Smile!

Meet my friends:

: )     : (     : O       :S        -_-

These guys are some of the smileys i use most frequently. The question i put to you is, will there ever be (or is there already) a place for these smileys in the hearts of the grammarians.

Now it’s fair to say that smileys serve as a shortcut so we don’t have to turn our every IM into epic prose. If they’re ever to be recognised as a legitimate form of punctuation it will have to be demonstrated that it is more than just a lazy alternative to writing out a few more words. They’re going to have to genuinely add something to a sentence. Now clever old me, being clever (and old) has worked you all up into a frenzy of doubt and expectation. You’re asking, “but when, Luke? When will somebody prove that smileys count?!” But don’t worry, i’ll do it. In fact i even had the idea before i started writing this!

Now the first two smileys up there are pretty simple, they express basic happiness or displeasure. Arguably these sentiments could easily be included with a few extra words. Hence:

“I’ll be coming home soon! : )”
becomes
“I’m glad to be coming home soon!” or “I can’t wait to come home!”

and “I have to be back by ten : (” becomes “unfortunately, i have to be back by ten” or “I have to be back by ten, which sucks.” We might pause here to debate the grammatical merit of ’sucks’ but pausing is a habit reserved for people with too much time, (and people with Sky+) so onwards.

:S and : O are also pretty dismissable, easily replaced with a pointed “…” or an “i’m shocked to hear…” (incidentally i think that : O holds pretty much the same meaning as ‘OMG’)

This fellow is better -_- but is dangerously close to the crazy horizontal masterpiece faces used by kawaiidiots. See also @_@ ~_~ ^-^ \*^_^*/ and i think we can all agree that granting these any literary merit is a slippery slope to madness and social decay.

Well that’s it then, all my favourite smileys rejected. Never mind. Go home.

The End.

…?

Or is it?

dun-dun-duuuuun! Time to break out my thus far concealed favourite smiley of all! Here goes!…

: P <—-zomg!

I love that little guy. He truly expresses something that cannot be easily defined. Explaining his mystical meaning would be like trying to explain how the colour red actually looks, to someone who’s never seen it before. Maybe it can be done, but it’s certainly not going to be easy. Watch what happens when we try to compensate the sentence:

“Sounds like fun : P”
becomes:
“Sounds like fun… NOT!” or “I am being cheeky and toying with you here but not in an offensive or necessarily totally genuine way when i say that that sounds like fun.”

hmmm.. no dice. God knows how this smiley came into existence in the first place, have you ever made that face? Imagine if we stuck our tongues out to the side like that when we wanted to express the kind of gentle-but-maybe-a-little-sarcastic kind of sentiment which that smiley embodies:

“Hey man, going to that party tonight?!”
“Hell yeah! Party on down! Bleaearrrggh…“

I think you’d agree it would look a little odd. Furthermore i frequently find myself wishing it was ok to use this smiley in a formal typing situation. Consider this hypothetical email to one of my tutors:

“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff.”
Compare with:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff : P”

You can see how the first example could be interpreted as a rather deadpan cry for help, whereas really i’m shooting for a kind of ‘i’m reading it and it’s hard but not too hard, but i’m also not so arrogant to think it’s going to be easy for me’ kind of vibe. But that’s not an easy sentiment to express, especially in a concise email. My alternative would be something like:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ That Lewis is one crazy cat lol!!”

I think that this guy : P basically serves as a mood-lightener. Pop him on the end if a sentence as you would a question mark, except instead of denoting a question you’re indicating that the sentence should be taken lightly. It’s a little mark to show that whatever you said, don’t take it too seriously. A disclaimer to say that you may or may not mean what you just wrote, and that everyone should just relax.

And everyone did. The End.

Note: I don’t usually have a space between the colon and the open brackets (or capital P, or S, or whatever) but i have to put one there to stop WordPress triggering its own dumb little graphics. If anyone knows a way to turn them off i’d be grateful.

Punisher War Zone

Finally saw this reboot of the Punisher franchise, the first production from Marvel’s new ‘grown-up’ studio Marvel Knights, which aims to bring some of the more adult Marvel characters to the silver screen.

This first outing is… odd. It’s shockingly brutal, that’s the first thing to say, and Marvel Knights are to be congratulated for their modest use of CGI – preferring traditional squib and cutaway technology (as well as a huge variety of props) to handle the gore. It’s refreshing, even if it is at times unintentionally hilarious.

The interesing thing about this film is just how comic-book it really was. I could imagine each scene in frame-form, the writing exactly reminiscent of graphic-novel style dialogue. Frank Castle was spot-on, he was the Punisher. He killed everyone, including women and young adults, with equal vigour regardless of their crime and with zero mercy. He was impossible to relate to – an inhuman killing-machine, and that’s how it should be! There wasn’t much to the story, it even featured a brilliantly self-knowing moment in which Jigsaw (the deformed villain) told his crew they were not going to hunt down the Punisher yet – first they needed to recruit several hundred goons and hole them up in a huge reinforced building. Seeing the Punisher punish everyone in that building is the climax of the film, and if you like that kind of thing, it’s hugely rewarding.

There are also frequent Biblical allusions which seem to imply that the Punisher is a Jesus-figure, the second coming for the shotgun generation. It’s odd, but this is an odd film. Perhaps the Punisher should best be seen as an example of what happens if you stick too ruthlessly to the source material. That is to say, I loved it, but I’m very aware that hardly anyone else will.

“Sometimes I think i’d like to get my hands on God” – Frank Castle considers punishing the almighty.

Adsby earns a spot in my bad books

OK i know i’ve been hating on Google a little bit these last few days, and i promise this will be the last anti-Google rant. (at least for a little while.)

We’re all familiar with ‘Ads by Google,’ the advertising system that fills every page on the internet with junk that’s vaguely related to the topic of the page itself. Behold mortal, the power of context sensitive advertising. This advertising has recently infected youtube, as if youtube wasn’t infected enough. Now you can expect your videos to be interrupted by cheeky little Ads by Google poking their noses over the bottom of your video. Watching hilarious footage of the world’s biggest cookie? Expect an ad for cookie delivery to sidle its way over to you. “Hey man, looks like you’re enjoying seeing those cookies. You know, i could hook you up with some of those double choc-chip for a very reasonable fee.”

Everyone knows that people in general are suggestible idiots, but up until now it has been the task of advertising agencies to convince us that this is not the case. We are in fact attractive smart-minded citizens who work hard and carefully consider the value, ethical considerations and environmental impact of every purchase. It was a slimy, manipulative system but at least it made me feel good about myself. Now all i get is, “you watch cookie?! YOU BUY COOKIE?!”

A particularly insulting example of this happened to me just this morning. I was getting my geek on, enjoying the third Watchmen trailer in glorious Youtube HD (which actually works really well) when my old friend Adsby of Googleton shows up with the following message:

“ALWAYS HAVE BAD BREATH? SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN METHOD TO ELIMINATE BAD BREATH – fangocur.com/bad_breath”

Goddamn that’s a mood-breaker. But here’s the real kicker, this particular ad is what Google assumes will be relevant to me! I check the tags for the video, and find “geek” “nerd” and “comic book” amongst them. Well thanks a bunch Google! Good work identifying the geeks in the audience and singling them out with some insulting adverts. Bully for you.

Stupid Google. Initiate nerd-sulk.