Nelkon

Google took reports about their repeated data losses as an shabby excuse opportunity to kill off their nerdy, but at least unsuccessful social network Google Plus (G+). Its retirement is announced for April 2019. I wondered what to do with my Ingress Stories and Sitreps that were posted in my profile. They contain great memories and awesome achievements of a lot of people. As a hopeless optimist I decided to transfer the content to another Google service: Blogger. Let's hope they won't shut down this Service within severals months also. The KilledbyGoogle-List has already 146 entries and contains some cool services I used to like a lot.

Something very EXOrdinary at the last mission day in Berlin was the fact, that I did my missions together with my 67 year old mother. She enjoyed them very much. After living for over 40 years in Berlin she discovered places and artwork in the city that she never visited or noticed before. And she did it with her son who lives 600 kilometers away in Cologne. She would like to do more missions but first we have to upgrade her phone to a model that’s capable of running #Ingress .

3605 #Ingress portal picture submissions within 365 days (4.1.2018). Exactly one year ago I submitted this picture of the logo in front of the +QSC AG ‚s World-HQ as my first portal picture submission . I thought this „enlightened“ picture would be a valuable replacement for the existing picture.

Another #wheredidingresstakeyoutoday #selfie . This time: The #feldbergturm at the top of the highest mountain in the #blackforest  with 1.493m . You can go up to the platform which lifts you up another 45m . From there you can have a great view of the black forest and the alps with their heighest mountain the #montblanc . Going down to the base you can visit the museum of the famous #blackforestham . At least they say so. When I was there, it was snowing, snowing and snowing. So the view was very limited and the museum was closed in the winter season.

39w Subway station Heumarkt or the warp core of the NCC-4711 Colonia? While going for some portals in the heart of Cologne I came by our newest subway station. Since you can't play Ingress in the underground I wouldn't have descended into the station itself. But at the entry is a glass box with remains of the Roman age. This became recently a portal thanks to #OPR . Then I saw the awesome architecture which hid under our city. Do you like it?

#Wheredidingresstakeyoutoday is (was?) a common hashtag at G+. This post isn't about today. It's about the last 600 days (backwards from 29.03.2018). This is the time it took me to level up from agent level 1 to 16. Was it good? No. It was absolutely awesome. While walking 1.865 kilometers I passed 6.468 portals and created links up to 31 km. But the bare numbers can't tell the awesome experience while driving through the night while cleaning lanes for megafields or shards. They don't explain the thrill you get, when your anomaly squad of 20 agents begins to run through the middle of Cologne or Berlin just in order to join 80 more agents. And instead of pulling out dangerous weapons every single player just seems to be absorbed by his smartphone. But the battle is happening in the augmented reality. On site and at several recharge rooms around the world.

I had to take a day off because the daycare of my kid was closed today. Together we took the opportunity to visit a beautiful place for the first time by foot: The Brauweiler Abbey (German: Abtei Brauweiler). It is a former Benedictine monastery located at Brauweiler, now in Pulheim near Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany. It was founded and endowed in 1024. The present abbey church, now the parish church of Saint Nicholas and Saint Medardus, is the third building on the site, built between 1136 and 1220 or later. The abbey was dissolved in the secularisation of 1803. The premises were subsequently used, under a Napoleonic law, as a hostel for beggars, and from 1815 under the Prussian regime as a workhouse.

The #IngressMissionDay in Bonn was awesome. We had lovely sunny spring weather. More than 1.200 agents strolled through the former capital of Germany. I took some pictures of the great places, the awesome agents and some portals too. This is just a short video clip. I had two very special moments.

At 05.05.2018 we built a big #Ingress field as a collaboration of Dutch and German agents. It yielded 1,6M MU for each of its 19 layers. Official #sitrep is still to come, but here are the first impressions of my tour. Agent + Malte Kremer and I are both into photography and we used our assignment as cleaners around the city of Salzkotten to take some pictures. His pictures can be found here: https://goo.gl/T3wJEg .

After helping building a big green #Ingress field over the Netherlands and Germany ( https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AttilaRadnai/posts/UNvqrtFBRLx ) I had to drive home 200km (sitrep for the + blackbullmouse Stephan Field is coming soon(tm)). Not an easy job. Checkpoints at Saturday 3 a.m. are tought since you have to work the day before and stay up until the field is built. Thus I was rather tired and had to take several rests in order not fall asleep on the highway. So I chose to combine the necessary rest with some unique captures and nice view. For this I chose the hill Syberg at a more rural part of + Dortmund . With an elevation of about 250m it offers a nice view over the home area of + Borussia Dortmund .

Pyramids are majestic and mystical structures. Consisting of 6 triangles (4 at the sides, 2 joint at the square base) they surely are the favorite shape of any #Ingress agent. I knew about the pyramids of Egypt or Mexiko. But I didn't knew there is one right in the middle of the German City of Cologne. After we found out, we planned our urban expedition to explore this awesome thing as carefully as any of my operations: We found a date to meet, exchanged GPS coordinates, went there and climbed up to the top. That's all.

Privacy, industry and the GDPR. While a lot of brave agents went to gather in Camp Navarro and Castle Kaltenberg, some agents had explored another regions. The first part of my recent Ingress adventure was a little fielding operation. Agent +Judith Antonowitsch need another 40k mind units to get her silver tier illuminator badge. So agent +Alexander Ritter and I joind in and we built a little multilayer in Cologne, covering the area between the quarters of Bocklemünd, Braunsfeld and Müngersdorf. There was no big planning ahead. We used an existing derp link between two quarters as a baseline, cleaned the quarter of Bocklemünd and set up four layers that added up to missing 40k MU.

Sitrep OP Just cause (English version first, German version below/Deutsche Fassung weiter unten) TL'DR/Management Summary: A fielding operation with world class football, a split Christmas tree and trespassing. Well, Ingress business as usual. Where: NR02-GOLF-15 - Germany: Cologne-Hürtgenwald-Wershofen When: From checkpoint 17 June 2018, 0100 to 1700 CEST million mind units: 7.7 Layers: 33 Agents involved: 33 Field circumference: about 200 km Illuminator Badges: 2x onyx, 1x platinum, 1x gold Sitrep video: https://youtu.be/t6-GSpoB968 Intel recording: https://youtu.be/v4clhOubHpE

Do you know the most badass #Ingress nation of the world? The #USA 🇺🇸? #Japan 🇯🇵? #Germany 🇩🇪? No! In my opinion it‘s #Norway 🇳🇴. They built the longest XF-cargress tunnel of the world. The #LærdalTunnel is almost 25km long. Driving through it felt like descending into another world. And the colorscheme of green and blue looked like a portal battle timelapse during an anomaly.

Oh wow, #IngressMissionday #MDPlusCologne at July 14th 2018 has really rocked the weekend in Cologne. I've met hundreds of cool Ingress agents and had the opportunity to take great pictures. Moreover this weekend provided me a platin SpecOps badge, a gold Missionday badge and a bronze Cassandra Neutralizer badge (70 liberated portal until silver). If you think my picture style is too saturated, wait for the great pictures of +Lars Tögemann with his blue and grey signature filter. If you like my pictures, you know what you have to do. Here is the complete gallery:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/qazot44PP2bsf6Wr6  

This is a very special #wheredidingresstakeyoutoday story. At least for me. Usually I explore cool new places when we have an +Ingress  operation like a big field. There was in fact a rather big field built right next to me. 8 MMU in the South of #Cologne and right next to this location. The #sitrep for operation „Breaking Bad Münstereifel" is here: https://plus.google.com/+DieterKummer/posts/M9awkWWVGXG . But I didn‘t take part in that special one. It was only the reason for a stealth approach although every neutralized portal would have counted towards my #cassandraneutralizer badge. But henceforth I preferred to seize the opportunity to visit one of the biggest radioastromony telescopes of the world. For 29 years it was the biggest of all. So it is really HUGE. The dish of the @maxplanckgesellschaft of the #Radiotelescope #Effelsberg has a diameter of 100m.

Operation summary Type: Starburst with 203 Links Place: Cologne, Germany Time: 06.10.2018, around 11:00 CET MU gained: none, as with any starburst “In October the earth will be moving through a swarm of meteorites left by the comet P21/Giacobini-Zinner. As these meteorites burn up in the atmosphere they will create shooting stars! There is no better moment to let starbursts bloom."  (Scientific background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHU8K4enPg ) Agent and #Ingress vanguard +Claudi Ja contacted the Enlightened communities with the idea to celebrate the Draconiden meteorits shower. This proposal resonated in many #Ingress communities. Wordwide over 100 green stars lit up our world (global sitrep: https://plus.google.com/+ClaudiJa/posts/E8DHtuHGpdj ) . In combination with the stardust of the meteor, which our planet was crossing, they produced an exceptionally enormous amount XM that surely helped mankind to evolve further to a higher level.

Operation summary Type: Starburst with 213 Links Place: Dormagen, Germany Time: 06.10.2018, around 19:00 CET “In October the earth will be moving through a swarm of meteorites left by the comet P21/Giacobini-Zinner. As these meteorites burn up in the atmosphere they will create shooting stars! There is no better moment to let starbursts bloom."  (Scientific background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHU8K4enPg )

"Playing Ingress is about to boldly go a way which is sometimes a very, very badly chosen path. " ( +Attila Radnai ) . I spent this weekend at the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. The 65km-stretch of the Middle Rhine Valley is a part of the official UNESCO world heritage. With its more than 40 castles and fortresses, historic towns and vineyards, graphically illustrates the long history of human involvement with a dramatic and varied natural landscape. It is intimately associated with history and legend and for centuries has exercised a powerful influence on writers, artists, composers and exotic matter.

This time my curiosity, +Ingress scanner and the living place of my grand uncle led me to the Siedlung Margarethenhöhe, mostly only called Margarethenhöhe. It is considered as Germany's first garden city with regards to the architecture and forms the centre of Essen's district Margarethenhöhe, where in 7.529 people (Status: 31.12.2005) live on an area of 147,09 hectare.

Another #wheredidingresstakeyoutoday adventure. This time my hunt for new portals and portal pictures took me to Berlin, the capital of Germany and the city where I grew up. And though I spent my youth there I have never visited the second highest mountain of the city , the Teufelsberg. This is the place where the US government built a big spying facility in the Cold War era. Since west Berlin was located within the GDR it was just in the middle of enemy territories. The wet dream of every intelligence service. Or Ingress agent.