a blog about #longposts

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…

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…

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 — almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren’t really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

Beyond the more widely-known “horse-armor” DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the “Wizard’s Tower”. I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load…