CL XXXVI: Island Ingress

On a wet grey Fe­bru­ary Satur­day we com­bined two of our amuse­ments on a boat trip to Keats Is­land: Cot­tage Life and Ingress. Some of this will be com­pre­hen­si­ble on­ly to Ingress play­er­s, but there are a cou­ple of fair­ly groovy pix.
Up­dat­ed with an apol­o­gy.

What hap­pened was, right near our cab­in there’s North Keats Cross­path, an Ingress por­tal (that link will on­ly work if you’re a play­er) which I had owned for an awe­some 449 con­sec­u­tive days, un­til one of the op­po­si­tion made a fair­ly hero­ic night-time boat trip and cap­tured it a week ago. This was Not To Be Tol­er­at­ed, so I and my wife (and fellow-player) ar­ranged child-care, broke out the boat, and put to sea in ad­verse con­di­tion­s.

It was a per­fect­ly OK cross­ing; low vis­i­bil­i­ty, but we’ve been there and back enough that we can tell one is­land from the next even when they’re vague loom­ing grey shapes.

A short win­ter cab­in vis­it is sort of heart­break­ing; it’s so ex­treme­ly cozy and peace­ful, and we want­ed to set­tle in for a few days of gaz­ing at the view with our feet up.

Dur­ing win­ter in a tem­per­ate rain­forest, ev­er­green ferns fill open spaces and de­light the eye but are hard to pho­tograph. I end­ed up over­pro­cess­ing these and they look fun al­beit lack­ing in pho­toin­tegri­ty.

Any­how, an hour and a half of boat­ing, an hour of walk­ing through the forest, a nice cup of tea in the cab­in, and a blow for the Ingress Re­sis­tance fac­tion. What a re­fresh­ing Satur­day.

Ingress side­bar: North Keats Cross­path · What hap­pened was, I thought it’d be cool to have a por­tal near our cab­in, and there’s an in­tere­sec­tion five minutes’ walk away, so I snapped its pic­ture and got ready to sub­mit it. The GPS said it was way off in the wood­s, but the GPS is flaky there be­cause we’re on the north slope of a mini-mountain, so I ad­just­ed it to put it at the in­ter­sec­tion, as you can see per­fect­ly clear­ly on the In­tel map.

Ex­cept for, it turns out Google Maps is wrong and the al­leged in­ter­sec­tion where the por­tal end­ed up is an undis­tin­guished pub­lic right of way close enough to our cab­in that we can hit the por­tal while ly­ing in bed. I ac­tu­al­ly sub­mit­ted a cor­rec­tion but Niantic thinks Google Maps is right and I’m wrong. Isn’t that aw­ful.

Ingress side­bar: Pret­ty field! · We man­aged to ex­punge the green from the is­land and make a pret­ty de­cent field, too. Thanks to agent @Ba1r0g for the idea, and @Mi­tal­lust and @Isen­trope for the keys.

Ingress side­bar: Bad be­hav­ior · When the oth­er side took the North Keats por­tal, I was sur­prised, be­cause it’s hard to find at the best of times, and they took it af­ter sun­set. So I emailed the guy who did it ask­ing for de­tail­s. Which he de­cid­ed was an ac­cu­sa­tion of cheat­ing and sent me back a rant about how dare I, be­cause my side are a bunch of ran­cid cheater­s. Jeep­er­s; what is it about be­ing on­line that makes peo­ple act like prick­s? I was ac­tu­al­ly pret­ty im­pressed at what he’d done, but I see no point in try­ing any fur­ther con­ver­sa­tion.

Apol­o­gy · In the de­scrip­tion above, I orig­i­nal­ly said that the email I got was mis­spelled; that turns out to have been wrong, and I apol­o­gize un­re­served­ly.

The gen­tle­man in ques­tion want­ed to re­pro­duce the whole email thread in a com­ment here but I won’t, be­cause there’s enough ju­ve­nile mean-spiritedness on the In­ter­net al­ready.

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