#unicode blocks

[unicodenthusiast]

Basic Latin - ASCII - Block 1

The Basic Latin Unicode block (also called the ASCII block) is the 1st block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8.

Contents: Upper and lower case English letters(52), Arabic numerals(10), basic punctuation marks and math symbols(33) and control characters(33)

Number (allocated / used): 128 / 128

UTF-8 character size: 1 byte / 8bits

Position (hex / dec): 0000-007F / 0-127

Version introduced: 1.0.0

[mokeymokey]

I can't get over this bit in the wikipedia article for the Pennsylvania Dutch where they put this guy's argument in Fraktur lmfao. What kind of microaggression is this

[shitty-proendo-blackout-posts]

my blog is evil :)

[anotherscrappile]

Ah yes, my favorite kinds of literature…

BOOKE

ROM𐌍CE

ıҺNSTAYA

NUNATEЄY

RETERE

𝔸.𝔽𝕋H𝔽𝕋𝔸

HßIH T𝔖RU L8E

ИH˧T H’AI!

HISTORICΛL FICTIOȠ

[essaressellwye]

Production and distribution of phone apps is so low cost that they can be extremely niche. An actual physical product that's useful for maybe 150 people isn't cost-effective, but software, especially subscription-supported, may be.

By definition I don't have a good idea of how much people are taking advantage of this, though I haven't been able to find a Shavian alphabet phone keyboard

[maplemonarchy]

I would definitely not consider making a custom font that includes some of the deemed non-important emoji’s (subdivision flags), the Deseret Alphabet, Shavian, Duployan, and other writing systems just because I think it’d be neat

Couldn’t be me.

[flightlessaugury]

Who knew that when a program says the file needs to be in .txt format, with encoding of Unicode UTF-8 and "insert line breaks" that it ACTUALLY needs that to function properly! That's insane! Woah!!!

Side note, fuck you ms word for making it so convoluted to actually get to that fucking point. I was fine, I understood what needed to be clicked, but why'd you have to make it so confusing to get to that window.

[pueriled]

Useful websites / links for rentry , bundlrs , gfx & etc for you!

symbol sanatorium - Links to a google document with a ton of symbols , kaomojis & text layouts. I use it for pretty much all of my recent rentrys.

sozaino.site - Website that's been making its rounds on rentry as of late, useful for graphic making. Has dividers, pngs, frames ~ etc if you have the creative touch.

sozai-good - site I found recently that has a lot of pngs you can download, also has frames and borders. In japanese but isn't hard to translate. Everything is also sorted into sections.

lottie lab - Website useful for animating, can be used to move around PNGs for rentry and the like. I don't use it much myself atm, but it's pretty easy to get the hang of.

scripted.neocities - Neocities full of code you can use for bundlrs or carrd. Also useful for stuff like spacehey and other sites that use CSS / HTML

blinkies.cafe - Easily make or find blinkies here! Great for beginners who want to make some simple things.

emojicombos - Search practically anything and you'll find an emoji combo for it. Useful for finding symbol / text combos and kaomojis.

unicode character table - Has pretty much every single symbol you've seen or needed. You can find what you want pretty easily due to its sectioning. Has stuff like arrows , dingbats , brackets , etc etc..

yaytext - Make your text 𝙼𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚜𝚙𝚊𝚌𝚎! or U͟n͟d͟e͟r͟l͟i͟n͟e͟d͟!͟ easily with this website! May possibly break screenreaders in the process though so be warned.

lorem ipsum generator - Too lazy to generate a block of text to make a page look filled out, well look no longer! This site can quickly generate of block of pure gibberish to make it seem like there's actually text there! Good for newspaper / magazine gfx ~

And that's all ( for now )! I use most of all these sites and find them very useful! Hopefully one of them will prove useful to you too dear friend (❁´◡`❁)

[twocubes]

they're planning to add pacman to unicode 16, which should release in september

like, seriously, they're adding game sprites to the new "symbols for legacy computing supplement" block (it's in the delta charts)

[unicodenthusiast]

What is a Unicode block?

A block is a set of characters from a single language, group of languages, or of a similar use (like math symbols).

The sizes of the blocks are usually multiples of powers of 16, or in larger blocks, other, larger powers of 2.

There are 328 blocks, as of Unicode 15.1.

[utopicwork]

I had a breakthrough yesterday that I've been fervently working on. With what I know about image compression and terminals I was able to implement image and animation display in terminals with color. I'll show a few examples and then explain the significance (I can't show the animation right now because I can't record it at the moment).

Note: These images were automatically optimized not manually, better quality is possible these are samples

The reason this matters is we now have a way to transport graphics in a very optimized way in which we only have to store the indexed colors and the positional data for the colors (which we have a novel method of optimizing) notably you only have to send the indexed colors once for an animation or stream of images. This provides us the ability to render graphics with no GUI so with far less overhead.

TLDR: We have an entirely new way to send and receive images/animations/streamed sequences

For the more technically interested read on

This uses the Python Curses wrapper, unicode block elements and Pillow to achieve this. The limitations are loose but input images will automatically be posterized to handle the 255 color limit of Curses (a little fuzzy on if there are ways around this beyond the fg/bg doubling idea I'm thinking qbout, I'll look into it soon) and your image needs to be a width and height that can be displayed within your particular terminal setup ex: a 32x32px image needs 32 lines and 32 columns.

To accommodate this for PierMesh we can use the ShrinkRay optimizations.

[kiragecko]

Angkorian Khmer is one of the languages I study. It's beautiful - a Cambodian interpretation of a South Indian language and script. There are thousands of inscriptions that still exist, and a lot of research done. It also is currently impossible to write on a computer.

You can write in Modern Khmer. You can write in several older scripts. (~sorta~ The characters exist, but there aren't really fonts or keyboards.) But, writing in any form of Angkorian Khmer is impossible.

I can make keyboard layouts pretty fast, these days. Fonts are a lot harder, but I've had a bit of success. The problem is that there is no perfect block of unicode to attach these things to, and a WHOLE BUNCH of equally imperfect ones. All in different ways.

Do I want to be able to write 'ṛ'* after a consonant, and numbers over 9? Can't just make an alternate font for modern Khmer.

Do I want to be able to make proper consonant clusters? Can't use Devanagari, which has the widest variety of special Sanskrit characters. Or Brahmi, the ancestor to most of these scripts, which actually has support for the numbers I need.

Do I want to be able to write 'au' after a consonant, and numbers over 9? Can't use Kawi (Old Javanese), a closely related script from the same period, that works in very similar ways.

-

Which unsatisfactory option should I choose? Or should I wait another decade, hoping academia will finally do it for me?

Annoying!

-

* or 'ḷ', 'ṝ' and 'ḹ', but the only reason I'd need to write ANY of those is if I was making a hypothetical period grammar, and including Indian characters that don't actually get used, and in some cases even the INDIAN grammarians were just adding to make pretty grids. Which I WANT to do, but understand is not actually a necessity.

[m-rld]

🩇

U+1FA47 Neutral Chess Knight Rotated Three Hundred Fifteen Degrees

Plane: 1 - Supplementary Multilingual Plane (10000–​1FFFF) Unicode Block: Chess Symbols Unicode Subblock: Chess symbols rotated 315 degrees Unicode Version: 12.0 (2019) 🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇🩇

[nekropsii]

hey, i noticed in the new upd8 that pardus gets censored when she (presumably) says the word “dyke”. is that actually happening in-universe or can you just not say that word on mspfa?

Your guess is correct, that is what she's saying.

The censorship is not intended to be read as in-universe - in reality, she is simply saying it. Pardus is not one for self-censorship. I'm censoring it as a safeguard against getting in trouble for having slurs in my webcomic, even if MSPA proper is absolutely infested with them, lol. And also just in case slurs which I am not comfortable with actually typing out - like the R-Slur, for example - get used in future Upd8s.

Some slurs may not be censored, such as fantasy slurs - think "pissblood", "cullbait", et cetera - "situational" slurs - words that can be slurs, but aren't always, like "bitch", "cunt", "queer", et cetera - or in some kind of instance where just putting it fully on paper is the only way to properly deliver the scene (there is one planned scene I can think of for this, but that's future nonsense). I'm just blocking out the ones I know would probably get us in trouble - or at least in hot water - if they were used outright, even if they're said as reclamation, or things I'm just outright uncomfortable typing even for plot - again, R-Slur.

So, for future reference, if you see a slur censored with a black bar, that's purely out-of-universe - it's being said outright, in full, by the character in question. If there's some other method of censorship used, such as asterisks or leet, that's in-universe.

For the record, I don't know if there's any hard-set rules on MSPFA against slur usage, this just seems like a common sense move. I'm airing on the side of caution. Nothing's hurt by occasional black bar censorship - you get the message either way, loud and clear. It's still there. The little unicode bricks are pasted in to match the character count in the slurs anyway, and you've got the first and last letters in it to help you piece together what's said. This will also hopefully prevent the comment section from getting too comfortable using slurs. Nothing's actually happened on that end, I've just been on the internet and in the Homestuck fandom long enough to know to not take any chances, lol.

[idioticbat]

i'm curious about something with your conlang and setting during the computing era in Ebhorata, is Swädir's writing system used in computers (and did it have to be simplified any for early computers)? is there a standard code table like how we have ascii (and, later, unicode)? did this affect early computers word sizes? or the size of the standard information quanta used in most data systems? ("byte" irl, though some systems quantize it more coarsely (512B block sizes were common))

also, what's Zesiyr like? is it akin to fortran or c or cobol, or similar to smalltalk, or more like prolog, forth, or perhaps lisp? (or is it a modern language in setting so should be compared to things like rust or python or javascript et al?) also also have you considered making it an esolang? (in the "unique" sense, not necessarily the "difficult to program in" sense)

nemmyltok :3

also small pun that only works if it's tɔk or tɑk, not toʊk: "now we're nemmyltalking"

so...i haven't worked much on my worldbuilding lately, and since i changed a lot of stuff with the languages and world itself, the writing systems i have are kinda outdated. I worked a lot more on the ancestor of swædir, ntsuqatir, and i haven't worked much on its daughter languages, which need some serious redesign.

Anyway. Computers are about 100 years old, give or take, on the timeline where my cat and fox live. Here, computers were born out of the need for long-distance communication and desire for international cooperation in a sparsely populated world, where the largest cities don't have much more than 10,000 inhabitants, are set quite far apart from each other with some small villages and nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples inbetween them. Computers were born out of telegraph and radio technology, with the goal of transmitting and receiving text in a faster, error-free way, which could be automatically stored and read later, so receiving stations didn't need 24/7 operators. So, unlike our math/war/business machines, multi-language text support was built in from the start, while math was a later addition.

At the time of the earliest computers, there was a swædir alphabet which descended from the earlier ntsuqatir featural alphabet:

the phonology here is pretty outdated, but the letters are the same, and it'd be easy to encode this. Meanwhile, the up-to-date version of the ntsuqatir featural alphabet looks like this:

it works like korean, and composing characters that combine the multiple components is so straightforward i made a program in shell script to typeset text in this system so i could write longer text without drawing or copying and pasting every character. At the time computers were invented, this was used mostly for ceremonial purposes, though, so i'm not sure if they saw any use in adding it to computers early on.

The most common writing system was from the draconian language, which is a cursive abjad with initial, medial, final and isolated letter shapes, like arabic:

Since dragons are a way older species and they really like record-keeping, some sort of phonetic writing system should exist based on their language, which already has a lot of phonemes, to record unwritten languages and describe languages of other peoples.

There are also languages on the north that use closely related alphabets:

...and then other languages which use/used logographic and pictographic writing systems.

So, since computers are not a colonial invention, and instead were created in a cooperative way by various nations, they must take all of the diversity of the world's languages into account. I haven't thought about it that much, but something like unicode should have been there from the start. Maybe the text starts with some kind of heading which informs the computer which language is encoded, and from there the appropriate writing system is chosen for that block of text. This would also make it easy to encode multi-lingual text. I also haven't thought about anything like word size, but since these systems are based on serial communication like telegraph, i guess word sizes should be flexible, and the CPU-RAM bus width doesn't matter much...? I'm not even sure if information is represented in binary numbers or something else, like the balanced ternary of the Setun computer

As you can see, i have been way more interested in the anthropology and linguistics bits of it than the technological aspects. At least i can tell that printing is probably done with pen plotters and matrix printers to be able to handle the multiple writing systems with various types of characters and writing directions. I'm not sure how input is done, but i guess some kind of keyboard works mostly fine. More complex writing systems could use something like stroke composition or phonetic transliteration, and then the text would be displayed in a screen before being recorded/sent.

Also the idea of ndzəntsi(a)r/zesiyr is based on C. At the time, the phonology i was using for ntsuqatir didn't have a /s/ phoneme, and so i picked one of the closest phonemes, /ⁿdz/, which evolves to /z/ in swædir, which gave the [ⁿdzə] or [ze] programming language its name. Coming up with a word for fox, based on the character's similarity was an afterthought. It was mostly created as a prop i could use in art to make the world feel like having an identity of its own, than a serious attempt at having a programming language. Making an esolang out of it would be going way out of the way since i found im not that interested in the technical aspects for their own sake, and having computers was a purely aesthetics thing that i repurposed into a more serious cultural artifact like mail, something that would make sense in storytelling and worldbuilding.

Now that it exists as a concept, though, i imagine it being used in academic and industrial setting, mostly confined to the nation where it was created. Also i don't think they have the needs or computing power for things like the more recent programming languages - in-world computers haven't changed much since their inception, and aren't likely to. No species or culture there has a very competitive or expansionist mindset, there isn't a scarcity of resources since the world is large and sparsely populated, and there isn't some driving force like capitalism creating an artificial demand such as moore's law. They are very creative, however, and computers and telecommunications were the ways they found to overcome the large distances between main cities, so they can better help each other in times of need.

[bonzos-number-1-fan]

JMJ: Frankenstein; or, the Modem Prometheus

Originally this was going to be titled "So Your Favourite Couple is Dead." but that would probably be a better outcome.

Spoilers for The Magnus Protocol episode 1, and all of The Magnus Archives by implication, below the cut.

This is going to be building on a couple of ideas I've seen throw around. Too often to cite any particular source, unfortunately, but I've not seen this conclusion reached and I think it might have more backing to it. Additionally, it's built upon the assumption that because "Chester" and "Norris" share VA's with Jon and Martin that they are Jon and Martin. Which naturally leaves that other J for "Augustus" being Jonah.

A very common thread in the conversations around episode 1's incident reports is that they're foreshadowing the major themes/beats of the show. The second one is obvious enough; don't got to the Magnus Institute. A sentiment we can all get behind. The other, a story of partial reanimation, has been taken to be a warning that the people you love don't always come back the same. I think that's likely the implication but a potential clue hasn't seen any attention AFAIK.

Before we get there though I need to briefly explain the history of JMJ. If you were a part of the ARG you'll know all about Colin's Code Collection. For those who don't know out favourite OIAR code monkey kept a selection of projects on the OIAR servers and through some covert means we gained access to this. Lots of it was normal stuff like Colin thinking he could improve Linux. However there were several encoded strings left by _6A1F7106A_$. These strings contained a few things but of importance for us is a few code blocks encoded in a monoalphabetic substitution cipher where the ciphertext was alchemic symbols. 6A1F7106A itself is an encoded string but unlike the rest of the ARG it was encoded in three layers. 6A is hexadecimal for "J", while 1F710 is Unicode for "🜐", and 🜐 was "M" in the aforementioned alchemic cipher. JMJ.

Now back to that incident. Coming back wrong was the entire premise of why that incident was scary. JMJ have come back too., and as that incident was about partial reanimation everyone ran with that idea mapping onto JMJ. But "Reanimation (Partial)" wasn't the only option for it as it could have bee "Reanimation (Amalgamative)".

This whole time they've been saying JMJ. It's not ever just been J, or M. Even before we knew it was JMJ it was 6A1F7106A. Always one string; like one name. We've been talking about how shunting the Fears through the portal could've mixed them together but they're not the only ones that could've happened to. So what if it's not about JMJ coming back wrong, but coming back pieced together into a new whole?

It's not just the naming either but how they act. An amalgamation of Jon, Martin, and Jonah vying for control. Jonah, again presuming Augustus is Jonah, is the rarest of the three because it's 2-on-1. Jon and Martin can try to suppress him. Additionally, the .jmj error also makes more sense if you treat them as a single entity rather than three entirely separate ones. The trailer initialises them all as separate things but any effects of them we see is a single name and given all the above they don't seem to be able to act independently. The reason the trailer mentions errors and undefined drives for the master–slave drives would then be because there is no singular consciousness in control of the whole. There is a lack of authority, no truly dominant aspect to them, no hierarchy. So they're vying for control and causing those errors. The .jmj error, the encrypted text when plaintext would have been more useful, Fr3-d1 breaking down, the fact they seemingly can only manifest single personalities at once, Jonah's rare appearances. There is an obvious conflict at play here.

The opening to this wasn't a joke either. I was planning on writing about how they're likely dead for real. We've known Elias' VA wasn't coming back for a long long time so if it's Jonah in there it's OG Jonah. OG Jonah who doesn't have a body, which means more than likely whatever has trapped them hasn't stored their bodies. They're in there forever. No getting out. No returning to life at all. Just a cyberspace hell.

But at least they've got some close company.