Friday 8 August 2014

Ingress Week 2

So Saturday I headed into London to see an exhibition at the British Library, and I knew that there would be Ingress portals along the way to hack and own and generally just try and a get a few points so that I could level up. The people that I've met told me that ti's not worth trying to take down portals until level 4, and I was so close.

I hacked a few whilst on the tube coming in, most stations seem to have a portal and most were blue, so that gave me nice little bits of easy points. 

The British Library is a short trot from Kings Cross station and I was there within a few minutes. I hacked a few portals along the way and then went into the Library.

I was lucky to get a left-over concessionary ticket to the exhibition, which saved me a few quid. and i have ot say i was glad i didn't pay full price as i was a little disappointed with it. There were far too many people there, and you had to stand with your nose against the glass as the comics were not always that close to the front of the display cabinets and I found them difficult to read. There were too many people, and it was almost constant queueing for the hour and half that I spent in the exhibition. I would have liked to have seen some of the images blown up larger to give some visual variety.

The theme was art and anarchy, and there were a lot of indie and boundary pushing publications there, but i'm not sure that an illustrated copy of Lady Chatterley's lover really counts as a comic, to be honest, but i saw the point that they were trying to make.

Anyway, back to Ingress. The British Library has around 4 portals within a short area, so i hacked them all and linked a couple. Then i decided to go to the Southbank. a friend of mine had posted on instagram about lobster Mac and Cheese from B.O.B.'s lobsters. It looked delicious, so i knew i would have to try it.

The southbank is such a vibrant place, and i'm hopeful that even when i move out of London, i'll still head into London by train, get off at Waterloo and stroll around there. The mac and cheese though, what a disappointment. For a start it was covered in fried onion, which i loathe, but that is a personal preference so i don't do them down for that. But for a tenner, i expected more than just so-so mac and cheese and the lobster was realy hard to eat with the utensils provided. I think i could make a tastier mac and cheese, and flake some crab into it for cheaper, and i think it would be more delicious. 



I headed out to the back of the Royal Festival Hall, and picked up some salted caramel brownies to take home, and a frozen plain yogurt with "Eton mess" topping. It was pretty tasty, although it melted quite quickly in the heat!


My phone had run out a long time before, so no chance for some cheeky portals on the way back.

One thing i have learned is that if i'm going to be doing this regularly, i'm going to need a backup power supply. I did bring my charger with me, but it was too warm and sunny to look for a spare socket inside the Southbank centre.

Sunday, I decided to head out locally. I live not far from the very pretty village of Pinner. I knew by looking on the intel map that there were some portals in Pinner Memorial Park. I knew roughly where it was, but hadn't ever been in it.

What a surprise, the entrance i went into had tall trees, which reminded me of parts of France and it felt so cool after the hot days we've had recently.



There were also wooden sculptures

And some kind of house that appeared to be serving afternoon tea.




and an expanse of grass, which some people were using to picnic on.
  



It was a really lovely place to spend an hour or so, and I would have never gone there if it hadn't been for Ingress!

One things I have learned over the past couple of weeks is that if I am going to make the most effective use of my time playing Ingress, then I need to plan. You get more points for creating control fields (linking 3 portals together), then just linking two together. The scanner (the map that's displayed on the app) is pretty small, and you can't always see the nearest portals, or see the most efficient way to link them together. So on the Sunday i went out with the details of the portals that I wanted to link together.




For the most part it was effective, although in between me creating this plan and me going out, someone had linked a couple of portals together! I'd also slightly misunderstood how it worked, as some of the fields that I wanted to create, i couldn't as they already had links running through the area that the control field would have been in. At least, i think so!

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