Vulcan vs the other planet (spoilers)

[trevanian]

I have a similar habit of using all-caps for simple emphasis...people still mis-read it as shouting, which is never intended but oft-misinterpreted.

And the same has been harped upon, incessantly it seems sometimes, regarding my own writing style.

I learned to type on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, years ago. In order to get "bold" or "italic" you had to put in a different type wheel. The only options available were underlining or all-caps. Double-striking worked, a little bit, sometimes... but it didn't tend to work well enough to be relied upon.

So, as a "stream of consciousness" typist, I use ALL CAPS quite frequently, and use it (as you said) for EMPHASIS, not for "shouting." "Shouting" is sort of a hyperbole way of looking at emphasis, as far as I'm concerned.

If you want to see "shouting" from me... it'll look like...

THIS-THIS-THIS-THIS-THIS!!!!!!!

(Now, back to your regularly scheduled rantings... )

Boy I hear that. My wife is of the 'caps is shouting' brigade, but I think that is because she didn't learn to type until she worked on a computer.

But perhaps this is something we're just going to be outvoted on. I don't use emoticons, but most other people who get up in arms over CAPS do, and they do so without anybody besides me telling them they should speak English instead of emoticon. So this might be a losing battle for us typists.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I've relearned a lot of things in the last twenty years. The world is changing continually, he said obviously.

When I was in my twenties the first thing that every writer I knew did when he or she got their first big advance was to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter - suckers were four hundred dollars a pop, which was more than a month's rent...but you could correct errors on the fly without changing ribbon cartridges or using white-out strips, and you could even change the font in about three seconds by switching out type-balls.

Of couse, no publisher wanted to read a manuscript with italics or other typographic "tricks." Underlining was good enough for Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1923, it was good enough for DAW in 1978....

 

[USS Mariner]

NPR had a segment on typewriters this morning. It turns out that a surprisingly large (and young, around my age ) chunk of people still use them.

Synchronicity, anyone?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Hey, the fact that there's a control code in ASCII for "carriage return" tells you a lot...

 

[trevanian]

NPR had a segment on typewriters this morning. It turns out that a surprisingly large (and young, around my age ) chunk of people still use them.

Typewriters are NOISY. Biggest drawback to writing was having to work longhand past 9 or 10pm because neighbors would go nuts from the sound of any typewriter, and that was every single place I lived.

 

[M'Sharak]

I've relearned a lot of things in the last twenty years. The world is changing continually, he said obviously.

When I was in my twenties the first thing that every writer I knew did when he or she got their first big advance was to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter - suckers were four hundred dollars a pop...

And weighed a fucking ton. Built like battleships, those.

I have a similar habit of using all-caps for simple emphasis...people still mis-read it as shouting, which is never intended but oft-misinterpreted.

And the same has been harped upon, incessantly it seems sometimes, regarding my own writing style.

I learned to type on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, years ago. In order to get "bold" or "italic" you had to put in a different type wheel. The only options available were underlining or all-caps. Double-striking worked, a little bit, sometimes... but it didn't tend to work well enough to be relied upon.

If you were putting in a different type wheel (even on an old Blickensderfer) odds are you were using an electric typewriter and not a manual one.

So, as a "stream of consciousness" typist, I use ALL CAPS quite frequently, and use it (as you said) for EMPHASIS, not for "shouting." "Shouting" is sort of a hyperbole way of looking at emphasis, as far as I'm concerned.

If you were typing that post on a manual typewriter, that might be a valid observation. But you aren't.

If you want to see "shouting" from me... it'll look like...

THIS-THIS-THIS-THIS-THIS!!!!!!!

Which brings me to the point: I don't want to see it (unless, perhaps, in the "Shouting Spock" thread, which is completely absurd and shouty on purpose.)

trevanian typing movie titles in all-caps is fine; I don't see that as a big deal. This board, however, works on software which includes features allowing you to easily emphasize text using italics, underlining or bold type. It's not stream-of-consciousness -- it requires you to go back and highlight the passages in question to apply the emphasis or to manually type the appropriate tags, and it might even cause you to consider revising your wording, on occasion -- but the fact remains that in a internet bulletin-board setting, the use of all-caps is generally perceived as shouting, whether that is your intent or no. It's considered rude, and I'm asking you not to do it. When in Rome, and all that.

And that's all for this diversion to that topic, please. Back to "Vulcan vs the other planet (spoilers)".

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

"THE WOMEN!"

 

[ancient]

Hopefully Vulcan gets blown up. Twice. And then they reset the entire film in the last 5 seconds...

...only to have it blow up again after the credits.

 

[Praetor]

lol, bunch of angry fanboy time travel lovers above. You do know those films you list were done 10+ years ago, right?. It's time for something original, not another mix of all the other movies, like Nemsis was of Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country.



PS

And how do you compare a classic and unforgetable stories like Terminator and Back to the Future, to something that has been done to death in Star Trek in every show, TNG and Voyager finale, and two movies already, is beyond me. Making this movie is like Terminator 29, it would tank in the box office, and Star Trek will probably as well.

Wow, I had no idea I was an angry time travel lover.

You do know they're making another Terminator movie, right?