One of the oddest parts of being an ex-Pokémon Go player is that I still have the app installed on my phone. Despite not having actively played it in years and frequently running into space issues on my phone, I have not yet removed the app. As it turns out, moving Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Pokémon Home is an incredibly slow, arduous process given that I’d collected over a thousand Pokémon by the time I stopped playing, many of them shiny, legendary, or incredibly powerful. In order to transfer Pokémon between the two apps, I have to use a limited resource in Pokémon Go, which burns up extra quickly if the Pokémon being moved are legendary, incredibly rare, or shiny. You can, of course, buy more energy to transfer Pokémon if that’s something you really want, but you could also just wait a week for your energy bar to be refilled again. Or just transfer a few every day. Whatever you prefer. After all, they wouldn’t just prevent you from using a long-advertised feature of the app, would they? They’d just put any means of it being made convenient behind a money wall.
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Saturday Morning Musing
When this post goes us, I’ll be busy attending to my soul and mental well-being by going on a hike with a small selection of my favorite people. After several weeks of being too tired to do much and a constant lack of days we can all gather, those of us who are available tomorrow are just going to do something regardless of the fact that half our group is missing. It isn’t ideal, I’d rather spend the day with all of them, but I need to get active and to spend time with people who help me forget myself for a while. With all the stress and anxiety that have been building the past three months, I need to ignore my desire to stay home alone to work on processing review suggestions and actually go do something I know I’ll love.
I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like losing myself in my gait as I wander from place to place, maybe listening to music or just taking in the sounds of wherever I’m at. Hiking is a sort of extension of that, because it takes me out of areas that always grate on me, cities with the constant hum of cars and neighborhoods with the quiet noises of people going about their daily lives. If you pick the right hiking location, you can go the entire hike without encountering anyone. You can embrace the quiet of nature and the irritating hum of modern life that most people only notice when it’s gone disappears completely. You can lose yourself in trees and the quiet emerald peace of a nature at its strongest. If you’ve picked a place with some nice elevation changes, there are a ton of great places to stop and admire the world around you. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the horizon and having an unobstructed view of the sky and there’s just something wonderful about getting both of those things as a result of being on top of something that rises above the area around me. Only in hiking trips can I get all of that at once.
Even though I’m going with my friends, I’ll be able to enjoy that. These are all people who know me well enough that there are no awkward silences to fill. I don’t need to worry about how to maintain a conversation or how to segue from one thought to another because they all just get how my mind works enough to not always need an explanation. I can just be myself around them and their presence doesn’t intrude on my sense of peace and quiet. For the past several years, we’ve always done at least a couple of hiking trips every month, though we’ve been doing fewer of those lately because of how busy everyone has been. They’ve been some of my fondest memories and include some of my favorite pictures. All of the background pictures you’ll ever see on my blog are pictures I’ve taken while hiking. If I could, I’d do all my thinking and writing in a spot that overlooks the surrounding area and has an unobstructed view of the entire sky. My dream house idea focuses mostly around a taller tower with what is essentially a glass dome on the top so I can sit up there and read or write as close to the sky as I can get. Heck, the whole thing might just be a tower of some kind. But it would have to be on the side of a mountain or on the top of a tall hill somewhere. That would be amazing.
After hiking, I’m planning to do the Pokemon Go Community day since I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the game now that I don’t have my ex to give me a reason to keep playing it. I don’t really feel like it “our thing” anymore, thankfully, but I still wonder if I’m just wasting my time on something that isn’t really adding anything to my life since I have a tendency to play the game alone and let it distract me from the main purpose of my frequent walks. It’s so easy to bring alone and leave running in my pocket, but I’m not good at ignoring it when it’s in there and will start to feel anxious if I don’t check it for a while. It works the same way as notifications on my phone do. If I know they’re there, it will always cause me more stress to just ignore them than to skim through them and either open them or dismiss them. In order to save myself from needless stress, I’ve started disabling certain notifications on my phone and setting up hour-long notification silences so I won’t notice when they show up until the hour is over. I’ve also removed most time-waster games from my phone for the same reason. I also repeatedly install and uninstall Imgur as I cycle between just needing something to kill some time and realizing that I’ll just sit on the couch and browse through Imgur for an hour instead of going to bed or starting my writing. Which is why I’m still on the fence about Pokemon Go. I definitely benefit from still having Sudoku on my phone because it often works as a way of doing some mental stretching when I’ll feeling particularly tired or fogged up from how focused I’ve been on my work.
It’s a really nebulous balance and I’m probably going to be working on it my whole life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just figure out how much work to do and how much relaxation to put in and when it’s already to simply escape instead of doing something genuinely relaxing. Even though I love writing and reading, they’re still work. Even though I’m super excited to start reading all of the amazing books people have written and mentioned to me on Twitter, there’s still a lot of work to do just to find all the links, titles, and authors. I want to just wake up in the morning and dig right in to my to-do list, but I need to take time to relax and hike and let my to-do list remain undone. I’m still doing at least four hours of writing or book recommendation collation a day, so it’s not like I’m slacking off, I just always feel like it’s hard to justify taking the time to wander through the woods or spend a few hours walking around the city with some friends while we catch Pokemon. I’ve only got so much time, after all. I want to get the most I can out of it and it’s, no matter how long I live, I don’t think it’ll ever be clear how to do that.
Pokemon Go – The Latest in Fitness Apps
Apparently, all I need to do to make something I post or say wildly popular is mention Pokemon Go. I’ve been tracking the changes in my exercise habits since I started using the application and making a few remarks about it on Facebook. Each remark, and even the few tweets I made, have all been very popular (by my standards at least, since I generally don’t get more than handful of interactions on any kind of post). I almost want to see if I can start planting references to it that will tickle peoples’ subconscious like they do with subliminal advertising.
There’s definitely a lot of health benefits to it. I’ve started walking an average of 6 miles a day, been getting plenty of sunlight and bug bites, actually making use of my evenings for something more than watching TV or playing video games, and really started connecting with my area. I’ve explored parts of Madison I’d normally never visit and walked through neighborhoods I never even knew existed. I’m not even chasing a Pokemon all the time, either. A lot of the time, these past few days, I’m just going out to see what’s out there. Its like I’ve always wanted to do all this walking and exploring but I needed an excuse to do it. So now I have one.[
Pokemon Go is definitely a ton of fun, there’s no denying it. I’ve never been all that outgoing, but seeing a bunch of people walking around on their phones is like having a keyword search to identify the other nerds in my area. It’s the best. Its like, suddenly, everyone is just embracing their inner nerd or child and banding together to enjoy this magnificent application. I’ve met and partially befriended more strangers in this less than one week than in the past few months. I can’t imagine that my life will ever be the same. Never again. Heck, I doubt life as we know it will ever be the same again. This is the start. Going forward, this type of game and this integration of VR/AR is only going to get, obviously, more popular. There will be more games just like this one.
The community already forming up around this has so far been amazing. You meet people wandering through the woods and compare notes on which Pokemon you’re trying to catch, giving each other advice on which paths to take to find which Gyms or Pokestops, and while the competition for Gyms is definitely fierce, no one seems to get so into it that they’re being rude or lying to people on other teams.
I’ve managed to avoid spending any money so far, but part of me just wants to dump money into the application so that the creators, Niantic, can continue to do their amazing work (and, you know, add more servers so they’re not constantly going down).
If you like to meet new people, it seems like Pokemon Go is the way to do it. Just look for people with their phone constantly in their hand who randomly stop walking for a few moments before continuing forward.