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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