I almost start to worry about Pokemon Go when we have only a few stories to report and not so many that I am culling them!
- A 19-year-old in Australia apparently crashed his car into a school classroom — a Catholic college in Melbourne that was mercifully empty at the time. Why is this relevant? He was playing Pokemon Go at the time. The police spokeswoman actually made Pokemon jokes during her debrief.
- But no one’s cracking jokes about this one. MOP reader Nordavind pointed us to this Danish-language report of a 21-year-old man who was indeed killed when his van ran off a road and hit a tree. Danish police are utterly refusing to call this a Pokemon Go accident, stating that while they found his phone unlocked with the Pokemon app running, they cannot declare with certainty that he was playing when he crashed. But, yeah.
- Remember the Sydney suburb trying to eject PokeStops from its local park because of the traffic congestion, trash, and extra police they were having to pay for? Dusseldorf, Germany, has a similar problem — a local bridge with PokeStops at both ends, and you can reach both by standing right in the middle, so guess where all the Pokefans from out of town are gathering? The Dusseldorf government is actually responding to it by deploying extra toilet and garbage facilities and traffic cops to shut down the bridge to cars as needed. Hopefully, the extra income from the tourists will be paying for that, eh?
- Gizmodo has a piece out on the founders of The Silph Road, a massive “whitehat” Pokemon Go research project by grey- and blackhat developers that’s resulted in a veritable cheat sheet for the game.
- Seen the Pogotoolkit.com yet? It’s a calculator that’ll tell you whether your critter is worth the evolve candy cost, at least for first-tier capturables.
