Happy holidays!

I hope everyone out there is having a great Christmas and New Year (and/or whatever middle-of-winter-oh-it's-SO-depressing-let's-have-a-party holiday you celebrate).

I made out like a bandit this year, pretty unexpectedly.

Just a few highlights.  Game nights with the family were great.

Magic the Gathering something something something...
my least favorite of the games we played.

For Christmas I got a Steam Link and a Steam Controller.  Expect a whole other post on them later but let me just say: YAY!

And then I got this: a bronze statue of a dancing faun.  I adore him.

Happy New Year, all!

Ingressination

I've been playing around lately with a little mobile game called Ingress.  It's basically a global capture-the-flag sort of deal with two teams, Green, the Enlightened, and Blue, the Resistance.

I chose the Resistance at set up (because, let's face it, I'm nothing if not resistant), and it's been a bit entertaining because my neighborhood is in constant flux. I don't know how many players this game really has, but it's active to say the least.

It works a little like this: Sites important to human culture -- statues, plaques, fountains, landmarks, &c. (and businesses which pay the game maker to be one of those sites) -- are portals through which leak exotic matter (aka, XM).

As an agent for the Enlightened or the Resistance, a player's job is to capture those portals by placing resonators around them (each portal can take up to eight resonators).  A fully resonated portal can then be linked to other fully resonated portals by someone who has the proper key.   Links that fully enclose a space then cover it in a field.  Fields control the mind units (MUs) of the people within that field.

You gain portal keys, resonators, and various other things (such as the XMP bursters and the ultra-strikes with which you attack enemy resonators or the portal shields with which you protect your own team's portals) by hacking the portals.  You hack by getting within a certain range of the portal and tapping the "hack" button in the game, or you long-press the hack button to glyph hack (play a short memory-based pattern-drawing game for extra effective hacking).

Alternately, it works like this: you wander around town attacking enemy resonators and setting up your own, and growing increasingly suspicious of anyone else that you happen to see meandering about poking at their phone.  Usually for no good reason, but you never really know ...  And because your attacks are most effective when you're (GPS-wise) standing right atop your targets, you end up wandering into courtyards, street car tracks, parks you've never visited before, and the odd cinema lobby (no, really).

If nothing else, Ingress has me walking a little further than I usually would - like, instead of making a bee-line for the subway station after class, I might go a block north or so to just check up on a portal and see what I can do.  Note though that my dog has no patience for standing around while I hack or attack portals, so at least she's still sensible.

My only real complaint with the game is that it makes my phone super hot -- enough that on cold days it doesn't matter that I have to take my gloves off to get something done -- and it uses battery like crazy.  Like crazy crazy.  I left it running while I walked around going to three shops today so that I could collect XM (because XM powers your activities and you gain it by walking around), and when I got home a mere 2.5 hours later, I had only 45% battery (and it had been full when I left).  Yeow.  Under normal usage, my phone only has to be charged about every three to four days, so that's quite a power suck.

But the game is at least a bit fun, and I'm learning some of the who's who of my local agents, both the friendlies and frustratingly aggressive greenies who keep tearing up all the lovely fields we make.  And I'm seeing the backs of buildings I've never before bothered to look behind.