`=v= Dingbats =v=`

Many have asked why I put those "=v=" and "=o=" characters in front of paragraphs in my email and news messages. I'm happy to explain it, but first I'll have to switch to a different typeface.

=v= There, that's better.

        At first I wrote messages using the style I'd been taught in high
school, indenting the first line of each paragraph.  I was posting to Usenet,
and I immediately fell prey to the notorious Usenet line-eater bug, which ate
up a large chunk of any message that started with whitespace.

~~~     So I just threw some tildes in front of the first paragraph, which
solved the problem handily.  These are the ancestors of today's dingbats.
However, my paragraphs were mighty wide, hard to read, and not all that
good-looking to my eyes.  

I learned that human factors testing found wide paragraphs hard
to read, so I shrunk their width a bit (64 characters max), and
started writing much like everyone else, with left-justified
paragraphs and a wide margin on the right.

                One day, as a joke more than anything else, I started writing
                my stuff way over here, still 64 characters wide, but with
                the margin on the left instead of the right.  People went
                ballistic, and complained mightily:  "What's wrong with the
                left side of the page?"  (Well, what's wrong with the right
                side of the page?)

Amused, and encouraged by some newly-acquired fans, I started
 doing something that was more fun and perhaps even weirder:
  a style somebody named "Continental Drift Indentation."
   I wrote an Emacs macro to automate it.  There were more
    complaints -- but also some howls of approval!  Somebody
     wrote a "dejymification" Emacs macro to undo it.  A few
      people sent earnest pleas that I change my ways, because
       they found my messages difficult to read.
.-.
|I|t was for the benefit of the latter group that I switched to
`-' an Illuminated Manuscript style, putting an ASCII box around
    the first letter of every paragraph.  A bit ostentatious, I
    agree, but at this point I had fans to think of.  Alas, the
    folks who went ballistic before went even more ballistic!
    The dejymification macro was altered to undo this new style.
.-.
 )I) continued to play with the illuminated characters.  Perhaps
( ( the nuttiest-looking message I ever sent was a story about
 ) ) slugs getting into my cats' dinnner bowls.  Each paragraph
`x' was illuminated with an ASCII rendition of a slug eating a
    morsel of cat chow.  (Slugs have fearsome-looking rows of
    little tiny teeth, which I can't really draw very well at
    this low resolution.)

/o/ Technology marched on, however, and people started reading
their messages with programs that used variable-width fonts.
Even some of my fans complained that they couldn't read my
messages anymore.  So I switched to a more subdued style:
starting each paragraph with some sort of ASCII "dingbat."
By the way, I managed to keep my paragraphs at 64 characters
wide throughout all these changes.

=o= In theory, my dingbats will be any three characters that
look nice together.  In practice, I seem to like dingbats
with an equals sign on either side.  Don't they look dandy?

≈✧≈ As support for Unicode has become more widespread, the
number of characters suitable for dingbats has increased.

                              =+=

=v= Honestly, I don't think it's such a big deal that I like to spruce up my ASCII text a bit. I've been accused of everything from egomania to sabotage for using these things: egomania just because I don't type like everyone else, and sabotage because some confused soul thought they wreck quoted-printable format.

I have to say I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that so few people have done anything playful with their text. There are some nifty ASCII art .sig files, and the occasional zealot who CAPITALIZES or _underscores_ or *bolds* every other *WORD* for _PROPER_EMPHASIS_!!! -- but for the most part it's a sea of left-justified text out there.

C'mon, folks! Have some fun with your plaintext! Let's see what you've got!

=+=

`An Alternative Explanation`

Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.strips From: "nancy g." <nancyg©tiac.net> Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 20:18:35 -0500 Subject: Re: Luann Possible Spoiler

I always had thought it was a cat's mouth (or nose), with whiskers sticking out on either side. I figured those who objected to it were simply Dog People. Warning: ASCII art follows. Those who are offended by illustrations made out of punctuation marks should move on to the next note NOW. Here's how I was picturing the creature and its friends: ^ ^ @ @ =o= (cat) ^ ^ - - =o= (sleeping cat) ^ ^ + + =o= (ex-cat) ^ ^ O O =o= (little orphan annie cat) ... Well, you get the idea.

=+=

`A True Story`

My Illuminated Manuscript style caught the attention of the legendary BIFF! Somebody complained about my use of illuminated letters in alt.tv.simpsons, referring to them as "those damn circles." Here's what BIFF! had to say in response:

Newsgroups: alt.tv.simpsons,alt.alt,alt.fan.biff,misc.misc From: BIFF@bit.net (Classic BIFF) Subject: Re: Those Damn Circles Summary: MAKE EM STAY!!! Keywords: THEIR AWEUSM!!! Date: Sun, 02 Dec 1990 08:04:48 GMT Organization: BIFFVM UNIVURSITEE

On 20 Nov 1990 18:58:45 GMT, brian©cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Brian Hoffman) said: > I cast another vote against those annoying f*cking little circles. They're > almost enough to make me unsubscribe to every newsgroup he posts in. HEY BRIAN I"M BIFF!!! I KNOW THOSE SERKELS ARE SUCK CUZ THERE SO BORING BUT DON"T UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS BBOARD BECUZ OF THEM!!! I BET HELL MAKE THEM LOTS BETTER REEL SOON!!! > Distinctive .sigs are great, but the circles are another problem altogether. HEY BRIAN DO YOU RELY THINK SO??? AWEUSM!!! I HAVE A RELY K00L SIGNACHER AND I HOPE YUOU LIKE IT!!! WELLL I HAVE TO GO NOW BYE BRIAN!!! COWABUNGA!!!

(This was followed by BIFF's distinctive 489-line .sig file.)

HELP! MY TYPEWRITER IS BROKEN!!!
-- E.E. CUMMINGS