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Tomorrow, some friends and I are going to get together for a new non-denominational tradition that we’re starting among our local group: Saint Bean’s Feast Day. For us, this is going to be a sort of potluck where every dish must feature at least one bean.

Back in mid-January of this year, we were all at a different friend’s house for a cookout while discussing Berkeley Bowl’s extensive produce selection. It’s the only store I know of that allows you to buy a dozen different types of eggplant.¹ One friend lamented that there were too many to try and that no one would be able to determine the best eggplant without buying many pounds of it. That is, unless we had a party where everyone brought a dish that had a different kind of eggplant in it. We liked the core conceit of the party idea, but none of the rest of us wanted a meal with that much eggplant, so we brainstormed other foods that have a lot of types before deciding on beans.

National Bean Day in the United States is January 6th.² We opted for an alternative date for scheduling Bean Day. We couldn’t…

My partner has been scuba certified since the age of twelve.¹ I have long enjoyed hearing animated stories of the cool sights to be seen, the majesty of coral reefs, and the safety and care that goes into such an ecological sport. In 2022, as a birthday/holiday present, my family bought a special phone case for my partner to go diving with so that we could see pictures and videos of the results.² Getting to see what was down there has definitely made me appreciate the activity more than hearing about it ever did. It’s a lot of work to edit any of the photos to balance for the blueness³ and low contrast of the ocean, which is why these images are just presented as is. Despite all of the stories and pictures and videos I had seen and heard, for years, I had maintained my stance that I was uninterested in ever going scuba diving, myself.⁴

This week, I went scuba diving for the first time, and I loved it. My partner and my mother-in-law⁵ and I all went to Cozumel, Mexico to dive along the Great Mayan Reef.⁶ This is the…

Ever since I first read about My Friends the Monster Trainers by Jamwitch via Laura Michet’s blogpost about it, I’ve been completely enamored by that game. I love the not-technically-pokemon designs about it. I love the believable-in-fiction setup for the game’s premise. I love how toyetic the design of the whole webpage where you play the game is. And what I found was that I also craved more: more not-pokemon to try to determine from clues, more detailed typings and how those types overlap with the real world, more keeping track of which creatures turn into which other creatures, among many more notes I wrote down to try to come back come development-time.

Since roughly June 1st of this year, I have been working on putting together a list of 50 names of not-pokemon followed by illustrating simple contour drawings of them by hand on my phone. Here are the names in alphabetical order.

Aboara
Arcupine
Blaazé
Bluega
Boarealis
Boouoy
Bowvine
Brewelée
Buffalloy
Bullbil
Calvine
Canaro
Capyterra
Chinchiller
Coltage
Cragmite
Dextsnail
Dragonet
Ducktile
Fincho
Flambébé
Gumchu
Hogtide
Hogwash
Hydromedary
Icebis
Joltergeist
Koalala
Llamina
Magmoo
Malleabard
Ossilot
Pneumatoad
Psycculent
Ratarot
Rockoon
Sanguin
Scorchion
Scorchling
Serindigo
Shrewdinger
Silverant
Sinisnail
Smolten
Snowflee…

Yesterday, I got to see some puffins in person for the first time ever!

Eastern Egg Rock Island is a 7-acre rock that sticks up to 20ft out above sea level, and it has been designated a protected habitat for puffins since 1973, thanks to the National Audoban’s Project Puffin. It is the furthest point south where Atlantic Puffins breed in North America.

Visiting Port Clyde that morning for breakfast, we went to the herring gut coastal science center to see the brand new touch tank that had been installed. They had a room with several tanks for horseshoe crabs, sea urchins, a flounder, a jackknife clam, and a calico lobster¹. It was maybe the most lethal touch tank area I’ve ever seen². We spoke with the head of the center, Sally, who mentioned that she had heard a rumor that there might already be puffins this year on Eastern Egg Rock Island. Normally, “they don’t arrive until July,” but it just-barely being July and having heard such a promising rumor, we had to check it out.

The mouth of the St. George river has hundreds, maybe thousands, of lobster traps in it that are checked…

It has been a little over a year since I first started handbuilding abstract-shaped dinosaurs out of clay at the local pottery studio where my partner is a member. It began with this one piece that a friend of the owner had made and we all coveted.

At a friend’s birthday party at that same studio, I decided to try to handbuild a similar long-necked dinosaur. It’s such a small object, after all. How hard could it be to form such a tiny amount of clay into the right shape?

I was immediately humbled.

After hearing my partner and the studio owner talk about how much they loved and wished they could steal that original dino on the shelf, I decided to try again with more of a plan.

I rolled some speckled clay into an oval and used a needle tool to cut out the spaces betewen the legs. I pinched the legs out into longer points and then gently tapped the body feet-side-down until the feet flattened out into cylinders from cones. I rolled out a cone that I attached in the back for a tail and a long cylinder that I squared off and attached in the…

After spending last night writing that blog post about pokemon phonetic pangrams, I felt like I was done with this hyperfixation and could move onto other things¹. This morning proved me wrong when I had the thought

Hey isn’t making a pangram kind of just a very specific case of that daily word game you made last year?

Suffice it to say that that inkling was correct, and it only took me all day to remember how that all worked, copy it into a new project, modify that into working for phonetic pangrams, set that project up with Render² for hosting, upload the iframe pointed there from itch.io, and build out a new itch.io page for the project. Take a look below:

It works with pokemon and the CMU phonetic dictionary, which covers a bunch of English words and names. It only supports General American English³ for now, but I think there are ways to extend that to other dialects going forward, with enough data about how the phonemes change.

Anyway, in the interest of keeping it short, that’s it! Enjoy, and please share your phonetic pangrams with each other…

As a follow-up to my previous post, I have uploaded the data and my previous solution to codeberg. Last time, I learned that Slither Wing is the only pokemon across all current generations to contain the ð phoneme, which meant that only datasets that included gen-9 could form true phonetic pangrams for General American English. With this in mind, I scraped the rest of the generations and compiled them into one unified dataset for all pokemon. As expected, I was able to find several 11-pokemon pangrams¹ by simply using the new dataset, but it made me wonder if there existed any pangrams with even fewer pokemon. I tried running the 10-mon pangram attempt across all gens and found that nothing happened for a while, even with the caching I had explained in the previous post.

Technical Hurdles

After discussing this with some of my friends on Discord, it became clear that the size of the problem-space being explored had grown very quickly with the size of the dataset of pokemon, just as predicted. For gen-1, there were at most (151 choose 10) combinations of pokemon to find a set that covered all 37 represented phonemes in that…

As I mentioned in my previous post, a phonetic pangram is a sentence or phrase that covers every one of the sounds in a given dialect of a language. Since proper nouns can form a phrase, a phonetic pangram could potentially be made from any sufficiently large collection of names.

This led me to the question: “Is it possible to make a phonetic pangram from pokemon names?” and more specifically, “Can we do so using only the 151 from the first generation of pokemon?”

Phonetics

For General American English, wikipedia lists the following sounds that comprise every commonly spoken word:

Consonants (24¹)

m, n, ŋ, p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, tʃ, dʒ, f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h, l, r, j, w

Vowels (14)

ɪ, i, ʊ, u, ɛ, eɪ, ə, oʊ, æ, ɑ, aɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ, ɚ

To make a pangram, I simply needed pokemon names that encompassed each of these 38 phonemes. You could imagine a worst case of 38, where each pokemon is picked for having exactly on phoneme represented in its name, though I figured there was probably more overlap than that.

Pokemon name pronunciations

I was able to…

Pangrams are single sentences or phrases that include every letter of a given language’s alphabet at least once.

Pangram Examples

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow

There’s another type of sentence(s) or phrase(s) that gets every vowel sound - or even every unique sound overall - from a language pronounced at least once. A few are presented below, but I believe with some time and effort, we could do better

Phonemic Pangram Example

With tenure, Suzie’d have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.

Phonetic Pangram Example

The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.

My own, bespoke phonetic pangrams

1. Fear not, boy: our usual chutzpah may win over grouchy foodies. Aye, hand your battered shank lengthwise up to their closed jaws.

2. L’chaim! Yes, after showing what three blue powdered treasures their benevolent hook caught, guys are joyous.

3. “Johann Sebastian Bach athleisure wear for jungles zips together proudly,” my voice shook.

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Pakunoda, member number 9¹ of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: And we are introduced to them very quickly. We have Pakunoda, who is a sexy lady. She has a lovely piece of animation. She checks her wristwatch, at one point, and she’s wearing her watch like a bracelet with the face on the inside of her wrist like some people do, so she’s, like, looking at the inside of her wrist to check the time.

Jack: But it’s…well, it’s interesting. We learn later that sort of a lynchpin of the back of this episode is the Nen power of another Phantom Troupe member. Pakunoda? Pakunada?

Keith: Pakunoda.

Sylvia: Pakunoda, yeah.

Jack: Who can sort of verify whether something is true by reading the memories of people she touches. We haven’t had this power confirmed, but that seems to be the case.

Sylvia: Yeah. I think that’s like a really important thing to draw on is the, like…the way the different founding members sort of step up during this sequence.

Keith: That’s like, the…like, emotional core of these episodes is that…