http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ Bulbagarden - The original Pokémon Community en Tue, 21 May 2013 06:46:12 GMT vBulletin 60 http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/images/styles/Millenium/misc/rss.jpg http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/gasp-figment-advertising-but-its-awesome-game-57799/ Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:22:50 GMT Just be glad I didn't go along with @Iteru;'s plan of posting this link in anime and pretending it was a link to deleted scenes from the Plasma episode :-p

But yes.

Basically, http://signup.europauniversalis4.com/r/315e6860ff9

So two things here:

2)Of course I want the sweet perks that come from people registering on my referal links. Duh. :-p

2)This has been my favorite game series of the past decade. I strongly feel they deserve a lot more exposure than they have to date.

There's nothing else quite like it, letting you take control of nearly any country in the world at the end of the middle ages (or later: you can start on literally any day of any year during the time period) and guide them to the beginning of the Industrial period, on a detailed map (2000+ provinces/regions). Unlike TW, which is all about fights, this one is as much about trade, colonization and diplomacy than it is about warfare. Just going and attacking someone without a good reason is not how you win: you have to decide what your aims in the war are, maybe even manufacture an excuse to attack your enemy.

And sometime it might be better to let the enemy live as your vassal than to destroy them utterly. Or it might be better to pretend to be their friend, while sabotaging them from the inside with spies, stirring rebellions and inciting natives to burn their colonies. And of course, there is always the possibility that things will happen...and maybe if you're France in 1790 and your economy is tanking and your people are angry and your king is on the literal chopping block...well, maybe that Bonaparte fellow is just around the corner. Who knows?

And to make it even better, the game is immensely moddable. Altering the map, adding new countries (fictional or real), nearly anything in the game can be altered.

So I'm hoping that posting this around will bring the game to the attention of more people who might enjoy it. ]]> Evil Figment http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/gasp-figment-advertising-but-its-awesome-game-57799/ http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ten-years-later-55168/ Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:35:32 GMT Since evkl kindly reminded me, and since it's been a decade for me too (a decade and a day, technically)...time to reflect on the past ten years of Bulba...

The pokémon community was in a pretty sorry state, back in late 2002. The completely abysymal early Gen III games (yes, FR/LG and Emerald would later improve the generation a great deal), coming after a long wait with no game release and the death of the pokémon fad, had pretty much left the fandom a shadow of its former self. The old sites were all dead, dying, or run by petty tyrants). Serebii was growing, but (phrasing it nicely), its management style did not agree with a lot of people - tastes being what they are.

This is around when I heard through the grapevine (I think it was Zak who told me) that Archaic was planning to restart the old Bulbagarden. Now, you have to appreciate my relation with Archaic at the time. I thought he was a childish little troll. He had a long history of being a rule-breaker, of yelling at mods when they enforced the rules, and of organizing gigantic spam-filled thread (aka shippers proms) and then declaring war on website that had the nerves to close them. I, on the other hand, was a very active moderator on a number of site that he declared war on. There was basically only one thing he and I agreed on: the fact that Little Pikachu (then the administrator running Pokemasters, who was my boss), and Serebii (who was Archaic's boss) just weren't the sort of people we really wanted running our pokemon websites.

It did manage to get us to work together, and that actually turned out pretty well, given that I got put in charge of lots of things. In a few months, he decided to put me in charge of everything, since he had very limited availability.

I don't think I appreciated back then how sysyphian my job really was. Looking back, it's clear that short of a miracle/stroke of genius, in the situation the fandom was in back in 2002, there just was no room to establish a new fansite. No amount of actually building a pokedex of our own, of original forum design and ideas, of forum games, and so forth, would have changed much of anything to that in the post-Ruby/Sapphire fandom. Not even Bulbapedia, alone, would have done much at the time, because interest in pokemon was as low as it's ever been. The best we could do, much like the fandom as a whole, was survive. For us, that meant a variety of small project and reorganization that revived the site for a few weeks, then fell back down. For the games, that was FRLG and Emerald. But between me, @evkl; and many others, we manage to keep things surviving. There was the World project, Evolutions, the Diplomacy Game; there was a series of forum reorganization...and probably many other things I'm forgetting. None of them lasted very long, but each of them got us busy for a little while, for a little time, and kept us going another week, another month.

The downside of it all was that it was - very - draining mentally. Add to that a fair bit of obstructionist staff, and constant conflict with Serebii (which is probably the single thing that helped us the most: Serebii constantly getting into fights with us, which both advertised our existence and positioned us as the anti-Serebii site), and by 2006 I was just drained. The fact that Archaic relied on me to get everything done, but refused to actually let me do the things I felt needed to be done, didn't help either. I wound up slamming the door, denouncing his inaction, and stepping outside.

I spent the next few years in a weird position in regard to the site. I talked about site things a lot with evkl, and others, and I had quite a few mods who kept me posted on most anything that was going on among the staff.

Meanwhile, my old job went to evkl who did most awesomely at it, and, thanks to Gen IV, was able to do what I never could : grow this site into a successful one. At first, he had the same role I did: being in charge of everything as Archaic's second in command, and running the forums. Eventually, though, as the other project got more and more important (see: bulbapedia), that job ended up being split. evkl retained his role as second in command to Archaic (first as chief of staff, then as vice-webmaster. He still has that job, though he now shares it), while he eventually passed the task of running the forums to SaturnYoshi, then on to Musashi (both of whom kept the name "head administrator").

(I should also mention the importance of Zhen Lin and Magnedeth. The two of them brought a lot to Bulbagarden especially with Pedia, and there is a *reason* why they have those silver bars next to their name, too).

I talked, once or twice, about coming back to help, but nothing came of it - until, at some point in what I believe was 2009, Archaic started teasing me about staff secrets and asking if I knew and "Oh, well, I suppose you'd have to be staff to know". That's around when I said "Oh, just make me staff already if you're that desperate, geez" (or words to that effect), and stepped back in as head of the Real World section. Well, head of the Real World section in theory. In practice...not so much. In practice, it took about a few weeks after I came back before Archaic, evkl and I got back into the habit of running things together. It took us another two years to finally admit it and create the vice-webmaster rank. (I'm sparing you the loooooong list of ranks and titles we tried to invent to describe things in-between). 0

So here we are, ten years and a full circle later. Bulbagarden has grown many, many times larger. The staff outnumbers what we had back in 2002 on the order of 10-to-1. We often get as much post in a single day as we got in a month back then. Bulbapedia is very well known.

And some things haven't changed. The same people are still running the show, despite whatever happened in-between. Archaic still spam us with nutty ideas (not to mention spamming my twitter feed), and still doesn't impress me :p. He still puts up with my questioning him and arguing with him on just about everything (which, oddly enough, is the one point where he impresses me: he's really good at swallowing his pride and putting up with criticism). And Bulba keep rolling, on and on. ]]> Evil Figment http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ten-years-later-55168/ http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ridiculous-hatred-against-iris-49977/ Sat, 14 Jul 2012 06:37:05 GMT Frankly, from reading around, all the complaints about how Iris "doesn't work toward her goals" sounds like people who can't get over the fact that the writers aren't devoting fifty bajillion episode to "character development" (in bracket because decent character development is the results of the events of the main plot, and happen concurrently with them, not something you put the main plot on hold for, and (generally) not the main plot itself. IE, not something you devote an episode to).

...BECAUSE THEY DECIDED TO WRITE A STORY THAT'S NOT BULLCRAP MOVING AT A FREAKING SNAIL PACE (see: everything between Kanto and BW.).

The sort of character development these people are looking for is just a slightly more sophisticated form of filler, ie a way for the writers to take three or four years to tell a story they could tell in one or two.

Could be wrong about the anime itself; three generations of the aforesaid snail-paced bullcrap have first driven me out then killed any interest I might ever have had in going back in (yes, your lauded DP did that, because it was still snail-paced). Even if BW actually sound like watchable.

Am definitely certain a very large number of Iris haters would write horribly neverending stories and think that's proper storytelling. ]]> Evil Figment http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/ridiculous-hatred-against-iris-49977/ http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/thanks-all-49470/ Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:43:23 GMT Thansk everyone for the birthday wishes! Wish we could like VMs the same way we can like post, would be a much more effective way to answer the lot of you, but I like all the wishes. Thansk everyone for the birthday wishes!

Wish we could like VMs the same way we can like post, would be a much more effective way to answer the lot of you, but I like all the wishes. ]]> Evil Figment http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/thanks-all-49470/ http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/you-not-target-audience-48101/ Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:29:24 GMT I have to admit, I have a problem with internet fandoms. (And it's not exclusive to pokémon)

It's the general sense of entitlement fans seems to come up with at the drop of a hat. It's found in just about every fandom, and it,s ridiculous.

In short, the idea seems to go like this: "We are fans of the show, and the show wouldn't be as popular without us, therefore it's an insult/attack for the creators to take the show in different directions from what we want!"

It's bollocks.

1)A show doesn't survive on its internet fandom.

There are a few thousand active members on Bulbagarden forums. Numbers vary, but this seems about average for a discussion forum. Even putting all the major forums together, and assuming none of their active members overlap, we might not even reach the five digits. Even if we do, these numbers include a lot of people not into the anime - game fans, etc.

You don't build a show by appealing to a few thousand people. In fact, a show built to appeal to only a few thousand specific people, is going to be a dead show pretty fast, because it won't have the numbers to justify the money being sunk into producing it.

All the more so given that...

2)The internet audience is NOT representative of the overall audience.

Harsh, but true. The internet audience (especially on forums) grossly oversamples certain demographic group (call it...teenagers and young adults, introverted, prone to obsessive fascination with a show). And, of course, it grossly oversamples the "obsessing over the show" demographic, because the people who simply like the show, without being obsessed about it, aren't going to be joining online discussion forums - they'll just tune it once a week, watch their show, maybe buy a few items of merchandise.

At the end fo the day, because of the sheer number balance, it's also that second group that's going to be responsible for the success or failure of the show.

This is especially true for cases where...

3)The internet fandom is completely outside the target audience

And yes, pokémon is one of them. Pokémon aims (per ShoPro's webpage) at preschool to elementary school age kids. (My Little Pony aims even lower).

If you are outside the show's target audience, you have no right to expect the show to be made according to what you'd like to see. Period. Complaining that the writers are "pissing in your face" or similar when the problem is that you're outside the target audience altogether is in no way, frm or shape justifiable; it's self-centered to the point of idiocy.

Oh, maybe you'll get the passing nod here and there (or every other scene, as in some episodes of Friendship is Magic), but the show's plots, characters and level of continuity are going to be made with the target audience in mind, not you. Continuity will be kept to what can easily be explained within the episode (eg, either in the "Previously on..." segment, or directly referenced during the discussion), or to throw-away gags that don't impact the plot. Characters, rather than growing and evolving, will tend to revert back to their default self more often than not. Not because the writers don't care, but because the character was created the way they were in order to fill a certain role in the show's formula.

If they stop filling that role, the show's formula doesn't work anymore, and since the show's formula is what sold it to begin with, the writers are not going to want to do that without a damn good reason. A damn good reason would be flagging numbers. Not "internet fandom outside the target audience upset".

Bottom line here: accept the show for what it is. Don't expect the writers to change target audience to YOU, because that's not going to happen. Ever. You can still, of course, criticize specific elements of the show; writers are not perfect. But never forget who the target audience is, and never delude yourself in thinking the target audience could (or should) be you instead. ]]> Evil Figment http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/3/you-not-target-audience-48101/