Big Bang Theory, season one. And if you haven’t seen it yet, start right now. Haven’t seen season seven yet, but so far it started well kept getting better.
I tried to watch Big Bang Theory when it came out, but it seemed like one stereotypical joke about nerds after another. Did not need the flashbacks to my younger days. What am I missing? It’s pretty popular among nerds and geeks, so there must be a reason.
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I watched an episode with a friend and the storyline was something about theorists versus experimentalists. I remember thinking that I was not sure that my friend (not a geek or nerd) could really understand how true this was. So I think part of the reason why geeks/nerds like the show is that they see jokes that only they can really appreciate. I eventually stopped watching because I got tired of how they portray women and how they show university life (as a graduate student it seemed like every professor taught classes and did research with graduate students/undergrads, but you do not see any of that on the show). Also, I am not really into comics/Star Wars/Star Trek so all of that got kind of boring.
Sounds very similar to my reaction. Thanks! I was wondering what I wasn’t seeing.
Yeah, same with me when it came out.
Then, nearly two years ago I bought season one on an impulse and liked it.
Go figure…
So…worth giving a second chance, it sounds like.
Getting back to the topic… It’s probably safest to assume that anything on BB, and indeed anything on the net, may have been intended as sarcasm and just not written well enough to make that clear. Or, if it looks sarcastic, to assume the opposite. Tone of voice does sometimes get lost.
Though I suppose that the only way to follow that paragraph is to assert that I am lying.
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Or maybe you were just being sarcastic? I can’t tell from your tone… being online and all. 
In my experience, yes. But that’s a matter of personal taste, of course.
Anyway, my feeling is they weren’t really sure about the format in the first two or three seasons - additional characters dropping in and out somewhat randomly, that sort of thing. From season three or four it gets more consistant. Additional characters reappear more or less regular but in accordance with backstories and/or the general layout of the show. Other additional characters even develop into main characters, and that allows for adding more range and dimension to the whole show. But that’s just how I feel about it. I started to like it, so I watch it - without analyzing in detail why.
It might be a factor that I don’t watch it on TV but on DVD. I don’t have to suffer the commercials and I can watch either the original version or the dubbed one. (Next on the schedule is the last season of Fringe, starting next week.)
I really like the idea of actually using some of those wacky unicode characters for something.
Unfortunately how to input them is highly platform dependent. Looking at the wikipedia entry the important thing to take away is the code point: U+2E2E then usually there is some way to input code points numerically, here’s a guide for windows.
If you are on a linux system I’ve had great fun with this xcompose setup, it also requires switching input method to xim which is probably pretty distribution dependent. But after doing the setup inputting ⸮ is just: compose key + question mark + less than sign. And you easily get access to all sorts of nice symbols: «, ≤, ∑, ∫, ¿, ‽, 
, ẻ, 
, 
, 𝖌, 𝕲(who doesn’t like fraktur?). This actually turned out to be pretty useful when I had to explain math over email for an introductory class where the students didn’t know LaTeX.
As for whether a sarcasm mark is useful, the fact that we have developed visual and auditory queues for sarcasm in speech suggests that we find it useful and necessary. And I confess to not expending the same effort when reading an internet comment, as when I read a piece of litterature or even an essay. Furthermore I believe general usage would rather be occasional underscoring of sarcasm, as opposed to a consistent markup of every single occasion where sarcasm or irony is used. Though perhaps it should be required in an attempt at defeating Poe’s law.
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