6 August

The iPokédex is here!

iPokédexYes, I am into Pokémon. Way more than any 34-year-old could possibly justify. At least I have a kid I can use as my excuse. But it’s getting pretty serious. First the DS video games, now the trading card game, and of course I will sometimes watch the TV show and DVDs with him.

If you know anything about Pokémon (or, for those of you over the age of 10, who don’t), you know there are a lot of them. In fact, the sheer, staggering proliferation of them seems to be the main point, or at least a shrewd marketing tactic. As a result, there’s a lot of information to know about them, and thus arose the idea of the “Pokédex,” or Pokémon Index. The Pokédex is both an element in the games and the TV show, and a tool for fans, to store and retrieve information about all of the various Pokémon.

That’s all well and good, but what I really wanted was a version that was always at my fingertips, i.e. a version that works on my iPhone. Strangely there seemed to be no iPhone-friendly Pokédex out there. I can understand why an official one wouldn’t exist, what with Nintendo’s reluctance to license their brands to other hardware manufacturers (a smart move when you consider the disaster that resulted the one and only time they tried it), and especially when you consider that the iPhone is now essentially a competitor to the Nintendo DS.

Anyway… the point of all of this is that I’ve built my own iPhone-friendly Pokédex, which I am oh-so-creatively calling the iPokédex. Don’t bother going to ipokedex.com though. (Yeah, I have no idea either.) I may eventually register a unique domain name for it (assuming I don’t get sued in the meantime), but for now you can find it here at this relatively pithy URL:

room34.com/pokemon

Enjoy!

What do you get when you cross The Beach Boys, Queen and The Foo Fighters?

It might just be my ears, but I believe you get The Dear Hunter, in particular, the track “Smiling Swine.”

Despite the obviousness of the multi-layered vocal harmonies, I had never before thought there might be a musical connection between Brian Wilson and Freddie Mercury, but there you go.

This is one of numerous “post-emo” (that’s my term, I think, but you can use it) bands that have gotten my attention over the past few years, starting with The Mars Volta and especially Coheed and Cambria, but more recently Circa Survice, Chiodos and these guys (who may actually be one guy; I’m not entirely sure). At any rate, I had never really given emo much attention, mainly because it seemed like something I was about 15 years too old to appreciate, and to be honest I still haven’t really checked out any straight-up emo (whatever that might be; I wouldn’t even know where to look), but the stuff these guys are doing is unmistakably marked with the same grandiose ambitions that were the cornerstone of the early ’70s prog rock I’ve been into since high school.

The Dear Hunter’s music, in particular, is quite intriguing with its incredibly varied instrumentation and song structures. There’s nothing else quite like it, except maybe Brian Wilson’s SMiLE. It’s definitely worth checking out.