Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

I love Ingress I love it so much.

Silly GPS territory control game gives me extra motivation to go out on walks. I can indulge my video game enthusiasm into physical stuff with a little bit of social dynamics (working together with people to make big fields).

 

oh man I guess I play ingress now

do you have any good resources/tutorials for beginners?

 

Aw man, I got enabled into it by one of my roommates who plays. They've been giving me tips (and low-mid level resources) to help me out.


The basic thing of the game is that there's two factions (green-enlightened and blue-resistance) that are trying to control these "portals" invisible to the naked eye. With the app, you can see them and interact with them.

The source of all your resources comes from hacking the portals. You can hack a portal one time every five minutes, until it burns out. That happens after like... five or six attempts? So if you're really patient/bored, you can hang out in one spot, doing that every few minutes, and then do other stuff. Alternatively, you can walk/drive a loop between portals, letting them refresh while you're gone.

You get better resources from portals that have been claimed with resonators. Resonators are one of the resources you get from hacking. Frankly, if there are other players active in your area, it's easiest for a new player to start out not even using them, just hacking to gather resources.

When you do start using resonators, the big rule of thumb is that you want to be as far from the portal as you can be, while still in its radius. There'll be a circle on your map that shows the area you're able to interact with. Standing on the edge spreads out the resonators as far as possible, making them harder to destroy.

See, you don't just claim stuff and get to safely keep it until it wears out. You also gain weapons that you can use to destroy enemy resonators. When you look at a fully claimed portal, it should have 8 spokes of light reaching out to different colored objects. Those colorful objects are the resonators. If you're standing near one when you use a weapon, you do damage to the resonator, using up energy so it wears out faster.

Sometimes, when you hack a portal, you'll get a key. Keys let you do a couple of things. Easily check on the status of a portal, to see who's claimed it with resonators. See how much energy is left in the resonators, so you can know to recharge them before they wear out and the portal goes neutral again.

And, for the meta game, you can use up a key to link a portal to the one you have a key to. If three fields have links between them, they form a field. Fields make areas the color of the faction you're in, and prevent other links from being made within that area. That generates MU, which does... something, generating a pool of power that's used in a global tug of war in certain events. I don't really pay attention to that stuff, so that you'd need to look up.

Making links and fields (like hacking, deploying resonators, using mods on portals, and destroying enemy resonators) gives you AP, the experience point necessary for leveling up. Starting out at level 1, you can only use the level 1 resonators and weapons. Leveling up lets you use the more powerful stuff.


But for more specific suggestions... It depends on the sort of area you live in! I live in large town in the boonies, so we have a lot of portals in walking distance. We have a google hangout chat with people from several of the surrounding towns, and sometimes people coordinate on making really big fields, or going and claiming a large area all at once.

 

I picked Enlightened for lore reasons, but the whole area I live in is heavily under Enlightened control and now I sort of want to switch because it seems more fun. But switching would actually just entail making a new account with a different email. :/ I mean, given that I only started like an hour ago, there isn't gonna be a BETTER time to switch.

Edit: Also, thanks for the information, that's really helpful!

 

I feel you there. I went with Enlightened because I enjoy the idea of being on that side, but... the resistance players in town have been getting less active, and the most active one just moved or something. It's not as fun when I don't have the opportunity to walk around blowing everything up.

 

Ok, well, I am resistance now :D This MAY shock you, but I've always been more partial to their color anyway.

 

SMURF!!! :OO

(Also, by the way, Resistance people tend to call Enlightened "frogs", and Enlightened call Resistance "smurfs". At least in the area I'm in. Affectionate derogatory terms are all the rage in war games...)

 

See this is hilarious bc my high school's color was red and had an intense rivalry with a school whose color was blue....... the students of which were referred to, by us, as smurfs

 

Spoiler: green vs blue

 

(clears throat)

We don't even know what this stuff is! Sure, they tell you it's "intelligent data," but who knows what the fuck that means - and you guys want to just expose people to it willy-nilly? Just spread it all over the place? I'M willing to expose myself to the risks to do my research - and I've got safeguards in place in case I start acting differently, believe me - but that doesn't mean I'm going to just give my mom a double handful of XM and tell her to go crazy!

Literally!

(bows and exits)

 

I just climbed over our back fence to the church behind our house and spent half an our destroying the Enlightened resonators I put up this morning and putting up new ones as far-spread as possible.

:D :D

 

@blue I forgot you were talking about a game for a weird twenty seconds.

 

ISNT IT GREAT :D

the most active enemy guy in my area destroyed my stuff and captured the portal, AND ALSO captured all the unclaimed portals nearby. :| imma get you, "brewguy"

 

Not sure where else to put this, if there's a better place, just tell me.

Sometimes I wonder if the lgbtq positive stuff happening st my school kinda got kickstarted by me.
Like, recently there been so much of it happening.
Last year when I came out as bi nobody knew anything about any of it.
I said it and everyone just kinda went :? What does that mean?
And I mean we had the pink day stuff, but it was considered more general anti bullying than anti homophobia?
(But I mean in the story he isn't actually gay they just called him that because he was wearing pink but regardless still has themes of homophobia since they were using gay as an insult)
And I know that there's been more attention of lgbtq people recently. But it's really nice to see it around my school, even though I know of absolutely no one else in the school who is lgbtq.

A week ago ish mme had forms for a gsa thing for those of us who wanted to join the gsa club in high school.
She started telling me about it and I got super excited and quickly filled out the form with my answers, why I wanted to go and whatnot. I put down that I was not straight and later me came up to me and went "so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to read your form...but uh" and I was like "no it's fine I'm already out to the whole class."
And apparently I got automatically accepted to go, because of that? Which makes me think that no one else who filled in the forms was lgbtq (or if they are, they're closeted, which. :C I'd like to have in person lgbtq friends)
There are posters up for pink day saying stuff like, against homophobia and against transphobia and it makes me so happy to see.
My teacher has a ally sign stuck to her desk
And one on the filing cabinet thing
It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy that the school has decided to support lgbtq people and learn more about them. And teach more about them.
C:}

 

@swirlingflight @blue You have inspired me to start playing Ingress! It looks like there is a mix of factions in my neighborhood, but the DC area is heavily Resistance controlled. So I picked Enlightened and it's time to get out there and cause trouble. :)

ETA: To absolutely no one's surprise, scientists and engineers are huge nerds. Goddard Space Flight Center is an Ingress battleground - there are portals all over the campus, with Resistance holding the west side and Enlightened holding the east.

 

bug friend

 

@blue i think eric plays ingress!! i remember him telling me about it once but i dont have a reliable smart phone so i cant play it :<

 

I tried playing but I don't live anywhere where regular walks can happen :(

So I might try again this summer.

Also I wasn't sure how to get started in the community

 

I have ingress but i haven't touched it in months. I should take a walk sometime and see what's in my area; i'm pretty sure there's /something/

 

I just finished When Ghost Meets Ghost by William de Morgan (I got the Kindle version on Amazon for free) and I enjoyed it a lot even though it took me ages to read it because he writes perpetually tongue-in-cheek and that, combined with the archaic English, meant I had to go back and re-read about every fifth sentence, and that meant that instead of just sitting down and reading for hours at a time like I usually do, I read a few pages every few days for months. Sadly, no actual ghosts were involved. Happily, another of his books (Somehow Good) is also on Amazon for free and I just downloaded it, so that's reading material for the next two or three months.

Also I looked him up on Wikipedia and it seems he was a ceramicist who only started writing novels after ceramics didn't pan out, and was married to Evelyn Pickering/de Morgan, who was an artist (apparently quite a popular one? I'm not an art critic or anything but the examples of her work on her Wikipedia page are super pretty). Anyway, they were an artsy power couple and that's cool.