Yes, that's true... an artefact of the fact that rotated Latin-script letters have been used by linguists for various sounds, but rotated other-script letters less commonly so (as far as I know). So they didn't get encoded in Unicode.

Now that UPA additions have been added, you can even write some text going up, since they have some letters rotated 90°!

By picking the right characters.

You know how if you want to type, say, "sound" upside down, you can just type "punos"? Or "monopod" upside down becomes "podouow"?

This is the same thing, only you have to use some more exotic Unicode characters to get things like upside-down "a" or "e".

by reading your comments it looks like you are trying to take credit for its rise in popularity, even hinting towards its creation.

Can you show me which comments you mean?

I don't claim to have come up with the idea by myself (see the second comment to this entry, where I say that my inspiration was a message by Mark Shoulson on a mailing list), and I certainly don't claim to have popularised it: I was surprised when someone pointed me to revfad since I had never heard of the place in general or the page on upside-down writing in particular.

Without knowing details, I imagine it spread from there. I certainly had no hand in it.

I think it's fun, but I don't claim authorship.

if you had any clue about it when you first posted this, you would have posted the very basic code.. tisk tisk tisk.

Since I only wanted to produce one sentence (for this journal entry), I did so through the technologically advanced method of copy-pasting from Character Map: no "basic code" involved, presuming that you are referring to programming with those words (and not, say, a lookup table of what upside-down character to use).

I still think you're blowing this out of proportion.

Also, while that may have been "basic 10 years ago", the possibilities these days are better the more characters are added to Unicode (especially with the phonetic additions for the UPA with its rotated Latin characters).

Ah well.

I have a feeling you won't be reading this reply, though, so I'll stop here.

(The reason I screen anonymous comments on this entry has nothing to do with you and more to do with people who post nonsense in response to this entry.)