The Smog: Rejected Names

Welcome to the first ever edition of The Smog! Well, it may very well have been called something else, and after a show of hands removing the good and the mediocre from the abysmal suggestions they were narrowed down to seven. I, cookie, am to place each one under close scrutiny.

The Smogon Gazette - This was the one I voted, so obviously this is the best one and the fact that this didn't win just highlights the shortcomings of a democratic voting system.

Gengar Aficionado - Okay, so I think I see what they did here: add a random-ass Spanish word to the name and it makes it automatically cool, right? Microsoft tried the same shit with Windows Vista and it just doesn't fly if you actually understand Spanish. Aficionado = fan, so that gives us "Gengar Fan". You'll leave your readers eternally guessing what exactly that means. GenGar fan = GGfan? With the number of alts that guy has, I wouldn't be surprised he sneaked this one in himself.

The Smogon University Journal - Immediately what springs to mind is that this magazine is going to be some bone-dry academic piece full of boring figures and tl;dr written by people with little in their lives but Pokémon. Imagine Jumpman and Tangerine in dusty tweed jackets and glasses so thick that they double up as Choice Specs while they sit in an office drinking cranberry juice from tea cups and discussing the optimal distribution of the 4 EVs left over in your garden-variety 252/252 spread. This is the Smogon University Journal.

Smogon Curricula - Again, with this I feel as if it's ramming the whole 'Smogon is a university' gimmick down your throat, when in reality Pokémon is, let's face it, a game. That's not to say we can just let it all hang out and allow the WiFi community, collectively the worst thing to happen to the internet since 4chan, to take over this website. Just that we shouldn't get all up ourselves by taking things too seriously or giving that impression. A quick search of 'Smogon' on YouTube will show that we have enough of that problem as it is.

Dialga Times - A pretty witty, if slightly nerdy, title, and if you don't know why it's witty you're reading the wrong magazine, in which case you should skip straight to my column from now on. Unfortunately, Dialga has the misfortune of being rather phallic, and associating our magazine with it would suggest that our humour hasn't evolved beyond penis jokes. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this and the case was that half the people who voted were either too dumb to get the joke or fell for the 'add random foreign language word' manoeuvre.

(Later) After noticing that Lorak's depiction of Dialga had an unusually long forehead I realised that I mixed up the two legendaries. Apparently Dialga is the blue one, Palkia being the phallic-shaped one. Could it have killed Nintendo to differentiate their names a little bit more? I guess they were too busy thinking up brand new concepts for Pokemon, such as Lumineon and Mothim.

Smogazine - Cheesy. This is the kind of ill-sounding wordplay Toothache would be proud of. It also sounds like a prototype nerve gas the Germans came up with in WWII but found it killed people quicker if you sat them in a lukewarm pool of stagnant water.

The Smog - And we have our winner! A title that doesn't take itself too seriously, is reasonably clever yet subtle, and doesn't take up like half the first line. It helps if the reader isn't bored by the time they finish reading the title, especially when it has words like 'curricula'.

So, there you have it. I don't know what I'll write next month. I've been granted licence to write whatever I damn well please, so thank god I don't have to restrict myself to Pokémon-related bollocks. You kids running around with Bullet Punch Scizor and Lucario - back in my day when Pokémon was actually good, Scizor was a piece of shit with no movepool that got walled by just about everything. And battles lasted up to 200+ turns.

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