Ayy nice

Hogwarts Legacy? Wasn’t that the game with, like, the plot that was suspiciously similar to blood libel, especially considering how similar goblins are to certain stereotypes and caricatures to begin with? The game where early access players found a horn that looked suspiciously similar to a shofar being described as some sort of annoying goblin instrument? The game where, even setting Rowling aside, several of the staff behind it had some very gross political views? The one where they named the one transfem character “Sirona Ryan” and had her voiced by a cis woman with her voice pitched-down in post to sound more masculine?

I mean, I never played Hogwarts Legacy, so that could all be wrong, but that is nevertheless what I remember people talking about… People have a right to play games even if they have problematic content, sure, but I also have a right to hear “yeah I just had to play the Blood Libel Game because it’s just so nostalgic” and think “wtf”

Thank you for your contributions.

That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.

People find love through dating apps

That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn’t entirely their own fault that they haven’t made the progress that they’re expecting.

Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you’d eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can’t harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you’re making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.

This isn’t to say that these apps don’t have a place in the language learning process, but rather I’m saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you’re aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.

I’ve thought about this exact “solution” too, and even tried using it in writing sometimes (not for real people, though). Ultimately, although capitalized singular “They” does its job, and means that one needs to think marginally less about phrasing… It still just feels kind of weird, because of how capitalized pronouns in English are almost always honorific, and are associated particularly with the Abrahamic God. This includes capitalized “You”, for the record. So at the very least, capitalized singular “They” comes across as a bit overly formal; at the very most, it comes across as literally deifying non-binary people.

Rephrasing or clarifying really does solve most of the issues with unclear reference. People who complain about singular “they” being confusing are basically just using the pronoun as a proxy for not wanting to hear about non-binary people. What I think is that the more people use singular “they”, the more people will learn to use the pronoun in a clearer manner, and the more people will find disambiguating shorthands. The reason there’s no standardized way to distinguish singular and plural “you” outside the reflexive, after all, is because the ambiguity of “you” is not enough of a problem to warrant a single standardized solution. I think singular vs plural “they” is going to be the same way, although I’m not confident in this.

Some people probably will use capitalization as a shorthand for number, like you and I thought of independently. More people will use phrases like “they themself” to specify the singular, or “they all” or “some of them” or “both of them” to specify the plural, much like they already do with “you”. At the most extreme I could even imagine “theirsel(f/ves)” being used in place of the nominative or non-reflexive oblique, or people saying “theyse” à la “youse”.

If I may propose something else, though —

Reflexive possessives were once part of Old English and are still used in a lot of Indo-European languages to this day. Taking the Old English words and applying the sound and grammar changes that English went through gives us “sy” and “sine”. So, “She played with sy hair” (i.e. the hair belongs to the person playing with it) versus “She played with her hair” (i.e. the hair belongs to another person).

I think that this could disambiguate a lot of ambiguous pronoun usage in general, not just with singular vs plural they. I also like the sound of using “X sy/sine/s’n Y” as an alternative way of marking possession, in cases where -‘s or -s’ is ambiguous or just doesn’t look or sound right. I don’t use “sy” or “sine” for real people, but I’ve taken to using it for fictional or generic people.

This is awesome, thank you.

Here’s a six-minute YouTube video explaining how to use it

TL;DW: Click on the extension icon, use the drop-down lists to find a browser and OS, select a pre-configured user-agent string from the list, and click “apply (container)” or “apply (all windows)”. Having your user-agent string change randomly with each request is possible but requires writing a bit of JSON in the options.

From what I remember, that image was hosted on hexbear.net, so I don’t think so.

I would say a user agent spoofer would be more useful for this particular image. The Mozilla team recommends User-Agent Switcher and Manager for Firefox users.

one bad Apple

♪ nagareteku toki no naka de demo kedarusa ga hora guruguru mawatte ♪

Egentlig stoler jeg ikke på staten til å faktisk beskytte minoritetsgrupper fra hets, så jeg tviler på at dette er den beste metoden til å beskytte muslimer.

Isn’t that the plot of Evangelion?