Harp the Wigglytuff @wigglytuffitout@computerfairi.es

leans into the fediverse this mornernoon while eating a poptart

so............. are yall good

im getting the feeling yall arent good and that Something has Happened

yall wanna poptart instead

i've probably messed up the threading there at some point so uh. as an apology for spamming up timelines, please accept this corgi getting his ruffle wuffled

so yeah, it's not exactly tearing down the berlin wall here.

but i will say that seeing my big articuno flap its way behind me (and utterly demolish the 8th pokemon gym)?

feels pretty good.

...i finally did what my 10-year-old self would beat herself up for messing up for years.

so i wisely promptly put my switch into sleep mode instead of trying to do it while mostly asleep myself, googled some strategies for the fight, thanked my lucky stars that #PokemonLetsGo is in many ways MUCH more accessible than the original #PokemonYellow , and yesterday...

...i found articuno.

and i remembered all those years of feeling ashamed because i screwed it up and missed out on one of my favourite pokemon.

and then, the other night, i was meandering my way through the Seafoam cave, grumbling about block puzzles into my pillow as i was getting ready to sleep, i hopped up on my eevee's surfboard thinking i had found a way through, and....

fortunately when Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu was announced, i was wholeheartedly ready to hitch my wagon to that nostalgia train. and - while i'm not going to say i'm any smarter than my 10 year old self - i will say i had more experience playing pokemon games at that point thanks to X/Y, Sun/Moon, etc.

my next pokemon game? Black and White. bought secondhand.

a solid decade and a bit of no pokemon.

as for the gameboy - all i could think of when i played even tetris on it was being ashamed how i failed. so, when next year the family our school class 'adopted' to give gifts for charity to had written down that one of the kids wanted a gameboy, i packed up mine to give.

so i pretended to be not interested in pokemon anymore, and then went back to the games that i knew on the PC. it would be years before i played a game myself on a console. i was well into college before i tried a handhold console again.

instead of doing anything sensible, i put my gameboy away and then... didn't touch it. because every time i thought about it, i just felt ashamed, because it was my fault that i failed. and all i could think about was that failure.

now this is the point where other kids would probably have cried about it and then moved on or asked their parents to buy them a gameshark or whatever. unfortunately, i was not most kids (a reoccurring theme in my life), so instead i just panicked. (and i think i also did cry.)

so i made sure i had everything ready, i carefully whittled down articuno's health, and then...

...my pikachu got a crit.

"you have defeated articuno!"

i made it all the way to the seafoam island cave... and... stumbled across articuno. and i was SO EXCITED. because i knew from recess how cool the legendary birds were, and articuno was the PRETTIEST of all of them. (swooshy, elegant, and blue. i was sold.)

so of course being the elementary schooler i was, i immediately settled in to playing it. pokemon yellow was my first pokemon game. you can probably see why, even though i got Let's Go Eevee, i immediately went to viridian forest and caught a pikachu to follow me around.