Quick note: I’m on the lookout for work in the writing, editing, content and communications areas. If you have a need for concise, human language, or technical things made simple, give me a shout. My Nintendo friend code is: SW-5245-7255-2617 (or you can email me at james@ravn.digital). Thanks!
I’m back into Ingress lately.
This is one of your wandering around geographical points of interest games, a bit like Pokemon Go, but a bit more grown up. (Only a bit, though.) In fact it’s made by the same people.
Nice things about Ingress are:
The game adds a meta layer of science fiction over the world, which holds some appeal to my escapist and nerd tendencies.
Genre-zealots would no doubt disagree, but the vibe is a restrained take on cyberpunk. There’s a slightly ominous ambient drone and impersonal machine voice when you play with headphones.
I’ve been playing on and off for nearly a decade. Recently, for the first time, the village where I live has become a battleground, and I feel oddly territorial about it. But in a fun way, not a Reform way.
I used to complain that rural living didn’t lend itself to the game. As you’d expect there’s a much higher density of portals (capturable locations) in towns and cities, what with all the stuff.
But actually, I now see the walking distance between portals as a benefit, because I can always use more exercise. And it’s come into my tactics this last week.
I’ve been getting off the roads to capture and link up portals around the village that prevent those passing through by road from forming links to other portals in and out of the village.
One opposition player passes through every day, but, I suspect, doesn’t get out of their car. Fingers crossed they park up when trying to take out my portals.
It’s quite satisfying to see team green give up their daily sorties on what I very much see as BLUE TURF. With a bit of patience, foot soldiers will always best road warriors.
Anyway: good clean fun.
Things I learned in the writing of this post:
I just threw some support at The Hyena by David Quantick on Kickstarter.
Looks like:
Anyway. It sounds like a humpin’ good read. Good books don’t go obsolete, do they?
Observed a chain of Starlink satellites from a dark patch of rural North Essex on the evening of October 19. Posted a wee video on Bluesky. It’s just a grainy closeup, but still captures something of the uncanniness of moving lines of uniformly-spaced lights in the night sky.
The Pukka Pad A5 Metallic Jotta Squared Notebook is my Countdown notebook of choice. I’m not saying we watch a lot of Countdown, but I need to order a new multipack.
I can recommend regular Countdown. If you’re like me, you see marked improvement on the numbers round over time as you pick up techniques and shortcuts (there is good YouTube on this subject), and gain confidence with speedy arithmetic. (I think I can remember going to school once upon a time.)
I think I’d do OK if I went on. My numbers are still average but I do well on the words rounds (although less so conundrums). My strategy would be to favour several large numbers and get close, if not the exact answer, in the time.
Reckon I’d be odds-on for teapot, and have a fair crack at a run of two or three episodes. Very far from octochamp material, of course. That’s before factoring in anxiety, though. Odds of actually going on: nil.
Noticed this interesting feature over at Last.fm:
Reminded me of the one idea for a social network I’ve ever had — and decades ago. You’d get to pick two (and only ever two) current zeitgesit-y favourite things.
It could be anything. A person. A song. A flavour of KitKat. You’d be able to see your friends’s favourite things and, I guess, react. (But not comment, I reckon.)
But perhaps most tantalisingly you’d be able to see trends, local, regional and global.
Twitter trending topics kind of came to do that — that, but without any of the negativity. And I don’t know that that data has ever been properly tracked and visualised over time (although it looks like twitter-trending.com has had a go).
Anyway.
Are.na is very nice, but not quite what I need from a scrapbook of the web.
So I’ve soft rebooted on Tumblr with a tumblelog now titled mclhuanism, described, tongue only half in cheek, as being about progressive and post-neoliberal art, media, design, communications and culture.
I appear to be scrobbling again. (Thanks, Tidal.) No earthly reason to follow. Although I suppose you could use my most-recently listened track as a Boards of Canada song randomiser.
Update: account deleted as I’m not using it — digital hygiene.
Casting around (again) for an alternative to Tumblr, Chazzer G suggested Are.na. So I have set up what I have today learned Are.na calls a channel: Heidegger’s surfboard.
I doubt this will stick, but going to give it a try.