I saw a couple of polls on the YouGov site, and wondered about having a go [Peter]

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Poll #15172 Polls nicked from YouGov

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

View Respondents

What is your opinion of the font Comic Sans?

View Answers

Like Very Much
0 (0.0%)

Quite Like
2 (15.4%)

Don't Like
7 (53.8%)

Can't Stand
2 (15.4%)

Don't Know
2 (15.4%)

Do you think dreams do or do not reveal something significant about your life?

View Answers

Do
4 (30.8%)

Do not
5 (38.5%)

Don't know
4 (30.8%)

xpost: http://ptc24.livejournal.com/668564.html

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There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Dreams: I sort of feel I've been forced into "Do". I don't believe in dream interpretation, in any sort of hidden symbolism or stuff like that - OTOH I think the basic emotional content may be a reflection of what's going on in life. Maybe I'm not interpreting "reveal" heavily enough. Do anxiety dreams reveal anything when you have plenty of other evidence there's lots of anxiety in your life?

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I think dreams may *reflect* what's going on in life, but to *reveal* it they need to provide knowledge, either through traditional interpretation or some other mechanism. If significant things in life cause dreams in a manner that's not reversable (or reverse-engineerable) there's no revelation.

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Maybe I'm not interpreting "reveal" heavily enough.

*nods* I voted 'Do not', without actually disagreeing with what you say here. I think dreams are a warmed-over mishmash of memory and imagination, and hence don't give any information you might not just as plausibly have got from memory and/or imagination while awake.

Occasionally I've had a really good idea in a dream, but not often enough to make me think dreams are an especially good source of cool ideas – it seems much more likely that that was just a good idea that I happened to have while dreaming instead of having it (or a similar thought) some other time. And yes, perhaps just occasionally a dream has made me think 'hmm, I might be a bit stressed' a little before my waking behaviour gave me the same idea, but not enough before (or often enough) to make dreams any kind of Magical Oracle into your Inner Psyche.

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That's about what I was going to say, but I phrased it as "dreams sometimes reveal things about your life". I'm sure there are good examples of not realising how worried you are about something before it came up in a dream. But I think "random mishmash of stuff you already know" is more common.

Or to put it more positively, if something about a dream bothers you, it's worth thinking about what it is. But it's not worth examining every facet of a dream and assuming they all have to reveal something.

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I'd have to go with (sometimes) reveal or perhaps cause; it's hard to determine which applies.

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I feel the need to elaborate on my responses:

Comic Sans is OK so I went for 'quite like'. I don't think it's particularly horrible. Maybe overused in certain types of document, but that's not per se a reason to dislike the font itself.

On dreams, it depends on one's definition of 'reveal', 'something' and 'significant' :) But I think the sorts of dreams you have, how stressful they are, etc can tell you something about your current emotional state. And sometimes you can find you are more bothered about something (NB not necessarily related to the content of the dream!) than you thought you were by how badly you've been sleeping and how much you've been disturbed by dreams. So I think that counts as 'revelation', so I went for 'do'.

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On Comic Sans:

As

rochvelleth says, let's disregard the question of whether it's massively overused in all sorts of contexts where a humorous handwritten aesthetic is wildly inappropriate, and focus on the font itself. If it's used in an appropriate context, say the lettering for an actual comic (e.g. OOTS), how does it fare?

I think it's not nearly so bad in that situation, but one blemish I've never been able to unsee in it is the sticking-out rightmost leg of the m. It's not an implausible sort of glitch to find in the occasional letter of genuine hand-lettered text, but to make it so prominent in this font serves to highlight the faux nature of the handwritten-ness, in that every single m has that exact same glitch. I think that a more sophisticated faux-hand-lettered font which somehow arranged to have different wobbles and errors in different renditions of the same letter (which would, of course, not fit into the usual framework of font file formats and would require a custom text rendering engine of some kind) could perfectly well have the occasional m look like that without spoiling the look of the font as a whole, but within the constraints of a conventional font, a blemish prominent enough for its repeatability to be noticeable breaks suspension of disbelief.

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