I think my son plays that game. Also, we have a whole reference book of Pokemon.
Which I had to refuse to read to him at bedtime on the very solid grounds that what I read is supposed have a narrative or it can't be a "bedtime story."
A bunch of my friends from grad school are super into this for reasons I don't quite understand.
Having watched way more of the TV shows than I ever wanted to, when I see "Pokemon," I think "child neglect."
Ah, an Unfogged post on this. It really has gone mainstream then.
6 Unfogged has finally become the Time Magazine of online eclectic web magazines.
I don't wish ill on anyone but I do not want to spend half a second of my life thinking about this and I hate the internet for forcing me too
It's already producing Upworthy-style heartwarming street encounters.
Is this that game where some kid found a dead body floating in a river?
I finally looked it up but the Wikipedia article made me tired so I closed the tab.
I got one sitting on the couch, and one going upstairs to bed. This is the kind of exercise craze I can get behind.
This had me wondering if I could have gotten any on the train back out to LI. Also this: https://twitter.com/TheBigPharaoh/status/752153520527343616
I admit that if the choice is between Pokemon and ISIS I'll choose Pokemon.
You're more or less the same age I am, so yes, you certainly are.
Anyway, I would say we should make an Unfogged Pokemon Team, or some such, but I don't see any advantage to non-local cooperation.
I don't see any advantage to playing Pokemon at all, to be honest.
And I think I'm actually a bit younger than you, though I may be mistaken. I'm 31.
It's okay. The culture you value is also worthless against the inexorable advance of death. But, like, maybe you can get a Squirtle in the meantime?
Nah. I'm turning 31 on Tuesday, so same cohort.
No, really, I never even played Pokemon as a kid, and I associate it with people slightly younger than me. I have no intention of starting now.
24 to 22. But for the record, that does make you younger, so there.
Yeah, I'm just being an ass. I played the first generation of Pokemon games circa 1998 and that was enough for me. I understand the compulsion, but I enact it differently--when I hear about the competitive scene, I get a "there but for the grace of god I go" experience. But Pokemon GO isn't Pokemon: it's Ingress with a skin that makes people more interested in it, with if you live in a dense enough urban area leads to fun interactions. Or just people being weird--I saw a dude hang out in front of the synagogue near me for hours this evening. Multiple people passed by, staring at their phones zombie-like. I tried to be more subtle.
Obviously, it's going to lead to someone's death. That is without question.
Anyway, I spent the last few hours in the local Chinese-run, Korean-style karaoke place getting drunk on shit lager (Chinese, then Yuengling). The best part was when me and the local drunk who doesn't speak English had to have our conversation mediated by the bartender. I have about as much Mandarin as he does English so it worked out. Great experience.
if you live in a dense enough urban area
So, not me then. I mean, this is a very dense urban area by Alaskan standards, but that means about what you would expect it to mean.
Oh, sure: obviously not for you. I imagine that there's a ten block area of Holdfasterage* that will work for this and beyond that there's no point. There was a great ("great"?) thinkpiece about how Ingress is problematically weighted against suburban and especially rural users, but I am unable to find it.
* Is there an official nom de blog I should be using? I suppose it's pointless given the other Alaskan metros it could be confused with, but still, tradition.
No need to come up with a nom de blogue, and I've never bothered to come up with one myself. When you get to the ends of the earth there's no way you can effectively obscure the specific location, and no reason to try.
That's only because you're not really at the end of the earth. If you were permanently in one the hamlets you've visited, then you'd regain anonymity. Here in the metropole* we can't meaningful distinguish Wales, Alaska from Wainwright, Alaska.
There used to be (maybe still is?) a great blog written by an Anglo-Canadian from Montreal who married into a Kativik village. I think I could identify that village on a map, but it doesn't really affect my understanding of it in any meaningful way.
* All things relative.
They can do this but the virtual urban-hunt game remains unrealized. Atlatls for all!
You do actually have to flick the pokeballs at the vaguely-sapient animals you'll be enslaving. You could imagine it was atlatl assisted.
26: It's one thing when people are staring at their phones zombie-like by themselves, but it's another when their zombie movement is choreographed like the guys I saw next to the fire hydrant by my house today. This is a whole new level of capture via proprietary app.
Anyway, I'm 27 and my Facebook wall is full of people delighted to be playing Pokemon Go while I well remember more than one of them trying to rip the cable link out of my Game Boy when I was trying to trade between Red and Blue in elementary school.
Here in the metropole* we can't meaningful distinguish Wales, Alaska from Wainwright, Alaska.
Here we can, though, and that's a non-trivial number of people. I've been to one of those but not the other, and a careful reading of the archives here would easily reveal which one.
Fair enough. I shouldn't be so flippant. I would try to discern which but it's hard to do a real archive search from a phone.
I nothing about Pokemon Go except what I've read online, and yet I feel confident that anyone who has the grouchy old person reaction to it is too far gone, and should be euthanized.
I can't even keep my log-in credentials intact. How will I ever catch them all?
This article has a nice slug: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/10/pokemon-go-armed-robbers-dead-body
My grouchiness about the game isn't so much old-person related as mentality related. I don't gotta catch 'em all, even in the "proper" game, so there's no way I'm going to enjoy catching them in a game with paper-thin mechanics. Still, it does seem to be crazy popular. Nintendo's stock is up by a third since it was released, and it's not even an in-house title.
I admit that if the choice is between Pokemon and ISIS I'll choose Pokemon.
One is a recent internet phenomenon that has achieved startling success through its expert use of social media and mobile platforms, and which has now led to tens of thousands of Americans obsessively spending long periods tracking down their elusive targets using satellite technology and augmented reality software.
The other...
Also I'm grouchy because this sounds too like the iphone atlatl/city bus AR game idea.
42: But it's a treasure hunt, with a thin layer of Pokemon layered on top of it. It's easy to see why it's a big hit.
I wonder how many "Pokemon GO Player Finds Dead Body" stories we're going to be seeing if it sticks around. I'm guessing having a bunch of people wandering around trying to check on locations that they (or anyone else) probably wouldn't have gone to on any normal day is going to raise the likelihood that more are discovered than would have been otherwise.
Maybe the police or park rangers could use it as a technique: instead of combing through some wooded area (or city, or whatever) looking for a missing person they could just request that the company stick a rare pokemon somewhere in it and announce that they'd done that, or at least just announce that they'd done it. And poof! Just like that a whole bunch of new people interested in walking around covering the area who would find something else if it was there too.
I choose Pikachu!
Am I doing it right?
So, the dead body stuff has made it clear that this is not the Pokemon game my son is playing. His doesn't have you actually wandering around.
I can see this being tremendously amusing for a little while
I wonder how many "Pokemon GO Player Finds Dead Body" stories we're going to be seeing if it sticks around.
Unless the game starts sending kids into hospitals, nursing homes, and morgues, I don't think the limiting factor is the number of dead bodies around to be found, not how many kids are looking for corpses.
Somebody find the grammar for that one.
LB should have used this post title for the post below.
I remember Pokemon! When I was a prefect in elementary school I would confiscate little plastic Pokemon coin things from younger children, and feel self-righteous about it, because children are psychopaths.
Add a stupid costume and a talking cat and you've got Team Rocket.
I think the player finds "dead body" will pale besides these type of stories: Pokémon Go: armed robbers use mobile game to lure players into trap, or various other harms.
Probably. There are more robbers than hidden dead bodies.
||
Is it just my low-end 5-year old laptop, or has Firefox on Windows become seriously slow and unstable?
|>
It's just horrible on my old desktop (maybe from 2010). It's fine on my newer laptop.
The first death due to Pokemon will probably be traffic related, but there will probably also be some unfortunate trespassing/gun interactions. Or maybe we all just get used to it: the first stage of our Strossian future.
I'm sure that World of Warcraft has killed many more through metabolic syndrome, but that's harder to pin down.
I really love that story about the armed robberies: it's a great idea, and it's hilarious that it happened that quickly.
The potential for mischief has got to be pretty great with this game. If I had a phone that could handle it I'd be tempted to get it and start claiming I'd found valuable stuff on the driveways of people I knew just to see them having to deal with an odd number of strangers just kind of showing up and wandering around in front of their house.
You can only do it at fixed locations, which are generally going to be local landmarks. For example, near Mobybar there's a prominent independent shoe store with a big sign that's a "Pokestop" you can periodically hit up for items. Likewise, there's a synagogue near me that's a "gym", which marks controllable territory: I haven't gotten this far in the game yet, but I understand that you assign a strong Pokemon (or team thereof?) to control it until eventually someone from one of the other teams takes it over. There are three teams globally, locked in an eternal struggle over gym control. Ingress only had two teams, so hopefully this'll make things more fluid in an interesting way.
There have been cases where a private residence or other nuisance location (hospital, school) is in the database, but there's a process to have a spot removed. I am sure it sucks in the meantime, though.
Anyway, at least it's getting the kids, with their gameboys and po-kay-mans, out under the sun talking to each other. It probably fixes whatever else old people think is wrong with the kids these days, too.
Is there no way to stop our kids from being enticed into wearing shoes and practicing Judaism?
Saturday night I ran into some kids in yarmulkes (and presumably footwear) who had found a Zubat spawn point, so no, apparently not.
Are xkcd links still considered obligatory?
I'm pretty sure I mentioned at the time accompanying a friend an Agent for the Resistance to an interview requested by the FBI regarding coming in close to the federal building downtown.
This cannot have been an isolated experience. Although maybe the FBI in my area is a little more clueless than most . . .
Maybe they switched it to Pokemon because of episodes like mine.
I like XKCD's take on the phenomenon.
I'm a bit surprised at how the game has taken off. According to Wikipedia it was released on July 6, and it's apparently already everywhere. Kudos on the marketing, I guess... which the media coverage is a part of.
https://twitter.com/gordonshumway/status/752489535766953984
Is it just my low-end 5-year old laptop, or has Firefox on Windows become seriously slow and unstable?
Firefox on my Windows 7 work laptop has gone bad, to the put where it gasps and chokes for 10 minutes every time the thing wakes up from hibernation. Firefox on my Windows 10 personal laptop is just fine.
So, the question is, are you on 7 or 10?
Installing Windows 10 didn't help my computer a bit. I've not installed it on any other machine.
https://twitter.com/CatchEmAlI/status/752500819694645248
73: 7. I haven't installed 10 because I figure it'll make my current machine melt.
It seems like most of people's excitement is coming from the game incorporating maps and the real world, which is something most people have never considered could be a type of game before. Although the cool people are all saying "This is just Ingress with pocket monsters", I'd never heard of Ingress or any other "augmented reality" game before. Maybe there will be a bunch of them now.
77: Thanks! I was wondering why everyone was spelling Ingres wrong, and what he could possibly have to do with Pokémon.
Just visiting bae on the Isle of Tears, gotta catch this Pokemon first with my lance
Ingress is also a proper improper noun.
Pokémon GO wasn't developed by Nintendo or even The Pokémon Company directly, but by Niantic. Ingress was their last game, which was made for or bought by Google. It's very similar to Pokémon GO but its branding wasn't as exciting.
Anyway, I'm really kicking myself for not buying Nintendo stock a few months ago. I knew they were going mobile and it was going to become a moneyprinting operation.
76: You might be surprised. I've been on my 2008 desktop for months longer than I planned and will be for at least a few weeks more, so I bit the bullet and upgraded just to make all the prompts stop. The computer seems to handle it just as well as it did Windows 7. It takes a little getting used to just because it's a new OS, and my computer doesn't function any better than it used to, but if Windows 7 wasn't melting your computer then I doubt 10 will.
81: Interesting, thanks. I think I need a new laptop anyway though. Speaking of, what hardware specifications do the resident techbros recommend? The aim being to maximize the useful life of the machine. (For normal personal use, no gaming/Photoshopping/bitcoin mining.)
I would never have expected this many people to embrace LARPing, even if their phones were telling them to do it.
My wife volunteered for a walk to the ice cream parlor, mostly so she could catch pokemon along the way.
Similarly, after the store closed on Saturday, we went to a local tea house. Both friends and my wife had trouble resisting their phones, but our friend has gone for a bike ride and explored neighborhoods while hunting for poke -critters, so... success, I guess.
Pokemon were too far behind me, and I don't have any nieces/nephews of the right age to follow their obsession. Early 20s seems to be the perfect age for the new app--lots of nostalgia already, and an excuse to share their hard won knowledge, if ironically.
Speaking of phones, what does it mean when I get friend requests on FB for people I'm already friends with? They're being impersonated, I assume. But to what end?
I don't see why convincing people that you are my mom's cousin is going to help you.
I believe they send all kinds of spam offers for the usual scams and phishing schemes to anyone who accepts a friend request.
Then people will know it isn't my mom's cousin right away. She never even did Avon or anything.
Presumably it's like any other spam - a response rate just high enough to make money at it.
But then why not a different cousin? My mom has bunches of them, but it's always the same one.
OT: Either I'm an exceptional role model who treats people with respect, dignity, and fairness or employee evaluations are bullshit. Or both.
I can see like 25 Pokestops with lure modules going in the immediate vicinity of my office in the San Francisco SOMA/Financial district. 20-30 year old tech dudes are leaving their ping-pong tables in droves to play.
And those guys probably aren't used to the rigors of being outside. Maybe MHPH is right about the coming wave of corpses.
26.last: The one in the mini-strip mall? I did a tiny bit of work on that.
Even if paranoia fiction is aesthetically facile and retrograde, and even if location-based entertainment need not be serious and political, there's still something fundamentally revolting about celebrating the Pokémonization of the globe as the ultimate realization of the merged social and technological potential of modern life.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-tragedy-of-pokemon-go/490793/
95: I wasn't even aware that was there until I googled.
I harbor fantasies of nationalizing Facebook and Twitter, and my reaction to 96 is still "What a hippie."
96: He's literally saying "I was into [THIS GENRE] before it was cool, but then they sold out. I really liked [POPULAR THING] the first time he published it 20 years ago, when it was called [OTHER POPULAR THING WITH EXACTLY ONE SIMILARITY]." One of the most hipsterish hot takes I've read in a while.
96
I knew it was Bogost just from your quoted sentence.
I described Bogost to my wife as "he's this long haired guy who, when he pontificates, his groupies surround him in awe, staring up at him as if he were Jesus" and that was sufficient for her to identify him at PAX.
Having read the article: what a blowhard.
102: I don't know who he is. I'm just a sucker for that kind of preposterous pomposity.
The title of the article, "The Tragedy of Pokémon Go" is pretty great in itself.
I like Bogost. He is pretty funny on Twitter unlike the real pompous a-holes like Andreessen and Paul Graham. This article was very good.
Who in there right mind would read tweets by Andreessen? He's like the world's dumbest billionaire.
the world's dumbest billionaire
Okay, that's a game show I would probably watch.
107 Just turn on the fucking news. There you go. You're welcome.
108: He might not qualify for another reason.
I would have thought that the real tragedy of Pokemon GO was the massive and terrifying security issue.
The real tragedy Pokemon GO is that you can't play it on a DS so you either have to let your kid use your phone or give him a phone. And not the shitty phone you already gave him so that he could play Angry Birds, but a real phone that has a data plan.
106: a message I sent to lourdes some months ago: Dude next to me on the train has a sticker on his macbook. What does it say? "A16z Andreessen Horowitz." I have found the most uncool person alive
(full disclosure: I also have stickers on my Macbook, but they serve to distinguish mine from lourdes' identical laptop, and I have nothing to prove.)
Well, that was quick:
The Reddit forum PokemonGoNSFW (warning: NSFW) contains various photos of redditors' and redditors' boyfriends'/girlfriends' genitalia flailing among various Pokémon. The Tumblr site Poke Peen (warning: NSFW) features an array of men and their members posing with innocent, smiling Pokémon, which hits the sweet spot between disturbing and fascinating and adds a whole new layer to the idea of a "pocket monster."
I'm not about to google it here or at home, but I'm very certain that none of this is different enough from what has gone on before to constitute a "new layer".
114 I think adding a peen is more than just adding a new layer.
I very much doubt there aren't tumblrs with Pokemon and peen that pre-date Pokemon Go.
"Very much doubt" isn't proof. If you're not willing to research that at work you don't deserve our respect or agreement.
If modus ponens tells us anything, it tells us that Moby is right in 116.
Am I pro-flirting-with-random-strangers enough to endorse the couple right behind me on the bus who just met through both playing this game? Yes, I think I am! Nice follow up by the dude to her opening.
Nice follow up by the dude to her opening.
There's no limit to what people will do on Muni.
119 Give us the play by play! What was the opening and what was his follow up?
This isn't Tumblr, Barry. We have some standards.
Although, in response to 116 et seq., a Tumblr search for pokemon peen returns no results. I find this genuinely surprising.
I don't even play the damn game, yo.
And I'm pretty sure that Moby is actually right about this, but I've already done more research on it than I really want to.
Doesn't tumblr block NSFW from search?
They chatted, located each other's fb things on their phones, made vagueish noises about possibly getting together on weekend...just normal stuff!
I think Barry meant that you should elucidate the specific Pokemon connection and how it came about.
To be fair, of the first page of results for that (AOTW), only this one arguably satisfies the conditions in 116, interpreted narrowly.
What does a meet cute Pokemon Go sound like?
Meet cutes, to be ranked in order of decreasing likelihood
WE MET WHILE PLAYING:
Pokemon Go
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Tennis
Poker
Volleyball
Ice hockey
Settlers of Catan
A Mozart piano concerto
Space Hulk
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Space Hulk
"You were the genestealer about to rip my face off. My bolter jammed. Coffee?"
It seems like most of people's excitement is coming from the game incorporating maps and the real world, which is something most people have never considered could be a type of game before
Really? There was that pretty popular app which gamified going to coffee shops and restaurants and stuff by making you check in. And geocaching has been very mainstream for quite a while.
Since I was free last night, I took my brother to dinner and then made him walk with me to see the new house. The cheerful multiracial interactions between neighbors playing Pokemon Go made me happy and encouraged again about the choice to move there. Then we went to the neighborhood gay(ish) bar where eventually I got to cheer the president of the local young Democrats as he caught a Zubat on the bar using another local activist's phone, but I didn't have to actually do it myself and figure out how much work it takes to throw a Pokeball right.
Foursquare. That was the app I was thinking of.
Using somebody else's phone is probably a good way to learn just in case the phone slips.
Pokemon Go will heal the world. There will be no place for us in it.
I'm thinking we need a LARPing version of Pokemon Go, but I can't figure out how to make a ball strong enough to hold a rabbit or cat that won't also take off a part of the animal while closing.
I've heard of geocaching, but I personally have only ever heard of people doing it in Europe. And "gamifying" does not constitute an game. Everything from personal fitness to personal finance to digitizing old scientific notes has been gamified, leading to no actual games (Foursquare certainly isn't a game).
In the parks here, they have geocaching events. Take the kids out in the park and find a cache filled with Steeler pins and such.
145: My former roommates did it in Arlington, Va. Specifically, they attached something to the back of a traffic sign near our house with a magnet. Geocaching was the stated explanation. I don't know how much time they spent finding other peoples' caches or anything, but there's n=at least one.
It may very well be more common in Europe, but here it's common as muck. Last time I was visiting my brother's family they took the kids out to do it, and believe me they are not tech-savvy (to the extent that my brother hadn't installed a single app on his phone after a year, because he didn't know his iTunes password or how to retrieve it). There were at least half a dozen caches in the small village they live in.
149: Yes, geocaching is common here (in CA). Geocachers asked to be allowed to put up a vault around the side of the building, where I guess they log finding the cache and sometimes drop off bits from other caches.
It seems like parents often use it as a "lets drive somewhere together, then hunt around the park" experience with pre-teens.
Geocaching.com claims there are more than 5,000 caches "near" Fresno. I assume they're using 100 mile radius or something similarly crazy, but that's way more caches than I expected.
I hate myself for downloading this game and I hate myself even more for enjoying it.
They found a dead body in the river today. No word on whether they found it the usual way (jogger on the trail) or somebody looking for a water Pokemon.
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