The Kind Of Funny Tragicness of Shiny Hunting

So my roommate (Joe) has a Game Boy Advance and a copy of Pokemon LeafGreen. I'm not sure exactly what his end goal is, but he is hunting for shiny pokemon (I believe his brother who lives elsewhere is too, I think). I have been helping him on this quest. If I'm listening to a book or watching a show or something, you can often find me pressing the A button repeatedly hoping a blue Snorlax appears.

For this pokemon/situation, it's set up in such a way that you can just turn on the game and press A a bunch until a Snorlax appears. When you're never lucky and Snorlax is not blue, you press A+B+Start+Select at the same time and it resets the game; you proceed to press the A button a bunch of times, and so on and so forth.

Trouble is, of course, there's only a 1/8192 chance to encounter shiny. An abysmal .01221% chance.

Bigger trouble is, of course, how statistics works. We are just as close now to catching shiny blue Snorlax as we were when we started this endeavor. Even though we've pressed that A button for hours and hours and hours by now, it doesn't make any difference to our next boot up. And I think that's kind of tragic. But also kind of hilarious in its own way.

On January 23rd, I did have the pleasure of watching Joe encounter a shiny Gastly while Joe, Tyler, and I watched the last episode of one of the greatest animes of all time, Ping Pong The Animation. It was their first time watching it, my fourth, and catching a shiny was just a beautiful moment to add to a beautiful experience of watching that anime again with them.