ProfessorMasterChief
What are some of your favourite movies?
Basquiat, Mean Girls, Romeo + Juliet (I'm a sucker for over the top Shakespeare adaptations), Dr. Strangelove, Labyrinth, Dog Day Afternoon.
What is your favorite book genre?
I like a lot of experimental and speculative fiction in general, whether it takes the form of sci fi, magical realism or whatever. Some of my favorite authors include Samuel Delany, Junot Diaz, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeff Noon and Jonathan Lethem.
What are some books that everyone should read before they die in your opinion?
Taste is subjective enough that I really think it's hard to claim that anything is a must read, but books that I'd pretty much always say are worth checking out no matter what your tastes are include
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez,
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,
Valis by Philip K. Dick,
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
Favourite book series?
Off the top of my head, I really liked the Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin and the Bridge trilogy by William Gibson (which I think is better overall than his Sprawl trilogy). More recently, I really enjoyed the Magicians series by Lev Grossman.
What is the most disappointing book you've ever read?
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I really like a lot of Murakami's earlier stuff, with
Wind-up Bird Chronicle in particular being one of my all time favorite books, and I'd been hearing people talk about
1Q84 as being a major return to form. What I got instead was one book full of Murakami's stilted attempt at a female POV character who literally stopped to periodically contemplate her breasts or examine them in a mirror, one book where the plot mostly hinges on how the male writer stand-in fucks a teenager but it's totally cool because magic, and one book where Murakami gets bored and brings back a fan-favorite character from Wind-up Bird for no reason I could tell beyond sheer self-referential wankery (seriously, there's no continuity between the two stories - he just decided to randomly toss Ushikawa into the story in an effort I guess to quickly resolve a story that had been going nowhere for seven hundred pages). There were actually bits and pieces of the book that were really compelling, which if anything made it worse, because you could see there was maybe an interesting book there hiding behind all the bloat and crap. Just a major disappointment all around.
What is the best book of 2016 in your opinion?
I only read a handful of books published in 2016, but my two favorites were
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders.
Greatest meme set in adv uu?
BD Poliwrath (shout-outs ict, that thing is scary af).
Other than UU, what is your favourite lower tier?
Little Cup.
Other than Pokemon, are there any other games you play?
I like old school SNES-era RPGs like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy line, and I really liked old school puzzle games like Myst and Riven. I don't really keep up with new video games, though.
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Nightingales
rate the old gen uus from adv to oras
ADV -> BW -> ORAS -> DPP
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Amaroq
...top 5 uu players and why...
- dodmen - Shouldn't really need a why, amazing builder and great eye for the game, should top pretty much anyone's list of best SM UU players.
- Pearl - Really inventive builder and just all around great player.
- Christo - I honestly think Christo is one of the best overall Pokemon players on this site, plus his building is solid too.
- pokeisfun - People like to simultaneously act like pif is a meme and yet still brag about that time they beat him on the ladder in 2015 like they just won OST. Yes, he often plays stall, and yes, lots of people don't really know how to play against stall, but it takes a lot of talent to win as much and as consistently as he does.
- TDK - I've got to say, the single builder who impressed me the most in UUPL this year was definitely TDK. He's obviously an excellent player as well, that should go without saying, but it's his teambuilding that puts him into the top 5 for me despite not being a UU main (whatever that means).
...UU's current tournament structure?
I've never been a huge fan of the traditional seasonal structure that other tiers tend to do. I think people need to look forward to a tour, it needs to generate interest and excitement. Think of how much people look forward to UUPL, or Grand Slam, or the other big annual tours. They would lose a lot of their impact if we ran them every three months. A big giant double-elimination tour that happens four times a year is a neat idea for sifting through the more consistent players and even for doing some neat things like ranking, but what it doesn't do is make people excited.
So I've been a big proponent of UU's seasonal alternative, where we have a different official UU tour each season. Now, this year was the first year we managed to do that. Was it successful? Well... yes and no. There were definitely some high points. I think Classic in particular was incredibly successful on just about every mark: it was competitive, it was fun both to participate in and to watch, it generated a ton of interest and development in otherwise "dead" tiers, and it certainly made UUPL more competitive this year. If you want proof of how successful it was, just look to the other tiers that are emulating its structure as an official tour these days.
On the other hand, if I'm being frank, I think that Majors definitely had some issues. I still think that the format was a cool idea in theory, but I think that if we keep that same format again this year, we're going to have to change up the execution. The pool play was really fun and exciting those first few days, when we saw a ton of pool games all at once, but they very quickly started to drag. Activity issues rippled through the tour at large, and there really wasn't a good way to deal with them fairly. By the end of the pool phase, things were starting to feel like a slog, and people were only finishing their games grudgingly. Then we went straight from there into a double elim playoff, which... well, double elimination tends to ALSO drag. I think the tour lost a lot of momentum after the first week of the pools phase, and didn't really pick it up again until near the end of the playoffs.
I would also like to eventually see a UU tour leaderboard, probably using a points-based system similar to what Smogon Championships is doing. I think that one of the benefits of having a consistent schedule of official tours is that you can start generating stats like that, and as I'm a bit of a stats nerd, I think that would be cool to collect even if we don't turn it into an actual tournament like SmogChamps.
TL;DR: I think that UU is pointed in the right direction as far as seasonal tours go, but I think it definitely still needs some work.
...Z-Moves...
Z-Moves are fun but busted af.
...UU community growth...
Not really up for a long answer here, but I think that the biggest way to productively grow the UU community is to have a stable and enjoyable tier, and lots of opportunities to play it.
...balancing old UU metas...
The very first thing I'd do is go back and ban Baton Pass in previous gens. It's just a fundamentally uncompetitive move, and even if earlier gens don't have the huge problem with it that later gens do (though I'd argue that ADV UU in particular really does), I don't think it adds anything positive to the metagame at all.
Other than that? Man, that's a hard question. I'd rather not fiddle with old gens too much, but I would love to see some of the old tiers shift with usage. While I love ADV UU, I'd be interested to see, based on smogtour/classic/RoA ladder tours etc, what would actually be UU if we applied our current standards to the tier, and then move things into BL on a case by case basis.
Other than BP, there's nothing that really stands out to me as broken in ADV and DPP UU (closest things would be Kanga in ADV UU, which I actually think has a positive impact on the meta overall, and Clefable in DPP UU, which can go fuck itself), so short of shifting tiers based on usage or potentially dropping some things down from BL, there's not too much to do. In BW, the obvious problems to me are Mew and Victini. I've actually long been of the (fairly unpopular) opinion that Mew is even worse than Tini, but I'm not 100% sold on a ban of either. I'd like to see how the tier looks without them. In ORAS, I've discussed above my thoughts on that tier, so I'll let that stand.
...thoughts on UUPL...
I think UUPL went really well this year. Obviously it was not a shining moment for my team, but there were some fantastic games, a lot of great competition, and it all just went really smoothly overall. This was also probably the most drama-free UUPL I've ever seen, so that's pretty nice.
Which player or team's performance surprised you...
My own, of course. I definitely made a couple of mistakes during the auction, but I still ended up with an incredibly talented roster of people, and a group of people that all got along, but we never managed to click as a team. Even taking into account our lack of depth in SM teambuilding, I feel like we still struggled a lot more than we should have on paper.
How did the final draft align with plans...
Honestly my team's final outcome was pretty close to my initial draft plan. There were a couple of key differences (I managed to lose on every actual SM UU main I had hoped to pick up), but other than that, it was pretty similar to my initial plan.
...good pre-auction/auction decisions...
Obviously Tony's decision to heavily pursue the Monsters as a manager with the express goal of picking up Pearl was a good one. Similarly, his early plans to nab TDK paid off in spades. There are some other obvious choices (yeah of course, Shiba retaining one of the all time best ORAS UU players was definitely a good idea, as was Kink's idea to trade for Eo), but I think Tony definitely wins out on "good auction decisions."
...bad pre-auction/auction decisions...
Ernes/Ernesto.
...confusing draft decisions...
BOUFF agreeing not only to trade away TDK, but to pay for the privilege. I know he wasn't planning on drafting him, and he wanted to grab Ark to help him with manager stuff, but... listen, I know I shouldn't talk, as I know I paid more than I should have in buying Star's retention rights, but man, to actually pay someone to take a player like TDK off your hands is definitely a bit confusing to me.
Did managers draft as expected?
Mostly, yeah. Tony, ict, Kink and Shiba all ended up with final rosters pretty similar to what I'd expected. Christo's wasn't a huge surprise either, but we'd already talked with each other about drafting plans. I didn't really have a strong idea of what kind of draft plan BOUFF/Ark would go for, though, and Fuga is always a wildcard.
...thought process building a team...
My main goal was to get one or two anchor players in each tier, and then a lot of people who I trusted to play well in pretty much any tier. I also wanted a team of people I liked, so I mostly went for people I've worked with before and who I get along well with, such as ABR, blunder, HANTSUKI and ZoroDark. I also wanted someone that I could plan a team with, and with Christo managing this year, I decided to grab Star, who I built and tested with a bunch during last year's Grand Slam.
...type of player you look for...
To play on one of my teams, you must be handsome, witty and enjoy long walks on the beach.
...thoughts on retentions/relegations...
Big fan. I think it adds some continuity to teams from one year to the next, and another layer to team management. As for relegation, it gives managers a reason to keep motivating their teams even at the end of the season, and I think that's pretty important.
...manage UUPL in the future?
Well, pretty sure I'm getting relegated, so probably not.
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Adaam
Would you rather eat a pound of bumblebees every MLK Day or forget how to read forever?
The bees, definitely. I bet a bumblebee wouldn't even taste that bad.
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Accelgor
What's the one post or thread you've made that you're most proud of or satisfied with?
Mean Girls post, last UUPL. (On mobile so I can't really link.)