childish_song raze i type most of the things i write here directly into the "says" box, but i know some 'skites write their blathes in a word doc or a notes app first, and then they copy and paste the text onto blather. i can tell when that happens because the apostrophes take on more of a curled appearance. (you know you've been at blather too long when you can spot minute differences in punctuation.) over the last little while, i've noticed the punctuation that originates from outside of blather sometimes gets lost in translation. some apostrophes and em dashes are replaced with japanese shinjitai, and whatever letter was supposed to be to the right of a given symbol gets eaten. it seems to be random. everything will be fine for a while. then one or two blathes won't be processed properly. a blathe like everything_is_automatic will show all of its punctuation as being normal until it's added to for a second or third time, and then it'll all go blooey. or i'll write something on the punk blathe eight years after it was last blathed to, and my em dashes will appear as question marks in floating diamond-shaped boxes. i asked dallas if he knew what the deal was there. he said: "this is happening because people are pasting in characters beyond the basic ascii set. things like 'smart quotations' are an example of that. the web didn't tend to have those when blather was first built, so it doesn't handle them well. it should either just replace/strip them out on input, or properly display them!" the two shinjitai appearing in place of some of the apostrophes and em dashes look like this: 稚 謡 in japanese, that's "itokena utai". in english? "childish song". i kind of like that. i've been using google chrome as my browser for years now. i've tried opera. the same thing happens on the same blathes. this morning i thought i'd dust off firefox and see what things looked like over there. no more childish singing. just apostrophes and em dashes, as they were meant to be displayed. maybe blather isn't the issue after all. maybe some browsers just can't handle the likes of us. 211201 what's it to you? who go blather from