Saturday, November 29, 2008

THE FURIES OF A THOUSAND CAPSLOCKS!!!

Oh goody, another Donut rage about how people on the interweb suck, get ready folks!
Not really this time, it's more about how the virtual world uses special symbols and combinations to such emotions and feelings that normally the tone of voice would do. Such as many people see when my title is read, normally everything in capslock would mean that I'm furious or mad at someone/thing. For the most part it would make sense, but with the keyboard flaw ( the capslock by the a which is commonly hit) it can be misunderstood which will ruin a conversation very easy.
So when someone is yelling, something is in capitals, and when the person is talking normal, it's exactly what I'm typing. But then what is used when a whisper is intended? Most would used something to the effect *whisper* which if the virtual world doesn't have emotes then it is also used for emotes such as *sigh*, which is very common (check my his last blog's title if you don't believe him...). That's mostly for roleplaying unless it can enhance someone's statement, such as the sigh.
Since the subject of symbols and emotes, the one that took me the longest time to learn was the smiley. I would have never thought of making a face from a colon and other symbols to create a vast array of faces to express people. Faces aren't the only thing that can be made, for example, a < and a 3 can mean a heart, which shows the writer's love or coy within the sentence. The final thing that was developed for speed was acronyms such as brb,afk and most common lol. All have meanings that all Internet taught people know, and are used for quick understanding and laziness. Other uses can be w/, w/o, and j/k which all use the backslash and are very common. The letters are words that combined to make a phrase or word that makes sense, for example w/o is WithOut(the capitals are to show). It's morphed into other such and create ...1337 speak.
But it's unstoppable, everyone is infected by it and use it as a daily and accepted way. And for most of it, the symbols and emotes are fine since they invoke the emotion of the writer to replace facial/body gestures and voice volume. But the 1337 speak and other garbage is almost unacceptable, which only provokes laziness and removes the writer's emotion and diminishes their vocabulary.

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