Well, that could have gone better - Las Vegas Anomaly AAR
I didn't sleep very well Friday night, probably because I ate too much and what I ate had too many carbs, but I still managed to pry myself out of bed at 0800 Saturday morning, fix some breakfast, do the morning drugs, and pack the stuff I was going to need for work after I put in my ninety minutes at the Anomaly.
When I signed up for the anomaly, I was off on Saturday, but that was a month ago, and in the meantime a couple of tax pros went and got themselves full-time jobs, which opened holes in the schedule (mostly at DI) and guess who got drafted to fill them. Well, I didn't fill all of them, but it seems that Latasha for some reason has me filling in at DI a lot more than she has me doing so at my home office, which is irritating, and I'm done talking to her about this stuff, because it seems to go in one ear and out the other.
Be that as it may, I motored over to the Plaza, got signed in with Niantic, hacked the registration portal -which was actually located a block away, but it was easily hackable from the roof of the parking garage, and that's where I was.parked - and then headed down to the Arts District to hack portals, maybe recover some media artifacts for the good guys, and screw up the Enlightened as much as I could on my own. I didn't get as many artifacts as I would have liked, partially through my own stupidity - I forgot to read the handy reference card from the Atomic Smurf Team (us locals) which had the checkpoints listed and thus the optimum times to find and hack portals with said artifacts. But I did what I could in the time I had, passed my artifacts to a nearby smurf squad leader, and went off to work by way of Wendy's.
Work was surprisingly busy. I finished up my six hours with four returns, so I pretty easily made my nut, and we didn't get out too much after six. By then, I'd already seen the bad news - those tentacle-sucking frogs of the Enlightened had beaten us pretty badly. We lost the portal captures 63-37, longest link path 90-10, and artifacts 64-36; the only area we beat them in was unique hacks, 75-0, but it wasn't enough to close the gap from losing the other three, and at the end of the day we fell short 217-158. Feh. I have some thoughts on this, but I don't know who to convey them to. At least we did better than the Atlanta smurfs, who got utterly crushed 183-17, not counting artifacts & unique hacks, which couldn't have helped much.
After work, I swung by Sonic for a footlong coney and some soda before going over to the Millenium Fandom, which was where the smurf post-party was. People seemed pretty cheerful despite the loss; I said hi to local smurfs I knew, was introduced to some out of town folks whose names/handles I probably won't remember tomorrow, bought a little bit of swag, and decided against buying another soda at the bar because it was way too crowded and you couldn't actually hear anyone. It's a really small bar, even allowing for the fact that just about everybody on our team was there (and there were teams up through W, so no shortage of people) and I don't know if I want to drop by some other night when maybe it's not so crowded unless somebody I know is going to be there.
Today was a little more leisurely. I slept in until 10, and since you didn't have to check in to Mission Day like you do for the anomaly, I just went out and proceeded to run the tables on the six missions I needed for the medal. I felt bad about only getting out of the car twice - once to do the Veterans Park mission, because you can't hit any of the portals from your car, and again at the Mob Museum, since the eponymous portal can't be hit from your car unless you want to pay for parking, which I did not. In addition to those, I did the Cultural Corridor on N. Las Vegas Boulevard (the Neon Museum, Natural History Museum, and Mormon Fort), the Downtown Art on 7th Street between Stewart and Carson, the Pawn Stars mission (which also includes some wedding chapels and a couple of ghost portals), and finally the Arts District mission which had several portals on Main and the backstreets north of Charleston. I checked in and got the Mission Day medal, then settled down to eat the breakfast platter with steak, which was every bit as good as advertised even before taking the 10% Ingress discount into account.
After that was done and i'd shot the shit with some of the locals (actually the talk came before the food) I headed home, for there was much blogging to be done.