My goal is, truth be told, to make a signed conlang and then post a translation quiz in said conlang on this site, like I’ve done with my spoken conlang. Self-doxxing material gets removed from Hexbear, but the border of what constitutes it is fuzzy: Rationally I know that nobody’s actually going to identify me from my hands or my eyebrows, and even so, they’d probably identify me from my body language, or even from the peculiarities of how I write, or any number of other things, before they’d ever have to resort to cross-referencing the creases of my hands… But that doesn’t stop me from being irrationally bothered by the idea of showing myself on camera, and it doesn’t stop me from finding it bothersome and unfair that there are 300 or so natural languages in the world that apparently just can’t be used anonymously online like all the other languages. People do have a right to privacy and a right to use their first languages, so why should millions of people around the world have to choose between one or the other? This is why I was excited to hear about VRchat’s sign language communities, or Zhaoyang Xia et al’s articles about SL video anonymization through machine learning, and figured I could probably utilize something like that for my own project.

The other solutions in my case are to go through the effort of manually animating a cartoon after all; to spend however much on setting up a proper mocap system; or to use or devise some sort of transcription system or orthography… which would be a pain for me to learn/make and a bigger pain to make other people learn just to play a translation quiz. This means that video really is the best option. If I am resigning myself to just wearing a mask to cover my face, then I’m sure I could find a way to add all the information lost back in.