I just watched a man release every Pokemon he caught except for a level 5 Magikarp, waste all of his money and throw away all of his items at the Pokemon center just before the elite four in Pokemon red in order to trap himself in an unwinnable game. He couldn’t beat the elite 4 with a level 5 magikarp, and it couldn’t learn the hm moves necessary to leave victory road, and Magikarp only knew splash and had absolutely no chance of beating the level 40ish Pokemon there so… This guy wanders around victory road hoping a Geodude or Graveler would use selfdestruct or explosion in the first turn of an encounter and miss his Magikarp, which is technically possible because even moves with a 100% hitrate have a 1/256 chance to still miss. It happened eventually, and he beat the elite four with a level 100 gyarados
What the actual fuck
For some context, this is from a video series called “SoftLockPicking” where a guy’s followers come up with challenges to get him stuck in an unwinnable game and he tries to see if he can get out of them. Sort of a video game escape artist.
I love desire paths. There’s something so wonderous about seeing an echo of humanity. Depending on it’s location, a desire path can mean so many different things.
In a city, like the pic above, they represent rebellion, and efficiency. The messiness of humanity. We like to imagine we’re oh so logical and neat so we design our cities to be logical and neat an then real humans literally trample on that idea. The ego required to think you can design something perfect that checks every box. Life is all about compromise and patching stuff when some new problem arises. Though people have certainly tried! Ohio state univeristy let students carve their desire paths, and then paved them over. It looks pretty artsy.
Some people will try to discourage desire paths, but this is almost always going to fail.
Eventually, people just have to accept them. Humans are too dang stubborn.
Certain desire paths are just adorable. A 0.5 second time saver. You just can’t design for maximum efficiency, humans will always find shortcuts!
Though on occasion a desire path can actually be the least efficient way…especially if you’re superstitious.
In a wilder area, such as below, they show us the curiosity of humans. A desire path somewhere natural often tells you there’s something interesting just ahead. (Though remember some ecosystems are fragile and will suffer if trampled! Stick to paths in these sorts of areas)
And how about desire stairs? I always think these look so cool. We get see humans determination to climb, to traverse every kind of terrain.
And for something really crazy…a desire path used for centuries will create a ‘holloway’
All of these pics are off the Desirepath subreddit, check them out for more examples! And many thanks to the users who submitted these photos.
