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Showing posts from January, 2010
Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever Looking forward to the new season starting Groundhog Day, I couldn't resist posting this. As two of the people who came up to speed in time to watch the previous season -- I wanted to be reasonably sure there was an actual plan to conclude it in place before jumping on board -- we (more or less happily) missed out on most of the speculation the fans were going through week to week for the first few years of the show. Between tight reruns on (then) SciFi, a borrowed season three (thanks again, Pat and Abby) and buying season four when it hit, season five was the only one we had to wait each week for a new episode. Given how they'd end each episode with an effective hook, that can be a little aggravating. Still, we've generally stayed in the realm of light fans -- speculating here and there but otherwise just letting the show unfold.
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One of those ideas that comes up from time to time has done so once again. In this case it's via a Michigan company that's looking to sell a $1.99 application that will install a character one can use as closing punctuation to mark a statement as being sarcastic . As noted, it's not a new idea. The irony mark , which is a horizontally flipped question mark,؟, goes back to the late 19th century and was intended to mark a statement as one that is to be understood on a second level, including irony and sarcasm. Much as people use emoticons in casual, written communication to at least give a clue to nuances filtered by a lack of intonation or facial expression, the idea here is to assist in conveying meaning. While the idea catches my interest, and we've definitely long since moved into an age where the limits of typography are essentially gone (I can easily remember when textbooks with elaborate mathematical expressions were inflated in cost on the basis of s
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Yes, it's highly suspect and a mostly "fast zombie"-derived formula (though Romero seemed to speed things up in his last couple outings), but this was one of those items I stumbled on and was such a quick one to run through and post...