the bulbasaur hypothesis

i've got this hypothesis, right? and it's about Bulbasaur. the pokemon, not some guy i know. Bulbasaur is a fairly recognized pokemon! people know him, people like him. he was one of the starters in the first game, so people have a lot of nostalgia for him. he shows up a lot.

here he is from the first game, where pokemon were more lumpy. cool!

but my bulbasaur hypothesis is as follows: there is a disproportionate amount of fanart of Bulbasaur, relative to his popularity. he's got a bump that not a lot of pokemon have, specifically with art. a lot more people have drawn Bulbasaur than you'd think.

why? because he's Pokemon #1. the pokemon all come in a clear, distinct order, and he's first on the list. if you're going to make a drawing of every pokemon, in order, you have to start with Bulbasaur. and a lot of people start a project to draw every Pokemon, draw Bulbasaur, and then stop.

here he is from the tcg, ready to attack.

there are a hundred reasons to start something, start an endeavor, but there are like a million billion reasons to stop along the way, and a billion million times you can stop. most endeavors people start are ones they don't finish. it's so natural to say, oh, i'll do this thing more often, i'll find the time for it, and then fail to. to start by saying you're going to have a drawing of every pokemon and end with just a drawing of a bulbasaur.

but you know what happens when you do that? you have a drawing of a bulbasaur. one you wouldn't have had otherwise. and that's something, right?

i don't know. i guess i'm like this every january, going in with major clear plans of how i'm gonna fix my brain and actually make stuff more often. i really excitedly draw the bulbasaur, saying i'm gonna draw ivysaur the next day. and then i'm too busy to draw ivysaur the next day, and the day after that. pretty soon it becomes easier to forget about ivysaur, to not want to get reminded of the dumb project i started. and i never make it to bellsprout, my favorite pokemon.

but i'm gonna do it anyways! even if stuff happens slower, i'm gonna make the stuff!

i'm not actually going to draw every pokemon though. i can't and largely don't draw, and i'm okay with that. i- i'm talking about blogging, here.

okay, maybe i'll draw one bulbasaur.

this one's about content so don't get too excited

"content" is a weird word. a lot of people who make stuff don't like it. i just kinda see it as a synonym for "makin' stuff", so i've never minded it. i guess it's specifically "makin' stuff with the intent that people see it online", but like... all the stuff i make is already online, and i would like people to see it, so like. whatever the hell.

anyways! it's a new year, still. 2025 felt like a step in the right direction for me, content-wise. seven Let's Play videos isn't exactly a great output, but (a) some of those Let's Play videos i think are really good, and (b) it beats the zero anything i was doing a couple years in a row, and i'll take a small blessing. Best Match (always be pluggin'), the youtube channel i'm running with my partner slash roommate slash best friend slash cat coparent Casey, has been really invigorating for me. i missed how much fun it was to just get something out there. not a ton of people are watching that thing, but i was running a Let's Play channel in 2025, i know how this works. the pickings were going to be slim no matter what. but i made some things i was really proud of, i developed my editing voice, and me and my friend got to laugh a lot and then other people watched it and maybe- just maybe- some of them did the little nasal exhale thing that's like a half-laugh, which counts as much as a real laugh if you're watching on your phone, that's the rules.

also the thumbnails are really good imo

so what's next for me, content-wise? what do i want to do more of? read more to find out! or don't, i'm not your boss.

thanks for still clicking even though i was kind of rude. i don't know, i feel self-indulgent talking about this stuff at all.

the first content thing i want to work on this year is this blog, clearly. it's not going to be daily- you might've noticed these posts are way too long to realistically do every day, and also telling myself i should do something daily means if i miss it one time i have a free license to never do it again. but fairly frequently, new blog posts. a couple of times a week, for sure.

the second thing is the aforementioned Best Match, which is going to continue pretty much as it was. i think i've come into my own in terms of editing style for these videos lately, and i want to keep that train rolling. i've got another one filmed ready to be edited (i'm procrastinating that as we speak), more to come. maybe eventually one of them takes off, probably none of them will, i don't care. it's fun, i like doing it. most of it isn't even real work.

and i really like the logo. that's the biggest part of this, for me.

thirdly, and weirdly maybe most importantly, i want to get back into long scripted effort videos again. i have ideas for longer video essays that i think people will really enjoy, striking a balance between going in-depth while keeping things light and funny and fun. if i can get a couple of those out this year, i'm extremely happy. if i can get one out this year, even! i miss making Big Video, it's been too long.

and then pretty much everything else artistically is going to take a bit of a backseat this year. i'm trying not to absentmindedly think of video game ideas, because realistically i'm never going to be a solo game dev and i'm okay with that. i want to keep playing with music production, because i like it, but the focus is going to mostly be on making my own background music for videos, which i think sounds like a fun challenge. i don't need to prove anything to anyone there.

hopefully it'll be a good year in terms of stuff i put out! i'm always running against some limitations there- undiagnosed adhd, some general malaise, the gravitational pull of my bed always beckoning me like some kind of a sea witch. like some kind of a witch from the sea.

sea witch.

anyways, if you're interested in seeing that stuff, i hope that stuff is there for you to see, and if not, that's cool too! either way.

i've been playing fuser and having a blast

in 2017 Harmonix, the rock band/guitar hero/frequency/amplitude studio, made DropMix, a game i had a lot of fun with. you could create mashups on the fly, whenever you wanted, splitting songs into component parts and exchanging them. it would automatically change the songs you played's keys so no matter what you did it sounded good- or at least okay. it required a big plastic thing, and an app, and then was a collectible card game on top of that. okay, so it wasn't all that great. but the potential was there.

DropMix. notice the phone app you need to have to make it work. bad idea imo!

i simply saw DropMix as something that seemed cool but was too rich for my blood until 2018, when Toys R Us closed its doors and every location had massive closeout sales. suddenly all of my friends had deeply discounted Fuser sets, as did i. i would buy as many booster packs as i could- packs that weren't random, so at the very least you always knew what you were getting. it was fun! i spent a little time playing it but much more time thinking about it. it was obviously a financial fiasco. no one wanted to pay as much money as it cost for it, and the people who bought it certainly weren't running around buying booster packs at full price. i loved the thing and even i never did that.

DropMix was a financial failure- its last cards came out in 2018, and the app was delisted in 2022, making the entire thing a paperweight now. but the idea, and Harmonix's technical aptitude, was still strong. DropMix was dead, but it was just the beginning- an even bigger successor was on its way. a successor that would, uh, also fail and be delisted. such is life.

welcome to my valley

one of my mutuals (which, by the way, mutual feels like such an impersonal term, this is someone i've been mutually posting alongside for years, we just haven't talked one-on-one), lilly, coincidentally the best person at being online to have ever been online, made a post about how everyone should start a blog, and you know what? you know fuckin, uh, what? everyone should start a blog. i'd wanted to start a blog for a while but always got caught on trying to make a neocities thing work, but, fuck that. blogspot dot com babey. why not?

so i've started

FUCK yeah

a place where i can post about fuckin uh, what ever. whatever i want. it's my desolate valley, it's not yours.