Ingress
 

For anyone who doesn't know what Ingress is, it's an augmented-reality game for Android and iOS.

During the supercollider experiments to find the Higgs boson, scientists unknowingly created a form of exotic matter ("XM"). This XM is like an intelligent form of data, spreading through the world, multiplying around sources of data transmission like active cell phones.

Landmarks, artwork, historical locations, and more have become XM portals, and you can see these portals using a scanner that you can load onto your phone. (The scanner is, in fact, the game software itself.)

A group calling itself The Enlightenment seeks to gather as much XM as possible, believing it to be the key to unlocking the next phase of human evolution.

Another group calling itself The Resistance believes that The Enlightenment's actions are dangerous, believing that their use of XM will enslave the human race. As such, it seeks to contain the XM to protect people.

Tomorrow, Saturday March 28th, an event called the Shonin Anomaly is taking place in Pasadena, CA. People from all over the country are going to gather to fight over control of the portals in order to capture special shards.

Are there any other Ingress agents on Trisphee? Any who will be attending the Anomaly?

Hm, I should dl this asap; I'm probably the Trisphite closest to Pasadena. (Does location matter?). This thing sounds pretty interesting.

Location does matter -- it uses your GPS location. That said, most places in the world have portals available.

Note that you can't possibly be the Trisphite closest to Pasadena because I LIVE in Pasadena. ;) But hey, if you can make it out (join the Resistance!) you can meet me here for the event.

If you ARE a Resistance member / want to join the Resistance, the rally point this morning is here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/34...!3m1!1s0x0:0x0 -- rally at 11:00 AM Pacific time.

If you're with the Enlightenment, I don't know where their rally point is, but you should try to find someone in the area that's already going.

The anomaly itself begins at 1:00 PM Pacific time, here: https://plus.google.com/111596025685...gl=US&hl=en-US -- both factions will meet here.

There are satellite events in Denver, CO, and Orlando, FL. Since I'm not registered with any of the groups there I don't have much information beyond these links: Denver, CO and Orlando, FL. Seek out members of the factions in those locations to coordinate.

EDIT: Just for fun:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...ngressPERM.gif

1.) Blargh, guess I missed it.
2.) You're Resistance? That's surprising. (I DL'ed it yesterday to get my mind off stuff.)

I tried it then got fed up. Nothing was near me to claim lol.

I mean, the point of the game IS to walk around a lot.

1) Yep, guess so. :(

2) I probably would have picked Enlightenment if I were left to my own devices because I do have transhumanist leanings, but Ginny picked Resistance before I had a chance to create an account and I wanted to be on the same team. (Because it would be kinda silly to always be ruining each other's plans.) It works out for me, because most of Pasadena is Enlightenment so it means there's always stuff to do.

Okay, so the anomaly results are in.

The Enlightenment held more portals than the Resistance today, but the Resistance captured all of the shards -- both today and in the other three events in previous weeks. When the scores were totaled, the Resistance won decisively on points.

Go us!

It was seriously a lot of fun. The third cluster battle was really intense for me. Ten straight minutes of desperately trying to keep six portals intact with a small group of allies. Lost two of them -- though there were a couple times I was afraid we were going to lose our hold on a couple others, but we recovered.

Espy the nearest stuff to claim for me was a good 3 miles off so you know a six mile hike to and from home for one spot. Theres loafs on the city but again its at least 6 miles away from me.

Yeah, for you it's probably the kind of thing that you play when you do have to go drive somewhere.

I can't wait until I go back to Pittsburgh -- most of CMU is, according to a good friend and fellow Resistance member, Enlightened. Oh joy.

1. I play and it's fun.
2. Get in touch with your local faction
3. Enlightened FTW Smurfs(Resistance) will be crushed. JK
4. I hate server lag even though I have full signal.
5. The game is glitchy.

L8 Enlightened :P took less than 2 months. Again get in touch with your local faction.

Go eat a fly, toad. ;)

I'm still L6. (The anomaly was surprisingly not very productive for AP.)

Go eat a fly, toad. ;)

I'm still L6. (The anomaly was surprisingly not very productive for AP.)

Ugh, did a silly and spent all my xmps trying to capture a lv6 portal. Not the brightest newbie. Guess I'm back to finding portal to hack for a while.

Yeah, don't go after anything more than about two levels higher than you. ^^()

Glyph hacking is a decent source of AP -- hold the Hack button down and a yellow bar will fill; when it fills, it'll present you with a memorization challenge to draw a set of symbols. This will provide you with AP and increase the item drops.

You can also long-press on the Fire button when using XMPs; watch the animation and release it in the center for the greatest damage bonus (20%) -- if you don't release it'll repeat the animation until you do, so there's no need to try to rush it on the first try.

L5+ is where xmps start doing real damage.
Your main focus as a low level is Deploy, Mod, Hack, Link, Field.
Best way to field is small triangles.

@Coda
I don't flies but i do drink smurf tears

I downloaded this game, it's a interesting story/concept, but I have no motivation to walk down my street to play the game. Still a cool looking app nonetheless.

Sadly illusion it does require movement. If anything you could play when you travel to stores and such

Hey Espy, we're gonna farm northeast Pasadena tonight at 8. You want in? (Yes, I know it's short notice, I just found out about it myself; someone was like "I'm bored, anyone else wanna farm with me?")

Sadly my new town doesn't have sidewalks so walking is a high risk, especially because we have high speed limits on all the side streets for no apparent reason except for stupid.

Doesn't have sidewalks at all? Or doesn't have curbs/turf/barriers between the pedestrian area and the street? Because the latter is paradoxically SAFER.

No sidewalks, at all. The only sidewalks are located at the beach in my Town. It's very weird considering all the Cities I used to live at are all around this Town and have sidewalks, then you come 1 mile down over here and nothing.

I live 3 streets down from the Elementary, Middle, and High School (all right next to each other) and even if they live 1 street away from the school they still get picked up/dropped off because there are no sidewalks.

People walk on the road though and walk their dogs despite the streets having a 30mph speed limit. With the exception to the school area that as 25mph. People ride their bikes on the side of the road, but I never caught one person riding a bike, and I was told most people just pack their bikes into the car and drive to the beach and ride the bike paths there because the streets are too dangerous.

The good news is (I suppose) is that we don't get a ton of homeless people in the area because it's unsafe for them to be walking/biking in the streets. :/

I mean, you can drive-by hack a lot. Doesn't work well if you have to link and deploy, but I do quite a bit of drive-by hacking when I'm not the one, well, driving.

Drive by hacks, deploys, links, anything really you need to be at or under 35mph.

I've done drive-by hacks at highway speeds. You just need to have the portal tab open and your thumb on the hack button. Obviously doesn't work for deploys and links.

I've done drive-by deploys at highway speeds before, but you give up your opportunity to hack.

Any action taken at >35mph has a chance of failing, though. A failed hack will return a message like "Hack returned no items." I think a failed deploy will just buzz and not do anything, giving you the item back.

I get to have fun this weekend. Atlanta shall be my play ground. *evil laugh*

Made a sort of...friend...on campus? Green dude. Seems decently nice. He bowls over whatever I attempt to deploy/link, though.

Espy that is a good thing. Let him blow it up and once its white again redeploy. 1st deploy 650AP do that a few times and it adds up. I got to L7 by doing that.

Yeah, it's a good strategy, really cheap too since it only takes you a L1 resonator and he can probably drop it with one or two of whatever the weakest XMP in his inventory is.

Of course, if you ever want to get back at him, and you happen across a JARVIS virus, you can blow up one of his farming portals (stuff with multi-hack and heat sinks), fill it up with L1 resonators, put worthless crap mods on it, and then turn it green with the JARVIS virus... now instead of a useful farming portal, he's got a dinky crap portal that'll make him waste resonators if he wants to get ANYTHING useful out of it... and he can't blow it up to put better mods on it because it belongs to his own team. Bwahaha.

I do in fact have a JARVIS virus.

Blowing up anything, though, is a challenge for me.

I was at a con and we managed to get a L8 farm going lol. the hotel was on top of 6 portals

Pffft, lucky.

Managed to find an ADA Refactor today, super nice.