I revived my Pokéwalker
I'm having a bit of the pendulum-swinging-back moment lately. I've been thinking about (one might even say interrogating) my current journal setups, and at the same time I'm still thinking about ways to strip "necessity" out of my smartphone. It's so silly to me that I tell the time with my smartphone when I could have a perfectly functional watch!
But what if that perfectly functional watch was, oh, I don't know, a Pebble Round 2? And this is about where I've found myself. I actually do like tech. But I don't see myself swinging back to the point where I was doing something like wasting days of my time trying to make my 1st-generation LIFX bulbs work in the same hub as some other IoT things I was mucking around with.
Anyway, one of the Frame Fatales community members mentioned finding an old Pokéwalker, swapping out the battery, and taking a Pokémon out for a walk. If you weren't playing Pokémon in the late 2000s, it was a device that came with big-box copies of Pokémon HeartGold and Pokémon SoulSilver and, well, that's exactly what you could do with it! You beam over one of your boxed Pokémon and you rack up a currency, watts, while you walk, and can spend that currency on finding items or even other Pokémon.
Fun fact, there was a time in university when I had a full squad of six of these things I took out for a walk. Only two of them were actually mine!
That person inspired me to find my own old Pokéwalker, though in the end I've ended up borrowing my partner's for a bit since my own seems to have been spirited away somewhere. One battery swap and a boot-up of HeartGold later, and I've got THIS the Wooper at my side.
I don't know how accurate the step counter is for this thing, but truthfully, I don't mind all that much. I'm still noodling on whether it's even beneficial to me to track these kinds of "life metrics". But the benefit of having a little guy with me when I go for a stroll is immense. It's a bit of nostalgia, a bit of letting that gadget-liker have some fun, a bit of feeling proud that I'm making use of this nearly two-decades-old little gadget.