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Friday, May 3, 2002
03:33 - Random Responses to Random Observations
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=makali&itemid=45887

(top) link
Matt Robinson has some observations about stupid UI decisions in the world. I'd like to take this opportunity to add my own comments, and thereby to call attention to his own laugh-out-loud blog.
  1. Trillian has "emotisounds" enabled by default now. This means that when chatting on IRC or ICQ, or.. whatever, and someone types "OMG LOL!!!1" my computer makes a hideous giggling sound. Gah! I really worry about some people who type "LOL". They seem to do it a hell of a lot, and I can't help but wonder if they really are "laughing out loud" or just sniggering and stuffing more lard and coke down their throats. People who express their emotions with acronyms scare me. Actually no, they piss me off; it highlights an increasing inability for people to communicate effectively with each other.

I've wondered about "LOL" for a long time. Now, I'm under no illusions that anybody who types "LOL" ever means that he's actually, physically, laughing out loud. The likelihood of that is pretty frickin' slim. But that's not what gets me. No, what gets me is this: People have overused "LOL" to the point where they have evidently forgotten what it stands for entirely. Nothing else can explain how it gets used periodically these days:
"LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!"
A variation on the venerable "hehehehe", which I have loathed with a secret burning passion ever since I first encountered it being spewed by AOLers back in 1994. An abbreviated, iconic shorthand, that form was popularized apparently as some kind of attempt to appear as some kind of technological superstar-- you're playing your keyboard like a guitar! Wheedle on those two keys, and it sounds like you're laughing to the guy on the other end! Boy-howdy, you can sure make that fingerboard sing! Hehehehe!

But somehow it got mated with "LOL"-- an onomatopoeia mingled with an acronym-- to form "LOLOLOLOL", which evidently the same AOLers can read fluently. I don't know-- to me, it can mean only two things:
  1. "Laughing out loud out loud out loud out loud"
  2. Something that sounds sort of like "Low low low low low low"

Sure, accuse me of being pedantic. But I challenge anyone to read out loud a passage of text containing "LOLOLOL" and not read it as one of the two possibilities above. And then, I further challenge, I dare you to ever attempt to use it again.

"LOOOOOOOOOOL!!!"
This one is just precious. It completely abandons any pretense of being an acronym-- I don't think any AOLer, even, could type this while under the impression that "Laughing out out out out out out out loud!" is a meaningful expression. No, this one is just "LOL" that's been streeeeeeeetched in order to affect more emphasis.

It's silly, it's obvious, it's cheap. But still, I would dare somebody to read it out loud with a straight face.

And for extra credit, immediately follow it with "And DROOOOOOOOOOL!"


The other point to which I must respond is this:
  1. Microsoft's OLE (and later ActiveX, COM, COM+, etc) gimmick when Win 3 and 3.1 came out was that "Whee! Look, you can put bits of Excel inside Word!" thing... Which was alright for some things I guess: it's convenient to be able to edit some figures in a report document without having to load up Excel and reimport the table. They overstepped the line when Outbreak Outlook Express used this same functionality to show HTML in email using Internet Explorer's rendering engine though. Aside from the whole huge virus/trojan/worm issues that this caused, I'm pissed off that advertising companies can send me mail that requests images from their servers which allows them to set cookies that link my email address to the web pages I visit (and thereby allows them to build up a profile on me in order to send me more unwanted advertising). And the virus issue just will not go away. The only way this will stop is if Microsoft rewrites Outhouse Outlook Express from scratch and makes some fundamentally different design decisions about what their product should and shouldn't be able to do.

My response to this is brief:

"...Or, conceivably, if people will ever take the apocalyptically drastic step of using some other program than Outlook or Outlook Express for their e-mail."

(Though, of course, that's a pipe dream. Every bit as much as is the possibility of open-source software producting professional-grade, easy-to-use, consistent and useful consumer desktop software.)

That is all.

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© Brian Tiemann