finger 16
so at one point in your life you may find yourself in a spot where you really want to roll your eyes at someone but decide it would be unwise to be seen doing such. or perhaps you might find the binary nature of eye rolls to be too limiting and need more granularity to your sarcastic body language
enter Finger 16. i’m proposing this simple protocol as a replacement to eye rolling providing optional stealth and more layers of meaning
they system works like this: the listener in the conversation creates a particular hand shape which shows between 1 and 4 fingers. each finger represents one possible part of a message, defined as so:
- index – you’re wrong
- middle – you’re stupid
- ring – shut up
- pinky – go away
this hand shape is then tapped against the body, either out of sight for personal gratification, or in plain view if someone else is to receive the message.
"you're wrong and stupid" being tapped out in plain view
"you're wrong and stupid, shut up, go away", the message hand and tap being mostly out of sight behind other arm
(note, as above, in the case the index and middle are both showing, those two components are combined into “you’re wrong and stupid”)
one implementation suggestion: a message of “shut up” is tricky to do by itself, best way to do it is to do it is to hold down all the fingers with your thumb, then flick out the ring finger. alternatively, combine the message with “you’re stupid” since “you’re stupid, shut up” is a very easy hand shape
Possible implementation of "shut up". Not trivial, but very possible to create one handed.
as a bonus, these hand shapes translate to hex very easily which makes them easier to type than trying to capture eyerolls in text. the fingers are encoded as such:
- index : 1
- middle : 2
- ring : 4
- pinky : 8
use the characters zero-f as header in a finger 16 message, then add up the values of the fingers above, and write it as a hexadecimal (1 to F) number. sample usage:
“Wow, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this point 0f3.”
this, to a finger16 would actually mean, “wow, you’re wrong and too stupid to understand why you’re wrong, i give up”.
and that’s the basic great idea. if you disagree, this is me listening attentively to your comments:
Your opinions are very important to me, as you can tell from my facial expression.
ADDENDUM: enumerated table of values
0f1 : you’re wrong
0f2 : you’re stupid
0f3 : you’re wrong and stupid
0f4 : shut up
0f5 : you’re wrong, shut up
0f6 : you’re stupid, shut up
0f7 : you’re wrong and stupid, shut up
0f8 : go away
0f9 : you’re wrong, go away
0fA : you’re stupid, go away
0fB : you’re wrong and stupid, go away
0fC : shut up, go away
0fD : you’re wrong, shut up, go away
0fE : you’re stupid, shut up, go away
0fF : you’re wrong and stupid, shut up, go away