XKCD: It's more than a comic

I wrote cursive when I was at school. These days I mostly write in squiggles.

I only use cursive when writing in cards.

Only when I write in blood.

I relearned it after college, in part because I was in boring meetings and I wanted to see if I could teach myself to write backwards, and cursive seemed more conducive to that than print with the flowing lines, not to mention that I was relearning anyhow, so switching directions incurred less pain of changed reflexes. I still write in a cursive a decent amount of the time when I'm writing quick notes, although items all in capitals and numbers are all in print.

One of my favorite memories. :) I taught myself how to write in cursive in second grade, even though my friends and I weren't supposed to learn it until third grade. My teachers allowed it because it was a lot easier for me (plus I thought it looked nicer ).

I only use cursive when writing notes to myself, because my handwriting is awful and difficult to read. If I want others to be able to read it, such as when filling out forms, I write each letter individually. In the past I also used all caps, but since then I've learned how to write lowercase without cursive.

I only ever print, because for whatever reason I got much more used to printing, and I can do it really fast. Cursive always makes me take more time. On the other hand, my cursive is *way* more readable than my printing, which is usually considered chicken scratch. :shrug:

As a left handed person, I can't even read my own writing, let alone expeect someone else to read it, which is why I usually don't use cursive. But I could, if I wanted to.

I’m also left handed.

I hated learning cursive in school. Twenty years later I discovered that there are many styles of cursive, not just the ugly, cramped style they taught us. So I taught myself an old-fashioned cursive that's much prettier.

Also, I finally realized how the modern cursive capital G relates to the Latin capital G.

I sometimes wonder if we'll reach the point where cursive becomes rare enough to be regarded as a legitimate visual art. Will we start seeing handwriting competitions?

That's already a thing for some languages isn't it?

That has existed for millennia. It's called calligraphy.

Yeah, a number of old cursives are practiced solely for their beauty. Spencerian is a big one.

#2913: Periodic Table Regions

Cross-referenced the "You are Here" area, and yep, that's pretty much it. Funny how most of the stuff in us comes from that one little block of the table.

Hey, we also have some fancy protons and regular dirt.

So which ones are Chaotic Evil?

That would be "safety goggles required".

I first read the title as "Periodic Table Religions", which led me to expect a totally different comic (though I had no idea what it could be).

Apart from that, not surprised too much by the "You are here" - years ago I managed to commit to memory (probably because it sounds funny) that we are mostly made of CHONPS and traces of other stuff.

Actually, there are alternate projections of the periodic table, they just don't seem to catch on.

Where they popular for a period of time?

I don't know about popularity, but here is a list of variations. There's a lot of them, turns out, some 2-dimensional, some 3D.

#2914: Eclipse Coolness

Being in the partial zone makes you a loser.

I disagree with the alt text. A partial eclipse is less cool than a sunset even though it does not happen every day. It's more weird, which gives it some coolness factor. It's like normal daylight except darker, but you don't notice that it's darker because your eyes are really good at adapting to different light conditions, only that everything is grayer and the Sun gives off less heat^note OK, from this point of view, it's literally "cool", but so is a sunset.

Yeah, I noticed this first hand when we had a partial eclipse somewhere around 90 percent a few years ago, and you could barely even notice. Like, you could totally miss it if you weren't paying attention.