A pile of ponies · 4:23am June 17th
Around the internet, there is a style of picture in which one person will fill an entire page with pokemon of a particular variety. I feel like I've seen a few variations on this, but the only one I can find right now is this guy's series of woopers.
Animated version
Anyways, I found myself bored to tears in class during a test and decided that I would do the same thing with something else. Initially, I thought about doing ponies, but quickly realized once I was beyond the Mane 6, Princess, and CMC, I would be out of ponies to draw off the top of my head. Because it's originally pokemon, however, I decided the compromise would be drawing my favorite pokemon, Ponyta. Here's what we've got so far:
Suspicious ponyta and unknown (?) included.
Eventually, I want to complete this and digitize it, and it may be that it becomes my August project to finish it up and maybe even attempt to animate it like the one in the Twitter link. That would require learning to animate, and doing so on the hardest known animal to animate, a horse. But I've never done things because they were easy, I do things because I want to, and having a difficult project to work on while I've got nothing better to do over the summer should be a good use of my time. I'll just need to find enough boring classes to actually add ponytas to. However, my current problem is that I'm not entirely sure what kind of ponytas to add to the pile. Looking at the above has me thinking I'll add various accessory ponytas like a rocket ponyta, magma/aqua/galactic/plasma/plasma2 etc, and there will of course be rapidash (kanto) and suspicious rapidash, but I want them in the top corners of the page. Shiny rapidash and ponyta of both varities will be in the picture somewhere, but since there are two variants, I won't put them directly in the middle. I like the burny ones better than the cotton candy ones, so it's mostly going to be those.
My current problem is that I'm running out of ideas for what to 'fill' the page with. I really want just layers and layers of little horses all around, but losing track of legs and bodies is already beginning to happen and I've only drawn 14 so far. Another thing was that I kinda forgot that Ponyta normally has this like, little flame coming out of its shoulders and haunches for some reason, and really, that would just make the drawing even more confusing than it already is. I also forgot that they have these big triangular ears with black/orange inner ears and I'm just kinda gonna ignore that because I've drawn so many horses at this point that it's hard for me to not draw normal horse ears. Never thought that would be a problem for me. Anyways, all that said, if you have suggestions for ponytas to add to this, by all means leave a comment.
In other news, it was sunny exactly once last week (not really) but rather yesterday, so I took the opportunity to go out. I was looking for a few things to help organize my mess and some stuff I needed for my new job, and figured that I might as well go skate. I really haven't done much of that since it got cold, and I'm the lightest that I've been right now since college. I would like to continue losing weight since I'm still kinda pudgy in the stomach, and regular cardio would help that a lot.
First, I went from my apartment to the nearest mall which is almost entirely down hill. I took a bit of a round about way there just to make sure I wasn't going full speed on a tight road near a river because that is the most direct path to the mall. very light work, traded skates for sandals and visited my favorite store ever, Daiso. Nothing you ever need is not here, I swear. I wanted drain cleaner since my bathroom has been clogged up with something as of late, I needed a pair of sandals for work, and I needed some shelves to organize all the paint I have lying around. All of it and a drink for the road at Daiso. They just have every random thing, and it's wonderful.
I got done with that and was very much not done skating. The added weight wasn't much, so from there I headed to the local sports park. This is between my apartment and my current Tuesday-Thursday school, and if I went directly, I could probably get there in five minutes (on wheels). However, because I was coming from the mall, it was uphill all the way. Now, this would be fine if the road/sidewalk was nice like it is over by the mall. Some roads have nice sidewalks, and some roads even have additional bike lanes which are usually in pretty good shape. This was not one of those roads.
Exactly one patch of street was smooth, and the rest was crap. And then even that smooth patch went away and I was trudging through sharp blacktop for a solid five minutes before finally hitting smoother pavement. Truly, it was painful. However, the next section of up hill went into the park and it got better, then entering the park, it was fantastically smooth. so smooth that it would've been fine even if I was on smaller wheels. It's only because I ride 125mm by 3 that I managed to get up the hill at all. on 80 by 4, It would've been much harder, and anything smaller likely would've just been penguin walking up the road. It's hilariously bad. On a similar section on my way home I nearly bit it for the same reason.
Anyways, after getting to the park, I was graced with some excellent sidewalks and a few good roads to skate around. One circles a baseball field, and another circles some kind of other field that's currently under construction. I couldn't tell you what it was, but it sure is there. I made the mistake of tracking my health on my watch, so I didn't get a distance or a map like I wanted, but I did mange to burn 600 calories while I tracked it at least, and I skated for a good two hours. I didn't time it exactly, but I used a couple items as I played Pokemon Go the whole time, and ran both of them out before I left. They last for 30 minutes each.
Speaking of, it seems like the company that took the game over from Niantic is doing a way better job running it, which is great because I stopped at the height of Niantic's incompetence last year just before the worst feature ever was rolled out. I'm playing catch-up now, but holy crap do Max battles suck. Dynamax was the lamest mechanic in Pokemon thus far and they somehow made something lame and boring even worse in this game. All the pokemon you had? Useless. You can only use Max Pokemon in Max raids, which means no playing alone ever again. You can totally ignore the mechanic since it does suck, but if you do, you lose out on a lot of pokemon because, right now at least, a handful of pokemon only show up in power spots as max raid targets. I happened to get lucky and catch large group doing an Inteleon raid that day, but I've not seen so many people playing the game at once since. Worse, said Inteleon isn't even my best Max pokemon, and I got it from a 5 star raid too. It just feels bad, clunky, and your reward is mostly superficial. That hasn't stopped me from playing the game though, so there's that. I happened to have enough bulbasaur resources to make it a decent Venusaur, and a couple other pokemon that have been leveled up from one star raids since that's all I can really do on my own, even with my decent pokemon. Nothing feels worse than attempting a 3 star raid with type advantage and barely doing anything to the target. Regular three star raids are possible alone, but I just don't have the stuff for these, and even if I did, I'm still not sure about it. They limit your mons to 3 and it takes so long. It's slog and a half. Would not recommend.
I equally wouldn't recommend PTCGP. To be totally honest, I did, at one point, learn how to play pokemon TCG. A friend of mine and I played card games a lot for years and we just bought some one day a few months before I left for Japan. I was not impressed. doesn't seem like a very mechanically deep game and it feels strategically one note. get six points and win, game over. Higher value pokemon have higher point values and so on. Maybe I missed a page in the rule book or something, but I always though it was identical to magic in that you mix your energys (read: mana) into your deck and you have to get lucky enough to draw into: your cards and your energy to not have a bad time. In pocket at least, energy is an unlimited resource you get once per turn normally, and also through other means like abilities (effects), Supporter cards (once per turn spell cards), item cards (Spell cards), and tools (equip spells). So far, those are very rare though, and all the best decks have other means of energy generation.
Because I started out going for, you guessed it, the rare Rapidash card in the only pack it was available in (Genetic Apex Charizard EX, I hate this and I'll get to that), I also ended up getting some of the best cards in the game overall and building the majority of a very, very strong deck. The golden child has an attack that can one shot everything in the game. As far as I know nothing exceeds 180 HP normally, and Charizard's second attack costs 4 energy, discards 2 when used, and does 200 dmg. Using Moltres EX from the same pack, you can use its 1 cost attack to flip coins for a chance at up to three free energy in a turn which you can put on benched fire types (charmander) and by the time you've passed the 1/2 turns you need to get Charizard out, you can potentially have enough energy to one shot several pokemon in a row before your opponent can even build up anything in response. I wouldn't call it fair, but there's a lot of bullshit in this game, and it all comes down to coin flips. It's just miserable to flip a coin four times and get fucked over four times. It's some desire meter shit sometimes, I swear. I wouldn't call it fun, but I do like to open packs, something I haven't done in a solid three years, so this scratches that old itch. I'm mostly just annoyed that the first couple ten pulls I did in the game were the only ones that ever netted me anything of value. The last two ten pulls I did for the Solgaleo and Lunala packs netted me actually nothing. Ten packs, no thing more than the standard uncommon. Actually garbage.
Oh, and another gripe: One pack only has so many cards, and most packs are split into half and half versions of the same shit. So you get all the same commons and all the same max rarity cards in both packs, but the middle ground and specific pokemon are in one pack or the other. It's actually bullshit. At least you can trade, and there are a few packs that aren't split (like the latest one which I've managed to collect at least one of everything from), but trading is limited to some bullshit special currency and the last pack released, meaning the stuff you need from the current pack won't be available for trade until after the next pack comes out. Worse, even if you can trade it, above a certain rarity, you can't trade cards. For example, I three copies of one rare card. You need two at most if you plan to play it, but because of species clause, you can only have two of any one pokemon no matter the value or kind (ex/non-ex) in one deck, so more often than not, it doesn't matter if you have two because you'd never use two. but you can't get rid of your extras because fuck you.
Interesting unrelated fact: DeNA, the company that made the game, is also the main sponsor of the Yokohama Baystars baseball team. Go figure.
In the job world, I've come to realize I have a way better grasp on how to teach children as opposed to adults. Basic stuff I've got. What to say, how to interpret it, how to play it by ear. Elementary school English I can do with twenty minutes of prep time no problem. College level Japanese English though? That's a lot more involved. I taught my first class with text books on Saturday and aside from making a couple mistakes with the pronunciation book for the kids, it went very smoothly. The older kid is very enthusiastic and happy to help his little sister along, and she will sit there and focus on her task. Honestly, she'll probably be better off than him since she's learning pronunciation at like, an appropriate age. Their Father however...
We have this book called Interchange which I suppose is a college level EFL textbook and it trips me up because it explains things, but almost the exact same things and way I explained it without a text book in the beginning? It was strange to open the book for the first time and see it cover similar material the same way I wanted to do it. It went further in depth and I didn't have time to study it much before the lesson (things will be different this week), but when we finished, what we'd ended up with was a dialogue read, some extra notes on contractions and pronunciation, and the exact same content of the previous lesson I'd pulled out of my ass.
I suppose, If I manage to follow through on my plan to convert to this company full time, I need to figure that out. I brought the book home and I'm going to forget if I do too much before the day of, so when Saturday rolls around, I'll sit down and actually plan my shit out this time. He seemed (happy?) with the lesson this time in the, 'oh crap, this is actually a college English class' kind of way, but I think he's more happy with the fact that I: can explain things in Japanese, am teaching the kids something they (will not) learn in school, and that I really know what I'm doing for them at least. This is in turn fueling my efforts at the T-Th school to focus harder on the pronunciation side of things because some kinds just cannot read at all which pains me so much, but there has been improvement since I started doing this here, so, eventually, we'll get there. I want to do vowels so I can add more complex words to my three letter word quiz, but I'm kinda wondering if I should because, as we all know, vowels are bullshit. Do you know how hard it is to find 3 letter words that don't use a vowel sound? You basically can't use Y at all, most words that start with said vowels are off the table, but that only makes it more confusing for them when they are on the table, and then there's multi vowel words, and that's just totally unusable. Have you ever realized that the most common word you ever use is made of two different complex sounds? 'The,' 'th' and vowel 'E' not the 'e' sound, but 'E' its vowel form. It's actually miserable, and if I didn't spend so much of my free time using it in funny ways, I wouldn't know what the fuck I'm doing with it either.
All of this is to say that I am enjoying my new job a lot, and it's helping me enjoy my main job too. Hopefully, I can dig myself out of the hole I'm in over the coming months, and maybe by the time next April rolls around, I'll be mostly financially stable and ready to move into a new position. Whether it's staying here and switching jobs, or moving elsewhere and doing it, It should be good. If I'm working the same job I currently have next year, something has gone very wrong and please check up on me.
Anyways, that's all from me for now.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
