a year ago, i accidentally purchased a yearlong subscription to geoguessr when all i wanted was a one month subscription. i resolved this problem by, rather than sending an email to customer support, playing a lot of geoguessr. oops.
for those unfamiliar, geoguessr is a game that drops you into a random street view location and tasks you with identifying your location on the map. you are scored based on how close your guess was (higher is better). depending on the mode, you can move around to try to gain additional information, but with time limits involved, the more pieces of info you can make use of, the easier the game will be. as a result, there are various "metas" that players will learn to, say, know which eastern european country they are in based on the shape of the bollards on the side of the road.
now, this was not my first time playing a lot of geoguessr. back during a four-month stretch in 2023, i played enough to at least identify the location's country correctly 90+% of the time without usually needing to move around too much (this is not very helpful if the country is, say, russia or brazil, for obvious reasons).
learning to identify regions within a country can vary dramatically in difficulty. for the united states, learning to identify license plates through the blur that google places over them is pretty doable with a small time investment put into flashcards and does wonders for your score! for russia, your best bet is memorizing a 200+ page google doc teaching you how to identify the month in which each region's coverage was taken, the color of the google car used to take the coverage in each region, and the shape of the antenna on the car used to take the coverage in each region. you then have to be able to combine those three pieces of knowledge to narrow down your guess (i have not done this... yet). All this... to end up with regions the size of entire european countries that you can still lose lots of points on. no thank you.
brazil is somewhat of a middle ground. a few locations have certain tells that will lock down a small area quickly (the state of espirito santo near rio de janeiro has some beautiful mountains that are instantly recognizable once you've seen them before). many others do not. the default recommendation for people trying to quickly identify which state they are in is to memorize the area codes (phone numbers are found on store fronts throughout the country).
there are 67 area codes to memorize, and though they are grouped by their first digit, the second digit doesn't follow any standard pattern. as a result, i put off learning this for ages (until literally last night).
what i used to do this is known as the dominic system. the dominic system is a mnemonic system that maps pairs of digits to letters (21 => ba), which are then used to trigger mnemonics chosen by the user (in my case, an image of batman). according to the creator, people are more memorable mnemonics than objects, so usually all 100 entries tend to be of people (technically, the system maps to people performing actions, not just people, but the simplification here works for the explanation). out of boredom a few years ago, unrelated to geoguessr, i started filling out my own dominic list and maybe completed ~30 of the needed 100 mnemonics before i found it too difficult to come up with memorable characters that fit (you try finding someone that works for nn! i ended up stealing jake peralta from brooklyn *n*ine-*n*ine from someone else's list). given that i now had a use for the dominic system, i spent a few hours finishing up this list yesterday, then set to work on mapping the mnemonics to the post codes (batman fights crime in the polar opposite of gotham: rio de janeiro, obviously).
i still don't quite understand it, but after going through every area code once, intentionally stopping and finding some relation between the person chosen by the mnemonic and the cities on the map or the shape of the region, i was able to get 62/67 right on my first try?? i did have to consult my mnemonic list to remember the person linked to each acronym a few times, but that alone was enough to trigger my memory of where they were assigned?? i changed the settings on the quiz to hide the borders of the area code regions and still got 65/67 right immediately (missing two due to being slightly off on where the region border was)??
this process (once i had the mnemonic list in place, which i can re-use for other countries) only took an hour for the initial memorization! and then i just, never forgot them! i tried it again this morning and got everything right! what! witchcraft!
for some examples of my mnemonics and how they helped here:
88=hh=hulk hogan flexing his muscles. region 88 looks like a bicep.
85=he=he-man raising his sword to the sky. he-man is strong, so naturally belongs with hulk hogan, and raising his sword to the sky makes me thing of being higher up, so he's in the region about hulk hogan's arm.
43=dc=george w bush (dc=>washington dc=>43rd president is george w bush, it's quite a stretch but it works for me). region 43 is the region in the 4x cluster with the city named londrina (which looks like london, which is the seat of gov for the uk, another stretch, which has counter-intuitively made this one of the most memorable mnemonics)
91=na=neil armstrong planting a flag. i've just managed to convince myself (for the purposes of the mnemonic) that the 91 area would be a great place for brazil to launch rockets from, which makes it super easy to jump from neil armstrong to clicking here.
i did not expect this to be this quick of a process, but now i'm wondering how many other things i can adapt this to. i'm very excited to find out, and might post updates here for anything particularly interesting.