How Ingress destroyed my Social Media presence.

(Or, what to do when a game takes over your life)

Those who follow my blogging here and my posts on our Facebook Page: Nerdtastic, or my twitter @JST3P know that I downloaded and started playing Niantic Lab’s Ingress, an Augmented Reality “game” back in December of last year. If you follow me, you also know that I just about fell off the face of the internet at that time. I have barely painted but one mini and my phone camera is not cutting it for pictures any more (doesn’t seem to save them) so I haven’t even gotten any good progress shots.

By happenstance of being a Google owned property, most everything to do with Ingress in the Social Media sphere is happening in Google+. G+ is my last frontier in Social Media, having never liked the way it worked. Ingress, in forcing me into moving to play, has also forced me into that platform to play and network. This is a hugely positive thing for me personally as my networking and gaming addictions have a fix, as well as professionally pushing me into a part of the market I avoided for so long. So, thanks again, Google! (And thanks for the swanky custom URL, http://google.com/+JasonStephens, I’m flattered!)

Now, this is all my own fault, of course. And with this post I start to right this ship again, but I am hopelessly addicted to Ingress now and so I must include that into the mix of JST3P.com and Nerdtastic.  I’m finally back down in the basement studio tonight, posting this, and I plan to resume my near-daily routine I managed for most of 2013. I will get a camera that takes good close up pictures again soon, right after a bike mount for my phone, oh and a new phone.

Another upshot, I am meeting new people and getting out into my city a lot more than I would have otherwise. We will be in Boulder, CO in March for the Recursion Anomaly event there (another Ingress thing) and I will definitely be blogging about my experiences there. Angiebanana will probably be posting some about that on Nerdtastic as well.