Posts Tagged ‘Niantic’

Baby Bub, Pokemon-spotting before the pandemic.

Even though he wasn’t an actual baby when I took this picture, this was still one of the last pictures that I got of him playing Pokemon Go with me prior to the pandemic. I’m not sure if I’ve posted it here yet but figured that it couldn’t help to post it. I haven’t really played Pokemon Go since the pandemic started, even from the comfort and safety of my own home — recent updates elongating the “white flash” that is present at some parts in the game could cause and have caused migraines and seizures in susceptible members of the population, and I felt that it was too much of a risk for me to take. Until I know for certain that it has been fixed in such a manner as to reduce the severity of either one of those things happening, I can’t in good faith pick the game back up. It’s a shame, but you do what you have to do to stay safe, even when it’s not fun…

Maybe I should make a completely new tag for this.

I was going to get the MMO of choice that I wanted to begin playing with Bub, but then I found out that you could pre-order Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet from Amazon, so I went ahead and got one kid each game. Whenever they come, they come. It’s also a lot better than getting them from Wal-mart, because when I tried to get my oldest son Pokemon Diamond from there, you all know how that went, right? It was literally stolen by someone before it could be loaded onto the Hewitt truck to be delivered to my house, and when I asked FedEx about it, the response was to put fraudulent notations on tracking stating that it had been delivered to my house when it had not… you know, when it didn’t take them three days to “figure out” that it had been stolen, first telling me that it had been loaded onto the delivery truck and simply not delivered, then telling me that it hadn’t even been loaded onto the delivery truck to begin with (so that tracking notation had also been a lie). Although I know that I can’t completely avoid FedEx, my goal is to use them for as little as humanly possible because so many of my packages from them come late when they pass through Hewitt, and any time I try to ask their customer service anything about them nothing gets answered to satisfaction. At least Wal-mart promptly refunded me when this actually happened, though.

It’s better than the $53 that the “chief ombudsman” of the state child support office stole from my youngest son’s January payment forcing the case to stay open when multiple good cause waivers had already been sought out and approved for it. I wasn’t supposed to be told that these waivers were still on the case when Stephanie Neely continued to “insist” that it had to stay open, which endangered Bub and me, and when a customer care representative accidentally told me, she told them to tell me that all subsequent communication about closing Bub’s child support case out again had to go to her — no, it does not. And I made that pristinely clear to all involved state agencies. That was why I reported the entire child support office to the National Child Support Agency, which as soon as I let HHSC and the state child support office know yielded quick results, and why I lodged a formal employee complaint against you. According to LinkedIn you have a $90,000 salary and have been working there since before I graduated from high school. Learn to manage your money better and stop attempting to skim off the top of child support cases that aren’t even supposed to be in enforcement to begin with. Maybe also consider getting another job where you don’t endanger children because you want a new purse or another pair of shoes. That would really be nice.

(insert Kansas lyrics that fit on one line, literally)

Ever since my mother passed away, I don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving.

Given the actual history of the holiday, I see absolutely no need to… that, and Bub is partially Native American on his father’s side (and one hundred percent complete sass on my side). We ate food as normal, had snacks as normal, and I got some time in getting our sorceress through Hell mode in Diablo 2: Resurrected. Once I gain some more levels past that by doing Ancients runs, Baal runs, and Cow runs — since when are cows not enjoyable in this game? — I’m going to start hunting on my own for a Shako, which is probably one of the best things I can get our sorceress at this point, not to mention having it on hand for other characters that may need to borrow it when their levels and stats are high enough to be able to equip it. Put a Perfect Topaz (…how many can you fit in this thing, anyway?) in it and it will serve more than one purpose. I just need to pace myself though because my brain will not let me play hours and hours of a game that I enjoyed in my adolescence and early adulthood, and at that, one that Bub enjoys. He likes both Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. I’ve never tried World of Warcraft on him because you have to pay to play it, and that would be the time that my migraines strike or my seizures become… more prominent, and I wouldn’t want to waste money on something that I can not reasonably commit to for periods of time even if Bub might like it. I don’t know. I’d rather pay once to cover the costs of owning a copy of the MMO and then play when we can. Yes.

Luckily though, this game doesn’t have any sudden, more persistent flashes like Niantic made Pokemon Go.

I miss playing Pokemon Go with Bub, but we have this pandemic, and was the “flash” problem even fixed?

I have more or less kicked the stomach bug from hell!

I know that it’s not proper nomenclature to call them the “stomach flu”, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel every bit as miserable as someone who actually had the flu. Then again, I was immunocompromised when I caught this. I caught it because I was so severely immunocompromised. ’round and ’round the wheel turns.

In Pokemon Go-related news, I’ve had to put that game down for the foreseeable future because a recent update to the game extended the amount of time that “the white flash” is present on the screen for the normally brief instances that it is. As a result, more people are being exposed to it who are at risk for adverse neurological events such as migraines or seizures… and I meet both of those criteria, or have both of those things happen to me, admittedly one more than the other. Until I’ve been given word that this is no longer the problem that it has become, I don’t think that I can safely play this game. And I’m definitely not going to want to get myself hyped up for new patches or releases if I am only able to play the game for very brief periods of time if it even manages to work out like that. I’ve liked this game since release, so this is a shame.

I suppose Bub and I can play more of the console games that we have in the interim to make up for this.

Fortunately, though, Bub hasn’t really been asking for this game… but we’re still in the throes of a pandemic.

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