"A Shiny Murkrow Told Me" ft. CaptGoldfish | TRAINER'S EYE #26

CaptGoldFish reflects on his Chicago Go Fest experience, despite the challenges of 2017, and how it turned into a memorable opportunity to connect with others passionate about Pokémon GO. He also shares how the game strengthened his bond with his daughter. As a creative player, CaptGoldFish delves into his Raid infographics, designed to help the community better understand Pokémon GO mechanics.

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Sources
Opening Song: "Forget You" by Alex_MakeMusic from Pixabay

Transcript

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David Hernandez 0:00

My name is David Hernandez and you're listening to As The Pokeball Turns.

Introduction

David Hernandez 0:43

Welcome to As The Pokeball Turns! Where we interview people around the community on how their Pokemon Go journey started, where it has been, and where it is currently going. There are 18 types within the Pokemon franchise, each with their own weaknesses and resistances. When you consider the different dual typings that can exist across the 18 types, there are theoretically 153 different combinations of possible Pokemon types. For those who grew up playing Pokemon, understanding how types interact with one another comes as second nature. But for those who were introduced to Pokemon through Pokemon Go, most notably during raids, understanding the type chart is a much more daunting task. This can make choosing the correct Pokemon for defeating raid Bosses increasingly difficult and many players have notoriously used the recommended raid party offered by the game. Thankfully many people have taken up the task of developing raid guide graphics showcasing CP ranges, weaknesses, and even the best Pokemon to use in raid battles. Many do this in hopes that raid battles are easier and to help educate the player base on what Pokemon are best to use for raid bosses. One detail that can easily be taken for granted is the amount of work and time that goes into developing these raid guides. Behind every raid graphic is easily countless hours of drafting, planning, and even drawing Pokemon that goes into it. My guest shares his experience with Pokemon Go, including the infamous 2017 Go Fest and shares how he approaches developing his personal raid guides with the aid of a Murkrow. Here's his origin story into the world of Pokemon Go. This is Captain Goldfish!

Interview with CaptGoldfish

David Hernandez 2:21

Today I'm joined by CaptGoldFish. Now, you may not know him by his voice, but you will recognize him more by his images, most notably, a witty Murkrow that's in the very corner of every one of his posts. CaptGoldFish, welcome to the show!

CaptGoldFish 2:36

Hey, it's great to be here.

David Hernandez 2:37

Definitely! Now, I wanted to describe your art real quick, cause I couldn't really find a good word for it. I wanted to say melancholy, but you're not really sad. Like, how would you describe your art real quick?

CaptGoldFish 2:47

Oh, it's a hard one because, I don't feel that I'm good enough to actually draw the things that I want to draw. I'm just learning how to draw as I draw, so everything that comes out, basically everything I've drawn has been online from the start. So, it's just how I feel, I start drawing it and what it looks like is what it just turns into.

David Hernandez 3:06

So you don't have like a set idea going into the drawing, you go with however you feel the Pokemon kind of speaks to you. Is that fair to say?

CaptGoldFish 3:14

Yeah, I'm, I'm getting a little bit better at knowing what to make it look like what I have in mind, but especially towards the beginning and, still I have an idea of what I want and then I start drawing and it turns into whatever it ends up being. I go with what it turns into as opposed to knowing exactly how to make an expression or what it's gonna look like. I'll make one and then realize, oh, this is just what it's gonna look like. So, I'm, not a trained artist by any means.

David Hernandez 3:39

Have you always drawn or is it kind of just a hobby you recently picked up?

CaptGoldFish 3:42

I haven't drawn most of my life. This is just in the recent years and a while back I drew with a friend on, there was an app called Draw Some. It was kind of like a Pictionary type thing where you played online and you drew a picture and they would guess it. So I had a friend that I was doing that with a little bit, and I kind of learned how to draw with my fingers, as best I can with like a drawing program.

David Hernandez 4:02

So you haven't drawn your whole life, so it's just a couple years experience you have with these drawings?

CaptGoldFish 4:07

Yeah, most of these, I mean, if people have seen some of my stuff, I would say most, a lot of it, was done with my finger on like an iPhone with just like a basic drawing program. it wasn't until I think last year that I got an iPad and it has a pencil with it so I can draw. It became a lot easier to draw with that. I could create layers and stuff before I was just smudging down some color and then going back and putting lines on top of it cuz it was a very simple program I was using,

David Hernandez 4:34

Well, color me impressed because I was always jealous of the people who could draw growing up. I was very straight with my drawings like I couldn't do curves, I couldn't do shades and stuff like that. I'm impressed that this is something so recent and you're pretty good at it to be honest, from my humble opinion, for what it's worth,

CaptGoldFish 4:51

I do try, but I think it's just a matter of, I've been practicing a bit. When I start to draw something, there's a point where you have to get past, this looks pretty dumb, this is not a good drawing, and you have to keep going until it becomes a better drawing. I did practice doing some kind of realistic drawings of people's faces and I was really surprised at how good I was able to do considering I've just been using my finger. You seen the Murkrow and Murkrow is basically my first real drawing of a Pokemon. Well, I take that back, in the early days of Pokemon Go there were a Facebook group if you found a rare catch, you would call it in, tell the group that this, there was something here and so often people would take a picture, a screenshot of where this Pokemon was, but I would usually catch the Pokemon and then take the screenshot. I would quickly doodle out like a Dratini in this spot for people to catch and so that was my first little drawings and I think people enjoyed that sometimes. Eventually, my daughter had a Pokemon screensaver for her phone, so I wanted a Murkrow one and so I ended up drawing with myself. I think the tools that I had was a simple paint program made my style the way it was, just limited to the tools.

David Hernandez 5:57

Now speaking of Murkrow, is Murkrow like your favorite Pokemon, or what's the story behind just Murkrow being all over the place?

CaptGoldFish 6:04

There was a lot of hate for Murkrow when that first came out. They came out, and I remember everybody seeing the little black shadow in the bottom of the screen thinking it was a new Pokemon, when it was a Murkrow, so people hated that. And then they hated catching them because they were so hard to catch and they were wasting your balls. So I was not specifically endeared with Murkrow, until one day, I just, for some reason, challenged myself to get Murkrow into 20 different gyms. And then it just kind of became my thing that I just dropped Murkrow in gyms and that was my Pokemon.

David Hernandez 6:33

And it's become basically your logo for basically your Instagram as well as your drawings now, because on every single drawing, for those who don't know, the Murkrow's always there in the right hand corner and there's usually I get some kind of witty quote. Is that what you would call it?

CaptGoldFish 6:45

I guess so, yeah, it's something, it's, it's a reference to something that I hope at least somebody gets. So sometimes it's very broad and sometimes it's very specific. That's kind of humor I like.

David Hernandez 6:55

And that's the best part cuz some of 'em I do get, and some of 'em like where does this come from? But I always look forward to seeing what the Murkrow's gonna say.

CaptGoldFish 7:01

Yeah, sometimes it's fun to see like people explaining what it might be or wondering what it is and sometimes people have different explanations than I had like I'm referencing something but it actually fits in something else too, so you never know.

David Hernandez 7:13

Wow, that's very cool. So let's go back a little bit. Before you even did the whole Murkrow drawing, when did you first start playing Pokemon Go?

CaptGoldFish 7:20

It was pretty soon after it was released. I had heard about it that it's a walking type game and I was at the time trying to get my daughter to walk to the library downtown here. She had some tutoring there, so I was trying to get her to walk and it was a little bit hard, but I thought, let's just get this game and maybe this will help us walk there and back. And it became something we did like a lot, we started going for walks without having to go anywhere, you know, she would just wanna go around the block and do stuff so that's basically why I started cause I had never played a Pokemon game or knew anything about any of them.

David Hernandez 7:53

Was that the only time y'all would play was just from, your house to the library or were there other places y'all would go to?

CaptGoldFish 7:58

Well, it started off with the walk and then later on that night we were like, do we wanna go out and catch some more? cuz especially at the time, if you were sitting in your house, there was nothing going on. We didn't know anything about any of what we were doing, it was just like, let's just go find some new things. So it started basically that first night, we would start to go out more.

David Hernandez 8:14

To add on: there wasn't even any raids, there wasn't no team rocket, there was no PVP, like we're talking bare bones of the game.

CaptGoldFish 8:21

Yeah, pretty much, there was a gym across the street and we lived pretty close to a park, so you could go through there and downtown is a great place to play. So we live in Iowa City, it's a college town, so there's a lot of good stops downtown, it's a very clustered area.

David Hernandez 8:34

Describe to me what it's like to play in Iowa, like where do people go for Community Day or where people go for Raids or stuff like that?

CaptGoldFish 8:40

It's straight up downtown where there's tons of stops and tons of spawns and you can just walk in a square block, and by the time you get around, everything's gonna be repopulated and it's pretty dense there. We have a local Discord group that meets down there a lot. When you get outside of downtown, it gets a little bit sparse, there's a lot more space in between things, so you can't really walk it. Downtown is the best place to go walk.

David Hernandez 9:02

And during, like say summer or winter, like, do y'all have like harsh summers, cold winters?

CaptGoldFish 9:07

Yeah, it's pretty cold, like, I went out tonight for my little 15 minute incense walk and it's 20 degrees out. It does get colder and it gets snowy.

David Hernandez 9:16

Do y'all get like, feets of snow at times? what happens then? Do y'all get to play or is that kind of when y'all put the game down a little bit?

CaptGoldFish 9:21

We still always play. If I wanna walk somewhere, we'll go to the mall or a couple of areas where there's still enough to do. But yeah, it does definitely cuts down on the walking. When it starts to get below zero, then it's like, your phone starts to not work so well cuz I used to, ride my bike a lot and I realize, I have to put my phone someplace where it's kind of warm cause it'll shut down.

David Hernandez 9:39

Yeah. I found that out. I don't know if you heard about it, but back when we had the winter storm, it was so confusing here we got to negative zero. I'm like, how do you get to negative zero as a temperature?

CaptGoldFish 9:48

Yeah.

David Hernandez 9:48

and we're not equipped for those cold temperatures for sure down here.

CaptGoldFish 9:51

No. I can't imagine. It gets cold, but like everything else, everything slows down a little bit, but you still have to go out and do things.

David Hernandez 9:58

Now, you said that you didn't play Pokemon before Pokemon Go, you weren't familiar, you only knew about Pikachu and stuff like that. Now that you've played Pokemon Go, do you have any particular favorite Pokemon at all or stuff that you've enjoyed?

CaptGoldFish 10:09

Often I like ones that are good for the Go Battle League. If I find a really good one that is high ranked or, a good shiny. I know the Murkrow on there and I've got a bunch of shiny Murkrows that are all best buddies and they hang out in gyms everywhere. You know, right now I like my Skuntank and trying to make that work.

David Hernandez 10:26

So are you heavy into the PVP scene or is it just something you kind of dabble into?

CaptGoldFish 10:31

I would say medium. I've made it to legend, I think twice. And it's been, it is stressful for me cause I'm just not that good. It feels like a lot of luck on my team working and, make a quick run and actually make it. But I do like playing it and I like to just think of it as not a very big deal.

David Hernandez 10:47

It sounds like once the game becomes work related, that's when it becomes less fun for you, is that kind of fair to say?

CaptGoldFish 10:53

Yeah, I would love to just use Pokemon that I like to use and not have to deal with like some of 'em are just way outclassed. But yeah, I would just like to use fun things that I like. I've tried to use my Murkrow a few times, it doesn't always work that great. It's fun when it actually works and, puts in some work, but it usually doesn't.

David Hernandez 11:10

Have you had a chance to go to any, like in-person Pokemon Go events at all?

CaptGoldFish 11:15

I've been to all the Chicago GoFest and...

David Hernandez 11:17

You went to all three of them?

CaptGoldFish 11:18

Yes, I took my daughter, we went to all three. Did not enjoy the first one at all. Very, very salty after that one and I had to leave before the raids even started on cuz my daughter was just, it was a lot for her with the heat and the lines and the nothing actually happening for the longest time. We ended up leaving before we could do any of the raids.

David Hernandez 11:37

Mm, you missed all the debut of the raids and all the easy catches I think.

CaptGoldFish 11:42

Yeah, all these, because we came home and we did two of the raids and they both ran from me. So it was like...

David Hernandez 11:47

Oh my gosh!

CaptGoldFish 11:48

It's even worse.

David Hernandez 11:49

So let's talk about Chicago real quick, let's talk about 2017 cause I haven't had a chance to talk about it. What was it like for you before the travesty that we knew what it became? How excited, like what were you expecting?

CaptGoldFish 11:59

Oh, I was really excited. and my daughter was super excited, like maybe there would be a Mr. Mime and Unowns were gonna be everywhere and regional Pokemon. It just felt like it's gonna be a huge group of everybody, playing and walking around and it turned out to just not be anything like. It was amazingly bad. Amazingly bad.

David Hernandez 12:16

It was definitely frustrating.

CaptGoldFish 12:18

Yeah. By the time we got into the park and realized we couldn't log in or do anything, then we had to immediately go into a line to get some food because we were not allowed to bring anything in, basically. And then, you know, somebody said there's an Unown here, and everybody just pointed in that direction, but couldn't even walk to it, nobody was even logged in. It was a very weird time until they opened the gates and let us all go out but by that point it was just too much, especially for my daughter, it was just physically too much of a day to keep going.

David Hernandez 12:45

That was the frustrating part cuz I went to the 2017 one and like you, I was excited, like this was the first one, I don't think they had done any live events at all. And I was excited to be around a whole bunch of people, be in a new city, you know, I had my expectations and of course, you know, it fell flat. One of the jokes I always said is the only thing that worked right that entire day was the water bottle refills and that's about it. Everything else was just a nightmare.

CaptGoldFish 13:07

Yeah, that's something we had to go straight to that to get our water cuz I don't know if you were allowed to bring water in?

David Hernandez 13:12

You could bring an empty water bottle.

CaptGoldFish 13:14

Yeah, you could bring an empty water bottle, so yeah, the whole thing was just rough.

David Hernandez 13:18

Now, thankfully they did improve the following years, 2018 and 2019. Which one did you prefer out of those two?

CaptGoldFish 13:24

Honestly they're kind of a blur. I like them both. We could freely move around a lot more. You just walked into the park and started playing and you didn't feel crowded. I think I walked in and immediately went to the Murkrow area. And over the speaker, they said, here's the competition of who has caught the most Murkrow and I'm like, that's me, right here!" I won that handily and I had my Murkrow shirt on. So I was excited about that.

David Hernandez 13:50

How many Murkrow have you caught?

CaptGoldFish 13:51

Let's see, caught, okay, 11,112.

David Hernandez 13:55

11,112 Murkrow caught?

CaptGoldFish 13:57

Yes.

David Hernandez 13:58

You have a lot of patience.

CaptGoldFish 14:01

Well, I play a lot. I have a Gotcha going all the time. I've seen twice that, 22,277, so obviously a lot of them have run away.

David Hernandez 14:11

Well, especially when you run the Gotcha and they're low catch rate, so that makes sense, 50% sounds about right.

CaptGoldFish 14:16

Yeah, I walked around and I won a bunch of the competition, I got a couple shirts, so I got one for my daughter and one for me. And I was able to trade some of my Unowns from previous GoFest for things like a Tropius, that was exciting for us, so it was a good time.

David Hernandez 14:28

Well, just from your experience in Chicago, if somebody was thinking about going to GoFest and they were listening to this podcast, what would you tell them?

CaptGoldFish 14:35

If they're thinking about it, then they must be a fan of the game and I would go because it's fun, especially, you know, I'm not even a very social person, but it's very fun to see all the people doing stuff and it's really easy to just talk to people to start a conversation and meet people from all sorts of places and they will be dying to have one of the Pokemon you have for something you are dying to have. It's amazing, the kind of trades you can get. It's just a fun experience, especially with me, I had my daughter and they had little things set up, it was very fun. As long as it's working, once it stops working, it's very frustrating.

David Hernandez 15:05

Amen to that.

CaptGoldFish 15:07

Yeah.

David Hernandez 15:07

We both can speak from experience from 2017

CaptGoldFish 15:10

Yeah, but the last few have been just great.

David Hernandez 15:13

Awesome and hopefully you get to go to another one in the future. I think people would love to maybe meet you. I don't know how many people knew about who you were back in 2019, but

CaptGoldFish 15:21

I think probably a lot less. I had friends that wore my shirt cuz I had some shirts made from just for friends. They were saying they got a lot of comments on 'em, but didn't really know who I was, so there's so many people that play that don't even look at any social media, so it's a wild amount of people. I don't know how many people would recognize any of my stuff at all.

David Hernandez 15:41

Well, that was actually one of my questions I was gonna ask you, like, when you went to 2019, did people know who you were or were you just another random person?

CaptGoldFish 15:47

I had done a couple of the infographs and stuff, but they were still not all that popular and not that I hadn't been doing it for that long. My first infograph, you know, probably nobody even saw that one, but it was on there for a little while. You know, I do a lot of things on the Silph Road on Reddit. My first one was okay, and then they started to like delete them after that. I learned what was okay and what was not okay and kind of adjusted to make it a bit better. But my first official infograph was a Murkrow and it was, I had seen so many of the people putting out like the task research rewards and telling you what the Pokemon were. And so I released my own infograph saying that they left a lot of them out. But yeah, so I don't know how popular I was at that time. I don't know how much, how widely popular it is now, but I have a lot more followers and they get seen a lot more, at least as much as I can see. I like that, I enjoy it, I liked making it for people and hope they use them. I mostly make these raid infographics for people who don't know, just want to know what they should use, and don't wanna look into it that much, and maybe help people that wouldn't normally be looking at that, but they think this one's fun, so they're gonna look at that and they'll help more people. Help the most people I can, that might need it.

David Hernandez 16:56

From what I saw from Instagram and Twitter, you had basically just random drawings of Pokemon for a bit, and then the first one I could find was an Azelf one?

CaptGoldFish 17:03

Yeah.

David Hernandez 17:03

And you only had like six Pokemon on it.

CaptGoldFish 17:05

Yeah. I think my first one, well, I think my very first one only had four, including the Raid boss. My first infographs were actually just Community Day Pokemon. I think a Torchic was my first one and that one actually the Torchic is talking, the Murkrow is just at the bottom, he doesn't have a quote, but the Torchic does. And I think it just says something like, I'm Orange, where everyone is yellow", cuz the, it's inverse colors. But yeah, it started off with just community Day Pokemon.

David Hernandez 17:29

I know that you draw them from scratch, like none of these are copy and paste until you've already drawn it. How long does it take?

CaptGoldFish 17:36

I have no idea how long they, the finger ones did. Some of 'em went pretty quick and some of 'em probably took a little bit longer. But now I have an app called Procreate on my iPad and I use a pencil, so it's great technology, it's just like drawing on paper, except that I never drew on paper before, so I shouldn't really say that. You know, it's a very good simulation and now one thing procreate does is creates a time lapse replay of my drawing, so you can watch the drawing pass and you can see how much time it takes and it's, about an hour and a half, I think, average for each one.

David Hernandez 18:07

For each new Pokemon that you draw?

CaptGoldFish 18:09

Yeah. And then to tend to put the whole guide together, even having them done, pacing, renaming, and putting in the moves, and double checking that I didn't make any mistakes, hopefully, which they always have mistakes on them, at some point even if I've gone over them three or four times, it's a lot of stuff and they're getting more and more complicated as we go on. I'm always looking for some way to improve them because I get a lot of polite suggestions like they want the shadows on there and they want, for a long time they wanted megas, which I finally did put Megas on there when the Mega system became what I thought more accessible to people. I do put a lot of thought into it. It's a complicated thing and a lot of other people have made infographs and I see them just getting, torn apart by nitpicking. I feel very grateful that my standard infograph is fairly well received, because I've seen some attempts at them that, I think it stops people from wanting to do them because there's not a lot of reward for it sometimes. It's a lot of work. People can be pretty mean, on Reddit especially. Most other places are pretty nice. Twitter and Instagram seem a lot nicer places, but Reddit seems there's a lot of people that have a lot of suggestions on what you should be doing. It's a tough thing to do with so much information now, cuz I, I think people want just like, the screenshot of pokebattler.com. You know, give me all those Pokemon, it just doesn't fit and I'm trying to draw this whole thing is hand drawn, so even if I'm copying pasted, it's tough to get it to all fit and still look like I want it to look and be fun to see it to glance. I do put my little, type chart at the bottom of each one. There's so many different charts on what's super effective one, what's not effective? I wanted to make one and then I just made one in the only way that I could draw it. It turned out more...

David Hernandez 19:45

Is it the one that... so is it the one that, the one I remember from you, there's one that you have that's A types and then you have other types around it. And I think you have the arrows. One that's not effective, one that is effective. Is that the one you're talking about?

CaptGoldFish 19:58

Yeah, there's like, it's, it's just like you have a big type symbol and then the little types on top with the green arrow going down to them and the little types at the bottom with the red arrow. You know, at a glance you can see every different type and what's super effective against it and what's not. So I think it works pretty well, I've used it and I know a lot of people have used it. People send me pictures of them printing it and blowing it up and putting it another wall, or they carry little cheat sheets around it. So that's one of my favorite things that, I've done that people have used even outside of Pokemon Go, you know, it's still relevant into the main series.

David Hernandez 20:30

And I think that's one thing, people don't realize, like for me, I've been a Pokemon fan my whole life. So I know the chart inside and out. But for people like you and other people who've come into Pokemon Go, who never played Pokemon at all, charts like that help because it allows you to reference something cuz you don't have the 20 year history that I do with Pokemon. You have Pokemon Go for six years and that's it. And they basically, what Pokemon Go is it's 20 years of Pokemon history stuffed into six years like that's what the charts are there for, they're there for people who need 'em. And I think people kind of lose sight of that sometimes.

CaptGoldFish 21:01

Yeah, I learned so much just by drawing it and making the guide, taught me how to do it myself. Not really until Go Battle League came out, did I even really know the types at all. I had my little chart up and I was looking at it like, what is super effective to this? I don't know. I don't know. A lot of people don't know these things and a lot of people have never seen any of these things and have no idea. I feel like I'm drawing for the beginner, but it's also useful for people that I know have been playing a long time. They just wanna see it, get an idea of what's best. They know that my drawings, they are ranked, they are real, the top ones to use, so the top couple Pokemon, they're gonna have 'em and they're gonna say, these are the ones to use. You know, I'll use this one over this one cause it's a little bit better. But the beginner will be able to get an idea, even if they're just looking at it, that's better than nothing.

David Hernandez 21:46

So I wanna play a little game with you real quick. So I've gone through your drawings and I've picked out some quotes, yeah, I picked out some quotes from the Murkrow and I don't know if you remember them all, we're about to find out here or not.

CaptGoldFish 21:58

I probably do, yeah.

David Hernandez 21:59

Oh, perfect. Okay. I want to get insight on why some of 'em are simple, they're straightforward, but some of 'em they're kind of complex. So I thought this would be kind of fun to throw in. So the first one is, it's from Suicune, be sure to spray and neuter your pets against things like tapeworm. Remember, if you can see it, treat it."

CaptGoldFish 22:15

Yeah. That's a little bit nonsensical, uh, sometimes the Murkrow is, he's a character that's doing his best. Very smart for a crow, but actually just gets it a little wrong. So sometimes the Murkrow is just misunderstanding things and in that case he's just saying nonsense. You know, the tapeworm, you know, the Suicune, I think, I believe is looking back at what is a weird tail section tapeworm type thing. I did like that one that I like sometimes where the Murkrow is just completely flooding something up, but he's doing his best to spew information that he is heard.

David Hernandez 22:50

And then when I read it, I'm like, I'm never gonna be able to see Suincune's tail the same ever again. I'm never gonna see, like, that was, it's genius. Like, I love it.

CaptGoldFish 22:59

And I've heard this a lot from people that, sometimes the drawings that I do of them make them like the Pokemon more than they did before.

David Hernandez 23:06

So this next one's from Darkrai. It says, I'm gonna fly. This makes me nervous."

CaptGoldFish 23:12

I think it was, I just put that in because all the counters are bad for the Murkrow. Maybe not my best one. Sometimes I don't have a good quote or understanding. I did a better one later because that one's actually my wife, for a present, she printed one out for me. The new Murkrow quote for updated one is, do Darkrai dream of Electric Mareep?"

David Hernandez 23:31

Yes. I love that! It's actually one of the ones I have listed right here.

CaptGoldFish 23:34

Yeah, and that one was because I tried to do a little more research on, what the Darkrai does and, they terrorize people with their dreams and I started recently putting the pokedex entries on there, so you get a little bit more of the flavor cuz some of 'em are a little, little wild.

David Hernandez 23:48

Well, how about this one? This one's kind of self-explanatory. This one's from Giratina, six feet before it was cool."

CaptGoldFish 23:54

That was directly towards the six feet Covid rule of wanted to be six feet away from everybody. So, Yeah, six feet before. It was cool.

David Hernandez 24:02

I loved it, like it was, it was great.

CaptGoldFish 24:04

I liked that. I did forget about that one. It took me a second to remember that one. Cuz I was thinking it was gonna be the, I think I did an animal farm quote of like four feet, good, six feet, just bragging. Something like that. I don't remember what it was.

David Hernandez 24:16

What about this one? this one's from the Machop Community Day. Listen Mac, it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B+A, stop.'"

CaptGoldFish 24:25

Yeah. Do you, do you get that one?

David Hernandez 24:27

So I don't know much about Little Mac, but is that something from Smash Brothers?

CaptGoldFish 24:31

No, it's from, Mike Tyson Punch Out. The Little Mac is the, tiny little PunchOut that you play. I think I put the little coach, there's like a referee that looks a little bit like Mario, that has a hat. I don't remember if I had a hat on the Murkrow or not.

David Hernandez 24:44

I believe he did on this one. Yeah.

CaptGoldFish 24:46

So, yeah and then that's a common Nintendo cheat was the, up, up, down, left, right, left, right. It's mixing a couple things in there, but that is because, Mac would always get encouragement when he was in the corner getting just beat up and his coach would be telling him. And I'm a little bit older, so some of my references go back to before Pokemon Games.

David Hernandez 25:05

So how about this one? This one's from Dialga. It's a metal dinosaur is an Excel ball of timey wimy."

CaptGoldFish 25:11

That's a Dr. Who reference and I think I just seen like a dinosaur, Dr. Who, and I don't know why I wanted to connect him in my brain once I connected it was, oh wait, he's also distorts time, the Dialga is part of the time thing. He,

David Hernandez 25:23

Yes, he's the legendary of time, he can distort time and go back and forth and stuff like that.

CaptGoldFish 25:28

So yeah, it just felt like a metal dinosaur was kinda weird in general. That's taking extinct animal and, futuristic metal animal and messing with time, so Dr. Who referenced a bit there. I think a lot of people like that one just cuz they like Dr. Who and any acknowledgement of that existence is happy.

David Hernandez 25:45

Off topic question real quick. it'd be a sin if I didn't ask you. Do you have a favorite doctor at all?

CaptGoldFish 25:49

I like David Eccles. Is that his name? The first of the rebooting of the doctors. I thought the scripts were not so great like the writing was not so great for him, but I think he played it really well. I just liked the way he played it. You could see like, it's my first doctor, so I learned from him. I liked his fake happiness and sadness behind it, kind of like, probably like a lot of people think my Pokemon are always sad.

David Hernandez 26:14

So this one is, from Attack Deoxy. It says, "put me in, coach!"

CaptGoldFish 26:19

Put me in coach. Oh, what is it? What is the point of that one? I'm at a loss at what that one meant.

David Hernandez 26:24

I think I know what it is. I think because the Attack Deoxys has such bad defense, I think Murkrow's begging to be put into the raid battle.

CaptGoldFish 26:31

Oh yes, he's super effective. I forgot about that because the very first Murkrow quote was, "I'm super effective." So, yeah, I think put me in is just like he's ready to go. A full fleet of Murkrows could take this guy down. And I know there has been challenges where people have used Murkrows to battle raids and won.

David Hernandez 26:49

So next one is from Mega Kangaskhan. It says...

CaptGoldFish 26:52

Okay.

David Hernandez 26:52

Oh, you already know this one?

CaptGoldFish 26:54

I don't know, but it's a funny one to me that, I enjoyed the drawing of that one.

David Hernandez 26:58

I only know where Kangaskhan is from playing risk.

CaptGoldFish 27:00

Oh yes. I like that one too. I thought it reminded me of Kamchatka on Risk, which is one of the countries in the game. All of my world geography is based on Risk and Kamchatka is on there. It's your gateway to Alaska is where that is. So I just reminded me of Kangaskhan, as like, this is like a Risk country.

David Hernandez 27:20

So I played risk growing up in college. That's kind of why I brought it in cause like I miss playing risk. I hate the setup, but Risk was just so much fun and I was like, I gotta bring this in just cause I didn't get the connection. Now that you said that it sounds like a country that makes more sense now.

CaptGoldFish 27:32

Yeah, it's a case of the Murkrow just getting it a little bit wrong, but doing his best.

David Hernandez 27:37

Well, very cool. Last one, this is from Yveltal. It's the state bird of Denmark.

CaptGoldFish 27:43

Yeah, a lot of people saying, thank you. I can't unsee that now because it's the flag of Denmark is, the shiny version of, isn't it white and red.

David Hernandez 27:51

Is it?

CaptGoldFish 27:52

I believe so, I could be wrong, I could be wrong, I don't know the Murkrow does not do a lot of research sometimes and just says things

David Hernandez 27:59

Well, for me, it always reminded me of a t-bone steak, so it actually looks like the state bird of Denmark?

CaptGoldFish 28:03

No, the, it looks like the flag. What did I say is a state bird? Denmark. Well, first of all it was, yeah, Denmark is not a state.

David Hernandez 28:10

That's probably the Murkrow getting it wrong probably.

CaptGoldFish 28:11

And I did get people correcting me on that, which I was like you can't argue with the Murkrow. That's one thing you can't do, you can't correct him. I said the state bird cause he looks like the flag of Denmark.

David Hernandez 28:22

Oh, it kind of does.

CaptGoldFish 28:24

Yeah.

David Hernandez 28:24

If you're listening to this, definitely Google it cuz it actually kind of does.

CaptGoldFish 28:26

Okay. Yeah, I think I probably did at the time cause I didn't want to be completely wrong, but that was like my first reaction was like, this looks like the flag in Denmark. And so he looked like a flag to me and so I decided to just put in some nonsense.

David Hernandez 28:39

That's genius. Oh my gosh. Yep.

CaptGoldFish 28:41

A lot of time there is a reason behind it, even if I'm the only one who's gonna be able to explain it fully. I think there was a lot of talk about that one there, they got into some serious discussion on that Reddit page about the Denmark flag and the state bird, which they do not have a state bird. I think people generally do like it. Sometimes I'm like, I hope somebody gets this or comments on it and nobody says anything about it. And I'm like, well maybe next time.

David Hernandez 29:04

Well thank you for joining on this game. I'm glad I asked these questions cause I was, some of them I knew and I just thought it'd be fun to bring it up, but another one's like the Denmark, I didn't understand until you explained it, to be honest, but now that you did, I'm like, oh, now that makes more sense.

CaptGoldFish 29:16

I think what people would maybe see the Denmark flag, but It was just nonsense what he was saying. He was completely wrong, but you know, he's a bird, so he is trying. He's very smart for a bird.

David Hernandez 29:26

Very much so. And that's the fun part. You gotta have a little nonsense in your life. You can't be all, grim and exact to the point, you know?

CaptGoldFish 29:32

Well I mean, some of the point is that people that normally would not look at a guide are gonna be looking at these because of it's fun and different and hopefully they like it. And if they do, then they're getting a little bit of information, a little something, so that maybe they don't go in with the worst stuff.

David Hernandez 29:47

Let me ask you this, so you're already about three years, give or take, into making these graphics, you know, working with the Murkrow and all that stuff. What are you hoping to improve moving forward?

CaptGoldFish 29:57

I don't want to get so complicated that it becomes less useful to people. The shadows are the big one of how do I get the shadows in there? How does it not become just a full on all shadows? I haven't seen it done by anybody well yet. Every time I see shadows on there, it's like, well, they just have shadow then non shadow on there. As far as, drawing goes, I still feel like I'm learning how to draw and so I want to get them to look like I want 'em to look as best I can. It does take a lot of time and I don't have infinite time to do them, so sometimes I look at it and think I drew this one by hand on my very first infograph. So there's a few of 'em I'd love to redo.

David Hernandez 30:35

Well, very cool CaptGoldfish, I appreciate you coming on the show. If a listener's listening and they don't know your work, or if they wanna check out your work, where can they find you? By all means, plug away.

CaptGoldFish 30:45

Well, I guess, Google Captain Goldfish, C-A-P-T Goldfish, and my Twitter will come up. I'm @captgoldfish on Twitter and, Reddit on the Silph Road, I often post there. Instagram, I post more of the actual drawings of the Pokemon. I put 'em there more often, but yeah, you just Google that and all my stuff will come up, that you can find them wherever you want

David Hernandez 31:05

For those who are listening, I'll make sure to include links for his Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter down in the description of today's show.

Thank You For Listening! :)

David Hernandez 31:12

Thank you for listening to an episode of As The Pokeball Turns. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Remember to give the show a rating of five stars. If you wanna do four stars, sleep on it and come back tomorrow. If you're feeling eh with three stars, come back in about two days. If you think this podcast is like McDonald's with two stars, come back in about three days. And for some reason, if you feel like you can only give this show one star, come back next week because no matter what, each road should lead to five stars. Until then, I'll see you next time. Here's the sneak peek for the next episode of As The Pokeball Turns.