This is a HUGE update—I did a lot of work on Porydex over the last three and a half weeks, and I’m extremely proud of how the project is coming along. Buckle up; Porydex has finally started reaching what I consider to be the next level.
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As of a few minutes ago, porydex.com has finally been fully updated with the Pokémon Showdown usage stats data from the last few years!
The multi-year hiatus is finally over! Porydex is now up to date and shall remain up to date for at least the rest of the Scarlet/Violet generation.
And that’s pretty much the only outwardly exciting Porydex thing I accomplished.
But inwardly…
Continue readingOne of my proudest Pokémon video game achievements is breeding a shiny Smeargle (nicknamed Escher, because I’m that kind of dork) in Omega Ruby, and raising it to become a ribbon master: a Pokémon that has earned every ribbon available to it in the games it could be sent into.
It wasn’t always easy. The ORAS contest ribbons required me to do some pretty convoluted things to Sketch the optimal movesets for each contest condition. (But that was part of why I chose Smeargle for this journey in the first place—one of the most flexible Pokémon, for one of the most wide-ranging challenges.) And for the Battle Tree in Sun/Moon, at certain points I was dual-wielding my 3DS in one hand, and a laptop in the other, with reference pages open to Bulbapedia’s list of Battle Tree trainers and their movesets.
But I persevered, and eventually, Escher’s collection was complete, and its summary screen became a thing of beauty.
Now, many years later, after several games that didn’t include Smeargle (Sword/Shield, Legends: Arceus) and thus couldn’t contribute to my ribbon quest, it’s finally time to pick back up where I left off. Smeargle is available in both Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl and Scarlet/Violet, which means a slew of new ribbons for Escher to be adorned with.
Continue readingA tragic realization: In the very near future, most people who read my short story It’s Always Friday will probably think its female “President Harris” character is extremely uninspired and blandly named… Except for the fact that I named the character and wrote the story way back in 2018, long before real-world Kamala Harris was on everyone’s radar, or even mine.
I chose the name by reading lists of common American surnames and looking for one I thought the average person could think sounds presidential enough to vote for, lmao.
(This post is a childish self-defense in advance. And also, maybe a brag I guess?)
Some time in the near future—maybe two years, maybe ten—the generations that popularized the nickname “Karen” as meaning “annoying person who does things like complain incessantly at service workers and their managers” will realize the label was sexist all along, and that by using it, they’ve been unintentionally perpetuating the same systemic misogyny that we’re simultaneously trying to overcome.
Continue readingDevelopment progress for Porydex has increased to ludicrous speed since my update post last month. I’ve finally made it out from under the mountain of backlogged work that had buried the project since late 2023, and now I’m even adding new features that I’ve been looking forward to adding for years!
Continue readingRemember Porydex, my Pokémon dex + competitive battling stats website? It still exists, and I’m still working on it—though the progress is slow and chaotic. Here’s a general update on where the whole thing is at.
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Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’d stay as far away from it as possible.
Continue readingOver the years, various writing buddies and I have dreamed of creating massive stories set in a massive shared world—a collaboratively designed fantasy setting with thousands of years of history, with the theory being that any of us writers could pick any place and time within the world and write anything from a short story to a full length series or serial, and over time we’d build up a huge library of works within this one universe. (And with the further idea that, if a reader liked one of those stories, they’d probably want to read the rest, and we’d thereby all be supporting each other’s audience growth.)
Most of those ideas never panned out, but I’m still deeply fascinated by the idea of “massive storytelling.” Both in terms of length (a series with a single throughline, with dozens of novels worth of entries, or millions of words worth of content, from beginning to end); and in terms of width (a series with multiple parallel throughlines, like a shared universe with many entries, or a series with such a huge cast of characters that in practice it may as well have multiple parallel throughlines).
I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on “massive storytelling” for a while now. What makes one “massive” series successful over another? What causes a massive series to die out? What qualities can a massive series have that will contribute or detract from its literary success? Or, as a separate question entirely, its commercial success?
Let’s look at some examples and try to figure these things out.
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