Dear Nintendo,
Actually it’s probably “Dear Game Freak,” or maybe “Dear Niantic or…” whatever--I
don’t give a shit. What I give a shit about, Nintendfreaktic, is Pokemon Go. And I hate
that I give a shit about it. I had a good thing going, with the never leaving my apartment,
sitting on my ass all day, giving my zoloft a run for its money to see if it could compensate
for my mind-cripplingly terrible day-to-day lifestyle choices of bad eating and inactivity--but
NO, you just have to go and make a FUCKING VIRAL HIT out of nowhere, that nobody was
expecting, and ruin my perfect schedule of pizza and yelling at people on Overwatch.
But no. Now I have to, like, walk and shit. And get sweaty. Just so I can catch a Lapras.
Well, TRY to catch a Lapras--what will actually happen is I’ll throw a pokeball, it’ll
suck the pokemon in, and you’ll just zoom onto the pokeball and freeze like a doofus,
forcing me to restart my application to check and see that, in fact, the Lapras fucked off
ages ago and here I sit surrounded by Weedles and fucking Rattatas.
And yet here I am. Playing your stupid game that brings me zipping right back to my childhood.
You know, I haven’t played your games since HeartGold and Silver came out on my regular,
non-bullshit DS, before you got all this newfangled 3D bullshit. And if you think your stupid
phone app is going to convince me to buy a goddamn handheld just so I can play your next
pokemon game then...congratulations for that successful-as-fuck marketing.
But anyway. I’m not here to bitch about your incredibly addictive phone app that’s
motivating, like, everyone to fucking exercise. Honestly, considering you guys didn’t seem
to expect it to get this big, it’s goddamn impressive. People who have little-to-no interest
in pokemon, and, hell, VIDEO GAMES have gotten hooked on it, including myself. It brings
me zipping right back to my days in elementary school, to hunting for AAA batteries for my
Gameboy Pocket, with my vastly superior Pokemon Red in hand, looking to capture every goddamn
pokemon I could get my hands on.
Which brings me to why I’m writing to you today, Game Niantedo--I’m here today to
talk to you about your Pokeballs. You see, when I was a kid, I didn’t think about them
too much. They were just, like, the things I used to catch and deploy pokemon. They were
in the really bad anime, too--they’re a huge, HUGE icon of your show, and they deeply
influence the decorative choices of everyone living in...what, pokemonville? Pokeworld?
Pokeverse? Whatever. They’re mysterious, yet ubiquitous items found everywhere, and
they’re powerful enough to contain the GOD OF THE GODDAMN UNIVERSE WHO CAN BE BENT TO
YOUR WILL TO TURN THE POWERS OF CREATION AGAINST ANY MORTAL WHO STANDS IN THEIR WAY.
Anyway. The point is, the older and more pedantic I get, I can’t help this niggling feeling.
This...overhwelming sense that your pokeballs? Your pokeballs make NO GODDAMN SENSE.
Well, at least they didn’t, until I sat down and started to parse through them. According
to Bulbapedia, the pokemon wiki, there’s no known lore explanation for how pokeballs
function. Nice try, Namendo Freaktic--you can run, but you can’t hide your lore! Let’s
go over exactly what we know about pokeballs: pokeballs, the red-and-white ones we’re
familiar with, are a mass-produced technological marvel that’s used to capture, contain,
and control wild pokemon. It’s two most important functions are the containment and
the control, things that otherwise can’t be done to pokemon very easily. When thrown
at a pokemon and makes contact, the ball opens and does...something to the pokemon--more
on that later, takes the pokemon inside it without so much as a first date, and attempts
to keep the pokemon inside. If the pokemon fails to escape, they become the property
of the owner of that pokeball.
Skating RIGHT ON PAST the slavery and dogfighting analogues, the pokemon can later be released
from the pokeball to fight or, I don’t know--do other stuff? They mostly fight. Afterward,
they return, and life goes on. When I was a little kid, this was all I needed to know.
I didn’t let things like “logic” or “reasoning” or “possibility according
to the laws of quantum and newtonian physics” get in the way of a good time. But now, while
I’m old, cynical, and hate fun, I can’t help but look at these balls of satan and
ask: how the FUCK do you work?
At first, I thought that the pokeballs operated like, you know, a genie’s lamp. Just, like
sucks and squishes the pokemon in and unfolds it when it’s released. There are a few problems
with this, however, the biggest, pardon the pun, being mass.
Mass is a big deal. It’s the stuffness of things, more or less. There are a lot of things
that exist in our universe that don’t have mass, like light and radiation, but most other
things you’re familiar with do: water, iron, calcium, carbon--all of the things that make
a human a human, and, coincidentally, an animal and animal. Due to the laws of conservation
of mass, the mass of a system remains constant unless the stuff making up that thing are
physically removed. So if you want to make, say, a hydrogen atom less massive? You have
to remove something--probably a quark or whatever. Of course, at this level, removing these building-block
particles drastically alters the nature of the object--that is to say, that hydrogen
atom would no longer be a hydrogen atom, it’d be...I don’t know. Something less useful.
So while this would succeed in making the matter less massive, it would also completely
remove your capability of using the hydrogen, or in this case, a pokemon, the way it was
intended, because it would be missing parts. Anyway. This is important because if pokemon
are stored in their entirety inside a pokeball, the world of Pokemon as we know it could not
possibly exist.
Pokeballs would be impossibly heavy. And I do mean impossibly. Pokeballs are capable
of holding any pokemon of any size or weight, including the largest and heaviest pokemon
in the pokedex to date: Groudon. Essentially a small dinosaur, Groudon clocks in at an
incredibly massive 950 kilograms, or over 2,000 pounds. If Groudon is stored inside
a pokeball, those atoms aren’t gone, they’re just smushed into this pokeball, which means
this pokeball the size of a baseball would weigh 2,000 fucking pounds. Good luck lifting
that, Thor, that’s like squishing a goddamn geo metro into a space the size of an orange.
We don’t get a lot of insight into the exact dimensions of a pokeball, but if we presume
the average ten-year-old boy’s handspan is 16.91 centimeters, we can estimate pretty
closely that a pokeball is approximately nine-and-a-half centimeters wide, and using our spectacular
geometry skills, we arrive at an internal volume of 452 cubic centimeters. Knowing this,
containing a pokemon of the size of Groudon would give it a mass-density of over 2100
kilograms-per-cubic-meter, 150% the density of the GODDAMN SUN. This little ball would
be a blindingly hot mass of plasma, shooting off neutrons and blistering heat the instant
the pokemon was condensed inside of it. While this would aptly-explain why pokemon disintegrate
into a blinding mass of light when captured, I’m not sure I buy Ash Ketchum having the
bicep of a Greek Demigod.
So, somewhat disappointingly, I don’t think this evaluation of pokeballs makes any sense.
So...what the hell are they? How do they work? Well, hold onto your butts, we’re about
to get a little bit more MatPatty than usual around here, and it’s time to figure this
the FUCK OUT, because I think I finally have the answer. And the answer? The answer is
goddamn terrifying.
I’ve been avoiding quantum mechanics for a long time because, well, it’s fucking
terrifying. Or at least I thought it was. It turns out, it’s just the study of how
atoms and particles work, move, and interact with one another. That’s not so bad. Of
course, this entire field of study is what built the massive and resource-demanding Large
Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator on the planet right now. Did you know I used
to live right by what USED to be the largest particle accelerator in the world? That’s
right, nestled right on the edge of Batavia, Illinois, is a device that was built to defy
the laws of man and god and smash atoms together to find out how they work, not unlike a child
cutting open his GI Joe, only to discover to his disappointment that all that’s inside
is a goddamn rubberband. Where was I? OH, right, quantum mechanics.
So if the entire mass of a capture pokemon isn’t stored inside the ball, what the hell
is going on here? In order to figure that out, we’re going to have to talk about something
in our real world that lives right on the blurry edge between real science and goddamn
magic. And that thing is called quantum entanglement.
You see, we’re used to our universe working a certain way. You throw a ball, and it leaves
your hand, travels through the air in an arc at a certain speed, slowing down slightly
in its forward movement due to friction with the air, and slowing down in its upward movement
due to gravity, eventually falling down and hitting the ground. This is, essentially,
Newton’s three laws of motion that we’ve all gotten comfortable with in play.
One, when the ball is in your hand and immobile, it’s likely to stay that way until an outside
force acts on it, I.E. your arm throwing it. Throwing it, it accelerates and carries with
it a certain amount of energy, which has to be cancelled out in order for it to stop.
These simple truths make our every day lives relatively easy to predict, but they are but
a small section of the rules that govern the behavior of the universe. There’s relativity,
of course, the way spacetime interacts with moving objects to create relative time disparities,
but there’s something else we haven’t even touched on yet in this show save for
briefly: quantum behavior.
When you zoom into the ball and into the atoms, things no longer behave like Sir Isaac Newton
said. Things are fucking weird, to the point that we’ve only rarely begun to understand.
Things appear to be in two places at once, and treat the linearity of time like it’s
a goddamn jump rope--we’re not even entirely certain if there are only three spatial dimensions
anymore.
It’s the laws of these quantum rules that rule the world of Pokeballs due to Quantum
Entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a very real and observable phenomenon in our world,
and it’s something that Scientists and Engineers are fucking scrambling to unpack, because
the consequences of quantum entanglement could completely upend everything we know about
computing, the transfer of information, and even goddamn farming.
When two particles interact with one another in juuuuuuuust the right way, they can become
“entangled,” or linked together, and when something happens to one particle, it instantaneously
alters the other particle. Doesn’t sound like a big deal? What if I told you that distance
isn’t a factor in quantum entanglement? These particles could be separated by millions
of miles, and if you alter one, it alters the other INSTANTANEOUSLY. With no time for
information to travel, just BOOP, it’s done. Real-world experiments have actually managed
to do this with objects as large as grains of sand over the distance of ten miles.
What does this have to do with pokeballs? Everything. You see, these experiments that
are being run are, essentially, making real-life Star Trek transporters that are able to transport
matter across the cosmos in an instant. And this is EXACTLY how pokeballs work. Pokeballs
aren’t storage devices for the atoms of pokemon, they’re tiny quantum computers
that are used to relay information for the construction of pokemon. But...how does that
work? Simple.
When you throw a pokeball and it hits a pokemon, it immediately begins analyzing the molecular
structure of the pokemon and uploading this to a network hub somewhere. Of course, some
pokemon are more complex and are difficult to analyze, such as stronger pokemon and much,
much rarer ones that have less data available to compare to in order to speed up the process.
As such, the pokeball burns out, the pokemon is released and rematerialized in its original
quantum state, and the trainer must try again.
When a pokemon is successfully captured, the data and atoms of this quantum state has been
properly itemized and stored elsewhere. The pokeball is, essentially, a quantum state
transponder that sends and receives data from a hub that could be essentially stored anywhere
in the universe, with quantum-entangled particles serving as the transmitters and receivers.
When a trainer is ready to use a pokemon for training, a signal is sent along with the
appropriate number of atoms, and they rearrange themselves into the pokemon. And since the
quantum states are saved, this is precisely why things like poison and paralysis continue
to be effective until they wear out or are removed, and also explains why trading and
storage are all managed by computer. It’s a lot like a Star Trek transporter, in fact.
So...what happens to a pokemon that undergoes this process? It fucking DIES.
No. Seriously. According to the quantum theory known as, no joke, the No-Cloning Theorem,
it is impossible to create a copy of a quantum state without completely destroying the original.
It’s a requirement, and it can’t be avoided. So a pokemon that is captured, while would
be perfectly copied atom-for-atom, electron-spin-by-electron-spin, while being moved from point A to point B,
would actually, as opposed to moving, would be getting copied piece-by-piece instantaneously,
Destroying COPY A while CREATING Copy B--while theoretically the stream of consciousness
of the pokemon would continue on, from the perspective of Pokemon B, it would, effectively,
be a new creation, and the original pokemon would be FUCKING FUCKED. Pokeballs are murdering
everything they fucking touch! They should be called MURDER BALLS.
This means that pokeballs are, effectively, the most scientifically advanced piece of
technology in the entire universe and are grossly, GROSSLY terrifying--they’re capable
of capturing, containing, and breaking down FUCKING GOD on a quantum level and reassemble
them at the drop of a hat. So, you know what, killing God on the regular really puts the
whole “Letting Ten Year Olds Walk Around Forcing Animals to Fight For Money” thing
into perspective.
But hey, that’s just a theory, a GAME theo--[beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep]
I’m Austin Hourigan, video maker and science extraordinare at Shoddycast. We here
at the Shoddycast love Pokemon, Digimon, and other animals both fictitious and real. We’re
dedicated to ending the harsh treatment of pokemon in the pokeworld, and we can use your
help. We’ve set up a website to rehome abandoned, quantumly-abused pokemon to caring trainers
and foster homes who are dedicated to living a pokeball-free life. If you want to help
in any way you can, either by adopting a lonely pokemon or donating to our foundation, just
head on over to StopKillingPokemon.Org. StopKillingPokemon.org was created using squarespace, which made
it incredibly easy to make an attractive, professional-and-modern looking website. With
membership comes a free, custom domain name, like StopKillingPokemon.org, and adding a
storefront to buy potions and ethers to care for your bedraggled pokemon was incredibly
easy. They have gorgeous templates that make it a snap to make a website, either for your
poor dehomed pokemon, or for other things, like a photography studio or bakery. If you
want to try Squarespace, head on over to squarespace.com/shoddy, or use the promo code “shoddy” for a 10%
discount. All proceeds may or may not go to helping poor pokemon in an area near you,
and help spread the word about the pokeball-free lifestyle.
Oh, and if you’re not busy RIGHT NOW, head on over to our twitch channel, twitch.tv/shoddycast,
where I’ll be playing competative Overwatch today, starting at 10 AM Central Standard
Time. And if that’s not your thing, I’m also streaming every WEDNESDAY at the same
time. Right now I’m doing a playthrough of a Tale of Two Wastelands as Sterling Archer.
Danger zone!
Thank you everyone for watching my video on Pokemon!
I have been wanting on Pokemon, ever since I started here,
But we didn't have any real reason, there would've been no real reason anybody would've watched it,
BUT THEN POKEMON GO WENT NUTS...
And everybody's freakin' playing it.
It's ridiculous,
So I'm hoping some of you will watch this, either way I enjoyed making it, because pokemon are AWESOME
And I'd like to throw out a Personal Thank you,