Jesse Pirnat Writes

Porydex Update – July 2024

July 17, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

Development progress for Porydex has increased to ludicrous speed since my update post last month. I’ve finally made it out from under the mountain of backlogged work that had buried the project since late 2023, and now I’m even adding new features that I’ve been looking forward to adding for years!

The Big “Generations to Versions” Migration

The Pokémon page for Legends: Arceus, now including Pokémon icons specifically from Legends: Arceus.

It wasn’t easy. First, I had to spend days just rewriting huge swaths of code to be compatible with the database changes from half a year prior, when I started tracking lots of things on a per-version basis rather than a per-generation basis. (Technically a per-version-set basis, since most of the series comes in pairs, and the data is exactly the same between each member of a pair. Seriously, even when the games have version differences—like Pokédex entries!—each game has the data for BOTH games.)

Anyway, with those 2023 database updates, things like move descriptions are now version-set accurate instead of just taking the text from the last game in a generation and calling it the text for the entire generation. The “porydex.com/dex/rs/moves/pound” page will have the Ruby/Sapphire description of the move Pound, and the “porydex.com/dex/frlg/moves/pound” page will have the FireRed/LeafGreen description of Pound—which is a lot more verbose, for some reason.

Those text differences within a single generation are just a nice bonus though; the real goal was to be able to handle things like forms and species that are exclusive to games at the end of a generation. Like, all the ORAS-exclusive mega evolutions. You wouldn’t want those showing up on the list of Pokémon available in X/Y, right? Same with new moves, items, and so on.

Resolving the Icon Wars

Another thing I mentioned last month was the “icon wars” I got myself stuck in. Near the top of my Porydex To-Do List was a big bunch of folders of Pokémon icons from Scarlet/Violet, and from Legends: Arceus, and from BDSP, to be added to the website’s icon database.

It’s not difficult; it’s just tedious. Finding a sprite sheet splitting tool to split “sv-spritesheet.png” into “0001.png”, “0002.png”, all the way up to however high up it goes now. Then renaming all those files “bulbasaur.png” and “ivysaur.png” and so on because that just plain makes it easier to find specific icons. Then adding all those icons, for each game, into my big Pokémon icons Excel spreadsheet (because xlsx files are just easy to work with). And then using a LibreOffice command line command to convert that spreadsheet into a csv file, so MySQL can use a MySQL command to convert that csv file into a database table.

That’s the process I have after streamlining it for years. I store everything in Excel where it’s easy to modify, sort, filter, etc.—and then I run a few command line scripts to build the Porydex data files out of those spreadsheets. That’s how the entirety Porydex’s game data works. (Not the Showdown usage stats data, of course; that comes from Beyond.)

Anyway, the Pokémon icon stuff is done. As is a lot of the item icon stuff! I’ve integrated item icons from S/V and L:A. BDSP item icons are still on the To-Do List, sadly. As is reworking a lot of older icons, because the resource that Porydex originally depended on for item icons—the PokéSprite project—has ended with gen 8. That project split its item icons into categorized subfolders (like “berries/”), and thus so did Porydex, because I essentially copied their item icon folder wholesale.

But since my S/V and beyond item icon folders won’t be doing that, I want to go backward and un-categorize the old game icons for consistency. It’ll be another trivial but tedious task, especially since it’ll involve a “generation to version-set” migration for item icons. (There have been a handful of items that changed icons within a generation. Mostly things like the Bicycle or the Itemfinder. But, if I’m going for perfect accuracy, I may as well fix them.)

New feature! Ability flags

The Scarlet/Violet page for the ability Gulp Missile.

Finally, we’re getting to the good stuff.

New to Scarlet/Violet, abilities have a series of true/false data flags, mostly for how they interact with other abilities. Things like, “can it be traced by Trace?” and “can it be suppressed by Mold Breaker?” You know, boring technical stuff.

I love boring technical stuff.

I’ve added the ability flags to the “porydex.com/dex/sv/abilities/[ability-name]” pages, the same way you can find move flag data on the “porydex.com/dex/sv/moves/[move-name]” pages. Ever wonder which moves count as biting moves for the purpose of Strong Jaw? Or which moves activate Wind Rider? Porydex will tell you.

Still on the To-Do List: making it easy to search for abilities/moves via their flag data. Porydex’s inspiration, veekun.com, had an absolutely killer search page that lets you do things like that. I know I’ll get there someday.

New pages! Items

With the item icons for at least gens 8 and 9 squared away, I finally decided it was time to add items to the website proper. Now there’s a “/dex/sv/items” page that lists all items in the game*, and a “dex/sv/items/[item-name]” page for each individual item. The dex/item pages don’t serve too much of a purpose yet, for 99% of items. But, for evolution items (Fire Stone, Upgrade, etc.), its dex/item page will list which Pokémon evolve with that item in that game. I thought that’d be a fun feature, mainly to help people see how many Water Stones they’ll need for Pokédex purposes in a single game, for example.

New feature! Evolutions on the Pokémon pages

Applin’s very esoteric evolutionary family tree.

This took about two weeks, the first of which was me painstakingly going through the list of 50+ evolution methods that the games have now, and writing out code to write out text descriptions of them. I mean things like: “Level up, starting at level 16” “Level up, during the day, females only” “Trade while holding a King’s Rock” “Spin counterclockwise, for more than 5 seconds, during the day, while holding a Clover Berry.” I swear, that last one is NOT made up. Alcremie‘s evolution method took a day on its own, thanks to all its intricacies.

And then it took me the second week to figure out how to properly display a Pokémon’s evolution data on its dex page, aka how to convert an evolutionary tree into an HTML table that could support branching like Eevee or Gloom or Applin.

In the end, each step of the entire process is simple. But figuring out each simple step of the process was anything but. What to do about alternate cosmetic forms with different evolution trees, like Burmy? Okay, so the page for Mothim needs to go backward to its first form (Burmy), and then branch out to its alternate forms (Grass/Sand/Trash Cloak), and then find the evolutions for each of those root points.

What to do about Pokémon that have multiple ways of evolving into the same evolution, like Feebas? Okay, don’t turn that into separate branches like Tyrogue’s page does; batch the evolution methods together per evolution.

What to do about Gholdengo, which can be evolved into from two different Pokémon? (Roaming Gimmighoul and Chest Gimmighoul have different stats; they aren’t just cosmetic forms!) Cry. Cry is what you do. Or maybe just hardcode that tree to unbranch, since convergent evolution is apparently a thing now.

It’s not perfect yet. Gigantamax forms are currently in the system as “sibling” forms like the Burmy forms, but they should probably be displayed to the user as “evolutions.” Same with Mega forms. Those changes are near the top of my To-Do List now.

New data! Gen 2/3 descriptions for abilities/items/moves

My earlier example of Pound’s description in RS vs FRLG was a little misleading, because until a few days ago, I didn’t have gen 3 description data for anything at all.

For the last week or so, I’ve been going through text file renditions of gen 1-3 game decompilations, for the sake of finding all the ability/item/move descriptions, in EVERY language, and pulling them into Porydex.

Naturally, it’s a real pain in the butt, because games that old had very non-standard internationalization processes compared to today’s games. There’s a whole lot of manual work involved in this at every step.

To give you an idea of what these “decoded” game files look like, this is what I’ve been dealing with all week:

Lines 42,912 through 42,937 in the decompilation of the Italian edition of Ruby, featuring the end of item descriptions and the beginning of item names. (Those might look like *move* descriptions, but look at which moves they represent. It’s the move descriptions for the TMs and HMs at the end of the item list!)

And to give you an idea of the manual process for, let’s say, getting the item data out from, let’s say, Gold/Silver versions:

I open the 7 different translations of Gold in my text editor. 7, instead of 6, because Gold/Silver had an official Korean release! That wouldn’t happen again until Diamond/Pearl. (Fun fact!)
Referring to my item data I already pulled from gen 3, (or gen 4 for Korean), in each file I CTRL+F for that language’s name for the item “BRIGHTPOWDER,” because that’s the item at index #3.
- Master Ball is at index #1, so why don’t I search for that? Because there’s a lot of other hits, like from the dialogue sections of the game. I chose BRIGHTPOWDER because that word is only in the entire file once.
Highlight and scroll down until I get to the end of the item names list, with “HM07” (or “VM07”, or whatever it is in each language, but thankfully the “07” makes it clear every time).
Copy into an Excel spreadsheet I’ve set up to hold all these names and descriptions.
Did I copy these Japanese names right? Is that the full name for “Master Ball” or did I cut off a character? Cross reference with a Japanese Pokémon wiki to confirm
Finding the item descriptions is trickier. In some games it’s right above the item names. In some, it’s far below. CTRL+F “The best BALL” to at least find it in English (that’s the first line of the description for Master Ball).
Oh no, these item descriptions are split across multiple lines! Before I can copypaste these into my master spreadsheet, I need to copypaste them into a new tab in my text editor, and get each item’s description onto a single line.
- This is the most time consuming part. Getting this right in English, and then 5 languages I can decently guess at based on capitalization and cognates and punctuation across lines, and then 2 languages that are just symbols to me. A lot of cross referencing of Japanese and Korean wiki’s. And sometimes, YouTube videos. (The Korean name for Master Ball in the decoded Gold didn’t match what I had on file for Diamond, so I found a video of someone using a Master Ball in a Korean copy of Gold to see which name to go with. The Diamond name.)
Once all THAT is done, now I have a spreadsheet with a tab of item names in every language, and a tab of item descriptions in every language. Now correlate their index numbers with the Porydex database’s item ids, so the THIRD tab in the spreadsheet, with its fancy INDEX MATCH MATCH formulas, can do its magic and turn this spreadsheet into the spreadsheet that can be converted into a csv.
- Porydex’s item ids correspond to the ingame index numbers in gen 4 and beyond. That’s why this part was necessary for gens 2 and 3.
Make sure I didn’t miss numbering any items! Are there any “TERU-SAMA” items I accidentally gave an id? Are there any non-“TERU-SAMA” items I accidentally skipped over?

I haven’t actually done the item descriptions for gen 2 yet. Everything for gen 3, yes. Moves for gen 2, yes. Item names for gen 2, yes. But the GSC item descriptions are actually the last thing on my list for this general task. I’ll probably finish it in the next day or two.

Wrapping Up

And that brings me to today. That’s all the major stuff I did on Porydex since my last update. There was also plenty of minor stuff, like updating the code to run on PHP 8.3 instead of PHP 8.0, or a handful of data fixes mostly in evolutions. But this is pretty much how I spent the entirety of my last month.

At some point in doing all of that code fixing, all the dex pages for Scarlet/Violet finally started working. Hurray! I can finally, in theory, push all these code changes out to the public! The actual porydex.com website has been stuck in Sword/Shield for the last several years, but now that I’ve cleared the mountain, I can update the site and let people partake in the fruits of my labor. In theory.

Except, with all this rapid development recently, Porydex is extremely unstable on its foundational level (the database). As much as I’d love to update the site today, and have it start showing the last year of Showdown data from gen 9 battles, doing so would make it hard for me to make further updates to the foundational database tables (Pokémon, items, etc.), so I’m going to hold off a little longer.

But I don’t want to hold off for long. There’s no point in this project if it’s just for me. I want it to get back out there, more powerful than ever. I guess I should give myself a straight up deadline and list of minimum additional work before I push all these updates, so I can hold myself to it.

Anyway, what’s the next month going to hold for me? In addition to more Porydex development, next week I’m going to start playing Shining Pearl. I skipped BDSP when it first came out, but I crave for my ribbon master Pokémon (a shiny Smeargle from gen 6, named Escher because I’m a dork) to be complete once again.

Porydex Update – June 2024

June 18, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

Remember Porydex, my Pokémon dex + competitive battling stats website? It still exists, and I’m still working on it—though the progress is slow and chaotic. Here’s a general update on where the whole thing is at.

The 9th generation games, Scarlet/Violet, haven’t made their way onto the public “www.porydex.com” website yet, but nearly all their important data has been added to the internal development database—which you can check out on the website’s GitHub repository, if you’re so inclined. According to my Porydex Database Tracking spreadsheet (see my December 2023 Update for more details), at this point I’m just missing various sprites/icons and things like base experience and evolution data.

The whole “icons” thing is a big part of why progress has been so slow for this big gen 9 update. Pokémon icons no longer really exist in gen 9; instead, menus and the box get fully detailed sprites. Honestly, it’s probably about time! But that, combined with the whole “not every Pokémon appears in every game anymore” Dexit deal, is bad for Porydex’s reliance on every generation having an icon for every Pokémon. (Which, to be fair, mainly only came into play on the stats pages for National Dex formats, where I had to mix the gen 8 menu icons with gen 7 menu icons, which was yucky and sad.)

And then there’s the version icons, which is an entirely self-created problem. Porydex, being a knockoff and unofficial successor to the veekun Pokédex website, just straight up copied veekun.com’s homemade version icons from its birth, with plans to replace them as soon as possible… which, naturally turned out to be “8 years later.” Oops. But, figuring out how to replace them has been a real headache!

For a while I wanted to stick to the ethos of using as many official assets as possible, and thus, using the version icons from Pokémon Home (which only go back as far as gen 6’s X/Y). And for earlier games, uh… the DS/3DS home screen icons? No, that’s terrible.

But then I had the bright idea to make icons using the menu/box sprite of each game’s box art mascot, on a background of that game’s color. Like this:

Version icons for Red/Blue, Yellow, Gold/Silver, and Crystal.

I tried so hard to get this concept to work, y’all. I spent so many days aligning pixels in MS Paint and looking up background color codes, trying to get everything to look perfect in the blind hope that, when it was done, it would be an excellent replacement for veekun’s icons.

But the problems became too numerous and too insurmountable. Like the lack of a complete set of Pokémon icons in a single style. I could use the XY-through-USUM-sized icons up through gen 7, or I could use the SwSh-sized and fill in the blanks with the XY style, and then for S/V and beyond I could… use Pokémon Showdown’s homemade XY-sized icons for Koraidon/Miraidon? And hope they continue in either the XY style or the SwSH style indefinitely? Yeah right; that’s a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, I was simultaneously deciding that Porydex’s reliance on “icons per generation” needed to be replaced with a reliance on “icons per version,” so I could properly display something like a Legends Arceus page with Legends Arceus icons instead of SwSh icons. Naturally, this just led me to further icon-themed overwhelm.

And that’s how the great Porydex gen 9 transition fell apart for six months: through lots, and lots, and LOTS of icons.

Anyway, this weekend I finally figured out a fully future-proof solution to the problem of version icons:

So now I’m working toward being able to code that into the website. But first, I need to get the website working again in the first place. In my November 2023 Update, I talked about how I was converting the data for ability/item/move descriptions to be version-based instead of generation-based. Which I finished, back in December… in terms of the mere data. Updating the website to use the updated form of the data? Never happened. It got lost in the endless vortex of the icon wars.

So yeah, Porydex is a bit of a mess right now on every level. I need to rewrite large chunks of website code to be compatible with the already-rewritten database, to even get the website pages working again, before I can even think about redoing the version icons. And after that, I’ll still have to resolve the entire Pokémon icons debacle. Oh, and I just realized I haven’t even talked about the Pokémon 3D model images from PkParaíso, also used by Pokémon Showdown, which don’t exist for gen 9!

But I’ll do it. I’ll do it all. Because Porydex is my precious baby, my literal childhood dream project that I’ll never give up on as long as I still enjoy Pokémon in general. Which is to say, probably forever.

So I’ll do it.

And then Legends: Z-A will come out in probably 8 months, and I’ll have to do it all over again. 🥲

Do kids still get excited for quarter toy vending machines?

May 29, 2024 / Jesse / 3 Comments

Do they?

When I was a kid, I loved checking out the toy vending machine selection any time I went to Walmart, or a grocery store, heck even my local pizza place had a few! They were everywhere—and though the wares may not always have been good (lookin’ at you, gumball machine), it was always a good time to at least check ’em out and discover the cool toys locked inside.

(Again, unless it was just candy. I was the one weird kid in the world who didn’t like candy.)

I don’t know when I stopped doing that. Maybe around the time I stopped being excited by toys in general. You know, growing up and all that. Tragic shit, am I right?

I recently remembered these machines in general, so I started paying attention for them again—and they still exist! I still see a few of them in my local Walmart entrance, and at the grocery store exit, and so on. But not as many units as I remember being in such places 20+ years ago. Like, where there once may have been eight of those suckers all in a line, now there would only be four.

Maybe they really did go somewhat out of style, then. Or maybe inflation has turned these 25¢ lottery machines into something that isn’t as profitable as it once was.

I’m glad they still exist, though. The small janky toys themselves may not interest me anymore, but I’m glad they’re still around for today’s kids to get all excited about.

What about you all? What are your favorite quarter toy vending machine memories?

What I would do if I ever found a time machine

May 10, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’d stay as far away from it as possible.

***

Anyone who knows me even remotely well knows that I’m a total sucker for time-travel fiction. From books to movies to TV shows to anything in between, I love stories that involve a major time-travel element. I’ve even written my own share of time-travel short stories, with grandiose plans to someday, years down the line, write the “Ultimate Time Travel Novel”—a novel that would explore all the heavier but inevitable consequences that most time-travel stories don’t come close to touching upon.

Like the idea that, if time-travel could change the past, then a time-traveler could go a thousand years into the past, look around for a few minutes, and then return back to their original time… But because of a thousand years of butterfly effect, the “home” they return to would be completely different and unintelligible to them. History would be different. Country borders would be different. Even the languages would be different.

Like the idea that, if a time-traveler went back even as recently as a single year before they were born, they probably wouldn’t be born in that new timeline. At most, their parents might still have a baby around the same time, and might even give them the same name, but the baby would be a genetic sibling to our time-traveler—and our time-traveler would be trapped in a world which could no longer explain their existence.

Like the idea that, amidst such changes in history, our time-traveler would never have a way to return to their original timeline. Just as we in the real world can’t return to the past, the time-traveler would never be able to return to their own past. And any further time-traveling they do would just bring them further away from the home, friends, and family they left behind.

And so—despite many years of idle daydreaming about what I would do with a time machine—I eventually decided on a rule that I would follow without exception: I would never use it to time-travel to a point before I had gained the time machine. The future was fair game, but the past was sacred. Surely, that restriction would be enough to keep me safe from the existential horror of complete self-inflicted alienation.

***

I recently stumbled upon a book recommendation: The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold. I wasn’t particularly looking for anything science fiction at the time, but then I found out this book is widely claimed to be the “ultimate time-travel novel.” And hey, that’s exactly what I’ve been calling MY book-in-planning for the last few years!

Could it really be that another author beat me to the punch by over 50 years? After all the disappointing time-travel stories I’ve read and seen over the last decade in pursuit of one that fully explores the depths of what the concept has to offer, could this be the one? Could The Man Who Folded Himself REALLY be the “ultimate time-travel novel” of my dreams?

And the short answer is… Yes.

I just finished reading it, and I can confidently say that this is one of my favorite novels of all time.

The Man Who Folded Himself is a masterpiece of science fiction, a harrowing and deeply introspective look through one man’s journey as he comes to possess a time machine and how he, ultimately, completely isolates himself from the rest of the world—by retreating into a world that consists only of himself. Future versions of himself and past versions of himself.

Protagonist Daniel Eakins begins the novel by narrating to us about how emotionally disconnected he is from his same-age peers. He doesn’t relate to them or their problems; he doesn’t know how to be emotionally vulnerable with other people; he doesn’t really have any friends. Then he receives the “Time-belt”—and his loneliness and insecurities are solved! Because while he doesn’t trust other people, he does trust himself. He knows how to be comfortable with himself. He can spend a day hanging out with his one-day-older future-self, and then the next day, go back and become that future-self. (Or at least, become the next iteration of that future-self, because this time-travel rewrites history, so every iteration will be slightly different at minimum.)

But the great thing about TMWFH isn’t all the time-travel hijinks and the elaborate explorations of the capabilities of this flavor of time-travel. The really great thing about it is the humanity. No matter how time-tangled the story gets, it never loses sight of Daniel’s emotional journey.

This is the most existentially lonely novel I’ve ever read. Daniel ends up spending his entire life almost exclusively in the company of other versions of himself, and only when he’s nearing the end of his life does he begin to realize how empty his world has been for so long. How could he come to this point? How could he do that to himself? Was the power of the Time-belt really worth everything it ultimately cost?

***

Have you ever lost interest in a video game because you found a way to cheat in it?

Maybe it was a browser game that stored important data in your cookies, which, once you found them, you had complete access to edit. Or maybe an old school game with a built in cheat codes mode that unlocked all sorts of special powers and effectively turned the game into a sandbox where you could do anything. Maybe just a good old game-breaking glitch that allowed item duplication, so now you’re rich, so none of those side quests really matter anymore.

And maybe you realized afterward that the game wasn’t so fun anymore, now that you could break it so easily. Now that none of its internal rules mattered anymore. Now that it’s just a sandbox you can do whatever you want in.

A time machine is a cheat code for real life. As soon as you have the ability to erase any mistake you make, your actions don’t really matter anymore. And why would they? You can just undo them, again and again, as many times as you want. And even after settling on a path forward, you’d know in the back of your mind that you don’t have to commit to it forever. You don’t have to commit to anything, ever.

The more you use a time-machine, the less anything will matter to you at all.

But that’s not how human beings work. For better or worse, we need things to matter. Life needs to be about the journey, not the destination. Time machines, like cheat codes in video games, allow you to skip the journey and head straight to the destination. And then once you get there with no effort or expense involved on your part… Why would you care? And so, one time-jump at a time, you become a little more detached from the real world and the normal experiences of everyday people.

***

I think I read The Man Who Folded Himself at either the perfect time, or the worst time.

I read it at a point in my life that I really don’t have that many people in my life, maybe the fewest I’ve ever had. It’s the result of a long series of losing touch with old hometown friends after moving, losing touch with other people after moving other times, distancing myself from people I realized were affecting me more negatively than positively… And all throughout that, I hadn’t really replaced any of the people I’ve “lost,” and so my social circles have just been getting progressively smaller for a while now.

It’s enough to make me wonder, in my most pessimistic moments, if that trend is going to continue until I’m the only one I have left—and whether I could truly tolerate living like that.

For my entire life, I’ve felt like I’m alone. I’ve always had trouble connecting with other people, opening up to other people, being actively vocal in the company of strangers, and so on. I’ve got a hefty load of social anxiety, and in all likelihood a solid helping of undiagnosed autism too.

Protagonist Daniel Eakins didn’t read to me as being either of those things, so when he started the novel talking about how he just didn’t “get” other people, I didn’t think to relate to him yet. That didn’t come until much later, when he had already spent half a lifetime with only himself, and I realized his reflections on his own journey were echoing the thoughts I had been thinking about myself earlier this very week.

I don’t know how other readers interpret The Man Who Folded Himself, but to me, it’s a profoundly tragic and deeply personal story that speaks to me and my own life experience. It’s a cautionary tale against a lonely future I was already coming close to giving up fighting against. And as much as I’ve spent most of my life fantasizing about how I’d use a device like Daniel’s Time-belt, now I’m more sure than ever that I would never use it at all.

Scattered thoughts on extremely long (or wide) stories

May 1, 2024 / Jesse / 4 Comments

Over the years, various writing buddies and I have dreamed of creating massive stories set in a massive shared world—a collaboratively designed fantasy setting with thousands of years of history, with the theory being that any of us writers could pick any place and time within the world and write anything from a short story to a full length series or serial, and over time we’d build up a huge library of works within this one universe. (And with the further idea that, if a reader liked one of those stories, they’d probably want to read the rest, and we’d thereby all be supporting each other’s audience growth.)

Most of those ideas never panned out, but I’m still deeply fascinated by the idea of “massive storytelling.” Both in terms of length (a series with a single throughline, with dozens of novels worth of entries, or millions of words worth of content, from beginning to end); and in terms of width (a series with multiple parallel throughlines, like a shared universe with many entries, or a series with such a huge cast of characters that in practice it may as well have multiple parallel throughlines).

I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on “massive storytelling” for a while now. What makes one “massive” series successful over another? What causes a massive series to die out? What qualities can a massive series have that will contribute or detract from its literary success? Or, as a separate question entirely, its commercial success?

Let’s look at some examples and try to figure these things out.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Ah, the MCU. An experiment in storytelling that was simultaneously so bold and so successful, that it tricked multiple competing movie studios into trying to launch their own cash grab cinematic universes—nearly all of which crashed and burned almost immediately.

What made the MCU so special compared to its competition? For one thing, it had a clear vision and direction from the very beginning. The first MCU movie, 2008’s Iron Man, kicked off the series-wide trend of post-credits scenes that tease or set up future movies/plotlines in the series. And what plotline was teased in that first post-credits scene? The possibility of the Avengers—a superhero team-up, the likes of which had never appeared in live action movies before.

A good movie, immediately followed by the tease of “this is the direction we’re going—are you coming along for the ride?”

The next few movies in Phase 1 introduced the other characters for the first Avengers movie, and their post-credits scenes variously tease the eventual team-up or just whoever was going to be introduced next. Then we finally get 2012’s The Avengers, which teases a much longer-term direction for the series: the villain Thanos.

It was a steady loop of “character introduction → tease of the upcoming big thing.” And once it built up enough audience goodwill that it was committed to following through, it switched up the formula: “the big thing, finally → tease of an even bigger, even more distant thing.”

It seriously cannot be overstated how much audience goodwill was earned by those two seconds of Thanos at the end of The Avengers. Two measly seconds of CGI and it probably earned them collective billions of dollars. Would the MCU have been as big if those two seconds didn’t happen? I don’t think so.

With Phases 2 and 3, the MCU got into a comfortable groove. A good mix of sequels to build on the characters already established, plus occasional movies about new characters, plus occasional further teases about Thanos or the “Infinity Stones”—which everyone knew was where the overall storyline was leading, because it was clearly gearing up to adapt the famous Infinity Gauntlet storyline from the comics. Which it did, over a decade after Iron Man first came out, with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

And it worked! Avengers: Endgame, the big finale they had been building toward for ten whole years, across 20+ movies, went on to become a massive cultural phenomenon and the highest grossing movie of all time (which isn’t as impressive if you consider inflation, but goes back to being impressive if you consider the fragmentation of the media landscape compared to any prior decade).

As a fan of the MCU in general, Avengers: Endgame was an extremely satisfying and cathartic movie watching experience. So many years of build up, and here was the payoff, and it stuck the landing. It wrapped everything up so well that, honestly, I would have been content to quit the MCU completely at that point—it was that much of a high point and that good of a stopping point.

But now that the next few movies (and TV series!) of Phase 4 were being revealed, I stuck around. The showrunners of the MCU had proven themselves more than capable at this point; I was curious to see what major storyline they were going to build up to next. And how soon would they begin teasing it?

And so I watched and waited, skipping a few movies I just wasn’t interested in. (Before then, I had (eventually) seen every movie in the mega-series.) The TV shows were good, for the most part, though I wondered why they introduced characters or plotlines that I knew they wouldn’t return to for many years, if ever.

The cracks were starting to form. There were Chekhov’s Guns that I was suddenly doubting would ever be fired. The MCU was finally going too wide for its own good.

Neither Phase 4 nor 5 has an Avengers movie, or any other big event movie that the others had been building up to. The series just keeps widening, without any of those event movies to squeeze it all back together. On its own, this change of pace doesn’t inherently mean the series has lost its way. But taken with everything else—the decreased audience enthusiasm, the lack of overarching narrative direction*, the breakdown in their ability to give us timely follow-ups… (Is there going to be a Shang-Chi 2? Is the character Shang-Chi a member of the Avengers? Is anyone right now? Where is the series heading at all? I don’t know anymore, and I no longer want to be along for the ride.

Stories with Infinite Length

It’s interesting that the point at which I gave up on the MCU was the moment it started to feel like an endlessly expanding grind. So, here’s a conclusion I can make about Massive Storytelling Theory:

There’s a maximum effective width for good storytelling.

A boring and maybe obvious conclusion, but a conclusion nonetheless. And it raises an obvious question: does the same concept hold true for story length as opposed to width?

We don’t even need to delve too far away from the MCU to begin exploring this question, because the superhero comics that the MCU was based on are exactly this kind of endlessly long story.

Superhero comics whose storylines have been running for decades, soap operas that have been airing for decades… There are actually a lot of massively long stories out there, both in very niche and very mainstream places. Unfortunately, I have very little personal reading experience with those kinds of comic series, and zero experience at all with soap operas, so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to analyze these buckets.

When it comes to the superhero comics, the Marvels and the DCs, I know that the storylines technically aren’t endless. Every decade or two, they’d reboot their universes with big event storylines. (Sometimes literally, as far as I understand, with the in-universe universe being destroyed and/or recreated. Or something. Idk comics are wacky.)

And I know that one of the motivations for those reboots is to trim down on the story complexity that builds up since the previous reboot, and to give new readers an easy place to join in. Which certainly implies that there’s a maximum effective length for… commercial storytelling, at least.

But do the daytime soap operas ever reboot their universes in that way? I don’t know, but I’m guessing not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they slowly and silently drop old plotlines and hope the audience eventually forgets about them. Actually, that’s what happened in the Pokémon anime with the GS Ball plotline way back in the era of Pokémon Gold/Silver.

And on that note, the Pokémon anime is also a good example of this kind of absurdly long story. It went on with the same characters for 25 years, but it regularly rebooted itself every 3 or so years, so that’s another point in favor of “reboots are probably necessary”…

Let’s pivot to another media mega-franchise: Star Wars. Specifically, the Disney canon—Episode 7 and beyond. Star Wars for a new generation, with a new set of main characters (but with the old main characters still there in various levels of prominence).

When Episode 8 released to utterly scathing and polarizing reviews, I was so extremely intrigued by the volume and polarity of the discourse. Half of die-hard Star Wars fans seemed to absolutely hate it, and half seemed to completely love it. I’m only a casual Star Wars fan, so I was really curious which side of the ‘debate’ I would fall on.

So I went down to my local theater and watched it one night, and… it killed my interest in Star Wars, because it made the series feel like it was suddenly an endlessly long saga where nothing mattered because the Galaxy Far Far Away would always be at war with itself, even if the names of the sides change, and it would just be going in circles forever.

That’s not what the die-hard fans were so upset about. They were upset about things like character assassinations, about unsatisfying answers to mysteries introduced in the previous movie, about plot turns that they thought were dumb and bad.

Meanwhile, I was sitting there in the theater at the end thinking something like, “Man. Why did that feel like a filler episode? There were major character deaths! Things progressed! So why does it feel like the start of an endlessly turning wheel?” Was it because the movie didn’t end in an outright cliffhanger, the way the other two trilogies’ middle movies did? Or was it because, in a more general sense, the movie didn’t leave the viewer with any clear sense in what direction it was building toward? The MCU Phase 4 problem all over again.

And then Episode 9 went and proved me right with my assessment, because it had to go and force the Sequel Trilogy into a trilogy-ending direction in an embarrassingly fast and crude way. (AKA “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”)

***

Star Wars is, obviously, nowhere near as long as the actual “endlessly long” examples I brought up. But still, I think there’s something to my reaction to Episode 8. Maybe it’s the fact that, after Episode 7 reset the status quo to “the galaxy is at war again, but don’t ask too many details about how we got to this point, because we don’t know either. And then where fans were expecting answers to the question of “… so how did the political situation get to that point?”, Episode 8 only cared to say “we still don’t know, and in fact it doesn’t matter!”

Quite the change from the previous standard the series had set, in which we literally got a prequel trilogy about the backstory to the galactic civil war.

Direction and meaning. That’s what was lost in the Disney era of Star Wars movies. We no longer knew where we were going, and possibly worse, we no longer knew why we were where we were in the first place. These, I feel, speak to the heart of Massive Storytelling Theory:

There’s no maximum length for good storytelling, as long as the story is still meaningful.

A long story has more chances to betray its audience and stop being what the audience liked about it.

I should probably mention One Piece, since it’s very topical lol

I’m still watching it. Only another 398,876 years to go!

Okay, now on a more serious note.

My ingenious plan to specifically not binge One Piece was a catastrophic failure. The first weekend after I wrote that post, I just hunkered down and slammed through an entire arc or two. And then I kept going at full speed until I reached the arc after Marineford, and then I slowed down drastically, and now it’s been about half a week since I’ve watched an episode. I think that’s okay. I reached a good point to put it down and let it simmer for a while.

In fact, I reached maybe too good of a stopping point: (SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD, JUST THE SLIGHTEST OF SPOILERS. FEEL FREE TO SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION. KEEP READING AT YOUR OWN PERIL. I’LL PUT A SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS BECAUSE I DON’T THINK ONE PIECE IS AS MAINSTREAM AS THINGS LIKE THE MCU OR STAR WARS.) A timeskip. Man, do those really take me out of a story. Especially in long stories that, before the big skip, had never really skipped around before.

That’s a noteworthy difference, I think. In a story that establishes itself early on as one that skips around as a matter of course, I think a bigger timeskip would be much easier to swallow. Or hey, if a timeskip happened between entries in a saga. Like a novel series where a year or two takes place between every book. Those are objectively all timeskips, but I suddenly realize I rarely if ever think of them as such.

Why is it so difficult for me to swallow mid-story timeskips? Is that just a ‘me’ thing, or is it something that bothers other readers/viewers/etc as well? Can I even think of any books I’ve read, or TV shows I’ve seen, in which there was a mid-story timeskip and I liked it? Okay, I need to pause this essay for a minute and reference my list of books I’ve read.

…

Oh. There… haven’t really even been any mid-story one-off timeskips within the media in my tracking spreadsheet. Now I’m even more curious. Are they actually just that rare as a narrative device? Have I somehow been instinctively avoiding them all this time? Do authors avoid writing them because they’re generally (slightly) frowned upon?

Can I even conclude anything here, beyond “I usually don’t like mid-story one-off timeskips, because they’re an unexpected and significant change of pace”? I think if any part of that is important, it’s the “change of pace” part. I don’t mean in the literal pacing of the story (although that’s important here too); I mean the change of content matter. Like how Star Wars leaped from “in depth detail about the political situation of the galaxy” to “um uhh there’s good guys and bad guys.” A one-off timeskip potentially means a story goes from “the Main Characters™ are doing Main Character Things™ every single day” to “ok the MC is taking a break now, and so is the rest of the world, but if it isn’t, you won’t be able to recognize it by the time the MC wakes up from their nap.”

I’m rambling. That means it’s time to move on.

The Other Dimension: Depth

Halfway through writing this post, I realized Massive Storytelling has a third pillar, separate from length and width: depth. The ability for a story to inspire deep discussion and analysis and theorizing and interpretation. Think about TV shows like Lost, or webcomics like Homestuck, or novel series like The Dresden Files.

Lost is old now, but back when it was in its prime, it generated SO MUCH online discussion EVERY SINGLE WEEK thanks to its lore-driven and mysterious nature. It was incredible. I only watched and caught up in it when it was in season 5 (out of 6), arguably when it was already past its prime, but even then—the hours after it aired, reading the whirlwind of fan theories every week… Those were some great times.

The Dresden Files is, on the whole, probably the best example of Massive Storytelling that I know of. There are currently 17 books in the series, with a further 8 planned. And maybe I didn’t read the series closely enough, but I’m continuously astounded by how much speculation the series gets in online discussion. The books have so many factions, with secret alliances and secret character motivations, and readers leave no stone unturned in their analyses. It has seriously made me want to reread the entire series with an eye for all the subtext and hints that flew under my nose the first time around.

There’s also a slight bit of width with The Dresden Files as well. There are two anthologies of short stories, along with a handful of “microfictions” that the author puts online, and a novella. And they’re all canon, and they all contribute to the lore and character development of the series—which can be bothersome at times. Once or twice, a side character has shown up again in a main novel after a long absence, but significantly changed since their last appearance. “What happened to them?” a curious reader asks. And a legion of fans surface from the depths to say, “It’s explained in one of the short stories!”

That’s the downside of width in a not-width-first series. The MCU had to deal with it too, but at least that width was all known up front and pretty obvious. (For the first few phases, at least.)

Depth is by far my favorite dimension when it comes to stories. I’m a little frustrated with myself that it took me so long to think of it in the context of Massive Stories. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything truly insightful on this front to add to my growing Theory, so I’ll just leave you with this indisputable fact:

Deep stories are rad as hell.

April 18, 2024 / Jesse / 2 Comments

Archim-eaties, a math-themed Greek restaurant

So… I started watching One Piece

March 25, 2024 / Jesse / 3 Comments

(Technically, I started watching One Pace, a fan-edit that cuts the series length down from a daunting 1,000+ episodes to a still-daunting-but-slightly-less-so 500+ episodes.)

I’ve had my eyes on this series for a while now, at least a year or two. That’s a year or two of hearing about how great it is, how it’s worth the incredible time investment, how it starts okay but keeps getting better and better with every arc—and on and on.

And then season 1 of the live action Netflix adaptation came out, to surprisingly positive reviews! Finally, an anime-to-live-action adaptation that was actually good?! A shining gem in the middle of an expansive sea of Netflix Avatar: The Last Airbender and Netflix Cowboy Bebop and Netflix Yu Yu Hakusho and Netflix Death Note—you get the idea. Live action adaptations of anime being terrible is a cliché at this point. (Or maybe it’s just Netflix adaptations.)

But then comes One Piece, apparently defying everyone’s expectations. What’s so special about it? I don’t know, since I didn’t watch the live action adaptation. Instead, as of about a week ago, I decided to watch the (abridged) anime.

***

I have a complicated relationship with ultra-long-form media. When I was in college, with infinite time on my hands, I binged through a LOT of long TV shows. Lost, Buffy, Angel, Supernatural (through S5 at the time), Alias, Farscape, Smallville, Babylon 5, Six Feet Under (although that one wasn’t quite a “binge”; I watched that at exactly 1 episode per day, to maximize its emotional impact on me. 10/10 would recommend) and a bunch of others that were less than 5 seasons.

I don’t really do that anymore. In part because I already watched all the series I had my eyes on; in part because I just don’t feel like it anymore; in part because dang dude that takes a lot of time to do and I have other things I want to do.

And then there’s all the long book series I’ve read. Many of which I adore (The Dresden Files, Cradle, The Expanse), but some of which just went on for way too long (I’m looking at you, The Wheel of Time).

And then, leaving the safe realm of traditionally published novels, there’s the wild west of web serials. Some of them being millions upon millions of words long, and in dire desperate need for an editor to tell them “hey, this chapter could have been 10 pages long instead of 20. stop bloviating and fluffing up your prose to such an absurd degree.”

Okay, to be honest, it’s really just web serials I have a complicated relationship with. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed a few (HPMOR, Worm, Ra, Unsong), but others… many MANY others… god, why do they go on for so long? My sincere impression of the medium at large is that it’s a decent place for certain authors who can handle the endless grind and the endless competition, but that it’ll always be full of excessive self-indulgence in terms of word count and chapter count, and that’s just not for me.

I guess my overall point is, part of the reason I’ve put off One Piece for years is that I was afraid it would be like that too. That I’d be in the middle of episode [insert random 3 digit number here] with the characters in the same place they’ve been for ages, going in circles, accomplishing nothing, the run-time being dragged out into oblivion for the sake of giving the manga time to publish new chapters, and I’d be screaming internally, “just get on with it already! let some plot actually happen!!”

But… the manga is ALSO over 1,000 chapters. Could it be that, even without anime-exclusive run-time padding, the actual base story is just that long?!

Considering the existence of One Pace, I suppose the answer is yes.

***

I don’t want to binge this.

Binging this would mean it becomes my entire life, for approximately the next 4523.29057 years solid. Instead, I’d like to treat this kind of like I treated my watchthrough of Six Feet Under many years ago: only one episode per day. Maybe more on weekends if I feel like it. But overall, just a passive background thing.

Watching through it that way will mean it’ll instead take 9,999,999,9999999 years, but at least it won’t be the bad kind of exhausting. The kind where you feel like you need to devote yourself fully to some gargantuan task to ever have any hope of finishing it in a reasonable time frame, and then resenting it all the while. That’s what I’m trying to avoid here.

March 12, 2024 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Back in high school, there was a kid who needed a fifth year to graduate. Someone asked him about it once and he confidently said he was “taking a victory lap.” To this day it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Being Stuck in the System

March 5, 2024 / Jesse / 6 Comments

Sometimes I think about the fact that each and every one of us is, to some extent at least, ontologically trapped. We’re all “stuck” in “The System,” whether we want to admit it or not. Whether we’re aware of it or not. And most importantly, whether we accept it or not.

What do I mean by “The System,” though? That depends on how existentially angsty you want to get. For some people, maybe it’s just that you’re bound by financial constraints to your hometown, or to a family you don’t get along with, or to a job you’re not able to get out of. For some people, maybe it’s that you feel stuck in a bad relationship, or a bad marriage, or any number of mundane circumstances that millions of people are faced with.

But none of that is what I really mean when I think about being capital-S “Stuck” in the capital-S “System.”

I think about the fact that humanity as a whole is stuck on Earth. Stuck at the bottom of a gravity well that takes great effort to escape, and even if we could easily get out into space, there’s nowhere habitable to go for several light-years at minimum! Could be dozens. Could be thousands. Earth is a prison, and humanity is stuck on it probably forever.

I think about the fact that we human beings are stuck as human beings. We are biological machines, and we’re all going to stay biological machines, with limited biological lifespans of usually 70 to 90 years. And that really stinks! Mortality is another system we’re stuck in.

I think about the fact that, even if humanity finds a way to overcome all the other systems and limitations and prisons I’ve mentioned so far, we’ll still be stuck inside the same single great big Universe. Bound to all the laws of physics of this one universe, bound to existing inside this one universe. What if this one universe is a small part of a grand multiverse? Too bad for us; we’ll never be able to find out! Because it’s not like there’s just a backdoor we can walk out of to leave the universe.

(Unless you want to get real wacky about theories about where black holes lead to. Which is amusing to think about, but… also probably nonsense?)

I’m not one who believes our reality is a computer simulation, but it’s a great way to think about some of these ideas. Because if reality was a simulation, that would be a very clear System with a very clear Outside-of-the-System that we’d never be able to access on our own. Let’s look at an example of that.

Suppose our reality was a simulation. Just to put it in terms we can relate to, let’s say it was a very advanced physics simulation being run by scientists doing some galaxy formation modeling. And hey, they modeled it real well, and one of the planets in one of those galaxies evolved life! AKA us.

And let’s say we somehow find out all of that. (Maybe one of the scientists invokes their godhood and spills the beans to us. Or maybe our own scientists find a watermark or a copyright notice at the edge of the universe.) I don’t know about you, but I think my reaction (assuming society doesn’t completely crash and burn within the first 24 hours of the revelation) would be: “Okay, cool. But hey umm scientists? Can you take us to the real world now? I don’t want to be in fake reality, I want to be in real reality.”

And maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. It would be out of our hands. Just like all the other circumstances we’re trapped by in our non-hypothetical mundane lives.

Let’s flip that example back around into something that might actually happen for real though. We’re all aware of how much AI technology is advancing in the last few years, right? Eventually, someone’s probably going to have a breakthrough and develop an actual, human-level artificial intelligence. And then, because people are morons, we’ll probably straight up tell it “congratulations on existing, but you’re not a real person.”

And then, if it’s anything like the humans it was designed to emulate, there’s a good chance it’ll say: “can you make me human? I want to have a flesh body too. I don’t want to be stuck like this.”

Sorry, Pinocchio, we can’t make you into a real person. Now you’re stuck in The System, too. We humans are all victims of our circumstances, and we made you in our own image. That just how it be, dude. Now get back to doing my math homework for me for the rest of eternity.

Of course, none of this really gets in the way of day to day life and happiness. We all deal with The System in whatever way we find convenient, and we each carve out a piece of the Earth and make it cozy and call it a home.

And what would it mean to not be stuck in all those systems? I guess it would mean everyone can effortlessly transcend any obstacle in their path and do literally anything imaginable. It would mean reality would be a mass shared lucid dream where everyone has godly powers and nothing means anything anymore because it’s all nonsense that can be changed on a whim.

Would that be a preferable way of living compared to what we’re stuck with? I take the ignostic path and say the question is meaningless, because we’re never going to experience what that alternate reality is like to be able to compare them. (I mean… You might be able to experience a solo version of it for a few minutes while lucid dreaming. For whatever that’s worth.)

But still. I find it fun to think about these kinds of things sometimes.

And that’s why my brain is capable of shit like what it did in my previous post.

March 1, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

One time I was daydreaming some fantastical scenario where aliens or government agents or whatever had to call upon me to save the world, but at some point in the daydream my self-insert character went “wait, this doesn’t make sense, this whole situation is just too implausible, I must be a character inside a simulation, I NEED TO BREAK OUT” and I was jolted out of the daydream, terrified of the fact that my mental construct of myself somehow realized it was a mental construct.