this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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doomer
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What is Doomer? :(
It is a nebulous thing that may include but is not limited to Climate Change posts or Collapse posts.
Include sources when applicable for doomer posts, consider checking out !bloomer@www.hexbear.net once in awhile.
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Em dashes are a proper and valid punctuation mark and sentence constructor. I use them a lot because they're useful for parentheticals, interjections, and exclamations, which is how I think and write, and because I read a lot of 19th century literature when I was very young where they use them that way. I'm getting annoyed that em dashes are being coopted by LLMs
However, this disgusting post is misusing the em dashes. You need to have a more advanced grasp on the English language to use em dashes correctly and LLMs clearly do not have that.
I use them too and type them directly by Unicode point (it's U+2014) when I want to use them. It's totally fine to use them, but if you read a human post that has them, they probably wouldn't have other tell-tale AI signs in them and could probably explain to you that they intentionally used one even if their understanding of them isn't perfect.
you can also use compose key + three hyphens, like this: —
also cool for hearts ♥, arrows →, trademark symbol ™, accents é, degrees ° etc.
i love compose key
TIL what the Linux compose key does
Just saw the Unicode-enabled X11 list of sequences and that is pretty impressive
True. I type them with Shift+Option+hyphen or just -- on mobile.
Although come to think of it, do I use em-dashes, or en-dashes? I know I wrote something where I paid very close attention to which is which but I guess I'm more slipshod with those nowadays.
Type one into here or other sites like that. It's an en dash (the shorter one) if you get 2013 and an em dash if you get 2014
Thank you, mystery solved kind of. It's the em dash, I can see that very clearly on my computer that my muscles know the keyboard shortcut, but when I was typing on my phone I couldn't remember it.
Do you type out the actual emdash character or just use two regular dashes together like a normal person?
Type it out, Shift+Option+- .