Teh vnb4r4bl3 l33tn3zz of |3utt0nz

[nancylebov]

4ll yooR b@s3 @Re b3l0n6 t0 uz

[h3[km4t3!!!11! J00r k1n6 1z pwnd!!!!!


I wanted to use angle brackets, but lj insisted on trying to interpret them as html. I don't think the ['s look too bad. In any case, buttons are subject only to less-destructive parsing by humans, so please let me know if angle brackets would be better.

Again, any advice on l33t is welcome, and so are opinions about whether the slogans are funny.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I think that it would likely bell @11 J0uR b@53 r b310n6 2 us!!1!

[boredmder.livejournal.com]

Randomly commenting (you're on my friendsfriends page) -

For angle brackets, use &lt; (<) and &gt; (>).

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

To make angle brackets happen in html, you can use ampersand-g-t-semicolon and ampersand-g-t-semicolon (substituting the actual punctuation and subtracting the hyphens); it should look like this when done properly: <fake tag>

Here's a table of character codes (http://www.tntluoma.com/sidebars/codes/) in HTML that should help.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I would like the title of the entry as a button, too.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Also on this topic, I expect you've seen Microsoft's A parent's primer to computer slang (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx). If you haven't, of course, go see it. Well worth the time for the giggles (if not ROFLs) it evokes.

[redbird]

As noted already, &lt; will get you a left angle bracket; you can use > without coding for it, because the parser will ignore a close tag if there's no open tag.

I gave up on reading the long word in the title of this post, and the second bit of "leet" in the text--my parsers don't work well on that stuff, it's worse than trying to remember how to pronounce Welsh.

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

After re-rendering the [ into < in my head, it turns out that the second one says "Checkmate! Your king is pwnd!" Which is actually kind of funny, if you can get your head around the idea of chess players speaking 133t.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Note to redbird: "pwned" means "owned" based on the implausible theory that "p" is a likely typo for "o".

I'm glad you liked the joke--I came up with it myself. I'm pretty sure there are still chess players in the right age range to have picked up l33t.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Are you saying that you do not grok the unbearable leetness of buttons? Or is it simply a matter of failing to parse the pun (remembering the source). :D

[redbird]

I'm saying that my parser didn't produce anything that I could understand as English from those text strings.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how far this joke is worth pursuing, but there was a book (movie?) a while ago called _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_. I've never read it, but when I was casting around for a title for my article, the book title turned up as a potential victim.

My vague impression is that was the book was mainstream, literary, and unlikely to interest me. If it had anything about codes, ingroups or chess, I can't take any credit.

[redbird]

That's not it--it's that I didn't get from the leet text-string to "The unbearable leetness of buttons."

I read Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being several years ago--because Ursula Le Guin mentioned it favorably in an essay--liked it, but haven't felt any impulse to reread it. No idea of whether you'd enjoy it.

[bruhinb.livejournal.com]

If you're likely be amused by a combination of semiotics, politics, and light erotica, you might enjoy it.

[mneme]

My parser had no problems with the first two, but '[' is not really an adequate substitute for '<'.
For obscurity points, '&#0060;' also works for '<'. The only unicode escape I actually use regularly (which is what that style of html escape is) is '&#8212;'—the 'em' dash.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing l33t is going out of fashion, or there might have been time to incorporate artfully misspelled unicode. Amph'tchooGo for '<', Amph'tch4t3toowontoo, for '—'.

[mneme]

Actually, I'm not sure it -is- going out of style so much as being mainstreamed -- venues like MegaTokyo have made an entirley new set of people aware of the "art". I think the one of the primary (positive) aspects of 1337 is that it tends to be both clever and suscinct, so your examples lack some of the essential "character" of 1337n355. I could see someone using, say, gOblinkg2 or some such, though (the 00XX unicode characters are just ascii dressed up), or even just a "plain" unicode escape for the initiated&#8212;like that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much you care about wikipedia, but it sounds as though the socilogical part of the article could use some updating.

I was thinking of obsfuscated 1337 like "/\/\?|<£'§ 1££+ §|<?11§ þ|/\||\| _|??" (Mike's leet skills own you) from the wikipedia article. Perhaps that's a sort of perverse or decadent leet rather than a natural development for most of the language.

My impression of leet is some of it's clever, but it gets pulled both towards succinctness (though I suspect most of its abbreviations are borrowed from text messaging) and towards expansion--the latter is partly playing with symbols and partly emotional emphasis.