Alola!

As I have in years past, I wrote a blog this year to celebrate the 26th anniversary of me playing Pokémon for the first time.
(Which also happens to be my 31st birthday.)

First of all, in last year's blog I had set a number of Pokémon-related goals for myself, similar to what I have been doing in my Paint anniversary blogs since 2023, so let's see how I did with those.



So it turns out that I was only able to accomplish 3 out of my 10 Pokémon-related goals last year, which is obviously far fewer than I had hoped to be able to do when I wrote my blog last year…

I attribute my failure to accomplish more of these goals to a variety of different things, but primarily these 4 things:

1. Me focusing more on my other goals for last year, that didn't have anything to do with Pokémon.
(I did a GREAT job of accomplishing those!)

2. Me repeatedly getting caught up in admin drama here on Paint, which (thankfully) is far less likely to be an issue this year.

3. Me spending too much of my free time talking with people on Discord and other platforms about things like religion and politics, rather than here on Paint about fun things like Pokémon, like I did back in 2019.

4. My ridiculous RL situation still being an issue, although it is far less of one than in years past.
(Due to me having a phone, a 3DS, and multiple ways of accessing the internet on my own now.)

In order to prevent a repeat of these same problems from occurring like they did last year, I will take a different approach this time: setting 12 Pokémon-related goals and trying to accomplish 1 each month.



Needless to say I don't actually expect to accomplish all of these goals, but for the ones that I obviously can accomplish (such as completing my Pokémon tiering system), I am quite confident that I can do so if I keep focusing on them over the course of a month, hence my whole “1 goal month” approach here.

Anyway, there's no time like the present to get started with these things, so I'm going to try to feed two birds with one scone here, and make my 26th Pokémon anniversary blog (this blog) the blog for last year's Pokémon tournament as well.



As I had mentioned in some the spoilered sections above, I have 3DS now, all thanks to my good friend MattTheTekie, which has allowed me to play my favorite video game series again for the first time in over 4 years!

Words cannot even begin to express how EXTREMELY grateful I am to Matt for this, as playing Pokémon remains (as it has been for most of my life) one of my favorite things to do!

Although playing on Pokémon Showdown is really fun, and I am EXTREMELY grateful for the fact that their Pokémon battling platform allowed me to still enjoy the thrill of Pokémon battles while I was unable to do so on my 2DS or DS Lite—not to mention being able to battle with Gen 8 and 9 Pokémon despite not having a Switch of my own yet, as well as their AWESOME NatDex formats—but I still missed all of the other parts of playing Pokémon.

In my 24th Pokémon anniversary blog 2 years ago, I wrote the following:

I would like nothing more than to return to the Hoenn region (in my Ω Ruby Version) and hunt for more Shiny Pokémon (I was trying to catch a Shiny Giratina in particular), breed more max IV Pokémon (that's a REALLY good guide on how to do that BTW), and just go through my regular routine of doing all of the daily battles and collecting all of the daily freebies and such every day.
(Gen 6 Hoenn has the best dailies of any Pokémon games BTW, and some of y'all here know why.)

I'd also like to return to the Alola Region (in my Ultra Moon Version, my other Ultra Moon Version, and also my Sun Version) and work on getting all of the version-specific clothing items that I hadn't gotten yet through Festival Plaza, as well as doing my daily routine there, working on catching and breeding more Pokémon there, and taking plenty more cool photos of myself with my Pokémon and uploading them here on Paint.
(I've certainly uploaded quite a few pictures of my Pokémon here already, but they're only a small fraction of all of the photos of my Pokémon that I've taken in the 3DS Pokémon games over the years.)

Of course, there's also the Kalos region (in my Y Version) on my O2DS, but I also miss Johto (in my SoulSilver Version), Sinnoh (in my 2 Platinum Versions, which I unfortunately haven't yet uploaded any pictures from), and Unova (in my Pokémon White Version 2, but also my White Version 1) on my DS Lite, and I could also be trading, battling, and doing lots of other fun stuff with y'all here on Paint in any of these different Pokémon games as well...

Back when I wrote all of that, I was quite sad because of how much I missed the world of Pokémon, despite the fact that I enjoyed spending time with y'all here on Paint. Needless to say, I've been able to visit all of those different regions again and see all of my beloved Pokémon again for the first time in years, and the only part of all of that that I haven't done yet is to trade, battle, or do other fun things in the world of Pokémon with my Pokémon-playing friends here, and I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to do so in the near future.

Of course, the lack of Pretendo support for the Gen 6 and 7 games ATM will prevent me from doing anything multiplayer in those, but I'm sure that will become an option eventually. In the meantime, however, I can still write blogs about those games just as I did back in 2019-2020, and I can play with y'all in the Gen 4 or 5 games via Wiimmfi in the meantime.

All you need to do is change the primary DNS to 178.62.43.212 on your DS. Make sure the secondary DNS is either 0.0.0.0 or otherwise the same as the primary.

Just do that, and you can use the online features of your Gen 4 and 5 Pokémon games again, almost as if Nintendo had never even shut them down!

Anyway, I suppose there's not much else to say here, since I kinda blew all of those goals I set last year, and I haven't yet made any progress on my (now permabanned) friend BenTen's Shinylocke Challenge, lol!





And yes, I do still plan on completing BenTen's challenge, BTW.
(I'm a man person of my word, Drac after all. You Y'all know that.)

Finally, just like I did in last year's anniversary blog, I'd like to leave some cool pictures from my Pokémon games here for you to enjoy, which I was only able to upload here to Paint because of my new 3DS.
(Which isn't a “New 3DS” BTW, but is still TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!)