*snort*

(The original trailer for "Star Trek: Nemesis" had a similar problem -- the text wasn't very well laid out causing the F and I in "Final" in the tagline "A Generation's Final Journey Begins" to blend together, so it looked like it was "A Generation's Anal Journey Begins", an altogether different film. :)

I don't get it...

Are they waiting for your click or for your dick?

Wow. That's stretching the point.

Oh fuck you Flasher. It's plainly obvious what the joke is unless you're a robot. Actually, I think even a ROBOT might incorrectly OCR that font.

A joke is no longer funny if it has to be explained to a linguist.

Maybe you have a fuzzy monitor or something, but on mine it's very clearly two separate letters (by spacing if nothing more).

Really, you're only seeing it because you expect to see it. :P

You apparently have not only the best monitor in existance, but also perfect eyesight.

That and $2.50 will get you a decaf soy carob-mocha latte with an extra shot. Small.

So, you're checking out singles ads, huh, huh.

You're so full of shit, the only thing separating those black letters is a medium gray antialias.

Maybe your monitor is set too light.

No Simon I'm hanging out in gay coffee houses, obviously.

My monitor's running at 1920x1440, so things that are separated by a single pixel tend not to be all that distinct. (It's about 114ppi, so each pixel is around .2mm square...)

Honestly I didn't see the joke the first time I looked either (and my monitor is almost new), but once pointed out, it is hard to see it any other way.

I read it right the first time too, thinking that maybe the graphic had been replaced and the original joke was no longer there. Only after going back and looking for possible misreads was it evident.

I put my monitor on the brightest possible setting, and after burning out my eyes, sometimes it looked like two distinct letters, but then my vision got all blurry and I had to set it back.

Well you're all uber-human Aryan monsters, I guess. Congratulations on your cyborg-like sensory perceptions.

Or congratulations on running in 640x480 or having your monitor poorly calibrated, and also for having no sense of humour. :)

I read it right too. Honestly, I think if the context had been different (say if the woman was naked and it was advertising sex instead of a 'date') I would've read it differently.

If you read it wrong then perhaps there was a subconscious reason for it - perhaps some sort of obsession ;)

Oh, I know.

I'm sleightly nearsighted, but still sit a couple of feet away from my monitor without glasses.

But you're all either wearing super strong glasses, or sitting an inch and a half from your monitor.

Don't be such a click.

Don't be such a cluck.

Really, though, I think Colm is right on the money - it's your mindset when you read it that determines how you parse it. The human mind has an amazing ability to find letters out of a mess of graphics (just as we have an amazing ability to separate streams of audio out of a mess of incoming soundwaves), but it doesn't do it in a vacuum, and instead relies upon heuristics. Maybe you guys saw the ad and immediately pulled up a certainly likely word list based upon the woman or something?

As for whether you can see a separation between the letters or not, that's completely irrelevant. The parsing on the letters isn't right for the c to combine with the l for a d, and angling just doesn't look right. It's kerning/font cues that indicate that they aren't one letter, not a separation down the middle.

Dennis -

It's not so much that I mistook the word "click" for "dick" as it is that the word "dick" is very evidently implied by the font/kerning/context. That's the joke. Many people got it. You did not. Get over it. If you could buy a sense of humor, I'd suggest doing so.

"It's not so much that I mistook the word "click" for "dick" as it is that the word "dick" is very evidently implied by the font/kerning/context. "

...yet earlier you said...

"You apparently have not only the best monitor in existance, but also perfect eyesight."

Nonetheless, if that's the "joke", then I guess they have the juvenile market cornered. Ha ha ha, funny. I guess I just don't have a sense of humor.

BTW: FLICK YOU!

"...I guess they have the juvenile market cornered..."

My impression was that this was a genuine mistake, and it wasn't *supposed* to look like dick (which is why it's funny). If they did it deliberately then it's lame...

What I meant by that, Dennis, sweetie, was that if one had perfect eyesight and a high defnition monitor, the distinction between the 'C' and the 'L' might become so clear as to obliterate even the faint implication of a 'D' that all of us normal people see.

I agree Mat - there is nothing about it that says that it was a big, clever joke, and that sort of font issue is fairly common. e.g.

http://www.6v6gt.com/humor/megaflicks.jpg

So it comes down to the perception of the reader whether it's teehee funny or not, and I didn't catch it, as did many others. I guess we have better neural networks.

Settle down class, we are supposed to be working.

Darn! Here I was thinking that Mark thinking of finding a partner was the joke. I was about to start a thread commenting on how the imposters were improving.