nemesis wrote:
> Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> AFAIK the joke was U+FDD0 is not a renderable character, according to
>> the Unicode spec, so, the eye of the basilisk is not visible, ergo no
>> one turns to stone, or dies. I still can't figure out why the basilisk's
>> use of a smiley emoticon would kill someone. I suppose it's because the
>> person is seeing an abstract form of the basilisk's face?
> 
> no, supposedly, U+FDD0 is the invisible character preceding the emoticon?
> 

> Unicode chars.  By the time you googled it all and is ready for the laugh, the
> magic is gone... ;)
> 
> 

I don't think it's that complicated.

The Basilisk turns you to stone when you see it's eyes.

The emoticon is supposed to be a face ( :) ).

The ':' is a set of eyes that were typed by the Basilisk, and so they 
belong to the basilisk, and so they are the Basilisk's eyes.

When the guy saw them, he died.

The alt-tag just confused things for me until I figured out the main 
joke... at which point I couldn't believe I spent so much time figuring 
out something so simple.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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