CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to do a 12-mission series set in Gold Creek Village, in Nichols, in the north of Canberra. Time to Complete: It is possible to do this series in an hour at a brisk walk, however, if you glyph hack, capture, fully deploy and link it can take twice that time - and, if you are playing PokemonGo and spinning every stop, capturing each of the four or five gyms, and chasing down the wide variety of pokemon that you can find there, it can easily take you the three-and-a-half hours it took me. Complexity: This is a very straight-forward mission series with easily accessible portals, and hacking all that is required. It is a good way to get to know Gold Creek Village and become familiar with the wide variety of cafes, sculptures, and tourist locations to which it is home. Terrain and Location Notes:  Location Accessibility: Gold Creek Village can be reached by bus, or by car, and has ample free parking. Traversing the Mission Series: If you pa...

Finding Time to Play: When do I get time to play Ingress? Since I switch between it and PoGo on my morning walks - although I'll admit to giving this game priority for allowing myself to stop... unless I've run out of pokeballs and need to collect more. Generally, the goal of the (mostly) morning walk is to get as many kilometres covered in the 30-45 minutes I have for walking, before the real-world demands some attention, which means whatever pokemongoing or ingressing that happens has to happen without me having to stop. I do, however, allow 5 minutes of exceptions, such as capturing a gym, or portal, but, after that, too bad, what I find is what I'm stuck with, no matter how much I want to change it. Weekends, when I have more time, things are different and I get to stop more, but I must still hit a minimum of one hour's walk on the health app before I can go home and do something else - and, I still to impose a no-stopping rule when I need to get things done. ...

Yesterday, I noticed I was 36 portal captures short of the 5,000 needed for the gold level of the Liberator medal, so I had a look around for a concentration of grey or green, and saw that Gold Creek suited the requirements nicely. Reachable by bus, this historical village houses the Australian Dinosaur Museum, Cockington Green Miniatures Garden, and the Australian Reptile Museum, among other attractions. On Sundays, it is serviced by two buses running around a half hour apart between the two major suburban centres of Gungahlin and Belconnen. It was a beautiful day for a Canberra winter, and I had to go for my walk. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone, and thirteen degrees Celsius, with only a light breeze, is great weather for walking in. By the end of an hour, I had covered what I needed, and was seriously short of resonators. Not a bad way to start the week.

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...

It was a beautiful Canberra autumn day,and I'd been cooped up at home for most of the week with a little one that was under the weather, and an essay on Wittek's ghazi theory to complete, so, with the little one in safe hands, and the essay done bar a few extra references and some formatting, I went walking. I needed a long walk just to clear the cobwebs, and Ingress had just the thing. I'd started a mission series a few weeks ago, and hadn't been able to get out to finish it, until today, when I set out to complete the last 9 missions in the set... and maybe add a few more kilometres towards the trekkers medal, while hatching a few eggs for PokemonGo. Well, that was the plan, anyway - and it worked beautifully. The buses ran on time, and I was down by Lake Burley Griffin by half ten or so, finishing Enlightened agent, Wharty's, pictoral series called The Burley Trail. Starting at the National Carillon, the Trail takes you along the edge of the lake to the Co...

  ANZAC Prd and AWM Banner Yesterday, I posted about using real-world locations in writing, and that reminded me, of a walk I did for Ingris, way back in October last year, where I photographed many of the statues I referred to in Shades of Memory . The walk was a 12-part series of missions that formed a picture of the Australian War Memorial. It was an 8 km walk up ANZAC Parade and around the War Memorial gardens. These are beautiful places to visit, to reflect on and to remember our past, and I couldn’t have asked for better surroundings to improve my fitness. The walk begins at the bottom of Anzac Parade, so I caught a 200-series bus from the city interchange, which travels down Constitution Avenue, and got off the stop before Anzac Parade, which puts you on the same side as the first portal. The mission series badges and banner are below, as are some photographs of this beautiful area. The mission series was designed by Enlightened agent, MT81 , and is called ‘...