idea: tumblr's original fandom population was mostly from lj, and therefore tumblr dialect grew out of lj dialect, which was naturally picked up on dw because we were the same people
Yeah, and we started with asterisks, only really switched to brackets when Plurk made asterisks into italics so if we were quoting something we'd have to change it.
it was years ago at one point, but I remember when dwrp discovered the gossip comm for the rpf community on insanejournal, and it was really wild looking at this other rp community with their own lingo where you could almost but not always tell what they were saying
but I was a forum RPer who moved to greatest journal until it folded, then insane journal, THEN livejournal (I'd always been on LJ for fandom stuff, just never RP), and then on to DW as LJRP died off completely, and LJ and DW are the first and only places i've ever seen brackets
I genuinely cannot remember when I first saw mun. I feel like I just kinda... quietly evolved from one style to another and then back again... then I took a break and was like the pizza guy gif. Eeeeverything was so different on DWRP
I like brackets because I'm lazy and I've always been a dialogue-heavy writer (all the way back to my original fic writing attempts). And bracket-style lets me write tags that are basically all dialogue with little bits of narrative when needed. But when I'm writing prose I feel compelled to include actual proper narrative more.
But yeah I think that's why I like both present and past tenses. Present tense has me in the moment, and kind of absorbed into it actively happening right then. Works really well for network things too. But whenever I'm doing handwave stuff in introspect, I switch to past tense for it
I continue to hate brackets, give me prose every time. I started RPing when ((ooc talk)) was in single or double parenthesis and brackets still make me think more of that.
I prefer prose too, in part cuz my bracket rp is just... prose in brackets, and in part cuz everyone does small text formatting for their brackets (except me) and it's harder for me to read
I feel like there's more flexibility with bracket tags because I can go from short tags to long tags if need be, while with prose if I give a short tag I feel like I need to add more even if there's nothing more to add. I like both styles, however, brackets are just a preference cuz they (for whatever reason) feel more casual.
As for me, I went from lj to dw when the exodus happened, never got into tumblr nor twitter rp, both formats are hellish and the organization of lj/dwrp is so much better for my adhd brain
as someone who almost became a cyber anthropologist with the intention of focusing on my fandom circles aka lj/dwrp and tumblr....... popcorns the shit out of all this
on hiatus
: I find it fascinating that you think it's easier as a visual separation, because I find brackets actually much harder to see! it's a line that runs the whole height of the text, so it doesn't read as a separate entity to me at a glance, in the way that asterisks or quotation marks do.
I hate smalltext because it's hard to read, I hate having to squint at my tags, but if people don't use smalltext, I'd probably just never notice the brackets.
i am also +1 to the brackets being easier as a visual separation crowd, but while i don't have a problem reading the small text, i do wish there was another way to visually differentiate it for the sake of accessibility
......i disagree that twitter users write in a tumblr-origin dialect, twitter not only came first but has a very different vibe to me, though perhaps that's because i don't actually regularly use either site so when i do go there, the user base i'm visiting doesn't overlap?
I like both Prose and Brackets but I'm from the time where Brackets = Network and Prose was in person, so that still sort of sticks in my head. I'm also much better suited to prose, as most of the time my brackets end up long anyway. And I struggle with small talk dialogue depending on the character I play. (Dorian Pavus is a talker and much easier to write)
Flint is not great at small talk, so I tend to struggle with brackets and smaller tags cause I need more substance for him to respond to either in the dialogue or the descriptors
pup I've never seen before; I've used both brackets and prose for as long as I've been in RP I think? I have a very small bit of proboards RP experience, so that may or may not still show up.
i think i somehow ended up the only human who does brackets in italics instead of smalltext but i swear to god i was copying what seemed to be the correct way to do it when i got started
/nodnod/ I've never really understood where either come from (meaning... I don't really use smalltext, unless I'm trying to emulate whispering. |D ), though I've used <tt> for 'text' posts before, or for character flavor.
I feel like in some older circles you can see people who have mostly stayed "pure/LJlike" like the equivalent of a US Southern accent supposedly being more similar to the Jamestown British accent. Slightly more muns and ::action marks like this::
I do a lot of phone tagging so i do not enjoy brackets at all, but will match if someone starts in brackets. To me it also was always prose = in person, brackets = network, so in person brackets feels weird.
Also, network posts used to be the same font as everything else, and now it's a given that we use a different font for all in-universe text communication.
^ also, do all networks have the same modes (usually video, audio, text)? that's sort of assumed, though it's also good form to specify which kind is being used. (and in games that do deviate, and make it clear/make it cleary why that is, player can still forget anyway because it's not the norm in most other places.)
over the course of 10+ years i've also gone from hating brackets to vastly preferring them lmao (though not preferring them so much that i won't happily switch if they're hard on my thread partner)
ShaynaIsHere
i'm also a big fan of specifying what mode (text/video/audio) is being used in a network thread, and leaving it up in the subject line so that i won't forget
mmhmm! and sometimes how one character can interact in those threads (sometimes to hide voice, sometimes because they can't hear, etc) is one way, and the other person sticks to another... I find it easier to have my character also match format, but it doesn't always go that way!
Yeah, the courier boom does line up with Homestuck, which is odd because I played from that and I remember we all had to put up opt-out posts for the IC text.
(Not very many people used them, though, if only because if they hated the text, they probably also avoided the characters because it was a huge fad canon.)
I feel like even if the quirkless courier by itself bothered people with its sheer faddishness, probably what happened was still a critical mass of the people who did agree to text with the Homestucks thinking "wow the thread looks so much better and matchier when I `font` it"
While horror and sex games had already started banning younger characters, I know gen games began to bar them as the craze went on, and at least one game that banned characters aged 13 and under, and later (post-timeskip) 16 and under, was later admitted to be HS repellent.
There were other factors, such as the rise of "sex-friendly" games (and the confusion as to what that meant, since some games use it to mean "it's a gen game but you don't have to move your smut off the comms if you want to thread that" and others for "it's basically a sex game but there's no smut-specific AC so you don't have to"), but that came later.
Mυrder Mυғғιɴ
: You can set it up so your phone "corrects" a certain thing so you can get html really easy, like I type "sml" and that gives me the html for brackets tags. I do that for all html on my phone so its super easy for phone tags!
I remember when luceti banned homestucks and they were like "well we use journals for communications so I dont see why they'd wanna come here cuz they can't do their text thing" as if that was the only reason people played from homestuck lol
But i'm a big fan of the tt for text threads, i'm also a former homestuck, but the visuals of it just makes it more enjoyable to me. My immersion or something I guess.
Idk I hate a lot of canons and characters but if I was a mod I wouldn't ban any of them, if I was worried about an influx i'd just put a canon cap in the game.
I bring this up every time we have one of these conversations, but brackets are very much the norm when writing theater, and I believe in some cases it is also italicised
its pared down, its minimalist, it can be very low effort or very very high effort to convey what you want to show with extremely little ability to tell
re "muhn" vs "moon" I definitely leaned toward the latter, but that's because for the longest time nobody informed me that it was short for "mundane" so I was just seeing it as similar to all the Japanese suffixes (-chan, etc) and moon would be how you'd pronounce that in Japanese
So eventually I learned the origin and was like "oh wait, THAT'S where that came from?" because I had no idea and then was like "huh guess I've been pronouncing that wrong this whole time..."
Everything was openly catty and mean-spirited in the LJ days compared to now, so that's an improvement. We have our own problems with gossip and grudge-holding, but it's not as bad as then.
Oh weird mun always seemed obvious to me, I came into ljrp in 2010 and when people were saying "mun" I was like "mun..." and idk it clicked cuz it seemed like a shortened word and mundane was the closest word that made sense to me
this is just giving me flashbacks to that person who posted as Dad from Homestuck like YOU ARE NOT MUNDANE. YOU ARE NOT ORDINARY AT ALL. YOU ARE WRITERS. I AM SO PROUD OF YOU and I know at least one person who permanently stopped using the term after that
I mentally associated it with SCA lingo. I don't know if that's where it's from or just a coincidence, but I know that SCA was using "mundane" for your RL self (vs your SCA character self) since at least the 1990s (when I was in the SCA in high school).
And although that was pre-large swathes of the internet (since this was, like, 1995) I think every SCAer I knew back then also did other types of RP so I wouldn't be surprised by some linguistic cross-pollination there.
Mundane made sense to me cuz we're often times rping characters from fantastical stories with magic powers or incredible circumstances, and by comparison sitting at home on my computer is rather mundane
I remember when I joined ddd in 2007 (hhhhhh) brackets and present tense were reserved for comment spam (stuff that went from network to in person without moving threads) and it was mostly past tense prose for more "serious" in person stuff
I've never known anything but mun.
I have a very small bit of proboards RP experience, so that may or may not still show up.
Also I miss writing same-size paragraphs with quotation marks so bad but I feel like I gotta conform
(and in games that do deviate, and make it clear/make it cleary why that is, player can still forget anyway because it's not the norm in most other places.)
and sometimes how one character can interact in those threads (sometimes to hide voice, sometimes because they can't hear, etc) is one way, and the other person sticks to another...
I find it easier to have my character also match format, but it doesn't always go that way!
it does make sense, though.
(I use... a lot of these, myself. /makes this comment into an example.)
i knew someone try to app the doctor from human centipede
I just think it's neat. ^^;