When it comes to survival, you can count out large swaths of millennials who are busy playing the latest mobile video game craze, and are instead winning the Darwin Award in locales all around the world.
The Pokemon Go craze has gamers going outside to capture imaginary characters in the real world. And while a few geeks may have gotten some fresh air and sunlight, the results have not been pretty.
Completely oblivious and unaware, many of these hapless video gamers have fallen off of cliffs, wandered near live wires while pursuing Pokemon in electrical plants and trespassing in downright dangerous places.
The Inquirer.net reports:
Across the country, there are reports of Pokémon Go leading players into dangerous situations, prompting safety warnings from numerous law enforcement agencies.
In San Diego, two men were hospitalized after falling from a cliff above a beach when they became distracted playing the game. A slew of trespassing incidents have been linked to the game.
Recently, three teenagers were stopped at a nuclear plant in Ohio when they trespassed on the site in pursuit of Pokémon characters.
[…]
With the Pokémon Go craze in full swing, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) urges players to exercise caution and be sure to catch their Pokémon at a safe distance from electric and gas facilities and equipment.
For yet another reason, people are not paying attention, and they are getting hurt.
Players in Bosnia are being warned to stay out of landmine fields… yeah, pretty good idea not to get blown up while playing a game.
According to the Telegraph:
The charity Posavina bez mina published a statement on Facebook saying: “Today we received information that some users of the Pokémon Go app in Bosnia were going to places which are a risk for (unexploded) mines, in search of a Pokemon.”
“Citizens are urged no to do so, to respect demarcation signs of dangerous mine fields and not to go into unknown areas.”
The fact that any deaths have occurred from a frivolous game is absurd, and the fact that so many warnings have cropped up shows you just how dumbed down the younger generations are becoming.
The survival instinct is failing. Situational awareness is the first step towards handling a threat, and these zombies are completely devoid of it.
And they are about to be initiated into a full 3-D experience. Some of them won’t come back from that.
People look to the crumbling edifice of civilization, at how fragile it is under pressure, and at the massive pressure coming down on that system to provide, to remain reliable. But this is how bad things are while the system still functions.
Cell phones and mobile devices mean people aren’t even looking up to cross the street or avoid needless injury. Common sense is abandoned for cheap, mass marketed artificial tokens, points and goals.
As Off Grid Survival warned, it is the zombification of America:
When I first started seeing reports come in, I thought it had to be media hype to help sell the new idiotic smartphone app. But last night, I saw firsthand how far this country has fallen into the realm of idiocy.
In a matter of about an hour, I witnessed 50 grown men – not kids, GROWN MEN – wandering around the park that I was fishing at. None of them were actually watching where they were going, looking to see what was around them, or even noticed the fishing pole they almost got smacked with as they walked right into me. No, they were literally squealing like little schoolgirls as they found some stupid digital character on their phones.
In a matter of 48 hours, Pokemon Go has turned millions of Americans into virtual zombies.
What do you think will happen if/when the ATMs, debit cards, EBTs and cell phones don’t work? When grocery shelves are empty? What will happen among all of us when that time comes, if this is the climate going towards it?
It’s just so sad how far we’ve fallen.
Read more:
Situational Awareness Could Save Your Life: “It’s Time To Realize These Are Dangerous Times”
“Skills That Could Save Your Life”: 25 Forgotten Survival Lessons You Need to Know
The Walking Dead: 7 Mistakes That Would Get Somebody Killed in a Real Zombie Apocalypse
Black people are saying they’re afraid of getting shot for walking around non-black neighborhoods trying to catch pokemon.
Those Pokemon aren’t for them
speakin’ of shootin’….just picked up some clay pigeons from wal mart today 90 for 5.98….that’s a damn good price…time to get out the shotguns and PRACTICE!
Thin the gene pool…
This doesn’t even concern me…
I figure in a SHTF situation they will have a life expectancy measures in milliseconds…
What special kind of stupid are these people?
Oh, and how about the 25 year old dumbass from Australia who quit his job so he could find all the Pokemon’s or whatever they’re called.
it will be like shootin’ fish in a cracker-barrel.
We don’t call the police around here unless it’s to lead a parade.
However I recently had to make exception.. I took a road trip and decided to stop by and see a friend that works at a government installation as a civilian. I phoned ahead and told him I would meet him on the parking lot when he got off work. My ETA was off and got there a little early. There were two Arabic men walking around holding up their cell phones and speaking in Arabic . It looked to me like they could have been taking pics or GPS coordinates… so I dropped a dime on them. (see something say something) When my buddy finally made it down to the gate I told him what happened.. He said naw those are just kids playing Pokemon …. happens all the time,
Kids? How big do the men get where you come from.?
Hell I didn’t know nothing bout no
Pokemon.
Crooks could be scoping out some place while under the cover as a pokemon chaser.
This past weekend I actually already dealt with Pokemon being used to cover for a crime. Of course, these people are pretty dumb, so we saw through the story pretty quickly. Multiple people were arrested…. We “caught them all”.
see something, SHOOT sumthin’, is the way I heard it…..no, wait…..no, it’s see sumthin’, do NUTHIN’….aint it?
they’re still trying to vote for bernie but will maybe switch to shillary IF they make it to the voting station (it wouldn’t surprise me if shillary had a pokemon of herself made up and located in voter boxes)
stevor, unfortunately they will make it to the voting booth. These are the same people that you see on Mark Dice, they can’t tell you how many stars are on the flag (13) and they can’t name two Founding Fathers. Trekker Out. Jefferson Davis.
I think it’s safe to say that a handful of isolated incidents do not constitute a trend.
Yet another moronic diversion in the dumbing down of the mostly youth of America and apparently the world. I read that the game was produced in Israel. I already made another comment about this same stupidity on a sports site today that has other comments besides sports. This Pokeman Go, whatever the hell that is, has intent to divert youth away from developing enveloping reality, all to turn them into clonelike brainwashed automatons. The electronic-brain connection is being altered to support tyranny without young victims even being aware that it is happening, just like most all video games are violent and produce violent minds and behavior in youth.
Aljamo, 2 days before I left for GA, a moron in a Lexus took out one of the utility poles on the street where I work. He was injured pretty bad and had to be taken to the hospital. It was a wooden pole and was hanging b y the lines. Needless to say his car was totaled. One of the cops on the scene found the driver’s cellphone in the floorboard that was set on that stupid game. He was playing the game and driving at the same time. What a dildo!
Exactly. Even more mind numbing than the crap on TV. I’ve told my family several times that the only reason the TV is still in the house is cause they’re here. If they weren’t that POS would been kicked to the curb.
Aljamo:
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Take a walk in the morning or evening when the sun is not sending out too much heat and radiation. Look at the blue sky. Blue light heals the eyes and stimulates brain function. Look far and then look close then look further which exercises the eyes and improves vision. Look around and notice something you hadn’t noticed before. When you feel better enjoy just being there. You will actually raise your own IQ. We need smarter young people so take responsibility for developing your mind and body. Works for old folks as well.
Much like my grandma’s response to the Florida man who ate the homeless man’s face. “That’s more than just drugs, that’s got to already be in you”. Stupid is as stupid does, people have been killing themselves with mundane crap for centuries, this is nothing different
I saw a guy at a drive-thru yesterday who started driving off while staring at his cell phone.
BTW, we’ve had three small solar flares since last night. It’s been months since I’ve had any notifications.
Archivist, I’ve got morons in my area even WITHOUT that stupid game. It damn sure makes them worse.
It’s a Moronothon.
Anon, LOL! “Moronothon”! Good one.
Pokemon;
At the risk of making the pokemon chasers appear more clever than myself, are the things that they find real or digital? Do they have drugs or money inside? What is the payoff?
I could probably find it for myself but I’m feeling lazier than a liberal today…. you got a link for notifications?
Come on Mac this is a really stretching for an article . I play this game with my son while walking the park and we really enjoy it and I’m always alert of my surroundings. Darwinism will take down any fool regardless of what they are doing. Might as well add hunting, fishing, motocross, an any other physical activity to Pokemon Go. You would have been better off writing about how the game is getting people up and moving. Maybe that blood flow will help them open up their eye to the real world around them.
Patriotaz – People like you and your son know that it is a game and not real life, plus you stay alert. Most of those brainless wonders out there can’t tell the difference. Sure it’s getting people moving but at what cost? Having wrecks, walking off cliffs, trespassing…the list goes on. If their eyes were not open to the real world before playing the game, they’re not going to be any more open by playing it no matter how much blood they start pumping to that mush holding their ears apart.
Folks getting stuck up in trees, hit by cars…..it’s an observation game….,by the CIA
I actually was very much against it at first because of all the potential negatives I saw. However, I changed my mind and tried it after talking to a friend who is about as inactive as I am who said it had him walking about 6 miles a night at the local park. Yes, there will be idiots in any mass movement and with 25-30 million Americans playing it, the media will hype the idiots who make a mess of things just like they do with guns or any other subject that will get them page views. The privacy concerns are real-ish though. Fortunately, if you have Android Marshmallow (6.0 or higher), you can control app permissions and deny it access to your private data and camera. I trust these protections as much as I do anything else coming from Google/Android, which is to say that if they compromise my phone I am screwed anyways.
I have to admit that I was curious about such a large cultural phenomenon and decided to try it to see what it was all about. The game itself is nothing special, especially with the augmented reality turned off. It’s the social aspect that draws you in. I went to the local park after work with co-workers at around 1:30AM. There were probably hundreds of people roaming around, all peacefully engaging in the same activity. It didn’t matter what race they were, everyone was just enjoying a beautiful evening in a local town park. At a time of so much racial tension, it was nice to see people being civil to each other and engaging in a common, if superfluous, activity.
Is it dangerous? That depends on the person. The problem is that it is not all that easy to find every one of the creatures you need to complete your collection. Some of them are very common and spawn quite frequently and some are rare and frustrating to find. This causes people to want to look for them constantly in order to have bragging rights that they captured something that someone else doesn’t have. This leads the to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for them at every possible moment. This is why you see people doing it while driving. I know people who have driven as much as 100 miles away just to hunt for them in a new location. All in all though, so long as people are responsible I see no harm in it. I think it will die a natural death come winter time since most people will not want to keep going during inclement weather or while the kids are in school.
As to why it is so popular, it is a demographic perfect storm. Gen Xers like myself remember watching the cartoon and playing the games either ourselves or with younger siblings. The fact that it has maintained it’s popularity and relevance among younger generations for around 20 years ensures that nearly everyone from their mid 40’s and younger can relate to it at some level. Plus, it came out in summer when kids are out of school and the weather is nice. It’s also a simple concept (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock meets virtual cock fight) with a surprising amount of depth, due to the number of possible characters to play. So, it appeals to a simple mind and a more intelligent one looking for some problem solving fun at the same time.
As a positive side note, people are now discovering local parks and landmarks that they may not have been aware of before (I had no idea how awesome the local park I went to was!) At any rate, America will survive Pokemon Go. It can’t survive a Hillary Clinton Presidency.
After all, a lot of folks here are racist as f++k, largely due to not knowing any blacks personally and judging the entire race off the media’s obsession with the violent minority, media only seems to want to show the negative, regardless of how marginal it is.
Pretty much. Just like with whites, there is a huge cultural and values difference between black people who have lived in generational poverty and those who choose to go out, get a job and work hard. There will always be some minor differences between people of different races, but so what? That’s part of what makes being an American great. We get to experience multiple cultures and generally live together in peace and I absolutely love that about this country.
Is there anything that this country is doing right?
Are the majority of this nation that screwed up.
Anon, it looks that way to me.
Braveheart1776
Enough to give you a headache.
Anon, I hear you loud and clear. Sometimes I do get headaches from them but not ALL the time.
Another cop killed some kids dog . What do they think ? Or do they think ? Do you cops have kids?
FROM CHRIS HEDGES’ WEBSITE– “Writing as Resistance”…
As the ghetto was emptied in the fall of 1942 Ringelblum longed for armed resistance, a resistance that eventually came with the heroic yet doomed uprising that began April 19, 1943. The Germans burned and razed the ghetto after the uprising, as they did nearly all of Warsaw when it carried out an armed revolt in 1944. Only a few fragments of the brick wall that surrounded the ghetto and a handful of old buildings from the ghetto remain.
“We are seeing the corroboration of the well-known psychological law that slaves who are totally beaten down cannot revolt,” Ringelblum wrote not long before the uprising in the ghetto. “Now it seems that the Jews are recovering a bit from the heavy blows; they have sobered up as a result of their sufferings and have concluded that [passively] going to the slaughter did not make the number of victims smaller but, on the contrary, it made the number larger. No matter whom you talk to now, you hear the same thing: we should not have allowed the Great Deportation to have taken place. We should have gone into the streets, we should have burned down everything, blasted the walls and run to the other side. The Germans would have taken their revenge. It would have cost tens of thousands of casualties, but not three hundred thousand. Now we are covered in shame and ignominy, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of the entire world, since our passivity gave us nothing. This should not happen again. Children and adults must defend themselves against the enemy.”
Darwin awards, baby.
Let it happen. We just might have a chance for STOOPIT to be bred out.
Who the F am I kidding, it’s stoopit to the left of me and stoopit to the right.
Poor dumb bastards
Stupid is as stupid does…driving into town you can spot the stupids as they are running, pointing and screeming with the cell phones stuck in their face. One of the new stupids ran into traffic and that started a stampede of other stupids following yelling some unintelligible name as if finding the mysterious whatever was their sole purpose in life. A few seconds later and they could have been dead stupids.
Nam
Oh good!
A few months back we had a rash of people walking out on highways and busy streets and getting hit by cars and trucks. They just ran out and raised their hands to stop traffic. Jaywalking! I watched this happen. Then there was the texting and talking on the phone while driving. People still do it. Now this Pokemon Go stuff to look out for.
Insurance companies must be loving it.
Anon, if it gets really out of control, you bet the insurance companies AND ambulance-chasing lawyers will love it. Can’t fix stupid. Can’t fix morons.
I’d say it’s pretty obvious….
If just about anyone in these forums entered a room full of “average” millennial types, we’d raise the average IQ score by at least 53.
boyo
They would eat us before it could rise.
For them anything to get out of reality. I don’t feel sorry for them.
Sgt.
Mother Nature has many ways to strengthen the gene pool. Weeding out the weak minded is one.
My brother was coming down on my niece pretty hard about it… so I said yeah … why don’t they just do what we did when we were their age? running up and down the road chugging bottles of lone star…Hey the girl does my laundry…
and I’m sure bro appreciates having me around as historian???
Over at The Daily Sheeple, “Massachusetts Attorney-General Bans The Sale Of All New “Assault Weapons”. Things are ratcheting up one notch at a time.
If I was to put some other people’s minds to it… I don’t think there’s anything that can’t be made on CNC. Nope I’m sticking with my original theory that ammo and primers will be taxed to oblivion and you might need some kind of double top secret license to get.
For some reason fire stations and churches have special pokemon things. We watch them gather in flocks (sheeple) every night. 30 people standing outside at midnight every night. Had 2 people walk off a cliff the shift before last. And we see plenty of idiots driving and playing.
Last night, under a waning gibbous moon, the streetlights were turned off along the Mississippi river bank to discourage the hoards of mayflies whose little corpses pile up like the winter snow otherwise.
Dozens of Pokemon players were wandering the streets and alleys, oblivious to their surroundings. It was surreal, a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie.
One more step toward “Idiocracy” going from a low budget movie to a full on documentary.
Hah!, see Stephen King’s third book just out in the Mr. Mercedes series, its a Zappit! Just coincidence right?
I don’t get why everyone hates pokemon go, the “pokestops” are all in low crime public places like churches, parks and grocery stores. The game does not set rally points for players to into dangerous places. People are doing that on their own. I’d argue fishing is an unproductive use of time considering the time and money invested vs what you bring home at the end od the day. The game encourages exercise and community, Comon.
Kids being dumb I understand – that’s why grown adults mind them till they are capable of being independent.
A fool at forty is a fool forever though, and I’ve been truly suprised at just how many fools there are out there!
What is nice is being able to identify the muppets in my own neighbourhood so easily.
If you need exercise in the open air then walk the dog, go foraging for wild berries while they are in season, dig a new veggie patch. Teach the kids how to use a paper map and compass to locate your cache sites. (If shtf can they survive if the worst happens to you?). Practice and pass on your bush craft skills. If your lifestyle is such that you can only get the kids outside and active this summer using an electronic lure, then maybe it’s time to make some serious adjustments to your lifestyle while you still can. If it’s the only way to get yourself outside then you are probably beyond help.
Within 2 days of that daft game being released in the states predators had already caught onto the potential
mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/convicted-paedophile-spotted-playing-pokmon-8424146
Pokemon: Darwin Edition
Got asked to go play Golf by a buddy-it’d be good exercise, he says-we’ll shoot 9 holes, and your leg brace won’t be needed-just bring your cane. Well, that Golf outing worked out real good-got thrown off the course-almost got arrested-when my buddy said we were shooting 9 holes, I brought my .308 and, well, those little white balls blew up real good.
No problems with the groundhogs though.
😉
Be well. Have a sane and safe day.
Cat
As someone who has had the gps turned off on his phone since smartphones came out, for the first time in years, i have it turned on.
My kids were playing it, so my wife & i downloaded the game. What we have observed is young & old, black & white, latino & asian, christian & jewish & muslim, gay & straight & transgender people all coming together to get outside and interact with other people. Racial stereotypes and cultural prejudices come crashing down when pursuing a common goal.
It is now a common sight to see cops talking to a group of teens in the park or street corner or shopping mall. Not chasing them off, but sharing info on the best places to catch rare pokemon.
This game is helping our society see past our divisions and come together. Local businesses are thriving, as restaurants, bars, shopping centers tend to be places that attract pokemon & people playing the game. Local & internet businesses that sell phones, cases, chargers, & external batteries are seeing sales go through the roof.
If i need to go further, consider this: according to the news – hillary should be sainted and pokemon go is very dangerous. They are right, in a way – people from different backgrounds getting together and interacting in a positive way is bad for the fear mongering news media. Folks getting along makes for lame headlines.
I’m not beating my berettas into plows just yet, but i have more hope for America now than i had last month.