firehose

Changing the racial identity of characters has become a contentious issue amongst fans of superhero comics and their adaptations in other media. The awful practices of casting white actors to play people of color, or of turning previously non-white characters into white characters, is all too common in movie adaptations of books, cartoons, TV shows, or even real life stories — but rather surprisingly, superhero comics and their adaptations have mostly avoided this problem.

In comics, the controversy takes a different direction. Several white characters have become non-white, mostly in movies, and sometimes in reboots. Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm in the new Fantastic Four; Helena Bertinelli aka the Huntress in the New 52; Nick Fury in the Ultimate Comics line and on screen. These are changes that agitate some readers — but realistically, the changes don’t go far enough. Superhero comics have a cultural bias towards white characters that has everything to do with their institutional history and nothing to do with what makes sense to the stories.

“TATTOOED BADASS PACIFIC ISLANDER AQUAMAN”

Though still not officially confirmed, it’s been reported that Jason Momoa will play Aquaman in DC’s very own Marvel Cinematic Universe — thus instantly boosting the appeal of one of the publisher’s more laughable superheroes by making him ludicrously attractive. I mentioned this on Twitter, and musician Marian Call wisely responded; “Tattooed Badass Pacific Islander Aquaman? It’s like the character makes sense for the first time EVER.”

I agree with Call. Jason Momoa, born in Hawaii to a Hawaiian father and mixed race mother, makes sense to me as Aquaman in a way that the character never made sense before, and I think it’s specifically Momoa’s Pacific Islander heritage that made it click.

This is not because I hold some weird belief that people from Pacific islands possess a unique and mystical relationship with the ocean. I do believe that there’s a stronger cultural connection to the ocean among people who live on islands — enough so that, if I were creating an ocean-based hero from the ground up, I’d sooner make him look like Momoa than, say, Chris Evans or Chris Pratt.

When Aquaman was created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris in 1941, he and his fellow heroes were presumably created as white Americans because white American audiences expected their heroes to look like them. Audiences were used to heroes played by Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, or Randolph Scott. Diversity was not a consideration in a pre-Civil Rights America with a reportedly 90% white population. (The percentage of the U.S. population reported as white stood at its all time peak in the census of 1940.)

Seventy years later, society has changed and progressed, yet superhero comics are anchored in the past, partly by virtue of the fact that the same 70-year-old characters remain popular. But nostalgia has created an industry that too often feels artificially out-of-touch with contemporary culture, and irrelevant to a modern audience.

Warner Bros. is now in the position of re-creating Aquaman. The studio could stay true to his appearances in the books and make him a corn-fed blond who looks like he just drove his tractor to church, but does that feel like a plausible look for an ocean-themed hero? (Inexplicably, the comic book Aquaman doesn’t even have a surfer’s tan.) Taking inspiration from an island culture like Hawaii, Samoa, or Okinawa, actually feels more natural to the spirit of the character.

These islands are all in the Pacific, of course, and Aquaman is linked to Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean, so Aquaman could plausibly look… Icelandic? West African? Native American? Or, he could stay looking Anglo Saxon. The British Isles are Atlantic islands, after all.

But the oceans are vast and interconnected, and Atlanteans are presumably well travelled and not bound to a single mainland culture. Making Atlanteans diverse is more interesting than making them homogeneous and white, and casting a mixed-race actor like Momoa makes the most sense. Casting a blond white actor would create the impression that Atlanteans are implausibly Eurocentric and strangely Aryan.

That’s a direction the filmmakers could explore, of course. Even without exploring it, a justification could be made for Aquaman’s blondness or whiteness. In most tellings, Aquaman is half-human, and half-American, and maybe even half-Floridian, so there’s nothing saying he can’t be white and blond. Some humans, some Americans, and some Floridians are white and blond. (Many are not, but some are.)

Come to think of it, an in-plot justification isn’t really needed. If the character is white and blond, audiences won’t actually question it.

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH-COLOR

This is cultural bias in effect. General (generally white) audiences never question why characters are white and blond. If a character could be white, that’s usually justification enough. Whiteness as default becomes logical and comfortable. Only non-whiteness requires an explanation.

Indeed, if a character is not white, some people will cry out that their racial identity is the product of political agenda-driven tampering. If a character is white, the same people will comfortably assume that he or she came out of the box like that.

It should be noted that we’re not even talking about the broad US census category of “white”, which covers people whose families hail from Europe, North Africa or the Middle East — including many people with tan, olive or ruddy skin.

In comics, whiteness is predominantly represented by the pale pink complexions of Northern Europeans — the color once problematically referred to as “Flesh” on Crayola crayons, until Crayola changed it to “Peach” in 1962. Real world white comes in many shades, but in comics all white people seem to trend towards hex color #FFCFAB. (Individual colorists may of course bring more nuance to their work, but how many white superheroes can you name who are consistently portrayed with bronze or olive-toned skin?)

Superhero comics don’t actually favor whiteness; they favor a subset of whiteness that borders on Aryan idealism. We ought to regard that as uncomfortably fetishistic, because it’s an aesthetic that the industry has chosen.

All fiction is manufactured. Authors make their worlds and choose what goes in them. It is always possible to contrive a fictional justification for a character looking whichever way the author wants, up to and including finding a way to make a white person the hero in a story about, say, feudal Japan, or ancient Egypt, or Persia during the Islamic Golden Age. A white hero is not the most likely scenario, but it’s always a possible scenario, so in that way it always becomes justified.

The decision to cast Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch has been called out by message board posters as evidence of an agenda at work — but white heroes in these non-white settings are rarely called out as similar evidence of an agenda. It’s all artifice, it’s all contrived. Fiction exists in service to an author’s design. All fiction serves an agenda, whether it’s articulated or not.

WHITE ANGLO-SAXON ALIEN

What could be more forced and artificial than the idea that a child from an alien world who crash lands at random in a Kansas field should look like he belongs to the predominantly white Anglo-Saxon culture he chanced into? First you have to accept that Kryptonians look like humans, and, OK, that’s a necessary precondition of the narrative — the story can’t happen if you don’t start with that assumption. But then there’s a secondary assumption that Kryptonians could look like late 1930s Kansans.

Most of the world does not look like Superman. If his ship had crashed almost anywhere else, he would have stood out, not as an alien, but as alien.

I’m not implying that Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel had a racist agenda when they created Superman, but I believe they conformed to a prevailing agenda, the unforced presumption of whiteness. The idea to make Kal-El white was likely a choice they made informed by cultural expectations. Anyone who is consciously aware of the existence of non-white people is always making a choice when they make a white character, whatever reasons inform that choice.

As it happens, Kansas in 1938 was only 96% white. Krypton was 100% white — right up until the 1970s. That’s when black people were finally introduced to the demography of Krypton on their own separate island. Krypton didn’t become racially integrated until 2009. Were diversity and integration artificially forced onto this fictional world? Yes, absolutely — just as they had been artificially kept out of it for decades previously. Krypton is artificial, and its demographics are always a matter of authorial choice.

It’s a relief to know that Krypton is no longer all white, but it perhaps begs the question; why is Superman still white? We can guess why Siegel and Shuster made him white, but why is he white today? Why, through every DC reboot, has he remained white?

It’s not that the world isn’t ready for a non-white Superman. We had one for several years — just not in the main comics continuity. Dean Cain introduced the world to a non-white Superman back in the ’90s in the show Lois & Clark.

Cain is a Midwesterner, like the Kents. He’s also mixed race — his natural father was half-Japanese. His mixed heritage was always apparent to me as a viewer, and it seems that an audience of 15 million had no problem accepting Cain as Superman. Perhaps much of that audience didn’t recognize Cain as mixed race, but they were certainly comfortable with a Superman who looked like Dean Cain. The precedent was set in front of a prime time audience. Superman doesn’t have to be white. A mixed-race Superman won’t blow people’s minds.

One might argue, of course, that Lois & Clark didn’t explore the ramifications of this change in the status quo. A Clark Kent who is visibly different to his neighbors, and visibly identifiable as adopted, might experience life differently to the Superman we know, and thus turn out differently, at which point he would no longer be Superman.

If one of the core themes of Clark Kent’s childhood is that he was taught his values of love and respect by Ma and Pa Kent, surely he would turn out the same way, even if he experienced more prejudice and estrangement from his peers? In fact, wouldn’t his experiences serve to underline Superman’s good grace?

It would all come down to how the story is written. It all comes down to the choices made by the author producing a work of fiction. A Superman who experiences prejudice and still grows up to be Superman sounds like the best Superman to me — and a mixed-race Superman sounds like the perfect exemplar of modern American virtues.

Race is not actually important to Superman’s story. What this unfortunately means, in his case and in almost every case where that holds true, is that he ends up being white.

Whiteness has a manufactured gravity that tugs at any character whose racial identity is not crucial to the narrative. This is where the cultural bias manifests. A character is white unless the story specifically demands otherwise. Audiences have become complacently comfortable with that idea.

RADIOACTIVE BLACKNESS

Before Andrew Garfield was cast as the new Spider-Man in the “Amazing” movie reboot, there was a fan-driven campaign to get black actor Donald Glover an audition for the role. Glover himself endorsed the campaign. He later said, “It makes sense. A poor black kid in Queens? It just fits. … It wouldn’t change much.”

The campaign met with the usual outcry from fans angry at the idea of a black Peter Parker, but in an interview with Hardknock TV, Glover said that the message that got to him the most was from someone who said that there are no black kids like Peter Parker. Glover’s response:

“[Y]ou don’t think there is a black kid who lives with his aunt in Queens who likes science? Who takes photography?”

Donald Glover knows better than that guy. In a diverse borough of more than two-million people, there are surely plenty of black, Latino, Asian, and white kids who like science and photography and live with their aunts. Yet there’s a section of the audience that cannot conceive of the idea that Peter Parker might have just as plausibly been a black kid as a white kid. They must imagine that would take some sort of special circumstance, one that fiction couldn’t account for.

Here’s the memo: “Black” does not require an origin story. No character needs to be bitten by radioactive blackness.

There is nothing about the Human Torch that presumes he must be white. The same is true for Iron Man, or Nightwing, or Wonder Woman. Whiteness is not an essential part of their stories. Sure, there may be implications to changing the race of any of these characters; if Steve Rogers had been black, it would knock the secret black Captain America revealed in the story Truth out of continuity. But it’s not implausible for a black Captain America to have the same strengths, principles, and virtues as white Captain America. Those are the aspects that define his character, and they’re not tied to his whiteness.

Some things would change. Race does shape a person’s experiences and interactions. But as Glover said of Spider-Man; “It wouldn’t change much.” The things we come to these heroes for would not change.

Fictional characters are fabricated out of infinite material. The only limits are the ones the authors impose. And time and again they impose the same limit. White. White. White.

Take another fictional Atlantean, Namor the Sub-Mariner. He’s half-human. Who would you cast in the movie? There are plenty of white actors I could imagine in the role. I’ve said before; I’d pay good money to see Zac Efron splashing around in little green trunks. But Daniel Dae Kim expressed an interest in the role back in 2010, and there are also a lot of fans who think that Namor should be played by an Asian actor.

And here’s the thing; They’re right. Namor’s features are more Asian than Caucasian. Like Superman and Aquaman he’s at least partly from a fictional race, so there’s absolutely no in-universe reason why that fictional race should look like white Europeans like so many of Hollywood’s leading men. Casting an Asian actor would instantly make Namor one of Marvel’s oldest and most high profile non-white heroes. Namor is only white if people decide he’s white.

The same is true of Nightcrawler and his mother, Mystique. In the movies they’re played by white actors, but there’s no reason they had to be. Mystique’s chosen appearance in the comics seems to emulate the Hindu death goddess Kali — blue skin, revealing costume, garland of skulls and a “third eye” skull on her forehead. So why shouldn’t she and Nightcrawler be South Asian? Marvel isn’t exactly overloaded with South Asian characters. (If you’re wondering, yes, there are South Asian people in Germany, even with German accents, even in the Catholic faith. Nothing about Kurt Wagner would change if we learned his mother was born in Delhi or Kolkata, but something would change for South Asian superhero fans who rarely see themselves in American comics.)

Of course, there aren’t many characters whose racial identity could be so easily changed (or rather, established) in the comics — and no-one should want to see another story like Psylocke’s, where a character’s race is artificially changed in-story. Movies and TV shows give us the best chance to re-imagine and re-establish these characters. Adaptation is the perfect opportunity to recreate Iron Fist, for example, as an Asian American.

But that’s not to say this sort of re-imagining can never happen in comics.

WHAT WE BOOT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT REBOOT

Marvel has avoided universe-wide reboots, which is generally wise, but the one advantage of a reboot is that it allows a publisher to introduce diversity into a universe that was codified in less progressive times.

When Marvel re-created its characters in the Ultimate Universe, the publisher did little to alter its characters beyond making Nick Fury black (on his second appearance) and making Wasp Asian American. There was no black Johnny Storm or black Peter Parker. It was a missed opportunity, and the publisher seems to recognize that now, given how it reconfigured the line around new heroes like Miles Morales, the black and Latino Spider-Man.

When DC’s New 52 reboot was first announced three years ago I briefly allowed myself to believe that the publisher would seize the chance to radically re-imagine its characters from the ground up. Superman could have a mixed, non-white appearance. Gotham could be re-imagined in the model of a collapsing Detroit, with an African-American Bruce Wayne as its champion. Wonder Woman and her Amazons, usually presented as predominantly white Greeks, could be given more Middle Eastern appearances. (The Amazons weren’t Greek, but rather a fictional alien culture invented by the Greeks. There’s no more reason for Amazons to look like Greeks than for Kryptonians to look like Kansans.)

In retrospect, my hopes for a diverse New 52 were foolish. DC wasn’t in the mood or in the market to do anything radical. The publisher made several admirable moves, giving solo titles to Batwing, Mister Terrific, Static, and Voodoo, and maintaining Jaime Reyes as Blue Beetle, but the publisher didn’t go to the mat. John Stewart could have been positioned as the Green Lantern; Ryan Choi could have been re-established as the Atom; Renee Montoya could have been kept in place as the Question. Most crucially, any white characters could have been reintroduced as non-white characters.

We’ve recently seen evidence that DC is open to this idea. Helena Bertinelli, the Huntress, was introduced as a black woman in the pages of Grayson; Wally West is now a young black man in The Flash (albeit one freighted with the cliché of being a fatherless street hoodlum); and white male hero Serifan of the Forever People is now black female hero Serafina in Infinity Man And The Forever People. All of these changes are worth celebrating.

On the other hand, the Earth 2 Connor Hawke was introduced as a seemingly white man when he had been mixed race in the pre-reboot DC Universe, and Green Arrow character Onyx has switched from black to Asian. If there’s an editorial policy in effect here, it’s unclear what the parameters are — except to say that it doesn’t extend to a non-white Superman.

All of that was on the table. The DC Universe is a construct. In rebuilding it from the ground up, its architects chose white as their dominant color scheme. It was not organic. It was not inevitable. It was a choice.

Maybe DC will make different choices in the next reboot — there’s sure to be one along in a few years. If Marvel makes the mistake of following DC into the reboot pit, one hopes they do a better job of shaking off white bias.

Of course, there will always be those who say that publishers shouldn’t add diversity by changing existing characters; they should only do it by adding new characters. But that’s difficult to do when white characters overwhelmingly dominate the racks. Batwing, Mister Terrific, Static Shock, and Voodoo have all been cancelled, while Superman, Batman, Aquaman and Wonder Woman now have almost a dozen titles between them.

This is an institutional problem. You can’t just ask superheroes why they’re white, Karen; but here’s an answer. Superheroes are white because they were created a long time ago, mostly by white people, mostly for white audiences. They are the product of cultural bias — yet they are expected to remain white even as the audience changes, for no better reason than that the industry is hidebound by tradition and continuity.

Perhaps it will take a more diverse talent pool bringing new energy and new ideas into the industry to create comics for today’s more diverse audience — possibly outside the established superhero universes. More diversity among comic book creators is a big part of the solution to superhero comics’ diversity problem. The historic lack of diversity among creators may in turn be rooted in that same diversity problem. Superhero comics look like an old boys’ country club, where whiteness is a prerequisite for membership. That’s not a welcoming proposition for non-white talent.

Every time a hero changes from white to non-white, whether it’s in rebooted comics or up on the screen, it helps chip away at that country club idea. That can only be a good thing for the future of the industry. And yes, it’s a “PC” agenda. It’s a pro-comics agenda. I’m proud to be PC.

I have bred an army of perfected super-Pokemon. I have completed my Pokedex. I am a grown adult man, and for a grown adult man, these are dubious achievements. I am not sure what drove me to do these things, but I am kind of proud of myself.

Pokemon is a Japanese RPG series, published by Nintendo, in which you enter a world filled with fantastic creatures called Pokemon. You are a Pokemon trainer, and your job is to kidnap these creatures out of their natural habitats and bend them to your will, forcing them to battle in glorified cockfights.

The first thing that happens in a Pokemon game is that you meet the Pokemon Professor, and he gives you a choice of three starter Pokemon. No matter which one you choose, it’s almost certain to be a piece of garbage.

The tagline for the Pokemon games is: "Gotta catch ‘em all!" But the Pokemon you catch are almost always garbage.

If you have embarked upon the process of collecting Pokemon without consulting external resources — either a guide or a website — your Pokemon are probably all garbage.

I wanted Pokemon that weren’t garbage

When I say your Pokemon are "garbage," I am speaking figuratively to explain that these Pokemon are inferior. However there is a Pokemon that is literally made of garbage, and that living bag of trash can potentially be superior to your lousy Pokemon.

It’s worth repeating that your Pokemon are likely terrible

Here is why your Pokemon suck so much: Underneath the cute animated monster battles, Pokemon games are, like all RPGs, made of math. But since the younger chunk of the Pokemon audience is likely to be horrified by the prospect of having to do fractions in order to play a video game, most of the math is kept under the hood.

For example, damage in the game is certainly a number, but you never learn that your attack did 124 damage; you just see your enemy’s health bar drop. Similarly, the Choice Band item’s tooltip explains that it "Boosts Attack," but it doesn’t say how much. If you want to get the numbers you have to go outside the game, to a guide or the internet, to find them.

The numbers behind your enslaved beasts

Pokemon have secret values attached to each of their stats called "individual values" or IVs, which are supposed to be analogous to the Pokemon’s "genes." The Pokemon you get in the game will have these values randomly designated when the Pokemon is first spawned and can range from 0 to 31, and they create a range of variance among Pokemon of the same type. Once again, the game doesn’t explain this system much beyond vaguely mentioning that it might exist, but competitive Pokemon must selectively breed to have perfect IVs.

Most Pokemon specialize in either physical or special attacks (special attacks are like magic), so a Pokemon will generally be considered flawless if its IVs are 31 in the five stats it uses.  Pokemon also have a "nature," some sort of randomly assigned personality quality that raises one stat and lowers another, and this needs to be beneficial, raising the most important stat while lowering the irrelevant one, or the Pokemon is worthless in competitive play.

What is The Pokémon Company?

There are also points called "effort values" or EVs, which are points that raise stats of your choice. Prior to the most recent Pokemon game, this mechanic was completely opaque. You had to consult external sources to figure out how to allocate EVs to particular stats, and you had to keep track of it on a notepad or something, because there was no UI for it.

The newest game tied EVs to a minigame; now you just have to grind that for about fifteen minutes for each of your Pokemon to earn these points and allocate them to the stats you prefer.

Consider a Garchomp. You probably don’t want to consider a Garchomp, because a Garchomp is a winged half-shark, half-dragon that looks like it crawled out of H. P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmare. Consider it anyway, because it’s the most popular Pokemon in online battles.

A flawless Garchomp has an optimal Jolly nature, which reduces his irrelevant Special Attack stat to increase his Speed stat. He has his EVs allocated to maximize his Attack and his Speed. And he has 31 IVs in every stat except Special Attack.

Those numbers, if you’re interested, are 358 HP, 359 Attack, 226 Defense, 206 Special Defense and 333 Speed.

A precisely average Garchomp with 15 IVs in all his stats, but with the same nature and EV allocation would have 342 HP, 343 Attack 210 Defense, 190 Special Defense and 315 Speed. The worst possible Garchomp with the same optimized nature and EVs would have 327 HP, 328 Attack, 195 Defense, 175 Special Defense and 299 Speed.

So, a perfect Pokemon is about four and-a-half percent better at everything than an average Pokemon, and about nine percent better than a really bad one.  It seems underwhelming. But players familiar with RPGs and the stats that govern them know that getting a little bit better at everything results in a substantial net improvement.

You have to breed your Pokemen to get perfect IVs.

Breeding the perfect killing machine

There is a Pokemon day care where you can leave two of your Pokemon and, if they are of opposite genders and compatible, they’ll produce eggs which will hatch into Pokemon of the same type as the mother.

The newest generation of games allow players to breed perfect stats by introducing items that allow a Pokemon to inherit its nature and 5 IVs from its parents. Previously, Pokemon could only inherit three stats, which meant that getting a completely flawless offspring was incredibly unlikely.

A flawless Garchomp has an optimal Jolly nature

The new games also added a postgame area called the Friend Safari, where you can capture Pokemon that are guaranteed to have two perfect IVs. One of the denizens of this zone is a primordial Pokemon called Ditto. Ditto is a gender-flexible pansexual that can breed with almost any other Pokemon, so if you obtain several safari Dittos with IV spreads covering the range of stats, you can breed perfect IVs onto anything else.

I’m going to spare the detailed mechanics of how perfect IVs are bred onto offspring, but hatching the eggs involves traveling the game with the egg in your party, or, more realistically, running back and forth on the stretch of road in front of the daycare until the egg hatches. The IVs are refined over successive generations until you get a perfect Pokemon.

There are a couple of other potential variables you have to account for — one is the Pokemon’s ability, which is a special quality that modifies how a Pokemon works. For example, a defensive Gliscor needs to have the ability that causes poison to heal him instead of damaging him, and the sluggish, status-altering Sableye needs to have the Prankster ability that gives his moves priority.

There’s no way to totally control which ability your offspring will have, other than breeding Pokemon that only have one possible ability, but if the parents have the ability you want, most of the offspring will as well.

The rest are, of course, garbage.

Finally, you may need to worry about "egg moves," which Pokemon can only learn if they’re born with them. These moves are obtained by breeding a Pokemon that knows the move with a female of the species you’re trying to breed the move onto. Sometimes, this requires several steps, and the process of how to do this is, once again, not explained inside the game.

Breeding a perfect Pokemon can take several hours. It’s boring, but also kind of hypnotic. You can do it while you watch TV. This is the Pokemon meta-game, and it’s one that competitive players know well. Casual trainers may not know many of these systems exist at all.

Min-maxing

The big mistake most people make is to breed a perfect Pokemon, and then start the process over with a different one. This is a bad idea. It can take several hours to get from a random original Pokemon and a Ditto to two parents with 4 IVs, covering the 5 you need between them.

Since the offspring will have 5 IVs from the parents and one random, your odds are one in 24 to get a perfect Pokemon: 1 in 6 to get the stat you don’t need randomized times two coin tosses, since each parent has a flaw, so you need the offspring to get each of those stats from the other parent.

Once you have an offspring with 5 IVs, instead of considering yourself done, you should switch it into the daycare rather than starting a new Pokemon. It will double your chances of getting a successive 5 IV offspring, and when you get a breeding pair that both have flawless IVs, you’ll get another one every six eggs.

It’s a tool for collecting garbage

It might take you three hours to make the first one, but in the next hour, you can make five more, which you can trade to other people for different perfect Pokemon.

The trading interface supplied by the Pokemon game is called the GTS. It is very popular; nearly 100 million Pokemon have been traded via the GTS since Pokemon X and Y came out in October. The GTS is also terrible. You can’t see the stats, moves or abilities of the Pokemon you’re trading, so the GTS is only good for getting Pokemon if you don’t care about their stats.

It’s a tool for collecting garbage, and we don’t want garbage.

I used the GTS to collect all the Pokemon and complete my Pokedex; I heard people like Mudkips so I bred about a hundred of them to amass a stash of perfect ones, and put the flawed ones on the GTS, one at a time, looking for each Pokemon that I was missing. If you got a Mudkip with 4 perfect IVs and some egg moves off the GTS recently in exchange for some random junk Pokemon, that was me.

You’re welcome.

As a reward for obtaining all 450 Pokemon in the Pokedex, you get an Oval Charm item, which causes your Pokemon to give you more eggs, speeding the pace at which you can breed more Pokemon. This was clearly just what I needed.

Since the GTS has no mechanism to facilitate trading of your perfect Pokemon you will have to, once again, go outside the game. There are forums dedicated to trading at Gamefaqs and NeoSeeker, and subreddits on Reddit dedicated to trading both legitimate Pokemon and "black market" Pokemon that have been "genned" or "cloned" by hacking save files from older Pokemon games.

Unless you have extremely high standards about these things, you will probably want to find somebody who will trade you a Ditto with 6 flawless IVs to facilitate your future breeding.  These are widely available and certainly hacked. Since Dittos can’t be bred to produce more Dittos, the odds of such a Pokemon occurring legitimately are the same as the odds of rolling a 32 on a 32-sided die four times in a row; literally one in a million.

But every Pokemon breeder seems to have one, and even communities that don’t allow trafficking in hacked Pokemon seem to ignore the possibilities of dubious Dittos in the Pokemon gene pool. A hacked Ditto is the Mitochondrial Eve in most collections of competitive Pokemon.

So just get one and pretend you are uncertain about its origins, because it takes a lot of work out of the process. Once you have a perfect Ditto, you can throw any perfect Pokemon you acquire in the day-care with it, and immediately start cranking out perfect offspring at a rate of one for every six eggs you hatch.

If you are particularly shameless, you can go on one of these forums and beg people to just give you a perfect Ditto for free before you start breeding at all; and someone might take mercy and hook you up.

Trading Pokemon through these web communities is kind of burdensome.  They’re all pretty small compared to the huge, worldwide pool of players on the GTS.  After arranging trades on these boards, you have to add the other person to your 3DS friends list, and then find them in the game to trade them. It’s needlessly laborious, and probably intentionally designed to keep perfect Pokemon from being distributed too easily.

But if you persevere, you can probably build a collection of flawless Pokemon to play with. It’s just a question of time, commitment and research.

The only question is: Why?

You don’t need Pokemon of this caliber to complete any Pokemon quest. The games are easy and don’t require, expect or even encourage you to engage with these more complex systems. Not only can you ignore IVs, EVs and Nature, but you can pretty much ignore the type advantages that comprise the bulk of Pokemon battle strategy, and just bungle through the main quest.

If all else fails, you can level your Pokemon until they can squash the content, since the final bosses are around level 60, and Pokemon can level all the way to 100.

I am not planning to compete in any Pokemon tournaments. I don’t think I would enjoy being the old guy at a Pokemon tournament. I can win most unranked online battles by choosing Garchomp and just using his Outrage attack, which is kind of satisfying, and my awesome Pokemon definitely help me progress farther in the Battle Maison endless challenge mode.

The game can become a huge time suck

Neither of these goals explains why I have, over the last six months, accumulated a box of 30 perfect, trained Pokemon.

Perfect Pokemon are necessary, but insufficient to compete at a high level in the ranked online battles. You need an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, or else you will likely be surprised by unexpected super-effective attacks from Pokemon you’re unfamiliar with.

Part of the urge to collect these things is just the urge to pursue rewards in games. Pokemon feel kind of persistent, because they have use in online modes, and can be transferred to future Pokemon games. You can set a discrete goal and accomplish it pretty quickly, which is pretty appealing, although, in aggregate, the game can become a huge time suck.

One way I try to rationalize my decision to play this game this way is to explain that it is kind of like tending a zen garden. Except that you can take your zen garden online and use it to destroy other zen gardens that belong to children.

That makes sense, right?

This year's soccer World Cup has already shown what the march of technology can do to the world's favorite sport. Yesterday Luis Suarez's lawyer claimed the tooth marks left in the shoulder of Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini by his Uruguayan client were enhanced with Photoshop; today the Russian national team's manager, Fabio Capello, blamed a green laser for his team's exit from the tournament.

Capello said that the Russian goalkeeper, Igor Akinfeev, had been "blinded" with a green laser shone from the crowd in the seconds before Algeria scored its only goal of the match. Russia drew 1-1 with its groupmates, a result that saw the North African nation progress to the competition's next stage, and the Russians knocked out. Russia were leading 1-0 until the 60th minute, when an Algerian player met a crossed free kick with his head, putting it past an airborne Akinfeev to level the score.

Videos and pictures of the incident appear to show a green laser beamed toward the goalkeeper. The light tracks across his body and face as he waits for the free kick to be taken, seemingly causing him to call out and gesture in annoyance. Akinfeev looks to be hit near the eye again as the cross comes in, before he misjudges a leap toward the ball, leaving his goal exposed.

It's difficult to tell quite how much Akinfeev was affected by the beam — the Russian doesn't blink or wince as it rakes across his face — but green laser pointers such as the one apparently used yesterday can be particularly dangerous for human vision. Human eyes are protected from most laser damage by a reflexive blink response — when a red laser hits our eyes, we look away within nanoseconds. But because green lasers are made using infrared beams outside of our visible spectrum, and cheaper pointers lack any kind of IR filter, the protection of a blink response is removed and our eyes can be damaged in short spaces of time.

Green laser pointers are considered so dangerous to vision that Coast Guard pilots are forced to land and have their eyes checked when targeted with one, and people across the world have been arrested and sentenced to years in prison for shining such beams at pilots and others on the ground. Soccer governing body FIFA has banned laser pointers from stadiums, but such devices have still been used to target players in Europe. Both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo came under laser bombardment last year during a match between Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Fortunately Igor Akinfeev appears to have avoided long-term eye damage. Indeed, after an inexplicable error against South Korea, the Russian keeper may have found himself wishing he had lasers to blame more often for his blunders.

Impossible, twisting geometric artwork abounds throughout the internet (see the Verge's logo for one prominent example). So it seems high time that someone made a similarly reality-defying font. "Oxymora" is it, transforming the familiar forms of English letters into bizarre, spatially confused 3D blocks that make your brain hurt. It was created by Barcelona-based illustrator and designer Birgit Palma, who says he was inspired by the work of brain-teasing artist MC Escher. As he tells us:

Actually I admire Eschers work a lot and use him quite often as reference. I feel that the solutions he offers are extraordinary and go beyond normal graphic design. When a client came to us and asked us to reinterpret the word MAX in a graphic way I immediately got fascinated by the fact that all the letters symmetrical. The symmetry and Eschers impossible figures were the base to develop the two different views of each letter and merge them. The project itself wasn't realised in the end, but I got so addicted by the system that I decided to make a complete font out of it.

Oxymora will soon be published as a display font by Ultratypes. It's probably not the best font choice for your average document, but if you're looking to leave an impression, Oxymora will do the trick and then some.

See some examples of the characters below:

All images courtesy Birgit Palma.

edictalis:

steinpratt:

split-the-coast:

When you discuss the wage gap, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Only white women make $0.77 to a man’s dollar.
• Black women make about $0.68 to a man’s dollar.
• Latina women make about $0.58 to a man’s dollar.

Intersectionality matters.

I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure that white women actually make more than that, somewhere in the low 80’s. The $0.77 figure is achieved by averaging the pay gap across women - which means white feminists who use that figure aren’t just ignoring black and latina women, they’re using their oppression to boost the numbers.

It’s pretty gross. Don’t be a part of it. Break the wage gap down by race.

Unsurprisingly, it is even worse than that. According to the National Women’s Law Center, in 2012, white women did make $0.78 on the dollar to white, non-Hispanic men. The reason it’s so close to the national average is that— surprise— black and Latino men also make appallingly less on the dollar than white men, though still more than then black and Latino women. Compared to every dollar made by a white, non-Hispanic man:

• $0.78 to white women
• $0.73 to black men
• $0.64 to black women
• $0.61 to Latino men
• $0.54 to Latina women

Pacific Rim is one of those movies that—whether people ended up liking it or not—everybody in the world wanted to like it. Giant robots punching the shit out of giant monsters! Overly dramatic speeches! Idris Elba! Movies like Pacific Rim are pretty much the reason movies were invented in the first place, and now Guillermo del Toro is getting another chance to blind us all with super-awesome monster-smashing robot punches.

As del Toro revealed in a special YouTube video, he’s officially making a sequel to Pacific Rim with Travis Beacham (who wrote the original’s screenplay) and Zak Penn (who is rewriting the Ready Player One adaptation). The film will be distributed in the United States by Universal, and it’s set for release on April 7, 2017.

In case anyone is worried that del Toro will get too clever and try to do something new with ...

When Adventure Time was in its earliest stages, creator Pendleton Ward decided on a show about a boy, his dog, a princess, and an evil wizard because it was so generic a network would probably pick it up. At the start, the only real indicator of just how weird the show would get was Lumpy Space Princess, the purple Valley Girl blob from another dimension. With an overwhelmingly enthusiastic personality, no sense of tact, and a hilarious voice provided by Ward, LSP quickly became a fan favorite, and we essentially learn her origin in “The Prince That Wanted Everything,” although LSP takes some artistic liberties in the telling.

The best thing about the “Fionna & Cake” episodes is that they give the writers the opportunity to put the cast in charge of the narrative, making each chapter a character study with a gender-swapped ensemble. LSP’s “Fionna & Cake Adventure” details Lumpy ...