We need you, Batman

So far the year 2016 has been bizarre.

Pokémon GO made it possible for us to live our childhood dream in real life (at least almost).

Pokémon GO also made the Westboro Baptist Church furiously defend their Pokémon Gym from a Clefairy called LoveIsLove.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won the Oscar (RIP, Leo memes).

As the US presidental elections crawl closer the situation seems to turn less real every passing day, as Twitter user @nickdiener summed up:

October 4th, 2016

The clown situation has truly ran out of control by now, as what started as a few suspicious clown sightings in South Carolina in August has now spread from the US to the UK and Europe and has lead to serious injuries. Clown costumes are used to cause terror and unrest within people, and some of them have carried real weapons and baseball bats and chased people (especially children), leading to bans to any clown costumes, even if they were to be used with no harmful intentions. Where the craze started from remains a question, and is it just a bad halloween joke that has prolonged for too long period and will end by the end of this month - nobody knows.

Nick Diener addressed this terrifying phenomenon together with the US elections' Donald Trump case and its whole absurdity, calling Batman for help as the situation has started to sound too much like a comic.

Last week the story took an even more unexpected turn as Batman made his counter move:

October 14th, 2016

Batman really did answer the call as an English man dressed up as him and chased the killer clowns to make children feel safe again. This, however, did not really help with the conclusion that 2016 cannot be real anymore.

Well, at least we are soon about to be done with it.

(Surprise: Actually it's desperately trying to make itself even longer. We tried to escape.)

(This post is solely marveling on the surreality of the latest events and is not in any way meant to be scientifically researched and structured.)

#killerclowns #batman #2016 #mediadiary

Stalking the Stalker

Who sees you when you're sleeping, who knows when you're awake?

Who knows if you've been bad? Who else than Santa Claus himself!

Since the task here is to stalk someone famous I thought to myself: who else could be more famous than Santa himself! Surely there aren't many people who don't know him by name, but not so many of them might know that he actually comes from Finland and -drum roll- from a small Finnish city called Rovaniemi up there somewhere in the north. You might have heard of the place, possibly multiple times, from my mouth actually. Dunno why. Totally not because Santa here is my homeboy and practically a neighbor.

Jokes aside, Santa Claus who years and years ago was a myth told to make children behave is nowadays in all honesty a celebrity. Santa Claus' Office, which is a tourist attraction in Rovaniemi, Lapland, consists of Santa himself and his energetic group of elves who are always ready to tackle a new exciting day! To make sure Santa stays up to date in the current social media trends the Office is active on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. Of these Facebook and Instagram take the cake in follower counts with 24,318 likes in FB and 15.8K followers in Instagram. That's more Instagram followers than many fashion houses like Vogue and Chanel have, and even beats Emma Watson's follower count. Not bad, old man.

Since for me Instagram is the most natural stalking area I moved my goggles to that direction. To be honest I have been a follower of the Santa Claus Office (@santaclausoffice) for a long time but hey, it didn't need to be a completely new target! Santa Claus Office's Instagram career started on 29th of August 2013 and since then it has gained much popularity with people all around the world.

Santa's Office posts fairly regularly, almost weekly during quieter times and more often when the tourist season peaks up. Posts mostly consist of the elves taking different activities, like nature trips, practicing for the Olympics and taking part in what is the biggest hype a that moment - latest Pokémon GO. But of course, since the most important part is Santa himself he is also given plenty of picture time! What is common in all the pictures is that its all about having a good time. Santa's Offices pictures are a refreshing mixture of professional photography and personal pictures which all are filled with warmth and happiness. The post descriptions are often a short story of what's happening in the picture, sometimes accompanied by a question, like:

With small questions like this the posts prompt interaction with followers. During the "quiet times" (aka. anything outside of summer holidays and Christmas time) the comments are scarce, but when we peek back to last Christmas...

Most of them are wishing Santa and the Elves a merry Christmas. How sweet is that!

Otherwise Santa's Office interacts with its followers by answering to comments that want to get more information about Santa Claus, Rovaniemi or Finland and also by liking photos it has been tagged in. Now that's some nice interaction from a bigger profile! Companies should consider the same because that makes you feel a little bit special (even if there were fifteen thousand other similar pictures liked that day).

Why is it important for someone like Santa Claus to interact with his followers? People who come to see him consider it as a chance to step into a fairy tale (literally, you should see the Office) and even if they don't believe in Santa Claus, meeting and getting response from him is a little bit magical and makes you feel nice and warm inside. Of course it's even more critical when it comes to children who come to the Office with stars in their eyes to meet the real Santa: they believe it when Santa does reply to them. Santa Claus is a well branded image full of warmth and love, and everything he does in social media must only strengthen that image.

(For those of you who are wondering am I for real with this post: yes, I am. I have been working in the Santa Claus Village for nearly five summer and Christmas seasons so inside of me I feel to some degree proud over the whole tourist attraction business. You can doubt the realness of Santa's legendary past but you can't deny his reputation all around the world.)

#santaclaus #instagram #mediaobservation #stalking

Pokémon GOes Crazy

By this point I guess it's safe to assume pretty much everyone is familiar with Pokémon GO. Niantic's location-based augmented reality game was The Craze of this year with more downloads in the first week after its 6th of August release than any other game so far, with an added bonus of (my estimation) thousands of people using APK download links (leaked download files) to get the game in regions it was not available yet, like Finland. Mind you, Finland only got it 10 days after the official release in America, New Zealand and Australia, so some people were desperate to not wait that small eternity. And no, I certainly wasn't one of those impatient people thank you very much (I might have been but shush)

If, however, there still is someone who doesn't know what this whole Pokémon GO business is all about I applaud you - congratulations, you've managed to miss a world wide mass hysteria over a game. The basic idea is to go out (optional if you live in a well located fairly big house with good GPS signal, just saying), dig out your cellphone, open the app and start catching Pokémon in your own neighbourhood! And if you find that only tracking and catching the Pokémon is not enough, you can also snap pictures of the pocket monsters in real life, whoaaah!

Back when the game was just a rumor, people were crazy about the idea. Augmented reality Pokémon hunting! Pikachus and Bulbasaurs in your own garden!! And when the game finally became reality people were even MORE crazy. And I'm not blaming anyone since I myself was digging through the wonders of internet to find a reliable APK file the moment Pokémon GO hit the US markets (shushhhh). And the moment I got my hands on the game I was - of course - screenshotting every Pokémon that appeared conveniently on my cat because that was The Best Fun, I tell you.

Poor cat has to endure a lot.

What Niantic might not have anticipated was the enormous popularity of the game. I mean, it's Pokémon so one would assume it might be popular... But since Niantic's previous title Ingress (2013) was never as popular with a mere couple of thousand downloads a day I guess they thought Pokémon GO would not exceed that by much and thus built the servers according to that. Well, needless to say PoGO came and swept those numbers by a mile and left the company struggling with servers that were swarming with people trying to catch the hype. During the first couple of weeks the servers were constantly down due to way, way too many users and what was the most interesting was the reaction of players. Niantic made sure to keep the users updated on the situation and kindly asked for patience. Users responded with rage. Furious messages flooded Twitter, claiming that having the servers down all the time was "unacceptable" and that they wouldn't come back to the game if that was to continue. Not many realized to stop and consider that after all, those behind the game were just people, and more importantly people willing to work around the clock to get servers back up as soon as possible.

What is interesting now, a couple of months after the initial release, is the change on how people feel about PoGO. What I'm going to ponder here has no sole scientific truth behind it but merely what I personally have observed so this might not be the case everywhere! The initial craze has toned down and actually taken a u-turn in many cases as people tried to level up as fast as possible to be the very best like no one ever was - and when they reached the point where leveling up takes a very, very long time they finally found themselves bored. I mean, the game physics are simple and they gameplay doesn't really require all that much, so if you're looking for super complicated plot and deep characters - sorry hun, not for you. New updates with more activities and possibilities are demanded daily (I notice this mostly in Twitter) but once again, Niantic is a relatively small group of people so they work on it with time. In the lack of immediate additions people deem the game as boring and bad.

For me, this progress has been weird to witness. I always felt somewhat alone as a player who started much earlier than many others in Finland (sorry guys) but who didn't even reach level 20 until very recently. At times I even got reactions like I was a...bad player? Just because I didn't advance as fast as many others? I think here lies the reason why I still find the game very enjoyable: I don't overindulge. Back when I started I was just as crazy over it, but due to real-life reasons holding me back for majority of days (read: all-day summer job for six days a week) I quickly toned it down to playing a couple of hours a day max, often skipping days in between. And so it continued. Still now, I enjoy pulling my phone out every now and then to see what's the situation, to conquer a couple of gyms if possible and then continue my normal chores. But even when I do that there have been people sneering at me like "Oh, you still play that game?". Yeah, I do. So what? I enjoy it and I think that is the main point of the whole game.

This whole rollercoaster ride that Pokémon GO has caused is one of the reasons why biiiig mainstream media fanbases are sometimes very, very tiring to be part of. Not because of the hype to be honest, but because of the fallout of the hype. Suddenly being part of the fandom makes you lame and embarrassing. Well thank you very much but I think mocking other people for what they like is way more embarrassing than liking something, so doing that is completely unnecessary and also very childish. And yes this is turning into a rant whoops sorry about that. Take a cute snake as an apology.

Totally not Ekans. Belongs to xxMeleexx on deviantART.

To bring this mess to a conclusion, Pokémon GO came, saw, and turned the whole world upside down for a moment to a point where people found bodies and were robbed while they were playing. Not many games can claim those achievements I'd say. But besides the morbid outcomes people have also gone out a lot, found a way to ease up their anxieties and met with new people to hunt for rare Pokémon together. So I'm personally very excited for the updates in the near or far future and hoping with my fingers crossed that there won't be people to ruin the fun for those who enjoy the game.

#pokemongo #niantic #videogames #mediadiary #rant