Hi professor! As a research student with a porygon partner, I was curious about your lab's rotom and how it deals with outside software. I know it isn't like porygon, where you download a program directly to it, but do rotom inhabiting computers ever show a predeliction for certain programs over others? I know lots of porygon have preferences for specific kinds of software and I'd like to know if rotom are similar.
Hmm, well, I think the biggest difference is that Rotom tend to be a bit mischievous. I’ve met a few that take their pranks too far, such as downloading malware, but most are more likely to pop out of their electronics and scare you, or vacuum up one of your socks on purpose!
The Rotom I have that helps run my Lab is mischievous too, of course, but knows how important our work is, so they, luckily, tend to keep any pranks for when we have excess time on our hands. For example, last week they played the same song on loop from different devices for hours! I was following that sound around for near an hour before I figured it out!
The upside, however, is that Rotom don’t really have much of a preference. I personally think this is because they work almost like an ‘upgrade’ to whatever electronic they’re currently possessing. Basically, they can bring certain programs over from one device to another, provided each device has the ability to use it! For example, the washing machine could potentially play music because it has a speaker, but couldn’t make a call to my phone.
We don’t often have to use outside software, and when we do, its generally created by a close friend of mine that gave me the Rotom to start with, so it’s a pretty smooth transition to new things, since they only really have to use one programmer’s style of work! When I do end up needing something else, however, like a new poketch or the like, I do try to talk to Rotom beforehand, and know what new criteria to look out for.
I don’t know if this expands onto all Rotom, but it does seem that mine tends to prefer fast technology to simple technology. They’d rather sort through piles of data and fix it up themselves with everything running quickly than have to sort through nothing and have things run slower.
The other nice thing is that once a Rotom learns a program, much like a Porygon, they tend to know it forever, unless something gets corrupted or they become ill and delete files. The difference here is that while Porygon you can directly download to, as you mentioned, Rotom need to possess something that already has that program and use it for a while to learn it! It’s not an issue for me since I rarely change my technology if I can avoid it, and use much the same programs, but I do know its why you can’t just send the Rotom in your phone to receive an upgrade; you have to directly put it into the device itself.