Post your searing hot takes

I actually somewhat care about defending Seaking. It does some things right.

1) Recognizable design. That black and bright orange sets it apart, even today.
2) Color balance. The mottled intense colors at the center, with much softer white and specks of blue at the periphery, make it genuinely very pleasant to look at, dynamic and striking without being too busy and cluttered.
3) Shape. With its rounded, stouter, compact figure instead of a koi fish, it both looks more Pokemon-like and more active, more full of agency, more like it would strike or hit at something.
4) Transition. All these three advantages are more pronounced because Goldeen doesn't have them. Goldeen is paler, balances color differently, and, thanks to its tail, longer. A more basic fish design leading into Seaking make its good traits stand out and feel like an improvement.
5) The horn gives it something to do that isn't just swimming. I know a lot of Gen1 Pokemon have this horn somewhat arbitrarily, but it's especially great for Seaking (who has less obvious ways to interact and engage otherwise), and they've used the horn to give Seaking cool goodies like Megahorn, Drill Run, and Lightningrod.
6) After enough generations, it's in a pretty neat spot in battle, with Swords Dance, Swift Swim, Lightningrod, and a colorful coverage set letting it do a lot of cool things. It is far from good, but it is unique and cool, and that's what I care about in battle.

Seaking's no Gengar or Charizard, but I'm legitimately glad it's here. Personally, it's my 5th favorite Water-type and in my top 100 overall.
this may be the first time I've given seaking this much thought, and it does give me some second-hand appreciation lol. Water itself was originally this umbrella typing for both things that have water-related powers and things that live in water. With so much competition, a lot of unremarkable, average Pokemon are going to get ignored unless a particular design speaks to you.

But that's not it. Like there are some "mid" Pokemon that you're going to use out of curiosity like Butterfree or Jigglypuff. But the thing with water pokemon is that they're annoying to encounter. Either you're spammed with them when surf (half so underleveled it's not worth the PP to KO), or you have to go fishing which is an annoying mechanic.

I feel fish get the shortest end of the stick because they're more "natural" and less fantastical.

I've been thinking a lot about Golduck lately. I tried it out in a Nuzlocke against some made-harder version of Giovanni's Gym where it sacrificed itself after living and taking out most of his team. I wanna use it for real. Also Snubbull on my next playthrough of Johto. And Girafarig in Gen 2 because I liked it in Soul Silver. but at this point I'm rambling. but i think a lot of Snubbull. I rotate it in my mind and stuff.
 
Agree that this is what trolling means, but i kind of hate trolling now, so i'm kind of on the fence here.

There's lots of fun in messing with people, elaborate cons, tricksiness, playfulness, what have you.

But much trolling these days is just 'Pretending to be a moron to strangers.' It's shooting fish in a barrel. It's just too easy - it doesn't require craft or whimsy - and it discourages treating strangers with good faith. There's no "Lol you got me!" after the reveal. It's "Why... did you do that?"

Most (not all) people I would call trolls, I would also call aggravating asshole, regardless of whether the intent is sincere foolishness or the manufactured kind.
 
Agree that this is what trolling means, but i kind of hate trolling now, so i'm kind of on the fence here.

There's lots of fun in messing with people, elaborate cons, tricksiness, playfulness, what have you.

But much trolling these days is just 'Pretending to be a moron to strangers.' It's shooting fish in a barrel. It's just too easy - it doesn't require craft or whimsy - and it discourages treating strangers with good faith. There's no "Lol you got me!" after the reveal. It's "Why... did you do that?"

Most (not all) people I would call trolls, I would also call aggravating asshole, regardless of whether the intent is sincere foolishness or the manufactured kind.
the thing is, is that i've seen people justify borderline trolling as just ragebait, and i feel like this generation is way too willing to turn a blind eye on people being assholes. though to be fair, you're not wrong in saying its just another synonym for troll, which i didn't really consider before posting.

The ADHD meds are supposed to make me think before i do things, and yet here we are.
 
In my view, ragebaiting is a kind of trolling, but the two terms are not synonymous. Not all trolls set out to make people mad, and not all trolls who set out to make people mad do so via ragebaiting, which I use to refer to the specific practice of posting opinions/media that the ragebaiter doesn't necessarily endorse purely to get a rise out of other people. You might look at this as needless pedantry, and you wouldn't be completely wrong, but it helps me to clarify why I have a particular dislike for ragebaiting: It's a low-effort and uncreative form of trolling. All you do is type out some bullshit, hit send, and watch the negative reactions flow in. It's on the same level as joining a Discord server and spamming flashing images or gore until you get banned. I'm not above deriving some entertainment from a good troll, but I like my trolls elaborate, committed to a bit for months or years, and only aggravating in incredibly petty ways. Ragebaiting is basically the antithesis of this.
 
Oh, boy. Haven’t been here in a while. You guys up for a Lightning Round?

Section #1: General Takes
  • Metagaming can be fun from time to time depending on the activity. Sometimes the top meta strategies of a game are just inherently more fun to use than the low tiers, too. (Have you ever tried using inside drift bikes after they got nerfed in Mario Kart 8? Because they feel horrible)
  • Crazy Eights is a strictly better version of UNO and I will not be hearing otherwise. Strictly speaking they’re practically identical, but people to change the rules of UNO too much for me to stay interested.
  • Players should NOT be refunded after spending money on live service games when they shut down- if you make the decision to spend money on a game that’s going to shut down at a later point anyway, that’s your own fault
  • Similarly, if you buy every yearly release of a game series, you aren’t allowed to complain that the games are the same every year (as bad as Pokémon’s gotten it’s way better than the sports games)
  • Toby Fox is a big enough name now that I’m not entirely sure Undertale and Deltarune can and should be called indie games anymore; they’re kind of in this weird in-between for me (for a comparison, I don’t see anyone calling Masahiro Sakurai an Indie Developer)
Section #2: Smogon Takes
  • Jirachi should remain legal in DPP OU- it’s Iron Head that should be banned because Jirachi brings a lot to the tier and all the other Steel-Type attackers prefer other physical STAB moves anyway (it would be like if they banned DynamicPunch instead of Machamp)
  • Snorlax is getting to the point where I think it’s better than Tauros in RBY OU (it’s already reached this point in Ubers) because of being far more versatile, a better Paralysis sponge (for blocking sleep/freeze) and being even more unwallable
  • Hidden Abilities broke starter Pokémon across the board and the newer ones (Gens 5-present) are strictly worse game design due to being designed around them and not as much around fundamental aspects of gameplay
  • The Steel-Type in Gen 6, specifically in XY was one of the most dominant Types in history (this was arguably even better than Dragon in the DS games if we’re going off of numbers)
 
Toby Fox is a big enough name now that I’m not entirely sure Undertale and Deltarune can and should be called indie games anymore; they’re kind of in this weird in-between for me (for a comparison, I don’t see anyone calling Masahiro Sakurai an Indie Developer)
being an indie dev has nothing to do with how famous you are? it's about the size of development teams. it's not like smash was made by sakurai and 5 other people.
Jirachi should remain legal in DPP OU- it’s Iron Head that should be banned because Jirachi brings a lot to the tier and all the other Steel-Type attackers prefer other physical STAB moves anyway (it would be like if they banned DynamicPunch instead of Machamp)
cold take, the majority of the playerbase thinks it shouldn't be banned (which is why it hasn't)
Snorlax is getting to the point where I think it’s better than Tauros in RBY OU (it’s already reached this point in Ubers) because of being far more versatile, a better Paralysis sponge (for blocking sleep/freeze) and being even more unwallable
there are good rby ou teams without snorlax. there are no good teams without tauros
 
being an indie dev has nothing to do with how famous you are? it's about the size of development teams. it's not like smash was made by sakurai and 5 other people.

cold take, the majority of the playerbase thinks it shouldn't be banned (which is why it hasn't)

there are good rby ou teams without snorlax. there are no good teams without tauros
  1. Oh, so by that logic, Gold & Silver should be called indie games because they only had four programmers working in the game at one point. All jokes aside, Sakurai’s always had the benefit of having a decent amount of manpower behind his games and his own company, so that does make sense.
  2. I wasn’t aware that the playerbase was… still not the biggest fan of, but at least more tolerable of Jirachi than they were previously. I’m still not a fan of this thing, though, particularly on Magic Guard ParaSpam structures. seriously how are you supposed to beat this crap
  3. In terms of opportunity cost, Tauros is much, much harder to drop than Snorlax and both of those are harder to drop than Chansey. That I agree with. However, I also think the Pokémon’s viability ceiling should be taken into account, as well as matchup spread, viable sets variety, and tournament results. As good as Tauros is at doing what Tauros does, it’s also one dimensional and has some issues with what I think is the most underrated Pokémon in the tier in Cloyster when lacking Thunderbolt.
 
In terms of opportunity cost, Tauros is much, much harder to drop than Snorlax and both of those are harder to drop than Chansey. That I agree with. However, I also think the Pokémon’s viability ceiling should be taken into account, as well as matchup spread, viable sets variety, and tournament results. As good as Tauros is at doing what Tauros does, it’s also one dimensional and has some issues with what I think is the most underrated Pokémon in the tier in Cloyster when lacking Thunderbolt.
hi its me the rby player. tauros is way way way way WAY better than snorlax even if its one dimensional. also like, thunderbolt is used more than ever on tauros these days, i probably have it on like a third of my bulls? roughly. snorlax's set variety is nice i guess but everything that's not 4 attacks or 3 attacks + counter is more of a compromise than anything. you'd really rather run one of those two sets but often you're forced to use suboptimal sets

Snorlax is getting to the point where I think it’s better than Tauros in RBY OU (it’s already reached this point in Ubers)
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tauros is now better than snorlax in ubers. broken mon
 
hi its me the rby player. tauros is way way way way WAY better than snorlax even if its one dimensional. also like, thunderbolt is used more than ever on tauros these days, i probably have it on like a third of my bulls? roughly. snorlax's set variety is nice i guess but everything that's not 4 attacks or 3 attacks + counter is more of a compromise than anything. you'd really rather run one of those two sets but often you're forced to use suboptimal sets


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tauros is now better than snorlax in ubers. broken mon
Huh. I stand corrected. Well played. Have to give better players than me credit where credit is due. :psyglad: Snorlax, you fell off. Glad to see Thunderbolt's getting more use on Tauros, though. I wonder if this all means we could be seeing more Gengar use in the coming months but that's for the RBY community to discuss. Snorlax is still good, guys, don't get me wrong, it's apparently just not as good as I thought right now.
 
In my view, ragebaiting is a kind of trolling, but the two terms are not synonymous. Not all trolls set out to make people mad, and not all trolls who set out to make people mad do so via ragebaiting, which I use to refer to the specific practice of posting opinions/media that the ragebaiter doesn't necessarily endorse purely to get a rise out of other people. You might look at this as needless pedantry, and you wouldn't be completely wrong, but it helps me to clarify why I have a particular dislike for ragebaiting: It's a low-effort and uncreative form of trolling. All you do is type out some bullshit, hit send, and watch the negative reactions flow in. It's on the same level as joining a Discord server and spamming flashing images or gore until you get banned. I'm not above deriving some entertainment from a good troll, but I like my trolls elaborate, committed to a bit for months or years, and only aggravating in incredibly petty ways. Ragebaiting is basically the antithesis of this.
i've been doing this long term bit in a Bloons Tower Defense discord server, where I pretend to be this pro-corporation guy, who gets riled up over copyright violations from old flash games. nothing will compare to the joy of someone replying to you no, BP only helped clean up an oil spill because they caused it as I successfully derail another conversation. I have a brilliant one planned for here, but I'd have to make an alt account to pull it off.

anyways i was waiting for someone to post in here so i could get some hot takes off:

1. Mr Beast
People online love talking about him like he's devil spawn or something but honestly he's clearly just a guy who learned how to game the algorithm. He's a little lame but what do you expect from someone raised on YouTube. The most interesting thing about him is his growing disdain for his audience, which is surprisingly common amongst people who make junk to appeal to mainstream audiences but have a lot of passion for their craft (they've outgrown their audience).

A lot of his recent content is no different than other competition shows, aside from being worse quality. Yeah, making shit like Squid Games irl feels dystopian, but Squid Games and Hunger Games became popular because the concept itself was so interesting, not because of their message.

2.
I used to be a big "music fan." Like my "thing" was listening to music and having opinions on it. And honestly that was the worst time in my life because it was such an empty interest. Art and movies are cool and all but a personality they do not make. No matter how interesting your topster or letterboxd is, that doesn't make you interesting. What makes you interesting is actually doing things, whether making your own art, fishing, playing on Showdown, because you're actively doing something.

Music is especially boring to talk about. I'm good at it since I've listened to a lot and I know what to say, but there's not much to say beyond something being good or bad. At least with movies you could talk about interpreting them.

3.
I love Drake. He's become one of my favorite rappers. The more I live life in my mid to late 20s, the more aptly his music describes the experience. Two common critiques of him I see are that his music appeals to incels, and he has become more immature as he ages.

Speaking from experience, women love Drake. Not everyone ofc, but he has one of the largest women fanbases in rap. As for his music, he has grown, and does talk about his experiences. There's a lot of interesting things there, specifically what preceded the Beef, where he was clearly becoming disdainful of the life he had created for himself, because he surrounded himself with horrible vapid people, and then got angry when they acted as such.

Songs like What Would Pluto Do are so interesting because it went under the radar, but in hindsight he was clearly screwing Future's girl, doing the same thing that Future bragged about doing to other people. And Future couldn't take it.

4.
I have like 5 half-finished substacks over the same thing, but in summary a lot of the internet feels like it's stuck in some permanent idealistic 19 year old leftism, that you see when kids go off to college for the first time. This is because young people spend more time online and dictate the algorithm.

One of my problems with it, is that it's more about having the correct moral beliefs than anything tangible. Like yes, rich people suck and America uses it's international influence for ill, but even if 90 percent of Americans agreed, nothing would change. Until recently, I worked as a teacher where I put in extra work to make sure my classroom was accessible and welcoming to all, I did all the things people on twitter said they wanted their college teacher to do. When I had extra money, I helped people in need and didn't ask for anything in return (would not have done some of this in hindsight).

And honestly I got punished for not selling out at pretty every instance possible. And still faced multiple cancellation attempts for the most absurd reasons (I can elaborate if anyone cares to hear).

5.
I feel like girlbossing has got a bad rep, but I kind of prefer it to what followed. The thing about girlboss feminsm is that women are discouraged from pursuing careers, women are discouraged from taking initiative and doing things. Stuff like more women scientists is cool and challenges the current order of the world.

the feminism that followed was, like with the internet leftism, passive in nature. It became about women being victims to misogyny. And I'm not denying that is the case. But the end goal shouldn't be a moral high ground, it should be changing those dynamics. And I feel like girlboss feminism was closer to that because of its active nature.

while I'm here, I'd also say that some of those ssris are half-lobotomizing people, and women on the internet today are kind of mean-spirited in the same way men were in 2015. Stuff like the Tea app is bully behavior.

6.
I think the britains might have gone overboard but I do think limiting the amount of time people can stare at screens, and putting age restrictions for adult content and social medias are for the best. I don't think having unlimited access to vices is what constitutes freedom. It's not like 1984 because you are already being tracked on the internet, we live in a digital surveillance state, the likes of which have never existed before, and even if you think you're being clever with a VPN from a YouTuber I guarantee you're not.

7.
I feel like there's an assumption that's what best for us is a life of comfort and pleasure, but maybe that's not true. People often pursue unhealthy relationships, and it's not because they're stupid, it's because they like the drama. Maybe we'd be happier 1,000 years ago being peasants living a life with disease and violence. Maybe we need a natural threat level to distract ourselves from the human condition.

There's no reason that things like being in school all day for 12 years is what's best for us. There's no reason working a job 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is natural. There's no reason you're supposed to be sober all the time. Or maybe there is. But don't take things for granted as being good/bad, think through them and make a decision for yourself. Maybe try putting yourself in a situation you'd find uncomfortable.

if any of these violate thread rules or are too edgy, i can remove :D
 
I used to be a big "music fan." Like my "thing" was listening to music and having opinions on it. And honestly that was the worst time in my life because it was such an empty interest. Art and movies are cool and all but a personality they do not make. No matter how interesting your topster or letterboxd is, that doesn't make you interesting. What makes you interesting is actually doing things, whether making your own art, fishing, playing on Showdown, because you're actively doing something.

Music is especially boring to talk about. I'm good at it since I've listened to a lot and I know what to say, but there's not much to say beyond something being good or bad. At least with movies you could talk about interpreting them.
Of course you were miserable — you made your music listening and opinions a matter of identity and focused on being an "interesting person" rather than just getting what you were sincerely into. This is a great way to be miserable no matter what your interests are. I listen to a great deal of music and am fairly opinionated about it, but I do that because I enjoy music, and pieces of music make up most of the art that has been the most personally meaningful for my life, not because I think it makes me more interesting than other people. I do find music interesting to talk about with other people, and I certainly wouldn't call it an "empty interest," at least not more so than any other interest that people use as a substitute for a personality.

A related take, though I don't know how hot it is: I don't think being an "interesting person" is inherently valuable. I've met a lot of boring, typical people whose company I have greatly enjoyed, and there are a number of people that I find deeply fascinating for negative reasons — serial killers, for instance. What matters is how you treat other people and how you make them feel, not how interesting you are. To me, that's high school shit, and I've been trying to get over it since I graduated.
 
I posted about this on social media but I don't really think the silksong wait is a big deal, and I don't think news updates are necessary. It'll release when its ready, and if it doesn't then it doesn't. There's other games out there to play and other metroidvanias to experiment. Check out nine sols i find it better than hk in a lot of ways
 
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