i can has readers?

Actually, I'm curious how long it'll take before someone finds this blog and starts commenting on it. We'll see. The post isn't about that, though. Instead, I'm hitting the other twin idiot box today: computers.

Right now, I'm noticing a very interesting contradiction in my life: I hate chatspeak and l33tsp34k, but I love lolcats -- which use something much like chatspeak in their captioning.

I have I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER bookmarked for two reasons. The first is I'm a sucker for cute cat photos. I admit it, I own it, let's move on. The second, of course, is that it's one of the better lolcats sites. It's not the best web layout (crowded side bars do nothing for me), and I don't "lol" at every post, but the ones submitted generally are fairly good.

The curious pidgin that's evolved for lolcats really is a distinct entity from chatspeak (thankfully), even though you can draw parallels. Overall, possibly because the captioning is shorter, I find the pidgin far easier to understand. There are also certain repeated memes that are often used well: I'm in ur $foo, $verbing your $nouns; FAIL, DO NOT WANT, and, of course, I can has $object?. The repetition means some people get sick of the concept quickly, and I know some people who never want to hear that first one again, but the key words in that sentence were "used well". No doubt at some point I'll hit the point where I never want to hear that joke again, but please note that I still find occasional uses of 'all your $foo are belong to us' funny, so I may be a lost cause.

People have taken the idea and branched out, using other animals, people, and characters from games. As with the original cat macros, some of these are done better than others. Game-based picture macros suffer a bit if you don't play the game, though I've seen some for games I do play executed very well.

On the other side of the divide falls true chatspeak, which I loathe in any setting except for actual length-limited messages (I'll give a little leeway for time-sensitive situations like battles in games, too, though). Its use in forum posts, I find completely unforgiveable. Personally I feel that if someone can't be bothered to type the other two letters in 'you', I can't be bothered to decipher the mess that they've spewed on the screen.

Game forums are where I see the worst offenders. I spent some time playing World of Warcraft, which I rather like, and naturally I checked in with their message boards when I started playing it. With any game, the percentage of players who post regularly is pretty small, but when you have 8 million users, a small percentage still leads to a pretty large pool of posters. As far as I can tell, at least half of those are people incapable of constructing a basic sentence in English.

I'm not talking about people for whom English is clearly their second language. Odd syntax doesn't bug me, and odd workarounds for words the writer doesn't know are frequently far more understandable than the alleged English-speakers' forays into chtspk. People who supposedly are at least in high school (or possibly even in college or out of school entirely) should, however, be capable of putting together a basic sentence.

Instead, what you often get is a string of letters and spaces, more or less indicating words, with seemingly-random punctuation and a lot of ellipses.

Here's a hint for these people: "every1 typs lik ths" is not an excuse for this. Obviously not only is that not true, but when people are telling you you're hard to understand, what they're saying is "write better or we're just going to pay no attention to you".

Luckily, there seems to be a growing trend lately to encouraging people -- nicely or otherwise -- to use clearer language and try harder to put together grammatical sentences. This means that possibly in a few years, I will find the average game forum far more appealing.

Next time: I possibly post about Top Chef, since the reunion show is on tonight, or I begin my collection of "secret messages in commercials", or something else entirely, depending as usual on my whims.