Nope, if you've lost the ability to verbalize vocally, there's no other option. Now go get those gross dentures back, kid!

They actually color-coded the locations in Pokémon Yellow and when playing Red and Blue on the Super Game Boy peripheral for SNES. It was glorious.

 On the very same Virtual Fossil Friday as the one that inspired the previous graphic, Ashley, Maggie Jo, fellow VFF regular Amanda Perry, and guest speaker Dr. Kirk Thompson concocted a fantastic idea for a public service announcement poster about fossils featuring Mary Anning. I got the okay to create it, and I had so much fun putting it together.

 Today on Virtual Fossil Friday, Ashley and Maggie Jo got to talking about pickled specimens in museum collections, and Maggie Jo coined the slogan "We Can Pickle That" and said she wanted it on a t-shirt. I asked her if she wanted me to make her one, she was very excited about the idea, and so here we are. (Always great when I can get an excuse to draw a squid.)

You can get the design on apparel, stickers, and other stuff in my store!

 In Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, where Legendary Birds can be found roaming in the sky on the overworld, this could actually happen!

 Just how rare and difficult to obtain HMs are is kind of up for debate in the Pokémon world. Yes, you can't buy them in stores. But you also seem to just be able to obtain them for such trivial reasons that it's like people are trying to get rid of them. 

I'm kinda glad HMs have been phased out in more recent games. They were a clever method for gating player progress in the early days, but it also meant you were stuck toting around a Pokémon (or several) who knew the requisite HMs to get you where you needed to go.

 Those times when grownups try to be cool and get in on a kids' fad and just end up embarrassing themselves. (Of course, according to my nieces, I'm still cool, so.)

I remember the 90's, when it seemed like no one over the age of 18 could pronounce or spell "Pokémon" correctly.

 I thought of another Nanotyrannus illustration I wanted to do; this time I used N. lethaeus (the larger of the two species, exemplified by the specimen "Jane"). I had fun kinda making her look like a sullen teenager. You'd be annoyed too if scientists spent decades trying to figure out your taxonomic status!

You can find this design on merch in my store!

 While at first it seems awesome to find useful items in obscure places that apparently other people lost at some point... it makes you wonder how long those things have been lying around, and if you should really be feeding them to your Pokémon.

 I was listening to a podcast on phorusracids and it just made me want to draw the kelenken from a novel I've been working on. They are literally the species Kelenken; I just lifted them wholesale from the fossil record and plunked them into my fantasy world. (Okay, I also made them slightly larger and more robust so they'd be rideable.)

On the vast steppe of the Sogen, the Plainsmen have learned to ride kelenken and use them as their main mode of transport (making them analogous to horses). By the time the novel takes place, the kelenken have become an integral part of Plainsman culture, especially because they are also extremely effective combat animals.

Plainsmen breed kelenken and give chicks to their children, with the animal reaching maturity as the child learns to ride. Kelenken have a lifespan of seventy years on average, so a kelenken and its rider develop a close, lifelong bond.

Kelenken are extremely intelligent and able to be trained to understand commands. However, in the novel, Arun explains that kelenken are not tame nor domesticated--they choose to live and work with the Plainsmen because the Plainsmen offer them safety, food security, and mental stimulation. When not being ridden, kelenken roam the plains outside of camps, doing their own hunting, but each rider and kelenken develop a unique whistle that they can use to call for one another across the steppes.

Over the course of the novel, Arun's kelenken Vy develops a close bond with Liu, and although as a Plainswoman by marriage, Liu is entitled to her own kelenken, she prefers riding Vy (and I think he prefers that too).

Also, if you're thinking Vy looks way too tall for Liu, you're right. Liu's people are rather petite and the Plainsmen are much taller and easily capable of mounting kelenken. Vy just sits down when Liu needs to mount him. He's adjusted quite well to having a non-Plainsman in the family.

 When someone tells me "you never know what you could catch" I interpret that as more of a warning than an opportunity.

 To be honest, there's not much of a joke in this one; I drew it because I was taking a short hiatus from the comic and it seemed appropriate to the situation.

But I put a lot of effort into those backgrounds, so I wanted to share it here.

 I don't understand how Sabrina can claim to dislike fighting, and yet she's a Gym Leader. And also the one who kicked the Fighting Dojo from official Gym status.

I kinda take most things NPCs say with a grain of salt.

 Throwback to Gen I, where due to some questionable battle mechanics, the Psychic type was essentially nearly invincible. Psychic types were supposed to be weak to Ghost and Bug Pokémon, but due to a programming error, the only damage-dealing Ghost-type move in the game (Lick) actually did no damage against Psychic-types. The three damage-dealing Bug-type moves in existence - Leech Life*, Twin Needle and Pin Missile - did extremely low base damage and were basically useless by the time you reached Saffron City. To top it all off, the only Ghost-type Pokémon in Gen I (the Gastly evolutionary line) and most of the Bug-types who actually learned Bug-type moves were also part Poison-type, making them extremely vulnerable to Psychic-types.

I have to give props to Game Freak for taking strides to address this imbalance in Gen II, where they introduced two new types that were both advantageous against Psychic, expanded the move pool for Ghost and Bug moves, and introduced Ghost and Bug Pokémon who weren't part Poison.

That said, considering the astounding complexity of the Pokémon Red/Blue battling system for its time, it's inevitable that the developers would make a few slip-ups, so I'm not really complaining about it. It's certainly not something that breaks the game. You just kinda have to go into it acknowledging that you should probably include a Psychic-type on your team.

*For the longest time, for some reason I thought the name of this move referred to actual leeches, like "yeah man, I'm livin' the leech life stealin' HP from my opponents". It took years before I realized that the "leech" part is supposed to be a verb--the Pokémon is literally leeching life from its opponent. I chalk that one up to being a weird kid who knew way too much about stuff like leeches and hagfish and early Cambrian stem arthropods.

 

I'm so excited to hear that (according to Zanno and Napoli 2025) Nanotyrannus is now a valid genus! I actually got to hear James Napoli talk about this seminal paper on a really awesome edition of Virtual Fossil Fridays where he broke down his and Lindsay Zanno's findings (and very generously let us ask tons of questions afterward); it was like reading the paper without the Nature subscription!

To celebrate, I made this graphic because there really need to be more things with NanoT on them. You can get this design on shirts, stickers, and more in my store!

 POV: You just singlehandedly saved a billion-dollar corporation from a criminal organization, and the CEO offers you literally anything in the world as a reward... and then proceeds to give you a totally unnecessary item that has no money value.

That's Pokémon Trainer life for you, friends.

(Also, considering that was the sole working prototype of the Master Ball, Silph's R&D division is not going to be happy it was just handed over to a 10-year-old who is 100% going to accidentally use it on a Caterpie.)

 I always found it incredibly weird that Blue is hanging around a Team Rocket-occupied office building, in an obscure tiny room only accessible by warp panel, seemingly for the sole purpose of battling Red, and doesn't even seem to care about the whole city-in-peril thing. I have to give props to Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee for rewriting this part of the game to make way more sense (instead having Blue work with the player character and new character Trace to infiltrate Silph).

There are a lot of plot elements in Pokémon Red and Blue that we didn't think twice about as kids, but thirty years on raise a lot of questions. Oh, the 90's.

 When you know your Pokémon team can easily cream that of anybody in Team Rocket, you're allowed to have a little sass.

 In a villainous base full of people who use Poison-types, you can bet there are going to be some pretty funky smells hanging around.

I wonder if the Rust Syndicate has this problem. Which of course is a segue into me talking about Pokémon Legends: Z-A! I finished the main game and I'm working on the post-game missions now, and overall I like Z-A way, way more than Scarlet and Violet. It's not perfect and I do have a few quibbles, but it does so much right that it's been a joy to play through. And I gotta get my hands on that DLC! I'm still planning to do a full blog post with all of my thoughts about Z-A because sometimes I like to pretend this is a gaming blog. I've just been really slow getting through the game because a) it is a delightfully massive game with lots to do and b) I've had a lot of other things going on, but that's okay because I'd rather have a life than spend most of my time gaming unlike Canari.

 In all honesty, Team Rocket are a bunch of pushovers as long as you have at least one Psychic-type Pokémon and somebody who knows Earthquake. Gotta love the imbalanced battle mechanics in Gen I!

(Which leads me to wonder why Sabrina didn't just go in and wipe the floor with them.)

 Fun fact: This NPC's dialogue refers to a real-world place, the settlement of Tiksi on the northern coast of Russia, which is actually the northernmost settlement with a population over 4,000. In the original Japanese dialogue, he states that he was sent to Podkamennaya Tunguska, a tiny village in the middle of Siberia.

Either way, definitely not the Tiki branch.

 Literally anything.

 One last FFTA2 sketch!

Vasily is a cantankerous, unsociable middle-aged bangaa who used to run his own courier business before joining Clan Excelsior after they helped him out of a jam. Aside from his skills as a Cannoneer, he's also an excellent airship pilot and knows his way around machines. He's extremely emotionally attached to his ship, a mid-size freighter named the Juggernaut, which he treats like his baby (since he didn't really have anybody else in his life before he joined the clan). After he joined Clan Excelsior, they lived on the Juggernaut and used it as their home base for a while. Eventually Qrrog secured Worgen Island for them and now they all live there, but still regularly use the Juggernaut to travel around Ivalice.

While generally cynical and blunt, Vasily is a decent guy beneath all that grousing, and he's very committed to the clan and always has their backs. In canon material, most bangaa have Scottish accents, but Vasily has a Cockney dialect because he just popped into my head that way. I dunno, maybe he's from a different part of Ivalice or something. He still has the usual bangaa habit of hissing his S's, though.

There are more characters who join Clan Excelsior in later fics, but I think I'll save their portraits for if/when I ever get around to revising those.

 I can't stop drawing Clan Excelsior portraits, but I had so much fun writing these characters; they each have such strong and diverse personalities and dynamics with each other that, like my Neopets cast, it's fun to just come up with new ways for them to interact and show different sides of themselves. My FFTA2 cast was really one of the first times in my writing that my character development was personality-driven--before then, most of the characters I wrote didn't really have much to them and basically just existed to fill a role, not be interesting in their own right (a lot of characters in Skydwellers had this problem, especially in earlier editions).

Plus, I've been re-reading those old FFTA2 fics and enjoying them despite their age. I've been dealing with a lot lately and those fics are a good happy place. Nothing like a bit of lighthearted fantasy brimming with quirky characters to take you away from your stress for a bit.

Qrrog Squallhammer was the first person to join Clan Excelsior after its initial three members; his recruitment involved piracy, being eaten by a sea serpent, and one of the wildest "how I met my spouse" stories ever. But it all worked out in the end.

 Last week on Fossil Friday, Ruby Pines was teaching us how to draw Dimetrodon, and as she was blocking out the shapes, she drew in what she called "footy pebbles" for the feet. MaggieJo then commented that she wanted to see a Fruity Pebbles-colored Dimetrodon. So I just had to.

Dimetrodon are often traditionally posed in a squat crouch, but there have been fossil trackways found of what appear to be Dimetrodon footprints that show two things: no tail-dragging marks and a narrow gauge between prints. Both these pieces of evidence strongly suggest that Dimetrodon walked in an upright position, so that's how I like to depict it.

(As much as I like the idea of Dimetrodon having whiskers, a paper came out last year describing scaly body impressions that appear to have come from Dimetrodon, so it seems that sphenacodontids had scales instead of bare skin/fur like later synapsids. These guys were just a little too early for whiskers, it seems.)

 I feel bad for any kid who has a Team Rocket member for a parent, though.

 More FFTA2 OC sketching! (I know, the proportions are kind of off. I draw these late at night when I'm winding down and I'm like "yeah this looks fine" and then in the morning I'm like "no no it's all wrong" but I don't feel like going to the bother of fixing it because it's just a sketch, and here I am overexplaining everything again when I should be eating breakfast.)

Anyway. This is Tara O'Donovan Squallhammer, the main character and first-person narrator of all the fics. She started off as an overstressed, exhausted college student from modern-day Earth, who was beginning to question what she was doing with her life when she found a Grimoire in a used bookstore and it transported her to Ivalice. At first, her adventures followed a path similar to Luso Clemens, with the Grimoire recording her escapades so it could return her home when its pages were filled.

However, as Tara grew accustomed to Ivalice, made friends for the first time in her life, and realized that her job as her clan's White Mage was way more fulfilling than being on the fast track to the rat race, she began to dread returning to Earth. Finally she made the decision to destroy her Grimoire, ensuring she could stay in Ivalice permanently (or so she thought, but that's a story for a later fic). 

 It's been a while since I drew the members of Clan Excelsior and I was having so much fun that I just had to do more!

Saskia is another of the founding members of the clan and its leader (because I wanted to break from the FFTA tradition of the main character arbitrarily being the clan leader). She's a taciturn, aloof, pragmatic viera markswoman who is a terror on the battlefield with her stealth, speed, and arsenal of arrows tipped with quick-acting poison. However, she is also a loyal and caring ally who is pretty much the mom friend of the clan.

She and Coele have a sisterly bond, as Coele was the first person to befriend her when Saskia was living in hiding in the woods. Saskia used to belong to a wealthy, prestigious, and totally corrupt clan who framed her for a crime when Saskia tried to expose them, so the viera escaped far to the south and became a forest hermit for over a decade--until she met Coele and started to come out of her shell. During the first fic, Clan Excelsior has an unexpected run-in with Saskia's former clan and they become tangled up in another of the clan's nefarious schemes--which actually turns out to be the perfect opportunity to bring them to justice, clear Saskia's name, and score a new airship.

Why is this woman giving you the TM for Self-Destruct at the worst possible time?! Lady, do you want to be saved or not?!

 I was sitting around and doodling last night, and I ended up drawing one of the characters from a series of Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift fanfics I wrote during and after college. I loved the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and played it to death*, so when they released a sequel, I was over the moon. When I learned that the world of FFTA2 is actually the same as that of Final Fantasy XII, it drove me to research the overall lore of Ivalice and I ended up incorporating a sizeable amount of FFXII stuff into the fics (not the least because Basch fon Ronsenburg is best pony and that's why he makes a lot of cameos), so they're sorta a little bit FFXII fics too? But I haven't bothered to keep up on any new Ivalice-related stuff so you won't see any of that in the fics. It's complicated arrrgggh.

 The presence of warp panels in the Silph Co. office building strikes me as strange. It's a really confusing and inconvenient way to get around. Hmmm, it's almost like the building was designed to be a challenging video game environment instead of a functional workplace. :)

 This one is based on a true story!

On my very first playthrough of Pokémon Blue (no comment on how long ago that was), I got to Silph Co. and got the Card Key, and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use it to open the doors. I tried pressing A to one side of the doors (where one would expect a lock to be), using the Card Key straight from the inventory, and consulting the Nintendo Player's Guide which just had very vague wording like "Now that you have the Card Key, you can open all those doors! Okay so anyway..." I must have struggled for about half an hour. (This was back in the day before reliable online walkthroughs, to say nothing of YouTube playthrough videos.)

Finally, in desperation, I went to my mom (who is not the least bit interested in video games) and asked her to just try something, anything. I handed her the Game Boy, she just started pressing random buttons, and in a matter of moments figured out that you're supposed to press A while standing in front of the locked doors.

Sometimes all it takes is a fresh pair of eyes. Thanks, Mom!

 I do love me some irony.

 Throwback to when limited programming space meant that sometimes signs in the overworld had very vague wording.

 I dunno, maybe we should take Team Rocket at their word? Why do we always have to assume they're up to something nefarious? Way to be judgy.

 Super amazing wonderful exciting news!

After much good-natured pestering from my paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe, I've launched a store to sell my illustrations on t-shirts and stickers and whatnot!

I'm so excited to be able to share my illustrations in a new way for people to enjoy (also it makes me a little extra money which is nice), especially since sometimes it can be hard to find good (and scientifically accurate) paleo merch of stuff besides T. rex and Velociraptor.

There's not much up there right now, but I will work on getting more designs up. For now I'll concentrate on shirts and stickers, but I'm always open to suggestions, and if there's anything else you want to see - another type of merchandise, a different shirt color, or even a whole new illustration - please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and let me know! 

 This comic was written back in the day when some people actually still used paper planners. I feel so old.

Also, you may notice that events are scooting along and I barely drew any comics in places like Celadon Gym and Pokémon Tower. That's because Trainer Wants to Battle! really focuses more on riffing on NPC dialogue than on trying to tell a cohesive story. There are about a million Pokémon webcomics detailing a Trainer's journey through a region, and I wanted to do something different. At any rate, if you're a Pokémon fan, you likely already know how the whole Kanto thing goes; I don't have to spell it out for you. By freeing itself of conventional narrative trappings, TWTB focuses more on the people of Kanto just being unhinged, and perhaps allows us to laugh at ourselves and gain insights into our own psyches.

When I wrote these comics, I literally played through the games and wrote down pieces of dialogue that I felt I could make good comics out of. That meant a lot of dialogue got skipped, but one of the cardinal rules of humor is that forced humor is never funny. I would much rather TWTB be the sort of comic where every strip is funny than fuss over narrative completeness. (At any rate, I think it sort of makes things even more unhinged than if I'd tried harder to make sure the overall plot made sense. At the end of the day, it's just about the player character trying to make their way through a world of weirdos.)

 Silly Channelers, getting their horror subgenres mixed up.

 Being a Gym Leader who's a narcoleptic comes with its own set of challenges. (I guess maybe it's better than getting hay fever from all those Grass-types.)

 Yeah, sorry, Giovanni, I'm not at all impressed with your underlings. (It doesn't help that they were using stuff like Rattata and Zubat. See, this is what happens when you sell all the strong Pokémon and make your grunts scrape the bottom of the barrel. Giovanni needs to hire a logistics manager. Like I said before, though, criminals are stupid.)

 I was re-reading Tolkien (as one must regularly), and one of the things that strikes me about the man's writing is how much he puts into his descriptions of not only landscape and geography, but the details of just being outside--the color of the sky at a given time of day, how the wind smells, the sounds trees make. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were obviously written by someone who loved nature and thought it worth writing about on its own accord, not just as the backdrop for a fantasy adventure. That richness of detail is what really helps bring Middle-earth to life in the imagination--it's not just a place where things happen, but a place that is wonderful and beautiful in itself, a world where you would want to be even if nothing particularly exciting was happening.

The way Tolkien describes the Shire is utterly charming, a loving homage to a rural England of yesteryear, and it serves as a really effective happy place when life gets stressful. I just wanted to doodle Bag End I guess.

 I always thought it was really odd that somehow, just you defeating this guy in a Pokemon battle causes him to drop an extremely important security item that's crucial to navigating the complex, and ultimately leads to Red ousting Team Rocket from Celadon City.

But, y'know, video game logic: if there's an objective to be met, the only way you're getting there is by doing more of what you've been doing the entire game.

Or maybe this guy just hates his job so much that he actually wants Red to go defeat Giovanni.

 I love Carnotaurus, so of course I had to make fun of it. T. rex is notorious for its proportionally small arms, but they look absolutely massive next to abelisaur arms, which were... basically just stumps with fingers. Seriously. 

(It kinda makes them even cuter, though.)

 Yeah, it's not like there were half a dozen people in the Game Corner tipping me off about checking a poster on the back wall.

On a somewhat related note, I'm reaching the end of Pokémon Legends: Z-A (the base game, not the DLC, which I will get ASAP), and I like it more and more on a story level the more I progress. At the beginning of the game, characters and events around Lumiose felt kind of disjointed, but when you reach the higher ranks, they start to gel into a cohesive whole, the significance of reaching rank A in the Z-A Royale makes sense (although I kinda wish AZ would have explained it to me earlier), and the plotline does a lot to follow up on the events of Pokémon XY in ways that are really satisfying for people who have played those games. 

 Every time I play a Pokémon game and see a Masquerain, this pops into my head, so I thought I might as well draw it.

 And that's how you defeat a Team Rocket Grunt.

 Fun fact: The rugose bony structures on the noses of Pachyrhinosaurus are called bosses.

Fun(?) fact: I have a ridiculous sense of humor and this is why I can't be a serious paleoartist.

Fun fact: I want this on a t-shirt.

 It's so shady that this guy in Celadon realizes how stupid gambling is, so he divests himself of his Coin Case by giving it to a random child. That's definitely sending some questionable messages.

 My buddy and accomplice in space humor Chris Lintott is Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and his running joke throughout his lectures is trying to start fights with the audience about whether or not Pluto is a planet (although I did once call him out on it during the Q&A and made him answer for his shenanigans in front of everyone, because that's what friends do). (For the record, he and I both believe that Pluto is awesome no matter what the IAU decides to call it.) So I just couldn't resist doodling New Horizons having this same debate with Pluto itself.

The irony, of course, is that New Horizons was a flyby mission, so it won't get to talk to Pluto later. Or ever.

 If you're a criminal organization, it's just a really bad idea to establish a prominent business right in the middle of town with the name of your organization in the name of the business.

Wait, new fan theory: the police are corrupt and actually letting Team Rocket do whatever they want, and Red is a lone vigilante trying to bring justice to a lawless Kanto.

They already used that idea for Pokémon Colosseum, though.

 Fight the system! Are we gonna let the Man bring us down, or are we gonna get our rover back?!

... I'm glad Chris Lintott enjoys my bonkers sense of humor.