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Pokémon GO Madness

After spending 3 hours in the car with friends who are obsessed with this game, I have yet to see why it appeals to anybody.

I was busy looking out from Ivinghoe Beacon, whilst they were in the virtual "gym". It made me feel old to be taking in the scenery whilst they were "catching" cartoon beasts.

What a miserable lot!

The thing is you find things that you never realized where there before. Last night me and my wife went out and found a tiny little community theatre in a nearby village and a beauty spot.

Also it's getting people out and about who hate exercise.
 
You know, nobody is being forced to play this against their will.

Nobody but the players can actually see the Pokemon. There is no branding or signage or anything to visually bother non-players.

And correct me if I am wrong but people have been gormlessly staring into a phone as they walk down the street for a good decade now either texting, playing other games or taking selfies.

You might see groups of folk stood on a street corner with their phones out giggling at the stupidity of what they are doing but how that would directly have a negative impact on your daily life is unclear to me.

Just what is it about Pokemon GO is it that is disturbing non-players' lives to the extent that they have to incessantly post memes or Facebook posts denouncing those who are having a bit of fun with it?

Live and let Pokemon.
 
I think it's seen as symptomatic of the perceived infantilism infusing popular culture.
Japanification.日本化

Also a function of once-young Pokemon fans aging into their birthrights. Out(re) and proud.

For us olds that might like some anime material, we're balanced non-fans, by comparison. We weren't post-natally immersed in this fictional universe. Many of us have had a much-longer (and broader) range of exposures and imprintments

But many of these relatively-wrinkled western Pikachu people are positively-nostalgic for their love of the pocket monsters. Conditioned/aligned/beloved. Digital natives, with a televisually-embued reverance for doubly-absent deities. Harmless fun, maybe, but, oddly-unsettling to the outsider.

This western PokeGo 'half-driven wandering' is, as @McAvennie so eloquently puts it, substantially-harmless. It's another variation upon the Japanese anime scene-searchers, butaitanbou where Japanese anime fans scour the streets looking for real-world street picture matches back into manga / anime.
 
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A more interesting aspect perhaps is that it's a striking example of a corporation 'branding' public space.

Nearly. It's almost an internationalisation of the bizarre (to many older, western, eyes) Japanese passion for yuru-kyara, the fairly-universal observance of having cartoon mascots for everything.

I see this as a modern-day adaptation of the ideographic Japanese language, cross-blended with mixinterpretations of certain western tropes and types.

In Japan, your local council has an anime character to represent them. As do undertakers, dentists, Police stations...everything. This becomes a heraldic menagerie of interactive symbols, with deep significances attached to relative positioning, sizes, colours, curious punctuation marks....and this is an all-ages, class-neutral language.

See http://www.fluentu.com/japanese/blog/japanese-culture-mascots/ for a better explanation.

I find I can sometimes understand it, to an extent, and just in certain ways, with effort. But I can find it also, as a old trad westerner, extremely annoying (I mean the Japanese national fascination for cartoonizing everything).

The PokemonGo 'craze' in the west is harmless.

Just wait until your old school becomes officially represented by a frog-rabbit armour-plated pink blob with large cute eyes...then you can man the barricades.

(Or if your favourite message board permits the use of emoticons. That's when the writing's on the wall for the written word :bananas:)....kawaii desu
 
Cute exemplary death? :cool:

Really though, why are we so threatened by Japanification when Americanisation (or globalisation if you're American) has such a strong foothold? Or when curry and chips has become a British thing?
 
I don't think there's any real threat from Japanification, as such, in that for the west it would be more of an adaptation rather than an a full adoption. Enrichment, not enslavement.

I'm unclear as to whether you're thinking that the undoubted Americanisation of the west (and the rest) would act as some kind of counterventive prophylactic against the import/infliction of Japanese ideograpghies and tropery or:

you mean that it didn't hurt the first time (being converted into an American, I mean), and therefore if We (ie us Little Britainers/ Little Eurozins) simply suck it up, it'll be fine this time, as well.

Perhaps I'm just being too acceptive, but to me either scenario is not particularly frightening.

However- a major caveat. We still must forever retain the real nuanced machine code of proper language, with functionally-effective English language making sense in the background. And none of this LOL/ROTFL/:-/ malarky getting used in the courtroom or the news.
 
A teacher has decided to ditch her job as a £2k a month teacher to make a living playing Pokemon Go. It may seem far-fetched to many but it seems that it is possible to make substantial sums of money from the game.

Sophia Pedraza, 26, plans to cash in on the craze sweeping the planet by walking the streets trying to collect virtual characters. Once she has built up her Pokemon accounts she plans to sell them on eBay.

http://www.thelondoneconomic.com/te...-uks-first-full-time-pokemon-go-player/26/07/
 
I don't think there's any real threat from Japanification, as such, in that for the west it would be more of an adaptation rather than an a full adoption. Enrichment, not enslavement.

I'm unclear as to whether you're thinking that the undoubted Americanisation of the west (and the rest) would act as some kind of counterventive prophylactic against the import/infliction of Japanese ideograpghies and tropery or:

you mean that it didn't hurt the first time (being converted into an American, I mean), and therefore if We (ie us Little Britainers/ Little Eurozins) simply suck it up, it'll be fine this time, as well.

Perhaps I'm just being too acceptive, but to me either scenario is not particularly frightening.

However- a major caveat. We still must forever retain the real nuanced machine code of proper language, with functionally-effective English language making sense in the background. And none of this LOL/ROTFL/:-/ malarky getting used in the courtroom or the news.

If the rest of the world was more like Japan it would be a darn sight better place.
 
A teacher has decided to ditch her job as a £2k a month teacher to make a living playing Pokemon Go. It may seem far-fetched to many but it seems that it is possible to make substantial sums of money from the game.

Sophia Pedraza, 26, plans to cash in on the craze sweeping the planet by walking the streets trying to collect virtual characters. Once she has built up her Pokemon accounts she plans to sell them on eBay.

http://www.thelondoneconomic.com/te...-uks-first-full-time-pokemon-go-player/26/07/

Anyone want to buy a hundredweight of beanie babies?
 
A teacher has decided to ditch her job as a £2k a month teacher to make a living playing Pokemon Go. It may seem far-fetched to many but it seems that it is possible to make substantial sums of money from the game.

Sophia Pedraza, 26, plans to cash in on the craze sweeping the planet by walking the streets trying to collect virtual characters. Once she has built up her Pokemon accounts she plans to sell them on eBay.

http://www.thelondoneconomic.com/te...-uks-first-full-time-pokemon-go-player/26/07/
Who would spend money on buying them?
This woman is ditching a long term career for an uncertain, iffy venture. Sounds to me like she was fired, reading between the lines.
 
I didn't realise that was a spoof until the bit about the pokestop at the end.

There's always someone claiming Jesus was the original something!
 
I just caught this one in a charity shop!

8X7qxUz.jpg
 
Coulple of interesting snippets from a long article about gaming it with an ulterior motive:

A pizza place in New York that spent $10 on lures increased sales by 75%, reports the New York Post. McDonalds Japan has the honor of being the first paying sponsor of Pokémon Go, reports Forbes; the company hopes to satisfy the appetites of players. When the game launched there on Friday, it included 3,000 gyms at McDonalds restaurants.

More civic-minded people are also trying to harness the power of the Pokémon flash mob. Last week, an activist group in San Francisco set lures at a protest site, hoping to attract a bigger crowd

Fusion
 
This is quite funny, and could equally go in dumbest criminals. :D

A police station in Virginia is using its Facebook page to invite “random citizens” to try and catch a super-rare Pokémon in their processing room.

It’s worth noting no one has actually caught Ditto in the game yet, but that’s not what the police are hoping get caught – their “random citizens” all have outstanding warrants .


The administrator of Smithfield Police Department’s page Sgt. Bryan Miller told The Virginian Pilot he decided to make a list of eight people with outstanding warrants a little more exciting. “I have a sense of humour,” he said. “I had no idea it was going to be this big.” He added he wasn’t expecting anyone to actually turn up.

ditto%20fools_zpscpxddcad.jpg

:rofl:

Guardian
 
could equally go in dumbest criminals.

They would have to be really dumb to really turn up to what is billed as the Bill.

Here in lovely Manc, the fuzz hired an office to invite some elusive customers in on the pretext that they had won a holiday. They boasted that a fair number had shown up, clutching the identification necessary to qualify for their prize.

I do wonder why such a neat little "sting" should be publicized. :confused:

I can't find the Manchester example but here is a variant in Phoenix, Arizona.
 
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Something good coming of it, for some.

A mum has described her autistic son is leaving the the house and socialising with other people for the first time, thanks to Pokemon Go.

Adam Barkworth, 17, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, struggles with social anxiety and requires one-to-one support from a carer.

But his mum said the Pokemon Go game has helped “change his life” by getting him out of the house and interacting with other people.

Adam’s mum and full time carer, Jan Barkworth, downloaded the game for him earlier this week and has been surprised at how far he has come along ever since.

Mirror
 
I do wonder why such a neat little "sting" should be publicized. :confused:

I can't find the Manchester example but here is a variant in Phoenix, Arizona.

I've a recollection of something similar going back a decade or so, where police in UK (I think) put together an outreach team that were supposedly making a documentary about graffiti, word got around all the local artists who gladly allowed the film crew to interview them and show off doing their trademark 'tags' And then they nicked them all with videotaped confessions. :rofl:

Not so sure why the method is revealed - perhaps the deterrent effect of people seeing that they got their man, plus seeing the criminals humiliated by their stupidity was considered to outway the revealing the method? Plus word might have gotten round about the tactic after the first round of busts?
 
Crazy methods for cheating at Pokemon Go - I'd heard of the bicycle wheel thing before and thought it was a joke, apparently not, also people strapping thier phone to their dog for a similar effect. o_O

Someone attaches their phone to a drone and controls it remotely!

 
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I suppose it's like my favourite games of Monopoly where I'm the only player allowed to buy properties, or Trivial Pursuit where I'm the only player allowed to see the answers before I hear the questions, or the chess matches where I get to flick my opponent's pieces off the board at will. Really improves the gaming experience.
 
I suppose it's like my favourite games of Monopoly where I'm the only player allowed to buy properties

Is that the Alan B'stard version? :p

Most of those methods look like more trouble than they're worth. People will end up breaking their phones.
 
Crazy methods for cheating at Pokemon Go - I'd heard of the bicycle wheel thing before and thought it was a joke, apparently not, also people strapping thier phone to their dog for a similar effect. o_O

Someone attaches their phone to a drone and controls it remotely!


There's a GPS spoofer APP available now that fools your phone into thinking it's at a Map location of your choice, thus you can play Pokemon GO without leaving your bed.
 
Ha! Westboro Baptist Church is a gym! They have been forced to defend their space with a Jigglypuff! Good list here with stories we haven't heard before:


 
Referential to the original series rather than Pokemon Go, but I can't think of a better place to put it - declassified US military document shows they considered weaponsing Pokemon, or more precisely the effects of the seizure inducing episode!

Document here with relevant section on pages 61-63, does not name the show but specifies the air date of 16th December 1997 near bottom of page 62. Also a notable date for being Phillip K Dick's birthday.

Short summary c/o Anonymous:

The onset of synchony and disruption of muscular control is said to be near instantaneous,” the 1997 Army report reads.Excitation is directly on the brain.” And “100% of the population” is supposed to be susceptible to the effects — from distances of “up to hundreds of meters” — “[r]ecovery times are expected to be consistent with, or more rapid than, that which is observed in epileptic seizures.

While many would likely assume other seizure inducing studies played a primary role in the weapons development, the report itself contains extracts that will expel this theory.

“The photic-induced seizure phenomenon was borne out demonstrably on December 16, 1997 on Japanese television when hundreds of viewers of a popular cartoon were treated, inadvertently, to photic seizure induction,” the analysis noted.

Relevant Pokemon clip below, if anyone feels like livening up their evening by risking convulsions:


Also the somewhat safer spoof of it 'Battling Seizure Robots' as someone will inevitably reference it if I don't:p

 
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