We're 14!

 Yesterday was February 27th, which means it was the blog's birthday! The fourteenth to be exact!

...Yeah, there's not a lot of fun things revolving around 14. That's the age blogs stop being cute and get acne. I don't miss those days.

I will, however, share some cool stuff that happened in the past month!

My new setup is here! For many many years I had these old cabinets that served as my TV entertainment center/place to store all my crap and since I got the walls and the floor redone in my room, I was due for a change here, too. We ordered this back in NOVEMBER and it finally showed up two weeks ago. There's so much more room for activities now! I'm due to upgrade the tv, it's comically small by these standards.

My cat could not get enough of the New Thing and of course had to try to explore every nook and cranny. Thankfully she only did it the first day I had it. She's lucky she's cute or else I would've been bothered by it.

It's been furnished a bit since then but I'm nowhere near done yet. I've been busy lately, but it's rather nice to actually organize my DVD collection for once.

I finally got a new futon mattress this past Saturday, too! I honestly forgot what it was like to be comfy on a couch. I'm loving it. It's gonna redefine how we think about sitting on things.

The Brilliant Stars set of the Pokemon TCG was finally released and the ETB I bought off the Pokemon Center site finally showed up. This set has FIVE Charizards, and I managed to pull two of them out of this box. And frankly, they're the two best looking ones. That alt art Charizard V might be one of my favorite cards of all time. It's a really nice looking card. 'Zard cards usually go for big bucks, and I managed to pull one of the heavyweights on the first try. I might as well retire from collecting these...for now. Again.

I'll be back. Eventually. But for now, I'm gonna admire this one.

NEW POKEMON!!

Gen 9, Scarlet and Violet, were announced yesterday and with them three new starter Pokemon. I was asleep when the announcement video went live so when I first saw these, I thought these were the fakest of fakemons I'd ever seen. You usually see stuff like Duck Wearing a Hat (Quaxly) and Chili Dino (Fuecoco) in the pages of Deviantart, not in an official promo video from the Pokemon Company.

I mean, you still do, just not in this capacity. Within an hour, the internet fell in love with all of them, especially Sprigatito, the weed grass cat.

Much like the Sword & Shield starters, this is yet another rare generation where I like all three of them. It call comes down to the final evolutions for me to decide who I'll ultimately go with. Judging by the the tuft on Quaxly's head, and that the new region is most likely based on Spain, it might evolve into a Matador and give us a water/fighting type. We haven't had one of those types in a while, plus fire/fighting and even grass/fighting are played out by now, but I wouldn't put it past Game Freak to zig when we're expecting to them to zag for once.

In either case, it's coming in "Late 2022," which means sometime in November. It just seems like yesterday that we just got Sword and Shield, and that was in 2019.

And this brings us to our last update, I picked up Pokemon Legends Arceus and I have been absolutely absorbed by it. It's a spinoff that finally makes the Pokemon world an open world one (or close to one as possible), where the emphasis is now on exploring and surveying Pokemon by catching them rather than battling other trainers and stopping some existential threat by doing so.

Well, there's still battles and the existential threat, but it's just so much fun. In Sword & Shield, there was a large Wild Area where Pokemon roamed around in the overworld and you could kind of explore it. If you were like me and had been wanting an entire game based around that concept, this game delivers in spades. Sure, the areas are a little sparse and there's only a fraction of all Pokemon available (only about 225 out of many hundreds), but there's more than enough sidequests and Pokedex filling to keep you occupied for a while. It takes place in an ancient version of the Sinnoh region, so it a Pokemon appeared in the Diamond & Pearl games, it's in this one. I won't spoil how they manage to include ones like Porygon, Magnemite, the fossil Pokemon or even the legendaries, but it's all explained in due time. It all seems to be a test run for a main series game, and if the teaser for Scarlet & Violet is any indication, we might be getting it sooner than we think. 

But the main attraction is shiny hunting. With a limited pool of Pokemon to choose from, and filling out Pokedex entries make shinies more likely to spawn, it's pretty stupidly easy to find them in this game. Every once in a while, you'll find outbreaks, where multiple of the same type spawn at once. That in and of itself causes a better opportunity to find a shiny. Or was, up until yesterday's update. 

You see, if you didn't find a shiny in the first spawn, you could reset the game, leave the area it's in and come back to it, you'd get a whole new chance to find a shiny. Repeat until you get one. That doesn't happen anymore, and it might've killed the streaming community for this game after a month. It was to be expected. The game's been out for less than a month and I've seen people with boxes and boxes of shinies. Safe to say, the process was pretty broken and it was nice while it lasted.

But that didn't stop me from finding my own! That Gible above came from the first time I succeeded in finding an outbreak shiny, and that took about seven tries.

Here's the rest of the ones I have: 

The Yanma I found last night out of the blue (ha), and the Sudowoodo and Aipom were also random encounters. The rest were all outbreaks. Geodude I got on the first try, while everyone else took quite a few before I found them.

I even managed to get two in one outbreak! And here I thought that was a myth.

All in all, not bad for 14, don't you think? Happy birthday, blog. I still believe in you.

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