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[Descan]

What he said. :v

/erases paragraphs

[wierd]

So it's had time to actually stabilize then?

In that case, I wonder what the West African Pidgin version of a grammar nazi is like...  That will be my new WTF.

[Yoink]

I was learning Japanese, heard this particular site was good, and it had a free trial so I started it. Haven't had time to go back, and they're sending me daily reminders. However the WTF is that the recent emails have started to take a ... passive aggressive tone about me not logging in:

Do you really want to learn Japanese?

I've just taken a look at your study profile, and I can see your progress has stalled!

[Button: Get back to learning]

Before you even start to give me reasons, I will go ahead and debunk three of the most common excuses students give me when they stop learning

Go fuck your self, I don't need to give your company "reasons" or "excuses". now i just don't want to use your product at all.

Holy crap, it's like the "High Expectations Asian Parent" stereotype personified. O_O


Speaking of email-related WTFs, I had to rummage through mine to find and print a ticket earlier, and I noticed a lot of emails about resetting my Roblox account password. This wasn't in my spam folder. I suppose I could have made a Roblox account for some reason long ago and forgotten about it, and now somebody's either trying to steal it or simply flood me with annoying emails... or it's just spam or a scam that managed to sneak past my filter.

[Reelya]

RMIT researcher in Melbourne recently came up with a new font called Sans Forgetica. It's based on research showing that reading some fonts cause you to retain more information than others, so they iterated and tested fonts.

The WTF is exactly how awful the font is to read. The trick to boosting memory is in fact making it require a painful amount of concentration to read every word. Sans Forgetica has big chunks missing from the letters forcing you to mentally fill in the gaps and concentrate on what you're reading.

As a pro-tip Comic Sans actually has a better memory-retention rate than other more popular fonts. Although Monotype Corsiva also has a similar rate of memory-retention in studies and is less awful than the other two fonts I mentioned.

[overseer05-15]

I've never understood the vitriolic loathing people hold toward comic sans.

[Tack]

When it's in small pt. it actually looks rather nice. Blow it up to 24 and I think you'd see the issues however.

[wierd]

Typeface snobs are bit like fashion snobs, or interior decorating snobs.

At one point in the past, great care was taken to take readability, reproducibility and margin/gutter prediction into consideration when designing typefaces.  This is where you got things like Helvetica. 

In the modern world, you have just "aesthetic snobbery", which does not really factor such things--- and you also have the "Avant-garde" "art" fonts, and their ilk thrown into the mix.

Comic-Sans was created for a specific purpose-- Specifically, to emulate the kind of flowing print typeface used in golden age comic books. There was a kind of manual printing (as in, penmanship type printing) aesthetic that came with that, which is what Comic-Sans tries to emulate in a more or less standardized and reproducible form.

Spoiler: Example (click to show/hide)

(See also, some of the architectural/blueprint fonts out there, which do the same thing, except with a different aesthetic.)

Given that more professional papers should not be handwritten, or carry a hand-written aesthetic, (no matter how prim and proper that handwriting would have to be to emulate comic sans), comic-sans is a poor choice.  More "lead-block typeface" is historically the correct choice, which is why things like Helvetica (and clones), and Times New Roman are preferred.

[Sebastian2203]

Well now even the washing machine is giving me ants in my hands (electricity) feeling so I had to unplug it so I could place my laundry inside and then plug it back on.

What are the chances that two electric appliances get broken in the same month to the same person?
First the toaster, now the washing machine, next time I will probably get electrocuted while typing on my keyboard or something.

[wierd]

Sounds like a faulty ground.

Get an outlet tester and see.

[TD1]

Y'all are actually acting REALLY racist about this too.

That is ridiculous. Joking about linguistic variation, or funny turns of phrase, does not make one racist. Certainly a certain race can be associated with a certain language.... but to say those who discredit the language are being racist is a calumny much greater than deserved.

[hops]

Yeah I mean we can make fun of Welsh and Scottish (which is a language) so I don't see why there should be a double standard here.

It's only when a linguistic phenomenon is an inaccurate stereotype (i.e. Ebonics) that it becomes racist IMO.

[Caz]

Yeah I mean we can make fun of Welsh and Scottish (which is a language) so I don't see why there should be a double standard here.

Scots, to be pedantic. When people talk about "talking Scottish" it's nearly always talking about Scottish English.

[Mephisto]

I don't know, I think there's a difference between a light-hearted "how is Siobhan even pronounced" and "this isn't even a real language."

[TD1]

And no doubt any argument pertaining to the latter would consist of trying to define what a language is and where certain languages are placed within that. It would not contain anything racist such as "black people speak it, therefore it is inferior."

A certain linguistic snobbishness, perhaps, of which I am often guilty myself. But racist? Tell me another one guvnor.

[hector13]

Yeah I mean we can make fun of Welsh and Scottish (which is a language) so I don't see why there should be a double standard here.

Scots, to be pedantic. When people talk about "talking Scottish" it's nearly always talking about Scottish English.

To be even more pedantic, Scots is a dialect, and also one that doesn’t have standardized rules in terms of how to spell things.

Scots Gaelic is a language, though. Not sure if people ever refer to that as “Scottish”, however.