CLIFFORD!!😛

🏔️ - he/him here cause haze told me to make a account

[pokemonarchive]

Hisuian Zoroark ex (2026) - Everyday Wonders Illustrator: Yoshioka

[gieoki]

AGAIN

[therandomray-artz]

watch your step!

[dreambirdclinic]

they bring me nostalgia

+ speedpaint !

[zozokyun-draws]

Mega Absol in the snow

[peakofthecliff]

every now and then i see one of those posts that's like "you get six pokémon in real life, what are you picking?" and without fail somebody in the notes says arceus or giratina or mewtwo as though they wouldn't immediately become the most geopolitically significant person alive.

like be serious for a second.

if you own giratina there is no such thing as having a normal life anymore.

you're not going to class. you're not stopping by the grocery store. you're not quietly existing in your apartment. every government on earth would like a word with you because you are, depending on which dex entry we're going with, friends with a being capable of casually opening portals into another dimension that was literally banished for being too violent.

that stops being "haha cool legendary" and starts becoming an international incident.

same with arceus. congratulations. you've effectively become roommates with what is, for all practical purposes, god. i don't think you're making it to your nine-thirty lecture after that.

personally i think the ideal pokémon team is one that actually improves your life without accidentally restructuring global politics.

mine would probably be something like this.

Flygon.

this one was never in question. favorite pokémon of all time. apparently they're supposed to create songs by vibrating their wings in desert sandstorms which is both beautiful and deeply impractical for where i live, but i also just think it'd be a genuinely comforting pokémon to have around. they're supposed to be incredibly gentle despite looking like they could carry you into the stratosphere.

also. transportation. i am simply saying.

Mudsdale.

i climb recreationally. i hike when i get the chance. mudsdale is basically built to go places humans aren't particularly good at traversing. also i like the mental image of showing up to campus on a horse the size of a pickup truck.

Clodsire.

look at him.

that's the whole argument.

no but genuinely clodsire feels like the emotional support bean of the pokémon world. every interaction i've ever imagined with one involves it blinking at you for thirty seconds before deciding you're probably alright.

i think everybody deserves that.

Corviknight.

not because of the flying taxi thing.

mostly because corvids are already absurdly intelligent in real life and the idea of having a giant steel raven wandering around my apartment quietly judging my life choices is honestly kind of comforting.

plus it would probably stop the campus squirrels from trying to mug me for granola bars.

Audino.

this is the one i think people underestimate.

dex entries consistently talk about audino sensing physical and emotional conditions through sound and touch. if pokémon actually existed, having one around would probably do more for your day-to-day wellbeing than almost any legendary ever could.

especially during finals.

especially after climbing.

Sandshrew.

this is entirely because i think it would happily exist in my backpack.

also if you've ever watched an animal enthusiastically dig a hole for no reason you'll understand why this makes perfect sense to me.

i think people get too caught up in building teams that would win battles.

i don't need to win battles.

i need somebody to remind me to eat lunch.

i need somebody to carry heavy groceries without looking offended.

i need somebody who will happily exist in the same room while i spend four hours writing an essay because somehow that makes the room feel less empty.

half the reason pokémon appeals to me isn't the battling. it's the coexistence. the idea that your everyday life would be shared with creatures that each have their own habits and personalities.

i don't want the god of antimatter.

i want clodsire to slowly wander into the kitchen while i'm making coffee and stare at me until i remember i forgot breakfast.

that feels infinitely more valuable.

[lozyrosie]

noibat and cubone ko-fi request

[pokemonarchive]

Pichu Bros. (2021) Illustrator: Saya Tsuruta

[gotchibam]

Shiny Plusle, Spinda, & Shiny Minun ko-fi doodle for YoukaiHito! 🎶✨

[mistray-art]

a Pokémon a day keeps artblock away - #565 Carracosta

[reunmint]

my eeveelution as wild cat series !!

vaporeon - tiger

jolteon - cheetah

flareon - lion

espeon - eurasian lynx

umbreon - melanated jaguar (black panther)

leafeon - clouded leopard

glaceon - snow leopard

sylveon - serval

eevee - house cat (maine coon)

[yeshakovv]

Mary

[peakofthecliff]

climbing is one of the only things i've found that forces my brain to shut up for a bit. you cannot really afford to be thinking about the essay due next week or whether you accidentally sounded weird in seminar or what exactly you're doing with your life when you're clinging to a brightly coloured plastic rock with the grip strength of a sickly victorian child. your world shrinks very quickly. suddenly the only things that matter are where your hands are, where your feet are, and whether that hold actually supports your weight or if it's about to humble you in front of fifteen strangers.

also there is something uniquely human about spending your free time inventing increasingly elaborate ways to climb objects. like we looked at mountains and cliffs and collectively decided that wasn't inconvenient enough, so now we've built entire buildings dedicated to scaling fake walls after class on a wednesday.

i think what i enjoy most about it is that climbing feels weirdly honest. you can't really bluff your way through it. either you can reach the next hold or you can't. either your route works or you're back on the mats trying to pretend you meant to fall off there. and everybody does it. every single person in the gym has had the experience of staring at a route, confidently announcing that they've figured it out, and then immediately being proven wrong by a piece of coloured plastic.

today there was a route i kept getting stuck on about three quarters of the way up because i'd committed to an objectively terrible position and refused to admit it for an embarrassing amount of time. which, unfortunately, feels like a metaphor that my literature professors would have a field day with.

anyway i did eventually finish it and experienced the deeply specific joy of sitting on a bench afterwards drinking water and feeling like i'd accomplished something monumental when, in reality, all i'd done was voluntarily climb up and down the same wall for two hour. it was fun though, i love climbing.

[lostinthehazeee]

how do people have so many smart things to say on here i can't even form one coherent thought half the time

[clownlemur]

[peakofthecliff]

minecraft is genuinely one of the most historically important games of the twenty-first century and i will die on this hill. entire generations learned urban planning because they wanted their little block house to stop looking ugly.

[peakofthecliff]

okay but i do actually think minecraft is going to end up being one of those games that historians in fifty years are forced to take seriously whether they want to or not because i made that post as a joke and then immediately spent the next forty minutes thinking about it on the walk back from class.

like, genuinely, think about the number of people my age who learned incredibly specific concepts because they downloaded minecraft when they were eight and became irrationally attached to a world made out of cubes. i don't even mean in the "video games teach problem solving :)" way people always talk about. i mean really specific things. entire generations accidentally picked up basic architecture because they got tired of living in dirt huts. kids learned how city layouts work because they wanted to connect their houses to their friends' houses with roads and railways. people figured out resource management because they needed enough iron for hoppers or because they underestimated how much stone brick a castle actually requires.

and i know some guy is going to reply to this like "clifford that's not urban planning, that's placing blocks in a game made for children," but i genuinely think there is something there.

because humans have always learned through play. we built miniature versions of things long before computers existed. children have been making little villages out of sticks and rocks for basically all of human history. minecraft just happened to create a digital space where millions of people started independently reinventing the same principles at the same time.

i don't think it's an accident that some of the most common experiences in minecraft are things like realizing your house is way too far from your farms, or that your storage room is impossible to navigate, or that building everything without a plan turns your world into a nightmare after eighty hours. every player eventually reaches the point where they have to start thinking about infrastructure. you don't call it infrastructure because you're fourteen and your main concern is obtaining enough diamonds to impress your friends, but that's what it is.

like, i remember being a kid and making roads between villages because it "felt right." i had absolutely no framework for why it felt right. i wasn't sitting there at twelve years old considering trade routes or settlement patterns. i just knew that places people traveled to a lot should probably be connected somehow. and now i'm in university reading about actual historical settlements and half the time my brain goes, oh, so medieval cities also struggled with terrible planning because nobody expected them to get this big.

the funniest part is that minecraft players independently rediscover the same mistakes over and over again. somebody starts a world, builds everything in a fifteen-block radius, runs out of space, creates a chaotic transportation system, promises themselves they'll organize it later, and then abandons the save entirely. genuinely not that different from half the cities historians study.

and that's before you even get into the social side of things. because multiplayer servers are fascinating. you throw fifty people into a shared world and suddenly questions start appearing that humans have been asking forever. who gets to build where? what counts as public space? who maintains the roads? is it acceptable to steal resources if the chest wasn't labeled? how close is too close to somebody else's house? people invent rules, customs, economies, political systems. entire friendships collapse because somebody moved a sheep.

i don't know. maybe i'm overthinking a sandbox game because i study history and literature and my brain is permanently broken in a very specific way. but i honestly think future historians are going to look back at minecraft as more than just "that block game everyone played as kids." it was one of the first digital spaces where millions of ordinary people spent years building worlds together, developing communities, and accidentally teaching themselves how societies function.

also, before anybody says anything, yes, i know i sound insane. i spent six hours reading about nineteenth-century urbanization this afternoon and then immediately logged on to my survival world to make my cow pen look nicer. i contain multitudes.

[fu-hurma]

crimes? crimes!