Spare letters for dolphins

The Fediverse turns out to be this wonderful playground of creativity. There is this incredible place called Oulipo that doesn’t allow the use of the letter e. And last week, while surfing I found this place for dolphins where you are only allowed to post the letter e! The balance in the fediverse is restored.

I have been posting to Oulipo for a week now. And it is much more intersting, and at the same time much harder, than I thought. It is ridiculously hard to write without using the letter e, and then the weird this is that it is even harder to find an e in a sentence that is rejected by Oulipo. I had to read this sentence a few times before I spotted that fifth Latin glyph:

Last night I finally saw a group of Boss Musicians of Jajouka play music on a podium, in that large round hall in Tivoli in Holland. It was as brilliant, wild, and funky as I thought.

So I built a tool that makes it a little easier to spot an unwanted letter. Every e that you type is displayed in red crimson. This makes it so much easier to spot (at least, if you’re not colour blind, so I also added a wavy underline to it). It is a handy little tool for those of us who like to publish things without using that fifth symbol.

But now that I know that there is this place that thrives on the letter e I decided to add an extra feature to this Ouliposting tool. Every time you do, by accident, type an e it gets added to a list of es you typed before. The idea is that you can then copy them and post them on Dolphin.town. It also plays a happy dolphin sound whenever you type an e. This startles me so much that I think I’ll develop some kind of Pavlovian fear for that letter.