A Couple Random Thoughts · 3:36am Jan 17th, 2013
I suddenly suspect that every person who writes the kind of fanfic that is riddled with typos and nonsensical grammar has a computer as junky as my old Dell.
I think this only because I took my Dell to E's house to use for typey typing and internet stuffs after he's gone to bed and I did some work on the next part of WGGTS tonight. I just got home and as I was adding the new bit to the file I have here on my good laptop, I realized it was full of typos and horrible mistakes, many of which were a result of the horrid keyboard on that piece of crap.
So maybe the people who have bad fic aren't to blame? Maybe they have computers like my old one?
DISCLAIMER: I totally don't believe that. Because many of the problems with my draft were fixed simply by running it through spellcheck and removing those squiggly red lines.
In other news, I am definitely on my way to making E into a brony. We went to Walmart for some things I needed after I picked him up and he was entertaining himself in the shopping cart while I was checking out by saying over and over again "Rainbow Dash...She's cool." And when we got to his house, I told him he could go play while I made some dinner and he asked for the ponies he knew were in my bookbag (who happened to be Lyra and Pinkie) -- And this is a little dude who normally spends his evening crashing train cars into one another. Even though he thinks Pinkie is funny and he "likes that green pony," he wasn't satisfied and told me in no uncertain terms "tomorrow I want you to bring me Twilight Sparkle and Spike the Dragon."
...I love corrupting small children >3
Let the corruption spread!
I know how you feel with a crappy keyboard. I have burned out the left side of the spacebar on my laptop. When I am cranking out words, it sometimes decided to just give up and I can easily end up with paragraphs with no spaces If I am not careful. I have also almost worn out some of the lettering on my keys.
awwww. hehe
719694
This laptop is nothing compared to the one I bought in 2003 -- Which, by the by, also still works, but has no wireless card. That one is completely missing the left shift key (it fell off, broke, and couldn't go back on) and the spacebar kind of doesn't work at all half the time. If I do try to use that left shift by pressing the little nubbly thing under where the buton should be, it usually gives me a small shock.
719898
I had more typos in that one chunk of writing than I've had in the rest of the story, and I'm pretty sure it was the fault of the keyboard. Because some of the stuff that was spelled wrong...Is not stuff I usually spell wrong AND I know I hit the correct keys. The computer simply wasn't registering that I hit them or something, because a lot of the squiggly red lines were due to letters completely missing from words.
And if only the world's badfic! problems could be solved by better keyboards...What a world it would be!
I used to have a crappy keyboard, but my writing back then was crappy on it's own merits, so I'm not sure how much it is to blame.
Also, whee! Let the corruption spread!
However:
I like ponies too, obviously, but I also spend my evenings crashing lego figures into one another. Why should the two be mutually exclusive? (Admittedly nowdays the crashing takes place in a microsoft word document and the figures have names, personalities, and complex, morally grey reasons for their conflicts, but still.
)
720105
How... shocking
But at least when you type on a normal keyboard, it's relatively easy to go back and edit. Trying to type out hundreds of words on a tablet (especially with autocorrect) is pretty awful.
720556
The point I was vaguely trying to get across there is that he's not usually a kid who wants much to do with stereotypically "girly" things. He's a really rough-and-tumble sort of boy, so the fact that he's so into Ponies is surprising for me.
720744
LOL it's actually not easy for me personally to edit on that keyboard. It's layout is very different from my current laptop and I wind up hitting the wrong keys a lot -- mostly the file key when I want the left arrow, which is frustrating.
720942 Ah, gotcha.