New Pokémon App Records Your Farts While You Sleep

Pokémon Sleep, an official Pokémon-themed free app designed to track your sleep, is out now in select countries via a soft launch following an Android-only beta in places like New Zealand and Australia. And some players have noticed that the app records noises you make while sleeping, like yawning, coughs, or even nocturnal flatulence, aka sleepytime farts.

Pokémon Sleep, first announced way back in 2019, is a sleep-tracking app that monitors when you fall asleep, how long it takes, the duration of your sleep, the time you wake up, and other data points. The app then uses cuddly Pokémon like Togepi or Pikachu to help illustrate how you slept the previous night, potentially allowing you to make changes to get a better, more restful sleep. The more you sleep, the stronger your personal Snorlax will grow, attracting more Pokémon, some of which might even be shinies. And while it’s tracking all this data and monitoring your sleeping habits and noises, it’s also, apparently, recording your nasty little farts.

As spotted by GamesRadar, some players online are already sharing video clips of the various noises Pokémon Sleep has recorded during their slumbers. Some of these noises are what you would expect, like yawns, loud coughs, cats knocking things over in the room, and tossing and turning. But because the app is always listening and recording sounds that cross a certain decibel threshold, it also means that any decently loud farts will be recorded and saved for your future listening pleasure.

The app only holds on to these recordings for 24 hours or until you fall asleep again, so the farts aren’t being saved forever into some digital cloud. I mean, they probably aren’t, but who really knows what you agreed to when you signed the EULA or other agreements attached to the game before installing it? Maybe all these farts are being logged somewhere for future use in Pokémon games? (Probably not.)

And for those who don’t want their farts recorded for posterity, don’t worry. The app has the option to turn off all audio recording if you’d rather your nocturnal emissions be left a mystery. Farts in the void or something like that.

Pokémon Sleep is out now in some countries on iOS and Android.

The Gathering Clone Has A Fan-Made Digital App

Game developer Pavel Kolev pulls Scar while playing Pixelborn, a free unofficial digital client for DIsney's TCG Lorcana.

Screenshot: Pixelborn / Kotaku

Lorcana, Disney’s trading card game, has transformed from a physical experience to a digital one thanks to a fan-made app out now on PC.

Announced in August 2022, Disney’s Lorcana lets you collect various characters from the company’s deep library, like Goofy and Mickey, to duke it out with your friends. Think of it like Magic: the Gathering or the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Now, though, instead of playing on just a physical board, you and friends can take the bout to a computer through Pixelborn, a free, third-party digital client.

Pixelborn turns Lorcana into a Hearthstone-like, according to Dicebreaker, letting you access a digital collection, card backs, and deck customization. While it’s free to access and use, if you subscribe to the team’s Patreon, you’ll also get ranked and direct PvP matches, as well as detailed statistics. Led by developer Pavel Kolev, the Pixelborn team ensured no trace of Disney was left in the online engine to swerve past any copyright problems, which is why you’ll mostly see grayed-out images on cards. As Dicebreaker explained, cards will stay gray until a player uploads images to the digital client.

Pixelborn

At any rate, Pixelborn appears to work as intended as evidenced by the above video. Dicebreaker reports that the version currently available supports a typical 1v1 match you would see in Hearthstone with a clean layout that’s easy to read and use. Though the digital client could stand to add a bit more polish here and there, the project already has a dedicated following, according to Dicebreaker, with folks competing on the leaderboard. Pixelborn is available on Mac and PC. A mobile version with crossplay and shared collections is also in the works. You can download Pixelborn directly from Kolev’s Twitter.

NYC Transit App Is Like Pokémon Go For Rats

If you live in New York City, you have seen your fair share of rats. There’s the infamous pizza rat, Scabby the Rat, the recently appointed Rat Czar, and just an overall deluge of the (I think) adorable critters skittering about the city that never sleeps. Now, you can seek out those rats in a real-life version of Pokemon Go, if you so desire, thanks to a new feature in a widely used app—though I would advise against trying to catch them, for several reasons.

The Transit app provides a litany of information for car-less commuters in more than 300 cities, with accurate train schedules, rideshare options, available scooters for rent, and more. It’s been widely praised as one of the best transit app options, and even though it’s not exclusive to New York City, nor is it even its official transit app, it’s got an added feature for those living in the Big Apple: Rat tracking.

Dubbed “the great NYC Subway Rat Detector,” the feature was rolled out in early October after the Transit app “first started asking subway riders to report rats in August,” Stephen Miller, a spokesperson for Transit, told Kotaku over email. Miller said that results are updated daily and show reports from the past 30 days, with a dedicated page for people to check the rattiest subway stations, input specific stations to see rodent info, and learn more about rats in general, like when the little cuties are most active (“swarms [peak] just after 2 am”).

Most notable, however, is how the Rat Detector works in the app itself, which is sending X (formerly Twitter) into a tailspin as people report their findings. Simply click on a nearby subway station, or one you use daily, and you’ll see details on departing trains and their destinations, as well as a little rat icon. Click that icon and you’ll get some info on the rodent sitch: Rockefeller Center, which is near Kotaku’s offices, has “very few rats” but is still ranked 177th out of 445 NYC subway stations. It’s gotten 128 ratings from Transit users within the last month.

My personal subway station (I’m not telling you which) ranks pretty low, with just 12% of reports claiming “so many” rats were spotted at it within the last month. I personally love rats—my co-ed soccer team is called The Rats, and I’ve also rescued several injured pigeons (flying rats), so I think this feature is adorable. Granted, I still shriek if a rat darts out of a rustling garbage bag during a post-bar walk home, but I am personally, firmly, on the side of the rodents here.

If you want to use this app to either spot or avoid NYC’s rodent population, the choice is yours. I wish I could pretend to catch them in little Pokéballs and then set their little digital forms free at a beautiful rat sanctuary where no one ever tries to poison them and they can eat all the garbage they want. A girl can dream.

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