Tag: from the mun

Is everything alright Bill? Your answers have been very short recently and I’m getting worried :( if you’re overwhelmed with all the asks or don’t feel like doing this some days please take a break. I love this blog so much but the person behind the blog is more important than the content. Please take care of yourself

Thank you, anonymous. You’re very observant to notice, and we deeply appreciate the sentiment. At the moment, I must admit that now is one of my busier times of the year, so I haven’t quite had as much time as usual. That, compounded with the fact that we have quite a backlog of asks, means that some of the answers in the queue right now are shorter than others. I apologize for that. It’s my hope that once things clear up offline, I’ll be able to get back to work on your questions as usual. In the meantime, rest assured that there will still be content, as the queue has been stocked in such a way to produce one ask a day until mid-March. That should give me plenty of time to sort things out in the meantime.

Thank you again for your concern and patience, anonymous!

{But as a side note, the mun is in the process of moving and apologizes for the shorter content for the time being. Thanks again!}

I was wondering, if I ever notice a typo if the mun would like to be notified about it? Typos are rare on this blog so I wasn’t sure if I should just ignore them since they don’t really effect the post. Thank you for keeping up this blog, I really do enjoy reading the entries.

{Go for it! 🙂 I don’t mind corrections or comments on any of the entries, so long as the readers are polite about it. (So “hey, just as a heads up, but I think ______ might work better” or “quick note, but you missed ______” or something along those lines, not “ugh, this thing you do really sucks, and it’s really bringing down the blog.” Which you’d think would go without saying, but you’d be surprised.)

Usually, I’ll have one of the characters respond to those kinds of asks, and it ends up being short because I never know what to say in response besides “hey, thanks for pointing that out.” Sorry in advance if earlier posts like that came off as curt, by the way! D: In the meantime, if you want to skip over “hey, I got your ask and the thing has been corrected” responses, feel free to block the from the editor tag. I might come up with a tag for it later if need be, and if that happens, I’ll let you all know.

In the meantime, thanks for the offer, as well ask the ask! :)}

#AMA. Are some of your answers as Bill/Lanette based on your personal opinions (hating milk, certain laws regarding relationships with pokemon…) or are they just things you believe would actually exist in the pokemon world.

{For the most part, I actually try to keep my personal opinions off the blog to avoid coloring posts with bias and whatnot. This is partially because I want to make what Bill says feel genuine (either genuinely his opinion or genuinely something that would happen in his world) and partly because I know that a lot of my opinions are unpopular ones in the fandom, lol.

I think the one thing that’s nearly based on my own personal opinions are the jokes Bill makes about Unova. I’m a New Englander transplant to New York, so part of Bill’s jokes are really me fulfilling my obligations as a self-respecting Bostonian at heart to make fun of New Yorkers. It helps that this version of Bill is the animeverse British one, so the other part of it is Bill fulfilling his obligation as a self-respecting British-descended foreigner to make fun of Americans. (We swear, we still love you. Bill’s just salty that you threw his tea into your harbor, and I’m just salty that a slightly more specific you believes the Yankees are better than the Red Sox.)

Other than that, most of the laws, culture, human-pokémon interactions, and even the science and other odds and ends are really the result of a lot of research, rather than my own opinions, and as such, they’re basically what I think is true about the pokémon world. Either that, or they’re really what I think Bill’s opinions would be about different pokémon or facets of his world.

But the milk thing? The milk thing is canon.}

trainersofhoenn:

“How long have you been working on the storage system?”

“I’ve been with it since its inception, actually, so that would be—oh—several years now. My partner, a Kantonian named Bill, and I went to Celadon University together, and one day, he shared the original prototype of the system with me. Back then, it had a text-based interface and was nearly unnavigable, and I told him that under no circumstances could he release something like that to you poor trainers. He invited me to help him develop the system further, and I gave it a proper GUI and cleaned up his code a bit. The system saw a worldwide release only a few months after that.”

“Ooh, that sounds like a lot of hard work! Can you share what challenges you faced in implementing it?”

“Well, it was hard at first to convince people to want it in the first place!”

“Whoa, really?”

“Yeah. It’s a great idea, and the general public thinks so now, of course, but how do you explain it to people who have no background in quantum mechanics, engineering, or digital physics? I can’t tell you how many times my partner and I have had to convince others that the system is perfectly safe, that Pokémon don’t feel a thing when they’re transferred, that it’s impossible to delete or modify Pokémon as they pass through the system, and so on and so forth. If you can think of a question regarding whether or not Pokémon would be harmed as they pass through the system, I’ve had to answer it at least 10 times.

“And that isn’t even getting into the financial aspect of it. I won’t go into too many details about that for fear of boring you, but let me just say that convincing people to invest in putting a PC in every Pokémon Center turned out to be far, far more complicated than figuring out a way to turn living creatures into electricity and data.”

“Huh, I didn’t know that! But hey, since we’re on the subject… I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering this, but how does it all work? You know, the process of storing Pokémon?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you all the details, partly because some of it is a trade secret and partly because the full explanation may take more time than you’d probably like. Whenever any of us—Bill, myself, or the other administrators, I mean—whenever we’re asked this, we often compare it to a telephone. Basically, a telephone works by converting the sound of your voice into electrical pulses, sending those through a wire as electricity or through the air as radio waves, and converting those pulses back into your voice on the other end. The storage system works in a similar manner. The matter converter breaks down a Poké Ball, draws it into the digital matrix, and sends it into our cloud-based system until you specify a destination whenever you withdraw a Pokémon. There’s a bit more to it than that, but then we’d have to get into the nature of Pokémon and how it’s possible for them to perceive their surroundings, even in an electro-digital state such as the one they assume inside a Poké Ball, and that gets a bit messy.”

“It all sounds so complex and fascinating. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say that I couldn’t imagine being a trainer without the storage system! Is there anything you want to say to all the trainers out there whose lives have been made easier because of your work?”

“Much of what we do isn’t for you; it’s because of you. So the first thing I’d like to do is thank our users, not only for using the system but also for going out, exploring the world, and discovering new and exciting things. In turn, you inspire us to create and explore, and with your help, we come that much closer to understanding the Pokémon we share the world with. And with that said, second, never stop being curious. Keep exploring, and keep befriending the people and Pokémon you meet.”

Lanette’s dialogue was written by @bills-pokedex! Her blog is this awesome project where she writes Pokédex entries as the Pokémon researchers Bill and Lanette, and it also doubles as a platform for trainers to ask for advice! There was no one else I would’ve considered for writing the Lanette conversation, and after reading this, I’m sure you all see why. Be sure to check her blog out! 🙂

{Congratulations to @trainersofhoenn for two awesome years! As someone who lurks this blog like whoa, it was fun to collab with the voice behind Brendan and help celebrate a highly ambitious and creative fan project.

Also? If you’ve somehow never heard of this blog, give it a look! You know how Humans of New York is all about sharing the unique stories and struggles of the everyday human being? Trainers of Hoenn does very much the same thing, only it’s one person running it, and it’s all about Pokémon characters. You get a story on your dash every day, and each one adds depth and character to even the most ordinary-looking NPCs. It’s funny sometimes, it’s heartwarming at others, and it’s all-around fun, period.

Thanks to the blog’s mod for the collab, and congrats again for another year!}

#ama did you make up bill and lanettes last name or are they revealed somewhere

{Lanette’s is the easier one to explain here, and the answer is, yep, I made hers up! If anyone’s wondering, Lanette’s last name partly comes from her Japanese name (Mayumi, which refers to Hamilton’s spindle) and partly from this awesome systems engineer.

The history of Bill’s last name is a bit more complicated because I actually stole it from the official Pokémon website’s episode summaries back when they weren’t as well-written as they are now. Whoever wrote the summary for Bill’s episode pretty much just tried to turn his Japanese name (Masaki) into a western one, rather than use his actual localized name. I just thought at the time that it was about as close to a last name as we’re ever going to get, so I’ve been using it ever since. Long story short, I technically didn’t make it up, but it’s also less an officially given name and more of a translation error.}

#AMA for the mun? (What does that mean lol) Is it just one person who works on this or do you have help from anyone else? And at the risk of sounding like a pokemon professor, are you a boy or a girl?

{Just one, admittedly! (This should probably explain why there might only be one or two asks answered a day and then a sudden flood of them on weekends, haha. Entries are in a queue, so that’s how they come out on a more consistent basis.)

I’m also a girl. 🙂 I’d like the water-type starter, please, Professor Anon!}

funky-ufo replied to your post “Wimpod and Golisopod”

So is this blog like official Pokedex entries or cool entries based on your imagination and what you know about the Pokemon (hope that didn’t sound rude).

{Not rude at all!

This blog is an in-character/ask blog for Bill. The entries are 100% tongue-in-cheek pages from Bill’s personal pokédex, so they’re more or less snarky commentary on different pokémon, equally snarky commentary on the pokémon world, or stories involving Bill and pokémon that he barely gets into because he definitely did not piss off a bunch of pokémon while doing fieldwork, nope. The other posts are asks, and they’re often more serious but still in-character.

Hope that helps!}