You can tell a lot about a person by what YouTube videos they choose to watch when they eat. Recently, I've been in a Pokemon mood. I'll watch videos about the different pokemon and movesets used in competitive battles, good old wi-fi battles, and playthroughs of ROM hacks. My favorite video recently was a playthrough of a ROM hack called Emerald Seaglass. It's a ROM hack that attempts to combine Pokemon Emerald and Crystal while adding in a bunch of fun extra features. It follows the Emerald storyline, uses updated Gen2 graphics, and features Pokemon all the way up to Gen9. It looks amazing, and I think it accomplishes its goal quite well. You can watch the video I watched here. I thought it was an enjoyable watch. I remember being really into watching playthroughs of ROM hacks, and one of my favorites was Shofu's Pokemon Rejuvenation playthrough. The era of 30 part playthroughs with live commentary is over, and now an entire playthrough is condensed into a 30 minute compilation of stream clips. Life moves ever forward. Looking back on it now, I spent so much time watching those playthroughs. Besides the ROM hacks, I remember watching almost all of UberHaxorNova's Quad Mountain Survival series. Considering each video was at least 30 minutes, the amount of time I spent watching those was substantially more than alot of modern tv shows. I gobbled every episode up with no issue. Nowadays, I'm having trouble finishing the 7 episode Fallout show. I'm not sure if that's an attention span issue or a mark of quality.
I think it's definitely at least partly an attention span issue because of my video watching habits while eating. It's very rare that I'll actually finish a whole video in one sitting. I'll click through a bunch and watch about a minute of each. I'm also a quick eater so when I finally stick with one I'm already done with my food. For that Emerald Seaglass playthrough, I finished that over multiple days worth of meals.
On the subject of ROM hacks, I think I'll finally try to play one. I've recently dipped my toes into emulation when I played Pokemon White for the first time on a DS emulator. It was pretty easy to set up, and I didn't run into any issues. I actually really liked the story of Pokemon White. A funny thing about my playthrough was I had a really visceral reaction to Team Plasma. They were really pissing me off because they were stealing people's pokemon and talking all this bullshit about how weak trainers don't deserve them while getting dogwalked by some random 10 year old who just started training. Total hypocrites! I wish there was an option to confiscate the pokemon of every Team Plasma member you beat. This was an interesting piece of worldbuilding because the average person in the Pokemon world must be absolutely awful at Pokemon battles. I guess they're still a relatively niche thing in universe even though the games make them feel so commonplace. I also thought N was fucking irritating until the very end.
I want to try out a ROM hack for the first time, and I think playing Emerald Seaglass would be a great start. The game looks amazing. Maybe I'll get it all set up on my next day off. Playing pokemon while eating instead of watching it can't be a bad thing.