What do you reckon? Is he trying to go for a domination victory without ever saying “MY THREATS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS!”? His track record shows that he’s arrogant enough to
think that the strategy of simply renaming things until they’re yours is actually viable!
After I saw Mexico’s response to Google following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, this stupid comic literally
came to me in a dream.
Adapts screenshots from Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991 DOS version), public domain assets from
OpenGameArt.org, and AI-assisted images of world leaders on account of the fact that if I drew pixel-art world leaders without assistance then
you’d be even less-likely to be able to recognise them.
Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:
“grinning face” is also “beaming face”
“beaming face” is also a “smiling face”
“open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver
“big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator
“cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”
…
The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as
quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For
example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷
What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are
that when people use them for their figurative meaning, there’s a chance that they have a different interpretation than others (this is, of course, a risk with any communication,
although the effect is perhaps more-pronounced when abbreviating1),
and
when people use them for the literal image they show, it can appear differently: consider the inevitable confusion that arises from the fact that Twitter earlier this year
changed the “gun” emoji, which everybody changed to look like a water pistol
to the extent that the Emoji Consortium changed its official description, which is likely to be used by screen readers, to “water pistol”, back to looking like a firearm. 🤦
But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To
You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:
My phone talks, so it reads everything out. And just to give you an insight, even the emojis… if you use an emoji it tells you what the emoji is… and the smiley face – the main
smiley face – specifically for blind people… that one is called “smiling face with normal eyes”. I don’t know if I’m expected to use the smiling face with sunglasses?
I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.
Footnotes
1 I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of
interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their
dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad,
fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.
Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100
To Whom It May Concern,
Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at
school.
Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions,
please feel free to email me.
Thanks in advance;
Dan Q
To:
“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>
From:
“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>
Subject:
Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100
Dear Dan Q,
We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.
Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060
To:
“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>
From:
“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>
Subject:
Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997
Date:
Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100
But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?
Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what
my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different
taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.
And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!
You’ve probably been taught that you can tell the difference between African Elephants and Indian Elephants by looking at their head and ears. The larger African Elephants have a
rounded cranium and big ears (with a shape somewhat like the continent of Africa itself!), whereas the smaller Indian Elephants have a two-lobed skull and diminutive ears that tuck
tidily alongside their heads.
If you’re inside the elephant or have access to an extraordinarily-large X-ray machine, you can also differentiate by counting the ribs: African Elephants tend to have 21
pairs, Indian Elephants only 20.
But suppose you don’t manage to get a glimpse at the front end of the elephant as it passes you. What hope is there of identifying the species? Well: you can look at its back!
Never forget: this back belongs to an African Elephant.
African Elephants, it turns out, have a concave back, whereas Indian elephants have a convex back (a bit like a hump)!
You could probably come up with some kind of mnemonic if you wanted, like “African Elephants back down when Indian Elephants back up.” But perhaps a better one than that.
I was having difficulty sleeping one night during the UK‘s current heatwave, so naturally I opted to practice my newfound ability to distinguish elephant species by their spines. Indian, Indian,
African, Indian, African, African… etc.
And then I came across this one:
What is this thing?
African Elephant backs are concave. Indian Elephant backs are convex. But what does it mean when you see a flat elephant’s back?
I’m testing a handful of highly-experimental new features on my personal website using multivariate (“A/B”) testing.
“Dark Mode” is just one of the new features I’m testing out.
If you visit within the next day or so you’re likely to be randomly-selected to try out one of them. (If you’re not selected, you can manually enable one of the
experiments.)
I’d love to hear your feedback on these Very Serious New Features! Let me know which one(s) you see and whether you think they should become permanent fixtures on my site.
I was told Windows installation should take less than 20 minutes, but these ones have been sitting outside my house all day while the builders sit on the roof and listen to the radio.
Do I need a faster processor? #TechSupport
“Tank sleepy. But Tank listen your idea in case it tasty idea.”
I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and
playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine1, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her
friend.
If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I
do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a
work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.
“Oh! Is you! Hurrah!” /buttsniffing intensifies/
Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.
I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing
and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a
profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.
Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose,
and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device
is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.
Seeking investors for a genuinely terrible crazy business idea. Photo courtesy SHVETS production.
The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???
Footnotes
1 Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out
of.
The other night, Ruth and I were talking about collective nouns (y’know, like a herd of cows or a flock of sheep) and came
up with the somewhat batty idea of solitary nouns. Like collective nouns, but for a singular subject (one cow, sheep, or whatever).
Then, we tried to derive what the words could be. Some of the results write themselves.1
Mooving right on…
I’d be lion if I said I wasn’t proud of this one.
I’m pollen out all the collective nouns now!
Some of them involve removing one or more letters from the collective noun to invent a shorter word to be the solitary noun.
They stay healthy by working out and getting vaccinated, both of which give them tough anty bodies.
The sound of an oven is a cackling: “When shall I one meet again?”
Eventually it grows up into a star, which are a lot louder.2For others, we really had to stretch the concept by mutating words in ways that “felt right”, using phoenetic spellings, or even inventing collective nouns so that we
could singularise them:
For more goose-related wordplay, take a gander at this blog post from a few years back.
Getting smashed doesn’t have to end with bumps and boozers.3
Blast but not least.
Did I miss any obvious ones?
Footnotes
1 Also consider “parliament of owls” ➔ “politician of owl”, “troop of monkeys” ➔ “soldier
of monkey”, “band of gorillas” ➔ “musician of gorilla”. Hey… is that where that band‘s name come from?
2 Is “cluster of stars” ➔ “luster of star” anything?
3 Ruth enjoyed the singularised “a low of old bollock”, too.
103: Early Hints (“I’m not sure this can last forever.”)
300: Multiple Choices (“There are so many ways I can do better than you.”)
303: See Other (“You should date other people.”)
304: Not Modified (“With you, I feel like I’m stagnating.”)
402: Payment Required (“I am a prostitute.”)
403: Forbidden (“You don’t get this any more.”)
406: Not Acceptable (“I could never introduce you to my parents.”)
408: Request Timeout (“You keep saying you’ll propose but you never do.”)
409: Conflict (“We hate each other.”)
410: Gone (ghosted)
411: Length Required (“Your penis is too small.”)
413: Payload Too Large (“Your penis is too big.”)
416: Range Not Satisfied (“Our sex life is boring and repretitive.”)
425: Too Early (“Your premature ejaculation is a problem.”)
428: Precondition Failed (“You’re still sleeping with your ex-!?”)
429: Too Many Requests (“You’re so demanding!”)
451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons (“I’m married to somebody else.”)
502: Bad Gateway (“Your pussy is awful.”)
508: Loop Detected (“We just keep fighting.”)
With thanks to Ruth for the conversation that inspired these pictures, and apologies to the rest of the Internet for creating them.
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