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Complex Numbers #1082815 added January 26, 2025 at 9:08am
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Revisited: "Unwritten, Expanded"
My weekly roll of the dice landed, this time, on an entry the significance of which I could not have known at the time: "Unwritten, Expanded" 
Written on December 14, 2019, it's just over five years old.
I'm back! Actually been back a while, but it's taken me this long to recover enough from my trip to concentrate on a blog entry.
The entry was my first in over a week. The significance is that it was the last time I wrote anything like that, because it's the entry that began my current >5 year daily blogging streak. It was also only ten days after the subject of my last "Revisited" post. Random numbers do things we don't expect, like clustering.
As for the actual subject of the entry, of course it's a riff on an article, one which still exists . The article is about trends; as I said, this was over five years ago, before covfefe, and before Twitter became Xitter (pronounced "shitter"), so it's likely everything in it is out of date.
Article headline: 'Use at least one Emoji per text'
Me: I, and the people I text with regularly (a select few), use emojis sparingly, if at all. We also use complete words, spelled correctly (absent the inevitable occasional typo), and proper punctuation.
There have been arguments about whether one should use periods at the end of a text message. My answer: Yes, absolutely, if you're texting a complete sentence. Younger folks say it makes you seem "curt" or whatever. You know what's curt? Fucking emojis. Younger folks aren't always right, and they don't get to make rules. That's the job of us oldsters.
And here's a rule I made that I'd like to see enforced: no more vertically-oriented video. Ever. If I see a vertical video, I ignore it. I don't care if it's a warning about an incoming tsunami or something cute your cat did. (One exception is rocket launches, where it makes sense. Another is video of a CEO jumping out of a skyscraper.)
Me: If someone has my phone number, I expect they might call at some point. That's okay. As long as they don't expect me to answer, especially if they're not on my contact list. Any unidentified number is a health insurance telemarketer, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sure I mentioned this somewhere, but there was a period when I was getting dozens of calls per day from telemarketers. Maybe I put my phone number somewhere I shouldn't, but don't blame the victim (me). That's reduced now to maybe once a week, but I still get scam calls of different sorts 2-3 times a day, on average. Consequently, I don't answer my phone unless I know the number or am expecting a call from, like, a doctor or whatever.
Me: So... wait... we're supposed to, on the one hand, condense our texts into emojis and "u" for "you" and acronyms such as IDK or LOL or whatevs, but you're going to get pissed because someone typed "K" for "OK?"
That wasn't the only "rule" I found to be stupid and inconsistent.
The entry continues, with me mostly getting more and more agitated about these arbitrary and changeable "rules," but I don't have any further comments on what I wrote back then. I'll just add one of my own about punctuation in text messages:
Except in truly extreme circumstances, one ? or ! (not "and;" "or") is more than sufficient. Also, if you end each of your texts with ... I will end up ignoring you. I actually don't care if you end a text with a period/full stop or not, but don't give me shit about it when I do.
So, in conclusion, the rules might have changed since then—I neither know nor care—but one thing hasn't: my lack of patience with arbitrary "rules." Except, of course, the ones I make up. |
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