copyright 2023 daniel kalak
licensed under cc by nd 4.0
when i open the text editor on my phone,
the only characters that i can type in
with immediate feedback, i.e. without
having to hit shift or the like, are
. the lower case letters a..z
. the digits 0..9
. a period
. a comma
. a space
also, the text width is limited to 42
characters.
i like how this limitation sparks
creativity in me.
instead of dashes, you have to use .. for
ranges. instead of asterisks, you have to
use periods as bullet points. instead of
leading your readers on with dashes,
colons, and semicolons, and confusing them
with parentheses and slashes, you have to
resort to a simple comma, or shorten your
sentences altogether. instead of thinking
about when to capitalize a word, or where
to use a hyphen or quotes or backticks,
you just write the words as you would say
them.
you only get 2 punctuation symbols. one
pauses a sentence, the other stops it. it
is so wonderfully simple.
this dichotomy reminds me of the library
of babel website by jonathan basile, which
allows in its books the characters listed
above minus the digits. you can find the
website at libraryofbabel.info.
the limitation of letters to ascii a..z
also reminds me of when my classmates and
i had a minecraft server in 2012. we didnt
have voicechat, so we had to do all
communication via the ingame chat. and
because it only allowed ascii, we had to
replace the german umlauts with ae, oe,
and ue, and the german eszett with ss. at
the time, i was quicker at typing these
replacements than the actual german
letters. and of course we only used
lowercase letters, because they were
faster to type.
i will probably write more articles like
this.
gemini://dkalak.de/txt/babel42.txt