incognito______ and I used to have long conversations about the leetspeakers on Cybersphere. Yes, even on a text based game in the late nineties, we still got 1337 d00d5. Why they couldn't go play CS or something with a less steep learning curve, I'll never understand. Anyway, I think he came up with the best analogy. When reading this painful bastardization of text, it's like having a conversation with a screaming idiot manchild. Maybe that wasn't his exact analogy, but it was along those lines. Maybe it was an allusion to the people who scream ever louder when a non-native speaker fails to understand them. Regardless, he managed to capture how hard it was to take these people seriously. When you read, ``lol fuk y u cell me?'' it's hard to think of the typist as a fellow human being worthy of your time. And, sadly, we gave these people far worse treatment on CS.

Playing on WoW all the time these days (and you won't stop me), I'm reminded of these conversations. Last week I taunted and tortured some random person for a while, refusing to give them a bit of information that was painfully obvious if they stopped to read a piece of text readily available to them in-game until they could compose a complete statement without any grammatical errors or shortcuts. When ``ne1 kno were 2 get ston tablets?'' became ``Anyone know where to get the stone tablets?'' I would be willing to help.

I wish I could just apply a filter onto the chat channels. An actual quote from last Thursday:

[PLAYER NAME] == fukin 12 yo chink gold farmer who was 2 pussy 2 go to tiennamen!!

If only I could have that automatically parsed into:

Excuse me, I would like to assert that I believe [PLAYER NAME] is a dastardly miscreant who gathers in-game items to be exchanged for real world currency. Furthermore, they are only twelve years in age, and of Chinese heritage. They were too cowardly to protest at Tiananmen square, despite not being born in time for the infamous events that occurred there.

I'd make a fucking fortune.

And before you tell me to play on a RP server, redvector has let me know that they're just as bad. And I'd have to act out eating brains. Oh well. At least my guild's mature and cool, for the most part.

Feeling: working
Listening to: Leonard Cohen, Democracy