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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

vole.wtf

171–180 of 310 posts

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you start trying to automatically filter out messages you don't want, you enter an arms race that you're not going to win. Surely a better solution is to provide the players with a way to votekick abusive users, and leave it at that?

have you never played video games? sure lets votekick someone from club penguin, im sure that wouldnt encourage cyber bullying and make matters worse

I've played a bit of https://skribbl.io/ recently and the votekick mechanism works very well for getting rid of people who just want to draw dicks and write swear words.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#172
post #121

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

I went the other way with my kids, greatly expanding the scope of curse words. Words are primarily tools of cognition—that is, they are how we hold concepts and use them to reason about the world. When we use words with other people, we are relying on their reason. Curse words are bad for human life because they don’t mean anything in most contexts they are used. “Fuck” can mean sex, but usually it’s emoting a non-sp…

Interesting take. Can you explain more about why you hold the opinion that sounds that are meaningless are bad for human life, to the point of being unacceptable? In my experience a good sigh or happy noise are net positives.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#173

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

A nice counter may be a font that uses ligatures to replace benign impotent words with their more forceful and blunt equivalents.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#174
post #9

I love this. I particularly like that arsenal is censored to a___nal.

Call of Duty has censored all input with a regex like this for as long as I can remember. I can't even name one of my classes "Assault" which isn't even viewable publicly. You would think it would be easy to add a whitelist for such a common word.

I remember playing Ragnarok Online back in 2005ish. I was working on my merchant. Merchants had an ability to get better sale prices to NPCs, so one common way to make money by buying some item from players in bulk for more than they could get vendoring it, and you make margin on it by getting even more. Arbitrage!

My skills weren't high enough to compete with other merchants on the highest margin common items, so I decided to try one of the lower priced things. Squeeze into some kind of niche, you see.

Around this time, I discovered the censorship list was enforced client side (oh the wild west old days...),

To make a long story long, there were these crabs and they dropped an item called "nippers". They were kind of a cute thing because though that was what they were called by the game's creators, the game censored you for saying it. I removed "nip" from the list of gylphs, I could shout an offer to buy them without interference. This let me buy these items from players without any competition. As the only dedicated purchaser, I was able to preserve a much higher margin.

Thanks to a soft monopoly preserved by regulations and information asynchrony, I was able to make significantly more money than I would have otherwise. That taught a lot of lessons to ~15 year old me. If only I could have applied those lessons in the real world!

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#175
post #83

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself. Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know wha…

How do you express yourself when you drop something heavy on your toe?

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#176
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument before (and I tend to agree with it), but here's a counter-point I heard recently and appreciated: Eloquence and good vocabulary are important, but there is a time and place for something vulgar and basic. Just like there's a time and place for a rapier and there's also a time and place for a folding chair or a pool cue.

I don't think vulgar goes along with basic, the four letter, Germanic versions of fornicate and defecate have a whole range of varied, nuanced, often contradictory meanings that capture the irreducible complexity of lived experience. The Latin derived versions just make everything so bloodless, so focused on one particular aspect of the concept. They really are the simple words, even if they have more letters.

What many people consider the strongest English vulgarity is derived from the Latin cunnus.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#178
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself. Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know wha…

ESL here. At school one teacher told us using swear words only show your lack of knowledge for better words. I took that to heart and the very few times I've used them, I really had no other option. However I've noticed swear words come more easily to me in English and don't feel as harsh as when I hear them in Spanish. I wonder if it's my lack of vocabulary.

I think it's a part of a broader challenge. In writing circles, there's always advice not to use some specific list of words. The list varies. An example list from a quick googling:

- really, very

- just

- totally, completely, absolutely

- thing

- some

- rather, quite, somewhat, somehow

- ...

Like all style advice, it's not really a "rule" to follow, but it's surprisingly difficult to avoid some of these words. I struggle with "really" and "just." It makes you work, but your language is better for it.

I think many swear words fall into this category of words that are really easy to use. These lists always heavily feature strengthening modifiers, and swear words are often strengthening modifiers. Especially "fucking" which is just a really fucking versatile thing to use.

I wouldn't say relying on these crutch words is a lack of knowledge or fluency, but maybe it's a lack of versatility and easy varied expressiveness. Relying on these crutch words makes it harder to be specific.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#179
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the other way with my kids, greatly expanding the scope of curse words. Words are primarily tools of cognition—that is, they are how we hold concepts and use them to reason about the world. When we use words with other people, we are relying on their reason. Curse words are bad for human life because they don’t mean anything in most contexts they are used. “Fuck” can mean sex, but usually it’s emoting a non-sp…

Interesting take. Can you explain more about why you hold the opinion that sounds that are meaningless are bad for human life, to the point of being unacceptable? In my experience a good sigh or happy noise are net positives.

Curse words are bad for human life because they seem like tools of cognition, but they aren’t. When used as words, they can only confuse and mislead you.

However, sounds that aren’t words can be very useful—they are perceptual evidence that we use in our reasoning. We identify groups of perceptions by differentiating them from other perceptions, integrate them into concepts based on their similarities, and assign words to represent all of concretes of that group.

So you have many “noise” experiences from yourself and in human interactions, identify some as happy, and now you have a useful new tool of cognition in the form of “happy noise”. With additional experience, you can refine that into many sub-concepts, like “pleasurable moan”, “contented sigh”, “silly giggle”, and so forth.

Curse words are different because they are just noise. If I say “happy noise”, you know broadly what I’m referring to. But if I say the word “fuck”, you have no idea what that word means—you would have to make guesses either based on the surrounding words that have semantic meaning, or based on how I said it using your conceptual knowledge of the kinds of noises.

That’s why you see curse words used in every kind of context as undifferentiated noise.

With my kids, I tell them that using any word they don’t understand is a curse word. It hurts their own life if they make the noise of advanced words they don’t yet understand, because it introduces ambiguity into their thinking.

For more information on the role of precepts and concepts in human cognition, I suggest reading “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESL here. At school one teacher told us using swear words only show your lack of knowledge for better words. I took that to heart and the very few times I've used them, I really had no other option. However I've noticed swear words come more easily to me in English and don't feel as harsh as when I hear them in Spanish. I wonder if it's my lack of vocabulary.

There's actually been interesting research done about that idea, that people who swear have a smaller vocabulary or are less fluent. It seems that the opposite is actually true¹, people who swear are actually demonstrating a broader fluency. Worth a read! ¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03880...

I'd love to see something like the entropy of words actually used by people who use common crutch words (e.g. fucking, literally, whatever) more often (somehow correcting for the fact that people who use any set of words unusually often will have lower entropy).
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