One Hit KO

Hey everybody, we are back for the second part of my 200 article celebration.  I decided to break these interviews up

into two articles so they will be easier to read.  Here is the interview with Ed.  I recently got a chance to sit down with him for a half an hour or so and we chatted about the history of the site, his experience with the game, and my feud with Soren Kierkegaard.  If you didn’t get the first part of the article, you can view it here.  Here is nearly our entire conversation.  One note before we get started, Ed did swear once in the interview, so to be nice I replaced it with the word “Jigglypuff.” 

Interview with an Ed

 

Pikkdogs: Thanks for being a part of my 200th article.  I know you are busy with the 5 girls running around.

Ed: The wife doesn’t run around as much lately.

P:     woops I mean 4.  Lol.   You almost have enough for a basketball team now.  Was that your plan all along?

E: I keep hearing the basketball comment.  Can’t we make it a hockey team?   Maybe without goalies.

P: you Minnesota people.  B-ball is where it’s at.

E: Anyway, I dunno.  The Wife came from a family of 4 kids.  I was an only child.  1 kid was plenty for me. 2 seemed doable.  3 is crazy.  3-4 seems negligible.

P: My parents had 7 kids.  You could give them a run for their money.

E: I wouldn’t mind having the money, but I’m not into running.   Is this part of the interview?  :)

P: of course.  You don’t expect me to start being professional and everything now do you?  You have seen my articles right?

E: Actually, it seemed somewhat formal here, so I wasn’t sure if this was just softening me up for the hard-hitting questions or what.

P: well I do have a couple but nothing hard hitting.  Can you believe it’s been over 200 articles already?

E: Oh, back to the 200 articles.  Yeah, it’s crazy.  I know you like to write, but it seems like it was just a few months, maybe a year, when we met (digitally).  That’s when I was searching for a deck for Ava, and you had written about Scizor/Cherrim.

P: yeah, I agree, 200 flew by.

E: Do you recall that we’re on our 3rd website URL?  TeamOmar.info, TeamOmar.com, and now OneHitKO.com.  It’s crazy to think that we’ve been on this ride together for this long.  I don’t have any regrets yet, though.  Even the crazy Team Busted commenting days are remembered fondly in my mind.

P: Yeah, I talked about that too earlier in the article ( I probably should have showed that to you now that I think about it, but why start acting professionally now?).  Yeah, those were some tough comments from the Team Busted guys, but I think it all worked out for the better.  Earlier in this article I had talked about how the site started.  So let’s talk about that.  Dr. Oppenheimer came to regret working on the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.  Do you feel the same in regards to the site?

E: No regrets.  Basically, I made the site just for the heck of it.   And the guys liked the idea of having our own site, so Omar and I started posting stuff there.  It was kinda just a place where we’d go and post our ideas.  It was mainly decklists and testing results and such.

P: Yeah.  When I started writing, did the site get more Six Prizes like?  Or is that just my imagination?

E: I don’t know if I’d say it got more 6P-like. I feel like OneHitKO (and TeamOmar before it) was always more of our take on the state of things.  6P was more like a set thing in a way.

P: No doubt as it got bigger it became less Minnesota Centric.  So it did become like 6P in that way.  We even had Pokeman Dan with us for a while, and he’s not even American.

E: Yeah, that is true.  It definitely grew geographically.  And I think that it took a while, but after we renamed from “Team Omar” to “One Hit KO” it had less of a “come read what this team has to say” and more inclusive.

 P: Moving on to your experience with the game as a whole.  Who would you say is the most interesting person that you met through the game?

E: Hmmm.  Well, interesting is very tough to pin down.  It’s VERY difficult to go to a Pokemon event and not meet interesting people.   I could go on and on listing people that I am very glad I’ve met.

P: lol true.  We are a weird bunch.  Adam for 6P is a pretty cool guy, even though he has forsaken meats.

E: Obviously, to the website, meeting Abdi and Omar were key in starting the entire venture.  Meeting you was what really made the site work, I’d say.  Radu was always an interesting character.  I’m sad to say that he seems to have left the game.  I don’t know if that’s temporary or not.

P: no doubt there are a lot of interesting characters in Minnesota.  Well the article is getting kind of long here.  So let’s move to the end.

E: Oh man.  I thought we were just getting started.  I like this Q/A format.

P: Okay one more before I ask you the final question.  If you could change one action that you did in your Pokemon career what would it be?

E: Oh man.  This one probably should be obvious, but it really isn’t, because I’m really a no-regrets sort of guy.

P: Do you regret not going to more Nationals?  That was fun last year.

E: Nationals is a tough one for me. I’m so practical that it’s very hard for me to justify the expense (both money and time) to go. It really was a blast, though. And so was both of my Regionals (which I didn’t attend this past weekend).

E: I would have to say that dropping during my first MN State Championship is probably the one that should make the top.

P: Yeah, you never know what might have been.

E: I would have been top-8, and I walked away. But, then I kinda feel like maybe my next year’s win somehow was connected.

P: could be.  Okay, final question.  You know how rappers have beefing partners?  Like they have feuds with other rappers?

E: Well, I don’t want to live on either coast, but I do feel like if I did, then I could have beef with the other coast.  Back in the day, I really liked Ice Cube, and kinda liked NWA.  They were always rappin’ JIgglypuff about each other once Cube left.

P: “Today was a good day”  that was the jam. Well, I am trying to start a feud with Danish Christian Existentialist Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a while. Kierkegaard once stated that all evil stems from boredom and not having things to do.  What do you think about that?

E: Well, I think that you’re just playing right into his hands on this one.  A great way to not be bored is to start a war.

P: I think that evil is more created by greed.  If it can be traced to anything, I think it’s more Darwinian and it comes from the need for things.  I’ve been bored, yet never started a war.

E: You’re starting a war with this Kierkegaard fellow!

P: but not because I’m bored, because I don’t like his theories.

E: Because you’re greedy?

P: ahh, no.  But this isn’t an evil thing.  It’s a debate.

E: This dead Mr. K didn’t talk about idle hands being the devil’s tools?

P: I guess he could put it that way.  But, I think evil is not done just because you are bored, but because of the need for things like money.

E: What Pokemon website should we have beef with?

P: Not 6P too many people there.  Not The Deck Out, the guy who does that is Finnish, and I am part Finnish.

E: I’m (technically) 50% Finnish, but I’m (actually) 100% American.

P: Oh you are a brother?  I didn’t know that.

P: Maybe Pro Pokemon.  We can be like Ice Cube and NWA.  We were once friends, but now we can be enemies.

E: Man, we really need someone better to hate.  What about PokemanDan?

P: I could see it.   We could say things like, “He’s so stupid he drives on the wrong side of the road.”

E: Yeah, that would be witty.  Except he probably just uses public transportation.  Like a JERK!

P: And that he is so backwards he drinks his beer warm.

E: Riding the tube all day.  Wearing jumpers.

P: Is “riding the tube” code?

E: I don’t know, and if it is, maybe he’s cooler than we are.  I’d have to look it up.

P: Well. we went way over time.  We can probably end the article.  Thanks for the interview buddy.

E: We should do this again.

P: More interviews,  I like it.

E: Maybe we could even do one that’s Pokemon-related.

P: no way.

 

 

Well that it all for my 200 article celebration.  Thanks for sticking it out for 200 articles, and who knows, maybe I’ll be here for my 300th article.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

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