Folks with this whole "you're old once you hit 25" mentality are just buying into a repackaged "you need to have your life figured out by 18 and if you're not successful by 22 you're a failure" load of shit. Like....bruh, life doesn't end at 25. Idk how to tell you that the time limit you're silently imposing on yourself and your peers is largely responsible for your dissatisfaction with your life. Stop living your life like happiness has an expiration date. It doesn't.

imagine playing pokemon so good in 2014 that now your rat is the poster child for the pokemon vgc scene forever

Ok, so an explanation for the people who don’t understand or weren’t there to know:

Back in 2014 at the worlds championship (the highest level of competitive pokemon, with the best of the best), there were a few pokemon who were dominant in the meta of the time with the restrictions (x and y just came out, championship rules means teams can only be made of pokemon found in x and y, aka the regional dex). At the time, there were planty of heavy hitters and clearly dominant pokemon, such as:

Mega Kangaskahn: strong as hell and bulky, ability lets it hit twice so almost impossible to take hits from and hit back as hard.

Garchomp, Hydreigon, Tyranitar (all 3 seen above), and Salamence: pseudo-legendaries (600 base stat pokemon, way above average) with huge attacking stats and either the speed or bulk to take on almost everything in front of them.

Rotom and it’s forms: high power with few weaknesses and an immunity to ground, tought to kill and can reek havoc on a team with statuses and high power moves.

Gardevoir and Amoonguss: great support mons, both tough to kill and make your opponents life hell.

Mega Mawile and Charizard: both megas hit hard, and can use a mix of nuke-level power and interesting support (priority and weather setting) to make an enemy team go to shit fast.

So all of these mons, and most people saw these pretty clearly strong pokemon and ran with them, tried and true sets of pokemon and all that. And yet one person wanted to break the mold, and saw a way to do so, and that person was that Sejun Park.

Now there were some weaknesses with the common meta of pokemon: not many resistences to water or dark, a majority are physical attackers, and a good few more defensive pokemon rely on abilities. That’s where the 1st unique change shows up: Mega Gyarados. Upon switching in, it’s flying typing gives it an immunity to ground attacks, and it’s ability intimidate lowers the attack of opposing pokemon. Then, it can mega evolve, with it gaining the dark typing (becoming water/dark), and both a good stat boost (better defences (which were already good) and a LUDICROUSLY high attack). However, there were issues: the frequency of Tyranitar and the Rotoms meant common super efective moves and danger switching in and out. Additionally, coverage fighting attacks made actually mega evolving dangerous, risking a high power attack punching a hole in your best attacker.

To fix these issues, 2 pokemon helped:

1. Gothitelle. It’s ability, shadow tag, make it so opponents can’t switch. Combine this with it’s good defences and special attack and status moves means that any pokemon in a bad situation on the enemy team is as good as dead, and a bad situation for an ally pokemon can switch out while the enemy can’t do shit. And of course, the other pokemon was:

2. Pachirisu. Now those who don’t know, pachirisu is what is known as a “pikachu clone”, a set of pokemon (emolga, pachirisu, plussle and minun, etc) with lower than average (for competitive) base stats. Now why was pachirisu so good? Simple: it matched PERFECTLY with gyarados. It’s suprisingly good defenses means it’s tougher to KO than expected, has high speed, it’s move Super Fang always does half the health of an opponent so no need to invest in attack and bypasses higher defenses on an opponent, nuzzle to chip a bit of health and paralyse an opponent (halfs speed and has a chance to make the opponent not attack during a turn), and most importantly, Follow Me. Follow me (and rage powder, same mechanics) redirect an opponent’s moves to itself, allowing a less health pokemon, or one about to get hit by a super effective move, to stay healthy. Mix that with it’s ability Volt Absorb (heals user when hit by an electric attack) and electric attacks that would cripple Gyarados instead do nothing but heal Pachirisu instead. On top of all of that, it had enough defenses to take attacks from even the afformentioned pseudo-legendaries, hits even the likes of mega gyarados or gothitelle would be devestated by. Plus it’s health restoring berry, it was a bastard to kill, crippled whole team that didn’t expect it (aka all of them), and set gyarados up to sweep entire games.

Add some other hard hitting mons as back up, and your mix of support redirecting pachirisu that no one expected to see, supporting trapper gothitelle to trap and screw over opponents while keeping yoir team safe, and mega gyarados nuking the opposition while also helping to shut down opposing threats with its mix of abilities, and you have a powerful as hell, albeit somewhat unorthodox team. But it worked. How well did it work?

It made it to the grand finals.

AND WON.

To this day, Pachirisu, thanks to this legendary team, has more championship wins than a majority of legendaries and starters.

If you want a better understanding and more in-depth information on all this, I reccomend looking at this video by WolfeyVGC, a world champion in competetive pokemon, and one of the best sources of information on competetive pokemon:

Today I saw a leaf that looked like a frog and I was like haha nice and then it hopped because it WAS a frog and I started crying bc life is really full of everyday miracles including but not limited to experiencing frogs

you got camouflaged dude. If you were frog prey...... hoooo boy

i would never burn out because whenever i get stressed or tired all i have to do is just work harder just work harder just work harder just w

i'd never fail because if i was close to failing all i have to do is just work harder

Translation not required.

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

Reminder that this was included on an official government USGS page [click], which not only gives credit to the artist--Ben Slyngstad--but reminds you that all government publications are public domain

@mayhem-moth

i kinda feel bad for oedipus b/c everyone assumes he chose to fuck his mom when in fact he went out of his way to avoid it. he left his hometown and distanced himself from his parents because he was afraid he would somehow get tricked into fucking his mom. everything could have been avoided if his adopted parents told him he was adopted.

someone: oedipus was fucked up like who fucks their own mother??? fucking weirdo.

me: it’s not his fault! he didn’t know!

also the point of the myth is supposed to show how despite your best efforts no mortal can thwart fate but also? what the fuck? the whole thing was an oracle telling laius that his son was going to murder him and fuck his wife. that shit came out of nowhere. he didn’t offend the gods or anything. they just decided for no reason other than the world is fucked up sometimes.

i have been informed that oedipus’ dad, laius, did in fact bring a curse upon himself for kidnapping and raping king pelop’s son chrysippus.

i stand by my stance that it’s still ridiculous to punish oedipus and jocasta for laius’s crimes. also why would the godss curse oedipus for fucking his mom when they tricked him into doing it in the first place? fucked up.

You’re assuming the gods are ruled by logic and not by zeus nudging poseidon and saying “hey you know what would be so fucking funny”

This is so accurate

did u guys ever watch the BBC drama “Atlantis” where the main character is a modern guy who accidentally travels back in time to Ancient Greece

and tbh it’s full of him having moments where he realises this is a myth

like this woman comes to him and asks for help because her husband is trying to kill her baby so he helps her smuggle the baby out of the city to be taken in by another family and the other family ask the baby’s name and she says “Oedipus” and the guy is like

oh fuck

and then he meets a girl called Medusa and the whole time is just like shit shit shit then she goes missing and they track her to a cave and he is like “guys this is gonna sound weird but does anyone have a mirror”

BEST MOMENT  is he meets a guy who says “Hi I’m Pythagoras” and he blurts out “THE TRIANGLE GUY” and Pythagoras is just HEART EYES like “YES I LOVE TRIANGLES HOW DID YOU KNOW”

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

i literally need to be face sat by music

i need music filling up my holes

Pov: Eres Kazuma Kiryu (Yakuza 0)