AR games and ARGs are different. The key word is augmented vs alternate. AR games use video technology to augment reality, putting a video game in the physical world. ARGs use communications technology to put a puzzle in the social world.

For example, an ARG might begin with a morse code pattern hidden in the border of a promotional poster. The morse code is for a URL that leads to a seemingly normal pizza restaurant's website. But if you put all the typos in the menu together, their positions in their respective entries make a phone number. Call the number, and you get the next clue, and so on and so on. People work together to solve these puzzles and get to the end, which is often some kind of teaser for an upcoming product. You could even give people a special video game item if they get to the end of the ARG.

They're really fun, I was lucky enough to participate in the Warframe 1999 ARG. I didn't make any original discoveries, but I followed along as it was happening and tried to solve the puzzles Myself. I even got most of them! The cool thing about an ARG is that they allow fictional worlds to blend into our world. That pizza restaurant website might be for a fictional pizza restaurant that exists in the story of the video game. So fans feel like they're part of the game world in a way that video games just can't do.

An ARG shouldn't need to collect any user data to be able to work, but since it can really be absolutely anything, I'm not surprised someone used an ARG for nefarious purposes.

He sees this as a transactional situation, and he will get nasty the moment he feels he won't get the returns on his "investment".

I mean that's possible... But no, it's not certain at all.

My girlfriend has rich parents, she's the type to do this kind of stuff, and we've been together for 5 years. She's also a communist and a class traitor. She sees generosity as fairness: if her family has a lot and her friends have little, she's got more of a responsibility to provide for all of us than we do. Also, she's never worked a paying job in her life and has no clue about the actual value of money. She's willing to give away money because it's just not that valuable to her.

This is overall very good advice. But I'm going to push back on the stuff about sex. I'm asexual, but I've done kinky stuff with a lot of people who turned out to be abusive garbage, and even a Nazi girl. And I don't regret any of the sexy stuff. I regret the bad relationships and being abused. I regret the love, but not the lust. The best sexual experience I've ever had was with an enby who destroyed Me for months and left trauma that lasted years. The relationship was not worth it. But gods above, that one night was...

If you're gonna fall in love with crazy, you might as well stick your dick in it!

Actually, it's a heuristic.

Forums are a type of social media.

Look, the six types of social media are: mail, instant chat, forum, blog, feed, and game. Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok are feeds. Discord and Whatsapp are instant chat. Email is mail. Reddit is a forum that wants to be a feed, and it used to also have mail, but they got rid of it and replaced it with instant chat. Tumblr is both a blog and a feed, as is youtube. Any site with user pages is technically also a blog, but most such sites would rather be feeds. And then there's games, most notably World of Warcraft, but also Halo and Minecraft and chess.com.

I disagree, if Rowling wants Hermione's ethnicity to be open to interpretation, I'm gonna interpret it how I want. She wants the benefits of virtue signalling a diverse cast, without being willing to risk actually writing diversity into her characters. That's why the main characters are all straight white neurotypical English people. That's why Dumbledore's gayness was hidden in subtext. Rowling wanted to hedge her bets and then claim she was an ally all along. But if she's gonna try to get the best of both worlds, well... I'm fed up enough with her bigotry that I'm gonna give her the worst of both worlds.

Also, Kingsley Shacklebolt? Might as well have called him MLK McSlavery. She is racist against black people too.

They named the asian girl "cho chang" and the black girl gets mocked for being against slavery

Fighting the Nazis

So I was dating this bigender guy, and while we're dating, he gets a crush on another guy and suggests we invite him to be a thruple. I don't really see what's so hot about this other guy, but he's nice so I agree.

Then a few days later, My boyfriend says he asked the other guy out alone, but I'm not going to be dating the other guy, so it's not gonna be a thruple. And I figure I'm okay with that, because I wasn't really interested in the other guy to begin with, and I technically consented. But for the next month, I feel really shitty and jealous.

And eventually during a mental breakdown a month later, I realise it's fucking cheating to ask a third party out in a way your partner didn't consent to, and My misery changes to fury. Fuck that guy.

And anyway, a few months later, the other guy contacts Me, drunk, saying he dumped our mutual ex, and he's convinced his entire relationship with our ex was a ploy to make Me jealous. And I prefer Hanlon's razor, but I'm glad My cheating ex got dumped and ended up alone.

Pullover all the way. Zips are cold in front, the most important place. Unless they're double breasted

One thing you can use p-hacking for is that if you want to prove vaccines are bad, give a bunch of kids vaccines and measure 20 different vital indicators. Then theorise that the vital indicator which got worse was caused by the vaccines.

Hell yeah karate!

I asked chatGPT to fuck off

I remember in the debate with Albanese, when Dutton was like "No, I care about Indigenous Australians! I visited tons of 'remote' communities, like Alice Springs, ... ... tons of communities!"

And I was thinking "Mate, you don't even know the Indigenous name of the one community you visited. You're a bloody racist disgrace."

Anyway, I encourage you to think of it this way: Right now, there are four languages around you, and you know one of them. If you knew two of them, that'd be better than one. Two's better than one. So I say just pick one you have the most connection with, even if that connection is "eenie miney moe", and learn that one. And hey, maybe the old people in the Country will guide your "eenie miney moe" to the right language for you.

They only hired one IT guy.

What I mean is, English's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar rules seem to Me to be highly optional in comparison with other languages I know a few things about. It's a less consistent language. English has tons of words that you'll mispronounce if you only read them, because they don't follow the majority convention. See: epitome, and all the many words that have the "ough" substring and use it to mean different sounds.

Compare that to French, where a government agency controls the spelling and pronunciation to make sure all the words are properly French enough. Or Japanese, where the structure of hiragana and katakana reduces the number of vowels that can be used. And sure, Japanese has Kanji, which is just as ridiculous as English, but Kanji's chaos only exists in written Japanese, while English has all that pronunciation weirdness.

For a long time, I believed that inconsistency in English was a deficit, and that's a common opinion from Anglos and adult learners alike. But then I learned the history of that inconsistency, about the many different groups that settled England, and I formed a new belief: it's an adaptation. You know, I used a bit of evolutionary biology. "What niche does this trait help to fill?" And this inconsistency means that English speakers are really good at adapting to new words with new rules. We do it all the time.

You know, I've followed Spanish gender discourse a bit, and it's a bit embarassing for the Spanish speakers. The average Spanish speaker views gender-neutral language like "latinx" as Anglo meddling in their culture, and rejects it as a form of cultural imperialism. But as far as I can tell, "latinx" originated on Spanish geek message boards, as a math joke. Now, English speakers get really upset about changing their language to be more inclusive too. But for many Spanish people, changing their language feels like being colonised by the British. Now, the renaissance of neopronouns and identity terms in English might just be a function of population size. But I dunno, Arabic and Mandarin have a lot of speakers too. I can't shake the feeling that the transphobic hispanics are hitting on something valid: maybe English is better at changing for queer people.

How does any of this make the life of the average English speaker easier? What average English speaker needs to even know what exsanguination means?

I think any fan of Vampire: The Masquerade would do well to learn it. Which, I know, is a bit flippant. But that's where I learned it. And I genuinely think geek culture is comparatively full of Latin and Greek, what with all the science fiction and fantasy and mediaeval words. You just pick up that stuff if you read a lot of books or play a lot of games, it's part of life.

And I don't know if you've noticed, but Japanese nerds know a suspicious amount of German!

I think UTs are bad for society because they make us less likely to question our linguistic biases.

Language is ontology. I've been learning the local Indigenous language, alongside Aboriginal metaphysics, history, culture, and law. Aboriginal language helps Me change My perception of the world around Me, by rephrasing daily life. With new words come new perceptions. I can't learn everything I've been learning at the same depth in English. A universal translator would stunt that development.

And I think that effect isn't just academic, it's societal. A whole world of monolingual people using UTs would be a world of people who don't know how to question the preconceptions that their language encourages. It would be a less intelligent, more culturally stagnant world.

Worse, under capitalism a UT would probably be controlled by corporations. Give corporations control of language itself, and society will decay. We're already seeing the start of this with words like "unalive" that develop from corporate censorship. UTs deployed en masse would provide new opportunities for propaganda and control. Imagine an immigrant in a new country who doesn't bother learning the local language, and just trusts Grok or ChatGPT to translate everything. It would be a good world for billionaires and a bad world for people.

I dread the day society integrates UTs into daily life.

There are dozens of Australian languages, and I think English immigrants should learn at least a few words in any one of them. Ideally the local one. You know, like it says in the post. "the local Indigenous language".

Out of all of the languages in the world, English is the best at accommodating foreign vocabulary and grammar. That's because England got colonised like five different times: By the Celts, the Romans, the Germans, the Vikings, and the Normans. And then they colonised everyone else! Now, the result of all of this is that English is a hodgepodge of Celtic, Latin, proto-Germanic, Old Norse, French, and whatever the people of England spoke before the Celts arrived, which we don't know very much about. And English is really really good at adopting loanwords with their own peculiar phonemes and syntax, because 90% of the language is loanwords.

So I would say that in order to be fluent in English, you have to know at least a little bit of Celtic, Latin, German, Norse, and French. And Greek too, if you're into the sciences! So I think Anglos have no bloody excuse for being unwilling to learn a new language. Plus, if you know what a kangaroo is, you speak a little bit of Guugu Yimidhirr, and if you know why quokk.au is called that, you know some Noongar. And I picked up some Yolngu just by listening to Baker Boy's hip-hop.

Plus, we all know how to say sushi, naan, pizza, taco, sauerkraut, tofu, falafel, maize... What I'm saying is, there isn't an Anglo alive without any talent for learning new languages. It came free with your English!

Woolah! Wangk-kadak Lemmy-ak? Noonook moorditj!