Well, I'm still on THE ROAD TO LEVEL 50 in Pokemon Go, and inching ever closer by the day....
I am, however, also simultaneously achieving my goals of filling up my part of town with THE BEST locations to play Pokemon Go by getting NEW POKESTOPS & New PokeGyms.
It was my personal goal since 2018, when I'd returned to the game. I'd left playing Pokemon Go around Feb or March of 2018 due to abject frustration with the app on my old iPhone because it kept hogging space on my phone's hard-drive, filling it up with updates, and growing too large for my phone, leaving me no room to shoot photos, or other things on a constant daily basis. Plus, the updates would mess things up in the game, and never fix them. Like, originally when you when to heal & revive the Pokemon, you could use 3 fingers, and tap 3 Pokemon at a time, row by row. They also messed up the walk cycle of the Avatar in 2017, which was way more noticeable if you were in a car, and the avatar was running. So, the fact that those things were never fixed, tho update after update never made any difference in these things, and the size of the app kept growing.
So, 1 day, in a huge aggravated huff, I uninstalled the app, thinking I was altogether done FOREVER with that game.
But, by the end of summer 2018, it became apparent to me that social media app by Facebook (now Meta) was doing very insidious and illegal things to the users. i already KNEW about that I kept getting censored, and I figured out I was being shadow banned before there was even such a term. But, since I also was suffering from anxiety, and depression, I didn't know that FB was messing with users to cause these illnesses specifically, but also to manipulate people to fight & attack their own friends & loved ones. I'd just about had enough of THAT... plus, FB bought Instagram. I poured over many articles, expose' interviews, and more. But, people were so addicted to those platforms, and they would not leave them, even when better alternatives existed.
I am still on twitter tho.... at least they're not illegally archiving my private text messages and emails, and selling them.
Well, it was very difficult to leave those platforms, and I even had decoy accounts, and they saw me coming and made up excuses & reasons to force me to jump through hoops to leave those platforms. But, I finally did it.
It was late August 2018...
Once I was OUT of the grip of FB, and I'd made the connection to soothing my depression by walking around outside every day, I wondered what i would do with myself, and my time. No more toxic FB, so what now? No more Instagram either....
Then I remembered that I used to play Pokemon Go. Well, now that I;d uninstalled FB & Instagram, I had plenty of space on my old iPhone to install Pokemon Go.
I wanted to try other things that were augmented reality as well.... but, I'd remembered playing Pokemon Go, and I'd always wondered what it might be like to actually complete the PokeDex.
Like, WHAT IF I could be 1 of those few people???
WHAT IF????
So, installed the game again, and logged in.
It seemed different tho somehow, so I had to figure out what to do, and I felt a bit lost at first.... also, the PokeGyms seemed different, and the Verizon one was gone that used to be near my condo.
So, I kept wondering who still played the game.
Do people still play?
Who are they???
I'd lived in Massachusetts & China the most since the end of 2001. But, Mostly I just lived here in Massachusetts. I felt stuck & frustrated, and every time I kept trying to get out of this place, I kept getting dragged back, unwillingly.
So, I stepped outside and started catching Pokemon again. I would also look up all kinds of videos on YouTube for tips & tricks and found there were lots of YouTubers that regularly made videos weekly, or even daily.
There actually were barely any PokeStops in my part of town. There was a Starbucks PokeGym down the street, then down the street from there was Colombian Square which had 2 PokeGyms, and some PokeStops, then just a few PokeStops like The Jet, and some sculpture in in South Field/Union Point with 1 PokeGym.
When I went over to the Starbucks PokeGym, and looked inside it, I found there were actually players in there whom had left their Pokemon to defend the gym. Who were they????
So, I walked around for miles trying to figure out where the PokeStops were, the PokeGyms, and how to defeat a Raid. At the Time they had Mewtwo in Raids, and I had no idea what I was doing.
Well, I kept up playing the game. I wanted to learn all that I could, Level up, and meet whoever the players were. I'd assumed they were kids, but it turned out they were all adults.
I found that I no longer had depression, and I felt good.
I'd only ever played casually before, but now I was out just actually playing.
I started to become incredible fond of Squirtle that September. I was totally obsessed with Squirtle everything!
And, I decided I wanted to find out how to get New PokeStops, and made that my mission as Autumn came around!
Well, all of those goals have been coming to fruition now! The majority of my PokeDexes are Completed. I hit Level 40 in 2019 which used to be the last level. Now, there's 50 levels, and I'm almost there.
But, the situation with PokeStop Creations was INSANE.
Well, we had haters & saboteurs....
I also played Ingress as well, which taught me a lot about strategy & long term planning, or set up & execution of a plan.
Anyways, there were a few choice spots that were needlessly impossible.
Well, not so much that they were impossible, its just that there were vultures spying on me, and my area.
I started figuring out their patterns, and also honed my methods. I'd change up my writing style as well, multiple times.
So, these were some of the difficult ones over the years:
Well, there were some things you cannot fix nor edit UNLESS you play Ingress.... but you need to Level up. And, Ingress can ALSO be toxic... and brings out THE EGO...
I had a lot of frustration with Ingress during the end of the pandemic Lockdown.
So, I'd quit playing it, but as my efforts were becoming fruitful in Pokemon Go's Wayfarer, and started running out of Waypoints to submit.... because I was completing my goals despite the fuckery of rigid pricks on Wayfarer targeting my town just because they hate me, and 1 other guy, who was in charge.
I READ THE RULES, so I KNOW WHAT I CAN AND CANNOT DO.
There were also punks moving my points off the point I placed them at, and voided them in the systems, because they're based on cells on the globe.
The ONLY Way to edit these points, which usually are still LIVE in Ingress, was to do Ingress Leveling Up. So, I went back into Ingress, and all the problems I'd previously had in 2021-2022 were no longer an issue, plus I had been so much more successful at getting Waypoints in through Wayfarer, so I could easily hack the Portals in Ingress to gain AP, build fields, and get the medals & badges I needed.
So, that's what I did on some warm days in Feb, playing very minimally, on mild days, before I had surgery.
Then, the task of attempting to do the Edits from the Ingress Platform, while Wayfarer is also going through a restructure, and even has an A.I. learning bot messing stuff up, and also banning players left & right for months.
There's also the Niantic Wayfarer developer App for nerds & creatives to do AR stuff.... totally full of bugs tho. I did so much testing in that thing, and it never recorded ANYTHING I did yet, even tho I used it quite a bit in Jan & Feb.
Well, it's been a combination of using Ingress's OPR-ish Location edits into Wayfarer, and putting that through the Wayfarer voting systems, plus apparently that developer app ACTUALLY WORKING FOR ONCE!
So, basically I have achieved THE ULTIMATE LEVEL OF UTILIZING WAYFARER!
And HERE THEY ARE!
THE IMPOSSIBLE PokeStops which I did:
And, I also got this 1 here through which was another stubborn location. But, I believe I've honed the methods for getting Restaurants and food joints.
There's, honestly, not much left yet... I'm basically DONE.
Sure, there's maybe a less than even an entire handful left, but It doesn't matter much...
I had SUCH AN AX TO GRIND over this stuff, and SO MUCH TO PROVE. But, I did it!
I'm DONE.
Now, I just need to hit Level 50.
Then, I think I'm gonna read some books, do some painting, complete some film & animation stuff, n do meditations. Maybe catch a Galarian Moltres, and Power up my Slaking to MAXED OUT.
