THE CHAMELEON
@thesisNevermore
Thus, it shall be just one.
Oh, this is EXTRAORDINARY. I am quite positively beside myself with delight. What a magnificent development! What a spectacularly generous allocation of creative liberty! I must congratulate our esteemed proprietor for having furnished this little corner of the internet with an assortment of features that I have every confidence its inhabitants will proceed to abuse in ways that would make a lesser administrator reconsider the entire enterprise. I, however, am positively ECSTATIC. Do you understand what this means? Of course you don't. Not yet. You have been handed the means to construct an entirely new dimension of interpersonal communication, and I suspect most of you are presently considering how to make your insults very small. I wholeheartedly encourage this. There is something positively delightful about giving an entire population the tools of artistic expression and watching what depravity they produce with them.
And the possibilities! Oh, the possibilities! Consider, if you will, the marriage of regular expressions and this marvelous new BBCode functionality. You may now construct typing quirks of such extraordinary complexity that the distinction between linguistic expression and elaborate programming exercise becomes wonderfully irrelevant. A simple prefix of [color=#33cc66][i] and a corresponding suffix of [/i][/color] can dress every utterance in its own little uniform. A regular expression such as `\b(inevitable)\b`, replaced with [b][color=#33cc66]$1[/color][/b] (b. a sport and remove the period darlings), may ensure that certain words receive precisely the emphasis they deserve. One might automatically disfigure correct particular expressions, annotate troublesome phrases with hover text, or give one's most delicate insinuations a suitably diminutive presentation. And because the quirk system has the courtesy to preserve the formatting tags themselves, we needn't concern ourselves with inadvertently converting a perfectly respectable color tag into a syntactic casualty. Wonderful! Simply wonderful! The ability to make a statement, contradict it in strikethrough, and conceal an entirely separate conversation in the hover text is an innovation I find personally irresistible. Imagine composing a message which offers its recipient three mutually exclusive interpretations, each presented with impeccable sincerity. What a splendid way to conduct oneself.
I am particularly enamored with the implications for those of us who favor a certain degree of theatricality. A character might develop an automatic system of textual corrections, with their initial statements appearing struck through and their revised declarations presented in bold. Another might employ conditional replacements to render particular names in their associated hemospectral colors, or fashion a quirk in which certain words appear to contain microscopic footnotes. One could even arrange for seemingly innocent phrases to carry an additional meaning that only reveals itself when the reader chooses to investigate. Why, the humble typing quirk has graduated from an affectation of speech into an entire apparatus of presentation! I can scarcely contain myself. Fortunately, containing myself has never been an especially pressing necessity.
And character ordering! Chronological dignity has at last been restored to those of you who have accumulated so many alternate identities that your profiles resemble the inventory of an inadequately supervised theatrical company. Your preferred representative may finally stand at the forefront of this delightful procession. Your hashtags, meanwhile, will retain their intended sequence, a development I appreciate enormously. There are occasions when the order of one's words is rather important, particularly when they are meant to be deciphered. As for clearing one's notifications with a single click, I confess to being almost overcome with emotion. The ability to erase an entire history of conversational attention with one decisive gesture! How wonderfully symbolic. How efficient. I shall certainly be making use of it. Rest assured that the notifications themselves have not escaped my attention merely because they have escaped my interface.
My sincerest congratulations to our industrious benefactor. You have given a community of extraordinarily imaginative individuals access to a remarkably versatile set of tools, and I cannot begin to express how eager I am to witness the consequences. Well. That is not entirely true. I could express them rather precisely, if I wished. But I am enjoying this sensation of anticipation far too much to spoil the occasion. I encourage every one of you to experiment. Be ambitious. Be inventive. Make your words beautiful, hide little secrets beneath them, and discover just how much meaning one can cram into a single sentence before the formatting CRACKS.
I am having an absolutely marvelous evening. I do hope you will all join me.
After all, we have all the time in the world to enjoy ourselves.
3c2tatic crack2. Got it
SHOUTPOLES. THAT'S NEW. TRY NOT TO CRACK YOUR BALL.
It's merely for theatrics, darling.
had to s(roll down a lot of empt7 spa(e to (li(k the unquirk and read this
Tragic, have you considered a digital mouse?
Begrudgingly, I will heart react.
I've earned it, haven't I? Hee hee, and hoo hoo. All of that rigamarole and more.
Alas, your spiel's evoked an amount of emotion and interest in me. Don't take this as any kind of change of heart regarding how I feel about you.
NOT HOVERING OVER THAT. KEEP YOUR SECRETS.