me explaining to the other trainers that apricorns are unknown outside of Johto because of deliberate suppression by the Silph and Devon corporations to present artificial pokeballs as the only means of capturing pokemon and establish regional monopolies after they eliminate renewable sources
there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.
not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market.
sm FUCKING h at y’all granola-crunching conspiracy theorists. you probably also believe Super Potions cause autism.
Ok, but it is a shame that artisanal balls are basically off the market now. Like, you have to ride the monorail and hike through a half dozen routes just to find someone willing to sell you a Fast Ball. Believe me, when your boss at the power plant needs five Electrodes by Tuesday you are not going to want to make the trip to Alola; you’re going to head on down to the Mart and get some Ultra Balls, which will do the trick but aren’t well tailored to the job.
I’m with you that modern catching techniques are better, not to mention more humane, but there genuinely is a loss from more niche balls becoming harder to find. Maybe someday the long slowpoketail of consumer demand will be met, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that Shellder.
look y’all are missing the point. mass production of silph balls crowding out traditional apricorn craftsmanship is, if anything, more a side effect of the real problem: that capture artifacts are too easy to get your hands on these days. $2 basic balls are a problem. before modern ball tech you had to go to an artisan, yes, but part of their job was to care about who had the power to recruit pokémon from the wild, as a backstop against another Knight of Veilstone coming along. there was a time when you’d never lay a hand on a ball yourself until it was clear you respected pokémon, whether tame or in the wild. but now, a “pokémon journey” is open to practically every teenager, even if they’ve got not interest in treating their team with trust and love.
the worldwide rise in the last century of organized crime and apocalypticcults who use pokémon as their muscle is a direct result of capture artifacts becoming a mass produced market commodity rather than a mechanism for preserving the sacred trust between humans and the wilderness. it’s a miracle that the powder keg hasn’t already gone off by now.
Oh that is rank historical revisionism - what, do you think artisans’ definitions of “respect” were constructed in a vacuum? We already had rhetoric as far back as the warring states period in Ransei about how only the soldierly classes, overwhelmingly descendants of nobility and taught from birth, had the intangible qualities necessary to “bond” with Pokémon. And when we start seeing apricorn balls develop in Johto, which borders Kanto - Kanto, where we know there’s been extensive cultural cross-contamination with Auroran and Dragnoran expeditions - surprise, suddenly only a small population has the intangible qualities necessary to use them, too.
That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.
Do you want more disillusioned kids joining gangs? Because that’s how you get Teams!
Artisanal balls and anyone who supports them are tools of the aristocracy to suppress the common folk. In the days when a ball could only be made by hand by an expert, only the wealthiest could afford pokemon, and as a result anyone not born into the “elites” was forced to be subservient to their “betters” for protection.
The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.
More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.
And as a beautiful side benefit of this, standard of living has increased across the board. Since every household has at least one minor pokemon in the family and there are increasing numbers of professional, working pokemon joining cities and other civilized areas and working to improve them, every aspect of economy and industry has been enhanced by their supernatural capabilities. Electricity is generated cleanly and in abundance for everybody. Pollution is cleaned up almost completely and instantly. The production of farms, mines, and workshops is multiplied, even as safety standards improve. Yes, every few years another potential apocalypse comes about and needs to be prevented by a couple of brave teenagers, but outside of those incidents the world is damn close to utopia.
Oooh, I know this one! The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration - they make the rules for flying here in the US) has designated “roads” in the sky to keep all the commercial jets from running into each other. When you’re headed the same direction at the same speed, you don’t get in each other’s way. If you’re heading east you fly at one elevation, and west-bound planes fly at a different height. There are lots of rules to keep mid-air crashes to a minimum.
However, if you’re running late, or weather in one spot is bad, you can call up Air Traffic Control and ask for a new route! And they will look at their little radar screens and maps of all the airplanes in the area, and tell you what shortcut you can take.
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
i saw a lot of (white) people on twitter talking about the innocent women and children in palestine and... i get it you hate men but read the room maybe? "i'm a misandrist" cool cool but... this is genocide.
absolutely nothing wrong with highlighting the vulnerable but there's nuance you are missing. arab men are constantly stereotyped as terrorists. maybe include them in your activism.
Every time I see an exclusionist on here and I click their profile they’re like 17 or 19 or maybe 21 at best.
And that’s fair- it’s not like people that age can’t have opinions or be right, they’re people.
But when I think about how long it took me to work out my own damn sexuality, gender, and all that crap, and how gently I stepped once I realised I was queer, and how much listening to people I did to see who the hell was out there…how much I am STILL learning about people who have different experiences…
…it feels really odd to see people this young being so secure in their belief of who should be excluded from the community.
Not how to support and include, to help and support, but how to exclude.
Like…being confident in your own sexuality at 19? Fuck yeah, good for you, I’m happy you had a better chance and an earlier start than I did.
But… telling other people they’re not queer enough to be in ‘your’ space?
Your space? Not mine anymore? Huh.
I’m over here at 35 still listening and learning and trying to understand everyone’s perspectives, discovering that sexuality is even more complex and nuanced than I know…and all these people barely out of their teens are talking like they know everything there is to know about being LGBT, ever. Like it’s all been written down, stamped, sealed, confirmed by some Authority.
Mmmm. No. Just… have an ounce of humility. Try gaining some perspective, please.
You haven’t lived long enough to even really listen to real life aces, to really think about what LGBT means. I don’t mean this as an ageist insult, I just really think that this kind of shit deserves TIME- hell I know it deserves time and thought because I am STILL unlearning bad assumptions and behaviours, and STILL meeting people who define themselves outside of the frame that I was once taught meant ‘LGBT’.
And you, a teen raised in a world that’s still pretty fucking homophobic and doesn’t recognise half of what the LGBT community itself has taken years to acknowledge, you think you know it all?
Because you’re online?
While you’re here, read some posts where ace people talk about how they’re treated. Forget semantics for a while: read the experiences.
I’m online too, I have been for some time. Doesn’t make me right, but experience is of some value. Experience in listening to queer people who aren’t quite like me, that is, in trying to understand how I am similar, instead of trying to figure out how they do not belong. In how people rework things, figure out how they can be less harmful, more inclusive, more representative of all those who are marginalised.
See, Q is queer but also often Questioning. It’s still important to let people be Questioning, there is an astounding amount of queerphobia in the world and we are NOT done working out the labels. We may never be.
Not so long ago, the T in lgbt was under question. Bisexuals are still being excluded.
So I’m being told I don’t matter by people who weren’t even born yet when I realised I wasn’t straight. They’re skipping right over all the reflection and going straight to self-affirmation by exclusion.
Which, again- if you are born into a world where you never have to question your identity, oh good grief I hope that’s real for everyone some day.
But we’re not there yet, yanno? And I resent being told that after all these years of soul-searching and careful, very careful questioning of whether I belong and how I can be a good member of the community, people arrive so 100% certain of their claim to being LGBT that the first thing they do is try to kick others out.
My general feeling when These Kids start yelling about who does or doesnβt Belong in the collection of the broken, hurt and strange that is the queer community:
