in 2010 i bought a mac and learnt how to write properly. you absolutely need a mac to do it. the way you do it is this: hang on. im kind of rusty. well i might have got it wrong but here goes: you press option or something. hold down Option key, hold down Shift key, and then press the MINUS button. this inserts EM DASH which is "proper typography". only possible on mac. i got rid of my mac in 2018 and now i cant write properly at all. its just so expensive to write properly these days

@jk I've thrown out paperbacks because I could tell the author copy/pasted their em-dashes. to do so disrespects the art. you can see this is a hill I'm more than ready to die on

@suricrasia @jk that's just being thrifty. No need to go out and buy brand new em dashes when there are perfectly good ones you can reuse

@funkula @jk I cannot abide by used punctuation. only the freshest for moi. to do otherwise would be so undignified!

@funkula @suricrasia @jk But my em-dashes are broken in two--I can't use these! Where oh where am I to get new ones?

@suricrasia @jk this is exactly what got us where we are with curly braces now (extirpated in the wild and only available farmed)

@funkula @jk hrm, well... at least *I* can still afford them

@suricrasia @funkula @jk I prefer artisinally hand crafted curly braces. Drawn with a quill and then lovingly scanned and OCR'ed into a document. Then write the actual text of the document around these characters.

@loke @funkula @jk finally, someone with taste! who is your supplier? I've been on the hunt for one ever since my old one got the book thrown at him for severely unethical behaviour

@suricrasia @funkula @jk that's my problem. They're severely overworked, especially since I had to write a bunch of C code recently.

I also needed to write some HTML, but I had run out of < and >. So I called my usual guy, a phenomenal artist. Uses actual compass and straightedge when drawing those angles. They're so sharp you could cut your finger on it just by looking at them.

Anyway, he was on vacation so I looked up someone online. Good price, portfolio looked OK, so I ordered a few kB. What did I get when they were delivered? Copy&pasted symbols from 'view source' of microsoft.com! An absolute travesty. I'd never use them. They were immediately removed. Not even going through the trashcan. Don't want them to pollute my hard disk more than they already had.

@loke @funkula @jk good on you! we ought to maintain our standards, or else where would we be? searching for special characters on google, going to their wiki page, and xclip-pasting them into our abiword documents, I bet! pitiful