I do a few things a bit differently.
Not to be weird for the sake of weirdness but my general goal in life is to see and think about how things are done and what people are trying to accomplish.
For now I'm just going to put a few here but this may end up being a whole section if it gets unmanagably long.
Quotes
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men`s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever- growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty ~ Daniel Burnham
No not that kind of quote ( though I do love that one and particularly use it as guidance as one of many reasons why incrementalism is not a great strategy ).
I've been a programmer for most of my life and I appreciate things like matching parentheses and curly-braces.
The standard quotation marks used in USian english "" have always bothered me.
First they don't easily match. It's like using |vertical bars| to demarcate things - no obvious opening or closing. “These” help a little but in terms of legibility, they lack it.
Second I just find them aesthetically unappealing and even the curved ones with a clear opening and closing kinda suck.
After I was sufficiently bothered by these / for the longest time I used the French « Guillemets » - and they're a massive improvement. They clearly pair with eachother and they very clearly have a ( relatively natural ) opening and closing ( < [ { like these } ] >).
.. but then I learned about the CJK ( Chinese, Japanese, and Korean )「 quotes 」and I mean - come on !
These are just obviously better in so many different ways.
They give clear openings and closings and demarcate a rectangular region which works well in left-to-right/right-to-left and top-down and bottom-up writing as well as with pictograms「 𓈊𓏤𓄤𓆑𓆛𓅓 」
These are not perfect and they're a little awkward when you have multiple lines ( which is more an issue of how we write than the punctuation marks, themselves ) but they're
Closing Punctuation
In messages and conversational text, I don't generally end sentences like this. I usually end them like this . ( or with no closing punctuation at all ) becasue somehow in my mind the abrupt. feels too strong ( in addition to being a bit more difficult to parse )
The Devil's Units
Look - metric isn't perfect. There are lots of legitimate criticisms of it.. but it's ridiculously better than the「 English 」measurement system ( which I generally refer to as「 The Devil's Units 」).
I know people who insist that Fahrenheit is more natural for every day use but I swear this is much more a matter of what you're used to than the underlying reality. If you grew up using Rankine or Kelvin then room temperature would obviously just be somewhere around 535R or 298K.. and that'd just seem perfectly normal and reasonable to you and you'd find 25ºC to be bizarre and a ridiculously low number.
The Mask
I'll write more about this later but this is such a basic show of courtesy/respect and a completely natural and obvious basic public-health measure right up there with handwashing and it's completely ridiculous that they've been stigmatised.
It is also such a simple element of disability justice that when there are airborne pathogens circulating ( and there absolutely are more than just COVID ) we should all be masking anywhere where immune compromised / otherwise high-risk people deserve to be ( which, in case this needs to be said - and, tragically, it does - is EVERYWHERE )