Learned some Chinese internet slang. âsbâ
Someone on Discord added me, Iâd soon learn that they did so âaccidentallyâ by typing in the wrong username (yeah, sure, must have been all those other people with nishnaabemowin usernames) and asking me if I also played âIK.â
After they apologized for disturbing me, they then proceeded to tell me that they were 25 years old and they lived in Hong Kong. I should also point out here that their username was âErinâ and their profile pic was an anime girl.
After I told them I was 79 years old and from Beardmore, they then said my country must be beautiful. I told them it was a shithole but we made do. They then tried to bring the conversation back around to âIK,â all but prompting me to ask them what it was with a big shiny glowing red sign.
I was already pretty sure it was some kind of scam, and they probably led with referring to the game with just an acronym instead of the name as some kind of subtle marketing tactic to make the game seem more important or prominent than it is by suggesting to you, the intended mark, that the game is such a big deal that strangers refer to it as just an acronym, since theyâre talking about it so much or it is so well known, and so triggering FOMO.
I was actually somewhat surprised to learn that this game was not a crypto game, and just some schlocky mobile game with predatory microtransactions. I will also not be saying what game it was, but you can probably guess in less then 3 guesses what IK stands for.
Anyway I then proceeded to ask them if they thought the founder of the development studio that produced the game, æć„, was actually poisoned, which is the only interesting thing I found on the studioâs wikipedia page. I then concluded that it must be legit because his poisoner was sentenced to death in 2024. This overall just confused them because they hadnât heard about it.
I then admitted to them that I knew what they were doing, and that I knew they were probably someone not being paid very much to pretend to be a girl for viral marketing of this crappy game, and that it wasnât going to work. They seemed to have added me from the Factorio discord, and so I also tried to tell them they werenât going to find a whole lot of people who play Factorio that also want to play IK. And I even admitted that Iâm not from Beardmore. They then said âsb,â and then also seemed to realize I wouldnât know what that meant, and so clarified by sending the Chinese characters that it is short for, which is ć»éŒ, which means âIdiotâ and is apparently a harsh insult.
I asked them if they were even actually a woman but then they blocked me.
