One Hit KO

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1HMbvwOf3I[/youtube]

Thanks Brett, I couldn’t have said it better myself.  I have always indentified with Brett Favre, and now that my time as a writer here are over, I echo his sentiment from when he first retired.  Now, its time to tweet pictures of my junk.  Well, I guess it can wait till after the article.

It has been very hard to write this article.  I am happy about my decision to leave the game and the article writing business, but I still find it very hard to write this article.  I usually keep a tight check on my emotions, but it seems this is an exception.

If you haven’t guessed yet, this is my final article.  I have decided that this is a good time to step down.  There are a lot of reasons why, here are a few.  For one, I recently took a full time position at my job and it has taken a lot of my time away.  Also, I feel that I am not having as much fun playing the game as I was before.  These reasons along with stuff like financial concerns have let me know that now is the time to at least take a break from the game.  I may go away, but just like King Arthur I will not die but be taken up to Avalon just in case the world may need me.   I may sometime come back, but for right now leaving just feels right.  I have other things to say, but I will save it for my interview with Anderson Cooper.

Interview with Anderson Cooper

Pikkdogs:  Thanks for taking some time with me Anderson, it means a lot to do this in my last article.  So, why did it take so long for you to tell everyone that you are really really gay?

Anderson Cooper:  I thought this was my time to interview you?

P:  Oh yeah, that’s right.

AC: So, you have recently announced that you will be leaving the game and stop writing articles, what is next for you. 

P: I’m very excited about my opportunities after writing for OneHitKo.  I think I am going to start concentrating more on fiction writing, I enjoyed doing it in college and I think I want to do some of that now.

AC: That’s funny, that last part about college is exactly what I was going to say when you asked me about being gay. 

P: That’s what I thought.   Anyway, besides writing I think I want to start taking some more college classes. I don’t want any more degrees, I just like learning.

AC: What do you think separated you from other writers out there?

P:  I never thought of myself in context of other writers, I just wrote.  I always tried to speak my mind and say whatever I felt, that’s what somebody who writes articles should do, never pull any punches.  I feel that other writers out there sometimes write like they have a stick up their asses.  They write in a style that makes them come off as if they are trying to prove that they are better than everyone else.  I just tried to write what I thought.  I was never any good at the game so I tried to bring other things to the table, like comedy, to just make a fun and entertaining article.  I don’t think trying to make yourself look good should be a part of writing an article.  Just share your passion with others, that’s it.

AC: What do you think of other sites out there, like Six Prizes, The Top Cut, Profitt, and Poke-Class?

P:  Well, I’m not here to make enemies, but I have never been shy to put out my opinion.  Six Prizes is not a bad site.  I love Adam C. more than Simon Cowell  likes tight shirts, but I do have to say how I feel.  I do feel that 6P is very mainstream.  It seems very plain and vanilla.  It’s a good site and all, I just wish they could spice things up a bit.  My commentary is not very fair because I think that it is in my nature to rebel against the norm, so 6P gets blasted by me just because they are good, but I guess that’s how it goes.  As for The Top Cut, I think that there site is interesting.  I love their interviews at Nationals and Worlds, those things are really cool and really unique.  Their weekly show is in a format that is really hard to watch, it’s like 2 hours long.  In a world where most people just skim through Pokemon articles in 2 minutes, having to listen to something for that long is hard to do.  I do think that they do know their stuff, but their format is really hard to get into and they seem kind of vanilla.  They do some great stuff and are really great players, but this is something that kind of goes against them.  Without any fault of their own, it kind of feels like since they are such good players and they keep on saying so, it seems like they are bragging and are not being very down to earth.  It makes them seem like a Donald Trump like figure that don’t connect with other people, though I’m sure this is not a correct reflection of what these people are.   I sometimes just want somebody to swear or something to try to spice things up and connect to the real world.  Profitt and Poke-Class are all very cool shows.  I appreciate what they do, doing a video is tough work.  It would be nice if they added more opinion to their shows, but it’s not like they asked me how to make things better.

AC:  What are your fondest moments in regards to writing and playing? 

P:  For playing, I think the best moments are playing with some of the teams I was in or interacting with.  I loved the Team Omar meetings, and it was a real experience going to the Team Warp Point Pokebarn.  I don’t know if any moments in writing are very fond, not saying that I didn’t enjoy it, just nothing seems to pop up.  If there was anything, maybe it was just those moments trying to come up with comedy dialogue with Pedro.

AC: Speaking of Pedro, how did you come up with the dialogue?

P: Sometimes I did hear a news story and write a joke down, but for the most part I would wait until I was writing an article and then just look for a news article and come up with a joke out of nowhere.  If for instance I saw an article about a painting missing from a French museum, I would either find an interesting story about the painter and try to tie it to funny topics like sex or something like that. Or I would try to play off stereo types, such as the guard was too busy smoking and surrendering to defend the painting.  Most of it was off the cuff that came out quickly, some stuff worked and was funny, some stuff bombed.  But, people rarely commented on the jokes, so if a joke bombed or was funny I wouldn’t really know, so I would just continue to the next joke.

AC: What was your favorite joke or story?

P: The one that sticks in my mind was the hooker urn joke, just because it was really dumb and not meant for print.  It actually was a joke I gleaned from the great Johnny Carson.  The story goes like this:  I ask Pedro what he did this weekend.  He says that he had to help his uncle at his factory. I ask him what his uncle makes, and he says “hooker urns”.  Then, I ask “what’s a hooker urn?”  And he answers “ about $500 a night.”  It’s a really stupid joke that plays off of the words “urn” and “earn”, those are Homophones, you should know a lot about those Anderson.  It’s the kind of joke that should never be in print form, but I did it anyway.  It was really stupid and I’m not sure if anyone likes it, but I sure did.

AC:  Pedro has been missing from your last few articles, where is he.

P:  I don’t know.  In the last article he appeared in he made fun of witches, maybe a witch took offense and banished him to yet another dimension or something.  He also made fun of the Nobel Prize committee, who knows maybe a bunch of Scandanavians found him and beat him up.

AC: That’s weird.  Talk a little about your relationship with Ed, and how he let you do some of the things you did. 

P:  I don’t think I really had any success in article writing, but if I did, it was because of him.  I was just another writer who wrote boring articles, and then I thought I would change my writing to make it more like a late night talk show, that means a lot more adult language.  The safe thing for Ed would be to say, “no, you can change things up, but just don’t swear and stuff like that.”  But, he gave me full creative control to do what I want.  He only censored me once, and I got that overturned though an appeal.  It would take a different guy to let me do what I did on a site that a lot of kids could be looking at, but Ed is no doubt different, in a good way of course.  I will miss working with him on the site.

AC:  As a TCG player, or a former one, what does the outside world not know about TCG players.

P:  The stereotypes of TCG players out there are not good.  People think that if someone plays a TCG then he must be a fat geek who lives in his parent’s basement and doesn’t shower much.  Well, that’s just not true.  Just look at me, I don’t live in my parent’s basement.  Pokemon players in general are scoffed at and looked down upon for playing a kids game, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.  All sub-cultures out there have some kind of stigma attached to them, and TCG players are no different.  You just can’t listen to all of that, and you have to operate outside of that and just do what you want to do without listening to others.

AC:  What was your favorite article, or type of article?

P:  That’s not an easy one.  Maybe it was my 200^th article celebration article in which I had an interview with Ed.  It was just fun talking with him and riffing off of each other.  I love talking with other people, I think it’s the spontaneity.  I tried a couple times to do interviews with other players, but that never got done.  If I had to come out of retirement for anything, the one I would be most favorable to do would be an interview.

AC;  So do you anticipate coming back to the game or the article writing business?

P:  I can’t predict the future, but I don’t see how I would ever get back to what I was doing.  I might get back into the game sometime in the future, and I might even write an article once or twice a year, I could see that.  But, I could not see me getting back to what I did before.

AC:  What was the final count for you, in terms of articles?

P:  I did do some math after I announced my retirement, and if you count Pedro articles, the articles I wrote with other writers, and the articles I wrote on 6P, it would come to exactly 250 articles.  It’s hard to compare that to what other people have done, and I don’t want to, I just know that 250 articles is a good mark.  It is a lot of articles, and once you hit 250 you deserve a rest.

AC:  You have played for a long time, what kind of state do you think the game is currently in?

P:  Well, it is very hard to judge things like that.  No matter what format I found myself in, there were always people complaining about it and saying that the past was better.  People complained about Claydol in the Claydol era, and people complained about SP Pokemon in the SP era.  Now people are mad at using supporters for draw, and people look back to the SP format as the pinnacle time of player skill.  No matter if you make the cards powerful or weak, someone will complain about it.  Right now I think the game is at a decent spot.  If I were commissioner of Pokemon I think one thing I would do is not have a rotation for one year.  I think we need a lot of sets in the format, and having too few sets do hurt it.  The future of the game is fairly bright.  Even though there are not a lot of younger players any more, players are starting to play when they get into college, so we keep on getting new blood into the game.  If that keeps coming, than the game will continue to go on.

AC: What was the best part of the game for you?

P:  No doubt, the best part of the game has been the friends I have gained.  I now have a lot of friends in Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan thanks to the game.  The friends I have made are no doubt that best part of my time in the game. I now would like to thank them, there are too many to mention so if you are my buddy and don’t see your name here, don’t feel bad.  But thanks a lot to everyone I met along the way including Ed, Omar, Tre, Louis, Meg, Abdi, and all of Team Omar, Card Selling Ed, Mike, Jake, Sudi, and Andy in Minnesota, Josiah, Jacob, Scott, James H. and the myriad of people in his Fort Wayne, Indiana league, Jackson I. and the Ohio people, Ryan, Claire, Jarred, Giancula, Alan, Jona, Tracey, Matt, Lauren, Thomas, the Richards, and Bertolli in Michigan, and last but not least all of my Team warp point friends which include but are not limited to the Baker boys, Ryan S. Graham, Wasim, Cody, Frank S., Wookie, Alex, Mike, Bohdan, Mark, Joel, Rob, Joe, and Matt.  I’m sorry to all of you who I left out, just because I forgot about you in this moment does not mean that you didn’t have an impact on me, because I can say that everyone who I met in this game did have an impact on me.  On a site note, I have to thank Coolestman and Balasar for commenting on almost every article in the past year, it feels great to know that there was someone out there reading the crap that I was writing.

AC:  What was your favorite game?

P:  It is very hard to come up with one game after I played many many games.  My favorite games are the closest.  I had one game against Tracey K. at the finals of a Cities tournament when I played a Gengar Trainerlock deck and she played an SP deck.  It came down to sudden death and she won.  Another good game was a first round game against my buddy Joel H.  That one too was Gengar against SP.  Another good game was at Indiana Stages against Dan Richard, I played Uxie Donk and he played Machamp.  This game came down to the wire.  And of course, I can’t forget about the quarterfinals of my first Michigan States tournament.  I had all but won a real close game, and then I made a stupid mistake and my opponent won.  Those are the top 4 games that I can recall right now.  I have played a lot of other memorable games, but those are the 4 closest that come to mind.

AC:  Who was the toughest person for you to play against?

P:  That is of course a very tough question.  Early in my career I would say Tracey K.  She was on the top of her game when I came in, and she would just wipe the floor with me each time I played her.  Last year I did get a win in against her, but she is a great opponent.  Lately, Dave Richard is impossible to beat.  I just can’t seem to get anything going against him, and he gets everything he needs.  Every coin flips goes against me and for him.  And of course I have to mention Evan B.  I might have beaten him once at the Pokebarn, but in tournaments he always has my number.  He is a really great player, I can push him to the limit, but he always has the last laugh.  Those are the three people that I struggle the most against.

AC:  Now that your run is over, what will happen to the site?

P:  This is not my site, so I can’t speak to that, but I understand that there is a plan to bring a lot of newer writers on and to save the site.  There was a site before me and there will be one after me, it’s not a big deal.  I look forward to seeing what the new guys can do.

AC:  Okay, we are at the end of the interview, and the end of your last article.  Is there anything you would like to say to wrap things up. 

P:  If I was a man that liked promoting mobsters, I could put in a nice video of Frank Sinatra right here that would sum things up pretty well.  Ahh, the hell with it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsmRCZF7NOQ[/youtube]

Thanks, Anderson even though you are gay I still appreciate you being with me on my final article.  (Note: it feels nice to be in my last article because I can do a lot of homophobic and racist jokes and nobody can do anything.  What can you do?  Fire me?  I already quit, so that feels nice. )

AC: It’s been my pleasure. 

 

I have one last thing to show you before I sign off.  Watch this, and then Goodbye!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEaabp5QWcM&list=HL1347826741&feature=mh_lolz[/youtube]

 

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