Pieces of Theron: Pokemon

Theron’s introduction to Pokemon was through his older brothers, cartoons, and the Gameboy Advance. What sent his passion for Pokemon into the stratosphere was Pokemon Go. When Pokemon Go launched, he soon learned that roaming our neighborhood was not as fruitful as walking through the village of Granville, where there existed official PokeStops and Pokemon Gyms. 

He was obsessed with “shinies”: color variants of each Pokemon which appear roughly once out of every 500 encounters. He spent hours recoloring images of Pokemon as shinies in a mobile app and sharing them with a cultivated fanbase on social media.  He would learn of hacks to get shinies on the various games, and then repeat the process incessantly, closely tallying his attempts, sometimes even asking us to push the final button in the process, for luck.