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This post has been a long time coming. I've noticed that, as we in the NQ2 have been writing and reading each others' posts, and responding and interpreting and mis-interpreting, that text, as has been said before, is an insufficient medium for full communication, especially of the non-verbal components of communication: body language, vocal tone, et cetera.
The most tragic victim of this loss of fidelity in the signal is that all-important, and only becoming more so with the passage of time, and into the strange future in which we find ourselves that refuses to make any semblance of sense, is the sense of sarcasm, or verbal irony. For a citation, see Poe's Law[1], an observation which is easily borne out by a visit to any number of popular or unpopular websites. It's simply impossible to know when someone is joking or being sarcastic in a text-based exchange, except through a complex set of heuristic models that are difficult for a human to apply, much less a machine.
To this end, I make the following modest proposal for an extension to the text/gemini (also known as gemtext) format, the current specification of which can be found at section 5 of the specification[2]. I propose the addition of another line type, called "sarcasm", which will indicate the line following it is of a sarcastic or joking nature, and not to be taken seriously. The "official specification" follows.
### 5.5.3 Sarcasm lines
Lines beginning with ":^)" are sarcasm lines. This line type exists to more clearly define when an author is speaking in earnest versus when they are joking or being ironic. Advanced clients may display these lines in a different, "jokey" font, such as Comic Sans, or wrap the entire line in "scare quotes."
Clearly, such a line-type is needed for "important semantic information," such as that listed in section 5.5.3, regarding quote lines, or in heading lines, or even, one could argue, preformatted toggle-lines. In fact, if this proposal picks up enough steam we could have "sarcasm toggle lines" to mark whole passages as sarcastic. For that, I propose the opening line of ":^)" and the closing as "(^:".
As a final example, here's a sarcasm line in action. Test your clients on it to see how they render it!
:^) This proposal is vital to the health of the Gemini community and should be implemented as soon as possible.
The original proposal was made by me on IRC 2020-07-10, and is quoted here (from tomasino's log[3]):
2020-07-10 21:56:31 epoch yay. it is raining.
2020-07-10 21:56:31 acdw I know how that goes....
2020-07-10 21:56:52 epoch brb. standing in rain.
2020-07-10 21:58:35 acdw oof
2020-07-10 21:58:49 epoch :) yay rain
2020-07-10 22:03:56 acdw :D
2020-07-10 22:04:48 acdw That's so funny I took your original "yay. it is raining." as sarcastic. The perils of text-based communication
2020-07-10 22:05:19 epoch that's why I doubled down on the "yay" and smiley face. I figured that's what happened from the "oof"
2020-07-10 22:05:20 epoch :)
2020-07-10 22:06:43 acdw hehe
2020-07-10 22:11:13 luna trying to interpret the tone of text is fun
2020-07-10 22:12:36 acdw SO much fun ;)
2020-07-10 22:13:11 acdw e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation [4]
2020-07-10 22:14:54 acdw oh, this is good: "Another example is bracketing text with the symbol for the element iron (<Fe> and </Fe>) in order to denote irony.[citation needed]"
2020-07-10 22:15:45 luna lmao
2020-07-10 22:16:14 acdw <Fe> needs to be in the text/gemini spec
2020-07-10 22:16:43 acdw for greater semantic fluidity in text/gemini documents and to make it harder to troll
2020-07-10 22:16:46 epoch <Fe><Fe>lol</Fe></Fe>
2020-07-10 22:16:59 acdw oh lort
2020-07-10 22:17:45 acdw also apparently :^) has "taken a hold in some communities[who?]"
2020-07-10 22:17:49 epoch <![CDATA[ <Pb>wat</Pb> ]]>
2020-07-10 22:18:19 acdw so I hereby formally suggest that :^) become the text/gemini line-type for sarcasm
2020-07-10 22:19:16 luna we don't need inline links, but we do need sarcasm indication :^)
2020-07-10 22:19:36 epoch gemini://gemini.thebackupbox.net/sarcasm.gmi [5]
2020-07-10 22:19:41 acdw uh yeah luna of course
2020-07-10 22:19:43 epoch and there's an instance of it in the wild!
2020-07-10 22:20:16 acdw :O
2020-07-10 22:20:22 acdw amazing
2020-07-10 22:20:31 epoch you forgot the :^)
2020-07-10 22:20:42 acdw I was *serious*
2020-07-10 22:20:45 acdw :^)
2020-07-10 22:21:02 acdw I think clients should be specced to render sarcastic lines as Comic Sans
2020-07-10 22:21:19 epoch I was thinking about emphasis on certain words indicating what within the sentence someone was being sarcastic about.
2020-07-10 22:21:59 acdw mm that could work. I just realized I surround sarcastic or "extra" text (or text I want to be taken self-consciously) with ~tildes~
2020-07-10 22:22:33 acdw Or you could spec that clients render sarcasm lines like this:
2020-07-10 22:22:59 epoch "elephants *love* mice" vs "*elephants* love mice" vs "elephants love *mice*"
2020-07-10 22:23:03 acdw :^) I'm being super cereal you guys => I'm BeInG sUpEr CeReAl YoU gUyS
2020-07-10 22:23:35 acdw lol have you seen that Seinfeld bit? Jerry asks Elaine which word someone emphasized and he gives two examples
2020-07-10 22:23:51 acdw and she's like, "I think he said <emphasizes another word>"
2020-07-10 22:24:25 epoch I think I've seen that somehow.
2020-07-10 22:24:36 acdw haha of course what I'm describing is impossible to google
2020-07-10 22:25:47 acdw so we'll have to trust each other
2020-07-10 22:26:05 acdw .. now here's a questions: if :^) is the sarcasm face, what about 8^) ?
2020-07-10 22:26:37 @tomasino Why so cereal?
2020-07-10 22:26:40 epoch that's just silly
2020-07-10 22:27:06 acdw B^)
2020-07-10 22:28:28 luna X^)
2020-07-10 22:28:36 epoch _ _
2020-07-10 22:28:37 epoch \O_o/
2020-07-10 22:31:35 acdw ooh a two-liner that's nice
2020-07-10 22:31:56 acdw so anyway I think text/gemini has space for all sorts of emoticon-based line types
2020-07-10 22:32:02 acdw thanks for coming to my Ted talk
[4] Wikipedia article: Irony punctuation (gemini mirror)
[5] possibly the first use of the :^) line-type in gemini
the toggle lines should be :v) and :^)
~ admicos on #gemini
I think this is a fine idea! Maybe there could be a toggle-toggle as well.