PokéBen Evolution BFG’s

Last week I talked about my horrible luck in finding jobs, because of my horrible resume, bad interviewing skills and hard to be around personality. Unfortunately, this lead to me desperately taking some awful jobs just so I could afford to surround myself with four walls and a place to put my pillowhead and food to cram into my pizzahole. One of my least favorite jobs besides almost all of them, was being a telemarketer. Imagine being an introvert, who hates rejection, talking on the phone and being a person that hates being listened to and judged how the call went after. That’s how much I hated that job.

My creative mind had to wander into an alternate universe in order to make it through the mindnumbing 8 hours every night. We didn’t have cell phones we could scroll through back then, so the only thing that got me through those nights were magazines. I started reading Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly between calls. I happened upon this article about a new game that Nintendo was bringing over from Japan to the United States for the Game Boy. It was an RPG (role playing game), which I loved, but this one was different than most RPG’s of the day, because it wasn’t a fantasy setting. It was simply a 10 year old kid named Ash that was given a choice between three creatures he could control to battle other creatures, and when they got weak, he could throw a ball at them and control them too.

The thing that I loved about Pokémon besides the fighting and collecting was that you could evolve these creatures and make them stronger. I had never thought of video game characters evolving in order to get stronger before. All of sudden, I was at work, avoiding as many phone calls as I could, thumbing through this article over and over again, looking at every creature, and plotting out how control every one of these creatures.

The world of Pokemon got me through two horrible years of telemarketing, because I left the Bitter World of Earth behind and entered the Bitter World of Kanto. At least in Kanto I didn’t have to answer the phone over and over again.

Here I was at 25 years old in 1998, trying to make my way in the world. Now, in 2025, 27 years later I’m still playing Pokémon. In those 27 years, there have been nine generations of mainline games. In addition, there are card games, movies, TV shows, worldwide competitions, books, comics, and a dozen apps. The biggest one right now is Pokémon Go, which has been around since 2016. There are hundreds of YouTube channels solely focused on Pokémon Go, the cards, movies and games as well.

The evolutions of each of the creatures, in addition to each of the abilities and strengths depend on a complex mathematical formula that allows you to be able to fight almost any Pokémon to win in battles as long as you have the right moves and are evolved enough. There is also a full lore behind the characters and each of the currently available 1,025 Pokémon.

In the last 27 years, Pokémon has emerged on the top of the heap when it comes to the highest grossing media franchises. In fact, it’s not even close, with Pokémon making $113 billion, while second place is Mickey and Friends at $61 billion. That’s more than Star Wars, Barbie and even Anpanman. I don’t know what the frick Anpanman is, but it needs to evolve much more if I wants a chance at the Pikachu crown.

Even football, the US’s most popular sport, football (23 billion), and the world’s favorite sport, futbol (11 billion pounds), combined don’t make as much as Pokemon.

Saying that Pokémon the brand has been a success in the last 27 years would be an understatement. What is the key to Pokémon’s success? How do they keep making so much money? Simple. The same mechanic of the game that fascinated me when I first played it 27 years ago. The brand, just like the Pokémon in the game, evolved. They didn’t just stop at the first game with only 151 Pokémon. They didn’t stop at video games. They came up with a card game, and made them collectible, and created rarity. They came up with movies, TV, put games on consoles, created worldwide competitions, and made apps. Lots of them. Some worked, and some didn’t. Some Pokémon are legendary, mythical and rare. Some are weak, common and horrible. But they kept trying new things, pushing more money into the ones that worked and got rid of things that didn’t work.

So that made me wonder why this blog and I are such failures. Why don’t I make any money? Because I haven’t figured out how to evolve. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. Believe me, I have tried. I have millions of Experience Points (XP), by way of getting older every day. I would’ve thought by now, I would have evolved into Super Bitter Human by now just by experiencing life. It seems like I am not going to evolve like most Pokémon do, just by gaining XP (maybe they are waiting for my maturity stat to get above teenage level?).

It appears that I will have to look at other ways the Pokémon have evolved to figure out why I haven’t yet. There are dozens of different ways that Pokémon evolve, so maybe I need to look into those different ways.

Some Pokémon evolve by getting hit by stones, like Moon or Sun Stones. I guess it’s time to travel to NASA and see if they have any trips scheduled for the Sun or Moon and see if I they have any ride share options available. It seems worth the trip to see if I can be a bitter version of myself.

Some of them evolve by being in special locations, so my next trip is going to be to Alaska to see if I can evolve into an Ice Type. The plan will be to expose myself to the cold, and if successful I may be able to shoot Ice Beams at people. If nothing else, I won’t have to rage quit about my the ice machine in the fridge not working anymore. My wife will be excited that she won’t have to keep trying to fix it anyways.

Perhaps my evolution will come by way of a held item like a Metal Coat, King’s Rock or Dragon Scale. If you see me in Scotland looking for Nessy so I can grab a Dragon Scale from him, don’t worry, I’m just trying to become a dragon type human.

Haunter and Kadabra evolve in Pokemon by being traded to another player. I’m not a huge fan of this, but I’m willing to do it at least short term to find out if I evolve that way. There used to be a show on Fox called Wife Swap that allowed Wives to trade their husbands to another family for a week. I’m pretty sure my wife would be willing to trade me for a week (maybe even more) if there was a chance that I could evolve.

Some Pokémon evolve through their Friendship/Happiness stats hitting a certain level with their trainers. Needless to say, if that is the way I evolve, I completely understand why I haven’t evolved yet. As you know, I’m never happy, nor will I ever be. And friendships, well, I’ve never tried one of those. Could somebody help me understand why someone would want a friendship with someone?

Lastly, there is a chance that you can evolve like Milotic by having a high enough beauty stat. Do I even need to dignify that with a response?

So, how will you know if I’ve evolved by next week? You will know for sure if I don’t post on this blog next week, because my evolution will include being bitter on a much larger scale, mostly surely by doing a Bitter podcast or starting a Bitter YouTube channel instead of doing these low level blog posts.

While you are waiting with bated breath to see if I evolve, get distracted by these Bitter Friday Giftures below…

The only way to make it through…