• After the best morning I could’ve asked for in Pokemon Champions, it’s time for Great Ball tier doubles. Let’s get wrecked. Seriously, I’m expecting to get crushed. And here’s a competitive team right away.Incin, Politoed, Whims, Dragonite, Gengar, and Sneasler. The middle three are shiny. We bring Wash, Azu, Dragonite, and Gallade. I’m thinking it’s…

  • A New Friend It’s Day Two of Pokemon Champions being out and thus far, I’ve only recruited my starting six, plus a Gallade that I decided to keep. I waited the entire 22 hour period and then some. So, my options today are actujally something incredible. Krookodile, Greninja, Jolteon, Alakazam, Decidueye, Glimmora, Rotom Wash, Furfrou,…

  • Singles Streaking With my limited cognition bandwidth today, but still wanting to keep the grind going in Champions, I decided to return to singles. Frankly, I prefer singles to doubles, as much as I love the strategy. The more competitive players play doubles, naturally as that’s the primary VGC format. I did get a really…

  • After taking it slow this morning, I’m finally ready to dive in and set some goals for my first day in Pokemon Champions. The Grind Begins Despite having the 50 training tickets and 30 teammate tickets, I’m not using them anytime soon. I’m going to just take the one free recruitment roll per day for…

  • I started downloading the game at 12:30am, since I woke up in the middle of the night anyway. Thanks, insomnia. Here we go… First Impressions The game only took about five minutes to load. Considering the likely to be heavy load on the servers later today, it was the perfect time to download. The tutorial…

  • To start, I am going to play Pokemon Champions with what is possible given just the basic free tools at our disposal. This includes Pokemon GO, free to play as I will never put money into it, and Pokemon HOME. You can pay for HOME, but for Champions purposes, just having the single box is…

  • I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them. … From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow: On Academics : “Academics, even those describing…

  • I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…

  • On Strawberries: “In material fact, Strawberries belong only to themselves. The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were…

  • This isn’t Carl Sagan’s best book, but it was his last, and it has plenty of good stuff to say. … Chapter 5 is about “Four Cosmic Questions” 1st cosmic question: “Was there ever life on Mars?” 2nd cosmic question: “Is Titan a laboratory for the origins of life?” 3rd cosmic question: “Is there intelligent…