Recap: Side Events at Peoria Regionals 2023

Last weekend, I attended the Pokémon Regionals in Peoria, IL. Rather than participating in the main events, I decoded to spend some time in the side events area:

Looking for things to do in Japan? Pokémon can help.

At this year's Pokémon World Championships in Yokohama, I found a display touting "Pokémon Pickup Japan", the company's social media outreach for visitors to the country:

PPJ on Facebook
PPJ on Instagram

Where did those bottles come from?

In a recent discussion about PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure, I recount a task that involved taking some bottles from the beach to a nearby recycling bin:

Pokémon Promotes Recycling? (Worlds 2023)

At this year's Pokémon World Championships in Yokohama, Japan, I had an opportunity to visit the Pokémon Activity Center, where I found a curious use of Grimer to promote recycling. I suppose it's not so surprising when you consider how the franchise has attempted to gamify walking, sleeping, and other regular activities:

Cosplayer Interview: Goosaphone

The following is an interview with Goosaphone, a cosplayer I met at Pokémon NAIC 2023.

Where are you from, and how did you get into Pokémon?

I’m from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I got into Pokémon when I was just 3 years old from the Indigo League anime. That year, I got Pokémon Yellow and a Game Boy Color for Christmas. I was obsessed!

How did you get started in cosplay?

My first cosplay I wore to a convention was May from Ruby & Sapphire when I was a sophomore in high school. I used my natural hair and clothes I bought-I only made the bandana myself. I’m remaking the cosplay this year with a proper wig and more accurate clothing, since that was over a decade ago. My skills have improved so much since then!

How did you choose costumes for this year’s event?

To be honest, attending NAIC was a bit of a last-minute decision for me, so I didn’t have a plan for a cosplay lineup initially. I was already working on Elesa, and since I wore Skyla to Milwaukee regionals a month before, I thought NAIC would be a good fit for her debut. 

And the other costumes for the weekend?

For Saturday, I initially wanted to be Sonia from Sword & Shield on Saturday, but the outfit wasn’t really weather appropriate. Serena was better suited for the warm weather, and she’s a very recognizable character, so I decided to bring her. For Sunday, I chose to bring my “Champion Ash” to celebrate Ash's victory in the Master’s Eight tournament that came to Netflix the week before NAIC. 

What went into making the Elesa costume?

Some of it is secondhand and some of it is handmade. The dress is made of a flexible material in three colors, the collar is from my Serena cosplay, and the headphones I painted and glued some cords onto.

You also wore a “Champion Ash” outfit on Sunday. How did you make that one?

Part of the outfit I got online, like the vest, and other parts are altered clothes or official toys. For the logo design, like the backpack and hat, I used a machine called a Cricut to cut out foam and vinyl (respectively). I got some basketball shorts online that I custom-dyed. For the wig, I used a black wig that I already had, and I cut, crimped, and spiked it. I had to use thinning shears to thin out the fibers so I could fit the hat on top! Ash uses all three regional gimmicks between gens 6-8, so I wanted to incorporate that into the cosplay. I glued a mega keystone of the glove for the mega glove. I purchased an official Z-Power Ring with Pikachunium Z and Dynamax Band replica toys for the other two gimmicks. I also have an official Rotom Phone like Ash has. I bought Leon's cape online as a finishing touch. Lastly, for the makeup, I contour my face to look more boyish, thicken and darken my eyebrows, line my eyes with black, and use an eye pencil to create those Z-shaped cheek marks he had.

Is it difficult to bring multiple cosplays to an event?

It depends! It’s always a challenge to cosplay on Sunday, since it's shorter, and a lot of the times you have to worry about checking out of the hotel too. It’s only really a pain if there is a lot of armor or big props, and most Pokémon characters don't have that problem, fortunately. Most of the problem is having the motivation to get up, get ready, and for Pokémon events, potentially compete. 

What other cosplays have you done recently?

Most of what I cosplay is from Fire Emblem, but lately I've done a lot of Pokémon. Goh from the Journeys anime, Rosa from Black & White 2, and Vaporeon are some of my more recent ones. My Rosa cosplay was even featured in the trailer for Chuggaaconroy's BW2 Let's Play!

What else did you do at NAIC this year?

I competed in Pokémon Puzzle League! I play this game very seriously, and it’s based on the anime, which is one of my favorite things about it, because there aren't any other Anipoke games out there. I ended up placing 1st on Friday, 3rd on Saturday, and 2nd on Sunday. I also did side events for GO and VGC. Between all of those, I won a ton of prize tickets that I cashed in for plushies and other merchandise!

Poke Press Digest Podcast: Episode 66-Day 2 Events/Discussing the music of "PokePark Wii"

In the first segment (1:22-3:54), I interview Vince Krekeler of Day 2 events, the company that runs many of the regional Pokemon tournaments in the middle of the US. I took this opportunity to talk with him about how things are going for the first full season back from the pandemic, and gave him an opportunity to talk about some of the other events they run.

The second segment (4:56-45:45) is a discussion of the music of PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure. Anne from Pikapi Podcast helps me cover the soundtrack of this final fourth generation side game. As you might expect, PokePark's array of environments meant that we got to discuss a wide range of tunes. If you want to know what we thought of the game itself, we examine that after the outro:

Links:

Day 2 Events
Pikapi Podcast
Poke Casters Network

What if other Pokémon movies got CGI remakes? (via Stable Diffusion)

Ever since the release of Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution in 2019/2020, folks (including myself) have wondered what other Pokémon movies might look like if they got a CGI remake. While there's no practical way to definitively answer that, with the help of the Stable Diffusion image generation framework, we can get a glimpse of what such a movie might look like. I took stills from a number of Pokémon Movies and used a "Modern Disney" model in combination with an embedding I generated using stills from Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution (I also retouched the images afterwards to improve their appearance).

Technical Details:

Model Used: Modern Disney
Embeddings Used: Custom "Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution" embedding
Front End: Automatic1111
Base Render Resolution: 512*512 (upscaled to 1024*1024)
ControlNet Features Used: SoftEdge, Color, Canny, Reference
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3050