Every week I'll be here to reveal and review some of my favorite moments from the internet. Whether it be bingeing television shows, streaming sports, or simply getting lost in a YouTube rabbit hole, I'm here to give you my top picks every Friday, as well as the perfect paring to get into an optimal headspace for them. This week, we're witnessing the apocalypse spread throughout the world in the form of cute digital monsters that people are kidnapping then forcing to fight, presumably to the death.

Pokémon Go: Fuck Yourself

Recommended Pairing: A backpack full of psilocybin mushrooms so you can trip your Pokéballs off. 

I've grown accustomed to constantly dodging hordes of text-messaging millennials meandering around my West Los Angeles neighborhood like hipster doofus zombies. It's like I'm the only person capable of walking with my head pointed in the direction I'm going. I have literally had to grab a stranger's shoulder on more than one occasion to keep them from sauntering out into oncoming traffic. I have been thanked exactly one time.

Last week things got worse, much worse. Instead of the usual demographic of twenty somethings in my way, I started to notice an enormous uptick in youths on the sidewalk serving as obstacles. What the hell was going on? As I scooted around a small pack of teenaged boys aimlessly plodding down the sidewalk, I snuck a peek at their screens...

The kids were outside hunting Pokémon. Pokémon?

I couldn't help but think... 

2016 has been a super weird year.

As I kept encountering pack after pack of Pokémon trainers out in the wild I had a few thoughts.

1. Someone's going to make a game out of catching people playing Pokémon Go.
2. Most of these people aren't accustomed to being outside.
3. Terrible things are going to start happening to a lot of "trainers."

Less than 24 hours later the first reports started rolling in.

• July 7th - Players Robbed At Gunpoint - Parkville, MD
• July 9th - Teen Find Dead Body in River - Riverton, WY
• July 10th - Robbers Lure Players into Trap - O’Fallon, MO
• July 12th - Man Ambushed And Robbed - Edgewater, IL
• July 13th - Three Attackers Rob Teen - Lake Ronkonkoma, NY
• July 13th - Man Stabbed Multiple Times - Anaheim, CA
• July 13th - Two Men Fall 75 Feet off a Cliff - Encinitas, CA

There's a lot to learn from these news stories. For instance, most people will walk blindly into a trap; off a cliff or into immediate danger if they suspect there's a chance they may encounter a rare specimen or a Pokémart. I still can't believe that the two lemmings who walked right off a cliff escaped without any significant injuries. 

Let me just go ahead and say I have nothing against Pokémon Go or the people currently obsessed with it. I actually love the idea that a game is encouraging people to go have fun outside. I think it's great.

My only real concern is that a lot of people need an app on their phone to get them to enjoy the outside world. Is this generation so inundated with games and videos and social media that you have to make a game out of walking around? I hope not, because I could see this becoming a reality sooner than later:

Maybe I am just a grumpy old fogey, but in my day you didn't need an app on your phone to discover a dead body in the river. You and your friends made up your own games and went exploring for fun, all the while secretly hoping to find something cool like a dead body floating in the river. 

I guess my point is, I don't want us to become solely reliant on game developers to supply us with a sense of adventure and/or accomplishment. 

Lastly, I do want to applaud the makers of this game with creating something that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Yesterday my girlfriend told me that a guy at her work was bragging about a Pokémon he caught and how his eight-year-old son thought that he was cool for having done so. That's nice. Nice things are great.

The world citizenry is frighteningly splintered. Religion, politics and money keep most of us from ever really connecting to anyone outside of our own little bubbles even though the internet keeps making our world smaller.

If this current phenomena of real-time gaming in augmented reality is ushering in a new era of electronic shared experiences — well, I'm on board.

It's interesting to see how much that concept has evolved in the past few years; From the Harlem Shake, to the Ice Bucket Challenge, to Pokémon go, I'm hoping we keep finding ways to have more and more in common and share something other than simply looking at pictures of other peoples food on Instagram while we're pooping. 

That'd be nice. 

Til next time. good luck catching 'em all.