When Pokemon Go launched a little more than a year ago, players quickly discovered that some Pokemon were regional exclusives–that in order to catch ’em all, you’d have to travel the world.
And by the world, Pokemon Go meant North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
But fear not, global majorities! Gen II made this distribution more equal.
Distilling wonders into words, says my “about me” page, since two thousand ten.
While true, and catchy, and a play on the blog’s subtitle “Words and Wonders,” I’ve never taken considerable time to actually say what these four words mean.
In times of continued self-exploration, I often find myself thinking, “What do I value?” Today, these two questions seem more intertwined than distinct.
Quarter-life crisis or continued exploration? I couldn’t say.
In my pocket. That’s where I like to keep my books.
I mean, I like to keep all my things in my pockets–my phone, my keys, my wallet, you know, the usual stuff, but also my GameBoy and my DS and, yes, even my books.
But growing up and reading bigger books (and somehow wearing pants with fewer pockets… RIP the days of cargo shorts being in style), it was just no longer practical.
At least until I joined the Mouse Book Club.
One year and two days ago, Pokemon Go reinvented the mobile gaming landscape and reignited a craze that has gone on for over two decades. But in the wake of early crashes and frenzied, frustrated players, how far has the game come, and how much further must it go not only to satisfy its fans but also to survive?
In this retrospective, we will confront the major problems still blighting players and lay forth some suggestions for how Nintendo and Niantic can overcame these ails. In particular, we will focus on three themes: player engagement through playing together, the updated Gym system and the game’s multiple currencies, and the inequality perpetuated by the game mechanics themselves.
So join me on this adventure and get ready to Go.
Celebrate. Celebrate the birth of our nation. Celebrate the unity of our people. Celebrate the independence we won from our oppressors. Celebrate the freedoms we all share.
And don’t, for one second, celebrate the lies we live by.
There’s that saying about the freshman fifteen, and perhaps due to the fact that I didn’t live on campus my freshman year, I never experienced it. Even when I did move on campus the start of my junior year, I began working out more at the gym and made healthy food choices at the dining halls, so if anything, I lost weight.
The first-year-teacher fifteen, though? Now that’s a real thing.
If I were Alice, I’d have exhausted my share of Drink Me’s and Eat Me’s with all the time life has made me feel bigger or smaller than I am. It’s a part of growing up (thinking you’re bigger than the world, to learn you’re not) and becoming an adult (thinking you’re too small for survival, to learn you’re not so small at all), but if I’ve got one thing on Alice, it’s all the Read Me’s piled up around me house.
On my nightstand. My coffee table. My kitchen table. The bookshelves. The floor.
Books abound, beneath my TV, beside my couch. It’s a glorious feeling.
Except all that Read Me is getting a bit too much to swallow. Would it be too apt a metaphor to say I’ve got the words stuck in my throat, sentences strung around my molars and tethered to my tongue?
If I could tap my temple, draw forth a silver sliver of thought, and place it in a Pensieve, what would I see today?
A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a Kickstarter campaign for a collection of books called Being ManKind–an intentional lapse of grammatical convention. The series tries to break free of gendered norms and stereotypes, the toxic masculinity we’ve all come to hate.
I’ve been wanting to write about why I support the project and why I think you should, too, but it’s been busy. So much of the last few weeks has gone straight into dealing with that kind of gender bias (in the classroom) that I haven’t had a second to write.
Now there’s little more than sixteen hours to go, and to be successfully funded, it needs to bring in about a thousand dollars every hour until it ends.
So, sure, there’ll be an ask at the end, but there’s (kinda) a story until we get there, too.
