Approved by UU Moderation / Amazing Art by Moutemoute
Hello and welcome to.. "Player Interview"! This project will allow you to discover or re-discover some well known players of the UU community. This time around we will be focusing mainly on important contributors to the forums such as Tier Leaders, Forum Moderators, Community Contributors, and Council Members. Let me first say that I am honored to be following in the footsteps of an esteemed and accomplished list of interviewers: Moutemoute, Feliburn, Kink, and Cynde. Thank you are very much for your work!
Hello Lily! How are you?
hey drew! I'm doing okay, tired as usual but otherwise pretty good. how're you doing?
I got my second covid vaccine which messed me up a little but other than I am doing good! Thanks for asking
So, tell me and the community a bit about yourself via a brief introduction. Name, age, favorite color, which council member you would leave stranded at sea, whatever you would like to say!
ouch lol, the vaccine sounds super painful. I had covid pretty recently so apparently I'm not eligible for a couple of months or something, idk the specifics
BUT anyway
hi! most of you know this already, but I'm Lilburr, more commonly known by my real name, Lily. I'm a 19 year old girl from Ireland, started playing UU in like, early 2018 with my trash SM teams after floating around in other tiers on the ladder (for reference I was CONVINCED bruxish was like the best mon ever). I became a lot more active in SS and yea rest is history. my favourite colour is purple! I would never leave any of my council members stranded at sea and would 100% take the hit for them but one more suspicious Azumarill image and I'll make Ramolost walk the plank
That's a great answer!
When I left on my heroic and historic hiatus you were, I believe, just a room voice. You are now the tier leader and room owner and a pretty competitive tournament player. How did this happen and how much money did you pay people?
I think you actually left before I even became a voice tbh, it was like mid March last year so it wasn't that long ago
to be entirely honest with you I'm not sure how it happened
I'll give a quick timeline of events though
so basically I was a ladder hero, I was often at the top of the ladder or close to it with whatever bullshit Machamp or Heliolisk offense I could come up with. at some point people began to take note of me being there relatively consistently, mostly because I also became pretty active in the ps! room and made a few forum posts here and there
I joined the UU discord pretty early on in my career, I think like December 2019, and surprisingly enough some prominent community members at the time (sage, juno) recognised me which made me super happy, and I guess they took a liking to me because they invited me to a chat that contained a large portion of the active UU community, which was Glaceon Goons
I made a lot of friends there that I'm very thankful for & they helped me springboard into hosting projects, writing analyses, doing VR stuff etc. and encouraging me to sign up for tournaments, the first of which being last year's edition of UU masters
where I was tragically clapped by Accelgor in round 2
I guess my performance was still good enough for Sage to take note of me because we got to talking a fair bit & she picked me up for UUPL despite me being a pretty much entirely unproven commodity
and after tryharding that tour I emerged with a fairly impressive 5-2 record against a reasonably difficult schedule
it just kinda snowballed from there. hogg was on my UUPL team and it seemed that I impressed him enough for him to bring me up as an option for council, which I got nominated for shortly after the tournament ended, and I just kept doing my thing from there
made posts, wrote analyses & qc checked other ones, took it upon myself to do some extra stuff too like writing council minutes and doing community surveys which hogg and tdk had planned to do but were too busy for
I guess in that sense I was a natural leader? lol, anyway I got promoted to forum mod after a while of doing that
eventually hogg decided his time as TL had run its course and he and tdk agreed that I was the best choice for a replacement for whatever reason
and here we are now!
sorry omg that was a lot longer than I expected
Indeed long but very interesting!
oh and in case it wasnt obvious I BRIBED NOBODY
lots of credit for my Smogon Success™️ goes to Sage, though. miss you ;-;
So what brought you to Smogon and Showdown?
I've been a fan of Pokemon for as long as I can remember, I played through the base games casually from a young age
my friends in primary (elementary) school were into it too, and we'd battle pretty often once bw came around and we were all old enough to actually know what moves and stuff do
being the competitive person I was and am, I furiously typed "competitive Pokemon" into my search engine as a kid, desperate to gain an advantage over my rivals
surprisingly I got to ps! long before Smogon
spent a lot of time messing around on ladder, nothing ever came of it though I just kinda used terrible sets and spammed like baton pass cheese
eventually I got bored and quit. a few years later (january 2018), my friend joey the goon invited me to join his draft league, and I was bored at the time so I said yes. that rekindled my love for competitive Pokemon so I started laddering randbats in my free time and then eventually got to UU
lurked the forums from that time until around when SS came around, took part in (and never got reqs for) a few suspects - I remember the Breloom one being my first - and that's how my smogon tenure came to be
once I started posting I just never stopped
Well that is quite the origin story! Smogon is very unique in that there is a very intimate and old community that has allowed this site to thrive for such a long time. What is your favorite part of our Pokemon community and what keeps you here?
my favourite part of the smogon community as a whole is UU no doubt! I also really love the other lower tier communities (less familiar with NU but I love RU PU and LC), they're super welcoming and tight-knit so it's like, rewarding to feel that they like you. I'm a super social person so I probably wouldn't have stuck around as long as I have - and definitely would not still be here - if not for the wonderful people around
I plan to take a break from actually playing Pokemon over the next few months but the community aspect is something I can't see myself leaving any time soon, even though there are a few bad eggs. sometimes I wish that people on this site would just be nicer to each other rather than waiting for opportunities to make quick gotchas and jabs for the sake of their like ratios, but such is life. I'm proud to say that I don't think anyone in UU is like that, at least!!
Yes for the most part UU is a very kind and amazing community. You have a lot of responsibility on this platform. Do you enjoy your position? Is there anything you do that you don't like or conversely anything you like that you don't do?
I love doing what I do, yea. there is a lot of pressure though which is very difficult to get used to
I don't think anyone really comes on this site expecting to lead a section or anything, most of us are just here because we like Pokemon and finding yourself in these positions can be pretty surprising and even daunting
I like to think I work pretty well under pressure & do a good enough job in general but there's always the lingering thought of "what if I'm not good enough?" that can be pretty difficult to deal with, and it's one thing that I've always been frustrated with in this position
as for things I do that I don't like
infracting someone is never fun
it's one thing to ban a spambot or whatever but it's pretty rough to actually have to punish a real person, particularly when it's a friend or someone within your community
I also have a habit of taking on wayyyy more responsibility than I can actually handle and getting kind of frustrated with everything after that but I'm improving on that front
I don't think there's anything on here I'd like to do that I don't do, though. it's always fun to think about what leading other sections and stuff would be like but my heart is in UU and I don't think that's gonna change
So like you mentioned earlier you live in Ireland. Tell me a bit about that. What do you love most about your country? Is there anything you dislike? Would you recommend anyone to visit and, if so, where?
with covid being how it is atm I haven't spent a whole lot of time outside my house in recent memory, so my view of ireland as a whole is a bit foggy
I looove the people that live here, ireland is known for being a very friendly place and I can say that's true for sure
there are lots of stinky boomers but you'll get that anywhere
lots of young people around here have very unified political and social outlooks which makes me fairly optimistic for my future as an lgbtq+ person, more than I would be elsewhere I think
being in the euro zone is great too
finally I'm a huge fan of the dying Irish language and I make an effort to do things to keep it alive. one thing I have been working on for a while is translating every Pokemon's name into irish - if you or anyone reading wants me to translate one in particular don't be shy to ask!! I don't bite!
I don't dislike a whole lot about the country other than the widespread glorification of alcohol and the lack of diversity in religion & ethnicity but they're pretty minor issues all in all
Very enlightening! Nice work trying to keep the language going. Thoughts on British people? (Keep to under 100 words and PG please).
oh boy
I'm not racist but
lol jk. I have no vendetta against the Brits but their history is hilariously appalling and I think most people, brits included, can agree on that(edited)
big fan of the british "people" meme as long as it's all in good fun but for obvious reasons I don't support actual discrimination
fuck Slough though
Haha! So tell me what are your favorite hobbies, music, TV and movies?
ooo okay so
I don't have many hobbies really, pokemon is my main thing but I've always been super into video games in general, so much so that I'm studying game design at university and I'm hoping to work in that field later on
some of my favourite games currently include Celeste, Terraria, the Persona series, and Genshin Impact
I also really like makeup. My sister is a beautician-in-training so it's been a common topic for us to talk about and naturally I gained am interest in it bc of that
As far as tv/movies go I don't watch a whole lot, mostly youtube, but I'm a huuuge sucker for Disney movies and I watch them w/ my boyfriend regularly
most recently watched Soul which is absolutely incredible PLEASE watch it
some youtube channels I love are Tom Scott, Settled, The Retro Future and False Swipe Gaming. also been a big fan of RTGame's twitch/youtube lately
as for music, words can't do it justice really
let me get my last fm chart from the last month
my all-time top chart (which really just goes from November bc that's when I signed up) is this
I listen to an average of like 6 hours of music per day but it's rlly varied I promise!!
bmth is a lot higher than all the others because their new album had just released and I was spamming it
I'll be sure to check all of this out! Let's play desert island. You are shipwrecked on a remote and tiny island that fortunately possesses all the necessities of life: food, water, shelter. You brought your 10 favorite non essential things with you, what are they?
oh my god LOL uhh
my phone, enough money to hire a private helicopter and a kayak to row far enough until I have a signal in case the island doesn't have one
or is that cheating
No that's fine lol
damn I'm lame
a good survivalist but lame nonetheless
Could you perhaps share a team of your own design that you are especially proud of?
ooh
does it have to be a current meta team or can I get one from a while back?
Current meta is best
But I suppose it doesn't matter
I made this Sticky Web team to face Clark (LNumbers) in UUPL - it isn't particularly impressive but it felt really good to use. I ended up losing the actual game off the back of some pretty poor luck and a couple of misplayed turns but the team remains good regardless. Slurpuff is cool as a Sticky Web setter because nothing really defogs on it safely after taking one of its attacks or Endeavor, and the rest is just standard setup spam that breaks well for other members on the team while retaining some form of defensive utility and taking advantage of the speed drop. I don't have a whole lot else that I can share since UUPL is going on and this meta is still young but I think this should be good enough
Really cool team! Last but not least, would you like to shout out anyone or give some final remarks?
a bunch of people but I'm not gonna tag individually bc it'll be wayyy too many
rats-
I love you guys more than I can say and you bring me so much joy even in my darkest days. some of you are edgy bitches but that's okay I wouldn't trade you for the world. ily all
rurk-
idk what made you guys take me in but you have to be the single most down to earth and laid back group on the site. we meme about being negative all the time but it's no wonder all my interactions in there have been positive. thank you guys, you're the best!
UU council and community-
wouldn't be here if not for you guys! whether you're a long-term ingrained superstar or a fresh new face, I see you and appreciate you more than I can say. you're all part of the life force of this place and the cogs wouldn't turn the same way without you. you matter and you're important. thanks for making my time here great. <3
and thank you for having me, drew. this was super well conducted and I enjoyed it a lot :3
Awesome thanks for being here Lily!
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