Two snips of dialog in Pokémon as the player looks at the TV in their house. "There's a movie on TV. Four boys are walking on railroad tracks."

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   Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Dec-2025 02:52:22 JST Mark T. Tomczak

   in reply to

   @kims There's a wild bit of videogame trivia attached to that movie. In the original Pokémon game and a couple subsequent ones, the TV in the player's house is playing Stand By Me.

   Why this movie of all movies?

   Apparently, it's a bit of a cultural touchstone for a generation of Japanese people because it was used in a fairly popular "Learn English" module, with the module capstoning at watching Stand By Me in English (I assume because the reproduction rights were reasonably cheap and the protagonists are about the age demographic of the students in the curriculum, but that's just guessing).

   Where am I going with this? I think it's interesting that we can't ever really know where the things we put into the world are going to go. Might as well try to predict the path of one gust of wind. Or the eventual resting place of a sunbeam.