Approved by UU Moderation / Amazing Art by Moutemoute
Hello and welcome to.. "Player Interview"! This project will allow you to discover or re-discover some well known players of the UU community. This time around we will be focusing mainly on important contributors to the forums such as Tier Leaders, Forum Moderators, Community Contributors, and Council Members. Let me first say that I am honored to be following in the footsteps of an esteemed and accomplished list of interviewers: Moutemoute, Feliburn, Kink, and Cynde. Thank you are very much for your work!
Hello TSR! How are you?
Hi drew, a bit tired after a busy weekend but all is well. How about yourself?
I am doing splendidly. Been super busy but it's all over now!
Alright well, tell me and the community a bit about yourself via a brief introduction. Name, age, favorite color, favorite smoothie flavor, whatever you would like to say!
Well hello I'm Michael, 23 years old, chem major, living in Colorado. Favorite smoothie flavor would be strawberry banana which is odd considering i don't like bananas outside of that at all. Also a filthy degenerate weeb unfortunately.
Wonderful to know! There is no debating the fact that you are a boomer. When did you join and what brought you to Smogon and Showdown?
I defintely getting to the crusty angsty boomer stage lol...... Anyway, I joined almost exactly 6 years ago as of right now. I had known of Smogon for a while beforehand and I have the tendency to be needlessly overly competitive with stuff. Most of my friends outgrew Pokemon in the earlier years but a few of my friends and I stuck with it for much longer and once we all graduated high school and I realized I wouldn't be playing with them and such as often anymore I got more interested in smogon and ended up making an account to start playing, and the rest is history.
One of the longest running jokes, potentially, in the UU community has to do with your name. For those who don't know, go ahead and tell us the origins of the name TSR. And additionally pick 3-5 of your favorite fake TSR acronyms.
Ah, of course. Well first in my defense, I grew up with my mom being quite the helicopter parent so my internet awareness before joining Smogon was quite inadequate. I made the mistake of naming myself ShiningFire08 when i first joined thinking that random usernames like that would be Cool and Hip. I was a month away from turning 18 at the time, by the way. Needless to say once I got my bearings I realized I was past due for a change. Since sometimes my personality turns into cardboard, I went to browsing the forums for inspiration and eventually came across the tournaments subforum. Naturally after exploring SPL and other such threads I come across absolute chads like TDK and BKC and want to be just like them. However in hindsight I definitely had a lurk more moment and decided to mash some letters together without knowing they were actually acronyms for longer names they used to have. As for my personal unofficial acronyms, I have some common ones that I'll list off now as well as who I'd like to think coined them.
1. The Shit Rag - Ark, who got an entire community to refer to me as used toilet paper.
2. Timmy Shit Rectum - Vivalospride, who I can only assume couldn't come up with a different S word.
3. Rational Rag - everyone, who realized I occasionally spit cold hard facts in viv's prediction vids.
4. Lily Henchman - Pak, who gave me this role in our server when I got forum mod and I get tagged with it once or twice a week.
Those are some good ones that are now public knowledge. A decision you 100% will not regret.
You have had a very impressive UU Masters run. Before I had you marked down as an old gens goon, I'm ashamed to say. But you've proved yourself a very talented player this generation. Talk a bit about your tour experience and why you think you got so far this time around.
Hm, hard to pinpoint honestly. Over the years I've been around I kinda have a bad tournament track record overall thanks to me growing up a clicker. In recent times I've been taking my playing and building more methodically as well as working out some irl confidence issues that had been bleeding into mons for some time. I like to think I put a lot of time into building good teams that can play themselves somewhat in standard scenarios so I can make good progress in game without resorting to crazy doubles and hard predictions every turn. Never been easier with bum ass boots slappable on everything so I guess it kinda clicked for me a bit this gen. I tend to also get bored building the same kinda frameworks so I also end up building a lot of what I like to think as creative stuff that I have actual fun piloting as well. As for motivation for this tour in particular, it was pretty hard to stay motivated with the self-imposed burden of creating 3 new teams every week to keep my opponents on their toes (I am not much of a fan of this meta). About halfway through my run I lucked Alpha Rabbit pretty bad, and after he told me I better win the whole thing. Felt bad to do it to a friend like that so I guess I took the comment seriously and kept putting in the effort to make it that far. Came up a little short but don't feel bad as pdt and nat are both great players as well and overall had fun.
I enjoyed watching your games. Proud of you pal
You are now a Forum Moderator. How do you like your job?
It's alright though honestly I haven't had much to do since Lily is always super on top of everything and gets to it first. All I've done so far is join in on giving the OK to a couple forum projects, lock a single thread, and delete a few nonsense posts. I'm sure there'll be a lot more to be done in the future so I'd like to think that I'll be Ready for when that time comes.
Fair, fair. Could you pick your favorite moment from playing Pokemon or perhaps your greatest accomplishment in competitive Pokemon?
I suppose this run in masters is actually my best accomplishment on this site so far which is kinda sad for six years of investment LOL. Hard to pick a single favorite moment though, probably the best times are when we're NOT playing playing Pokemon; stuff like hopping into a call with the boys like Chris Wanka and Pak and shooting the shit while heavily intoxicated and such.
Do you play any video games outside of Pokemon?
That I do. As for the major one, I've been an enormous fan of the Monster Hunter series since I first got Tri in 2010 and haven't looked back since. Would highly recommend anyone reading this to give Rise a try and then proceed to sink 400 hours into it with me. Other than that, my over competitiveness I mentioned earlier has me gravitate to a lot of mechanically demanding games. Monster Hunter fits the bill there but it's also strictly a co-op game so I turn to some PvP stuff as well. I used to Rainbow Six Siege a lot though I eventually lost interest and never put in time to get really good at it. The hacker problem the game has past Silver in Ranked is horrendous to this day. I used to play smash a lot (not a melee chad unfortunately) and showed up to a few locals occasionally, but ever since the quarantine hit those haven't been a thing. Playing Smash Ultimate online is an absolutely miserable experience so I pretty much shelved it and looked into the traditional 2D fighting games. A while ago Guilty Gear Accent Core +R (old game) got an update on Steam that gave it rollback netcode so I decided to give it a try and never looked back. Sick game with super fast pace and several mechanics that reward aggressive play, all complete with a fantastic heavy metal aesthetic and soundtrack that I'm a big fan of, also would give the recommend to anyone that's into 2D fighters. As a weeb I'm also a big fan of the classic rpg style games, though these days they have to really grip me somehow for me to keep playing. Through the years I've been a big fan of Zelda, Borderlands, Fire Emblem (though I need to go back and play a lot of the old games), and some more I would have to think more with my applesauce brain to reference here. Slowly getting through Persona 4 and 5 at the moment, though its tough as the gameplay is a bit of a slog.
Gaming. What about TV, movie, and music interests? Do you have a favorite song, movie, or TV show?
Honestly not a big TV watcher, my mom got rid of our DirectTV service when I was 11 and it kinda just got phased out from a regular part of my life back then. I know I'm missing out on stuff so the plan to sit down and watch some Good Shows is still on the table, such as Pak's favorite recommendation Riverdale (very sarcastic statement). Movies are kinda in the same vein for me since my attention span doesn't work very well at just sitting down and absorbing something. I'll go occasionally to the theaters to watch something with friends but I honestly rarely sit down by myself and just watch something. Again lotta good stuff I know I'm missing out on that I can never talk about with anyone. Classic boomer stuff getting behind the times and all right? As for music I'm pretty open to all genres though in recent times I've become a growing fan of rock and metal thanks to BKC giving me a starting point last year in roapl. As of right now I like a lot from Dream Theater, Slayer, Megadeath Mercyful Fate, and W.A.S.P. As for the obligatory rap / hip-hop options my favorite artists in that area are probably JID and brockhampton, they have a lot of unique songs and sometimes I like having a few songs that aren't about doing drugs and floopin hoes etc. Some other things you literally can't go wrong with also include ab-soul (thank you pak for making me appreciate his music a lot more) and Kendrick so yea basic shit. I also am a big fan of stuff from Prince and Steely Dan since my dad would play CDs from them all the time on long rides when we'd go fishing and hunting so I grew up always listening to it. Could go on longer but we'd be here forever.
Sheeeeesh! Lots to unpack there.
Killintime told me that in the event we were the last two alive on Earth, he would let the human race go extinct. You wouldn't do me like that, would you?
Seeing as we're both biological male humans I don't think there would be a choice in the first place.
You clearly haven't watched Jurassic Park. Nature always finds a way.
Could you perhaps share a team of your own design that you are especially proud of?
Sure.
I built this team the week I was playing CBU in masters. It's a bit of a more specifically prepped team obviously but I like the way the team plays into itself a lot as well. Most of the team packs momentum moves and pivot into each other's defensive checks off of the free momentum. The Azelf set is also quite nasty for slower bulky offenses to play since even when it meets stuff like mew that can kinda stuff it'll at least be able to disrupt a thing or two and U-turn out. It has some funky choices like AV Amoonguss that I like a lot in recent times thanks to its ability to stuff Keldeo, Raikou, Kommo-o (kinda) a bit better. Doesn't actually have a ghost resist so having it sponge Aegi a bit more is never bad. It's Modest with that investment so Primarina has to CM 3 times against before its Sub survives Sludge Bomb. CB Scizor's also a neat pick for immediate power as well, CB Bullet Punch and Knock provides a lot more power vs dumb screens teams than HDB Swords Dance sets, and CB Dual Wingbeat crushes stuff like Buzzwole, Keldeo, and other Scizors just fine. Unfortunately I posted this in my UUPL chat and got flamed by odr, viv, and many others for running Flip Turn on Keldeo. Literally just double.
Very cool team! Would you like to shout out anyone or give some final remarks?
I don't have too much else to say at this point except we should fuckin ban Mew, I'm so damn tired of having to put defog on every team just for SPIKES of all things in the boots gen not even mentioning the 700 other sets you can run on it if you feel like it with the exception of the Cosmic Power variant in which case I will gladly take my free win against it. I'm burned out as hell with this game at the moment so I'll probably enjoy my lack of playing obligations for the next couple weeks at least but I'd definitely ladder to nuke Mew from this tier given the opportunity. Lastly for shoutouts I'll just give a general shoutout to the barclay boys who've been on the ride since showed up and make the days I spend on Smogon a lot better. Reminder vivalospride stalled barclay and the jerk. Thanks for having me on!
You're welcome. Always a pleasure talking with you!
Last edited by a moderator: