Shadows of Doubt

An alternate universe corpo city filled with generated crimes to solve. You get a case board, scan for fingerprints/footprints, talk to witnesses, look up sales records, check out cctv cameras among loads of other stuff. All of it is happening live in the city - everyone has schedules, an apartment, a workplace, an inventory, an email account, a blood type, a shoe size… - so that murder/kidnapping/robbery literally happened in the game while you were crawling through vents looking for an envelope with sensitive documents that someone asked you to steal. Just yesterday I got to a crime scene super quickly and caught a murderer leaving the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on their person. There are deus ex style body augmentations too.

One of my favourite cases was a woman who got murdered. I had the husband pegged for it but couldn’t pin it on him. His fingerprints were all over the place and he was on the cctv but they lived together so that wasn’t really evidence. The case went cold. A couple of days later the HUSBAND is murdered and I’m stumped. Just go looking for anything related to the guy and hope I stumble across something useful by accident. So eventually I break into the husband’s boss’ apartment and find a bouquet of flowers with a note for the boss from the husband. It turns out the husband is having a secret gay affair with his boss. The boss kills the wife so he can be with the husband. Husband doesn’t want to be with a murderer I guess so the boss kills him too!

It’s occasionally a little buggy still. I was supposed to follow someone, take a photo of a briefcase handoff, follow the recipient and get the briefcase back and have done this type of case before. Yesterday though the handoff never happened and I waited with the original owner for a few in game hours. My guess is the recipient is dead or was someone I knocked out earlier while I was solving another case and I messed up their schedule.

I don’t have thumbnails set on my phone so I only ever saw the full image. That said, I looked at it without my glasses with my arm outstretched and I’m going to guess they saw either buttcrack or titcleft

This particular flavour of survivorship bias is also called the anthropic principle

In Ireland it’s Éire, while Iceland is An Íoslainn, so it doesn’t really work 😕

No thank you, I don’t want to imagine this please

Or the person telling the story lies some of the time in which case it’s not a riddle and you’re just talking to a normal person

*numbers that are the product of exactly two prime factors

I like the idea that time machines are like phones in that you need a receiver to pick up the signal. A consequence is that you can only travel back to the time that the machine was turned on.

https://youtu.be/ia4YrCShFrQ?si=w5OYNEaNRpG8QvMZ for reference

Oh I’ll admit I’m wrong either way, but yes I do not like my authority to be challenged. It makes the class significantly harder to manage when students feel like it’s OK to dunk on me at any opportunity and provides a bad environment for learning. My preference would be respect, but I will settle for being treated with respect. If a student won’t offer it to me with their questions, then I won’t offer it to them with my response. But I will always admit they are correct (if they are).

Authority that cannot be challenged is authority that cannot be respected. Authority must continually earn the respect of its constituents, or it will lose its power over them.

I sort of agree with this. In a classroom, you can challenge me, my knowledge, my abilities. I like to think I earn the respect of my students with all of these, as well as my compassion, my fairness, my humour.

The reality is that I am an authority however. I wrote the assignments and the exam and I mark them too, and I do it all in accordance with the state-mandated curriculum. If they “know” something because they read about it elsewhere, I should be treated as a equally valid source of information because I am. I know the curriculum inside and out. They dont “need me to admit that I was incorrect, and move forward with the correct information”, they need me to tell them why the thing they “know” is not the thing I’m teaching them. I offer that I was incorrect out of humility, not necessity.

For me it matters how the question is asked. I love getting questions beyond the scope of the curriculum as it varies up my classes from year to year. However, “Actually there are 4” as in the meme is disrespectful, challenging and undermining. “I heard something about a fourth state of matter, what’s up with that?” is a prompt to reasoned discussion.

As a teacher, this type of response is a great jumping off point for the discussion of curriculum vs truth, what is the extent of reality vs what is going to be on the assignment / exam etc.

It’s also a great way to stick it to the know-it-all who is trying to undermine my credibility, and has the added bonus of perking up the rest of the class.

I use DuoCards for flash cards. The word games are FOCLACH (basically wordle in Irish), litreach (guess words from people saying them in 3 Irish dialects) and seafóid (basically Waffle in Irish). The games are all browser based apps so not in app stores, but DuoCards is.

ETA while DuoCards has built in flash cards, I usually make my own based on the words I learn from all the other sources, and get the translation and grammar details from teanglann.ie, tearma.ie, or nualeargais.ie

My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.