Pokémon Worlds/XP 2026 is a mess right now

For those of us who were feeling sad about missing out on the convention… maybe don’t feel so rough, because there’s been a lot going wrong:

• Little kids are getting scammed by adults in Pokémon trades.

• There have been multiple brazen thefts of plushies from people attending. And these 4 incidents are only what has been reported on Twitter.

• There are multiple examples of staff very blatantly violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, even when supervisors get involved. Like, even for wheelchair users.

• People have gotten double charged for merch accidentally and been unable to get a refund.

• The Pin Rally ran out of pins by 9:30am on Saturday (the second day) and is now closed for the rest of the con. There were unmanaged stampede risks and fire hazards.

• Scalpers have been lining up outside nonstop. Note that while it is a tradition going many years back for people to sell or trade Worlds merch from previous years, this has notably involved people blatantly reselling merch from this specific event.

• Lines have been crazy long, and most people have to spend hours for each line.
Kids are having a rough time, to say the least. Staff are sometimes snapping at attendees, because a few bad apple attendees are straight up sprinting into people.

• The most notable incident that many have heard about was the 2024 World Champion Luca Ceribelli, being effectively banned from competing due to a misunderstanding about allowing one disabled friend to join them in line.

This is not to mention the difficulties with getting tickets, getting selected in a lottery to be able to attend side events, etc.

EDIT: Pin Rally officially canceled for Sunday. People reportedly overheard staff saying it was due to multiple fights that broke out.

For those of us who were feeling sad about missing out on the convention… maybe don’t feel so rough, because there’s been a lot going wrong:

• Little kids are getting scammed by adults in Pokémon trades.

• There have been multiple brazen thefts of plushies from people attending. And these 4 incidents are only what has been reported on Twitter.

• There are multiple examples of staff very blatantly violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, even when supervisors get involved. Like, even for wheelchair users.

• People have gotten double charged for merch accidentally and been unable to get a refund.

• The Pin Rally ran out of pins by 9:30am on Saturday (the second day) and is now closed for the rest of the con. There were unmanaged stampede risks and fire hazards.

• Scalpers have been lining up outside nonstop. Note that while it is a tradition going many years back for people to sell or trade Worlds merch from previous years, this has notably involved people blatantly reselling merch from this specific event.

• Lines have been crazy long, and most people have to spend hours for each line. Kids are having a rough time, to say the least. Staff are sometimes snapping at attendees, because a few bad apple attendees are straight up sprinting into people.

• The most notable incident that many have heard about was the 2024 World Champion, Luca Ceribelli, being effectively banned from competing due to a misunderstanding about allowing one disabled friend to join them in line.

This is not to mention the difficulties with getting tickets, getting selected in a lottery to be able to attend side events, etc.

EDIT: Pin Rally is officially cancelled tomorrow. People overheard staff saying it was because fights broke out multiple times.

Hey y’all, so I’ve recently started getting into soldering for retro game console repairs and mods. But… for some reason, it’s harder than I expected. I kinda want to take an in-person class or lesson of some sort, but I really don’t know where to start. Can anyone help me out with class recommendations?

Pokebert's Canonical Guidelines for Pokémon Playthroughs

Rule 0 — The Grant Principle

An outcome is canonical if and only if the game granted it.

Legitimacy is a question of authorship, not tooling. Hardware, software, and external services are proxies - negotiable whenever they stop serving the experience. What is never negotiable: every Pokémon, item, stat, and event in a canonical save must have been generated by the game's own behavior, never specified by the player — except where the game itself officially solicits player input (naming your Pokémon, choosing a starter, answering an NPC). Input the game asks for is part of the grant.

0.1 — Scope of judgment. More specifically, these guidelines judge claims, not artifacts. Nothing is forbidden in itself; a save, tool, or technique is only ever prohibited relative to the class it claims (see Rule 6). The sole true violation in this canon is misrepresentation: presenting a non-canonical artifact as Canon.

0.2 — Advantage neutrality. This canon judges authorship, not advantage. Material gain neither legitimizes nor delegitimizes any act; content that passes Rule 0 remains canonical however profitable, and content that fails it remains excluded however harmless. (Precedent: Emerald RNG manipulation is pure material gain and fully Canon; a record-mixed EXP-farm base is authored cargo whether or not it enriches the recipient. See In re Toto's Base, Appendix.) Advantage does, however, trigger heightened audit under 3.6.

0.3 — Definition of "the game." "The game" means any authentic instance of it, including its officially designed cross-save channels (trades, record mixing, Mystery Gift, Pokéwalker strolls). Content received through those channels is game-granted. This defines what counts as granted — how granted content may be moved is governed solely by Rule 3.

All rules below are applications of Rule 0. Where a new situation arises that these rules don't cover, resolve it by Rule 0.

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Rule 1 — Platforms & The Realizability Principle

1.1 Within 12 years of a game's release, play on authentic cartridges and original hardware.

1.2 Exceptions at any time, playable via emulation or homebrew sideloading:
- Pokémon Gold Spaceworld 1997 demo
- Pokémon Diamond and Pearl prototypes
- Authentic event distribution ROMs
- Official Virtual Console releases
- Leaked official builds and prototypes generally (see 4.3)

1.3 Sunset clause: once 12 years have elapsed since release, all platform distinctions dissolve. Original hardware degrades and secondhand prices become exclusionary; authenticity of platform was always a proxy for authenticity of experience, and expires when it stops serving it.

1.4 Realizability Principle: a method is legitimate if it can be performed end-to-end on original hardware, whether or not you personally perform it that way. If authentic consoles, link cables, and a flash cart could accomplish it physically, executing the equivalent in emulation changes the means, not the meaning.

1.4a — Methods, not end states. Realizability blesses methods, never outcomes. A save editor is not a realizable method regardless of hardware, and an edit does not become legitimate merely because its resulting bytes are identical to a state an official act could reach — end-state equivalence would legitimize fabricating any plausible content. Transport of actually-existing game-granted data is governed by Rule 3, not by this rule. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 1.)

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Rule 2 — Infrastructure Restoration & Distribution

2.1 External services and tools that restore or replicate deprecated official functionality are legitimate.

2.2 Restorations must faithfully reproduce the original presentation and behavior - restoration, not enhancement.

2.3 Accessing them through built-in console features (e.g., DNS settings) is legitimate.

2.4 Recognized examples: Poke Classic Network as a replacement for the GTS and Nintendo WFC.

2.5 Mystery Gifts and event items are valid when the receiving game accepts them through its own unmodified reception code, with no external tools and no modification to the receiving game. The game vouches for what it accepts through its own front door. Unofficial distribution ROMs are therefore legitimate as senders.

2.6 Spirit clause: Rule 2.5 must not function as a PKHeX substitute. Distribution through official channels does not launder arbitrary content into canon; distributed items and Pokémon must be consistent with what official event infrastructure would plausibly carry. The same applies to the Pokéwalker: unofficial tools can technically push any gift or Pokémon to it, but doing so violates the spirit of authenticity.

2.7 Community events: Rule 2.5 extends limited but legitimate blessing to non-official events distributed in official event format - e.g., the July 2026 Anthrocon BPSHOP Seaking.

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Rule 3 — Save Maintenance, Repair & Migration

3.1 External save tools are legitimate when they preserve, repair, or transport game-granted content:
- Backing up saves off degrading media
- Restoring a save after a cartridge battery replacement (including RTC repair, e.g., reviving Emerald's berry clock)
- Repairing malformed or residual data - e.g., removing stale Trainer House records left behind by Pokéwalker experimentation
- Migrating Pokémon or saves forward when official transfer infrastructure no longer exists

3.1a — Reasonable availability. An official channel is treated as unavailable under 3.1 when performing it would require participation, hardware, or access not reasonably obtainable at the time of the act - not merely inconvenient, but genuinely beyond reach (e.g., the sole counterpart save is held by someone with no means to dump or link it). Availability is assessed at the time of the act; rulings under this clause carry a date and lapse when the channel becomes reasonably available, after which the official act is obligatory for future transports. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 2.)

3.2 The edit may act on the container, never the contents. Fabricating or altering items, species, shininess, stats, IVs, ribbons, met-data, or event flags is prohibited — regardless of tool.

3.3 Interoperability exception: editing trainer record data only (name, TID, SID) is legitimate when its purpose is to unlock officially designed functionality obstructed by an incidental technical limitation - e.g., altering trainer identity so one save's Trainer House can receive distinct teams from multiple Pokéwalkers. The teams themselves remain game-granted; the edit adjusts the addressing, not the cargo. This exception is void the moment identity edits touch a Pokémon's provenance - TID/SID manipulation to alter ownership, legality, or shininess is content fabrication under 3.2.

3.4 Intergenerational transfer: moving Pokémon between Gen 2 and Gen 3 (e.g., via Poke Transporter GB) is legitimate under the Realizability Principle (1.4): the fan-made transfer ROM can be run on a flash cart across real GBAs and link cables, so the transfer is physically achievable on authentic hardware. Content is transported, never authored - Rule 0 is satisfied.

3.5 Litmus test: after the edit, does the save contain anything the game did not generate? If yes, the save leaves Canon class.

3.6 — Heightened audit. When a transport under this rule confers material advantage, the verbatim requirement is inspected with elevated scrutiny: the transported data must be byte-perfect as originally granted, and any deviation - however small - is authorship under 3.2 and misrepresentation under 6.6. Advantage never changes the law (0.2); it changes how carefully compliance is verified. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 4.)

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Rule 4 — In-Game Actions & External Knowledge

4.1 Any action achievable through sanctioned inputs alone is presumptively legitimate (subject to Rule 5).

4.2 External knowledge is always legal. Guides, damage calculators, Feebas tile calculators, RNG timers, disassembly research, pen and paper - knowledge is not a tool acting on the game. Frame-precise execution informed by external computation (e.g., Emerald RNG manipulation) remains vanilla input and is fully canonical.

4.3 Provenance of knowledge is out of scope. This canon evaluates the authorship of game-state, not the real-world chain of custody of information. Knowledge and data originating from the games' official creators - Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures Inc., ILCA - is first-party truth about the games and fully canonical as knowledge, regardless of whether it reached the public through official publication or leak. Leaked source code, design documents, and debug material are authored by the same hands as the retail ROMs; the canon does not distinguish how they escaped the building. Leaked playable builds are governed by 1.2 as prototypes. (Canon status is a statement about legitimacy within these guidelines, not a legal opinion about anything else.)

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Rule 5 — Glitches & The Authorship Line

5.1 Legitimate: glitches in which the game misbehaves on its own terms - misread data, corruption, underflow, stale memory. The game remains the author of the outcome; the player merely triggers the fault.
- Examples: MissingNo., trainer-fly Mew glitch, Pomeg glitch, bad clones, glitch Pokémon generally.

5.2 Excluded from Canon: Arbitrary Code Execution. ACE is excluded not because the code is "unprogrammed" - the CPU only ever executes bytes legitimately present in memory — but because the player deliberately arranges memory to encode instructions of their own design. The game becomes an interpreter for a player-written program; authorship transfers from game to player, violating Rule 0. ACE saves and products are Feat-class (6.4), never Canon.

5.3 Litmus test: could the player have specified the outcome's content in advance? A glitch hands you whatever the fault produces. ACE produces whatever you wrote. The former is discovery; the latter is authorship.

5.4 Consistency note: hand-performed ACE and an Action Replay both write player-chosen values to memory. A canon that admits one and excludes the other is ranking convenience, not legitimacy. Both are excluded from Canon for the same reason.

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Rule 6 — Classes of Record

Fabrications hold no class (6.7). Per 0.1, the only violation is claiming a class you don't hold.

6.1 — Canon. Playthroughs satisfying Rules 0–5 in full. The only class in which outcomes count as obtained.

6.2 — Restoration class. Playthroughs of works assembled exclusively from official content, where the unofficial contribution is editorial, not creative:
- Bug-fix-only ROM hacks
- Re-enablement of dormant or regionally removed official content (e.g., an English-language Game Corner restoring HGSS slot machines)
- Reconstructions of unreleased canonical content from official material (e.g., Super Gold 97 completing the Spaceworld-era game)

Restoration is to Canon what a critical edition is to an original manuscript: every word is the author's; only the assembly is the editor's. Closest class to Canon - but the text is not the retail text, so its saves are Restoration-class, never Canon. Whether Restoration-obtained content may migrate into Canon saves is a recognized grey area: no official ruling is made, and the question is left to individual judgment. Restorations claiming fidelity are held to that claim: content not traceable to official material demotes the work to Apocrypha.

6.3 — Apocrypha. ROM hacks and modified works generally. Fully valid as works and as playthroughs - a completed ROM hack save is a real accomplishment - but they make no canonical claim and their contents never migrate into Canon saves.

6.4 — Feat class. Performance records: hand-executed ACE, TAS-verified routes, and similar acts of mastery. The act is honored; the resulting save and its products are Feat-class, never Canon, permanently.

6.5 — Research class. Any technique whatsoever - ACE, memory editing, debugger use, prohibited tools - is valid when conducted for documentation and research (e.g., TCRF contributions, glitch research, preservation work). Research produces knowledge, and knowledge is always canonical (4.2, 4.3). Research saves are Research-class - a sibling of Feat, not a subclass of it; the findings they generate are Canon-usable by everyone.

6.6 — Misrepresentation. The only prohibited act in this canon: presenting a save, Pokémon, or outcome as Canon when it is not - fabricated content in a claimed-legitimate save, TID/SID provenance laundering, distribution-ROM injection posing as an event, an Apocrypha or Feat product traded as caught. Class fraud, in every form, is the crime. Everything else is just a different shelf in the library.

6.7 — Fabrications hold no class. Genned and hacked content is never valid — not as Canon, not as anything. Content authored directly by the player without play - PKHeX'd Pokémon, Action Replay products, genned items - is not a record of anything, and the classes of this rule classify records. An honestly labeled fabrication is therefore not prohibited as an object (0.1), but it is null: it holds no class, documents no act, and can never validly claim one. It is a book-shaped object with blank pages - not a lesser shelf, but unshelvable. Purpose can redeem the save around it: fabrication performed in service of a documented act takes that act's class (fabricated test subjects for mechanics research are Research-class per 6.5). The bytes alone, absent an act, are nothing - and any downstream claim of class for them, by anyone, is misrepresentation under 6.6 committed at the moment of the claim.

Appendix — Case Law

In re Toto's Base (July 2026)

Facts. Petitioner held a Secret Base record legitimately obtained from a friend via Gen 3 record mixing, and sought to transplant it by save editor into a new save. The friend's originating save existed but was ~2,800 miles away; no authentic-hardware remote link existed at time of ruling, and the emulated official route required the friend to possess save-dumping capability, which was unverified. The base contained a six-Blissey EXP-farming team.

Holdings.

1. Advantage neutrality.

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1. Material gain is legally irrelevant; the canon judges authorship. The farm's utility was authored cargo. Codified as
2. Heightened audit. Advantageous transports face elevated verification of the verbatim requirement.

Disposition. Transplant ruled Canon as of July 2026, conditional on factual verification that the friend lacks dump capability; ruling lapses if the official channel (including emulated record mixing under 1.3) becomes reasonably available. Preferred remedy noted for the record: perform actual record mixing remotely where possible - the canon favors playing the game.

I’m noticing it suddenly doing more hedging, more “devil’s advocate”, more “let me push back on that”.

So as a non-binary AMAB, I’ve seen a lot of talk on the subreddit about how testosterone tends to be “protective” when it comes to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and I wanted to hear from other AMAB people about how their experience lines up with it (or doesn’t) and how EDS is easier to overlook sometimes for males, and how that can have us overlooked in diagnosis.

In my experience:
- We don’t have the highly velvety soft skin that women have. A family member of mine who is a certified massage therapist with 15+ years of experience has helped numerous women receive an EDS diagnosis after doing extensive massage therapy on my mother with hEDS, but she noted that she can only see that obvious “EDS skin tell” with females. Even for me as a diagnosed hEDS male, this family member said she wouldn’t have been able to easily tell I have the condition despite inheriting it directly from my mom and having so many of the same symptoms.
- I indeed do not suffer very much from joint subluxations/dislocations/joint issues in general as a result of daily physical activities. And in fact, I suffer as equally if not more from stiffness! However, I do have to be constantly careful when laying down, sitting, leaning, or kneeling - basically anything where muscle support doesn’t actually have a major protective effect on the joints, I can still just as easily get fucked up. My right knee is unfortunately permanently messed up as a result of dislocating it the wrong way just from sitting 6 years ago.
- I was always viewed as a huge wimp in elementary school and middle school because of how uncoordinated and hypermobile I was. It really wasn’t until high school and puberty was in full swing that I was able to perform at a “below average but still somewhat normal” level when it came to P.E.
- My dad and I had to eventually stop rough-housing as fathers and sons sometimes do when I was a child, because it was getting me subluxations too often. While I was an undiagnosed child with EDS at the time, my mother was diagnosed at this point and so she knew to intervene before those injuries started to stack up for me.
- The only reason I even knew to seek an hEDS diagnosis and keep fighting for it was because of how much my mom fought for me through the medical system even when it kept ignoring me. When she took me to Kaiser Genetics in San Francisco in 2016 (so I would’ve been 16 years old at the time) I fell a couple of points short on the Brighton Scale due to the aforementioned stiffness and less flexibility when compared to fem presentations of hEDS. So despite having a verified family lineage through my mother (and heavily suspected in my maternal grandfather, who had chronic pain and was a highly flexible gymnast) I got looked in the eyes and told “You didn’t meet the threshold for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, so you do not have it.”
- I do bruise extremely easily and scratches take a while to heal. This was sometimes overlooked as a kid as just “boys being boys”. It wasn’t until I slept on a pile of rocks/gravel as a runaway homeless juvenile when I was 15 and had to get physically examined afterwards by a doctor, that I realized just how abnormal my bruising levels were because the doctors were convinced I was being beaten badly by my parents.
- I have dealt with really bad pinched nerves from otherwise normal activities my whole life. In fact, if my wrists get too cold and stiff, they start to feel like they’re being electrocuted from that crazy level of pinched nerves in my hands & wrists! I ended up having to leave a job at Sweetgreen at the young age of 17, because tossing salads all the time became impossible.
- I can still do party tricks like scratch my own entire back perfectly fine or do weird shit with my double-jointed thumbs, lol.

None of this gets into the systemic issues that wouldn’t be improved by testosterone but rather are systemic due to inherent issues in my connective tissues - for example, I have pelvic floor dysfunction, really bad gastrointestinal issues, disabling levels of dysautonomia/POTS, bad TMJ flare-ups, lifelong eczema, costochondritis, severe sleep apnea despite not being overweight.

So, I hope this gives an idea of how hEDS can still be a massively disabling affliction even when the very classic symptoms of joint issues aren’t as prominent!

It’s no secret that the age gating / ID verification is easily the most hotly contested topic on this sub, but what on Earth is with everyone here being so overly paranoid and ridiculous about it?

No, a female avatar with reasonably normal proportions in regular summer swimsuit wear is not something we need to age gate or ban users for.
No, the mere mention of alcohol or cigarettes existing at all in a sticker/print/group does not need to be gated behind an ID.
No; not absolutely every mention of sexuality whatsoever needs to be censored or age gated.

When I can go to my local movie theater and can watch freaking Madagascar and see funny CGI animals shake their bootay, we do not need to be making VRChat more conservative than that.
When I can go to freaking Disneyland and consume an alcoholic beverage in view of a minor, we do not need to be shaming people for daring to have a drink in the presence of minors online.
When there is already a push in recent decades not to do strictly enforce morality dress codes on middle school and high school girls, we do not need to advocate for stronger policing of sexuality and/or gender expression than a Catholic girls’ school.

Why do so many VRChat users hide behind a fake progressive image to enforce purity culture in this platform???

Note: the following is a non-participation link. Do not brigade this subreddit or this post. This is strictly as a reference for discussion within LWMA.

The post in question is https://np.reddit.com/r/DecidingToBeBetter/comments/1ul1u23/wife_told_me_why_we_havent_had_sex_for_two_years/

Edit: My apologies that this didn’t fully post, I am on vacation and cell service has been spotty.

What I felt was worth posting here about how this is a saddening (and unfortunately fantastic) example of how misandry most commonly manifests in marriages when it comes to men and male gender roles.

Specifically, the OP states that he wants to improve and get better after his wife told him she no longer finds him attractive anymore. While there were some legitimate issues, her strongest most cited reason was his “lack of ambition”. He had previously been a news reporter and a successful book writer, but then COVID happened and fucked up the momentum.

What shocked me most though was the amount of women in the comments replying saying that they were wives who wish their husband would do the same as OP, and lament that other women they know have the same situation in their marriages. Is this a case of these married wives simply not reading past the title of the post and assuming it’s a classic “husband doesn’t want to do chores” situation, or an example of tried and true misandry?

Curious to see what folks here think.