Author Archives: Chris Burns

Here in November of 2019, we've got the full list of Pokemon GO research ready to go! This is the part of the game where the Pokemon trainer gets to do work that's sometimes easy, sometimes incredibly taxing, but always rewarding. Every two months, Field Research Tasks are refreshed, and November is the place where a Pokemon GO update means a big change in the way users are able to pick up the latest and/or best Pokemon in the game!

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China was watching as Blizzard Entertainment president J. Allen Brack walked onstage today at BlizzCon. Knowing full well that this event might be overshadowed by the biggest Blizzard-related news of the latter half of the year, Brack began the first major presentation of the event with what might've appeared to be an apology. He did use the word "sorry", but he did not use the words "China" or "Hong Kong" whatsoever.

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A group of researchers showed that vampire bats who made friends with other vampire bats in captivity often kept said bonds in the wild. The research was published this week, showing that a combination of extrinsic constraints and intrinsic partner fidelity caused lasting social structures between tested vampire bats. These lasting friendships were shown via such activities as grooming and food sharing.

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If NBC follows through with today's report, they'd be the first "totally free streaming video service" to be delivered by a major media provider. Of course, said streaming video provider wouldn't likely be delivered COMPLETELY free. Instead, today's report means it's likely NBC's Peacock will be free, with advertisements. So sorta like what Hulu did when they started... only a little bit different.

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Today we're taking a peek at a number of images of the next-generation Motorola device called RAZR. But wait, you might be saying, didn't we already have a Motorola RAZR, more than once? In this case, the brand seems to draw on that memory of the radical-looking flip-phone, moving forward with the latest hardware technology to make the device's form factor better than ever before.

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Today we're looking at a variety of changes made to Pokemon GO this morning - the most interesting of which was a tiny mistake in the moves code. Those players who had Pokemon with the move "Giga Impact" could've (and in some cases did seem to) take advantage of a listed power of 9001 instead of just 200. This level of power in a single Pokemon move in Pokemon GO would, essentially, devastate any Pokemon opponent.

Giga Impact Power!

According to sources including Poke Miners, the Pokemon move "Giga Impact" had a lot more power than normal for a short period this morning. At approximately 16:53 hours on October 31 (last night), PokeMiners reported that changes had started to be made to the game's code - including moves like Giga Impact and Locked On. Giga Impact, at that time, had its power changed to 150.

At some point between then and approximately 7:24 AM this morning, another change was made, and the move Giga Impact had a listed power of 9001! That's enough power to knock out basically any Pokemon in the game in one go! The 7:24 AM update changed the power of Giga Impact to 200 instead of that whopping 9001. The image you see below shows one of the effects of the Mistaken Evolutions in the next section. This image comes from 8bitCR on The Silph Road.

Mistaken Evolutions

A few other oddities were in play for a while this week, too, fixed just this morning. One was an evolution of Bellsprout. Instead of Bellsprout's standard evolution into Weepinbell, it was reportedly evolving into Sandslash!

At the same time, reports suggest that the Pokemon Victreebel had a new evolution option - evolving into Dugtrio! It would appear that this was more of a mistaken image file situation, where a Diglett looked like a Victreebel, instead of an actual Victreebel having the ability to evolve into Dugtrio.

Shadow updates!

Another major set of Shadow Pokemon additions were made to the game's latest game files! You'll find these Pokemon listed in the image above! This could have a lot to do with the mistaken identities in evolutions above - or it could just mean we're about to get a very DARK FUTURE!

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A new comic called Silver Surfer: Black #5 was released this week with new insight into the origins of the Marvel Universe. At this moment in time it's important to note that the following article requires a SPOILER ALERT for the comics in the "Silver Surfer: Black" series. Once you read this article, there's no going back to a time when you didn't know the deal. The details of this series are too important to not report on here - or at least they're important if you're the sort of person who enjoys knowing the most KEY details of the history of Marvel Comics.

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There's a company by the name BBK Group that you should get to know, if you don't know already. Where Apple made their mark in the smartphone world with a single brand, iPhone, BBK Group (aka BBK Electronics Corporation, or BBK) went completely the opposite direction, creating not only a wide variety of different smartphone models, but running a set of different smartphone companies that, to the average consumer, look like completely separate entities. If one combines the various brands owned by BBK into a single count, they ship more phones than any other single brand.

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There's a Pokemon GO Battle you're about to drop in on with Regice or Registeel, and you'd like to know the best Pokemon counters. The good news here is that while these Pokemon have a different set of Pokemon Types, they've got relatively similar best-possible counters with which you'll be able to take them down.

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New research says that dropping f-bombs and other curse words can help you get a better workout. That's according to a set of researchers from Keele University in England. They've conducted several years of research on this and related (swear-intensive) topics, leading them to several conclusions. One of these conclusions was that humans "produced more power" when swearing whilst exercising than without said swearwords. Related tests showed that participants were better able to handle pain if they vocalized curse words.

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Huawei keeps shipping more phones every year, growing said shipments by percentages that leave all other companies in the dust. For example their year-over-year growth for Q3 of the year 2019 for unit shipments was a positive 29%. The next largest - and only other major positive percentage - was Samsung's comparatively meager 8%. Because of Huawei's monstrous growth, global smartphone vendor shipments this quarter (compared to this same quarter last year) are up 2%.

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Official Apple earnings sheets released today show iPhone sales numbers down, while all other categories in Apple's earnings breakdown went up. Apple's Financial Year 2019 Forth Quarter Results showed both the three months period ending in September of 2019 and the full 12-month period ending in September 2019. Of course, even falling iPhone sales numbers are sales numbers that dwarf every other category, per usual.

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