Ingress: Rule of acquisition number 7

CMU, Ingress's in-game store currency, stands for "Chaotic Matter Units."

At $9.99 for 15,000 CMU, Niantic is bound to make quite a profit, if enough players go for it. And you know what the saying is about a fool and his money.

I guess, it was just a (chaotic) matter of time before it happened. I am just surprised they didn't do it sooner. Perhaps Niantic was just waiting to become independent from Google (which happened just about 3 months ago.)

Now that Niantic is an independent company, Ingress has to make it on its own as a profit-making game.

Being an exploratory and promotional tool for Google can no longer be its "raison d'être" now, can it?



Or did you really think that Chaotic Matter was real, and that some benevolent aliens were really out there to help humankind out of the goodness of their hearts?



It's called rule of acquisition number 7.

Look it up: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

Everybody Wants To Rule The World

Those people are funny! Quite a few insightful comments. (And even some sound advices, too!) More here.

Blues have more fun

Telling it the way it is.

It's not the East or the West side . . .

I don't know...



Try as I may, I am not entirely convinced Lord Vader makes the most assuaging recruiter there is out there for the Shapers and their cause.



Just sayin'.

Some people just simply don't get it...

The magic, I mean:



But then again, most people don't believe in magic:



It's a lie, of course, most people only pretend they do not believe in magic, while in reality they do, even those who won't admit to it, least of all to themselves.

Practitioners of the art, on the other hand, are another matter, altogether. They might tell you they believe in magic, but, more often than not, understanding it, they do not:



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QUOTES SOURCE: A Madness of Angels (Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift), by Kate Griffin
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"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live."
---Victor Hugo

Ingress: Reach out and touch faith

I am not sure about some of those missions...



I mean...



Are they safe?

It's all around the world

The Mission

What can I say?

It's a tough mission, but somebody's gotta do it!

Something about Ingress...

There is no telling...

Romancing Ingress

Foule Sentimentale

Everybody Needs a Break

Hiking a date to the movies tonight.



Kingsman: The Secret Service is playing at 8:10pm

It should give us plenty of time for a bite to eat and a drink.



Or something or another...

Ingress: Rise of the Machines

If you ask me, General Grievous and his like are a bore...



But then again, perhaps not as much of a bore as some of the so-called "humans" I've met in the field.

Truth is L1 to L8 is an adventure. It really is, it's a revelation and an exploration. It's fresh, open and exciting!

L9 through L16, however, from what I've been able to observe, has had a tendency to devolve into little more than a pissing contest amongst mostly white Anglo-Saxon males in their 40's, who get a kick at comparing the size of their...APs.



Oh, puh-leeze, put your mobile operating system away, guys. Nobody really cares about the size of your AP.

And no, I have no interest in your Farm, either.

Do I look like a farmer to you?

The Problem with Ingress

It's ruining my Zen thing, man!

The Company You Keep

Well...



...yes...

       

I've been thinking about that, of late. A lot!

Anyway, my friends made me do it: I've joined the Green faction.

(I feel like such a dork—hopefully no one will recognize me behind my green spectacles.)

To be, or not to be

By the look of it, the game is set so that the followers of either faction can spin their own mythos any which way they want so they can feel they are on the right side, ideologically speaking. As it turns out, statistically, only half of the players chose a team based on the in-game storyline anyway—the other half defers to other more practical determining factors.

Ideologically speaking, if this were something other than make-believe, one would be hard-pressed to make a choice. I imagine the Nuremberg Code would have to be of some relevance, here.

One way to look at it, subjecting uninformed populations to the influence of Exotic Matter (which is what theoretically is done in Ingress, in terms of game mechanics, when "mind-units" are "captured" within a green triangle field) without the informed consent of those populations is tantamount to, say, adding a foreign substance like LSD or DMT to the drinking water without people's knowledge.

BUT THEN AGAIN, it could be as easily argued that considering that the majority of the people in question is already brainwashed by the Man (I mean, can we really speak of "informed consent," when people are led unknowingly into military and/or economic ventures they understand nothing about?), maybe a good dose of LSD or Ayahuasca (or... NZT, anyone?) in the drinking water is something that, maybe, the world could use after all—who knows?



See? I just argued both sides of the (same?) coin.



This reminds me of a Bertrand Russell quote:

"To be perfectly intelligible one must be inaccurate, and to be perfectly accurate, one must be unintelligible."

But I Ingress...

ONE PLAYER TESTIMONY: IT ALL HAPPENED SO QUICKLY

I’d like to say that my Enlightened decision was made after laborious study, weighing up all the pros & cons and only after I fully understood what was at stake (so to speak…)

It all happened so quickly! Honestly, I didn’t even think it would go further than a light perusal of the app, after which I was sure to delete.

But there it was a simple question…



On deeper click…



At the time Resistance seemed to feel old, tired and closed minded. The Enlightened seem to at least be aiming for something better…

I’ve converted our bass player to green. He said it felt just like Watchmen, where you know the right decision is Rorschach, but the pretty girls are always at Veidt’s…



On the bight side, at least we’ll be the first to know if it’s Xanadu or a cookbook, right?

— R. O.

Don't Sleep