AernaLingus

Lmao, I love this interpretation. In light of the flavor text, I think Metapod has tired of seeing its comrades' innards be spilled and is about to even the score.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Metapod_(Vending_S1)

カラが固くなる前に強い衝撃を受けると中身が出てしまうので注意。

Damn, that flavor text is brutal; apparently, it's from the Pokémon Blue Pokédex entry. In the English translation of the game, it's rendered as

This Pokémon is vulnerable to attack while its shell is soft, exposing its weak and tender body.

but a direct translation would be something like

If it receives a strong impact before its shell hardens, its insides can end up spilling out, so take heed.

It ain't easy being green.

The artist is Aya Kusube (Bulbapedia, The Art of Pokémon), whose Poliwag was shared a few days back and who has been illustrating Pokémon cards since 1998 and has also illustrated some Pokémon books, including one about Haunter, the design of which would later be seen on her Haunter card (see some illustrations here).

There's not much info about her out there (unfortunately, her personal website is defunct and was full of Flash content that was not preserved in the Wayback Machine), but her father, Daikichirou Kusube, was the founder of Shin-Ei Animation, the anime studio best known for producing the long-running Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan series as well as more recent anime including the pair of shōnen romcom hits Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san & Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu and the adorable father-daughter cooking seinen Amaama to Inazuma.

Bulbapedia has this to say about her style:

Kusube's style, especially outside the TCG, is purposefully aimed at younger audiences, where characters are drawn simply and have a limited color palette. Her personal work however demonstrates her eye for detail, using a myriad of various charcoal pencil strokes and marks to define outlines and areas of shadow. The majority of this work remains black and white. This particular method is applied to her TCG artwork, many of which incorporate a solid drawing with only a few key colors accompanied with many penciled hatches or dots to define shadow.

Looking at this card as well as her others, it's pretty amazing the kind of atmosphere she's able to create with a scant few colors and some careful shading. Her Abra (Bulbapedia) is another favorite of mine.

vance is, amazingly, ambimasturbadexterous

couches are a hands-free experience, after all

I 100% relate to this! It's so frustrating...when you're doing okay, you both intellectually and emotionally understand that doing some of these more unpleasant or challenging tasks will make you feel better afterwards. But when you're feeling down, your brain tricks you into thinking that you're just tooooo depressed to do anything, which can lead to things piling up, resulting in a vicious cycle of anxiety inducement. And yet, if you can ignore that voice and just start doing something, anything, it can really help to pull you out of that rut, and as you say, even if it doesn't, you'll at least feel better than if you were rotting in bed.

The two things that have helped me most with getting out of bed were getting smart bulbs for my room and avoiding algorithmic/infinite scroll stuff on my phone in the morning. I know, I know, IoT stuff sucks (I have mine blocked from the internet, and if you're comfortable fiddling with self-hosted stuff you can avoid that stuff entirely), but having those lights come on gradually in the morning has meant that I both wake up easier (i.e. not super groggy out of a deep sleep) and then stay up because the lights are on full blast when my alarm goes off. The algorithmic thing is also important. The best thing is honestly just to not look at your phone and jump out of bed immediately (sometimes I will literally count down from 10 and then launch myself), but I've found that if I just check my YouTube sub feed and watch a quick video or two, it doesn't get me locked into bed in the same way that scrolling through Twitter or even Hexbear does. There's a finite amount of content, and I will never intentionally start watching a 1 hour video before I get out of bed whereas I might unthinkingly start scrolling through a feed and lose an hour in the blink of an eye.

Of course, you may face different obstacles that make these less viable or relevant, but those two things have made a huge difference for me, so I thought I'd share.

I was a very trusting kid and this kid was blessed (?) with the soul of a shady used car salesman, so I'm sure he would have managed to scam me with some other card even if I had gotten the Ancient Mew I was owed. But I'm glad that you got fistfuls of Mew—I'm sure that must have been super cool! What did you end up doing with them—hoarding them? Handing them out for street cred? Do you still have a shoebox somewhere with half a dozen sealed Ancient Mew?

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Raichu_(Paldea_Evolved_64)

I love that Raichu is just sending out little tendrils of electricity while he has an upside-down nap. That's one way to stop someone from giving you a rude awakening!

Holy shit, the guy who did this artwork (Toshinao Aoki) was the same guy that did the Surfing Pikachu artwork, which was his first card! He also did Flying Pikachu (plus a newer version) and the Dragonite promo that was one of four cards given out at theaters for Pokémon: The First Movie. Legend. He also seems to do some anime and manga work, although nothing I'm familiar with, and you can also check out his Twitter.

Out of curiosity, I finally dug out the ol' Pokémon binder, and weirdly I don't have any of the four Mewtwo Strikes Back promos even though I saw the movie in theaters, presumably as soon as I was able. Given that this was the height of Pokémania, it's possible the theater just ran out of them. I think I also missed out on Ancient Mew, but I did end up getting it through a "trade" (swindle) for my holo Base Set Blastoise (the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever...still hold a grudge to this day). I do still have my Entei tucked safely away, thankfully, along with my promo from I Choose You (the first card I'd acquired in probably 15 years, and still the most recent one).

It also made me smile to see this partially-torn Japanese Quagsire that I'd taped back together. To this day, I still have no idea how I ended up with it. I have a few other (probably a single pack's worth of) Japanese cards, but those are all in good condition, and I know they came from my dad—think he got them from a colleague or friend who went on vacation in Japan. But this Quagsire...it's not from the same set as the other Japanese cards (they're all Base Set), and I remember that when I found it, it was already hella beat up, whereas the others are pristine. I remember finding it randomly in my house, but that doesn't make sense because we had lived in that place continuously since before the TCG launched. Whatever the case, it was my treasure (a Gen II card months before the Gen II TCG or games had even launched in the States!), and it's neat to look back at it and rather than be this purely mysterious artifact, it's something I can now read and understand perfectly.

Bringing it full circle, the artist for that very first Quagsire card? Atsuko Nishida, part of the original Pokémon development team and designer of many iconic Pokémon, including Bulbasaur, Charmander/Charmelon/Charizard, and Squirtle/Wartortle; Vaporeon, Umbreon, and Espeon; and most famously, Pikachu and...RAICHU!

The flaw stems from many accessories failing to enforce a critical step in the pairing process. To start the Fast Pair procedure, a Seeker (a phone) sends a message to the Provider (an accessory) indicating that it wants to pair. The Fast Pair specification states that if the accessory is not in pairing mode, it should disregard such messages. However, many devices fail to enforce this check in practice, allowing unauthorised devices to start the pairing process. After receiving a reply from the vulnerable device, an attacker can finish the Fast Pair procedure by establishing a regular Bluetooth pairing.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Alolan_Meowth_(Cosmic_Eclipse_128)

You can learn more about the artist (Sekio) and see their work by checking out their personal website, Bluesky, and Pixiv, among others; you can also view a list of Pokémon cards they've illustrated on Bulbapedia.

I stopped playing after the DS era, so I didn't realize they'd come out with a perma-smug Meowth variant...I dig it.

RSS feeds are definitely the way to go. And for YouTube, I never stopped using the subscription feed. I get exactly the videos I ask for from the creators I follow—nothing more, nothing less.

Hell yeah, proud of you!

I've been trying to be more resilient too. Doin' OK-ish.

Same here—glad you're hanging in there. I feel like I've made slow and steady progress on this front over the last year or so, and a big part of that has been having more of a consistent routine. That way, even if I get knocked off course a bit, the routine keeps me anchored and prevents me from spiraling downward. I actually fell out of it for a few months due to a more major event, but I've finally slotted back into it these past few weeks and I can really feel the difference.

Damn, that Plutonomy report is some top-tier ghoul shit. Haven't finished reading it yet, but this bit on page 22 stuck out to me (emphasis mine)

Organized societies have two ways of expropriating wealth — through the revocation of property rights or through the tax system.
[...]
There is a third way to change things though not necessarily by expropriation, and that is to slow down the rate of wealth creation or accumulation by the rich — generally through a reduction in the profit share of GDP. This could occur through a change in rules that affect the balance of power between labor and capital. Classic examples of this tend to fall under one of two buckets — the regulation of the domestic labor markets through minimum wages, regulating the number of hours worked, deciding who can and cannot work etc. or by dictating where goods and services can be imported from (protectionism).
deciding who can and cannot work

Child labor. They're talking about child labor laws.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Piplup_(Phantasmal_Flames_27)#Gallery

This Full Art illustration rare features artwork by Jiro Sasumo, winner of the 2nd Pokémon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix (you can read an interview with them (which shows of their contest-winning artwork plus a few other pieces) as well as check out their Pixiv and Twitter.

In the aforementioned interview, Sasumo says

My goal is to draw illustrations that look like portrayals of a world where Pokémon really exist. I believe that Pokémon fans enjoy imagining how Pokémon would go about their lives if they existed in our world, and I’d be happy if my illustrations could help them imagine this scenario.

That sentiment really comes through in this illustration. And also, take note of the flavor text

A poor walker, it often falls down. However, its strong pride makes it puff up its chest without a care.

Ngl I did have a bit of a fall today, but I'm gonna try to be like Piplup and keep moving forward!

One of my favourite games ever tbh.

Same here! I played it so much back in the day that I got my GBC confiscated, something not even Pokémon Blue was able to accomplish. Still need to finish the English translation of the Japan-only sequel. And relevant to this post, there's even a romhack for Neo that I wanna tackle next! Games aside, I still listen to the music regularly, and I've even been transcribing and analyzing some of the pieces. Ichiro Shimakura pulled some absolute wizardry on that soundtrack. If anyone wants to give them a listen, here's the first and here's the second; what's neat about that site is that, by clicking the "Settings" tab you can toggle individual voices (which really demonstrates the trickery Shimakura employed to get such a big sound with only three melodic voices) as well as tweak the stereo width to your liking.

I've only gotten back into playing offline tcg with my niece

Awww, that's lovely!

Tap left for sleep, right for paralyse, upside down for confusion. Poison and burned have status tokens

Thanks for hunting down the info—a mix of tokens and card rotation, then! Well, should I ever find myself in an impromptu face-to-face game of Pokémon TCG, I"ll know what to do.

Hey, put some respect on Diglett's name!

...but yeah, there does not seem to have been any rhyme or reason to the music choices—seems like they just had a list of popular classical musical selections and assigned them at random. I bet they both used The Blue Danube and gave it to a non-Water Pokémon.

why is this in badposting, it's just the truth

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Natu_(McDonald_Pack_15)

Oh boy, the e-Reader cards! I was always curious about those as a kid but I never had an e-Reader to try them myself. It's a gimmick, sure, but I bet I would have been absolutely enthralled with it if I'd had one.

If anyone's wondering what's in the e-Reader data for this card, the short strip gives you an interface that shows the Crystal Pokédex entry + card info, including a dictionary which defines any game-specific jargon:

Screenshots

Screenshots transcript

There are eleven screenshots, all showing the software that results from scanning the e-Reader short code om the promotional McDonald's Natu card. The text is primarily in Japanese.

The interface (common to all screenshots) has a gold border with a logo that reads "e-viewer" in the upper left-hand corner. On the bottom, the current screen's name is show in the center, with left and right arrows in the corresponding corners showing what screens the player can navigate to. These are all written in English.

The first screenshot (named simply "pokémon") shows the Pokédex information from Pokémon Crystal alongside a sprite of Natu, which seems to be based on its official Ken Sugimori watercolor illustration rather than a sprite taken from any of the games. It also indicates that we can see the "Evolution Info" screen by pressing A:

ネイティ

NO. 177ことりポケモン体調. 0.2 m体重. 2.0 kg

きように　きのみきを　かけのぼる。えださきに　できた　あたらしいきのめを　このんで　ついばむ。

The second screenshot shows the Evolution Info screen, using the same sprite for Natu but a flat and simple three-color sprite for Xatu (called ネイティオ in Japanese). The interface also indicates that the player may return to the "Pokémon Info" screen by pressing B.

The third and fourth screenshots show a textual description of the actual Pokémon card, which is a bit wordier than the card, although it contains the same information. The fourth screenshot is simply the same screen scrolled down to reveal the rest of the text. Keywords are written in red text (below indicated by bolding). The currently selected dictionary entry further has a flashing underline, and the selection can be changed by pressing the L and R buttons (although this is not indicated in the interface):

ネイティ

HP. 40ID. M-10-#(Psychic energy icon)

◆「ウイングカッター」は、コイントスが必要だけど、「おもて」ならエネルギー１個で２０ダメージも与えるワザだよ。 ◆「にらんでつつく」は、相手に１０ダメージを与えて、コイントスが「おもて」ならマヒにするワザだよ。

The fifth through tenth screenshots show the dictionary entries (which, on this particular card, are the Japanese TCG's terms for "Coin Toss," "Energy," "Move," and "Paralysis"), each of which indicate that the player can return to the "Card Info" screen by pressing the B button. There are more screenshots than entries because the last two entries required scrolling to reveal all text:

コイントス

コインを投げて、「おもて」か「うら」かで判定すること。

エネルギー

ポケモンが、ワザを使うときや、「にげる」ときになどに必要とするもの。基本的には「エネルギーカード」によって、ポケモンに与えられます。

ワザ

ポケモンが持っている能力の１つ。自分の番に一回だけ使うことができ、使ったら、自分の番が終わります。ワザを使うためには、そのワザに必要なぶん以上のエネルギーが、そのポケモンについていなければいけません。ワザをを使っても、特に説明されていなければ、エネルギーカードはそのポケモンにつけたままにしておきます。

マヒ

特殊状態の１つで、ポケモンが「マヒ」している状態のこと。「マヒ」状態のポケモンは、そのめじるしとして、カードを横にします。「マヒ」状態のポケモンは、ワザを使うことも「にげる」こともできません。自分の番を一回「マヒ」状態ですごしたポケモンは、その番の後のポケモンチェックで「マヒ」から回復します。また、ベンチにもどったポケモンは、「マヒ」状態から回復します。

The eleventh and final screenshot shows the "data" screen, which simply displays a message indicating that the long code can be used for a Construction e-Reader game (i.e. a game that can be played solely with e-Reader cards and not requiring a GBA game cartridge); the equivalent English message is "This side Dot Code contains data for construction function blocks.":

このカードのサイドコードはｅゲームＺＥＲＯのファンクションブロックです

and the long strip contains data for Construction: Melody Box (just plays a short one-voice melody).

Ngl, I actually learned something about the TCG game when reading and transcribing those Japanese dictionary entries. I only ever properly played the card game on the Game Boy (Color) game Pokémon Trading Card Game (which absolutely SLAPS across gameplay, graphics, and especially music, btw), and in that game status effects are indicated by a little icon underneath the card art. But apparently, in the physical card game you're supposed to tap your card to indicate paralysis. Are there different ways you're supposed to indicate the other status effects, or does tapping cover everything?

Anyway, on the subject of the e-Reader, here's a few interesting technical videos on e-Reader cards in the original Animal Crossing from Hunter R.:

Cracking Animal Crossing's e-Reader Cards

Creating e-Reader Villagers in Animal Crossing

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Poliwag_(Neo_Discovery_62)

I think I might actually own this one since I collected from Base Set through at least the first set or two of Neo (this is from set two of four). Cute art!