CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Three days ago, I was 600 resonator deployments short of completing the second stage of the Magnus Builder's Challenge. Today, with the flu starting to make its presence known, I finished it with 5 days to spare. Pretty happy with that. Progress Report - Day 9 to Completion Day 9: Sunday: I didn't want to go out today, but I'd identified two blocks of portals where I might deploy another couple of hundred resonators. I was just trying to figure out when to go, when my husband suggested a family trip to look at Cooma, a small town about an hour's drive south. I took a quick look at the intel map, saw a bunch of grey portals and figured I could I could fit a small amount of deployment in, while we looked around - and it was worth it. We got to check out Cooma, which has a lot more portals, and a lot more history, than I thought, and we found a nice new area to visit. As we approached the town, there...

Ingress provides all sorts of incentives for fitness. This month, there is another anomaly being held over in the States, but people all over the world get to participate in the story-line fuelling the event. Our task is to deploy a number of resonators to portals for which we will be awarded a medal - 1,331 for the Builder level, and 3,113 for the Architect level. The only catch is that the resonator only counted towards the score if we have never deployed it on that portal in that particular resonator slot, and that was where it got challenging. Fortunately, upgrading the resonators deployed by other agents counted, or very few of us would have achieved even the basic level, so the event demanded a different style of play. Instead of deploying the highest level of resonators we could, we had to remember to make space for other agents on our teams to deploy their resonators. This, of course, held the risk of making the portals we'd built more vulnerable to attack from agents on...