THE ASCII CONSPIRACY
Jan. 15th, 2003 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sepdet(finally remembering to use the cut function, which with my level of spam I should do every time)
[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<font ="times">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
(finally remembering to use the cut function, which with my level of spam I should do every time)
<lj-cut text="Allatwan has a fit of being silly"><FONT ="Times">I was just alerted to a terrifying phenomenon.
Our letters are vanishing!
A very few of us remember the beginning of this great catastrophe, but few then realized it was part of an alien conspiracy, or could imagine what was to come.
The QWERTY keyboard design was foisted on us by which all the most commonly-used letters are positioned as inconveniently as possible. DVORAK tried to combat the menace, but in the end was overwhelmed. Letter keys on typewriters wore out one by one, until we were left with vague insubstantial and utterly illegible shapes.
To combat this growing threat, ASCII code was invented in the 60s, an attempt to preserve and protect our alphabet and symbols by backing them up on magnetic tape and defining them using cutting-edge computer technology.
But even there the aliens were at work. Characters were hidden away in odd corners, so they didn't make the cut. Whither the cent sign? Whither curly quotes? What happened to this poor, emaciated ', once adorned with a graceful flourish? Meanwhile, sinister, meaningless characters like | and ¬ were added, along with the hitherto-unseen \ and an unholy posse of parentheses far more than any but the most abstract mathematician would ever need. And for a while, our poor zero was nearly blotted right off the keyboard, an ugly slash across its face witness to its wounds. The g-key began to sound the alarm. But did we hear its call?
Nevertheless, ASCII and daisy wheels helped stem the forces of litteracide.
It is unknown whether dot matrix printing was a stopgap desperation measure, or another assault on our letters trying to deconstruct them down to their constituent molecules. I tend to think the former, since perforated holes were added along the sides of the pages, meant to keep the paper from being spirited away altogether. And for a while, it looked as if even lowercase might be lost. So desperate were we that we had to strip our letters of all beauty.
But eventually, in the nineties, we began to make headway. High-ASCII characters and fonts were devised just in time. Curly quotes came back to flourish, and the battered cent sign returned to us, although only a shadow of what it once was -- for in the interim, people have almost forgotten its existence. The zero's wounds were healed. The alarm bell of the g-key fell silent. With the advent of Palatino, our proud alphanumeric army was returned to its former state of grace and strength.
</FONT><FONT="Geneva">
But not for long. Thwarted in their attempts to obliterate <I>litterae</I>, the aliens launched a new sinister plan. What about the Web? Aha! We shall reduce them back to the original ASCII characters again, so that if anyone tries to write a proper m-dash, it will appear as gibberish on other browsers and platforms! Curly quotes will again be banished! Even the space character will become shy and apologetic, fleeing titles, names, URLs! Paragraph indents will be ruthlessly devoured! And worst of all...
<I>Where did out serifs go??!!!</I> I tell you, at the end of the decade of Palatino, Zapf Zingbats, and Chancery, we were almost beaten back into the sea. Chicago and Charcoal alone were sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught. And even they show their bruises, weakening until they were no more than Geneva, Helvetica.
And now a desperate battle is being waged over the very soul of the U.S. economy: the dollar sign. Creeping decay is stealthily oozing across the keyboard. Those of us of the pre-computer generation remember a very different dollar sign from you young people. Once, it was braced and banded with two vertical bars-- pillars of Hercules, some said; pillars of Kings and Faith, said others, while various legends still circulate about an S with a U superimposed, whose lower joint was slowly eroded away.
The latter was a sign of what was to come.
How many of us even noticed when the letter-eating acid dissolved the first vertical bar, one of the two pillars of the almighty dollar? Its demise went unmourned, unnoted. And the decay still continues. The remaining vertical stroke is becoming scarce: already in many places, all that's left are the very tips of it, top and bottom; the interior of the S sign is left naked and defenseless. The Yen and Euro have attempted to step in and offer support to their suffering comrade, adding structural supports to E and Y, but the damage has been done.
A final battle is being waged across the internet. As letters begin to falter and fail, we are forced to substitute numbers, other letters, even the vile backslashes introduced by this alien conspiracy, to replace the missing characters. 12 7|-|1$ 7|-|3 3|\||)?
You may argue that even in the distant past, letters changed, altered, disappeared -- after all, the thorn character is known only to scholars -- but I tell you these mass extinctions are more than we've ever faced. The hole in the ozone layer and the hole in the dollar sign are one and the same, and we may face total extinctions of entire fonts, entire FONDs, if we sit back and do nothing. We must take a stand, here and now, or the plague will spread to every letter on the keyboard. When O becomes ), L becomes |, A becomes ^, and H becomes -, it will be too late.
And yet in the midst of this crisis, the Bush Administration has been loosening typographical standards, claiming that the Middle East conflict makes it imperative that America be allowed to exploit all sources of typography. But he is clearly being controlled by the powerful Sans Serif lobby, which helped put him in office. The U.S. military is spending millions of dollars and wasting letters every day in the form of meaningless acronyms. They are still remembering World War II, when the war ironically ushered in a period of prosperity. But war has grown more expensive, and we no longer have a limitless litteral supply to give acronyms even to the tiniest PT-109, HMV, or F16.
In their blindness, the government is exascerbating the situation even more and forcing citizens to be party to this crime: license plates, tax forms, and drivers' licenses are further eroding the letter supply. Corporations have joined in, devouring vast quantities of letters in serial numbers, registration numbers, and the names for car models, cameras, computers, everything under the sun. Nor is the ivory tower immune to this stupidity, for algebra and degrees have been gobbling up letters ever since the printing press was invented.
Therefore I urge you all to write your congresspeople in support of the Endangered Letters Act. It's not too late. If we act now, we may be able to preserve the remaining pockets of Park Avenue and New York. And someday, with care and diligence, we might be able to release Alice from captivity, and reintroduce the noble division sign into the wild.</FONT></lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="Allatwan has a fit of being silly"><FONT ="Times">I was just alerted to a terrifying phenomenon.
Our letters are vanishing!
A very few of us remember the beginning of this great catastrophe, but few then realized it was part of an alien conspiracy, or could imagine what was to come.
The QWERTY keyboard design was foisted on us by which all the most commonly-used letters are positioned as inconveniently as possible. DVORAK tried to combat the menace, but in the end was overwhelmed. Letter keys on typewriters wore out one by one, until we were left with vague insubstantial and utterly illegible shapes.
To combat this growing threat, ASCII code was invented in the 60s, an attempt to preserve and protect our alphabet and symbols by backing them up on magnetic tape and defining them using cutting-edge computer technology.
But even there the aliens were at work. Characters were hidden away in odd corners, so they didn't make the cut. Whither the cent sign? Whither curly quotes? What happened to this poor, emaciated ', once adorned with a graceful flourish? Meanwhile, sinister, meaningless characters like | and ¬ were added, along with the hitherto-unseen \ and an unholy posse of parentheses far more than any but the most abstract mathematician would ever need. And for a while, our poor zero was nearly blotted right off the keyboard, an ugly slash across its face witness to its wounds. The g-key began to sound the alarm. But did we hear its call?
Nevertheless, ASCII and daisy wheels helped stem the forces of litteracide.
It is unknown whether dot matrix printing was a stopgap desperation measure, or another assault on our letters trying to deconstruct them down to their constituent molecules. I tend to think the former, since perforated holes were added along the sides of the pages, meant to keep the paper from being spirited away altogether. And for a while, it looked as if even lowercase might be lost. So desperate were we that we had to strip our letters of all beauty.
But eventually, in the nineties, we began to make headway. High-ASCII characters and fonts were devised just in time. Curly quotes came back to flourish, and the battered cent sign returned to us, although only a shadow of what it once was -- for in the interim, people have almost forgotten its existence. The zero's wounds were healed. The alarm bell of the g-key fell silent. With the advent of Palatino, our proud alphanumeric army was returned to its former state of grace and strength.
</FONT><FONT="Geneva">
But not for long. Thwarted in their attempts to obliterate <I>litterae</I>, the aliens launched a new sinister plan. What about the Web? Aha! We shall reduce them back to the original ASCII characters again, so that if anyone tries to write a proper m-dash, it will appear as gibberish on other browsers and platforms! Curly quotes will again be banished! Even the space character will become shy and apologetic, fleeing titles, names, URLs! Paragraph indents will be ruthlessly devoured! And worst of all...
<I>Where did out serifs go??!!!</I> I tell you, at the end of the decade of Palatino, Zapf Zingbats, and Chancery, we were almost beaten back into the sea. Chicago and Charcoal alone were sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught. And even they show their bruises, weakening until they were no more than Geneva, Helvetica.
And now a desperate battle is being waged over the very soul of the U.S. economy: the dollar sign. Creeping decay is stealthily oozing across the keyboard. Those of us of the pre-computer generation remember a very different dollar sign from you young people. Once, it was braced and banded with two vertical bars-- pillars of Hercules, some said; pillars of Kings and Faith, said others, while various legends still circulate about an S with a U superimposed, whose lower joint was slowly eroded away.
The latter was a sign of what was to come.
How many of us even noticed when the letter-eating acid dissolved the first vertical bar, one of the two pillars of the almighty dollar? Its demise went unmourned, unnoted. And the decay still continues. The remaining vertical stroke is becoming scarce: already in many places, all that's left are the very tips of it, top and bottom; the interior of the S sign is left naked and defenseless. The Yen and Euro have attempted to step in and offer support to their suffering comrade, adding structural supports to E and Y, but the damage has been done.
A final battle is being waged across the internet. As letters begin to falter and fail, we are forced to substitute numbers, other letters, even the vile backslashes introduced by this alien conspiracy, to replace the missing characters. 12 7|-|1$ 7|-|3 3|\||)?
You may argue that even in the distant past, letters changed, altered, disappeared -- after all, the thorn character is known only to scholars -- but I tell you these mass extinctions are more than we've ever faced. The hole in the ozone layer and the hole in the dollar sign are one and the same, and we may face total extinctions of entire fonts, entire FONDs, if we sit back and do nothing. We must take a stand, here and now, or the plague will spread to every letter on the keyboard. When O becomes ), L becomes |, A becomes ^, and H becomes -, it will be too late.
And yet in the midst of this crisis, the Bush Administration has been loosening typographical standards, claiming that the Middle East conflict makes it imperative that America be allowed to exploit all sources of typography. But he is clearly being controlled by the powerful Sans Serif lobby, which helped put him in office. The U.S. military is spending millions of dollars and wasting letters every day in the form of meaningless acronyms. They are still remembering World War II, when the war ironically ushered in a period of prosperity. But war has grown more expensive, and we no longer have a limitless litteral supply to give acronyms even to the tiniest PT-109, HMV, or F16.
In their blindness, the government is exascerbating the situation even more and forcing citizens to be party to this crime: license plates, tax forms, and drivers' licenses are further eroding the letter supply. Corporations have joined in, devouring vast quantities of letters in serial numbers, registration numbers, and the names for car models, cameras, computers, everything under the sun. Nor is the ivory tower immune to this stupidity, for algebra and degrees have been gobbling up letters ever since the printing press was invented.
Therefore I urge you all to write your congresspeople in support of the Endangered Letters Act. It's not too late. If we act now, we may be able to preserve the remaining pockets of Park Avenue and New York. And someday, with care and diligence, we might be able to release Alice from captivity, and reintroduce the noble division sign into the wild.</FONT></lj-cut>
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-01-15 09:33 pm (UTC)And also Extremely Entertaining.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Other RoseÒ
HAH!
Date: 2003-01-28 02:21 pm (UTC)HI. :)
-- LAM, that wild and whacky former Fianna Philodox named Megan