My Blapril Is Over

We did it! We've reached the end of Blapril 2020! (Well, due to a technicality it actually runs to May 9th, but just to keep things consistent year by year I'm calling this the end for me.)

Within the month I posted twenty times  (if I count a few extra warm-up days on the start), and I even like quite a few of the things I wrote, so we're counting the whole thing as a resounding success. I've spent a lot of this month thinking about what to write about and looking forward to writing, and while that has mostly resulted in an over-large ideas folder rather than a whole bunch of posts, that also bodes well for the possibility of continuing to write into May and potentially on into the future (even if my track-record of keeping the place running outside of blog festivals leaves a little to be desired...come back in a week and see how that turns out?).

As we complete the month and the posts of appreciation, relief, and thanks roll in, it has left our noble leader Belghast pondering about the value of the challenge aspect of our little annual blogging festival; whether driving ourselves past our comfort zone to post more than we would normally in order to get special shinies to hang on our blogs is really worth the sense of burn-out that so often follows. I didn't think I really had a horse in this race, as I don't think I've ever displayed one of the Blaugust badges that I've won over the years. I am enough of a geek to appreciate gamifying any and every aspect of life that you can, but I take part for the sense of community and encouragement, not for the prizes. 

But perhaps that's the point, because it's clear that despite never going in for the shinies, Blaugust is undoubtedly the thing that gets me back to blogging. Let's take a look at the numbers:

2011: posted 38 times, 27 of them were in Blaugust, with the rest spread throughout the year.

2012: posted 29 times, 24 of them in Blarch, Blaugust and Blogtober.

2013: posted 3 times, all in Blaugust.

2014: posted 40 times, 34 in Blaugust, 1 in prep in July, 4 immediately afterwards in September.

2015: posted 35 times, 31 in Blaugust, 1 in prep in July, 3 immediately afterwards in September.

2016: posted 44 times, 40 in Blarch and Blaugust.

2017: posted 14 times, 3 in the lead-up in July, and 9 times in Blaugust.

2018: posted 18 times, 15 were Blaugust, with another 1 directly before and after

2019: posted 24 times, 18 were Blaugust, with another 1 directly before and after

2020: posted 24 times so far (if I count this one), and 20 of them are for Blapril.

In many ways, this is just a Blaugust site. 88% of my posts are a direct result of Blaugust! I return here every year to write and to rejoin the community, and then I disappear again to hibernate for the winter. I guess you could look at those numbers and say that blogging festivals obviously burn me out, and that if I didn't try to sprint I could jog for longer, but I think it's pretty clear that it's the exact opposite, every year the festival helps relight the spark. Perhaps Blaugust hasn't worked for me to develop a regular blogging habit as I continue to vainly hope, but the mere fact that for a month a year I am encouraged to come out of my shell and doff my writing cap again is a big deal. Thanks to this blog, I have a record, in my own words, of my life over the last decade that I just wouldn't have otherwise. Sure, it's mostly about the videogame bits, but it's a darn sight better than nothing.

So this time I'm going to celebrate the fabulous Blaugust shinies that I've gained over the years, and look forward to adding a third silver one for this year to my collection somewhere down the track.

PS. In the 2018 version of this post, I mentioned that going forward I was going to try to add more pictures of me wearing ties. Everything has changed so much since the start of the blog, ties aren't a part of my daily life any more, and haven't been for years. Heck, I haven't worn one since my friend's wedding back in August last year, but here's a good old fashioned blurry tiepic, just for the old time's sake.

Long Live the Queen! Turns 51-60

What's This?

I'm taking part in a collaborative game of vanilla Civilization VI with some of the other Blaugustines. The eight of us (so far) are taking turns playing 10 turns each of a fledgling Britain under the guidance of good Queen Victoria, doing the best we can to not burn the whole thing down, and then passing the game on to the next player. 

The Story So Far…

Turns 01-10: Naithin Gets Us Started
Turns 11-20: Rakuno Does Some Exploring
Turns 21-30: Paeroka Has an Eye Towards Expansion
Turns 31-40: Tessa Founds Leeds
Turns 41-50: Krikket Builds a Boat

Let's Do It!

I've inherited a pretty healthy looking realm from my predecessors here. Plenty of military close by to defend the homeland with no obvious threats that we're not already set up to face, so it's time to set London to building another settler unit. Meanwhile we'll send our armies out to take care of these bandit camps; the archers and scouts will head west and our slingers will try to take out the nest to the south-east of Leeds. This new builder could have done good work here in London setting up another fishing fleet, but I'm sending it over over to Leeds instead to try and give our new city a bit of an early boost. Unfortunately we've just been informed that someone has just finished Stonehenge, so that puts a bit of a dampener on any hopes we might have entertained of getting off to a good start for a religious victory. That's quick work, we haven't even researched Mysticism yet. 

It's turn 52 and we're going to pick up the Irrigation technology. Usually I'd be reluctant to grab something that we hadn't hit the eureka moment for yet, but I'm about to build a rice paddy in Leeds that will trigger this one, which should then set us up nicely to build a sugar plantation for another much-needed luxury good. Potentially down the track the Hanging Gardens might make for a good first wonder, too. In the west a barbarian scout has wandered within range of our archers, so that should make for some easy experience points.

We have a visitor, and it's the Americans, bearing hot apple pies. I wonder if they're the ones who built Stonehenge?  Teddy Roosevelt seems like the sort of outdoorsy bloke who really enjoys a good stone circle every now and then with the guys.

Hot on his heels, Cleo pops by to borrow a cup of sugar and to let us know that she likes the cut of our jib, which  I'm not inclined to take to heart all that much considering that she was rude to Tessa just a few turns ago. No idea what we did to trigger this, perhaps she just likes it when folks beat up the barbarians?

It's now turn 54, and our slinger-cum-archers have headed further south and discovered a natural wonder just outside our borders. Handy! I prefer the cartoony style of the strategy view for almost everything in this game, but for discovering wonders if leaves a lot to be desired in comparison to the default view's flying camera and fancy lighting effects.

Our newly-acquired fleet has also found that there's not much of a future to be found in sailing east, though they did find this friendly village down by the South Pole. Hopefully we'll able to get some soldiers down here to claim it for the Empire eventually, but for now all that the pride of the Royal Navy can do is sail back home and hope that there's a clear path out to the open ocean somewhere out west.

Speaking of the west, the spearmen tasked with defending the barbarian camp that's been disturbing the sleep of all of London has foolishly decided to march out to attack our archers, allowing the scout to sneak in, ransack the camp and stab them in the back, and resulting in promotions for both of our units. I hadn't realised that the archer/scout combination force was so very powerful, but these two are really synergising over here.

Our southeastern archers have a bit of a job ahead of them clearing out this barbarian camp, but if they can manage it, the space around the wonder here is starting to look like a half-decent place for another city. All that tundra means that it's not great, but there's a lot of food around as long as the citizens like fish, and with the extra bonuses from the wonder it could turn out to be a real powerhouse. After we complete Irrigation, I set te boffins to look into Bronze Working, as the discovery of iron could help us plan our future growth and because one of the near-by city states wants us to build a unit of spearmen and it's always a good policy to make friends with the smaller nations.

This is looking hopeful. As our super-barbarian-countering force heads further west, they find the border with another continent just over this river. Since Victoria gets a free units in any new cities built on other continents (and another for building harbours there), expanding this way could be a great way to build our army up quickly without compromising on fast growth back home. If we can just find some luxury resources out here things are looking good for a rapid expansion west. Unlimited access to a tea supply would make us a true British Empire, after all.

It's the French, bearing champagne and cheese and a lot of eye shadow! Catherine is one of my favourite Civ VI leaders even if I always end up fighting her in the end, because she's just so darn smug. Thankfully it looks like their capital is a decent distance away to the North, so we don't need to worry about her for a while. 

With all these potential spots to build new cities out west, I've gone ahead and shelled out gold to build another new settler unit in Leeds. If our western exploration doesn't turn out enough good spots I guess they can settle here on this rice field, giving us access to a good looking spot with high production and access to gypsum, another new luxury resource to feed our people's insatiable need for exotic goods. I'm figuring expanding in this direction seems to be a priority, since that's where the other countries mostly seem to be, and that we can head back and grab the wonder in the southeast at our leisure later. The final place that either of our new settlers end up won't be up to me, though, as my reign is quickly coming to an end. I wonder if I'll even recognise the place when I see it again at 80 (or more turns down the track)? 

Having completed our exploration into Early Empire, the next thing that we look into will be a State Workforce. This will give us a boost to early-game Wonders if we decide to work on any, and should be pretty fast to complete, giving my successor a chance to change my dogma choices if they want to. I've also gone for the option of increased production across the empire instead of our previous God King choice, as we have multiple cities to get the benefit now, and more on the way soon.

Excellent news! There's a sea or a lake or something out here to the west. Hopefully it joins up to the Southern Ocean which will give out fleet something to do, but even if it doesn't it provides an even better chance to build new cities with harbours out here in order to flood the place with British colonial troops. There's also some furs, so that will help on the luxury front too. I am more and more convinced that this is an excellent location for our new expansion, so I'm sending the scouts south-west to look for perfect city sites and keeping the archers close to the Egyptian border to ensure that Cleo doesn't try to expand in this direction before our settlers get a chance to get over here.

All in all, a short but sweet reign, building on the foundations of my predecessors but not doing anything world-shaking. All good things must come to an end, though, so now I'll pass the reigns over to the Rambling Redshirt, who is presumably a Rambling Redcoat for this one. May your people bathe in luxuries and your armies meet with no-one in particular! 

The game file can be found here.

This is my nineteenth post for Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years (when I started this post it was still April somewhere in the world, so it counts...). Shoutouts to The Ancient Gaming Noob, who has been blogging about games seemingly forever and whose in-depth AAR and analysis posts constantly make me, possibly the person least suited to EVE:Online in the universe, want to install EVE:Online.

Where's the Conversation?

This is my eighteenth post for Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. I am well behind schedule, but that's nothing new, and I'm still enjoying keeping more-or-less up to date with what others have been creating over the month. This has led me to sign up to a collaborative game of Civ VI being oranised by Naithin, so look out for more on that topic soon.

I've been appending some variation of this footer to the last few posts after being inspired by similar notices on other people's blogs. Back in the days when Blaugust was big on rules and you 'had' to have something like it I used to find it an imposition, but this time around I'm finding it a good addition, even if my blogger quote version isn't as attractive as the sort of thing that people are doing over on their wordpress sites.

As I alluded to earlier in the month, I'm a little bit too much of a rebel to enjoy being told that I have to do things a certain way, and that extends to little things like this, but now that I can include it as an optional extra if I want to without feeling like I'm going to lose internet points if I don't, I'm finding the footer a useful tool. Not only does it force me to stay up to date with what others are writing if I want to find someone else's post to link to, which is a handy reminder if I've slipped behind, but it also provides a nice jumping off point if my readers want to keep exploring Blaugust instead of being trapped at the Leaflocker, which has helped me to feel more of a sense of community about the whole thing.

Today, though, I stuck the footer in and realized that the footer and what I'd been planning to talk about were inextricably linked, and it didn't really make sense as a footer anymore. I guess it's a header this time. With that prelude out of the way, then, let's start the post...

Where's the Great Conversation Post?

Last week was a bit of a disaster on the creativity and productivity fronts. I'd say it was a bit rubbish on pretty much every front, but given that so many people that we know and hear about around the world are struggling so much, the fact that we've been having headaches or sleeping poorly or feeling lethargic but are still together and well fed and generally healthy seems to be taking the piss a little bit.

Nevertheless, I haven't had a good week for doing things in general and the blog in particular. No posts since last Tuesday, not even any slow progress on drafts, just a slowly mounting pile of potential topics, most of which are video game related, which is not exactly surprising given the way that games are definitely the way that I've been spending most of my time. When I go into shut-down mode like this I tend to retreat into old familiar games for extended binge periods, and this time has been no different.

Lately my go-to game has been Slay the Spire, a deck-builder that I only got into in the last few months and which I am distinctly terrible at. The battles often make for fun little puzzles, with the added advantage of them being randomly generated, meaning that there isn't necessarily a 'right' way to do them, and when I stumble across a deck that really works it makes me feel extremely smart. It also has the added advantage of being an easy game to play with one hand while lying in bed, which is a big plus when I'm just not feeling it.

Mahjong never stops being a distraction. Last weekend I played in the first week of the new ARMA league, a nine-week long online team competition being run by the Australian riichi scene, and then watched the other games and participated in the after-show analysis, which ate a significant portion of the weekend. Thankfully my game wasn't on the stream since it went terribly for me, but I still learnt a lot from talking about my games with good players and learnt more about some higher-level concepts to try and incorporate into my play.

Add into the mix reinstalling Civilisation VI in preparation for the co-op game, never a great idea for productivity (I've had it back on this machine for three days and it's been running almost constantly in that time) and it's a wonder I have time to get any work done at all.

My humble monthly just dropped for the month, so I was able to gift a friend with Optus Magnum, so I need to try and improve my scores so that she thinks I'm smart. I just picked up Chimera Squad, too, and XCOM games are famous time sinks. Honestly, I might have to give up eating and sleeping just to get all these games played. Blogging will just have to wait a little bit longer.

A Love Letter to Saboteur

Games night this week saw a return to boardgamearena.com, which has quickly become our home base on Monday nights.

We started out with what I had assumed would be a quick game of Love Letter while we were gathering players, but I hadn't counted on either my player's unfamiliarity with the game slowing it down far too much, or on BGA using the 'premium' 5-8 player rules, which I'd never met until I was suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into teaching them to new players;na frustrating experience for everyone involved.

Love Letter wasn't necessarily a completely intuitive game in the first place, indeed a lot of the attraction comes in puzzling out the competing relationships and strengths and weaknesses of the different combination various cards for yourself as you play, but a few things about this implementation haven't helped the learning process. The original rule book, as well as being insanely cute, has extremely clear detailed descriptions of each of the card interactions, as well as having well-written descriptions on the cards themselves. In this version, a shorthand iconographic notation which might work as a reminder but does nothing to help a new player has been used on the cards instead (possibly this is included in some international versions of the game, so it might not be BGA's fault). On top of that, the rules written on the board have been shortened so far as to lose their meaning, so they don't make the situation any better.

The extra cards themselves, though? They are very cool, speeding up the game overall and creating more of the supremely satisfying what-just-happened-there moments which are where Love Letter shines. Definitely an improvement over the double-base-deck version that I was expecting we would be playing when I suggested the game, even if they do make for a considerably more complex game to teach.

Next up we played a couple of palate-cleansing games of 7 Wonders, which I wouldn't normally mention further since I've talked at length about this always excellent in the past, but one of the games was a little notable. I was playing as Giza, and realised early on in the second age that since I'd missed out of the marketplace cards and neither of my neighbours had built any stone at all, I was going to have to shell out for the two-stone quarry if I wanted to finish building my wonder, bringing my stone production to an excessive 5. A little later on, with none of the other players having realised their predicament just yet, I was able to tuck the second quarry under my wonder. The outcome of this was that a number of players had access to either only one piece or even no access at all to stone for love or money. A similar situation has also arisen with the cloth supply, which all resulted in a wildly uneven game where those who had free builds or gotten lucky in the resource lottery did very well, and some other players, even those with otherwise fine resource bases and stacks of cash, had a terrible final round (one player had two turns in which they could do nothing and another two where they only had one option.). I have played more than 100 games of 7 Wonders, and I don't remember ever seeing one like this.

Finally, the remaining six of us played Saboteur. Personally I think six players is one fewer than the ideal number of players for this hidden traitor card game, but we made it work. BGA actually has a handy option to force there to be the maximum number of saboteurs, which I would say is a must for a six-player game to give the bad guys a chance, but unfortunately I missed it when setting up the game, as I was dazzled by the number of variant rules on offer. One house rule that isn't enforceable, but that I think greatly improves the game, is to force players to play cards if they can and to only discard if they have literally no other option, but we enforced this via a gentleman's agreement, and it worked well. The highlight was the moment when the miners, having uncovered and neutered the saboteurs early on, debated the wisdom of potentially deliberately fixing their opponent's equipment in order to force them to play useful cards where we needed them, which wouldn't have ultimately worked but made for an interesting thought experiment that wouldn't have otherwise been possible in a game that I generally feel like I've played out.

All in all, it was another enjoyable, well executed Monday night games night. The games are just the oil for the wheel of conversation, of course, but it helps when they add to the fun rather than just stressing everybody out as they wrestle with technology and mechanics.

This was my seventeenth post in Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating over the month. I'm looking forward to seeing what Stargrace does with their new socking knitting machine!

Image Problems

I don't tend to go near the blog on Sundays, but today I got a message from a friend who was reading my post about making acorn coffee that I posted earlier in the week who was asking what was wrong with the images on that post.

Sure enough, when I headed to the site myself, some (but not all) of the images on that post and a number of the other posts from the past few weeks had disappeared from the Leaflocker and been replaced with the dreaded missing image icon. I figured that it was just an internet issue or some kind of temporary problem with Blogspot, but as the hours passed and they pictures didn't come back, I figured that I'd better try and fix them.

Strangely enough, all of the images that are missing are Blogspot hosted images that are still visible when I look a the blog's image album, which at least means that they were all pretty easy to restore, but makes it even odder that they've all disappeared from the blog. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which images have been affected, either.

When things like this happen, it makes me think again about possibly looking into some more permanent or premium hosting for the Leaflocker than the ever-precarious-seeming Blogspot, as I'd miss it if it suddenly disappeared or a I lost some of the things that I've posted here over the last ten years, even if no-one else would. The idea that the blog has outlasted about 5 computers and numerous harddrives makes me think I really ought to put some thought into preserving it better than I have the rest of the places that I've kept my precious memories, which is so say, not at all.

Then I remember that this is only maybe the second time that I've actually lost content on blogger over the last ten years, and that for a service that I don't have to pay for it really is remarkably stable, and I figure I can risk hosting it here for a little bit longer. Blogspot's frustrating interface and limitations might annoy me every time I actually try to attempt consistent formatting or to do anything more than just shove some words and pictures down higgeldy-piggeldy, but it's been a good home to me for a long time now, and as long as this sort of thing doesn't become a regular occurrence, I'm not going to be rushing out to change it just yet.

Guess I'm spending the last little while going through the last little bit of the archive trying to restore what images I can, though. If you notice a file missing somewhere around here, do let me know.

This was my sixteenth post for Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating over the month. One of the things I enjoy about Blaugust is vicariously experiencing people's adventures in games I'm never likely to pick up myself, and my favourite post for today was this one by Kluwes over on I'm not Squishy, which managed to make a game that I have always been utterly uninterested in sound like the kind of thing that I just might want to try out, with the right group.

Leaflocker Cryptic 003

Following just three months after the last Leaflocker Cryptic, here's the latest installment in the series. Pour yourself a cup of tea and give it a go, then let me know what you thought in the comments. 

Click on the image to enlarge, or download it in .puz format  or as a printable PDF.

Edit 19/4: Fixed error in clue for 1D. Thanks, M Cats for noticing it!

Acorn Coffee

One of my targets for this month-long blogging festival was to complete as many of the posts from the last Blaugust that I planned but never got around to completing as I could. When Blaugust rolled around last year we'd just moved from Oxford to Southampton, and were particularly enjoying the novelty of having the wonderful Southampton Common, a lovely rambling public park on our doorstep. To celebrate, I was hoping to do a series of posts about collecting various edible bits and pieces from the park and turning them into delicious goodies. This plan didn't eventuate as we gorged ourselves on blackberries (Mrs Owl more than me, as is our custom), but that's about it, except for a slowly-growing bowl of acorns that we collected by our kitchen window. 

That post never happened, but the acorns have been sitting there taunting me, growing slowly older and occasionally smaller as I threw out the obviously mouldy and wormy ones. And here we are, on a sunny afternoon in April, and I've decided that I'm going to do something with them: it's acorn coffee time. Sadly, we don't have all that many acorns left, but hopfully it'll be enough for a trial run, and if it's terrible at least I won't have needlessly deprived the local squirrels of too many lunches.

I first heard of acorn coffee being drunk by desperately under-provisioned confederate soldiers in the Starbuck series. The Starbuck books (Rebel, Copperhead, Battle Flag and Bloody Ground) are possibly the most Bernard Cornwall of all the Bernard Cornwall books, so if you like the sort of thing where the ragged but dashing apolitical but caught in the wrong place at the wrong time bad-boy hero beats the baddies and the fancy boys, wins the war and gets the girl, a genre that I admit I have a bit of a sort spot for, you can do a lot worse. If you search acorn coffee online you do seem to get a lot of hits from civil war reenactors and the like, a few posts saying boring things like "don't eat acorns they're poison", but not a whole lot of links to people actually selling it as if it's the sort of thing that people would actually want to put in their bodies, which isn't a great sign, but we've started the post and we're committed now, so we gotta follow through.

First things first, pop your acorns in a pan and boil them for quarter of an hour or so, to soak off some of the poisonous tannin stuff and to kill any bugs that you've somehow missed in the last few months.  This was a good chance to use this pan, which Mrs. Owl brought back from India and is useless for almost everything, since anything and everything sticks to it and it's impossible to keep clean. I think we only keep it because it seems cruel to inflict it on someone else.

Drain off your acorns and proceed to shell them. This could take a long time if you had a big pile of acorns, but with this many it was pretty easy, especially since these acorns are all getting a little old and soft. Most of them I could easily pull apart with my fingers, and those that I couldn't could be cut into with a kitchen knife easily enough. The nuts produced ranged all over the grey-brown-black colour spectrum, but mostly seemed solid and, I guess, nutty, so that seemed hopeful.

Roast the nuts until they smell like roasted, earthy nuts, I had them on for about 10 minutes, and then coarsely grind. Sadly, my mortar and pestle is in storage on another continent, but we have a stab mixer with a chopping attachment that works pretty well for this sort of stuff. It went a little weird and discouloured a few years ago when we were making gingerbread and can't be cleaned properly, but it still cuts and it's stopped infusing everything that you put in it with nutmeg, so it does the job. At this point, the grind smells almost like nutmeg, but it has nothing to do with the mixer, it's all the acorns!

Lightly roast the grind again, being careful not to burn it. Once the edges start going a darker brown, grab the whole thing out of the oven. I think I left mine in a little bit too long when I got distracted reading Plato, which gave the whole thing a strong smoky aroma, but I think I rescued it just in time. 

Grind again, then serve like you would coffee. I imagine pretty much any coffee-brewing method would work as long as you can get the grind about right. Unfortunately, we're not coffee family, and I don't have a coffee pot at home, and I'm not quite sure how I managed to get this far along in the process before I realised this slight snag in the plan. I tried using a tea-ball, but I'd already ground my 'coffee' fine enough for filters , so it more or less went strgiht though. In desperation, I emptied some tea bags in the pot, refilled them with my grind and stapled them closed again.

Here it is, the moment of truth. I make a few cups, one with sugar, one without, one with milk, and force Mrs Owl, who doesn't like coffee but does like trying new things, especially if they're a little bit out of left field, to take a short coffee break and act as guinea pig. She proclaimed the smell 'smoky, like Russian Caravan', the first taste 'not like poison', and eventually opted for the milky option, which she said tasted like 'a mix of coffee, tea and wood, but in a nice way' and 'better than coffee, at least'. Most importantly, she said she'd happily try it again, which I though was pretty encouraging.

For myself, I found the black coffee to be a little weak (possibly something that could be overcome by just using more), but generally pleasant, without the sharpness of coffee but with a lot the same bitter and sour notes, especially in the aftertaste, and I also opted for a slightly sweetened option with milk (the same way I take my coffee normally). I found this to be reminiscent of a homemade mocha of  instant coffee and hot chocolate: I definitely wouldn't say that it was better than coffee, but it hit a lot of the same buttons. I would also happily try it again sometime, which is a little unfortunate because we probably only have enough left for about one more cup each and it's a long time until the acorns start dropping again. 

Assuming that this isn't the last post on the Leaflocker when we both drop dead later this afternoon, we're definitely going to have to pick up a lot more acorns next year; so if you see a couple of people scouring Southampton Common next August or so, do come and say hi!

This was my fourteenth post for Blapril, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating, especially if you're interested in the daily adventures of the gamerfolk. I've been enjoying Dextraneous' ongoing Pokemon review series since he began it, and he's just reached the end of the first generation, showing no signs of slowing down.