"Take that, you thread-misusing miscreants!"

Now where is that evil alcalde?

I wonder how many red capes Cory has been sent?

(If you use the The Chicago Manual of Style of course you should use a Chicago typewriter.)

Didn't G. K. Chesterton say something about wearing a cloak?

I remember reading about half when I found out about the mouseover text... and had to reread from the beginning taking care to put my mouse over the image and read what came up (in some cases it changes the whole joke!)

Was at the park - quite the scene. Friends whose home abuts the park were bemused. A velociraptor almost ate my husband.

http://rivqah.livejournal.com/6864.html

It also inspired someone I know to go to a Halloween party this year dressed as caped-crusader Cory. :-D

While I'm here (curse you, distracting internets!), this seems as good a place as any to mention that I think I've found an Arabic word meaning 'to disemvowel'. Or close, anyway. While flipping through my dictionary the other day, looking for something else, I came across sakkana. In a grammatical context, it means 'to make vowel-less' (that is, 'to pronounce [a consonant] without a following vowel'). Arabic has a verb for everything.

Amusingly, the usual meaning of the word, in a non-grammatical context, is 'to calm' or 'to soothe'...

Mouseovers? There are mouseovers?!?

Aargh. So much for my free time next week.

Regarding "win"...I wonder how long it will take for this sort of bulletin board speak to spill over into corporate boardrooms.

20 Years from Now: "Steve, I'm sorry, but your business plan is full of fail."

I was gonna go into this big thing about triconsonontal roots and Semitic morphology, but then I realized that if you have an Arabic dictionary you probably already know all that. :) If anyone else is interested, let me know and I'll do the spiel.

WHAT?

Kelley @ #22: Just think of it as a slight difference in dialect.

19: I too look forward to the day when, for example, I receive JP Morgan equity research documents with headlines like "GENERAL ELECTRIC (GE): Rising Pension Obligations And Debts Threaten GE's Long-Term Profits. Recommendation: O NOES! (price target $370)".

"full of win" gets about 70,000 google hits, so it's definitely in use. "Made of win" gets about twice that. Which I guess means that more people think win is a solid than think it's a liquid.

"That was an epic fail."

"Do you always fail so epically?"

(I work in the video game industry, and therefore believe this particular phrasing originated there. I am willing to believe I'm wrong, though.)

(Teresa, did you dress as Cory for trick-or-treat? Or did he dress as you?)

...because ours didn't scale....

He spent FIVE WHOLE COMICS setting up one shaggy-dog joke?!! Only XKCD...

The only thing that strip needed was a speech bubble from the defeated MPAA-ninja filled with only consonants, which could be re-emvoweled to some pithy comment.

The Donald Knuth as Yoda bit was also pretty good.

It inspired this comic drawn by a friend of mine, based on things her friends say. I'm the one with the big quote bubble. Don't you recognize my face?

Ai gibs Cheez and Tofu 5 burgers ennyway.

So Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian) do this thing for their roots, whereby a root isn't really a word of its own; it's a sequence of three consonants. To make a word, you take the root and add vowels (and sometimes other affixes) to it in various defined patterns.

I'm going to totally make up an example here because I don't know any real-world patterns. Say there's a root, TNH, which has a meaning of "administrate", and patterns C1aC2uC3 and uC1iC2C2iC3, which mean "agent" and "adjective" respectively. Then "tanuh" would be "administrator" and "utinnih" would be "administrational". Or if you had a root NFR meaning "beauty", "uniffir" would be "beautiful". And so on.

In real Semitic languages things are naturally more complex--things that don't mean what you'd expect them to mean, and so on--but that's the gist of it. And with such a system it's not surprising that there's a verb that means "to take the vowels out", because that's what you do whenever you need to work out the root of a word.

The commenters I's have been removed!

Damn you, Ethan! There's gone my productivity for the day. And my coworkers are looking at me funnier than usual.

Interrupting starfish, indeed.

Not unrelated: the first line of this comic made me decide to post the link even before I saw this thread. (Would've been in the Open Thread, but this is clearly the right place.)

And that property of Ancient (Middle) Egyptian is what gives us things like the ankh heiroglyph becoming a symbol of life, and the scarab beetle becoming a symbol for evolution, because that ankh symbol is a drawing of a sandal strap, but it also stands for 'n-kh', and the word for 'life' has those same consonants; the scarab beetle can stand for the beetle itself, or for the consonants 'k-f-r', which are the consonants in the verb 'evolve'.

Carrie, I love your erudite comment about triconsonant Semitic roots. Can I give a real example from Hebrew, because this collection pleases me: s-p-r is a root meaning words to do with counting or telling. Sefer is a book, mispar is a number. There are related verb forms meaning to take a census, to balance the books and so on, and the words for writer and author are connected too. But histaper, which grammatically is the reflexive form ("to tell eachother stories", I suppose) means to get one's hair cut.

I think words to do with the English cypher come from this root, via the French word which is currently spelled chiffre and which originally came from Arabic sifr. But this being Making Light I hope someone more expert will correct me if I'm wrong.

Teresa... I think we will all be very disappointed if you show up at the next worldcon dressed in any other garb. C'mon... You know you've always wanted to wear a floor-length red cape.

TNH is a unique Internet character with her own distinctive costume, so you shouldn't expect her to be seen (nor to be drawn) wearing Cory's costume.

@19: It might be parallel development, but "owned" already shows up with great regularity in computer security seminars. With sober late-40s-to-mid-50s suited guys solemnly intoning it, too.

The use of "owned" in software development methodology is definitely parallel development, but the usual technical definition sounds like it applies to the gamerspeak version as well: "Object A owns object B if A destroys B in every possible run of the program."

I'm sure it's related to pen-and-paper role playing games, or even computer versions that still involve simulated dice rolls.

All actions have a difficulty class (DC). You roll a certain number of certain-sided dice - number of dice and sides depend on game system, character stats, and type of action.
Total number showing on the dice that is less than the DC means you fail. A total equal to or higher than the DC means you succeed. (Although in some systems you have to have a certain number of successes to actually do what you want instead of just something approximating it.)
Any dice showing the maximum for that die means you are full of win - depending on what action you're performing and what system you're using, it could be a critical hit or a chance to reroll for more successes.
Rolling a 1 is a critical fail - for example, not only do you fail to hit your enemy, you trip over a rock and stab yourself in the face with your own blade. Epicness of the failure is usually determined by the number of ones rolled and by the GM, DM, or other word for storyteller/"guy who rolls for NPCs". If you're rolling, say, 10 D6's, and they all come up ones..... you may want to pull out a blank character sheet and start over.

... I came across sakkana. In a grammatical context, it means 'to make vowel-less (that is, 'to pronounce [a consonant] without a following vowel')

Fascinating. I guess that's the same root as sukuun, the circular diacritic which indicates the lack of a following vowel, in fully-vowelled written Arabic.

Carrie S @ #38

I'm going to totally make up an example here because I don't know any real-world patterns.

There's a list of derivatives of k-t-b* in the introduction to a book** I have on the Arabic alphabet. kataba to write; kattaba to make someone write; takaataba to write to each other, correspond; istaktaba to dictate; kitaab book; maktab office; maktaba library, bookstore; kaatib clerk; miktaab typewriter; mukaataba correspondence; mukaatib correspondent, reporter; muktatib subscriber; kutubii bookseller; kutayyib booklet; maktuub written (or letter); katiiba military detatchment (apparently from the practice of drawing up armies on paper before putting them into the field).

* This seems to be a fairly standard root to use in examples - I suspect it's unusually productive & regular.

** The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write it by Nicholas Awde & Putros Samano, 1986.

Tangentially, does anyone else find themselves using "shiny" in more or less the Serenity sense? (as a multipurpose positive response or description)

My friends and I had been using "shiny" in that sense for a few years before Firefly. It was actually a bit disorienting to hear it on television as I couldn't recall hearing anyone outside of my age group use it before (early 20s then). Even though I love the show I've actually been using it less. I would use the word, my brain would switch over to thinking about Firefly, and I would get distracted from whatever I'd previously been thinking about.

(Further pictures may follow)

(Should I just start running now?)

Nobody has yet mentioned "You win the Internet" which is one of my favorite forms. (Or variant "You just won the Internet")

"Shiny" was definitely around well before Firefly, and I think Buffy was picking up on usage rather than creating it but it's hard to be sure.

(Further weirdness may be delayed. Saturday is going to be busy on other stuff.)

No.

This is from the kid who's taking Arabic 001, though. Half the time it still devolves into lines and loops for me.

Pink Panther (virtual)

Re: Epic fail

I suspect it's from D20 (Dungeons & Dragons v3.0, released in 2000) where character levels top out at 20th level in the normal scheme of things. Following the Law of Escalation, the Epic Level Handbook came out which allowed characters to advance beyond Level 20.

Hmmm. Supermoderator is even longer than Disemvowellor. We could always shorten it to SuperMod...

Faster than a speeding spambot. More powerful than a driveby troll. Able to stop raging flamewars with a single disemvowel. It's SuperMod!

...who eventually inspired a group of youths to join her Fight. They became known as the SuperModSquad.

(By the way, SueInNM was really me. That's what happens when I use my wife's computer. I get a sex change.)

15: my Arabic is shaky to non-existent, but wouldn't that make TNH a musakkani?

:-) I think I'd go for the active participle (with feminine suffix), musakkina.

Carrie @ 38

What I always liked most about the way Arabic works (besides this building-block structure in the first place) was how the meanings sort of... drift, sometimes in oddly tangential but logical ways. I forget which root it is now that starts out in the form I as 'to be happy', and ends up in about form X as 'to take a concubine'...

Tim @ 50

Yep, sukuun is the same root.

Nix @ 66

(Does it less confusable in non-transliterated form, or once you understand the underlying rules?)

Nope. Well, with long experience, sort of. :-) Because, as Carrie mentions above, the consonants are the foundations of Arabic - the alphabet is all consonants (plus a couple of consonants - w and y - that get co-opted into diphthongs or long vowels if the preceding letter is vowelled). The basic vowels, the 'short' vowels, are represented by little marks above and below the letters. Most of the time in the written Arabic, no-one bothers with these short vowel marks, unless something is *really* ambiguous.

So, to build on Tim's example, if you saw ktb in a written Arabic sentence, it might be kataba (he wrote), kutiba (it was written), or kutub (books). The only way you know which of those it is comes from context - for example, if it's the first word in the sentence it's going to be a verb - or if a helpful editor has put the mark for 'u' over the 'k'.

1. go to the linked page.
2. let your mouse rest within the boundaries of the cartoon. Don't click anything.
3. if that still doesn't work, you can see the joke by right-clicking "properties", again from within the boundaries of the cartoon strip.

Gur pbeerpg anzr sbe jung crbcyr ner pnyyvat zbhfrbiref urer vf npghnyyl gur "nyg" nggevohgr va ugzy. (Didn't want to spoil the punchline).

Pink Land Rovers.

I wishj I could remember what I was on last night.

But here's a (rather larger) revised picture of The Disemvoweller.

The hard part of do this CGI stuff is finding clothing models which don't look like a wardrobe accident waiting to happen. And, while all I've seen are the TV adverts, the new Beowolf movies seems to be solidly in uncanny valley territory. That problem is one reason why I go for slightly unreal characters.

But the Orangina advert isn't my fault.

Tamiya makes a 1/35 scale model. Photos here. It's even molded in pink polystyrene.

I was more familiar with the era when the SAS drove Willys Jeeps and Chevrolet 30 cwt trucks in North Africa. Built a Jeep conversion when I was a lad; I think I scrounged the .50 caliber gun from another kit, but built the Lewis guns from scratch, and carved a bunch of 5-gallon jerrycans out of balsa. I was very proud of this model.

The SAS jeeps used a Vickers; not the Maxim type, but a gas-operated model variously known as the "K" and the Vickers G.O. It was originally an aircaft machinegun, supplanted by the .303 version of the Browning, and used a pan magazine like the Lewis gun. The LRDG used it to replace their Lweis guns.

It was apparently a development of the Vickers Berthier, which the Indian Army adopted instead of the Bren. Like the Bren, it had a curved magazine. There are some clear pictures here that show the main visual similarities and differences.

That CGI Pinkie is a 88-inch wheelbase Land Rover, and the Army mostly uses the long wheelbase models. The Tamiya kit is the 109-inch Series 2 Land Rover. By the time of the Kuwait War they'd been retired, and the SAS used the then current 110 model.

It is beginning to look as though the Land Rover Defender is starting to fade from the military procurement world. It's possible that civilian-standard vehicles will still be used by the military, but they'll not be front-line equipment.

I, my family and friends have been using "Shiny!" as a response to something catching your eye and distracting you since the 70's but we picked it up from a bird character in a book and sometimes we still go "Caw Caw" as well.

But Jeremy's word was "sparkly".

Still, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it mutated into "shiny" through the same Great Game of Telephone that generates so many urban legends from short stories, comic strips, and comedy schticks.

Mark & Marty, I had the same experience with "Wha', mouseovers? Mouseovers? Mouseovers! … Damn, back to the beginning …"

Clifton, #60: I normally see that noun in plural in that phrase, even when the usage is clearly singular: "You win the Internets" or "Here's your shiny Internets." The last word is sometimes also spelled Intarwebz.

NelC, #69: Desert pink? You sure it's not Desert Peach? ;-)

T.W., #72: Would that be Jeremy the crow from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH? "Ooh, a SPARKLY!"

"The Disemvoweller"? That nom-de-guerre is too much of a mouthful.

How about "Th Dsmvwllr"? That's shorter. Or for variety, how about "e ieoee"?

And I think in this case the correct name is not ALT but TITLE. According to HTML standards, TITLE is supposed to render as a mouseover tooltip, while ALT is only supposed to render if the image does not. If I remember correctly, that's why flamewars broke out around the "Popup ALT Attributes" Firefox extension.

See also.

Oops, pardon. I'm completely self-taught where html is concerned, have used tags on an as-needed basis for my blog, and haven't necessarily kept up with developments, so thanks for the clarification.

Ironically, it was the imprecise or potentially misleading use of a term that prompted me to make my original comment (82). 'Mouseover' is in general use for any function in which "something else happens" when the mouse rolls over a certain page location. With ALT and TITLE, the text info usually only appears after the mouse has rested a bit. If you're used to the term mouseover in the JavaScript sense of onmouseOver, you might expect the effect to happen instantaneously. And then get frustrated because you weren't seeing what everyone else was.

Isn't that the wail that's said to be heard around the post of someone who is about to be disemvowelled?

Now I am become moderator, disemvoweler of blogs.

Visual ref: Me in my Stetson.

That's a pretty good grouping you've got going there.

Wouldn't that make Teresa into the Disenvoweller's Evil-Universe counterpart, the Consonant Consumer?

My favourite version of "to win the Internet" is "to wih an Internet", which variant took off after GWB said "I hear there's rumors on the Internets" in one of his speeches, and was roundly mocked for seeming to claim that there are more than one. The handy thing about "Internets", of course, is that any given person can win one Internet and still leave plenty for other persons whose actions are made of win and/or awesome to also win their own Internet (or leave space for themselves to win another Internet in the future). Thus you get awards like, "That was brilliant! Have an Internet," or "One Internet, slightly scuffed, all yours".

On Fred Clark's Slacktivist (and perhaps elsewhere) someone is said to have "won the thread" if they say something so amusing that no one else thinks they will be able to top it. (For example, I believe cjmr of Slacktivist won the thread in response to the question "What will be Jerry Fallwell's greatest surprise in the afterlife?" by saying "St. Peter is Catholic.")

Does this mean that Ma Teresa, unlike other godmothers, carries not a violin case but a vowel case although it too has a weapon in it? I thought that pens were mightier, especially where bonafied editors are concerned.

So I'll just say that I wasn't trying for a resemblance to any real person, and besides, nobody ever recognises a masked hero when they're not wearing the mask.

On the other hand, the default face on some of these CGI figures is so often used unmodified that I have got to the point of being able to recognise that.

On the other hand, I'm the guy who can't recognise Paris Hilton. You can, I trust, imagine the shocked reaction of the surrounding cartoon characters.

Anyway, the character is wearing a mask, which means that nobody will recognise the face. Ever.

Well, that's my excuse.

Anyway, knowing what some people do with the software, I'm not sure I want to duplicate a real person. It almost feels stalkerish. But a bit of fiddling with the face controls can make a huge difference to the look of an image.

Here's one I did earlier.

Let's not forget that masks make a crimefighter's pupils disappear, which means there's no identifying eyecolors. Me, if I went into costumed crimefighting, I'd go for goggles and for an overall look not unlike that of Mike Mignola's Lobster Johnson.

(I'll get my coat...)

I'm pretty sure I've gone down this route before, but anyway, here's an exerpt from the script for that issue/episode:

     THE DISEMVOWELLER stands on the street corner, tommygun pointing at the sky, stetson low over the eyes.

DISEMVOWELLER : You!  With the spiky bag and nifty headwear!  Stop!

     CLOSE UP on THE CONSONANT CONSUMER

No dialogue

     Even closer up of the CONSONANT CONSUMER's bag, which has various consonontal straight bits poking out,

and a 'W' hanging by one end out of a hole.

No dialogue.

     CLOSE UP on THE CONSONANT CONSUMER, who is grinning while pushing back her stetson 

CONSONANT CONSUMER : Don't come any closer, if you want to stay comprehensible

     THE DISEMVOWELLER strides across the street from the left, towards where THE CONSONANT CONSUMER stands

on the far right of the frame.

DISEMVOWELLER : Your so called moderation is too extreme

CONSONANT CONSUMER : Let me show you what the Evil Universe calls "Civil Discourse"

     Same as last frame, but both have opened fire

DISEMVOWELLER :  i i o e ea i o i i ieio!

CONSONANT CONSUMER : Bttr hrs thn y hv trd t clg p my cmmnt thrds!

     Overlapping fields of energy spill out over both

DISMEVOWELLER :  !  '        !       ...   ...

CONSONANT CONSUMER :     .            21  '        !

     Aerial view of Manhattan shows the delettered area spreading.  Flying into view at the bottom of the 

frame is CENSORED PROFANITY MAN.

CENSORED PROFANITY MAN : #$@%!

(Presumably Kanji Girl and The Mandarin turn up to sort this out).

Most of them are hard to tell apart. There seems to be a common sunken-cheek look, which is maybe something to do with Hollywood standards. If anything, most of the woprk has gone into their noses. The standout is intended to be Vietnamese.

(Geekery follows)

The figures are defined by a set of vertices in 3 dimensions, with polygons defined by the set of vertices. The changes to the shape are called "morphs", and the data is a set of differences. A "morph dial" scales the actual difference applied, with a 0 being no morph and 1 being the full difference value.

Morphs at full strength can look exaggerated, and some morphs can do odd things when combined.

(End Geekery)

Back to frivolity.

but is it possible that in the original book Jeremy said "shiny" instead?

Yes. Having been asked by Mrs. Frisby why he was trying to pick up the string to begin with, Jeremy said, "Because it was shiny."

Heck and tarnation. I had just about sufficiently scrubbed The Secret of NIMH from my easily-accessed memory to enjoy Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH again. Thanks heaps, all you wicked people.