymore and I don’t really feel like going as “the hulk after he has shrunk back to normal size.”

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Getting Attached To A Shiny Pokémon Because Of A Sad Story

As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends at the Table and have begun to catch up on my usual collection of podcasts that fell by the wayside while I was incredibly focused on the one thing. I’ve been jumping around, from one thing to another, as my time and attention demand, and having a generally pleasant time half listening to a bunch of podcasts and half playing a game whose structure I’m fairly content to ignore. It makes for pleasant evenings, most of the time, though I’ll admit it gets very difficult to handle plot bits of Pokémon that I run into if I’m also trying to listen to anything. My general answer to that is to spend time wandering the new land and catching Pokémon when I’m more interested in the podcast than in making story progress, so I’ve barely done any of the DLC’s story (or at least what feels like barely any of the story but could easily be half or more of it, depending on how long it runs). What I’ve done plenty of is catch Pokémon and enjoy the scenery of this new area.

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The Return of Pokémon Violet: It’s Shiny Time

After several delays due to life chaos and the general distraction of other video games, I’ve begun playing through the first chunk of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC. It felt a little odd, returning to the game for the first time in several months. I’ve kept the software updated and I’ve gone back into the game once or twice since I finished playing last winter, but never for more than a couple minutes. I don’t think I even saved either time, since I was mostly going in to check something. I’d avoided it for so long because there’d been a lot of reports of save file corruption due to one of the late winter or early spring updates and I didn’t want to risk my complete Pokédex. I figured that, until Pokémon Home was available, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Then Pokémon Home came out and I still didn’t play. Normally, I’d have restarted it and played through the game again that instant, but I have been busy this summer (to put it simply), so it fell to the bottom of my list until I remembered the first of two DLC segments was releasing sometime soon. After that, it was mostly just a timing thing and feeling uncertain about whether or not I was up for more Pokémon. I was in the middle of a wave of depression, so it was difficult to start doing anything new. Once I did, though, I was glad I went back.

It was easy to forget given how much stuff has happened since it came out, but I think this Pokémon game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing an entry in the franchise. I mean, sure, it was incredibly buggy and had enormous performance issues, but it was the first entry in the franchise that I could play with my friends. Some of my best memories from the horrible period that was the start of last winter involve getting together with my friends to play together, do some raids, or even just hang out in voice chat while we all played by ourselves. I think the game would have benefited from a few more months of work of course, but the people making the games have shown that each thing they do is part of a cumulative effort to improve the franchise as a whole, so I remain hopeful that the next game will have everything Scarlet and Violet did, but better. I mean, its not like they’re going to be backsliding or somehow releasing a worse game than the last one. Sure, the games may not have lived up to everyone’s expectations, but they’re still better games than the previous iteration. I mean, hell, people give Sword and Shield a lot of guff, but at least you didn’t have to be taught how to catch Pokémon if you’d already caught one and it was SO much better than the hours-long intro of Sun and Moon.

All the company really needs to do is stop redoing all the Pokémon models every release or two and focus on other work. There’s too many Pokémon for that shit. I know a lot of people didn’t like this game and while I absolutely understand the frustration they’re voicing, I can’t help but think that, laggy moments aside, it runs better than most BioWare games I’ve played right at release. Sure, it would have been better if they’d focused on optimizing the game for the Switch’s admittedly limited hardware, but it’s still not that bad, compared to the general state of the video game industry. It actually delivered on the promises it made, even if did so at a subpar framerate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t voice our opinions or attempt to hold the company to account for what seems like a product they rushed to the market (likely against the wishes of the people actually making the game), I just don’t think it’s worth hating the game over. I mean, it would bug the hell out of me to have worked on a piece of software that was this full of visible issues when it got to customers, but I also know that sometimes your schedule says “release” and you’ve already done everything you could to suggest (or demand) that the product should be delayed for quality reasons, so you can only sit by and watch a minor disaster unfold (save those emails, everyone, because it can be really helpful to show you noted all those issues months ago when someone comes knocking on your door to find out how, as the bastion of quality, test let something this poorly performing get past them).

I haven’t gotten very far into the DLC since, true to form, I stopped following the plot and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction. There’s tons of new Pokémon to catch and I have to catch ’em. Which has worked out pretty well for me, all things considered, since I’ve caught three new shiny Pokémon in the three evenings I’ve spent playing the game [predictably, my rate of catching shinies has dropped off since I wrote this]. I caught two the first night (a shiny Poochyena literally walked up to me within a minute of being able to control my character in the new area we went to) and one on my most recent night. All completely random shiny spawns. Just wandering around the world for me to find. Which is funny, since I’ve tried to go shiny hunting before, when some of my favorite Pokémon were showing up in swarms, but I’ve never managed to get a shiny one during those times, despite how much I’d shifted the odds in my favor. I literally spent four hours shiny farming a Vaporean outbreak and had nothing to show for it, despite encountering enough Vaporean that I should have seen at least four shinies if the statistics I’d looked up held true. It’s been a bit frustrating, to see all my friends have a great deal of success with shiny hunting but be unable to get lucky even once when I’ve gone looking.

Every shiny I’ve ever caught, outside of plot shinies, has been the result of completely random chance. I’ll admit that Violet has been pretty good for shinies, but three of the four I’ve found were found just recently, in the DLC, and this is not exactly representative of my experience as a whole. Outside of Pokémon go and the aforementioned plot shinies, I’ve averaged maybe one per generation, and that’s even counting Pokémon Legends: Arceus (my previous record-holder for most shiny Pokémon caught in a single game). Still, Violet is a lot of fun to play. I miss the days when my friends and I played together, but it has been a long year and a lot has changed since then. Half the people I played with back then are no longer in my life (all thanks to the wizarding world bullshit of February), so it’s not like I could recreate that experience. Now, all I can do is hope that I make new friends who are just as into Pokémon as I am and that the ones I’m still friends with are still up for playing it even though I’m a month late to the party. Time will tell, I’m sure, but I will continue regardless. Pokémon used to be a solo experience for me and it will be fine if it goes back to being that again.

Pokémon Going, Going, Gone… Well, Eventually Gone.

One of the oddest parts of being an ex-Pokémon Go player is that I still have the app installed on my phone. Despite not having actively played it in years and frequently running into space issues on my phone, I have not yet removed the app. As it turns out, moving Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Pokémon Home is an incredibly slow, arduous process given that I’d collected over a thousand Pokémon by the time I stopped playing, many of them shiny, legendary, or incredibly powerful. In order to transfer Pokémon between the two apps, I have to use a limited resource in Pokémon Go, which burns up extra quickly if the Pokémon being moved are legendary, incredibly rare, or shiny. You can, of course, buy more energy to transfer Pokémon if that’s something you really want, but you could also just wait a week for your energy bar to be refilled again. Or just transfer a few every day. Whatever you prefer. After all, they wouldn’t just prevent you from using a long-advertised feature of the app, would they? They’d just put any means of it being made convenient behind a money wall.

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My Journey Through The Pokémon Games Continues

After many long months, I finally finished Pokémon X. I still have a legendary or two to capture, but I’ll admit that I’m happy to be through the game. None of the post-game stuff in this generation is particularly interesting to me and I’m very tired of how cinematic parts of the game are. I’m not there for cutscenes or to watch movies I can’t skip. I’m there to play Pokémon while riding my exercise bike and going to sleep. I don’t want to be actually engaged or entertained, just mildly distracted. Which is a bit of a problem, since I moved from Kalos to Alola. I decided to skip straight to Ultra Sun rather than consider playing Moon since I remembered how painful the first iteration of the game was and how much of that pain they eliminated in the Ultra version of the game, but I completely forgot how frustrating it was to hunt for Pokémon in a world where the Pokémon vary from one grass patch to the next on the various routes.

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My Pokémon X-perience Is Kinda Forgettable

I’ve been doing a replay of the Pokémon franchise over the past year or so (very casually, mostly while riding my exercise bike or for a few scattered minutes here or there) and I started Gen 5 a month ago with Pokémon X. Now, I’ve never actually finished Pokémon X before. I’m not sure I’ve even gotten to the point where I’d fight or capture the titular legendary Pokémon in either of my past play-throughs. I honestly can’t remember how far I got in any of my previous runs because they were all fairly focused play-throughs that happened with multiple years between them. I think I did my last attempt at beating the game in the months before Pokémon Sword and Shield came out, and the one before that was in the year or two after the game originally released. Long enough ago that I don’t remember exactly when it happened.

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Bad Parents, Video Games, And My Search For Catharsis

Spoiler warning: the following post contains major plot spoilers for God of War: Ragnarok and Pokémon: Violet/Scarlet. They’re in the next paragraph and form the majority of it, and they don’t show up any less the further down you go. You cannot escape them unless you leave this post now and only return once you’ve had am opportunity to beat those games to your satisfaction. I don’t really go into specifics in terms of how things happen, but there are secrets and conclusions to things that get revealed, so maybe bail out before you read those if reading them will negatively impact your gaming experience. Since I’m out of other stuff to put here, to push the spoilers further down the page, I’ll let you go with a final admonition of “you’ve been warned” and hope that you are making good choices for yourself.

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The One Thing I Can’t Escape in Pokémon Violet

I still have a few more plot events to run through in the latest Pokémon game, not to mention about one hundred to one hundred fifty Pokémon still to catch or trade for, but I’ve put a pretty serious dent in the game’s content, met most of the NPCs, finished my classes, and at least briefly visited every major area in the game. I’ve had some fun moments spotting Psyducks glitched into surfaces, finding Garchomps flying around in mountains, discovering that my shiny Psyduck really is visually glitched and I wasn’t just imagining it being weird-looking this entire time (it’s constantly under a “bright-light-making-colors-fade-a-bit” effect when it appears in the world), and getting revenge on the high-powered trainer I accidentally ran into in my first few hours of the game (a cabbie just outside the central hub city on the path to the Elite Four is stronger than most gym leaders). I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the world, searching for new Pokémon to catch, and discovering stuff some of my friends who already finished their Pokédexes never found. It’s been fun. Mostly.

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The Latest Pokémon Game Comes With A Whole New Collection Of Fan Complaints

I played a lot of the new Pokémon game over the weekend. I picked up the Violet version of the game, agonized briefly over my starter (I wound up going with Fuecoco because his adorable empty head felt very aspirational to me as I struggled my way through the side-effects of my Covid booster), came to despise the rival-type character for her constant condescension, and got lost in exploration. I wound up collecting about 160 Pokémon in my play over the weekend and only a single badge. After all, I was too busy losing myself in classes, sandwich-based picnics, and the intricacies of locating new Pokémon to bother with pursuing badges, titans, or the downfall of Team Star (who mostly seem harmless so far). Plus, I found myself resisting my usual level of immersion and drive after spending most of the day the game came out reading about performance issues, visual glitches, and the sundry other complaints it feels like the most vocal people on the internet have raised against this game, Game Freak, and Nintendo in general. Even after several hours of play, I still feel trepidatious about investing myself in the game given all the negativity I’ve seen online. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, so far?

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