13 ms·
Unsettling capital letters
- danohuiginn 5y agoꙮ Meet 'multi-ocular o'. This is the fever-dream of some 15th-century Russian scribe. He was writing about 'many-eyed seraphim', and decided that no ordinary O could do justice to them. Somehow, his doodle found its way into unicode. For the more sedate eye-lovers, there is also Ꙩ (monocular o), and Ꙫ (binocular o)
- nathancahill 5y agoThanks, I hate it. Page 46 (Figure 42): http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf
- ectopod 5y agoIt's horrible but effective. It doesn't really work as a normal size letter though. Perhaps someone could add a note to font designers in the Unicode spec: "This glyph is intended to be three times larger than a regular O."
- gpvos 5y agoThe binocular o is the unofficial IPA symbol for the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill.
- legerdemain 5y agoNamely, a snore noise, because the character looks like a pig's snout?
- vsareto 5y ago(ꙮ‿ꙮ)
- robertk 5y ago*_ꙮ
- grose 5y agoThis is the coolest thing I've seen today. I've been working on a game rendered using xterm.js† and this would be perfect for an enemy. † https://kawaiisolutions.itch.io/bitesize-tactics https://kawaiisolutions.itch.io/bitesize-tactics
- nullc 5y agohttps://twitter.com/mindspillage/status/1378822963017879554 https://twitter.com/mindspillage/status/1378822963017879554
- procparam 5y agoSome great contenders for new uppestcase letters on this page. http://tom7.org/lowercase/ http://tom7.org/lowercase/
- re 5y agoThe tom7 link was posted here a few weeks back, if anyone is interested in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667852 (167 comments)
- imdsm 5y agoWhen I saw this thread I went looking for the link, couldn't find it. Felt sad. Came to read comments. Saw others have posted it and now I feel content again.
- pessimizer 5y agoThe main thing we learned from this is that this a terrible problem to use machine learning for. These are far better, and readable. The algos couldn't even figure out that letters are a bunch of straight lines and neat curves.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yarcob 5y agoI had a similar thought. It's amazing what you can do with machine learning, but this example shows that you can't just throw machine learning at a problem and expect good results. And it shows that, at least for now, machine learning isn't going to make humans obsolete.
- alpaca128 5y agoIt showed that machine learning is useless if the input format doesn't match the problem. The result would probably be better if the problem was approached more on a vector graphics-based level rather than throwing a bunch of pixel clusters at the program and expecting it to figure out the underlying shapes by itself. I mean, children in school don't learn to write by copying printed letters out of a book either, instead they're shown the individual strokes and their direction step by step.
- WhyCause 5y agoOddly enough, I did the same thing with my Es when I was first learning to write my letters. I didn't have a special name for them, though.
- LanceH 5y agoMy daughter, whose first name began with an E also did this. We called it a super 'e' and absolutely didn't correct her.
- wiredfool 5y agoI definitely did this way back when I was learning.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI think children instinctively understand the zero-one-many rule :).
- drewzero1 5y agoI did this as well when I was little, and I distinctly remember thinking that if one rung on an E was good, more must be better. My kindergarten signature is still faintly legible on my library card, and contains a four-runged E (I was very proud of making it fit in the small space provided). I don't remember for sure, but I think I thought of it as an EEEEEEEE.
- withants 5y agowith ants
- gpvos 5y agoThanks, ants. Thants.
- gorgoiler 5y agoPlaying with letterforms is such a fun part of childhood. I hope that kind of pen and paper play never goes away entirely, even as we push our children to use “devices” more and more at school. This also reminds me of another form of the lesser/greater/greatest joke: Wowoman Pokemon: https://i.redd.it/1664raw5t2i01.jpg https://i.redd.it/1664raw5t2i01.jpg
- m463 5y agoI have a remarkable 2 and I'm dusting off the ability to write on "paper".
- visarga 5y agoIt really tempts you to write calligraphically.
- m463 5y agoI have to do something different, maybe press harder because some of my strokes are almost invisibly thin. Same problem with pencil. I do like a fat magic marker, and mechanical pencil is fine. Thinking about it, in the past decade or two, I haven't ever written much more than my signature. Maybe in the future writing will only be done for pleasure, like listening to vinyl.
- visarga 5y agoI spend a sizeable proportion of my work time with it in my hands, drawing my plans.
- austinjp 5y agoCuriosity rather than nit-pick: calligraphically or cursively? Or itallically? :) I've deliberately modified my handwriting a few times in my life, like many people. In my teens it was an expression of character. Later in life, I did a master's degree that required many written exams over several years, and I found i was getting hand pain and cramping from writing so much for so long, over 2 hours for example. After some Googling, I turned to itallic writing (I'm right handed), where all strokes are of the form //////. It made a huge difference and I stuck with it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Clewza313 5y ago"Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow" is my new favorite pangram. (I thought it was missing the "f", but as akersten points out it's hiding in "of"!)
- akersten 5y ago"of" has "f" though?
- Clewza313 5y agoThanks, updated!
- freetime2 5y agoAh I was wondering what the significance of that was. I figured maybe some meme I was not familiar with. Also the is the first time I have heard of a “pangram”.
- mkl 5y agoMiscounting fs when "of" is present is actually a fairly well known psychological effect (see e.g. https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain-teaser/ https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain...). It's because the sound of the letter is different, and that makes me think deaf people will be more likely to count correctly. I still prefer "The five boxing wizards jump quickly".
- euroderf 5y agoIn the 1980s in a free rag in DC, someone posted this one in the classifieds: Nymphs vex, beg quick fjord waltz. Just 27 letters <3
- dhosek 5y agoBack in the 90s when I published a typography magazine I remember one of the Adobe people (David Lemon, iirc) really loved this one. And of course the longer but no less delightful, "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."
- nojs 5y agoThe calligraphy is beautiful!
- arbirk 5y agoLove it! Nice new font with a backstory
- thrower123 5y agoWhat in the actual fuck is wrong with this site when this trash is the #1 post on the front page?
- griffoa 5y agoBrain fast food. Everyone loves it. And yeah, HN isnt what it used to be. Especially since the influx of the 50 cent army.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- P9dCddDPe7j 5y ago> 50 cent army I'd love an explanation of this...
- Clewza313 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party Although I'm not sure the CCP's tentacles extend to crafting funky new fonts.
- dang 5y agoThat breaks the site guideline against insinuations of astroturfing, shillage, brigading, foreign infiltration, etc., without evidence. Please don't do that again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We have that rule because internet users are overwhelmingly too lax about posting such claims, which are almost all based on imagination. That's poisonous for discourse here. Real astroturfing is a different story, of course, which is why the guidelines ask you to email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you think you might be seeing that. The point is that there needs to be some data or evidence—some shred of something objective—to go on. That rules out 99.9% of these cheap internet swipes. There are zillions of past explanations going back many years if anyone wants to have a look: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Edit: considering that the majority of your recent comments are like these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880468 ... it's clear that this account is abusing HN and I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to do that with.
- nathanmcrae 5y agoFor more examples of this kind of thinking pushed to its limit, see this 17th century German calligraphy book: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/17th-century-calligraphy-from-germany https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/17th-century-calli...
- mkaic 5y agoReminds me of the characters Raava and Vaatu from Nickelodeon's Legend of Korra. I love how crisp and sharp the lines are, and the amount of detail is spectacular!
- kstrauser 5y agoThat’s absolutely gorgeous! On the other end, may I present Russian cursive: https://www.boredpanda.com/russian-cursive/ https://www.boredpanda.com/russian-cursive/
- jan_Inkepa 5y agoDelicious! Thanks for the link!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brianpan 5y agoI think graffiti pushes lettering to much more extreme places (color, forms, styles). One example: https://www.instagram.com/n_o_madski/ https://www.instagram.com/n_o_madski/
- steve_adams_86 5y agoI find it incredibly fascinating how readable the end results are. They’re so wrong, so fun and attention-grabbing, and somehow it makes sense. I’d really like to understand better how it is that we can decipher language so well. At least, it seems like we’re good at it. Why can I read that font or that calligraphy? It’s almost an abomination, haha. Yet my brain troops on, parsing and processing, turning those squiggles back into what it knows. Truly fascinating stuff. I also enjoy the back story here. Exploring written language as a kid was a lot of fun. I settled on a strange way of writing, not much unlike the runes on the inside of the ring in the LOTR movies, and it was entirely arbitrary and almost an artistic decision. Totally impractical. I still write like that to this day.
- oconnor663 5y agoReminds me of this classic: > Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. I think that paragraph oversimplifies. (For example, splitting up the gh in "rghit" or the tt in "ltteers" would make them much harder to scan.) But clearly what it's getting at is true, that there are certain details of words and letters that we tend to focus on, and we can ignore quite a lot of noise as long as those details are in place.
- raverbashing 5y agoYes they have been "shuffled" except for the 1st and last and they have kept a general ordering through the word
- viceroyalbean 5y agoSomething I just noticed about that text is that "important" is spelled wrong - there is an E and no A. Searching for the first line shows me some results that have it wrong and some that have the A in there, I wonder how that came to be.
- 5y ago
- adfm 5y agoLooks like something from of Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" to me.
- germanjoey 5y agoMy five year old son does this!! He draws each extra horizontal line with ever increasing gusto...
- smallnamespace 5y agoThose are some consummate E's
- blahedo 5y agoI love this, but I find the K both in the original font and in the final version to be a bit unsatisfying (and the X to a lesser extent), because all the other letters are repeating existing letter features but K just adds in this extra stuff to be obscure. I think a stronger candidate on that one would be a vertical bar on the left and then some diagonal crosshatching (in the V/W family) derived from the two legs of the K. Possibly K and X would have identical or near-identical cross-hatching patterns except the K would have the vertical bar on the left.
- ansk 5y agoK (as well as X and V) is supposed to be a fractal, so the pattern isn't just arbitrary. X and V are too dense in my opinion and could use a lower branching factor, maybe base 2 for consistency. K is better in this regard, but they didn't recurse correctly which makes it less satisfying.
- julienfr112 5y agoMy daughter used to write E exactly like this ! We called it comb E ...
- 101001001001 5y agoThis is not intellectually interesting. It doesn’t gratify ones intellectual curiosity.
- BerislavLopac 5y agoCould you click on all images containing a street crossing, please?
- austinjp 5y agoWell, your assertion is trivially disproven: It does mine.
- doubletgl 5y agoAgreed. Someone made a weird font, congrats. Artistic curiosity maybe, but putting this on HN really is a big stretch.
- andybak 5y agoI was delighted to see this on the front page. Letter forms fascinate me and I enjoy playful explorations of the topic. They sit neatly between formal and informal systems and shed light on human cognition. I'm very glad you're not the gatekeeper of what's here and what isn't.
- doubletgl 5y agoI'm very glad most of the HN content does indeed satisfy more narrow criteria than "it could be interesting to someone".
- andybak 5y ago> "it could be interesting to someone". Nobody is saying that. HN content typically caters to a prticular kind of geeky intellectual curiosity - that I think often has broader interests than you're giving it credit for. As someone else pointed out this post would fit nicely into Douglas Hoftadter's Metamagical Themas - a book with impeccable geek credentials.
- ben_bai 5y ago1 kn0w 7H12 m1gh7 83 0Dd 8U7 7H12 12 R34d48l3 70 M057 h4X0r P30pL3.
- laurieg 5y agoI love this post and how it shows that playful exploration can produce interesting results (and learning along the way). I've often felt that getting learners to ask "What if" rather than "Why" leads to a much more fun and fulfilling experience while covering the same content.
- austinjp 5y agoThe post notes that adults "fucking hated" the ladder E. Does anyone else find it creepy, or just me? I can't explain exactly why. As the alphabet develops in the replies, it loses some of the creepiness and gains something else. Not friendliness exactly, but.... not sure. Something. I think the first ladder E is creepy partly because it's unexpected, and is placed among normal letters. It's a cuckoo, an interloper, alien. Others have pointed out similarities with some machine learning outputs. I was reminded of the spooky, spidery lettering from fashion GANs, e.g. check out what happens to the text "bisou" and "100% love machine" in [0] taken from [1]. [0] https://images.deepai.org/converted-papers/2007.10947/figures/f_attgan_fashion_title.jpg https://images.deepai.org/converted-papers/2007.10947/figure... [1] https://deepai.org/publication/garment-design-with-generative-adversarial-networks https://deepai.org/publication/garment-design-with-generativ...
- warent 5y agoI think it has something to do with uncanny valley. Just like how distorted human faces look unsettling, this is the same mechanism. The letters are deeply rooted in our interpretation of the world, so when those symbols are distorted, it is a distortion of the whole world itself. I bet it's mostly only native users of the alphabet who are affected like this. Someone who uses it as a second language, e.g. a japanese person, probably doesn't get the same feeling
- augustk 5y agoI get the same feeling when I look at some recently built "distorted" buildings with irregular windows. Here is an example: https://www.archdaily.com/782889/flower-plus-kindergarten-oa-lab/56d3abe4e58ece504c0000ed-flower-plus-kindergarten-oa-lab-photo https://www.archdaily.com/782889/flower-plus-kindergarten-oa... Maybe it's linked to trypophobia.
- beaconstudios 5y agowe like things to be regular, so we don't like things that almost fit regular conventions but break them in some obvious way.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe idea looks good if you want to prevent OCR from reading your letters and alerting the authorities. Or you could just write like my grandma, nobody can read her writing. I'm still trying to decode her letters.
- yc-kraln 5y agoIs this a non-AI version of uppest-case? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
- davidbanham 5y agoThis. This is what the web is for. It harkens back to the web of my childhood before real name policies dampened the wacky fun.
- vidanay 5y agoMy brain must be broken, because I don't find anything unsettling about them at all. My brain simply classifies them as artistic pictograms that are representative of the respective letters. Similar to the overly fancy first letter of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
- LForLambda 5y agoGet the app
- LForLambda 5y agoI can't scroll on mobile without tapping to download an app. Ugh, when did Tumblr become such trash.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chapium 5y agoI had no trouble scrolling, but the "get the app" overlay seemed to break the "go back" function of my browser. If this is a dark pattern to get me to engage with the site it has backfired and convinced me to avoid it at all costs. A horrific (cool) font for horrific (not cool) webdesign.
- euske 5y agoThanks. I just had to make this for my own sanity. https://imgur.com/HJlojYx https://imgur.com/HJlojYx (This is Japanese hiragana. The original letters are written below for comparison.)