MetaChat - ‮‮Whee!

‮Oh god the virus is spreading.‭

posted by loquacious 11 December | 20:04

‮Test

posted by loquacious 11 December | 20:04

‮Test with 8237 escape code‭

If you append your posts with & # 8237 ; (remove spaces) it should "escape" the mirror control.

posted by loquacious 11 December | 20:06

‮is this the time when we're allowed to burn our pants?!‭

posted by cmonkey 11 December | 20:50

Backwards Day has resulted in my favorite comment yet from mathowie.

posted by Greg Nog 11 December | 20:51

Matt has the typical cavalier programmer attitude: if people do stupid things, my code will behave unpredictably. It's amazing to me that his site is so successful, and it's really a tribute to the members of the community, and probably some luck.

posted by knave 11 December | 21:27

I want a program/driver that will mirror my monitor's output. I want everything reversed l/r. It would be like Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks. My left-handed brain would eat it up by my weak and pathetic right-handed friends would be AT A LOSS!

Matt has the typical cavalier programmer attitude

Which is funny, because he's not a programmer; he's a web designer.

posted by Eideteker 11 December | 22:11

and a useability expert.

posted by quonsar 11 December | 22:59

Well, to be fair anticipating the widespread adoption of Unicode isn't really the primary focus or domain of either a "useability expert" or a "web designer".

It's easy to be critical of how things "should" be done in retrospect, but there are many well known sites or programs that have similar compatibility issues.

It seems that because MeFi has evolved over time and contains many layers of what (Matt himself may admit) is not the best code on the planet. And it really isn't meant to be - it's just this site, y'know.

I certainly didn't expect the mirror control character to screw up as much stuff as it did. I was pretty sure it was going to be stripped when I hit post and I'd look like an idiot. (More of an idiot, wiseass.) The most I was hoping for was that it would reverse the "posted by" tagline and maybe the titles and tags.

posted by loquacious 11 December | 23:17

Heh. I hadn't noticed that you had started the Mefi thread, loq.

posted by deborah 11 December | 23:39

It would have been a lot cooler if I had a backwards username or if I registered my username "backwards" so it would be the only forward-readable thing in the post, but it was really spur of the moment and unplanned and I'm not all that clever.

posted by loquacious 11 December | 23:50

*loquacious crosses his fingers for 2nd place, as his cheap ass media player bricked itself*

posted by loquacious 11 December | 23:51

I should probably post 100 comments to this thread so it gets its own page in my history.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:37

Unless the total number of comments one can post to a thread is limited.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:38

I know that the frequency of comments is limited.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:38

One is limited to a comment every thirty seconds.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:39

So:

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:40

100 comments × 30 seconds/comment = 300 seconds

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:43

3,000 seconds / 60 seconds/minute = 50 minutes

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:44

Oops, the first 300 seconds should be 3,000.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:45

(my bad)

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:45

So, now that I have the value for time t, the question is:

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:47

How long can I keep this up?

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:47

I mean, there's no way I can do this every thirty seconds, exactly on the second.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:48

So, the chances are it will take me well over an hour to manage this feat.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:49

Sadly, that's not enough time for me to learn enough scripting to run a bot that will make these comments for me automatically.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:50

(or is it?)

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:51

Man, I'm barely making a dent.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:52

This looks like a job for...

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:53

≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:54

Holy crap are there some bad compression artifacts in that jpeg.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:55

Speaking of backwards, anyone reading the Recent Comments page is going to see this monologue backwards.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:57

Sequentially, I mean.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:58

The letters are in the right order.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:58

It's just that the posts are displayed in the opposite order of that in which they were written.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 19:59

So yeah, there's more than one kind of backwards!

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:00

I guess that's sort of a good lesson to pull from this thread.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:02

A 'moral to the story,' if you will.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:02

Which you might not!

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:03

(will, that is)

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:03

I shouldn't assume that you would will.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:04

I mean, it's rude.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:05

Maybe I should start typing my comments backwards, chronologically, for the benefit of those reading the "Recent Comments" page.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:05

Which gives me an idea.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:07

So really, you should learn to start looking at things in different ways.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:07

So the man says, "I never thought of it that way."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:08

Then she lets him take another look at it.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:10

"So depending on how you look at it, it could be a young woman, or an old one."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:12

"And this could either be the top of her chest, or her chin," she says.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:14

"See, this could be a choker or a mouth-line."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:15

Then she points a little lower.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:16

"And this could be either her chin, or the outline of her nose."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:17

Eideteker is being a bad, bad boy.

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:17

"It's hard to tell."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:18

"And is that an ear, or an eye with lashes?"

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:19

"But this part here, this could be a wart, but it could also be an extreme profile of her nose and eyelash."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:20

Then she points to the middle of the image.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:21

"Some parts of this image, the hair, the furry coat, the feather," she says, indicating each in turn, "those are the same no matter how you look at it."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:22

"Let's take a look."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:23

She sets the image down inbetween them.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:24

"You can see it either of two ways, but not both at the same time."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:25

"It's called a reversible image, or a reversible figure."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:25

I do hope you're keeping count.

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:26

She smiles at him.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:26

The man is, at this point, scratching his head.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:27

"Ah, but it could be either!" she exlaims brightly.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:28

"No, I think it definitely looks like an old woman," he says.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:28

"Are you sure it's not a younger woman?" she asks.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:29

He scoffs: "That's a picture of an old lady. Why do you ask?"

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:30

≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:30

She hands the picture to him:

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:31

"Take your time if you need to think about it."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:32

"Now I want you to look carefully at this picture and tell me if you see a young woman, or an old woman."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:32

She laughs, "I think I have a way to show you that there's not always just one way to see things."

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:33

"You're darn right I am," he declares assuredly.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:34

"You're sure that things are always cut-and-dried, without room for equivocation?"

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:35

She shakes her head in disbelief.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:36

"There's a right way to see things, and a wrong way," he says to her.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:37

A man and a woman are arguing over whether or not things are always black and white, or whether there are sometimes shades of grey.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:38

So, here goes:

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:39

It'll be fun to see if I can do this off the top of my head, without a script.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:40

Only I will tell the story backwards, so that one will have to read the thread from the bottom up.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:40

Maybe I can make it up to you by telling a story.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:41

I knew you were doing a copy/paste job!

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:41

I'm sorry deborah!

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:41

*settles in with a cup of tea*

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:42

(having disabled that option myself, right away when I set up my account)

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:42

No apologies! I like silliness.

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:42

I forgot that you might have your account set up that way.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:43

Deborah might have her account set up to e-mail her when someone comments on her threads!

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:44

A terrible thought just occurred to me, throughout all this silliness I am about to embark upon.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:44

Oh no!

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:45

*curtain*

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:47

- T H E B E G I N N I N G -

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 20:47

You kept it up for an hour, but I count 77 comments (per Gmail). Slacker.

posted by deborah 13 December | 20:58

Well, as it turns out, it's only 50 comments per page. So, I goofed.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 21:00

And as for the other 21 comments, feh. I'll finish them some time before the thirty days for which this thread is open are over.

posted by Eideteker 13 December | 21:01

11 December 2006