15 October 2009

"For Sensitive Skin"

Why is it that nearly everything that's labeled "For Sensitive Skin" contains moisturizers, fragrances, aloe, and other things that irritate my skin? Why can't "For Sensitive Skin" simply mean "no unnecessary crap added"? It would sure make shopping a lot easier for me and result in my poor hands hurting a lot less often.

I can't even buy razors anymore because so many of them have aloe in their lube strips and don't bother saying so on the package. And now I have to be careful about buying soap (SOAP!) because it so often contains aloe and other irritants (my hands were oddly and painfully dried out for several months before my better half noticed aloe listed in the tiny print ingredients list on the massive bottle of Dial that we had purchased from Sam's Club). It's almost like HBA companies don't WANT me to buy their products...

Now I realize that my aloe allergy probably puts me in the minority but there's no reason for EVERY BLOODY SKIN PRODUCT to contain aloe. Sheesh.

Pokémon Power-type Tier List

I originally intended to list every Pokémon type in order of awesomeness but decided that detailing why each one is in its respective position would simply be too long and nobody would read it. So instead I present only the best and worst in no particular order:

Best

Dragon - Dragon has only two weaknesses (itself and Ice) but multiple resistances which can make them rather hard to take down. But what makes them really shine is that only Steel resists Dragon so they're usually swinging for big damage even though most of their moves are only of moderate power (or have low accuracy or negatively effect the user in some way).
Psychic - Psychic not only has some incredibly powerful attacks, it also has lots of extremely powerful Pokémon. As a result resistance generally doesn't help much so only Dark-types have a reasonable chance of surviving a hit from a Psychic.
Dark - Dark's best attributes are it's immunity to and effectiveness against Psychics. But Dark-types tend to have low defenses and are thus glass cannons. Also, Dark-type moves are fairly low-powered compared to most other types but tend to have more side-effects (flinching, defense lowering, etc) as a result.
Ice - Ice is by far the easiest way to take down Dragons and a lot of them have a chance to freeze the opponent which renders the target incapable of doing anything. Ice-type Pokémon, however, have one major problem: multiple weaknesses and only one resistance (Ice) make them fairly weak defensively.
Ground - Ground-types are immune to electric but can't hit fliers so it's a bit of trade-off. What makes Ground really good is that is super-effective against FIVE! different types (and attacks like Earthquake and Magnitude which can one-hit kill anything that's weak to ground and severally injury most everything else don't hurt).
Steel - Steel-types aren't the hardest hitting lot but their resistance to nearly everything makes them useful as tanks while you heal up the rest of the party.
Fighting - Strong against both Dark and Steel but only weak to Psychic and Flying. Not surprisingly, Fighting-type Pokémon tend to have fairly high Attacks which, when combined with Fighting's super-effectiveness against five different types, makes it a force to be reckoned with.

Worst

Bug - Bug is strong vs psychic and dark. And that's about all it has going for it. While Bugs have finally received some higher-powered attacks most Bug Pokémon still have fairly low attack values and thus still deal only moderate damage.
Normal - Immune to ghosts but can't hit them either; weak to fighting; resisted by rock and steel. Poor Normals; they're probably the most common type yet one of the least useful overall.
Poison - First off: I love my Crobat and my Crit-o-Matic Drapion. But Poison is still a pretty awful type overall. Poison does nothing to Steel and is resisted by multiple types but only super-effective against Grass (but many Grass types are also Poison which resists itself). Really the only good thing about Poison is the Poison status condition (which is why the only Poison attack my Crobat and Drapion use is Cross Poison).

Flying, Water, Fire, Grass, Ghost, Electric, Rock don't really stand out as particularly good or bad thus they're not in either list.

Now obviously a list like this is going to vary from person to person (an ask five people and get six responses kind of thing) so feel free to post your own lists. I'd love to see them.