Obligatory Pokemon Go Post.
/
Did you think I wasn't going to write about it? Please, it's like you hardly know me. Plus I'm pretty sure if I dont write about it a bunch of huge guys in Team Rocket outfits come to my house, kick my ass, and take away my nerd street cred.
Granted, it did take six days to turn out a post because I've been too busy trying to become a Pokemon Master to sit down and write, but shutup.
So, Pokemon Go has been out for almost a week now, though it's only been vaguely playable since about Friday. Needless to say I've literally done nothing else besides walk around my town trying to catch Pokemon and not think about what the bill for my data plan is going to look like at the end of the month.
If you don't know what Pokemon Go is you either just found out about the internet today and somehow this is the first website you went to, or you are some kind of an asshole who doesn't like fun or things that are awesome. You probably also hate like, pizza parties and the laughter of children. Whatever your excuse for not knowing what Pokemon Go is, go look it up now or just get out, I'm not explaining it to you.
Now that the soulless fun hating robots who were never programmed to love or understand the human experience of awesomeness are gone the rest of us can have a chat about the game that will undoubtedly lead to us all becoming dirty migrant pokemaster woods people who eventually die of not going to work and getting hit by a train trying to catch a Charizard. Despite all of our impending and unavoidable deaths at the hands of this phone game at least we'll die in great shape. When your family has to come and identify your body the coroner is gonna be all like "I'm terribly sorry for your loss, but if it's any consolation they had some seriously bitchin' calves and glutes." Then you parents will be all "They walked fifteen miles through the woods to catch a Diglett once."
First off, because it's important: My starter was Charmander, because Bulbasaur is the Hufflepuff of starters and I always used to take Squirtle back in the day so I thought I'd change it up. I also went team Valor because what else would you pick? If Bulbasaur is the Hufflepuff of starters, Valor is the Gryffindor of teams.
Now that I've pissed off anybody not into Pokemon and insured that nobody will ever think I'm cool again after making fifty-seven Pokemon-Harry Potter mashup references in two sentences, I can get on with talking about the game.
As someone who was at the perfect age for the Pokemon craze when the first games came out back in 1996, I am of course drowning in nostalgia boners for this Go and all the fun I'm having exploring towns around me looking for various wild Pokemon. I caught a Scyther the other day and it was like, I don't even care what happens the rest of the week, this is all I need out of life.
Primarily my experience roaming around playing Go has been incredibly positive. In the week since this game came out, not only have I discovered two public parks in my area that I never new were there, I've gotten double the normal amount of cardio I usually get due to riding my bike, walking the dogs and running around playing. It makes me remember why I was always so skinny as a kid and now I have to go to the gym seven days a week or I get whatever the man version of a muffin top is.
Most astonishingly, considering I'm usually an antisocial grump who fears any contact with any stranger and most casual acquaintances outside of a context I am prepared to see them in, I probably had more conversations with random people I bumped into on the street on Saturday alone than I have in the past five years combined. On top of that, I actually walked away from those situations feeling happy and not wanting to go back to my house and stay there for the rest of the month playing Overwatch and keeping the curtains shut.
All that being said, I'm sure that once the initial shiny newness and glow of getting out in the fresh air as worn of we'll all realize that the game is ruining society and destroying our mental states at a rate never before achieved by technology up until this point. You are a lying Grimer-Orgy attendee if you tell me at least once playing this game you haven't yelled "FUCK!" after the third Pokeball in a row misses a goddamn Rattatta. I accuse Pidgey's mother of being a whore every time one breaks free while I'm trying to catch it. It's going to become a real issue.
Besides making me unreasonably aggressive towards small pretend monsters, and the fact that it apparently started a gang war over night depending on which team you chose, there's also the fact that it is definitely going to get me arrested. A few days ago a gym popped up on my map in the area I was passing through. It was only a couple of blocks of a detour so I headed over that way and figured I'd see if I could beat whatever trainers were there and take over. Nothing wrong with this plan except that the gym was centered on a playground for small children. Not even like, a playground located in a public park that has some benches or hiking paths or even a pavilion or something nearby that a person who was not a small child themselves or the guardian of one could pretend to have any business nearby. Just a straight up playground in a development in the middle of a lawn with nothing around it.
In order to be able to fight and potentially take over a gym you of course need to be close enough to it in real life to register your location. A hundred feet or so does the trick usually. This means that if I wanted to take that gym, I was going to have to be a fully grown, bearded man, creepily inching closer and closer to a park with his phone out as a group of ten year olds hang out on the swing-set.
Nobody ever became the very best, like no one ever was by shying away from looking a bit like a pedophile though, so I did what needed to be done. I'm probably on some neighborhood watch list now, but I'm the gym leader of that gym. So you know... worth it.
I figure I've got about a month, tops before it stops being socially acceptable to post constant pictures of Poekmon I've caught, or somebody gets stabbed in the liver over a Mew and ruins the fun for the rest of us, so until then, I'll be out there trying to catch 'em all.
55 down. Should only take me the rest of my life to get the rest. right?
