> Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. bold and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did.

Yeah… After posting that message, I remembered that _foo_ in Markdown also results in <em>foo</em> - so the underscores are backwards-compatible. But I've just always used asterisks so I completely forgot about it. So I guess they were bound to make some people upset no matter which one they made <em> and which one they made <strong>, and I'm on the losing side. :P

Whatever. If this ends up taking over the world as Markdown did (and I hope it does), I'll just get used to it, I suppose.

Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?