X – XP

A high level of nostalgia means that this year my chosen theme for the 2016 A to Z challenge is Pokemon. Whether you yourself have a similar level of sentimentality or you’ve never really gotten into it, I hope that you enjoy this month of posts as I indulge myself.

XP! Or experience (possible even experience points) if you want to use the full word, but considering I need to hit all the letters, I don’t!

XP is very important in Pokemon. It’s how Pokemon get more powerful, causing them to level up, and levelling up can cause such things as evolution and learning new moves. How do you get XP? Mostly, it’s battling your Pokemon agaisnt another Pokemon, whether a trainer or wild. As long as your Pokemon does not faint, then it will gain XP, and there will generally be a little bar at the bottom that fills up, so you can tell how far it is until your Pokemon will hit that next level.

There are a whole bunch of complicated equations that determine how much XP a Pokemon will gain when it wins a battle. It depends on your level, the opponents level, and some items can effect this.

Levelling is effected by the experience group that the Pokemon falls into, of which there are six in the current generations: Slow, Medium Slow, Medium Fast, Fast, Erratic and Fluctuating. This basically describes how much XP a Pokemon needs to gain it’s next level. I won’t go too much into it, because it gets very maths based, and although I like maths and graphs, I know that a fair few people don’t 😛

The maximum level a Pokemon can achieve is level 100, after which point they just stop gaining XP. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that high, because it takes a heck of a lot of work. The highest I ever got was high 80s, I think, and that was my Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow, because I used it for everything.

The last thing to mention is XP sharing. If you start the fight with one Pokemon, and then swap out halfway through, then as long niether of those Pokemon faint, they will split the XP of the fight between them. It’s a good way to fast level up slightly lower level Pokemon on your team, and I do it all the time. It gets a lot easier when you pick up an item called XP Share, which you give to a Pokemon to hold, and any battle that you fight, they will get a fraction of the XP from it. And the best part about this item, it that it doesn’t take any XP away from the Pokemon that actually does the fighting. I always look forward to getting it in the games.

 

Pokemon of the Day

X is for Xerneas

A blue and black stage-like Pokemon, it has eight sets of antlers, four extending from each side of its head. In active mode, these horns are pale gold in colour and the tips is adorned with a glowing colour, changing for each set of horns (orange, red, purple and blue). In neutral mode, the horns are a pale blue, matching the colour of it’s upper body. It has x shaped pupils, and markings on it’s bodys, along with it’s horns, form a large x shape. Xerneas is a legendary Pokemon which is said to have the power to share eternal life, denoted by the horns on its head shining in seven colours rather than four. At the end of its lifetime, it releases all of its life energy into all living things around it, transforms into a tree, and then sleeps for 1,000 years. It also has the power to create trees and forests, making it a very benevolent and powerful force for nature.

So there are only two Pokemon that begin with X – Xerneas and Xatu. But I’m actually impressed that there are Pokemon that begin with every letter of the alphabet, even if there’s only a couple. So, today, you get my pick of the two X’s, which is Xerneas, the mascot of Pokemon X, and one of three legendaries in generation 6. It’s kind of cool, it actually resembles the letter X, and it’s got this awesome forest god things going on. I didn’t use it much, but I like the fluff from it.

X – Xanaduism

Look! I found a really posh word for X! Xanaduism: academic or literary research that attempts to find the sources behind works of the imagination, especially in literature and fantasy. Named after a noted study of this kind of John Livingston Lowe’s Road to Xanadu in which he analyses Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

What does that mean in literary terms? It’s the study of sources of inspiration. Particularly for books.

Idea for books and novels don’t just spring out of nowhere, that’s why we have a word for it – inspiration. Something happens, someone says something, we see something happen, and for some reasons it lights up this little spark in ours brains, and our imagination is away.

So where can you find inspiration? Oh lots of places.

• Books/films – maybe you see a plot you like, but think of somewhere else you can put it, another city, another time frame, different characters (it’s not plagiarism, it’s re-imagining, and consider there are only 7-20 different plots (depending on who you ask) every story will have similar themes or plots to another, it’s all about how you tell it.)
• Blogs/Forums – online can be a great source of inspiration. I’m a member of NaNoWriMo, and there are entire threads devoted to swapping and throwing out ideas for other writers to use in their own work.
• Overheard dialogue – okay, for me I tend to overhear my characters talking in my head, but it counts, since it inspires new scenes of developments to occur. Other places for good conversation are public transport, coffee shops, parks, all sorts of busy places. Sit down, and listen out.
• Getting out somewhere different – cementing your butt to your chair is all well and good, but if you’ve been sitting at the computer for three hours and the cursor hasn’t moved, change the scenery. Go for a walk, get some fresh air, do something different for half an hour. I clean the flat when I’m stuck, and usually when I’m done I’ve shaken loose my brain and can force those fingers to type again.
• Dreams – this is my big one. I dream in colour, and I dream in fantasy. Seriously, I cannot have ordinary dreams like driving or being late to work or stuff. I play manhunt with aliens in their spaceship, I fly across the mountains trying to hide from hunters, the dream I had last night involved two worlds with portals between them and a snow queen that was determined to keep them shit for her own benefits. So many of my novel ideas have come out of dreams.

Is that an exhaustive list? Of course not. The ways in which we can be inspired are as countless as the things they inspire.

Anyone got any tips they use to get the inspiration up and working?

X – Pokemon X

As I am sure many of you have also found, this was my hardest letter to come up with something for, and I have had to fall on my backup plan.

I trawled through dictionary websites to try and find a word beginning with X that I could use for a post, but nothing I found could make a full post topic. The closest that I found was Xerarch, which means ‘To originate in a dry habitat’. Not much you can add to that apart from: Yes, desert dragons do come from a dry habitat. It is a desert after all.

So I’m falling back to Pokemon X, one of the two latest Pokemon games to have come out, and handily one of the types of Pokemon is the dragon type.

We’re currently on generation 6 of Pokemon (so generation 1 had the original 151, and every generation since then adds about another hundred, bringing us up to 719 in total now).

New dragon pokemon that were added in this generation are:

• #691 – Dragagle
• #696 – Tyrunt
• #697 – Tyrantrum
• #704 – Goomy
• #705 – Sliggoo
• #706 – Goodra
• #714 – Noibat
• #715 – Noivern
• #718 – Zygarde

Of course, these are the most recent pokemon, so if you haven’t played Pokemon in ages, or aren’t caught up, then you won’t be familiar with these guys, you’ll probably know ones such as Dratini/Dragonair/Dragonite, Kingdra, or some of the legendaries Latios and Latias. Although confusingly, some pokemon that look like dragons (Charizard for instance) are not dragon type, but can breed with dragons.

Dragons type is special in the manner that dragons are special, they have claws and breath attacks. Dragon attacks tend to be special attack rather than physical attacks in battle and dragon type is one of the two types (the other being ghost) which is super effective against it’s own type. Its resistant to quite a few other types (electric, fire, water and grass) but has gained some weaknesses to ice and fairy types (fairy being a new type for generation 6).

I quite like dragons, but I tend to not go for a whole dragon team when playing. Or at least, I don’t outside of themed competitions. When the theme is pick and type and battle it, I do tend to go for dragons. I’m not very hard to predict sometimes.

And that is X done with! Sorry it was rather tangential, but I am sure you understand the perils of the letter X as well, especially if you’re visiting from a to z yourself. Only two more to go! I’m so excited!