The Not Happy Thread

I'd say the "poop" segment of the Forum Daily Five has been more than made today....

 

She doesn't have any medical qualifications, but I have been displaying a couple of symptoms (which I think is coincidental) and she did provide a link to the NHS website. She does know where to find reliable sources.

 

Meningitis symptoms are pretty common. If you had a hangover, you could have literally all of the early warning symptoms for viral meningitis. However, (unless I'm mistaken) you're in the UK and it's my understanding that the UK has socialist healthcare, so the most it would cost to get checked out is a few hours of your time. Rule out meningitis, possibly find out why you have these symptoms (my guess is school stress), and get your loving mother off your back about it. Seems fairly win-win to me.

 

Turns out this is 100% legit! Who'd have thought?

 

I just read an article in Rolling Stone that said that someone was using something as a "pneumonic device" to help them remember a talking point. Highly political article, so I'm not going to link it here, but FFS, what happened to copy editing?

 

It always annoys me when I see articles that have errors in them. Have they not heard of proofreading? The most glaring one I saw recently was in an article about unreasonable mothers. Some of them would do anything to make their "little angles" happy.

My Not Happy is that just as I finish Season Five of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season Six begins to air!

...in America.

Who knows when it'll reach Amazon Prime? Probably at least a year. Does anyone know where I can illegally watch Season Six of Brooklyn Nine-Nine?

 

You could sneak into America without a passport and watch it. That would be illegal.

 

Goddamn kids. In order to accomplish some functions at work, It Has Been Decided that we all need to have LINE accounts to communicate with each other. Y'know, because email and Facebook messenger are soo 2015 and all. Of course, to get a LINE account on your PC, you have to give it your phone information, so you have to create an account on the phone even if you don't want the fucking thing on your phone, and to create an account on your phone, you need... something that defaults to Japanese and can't be switched to any other language because everybody who lives in Japan can read the pathetic squiggles and cartoons they use here in place of a written alphabet. It seems that they want to know the ID and password assigned to me by my phone company. What fucking ID and password? And what's wrong with using email? Or messenger, which I had to get a few years ago in a similar idiotic situation. And in two years I'll have to sign up for Taintogram or Felchnet or whatever the new cool killer app is.

Because it'll be in a different color....

 

It's because the powers that be assume automated spell check and grammar check is enough, so some of the first staff cuts to most magazines and newspapers include fact checkers and copy editors. That leaves the remaining editorial staff overworked, so things slip by. Meanwhile, in order to make a living, the journalist who wrote the piece probably has to hustle and write twice as many articles, so they're overworked as well.

Until recent years there were many layers of fact checks and edits, so errors that made it to the public's eyes were a rarity.

 

Also, at the core it's still humans and humans make mistakes. In my job we always (time allowing) give our writing to another writer to proofread before it goes out. Sometimes the head of department will do a second proofread. Even though we're all good at our jobs, errors still get through - especially homonyms or typos that make words into other correct words. Our brains are really, really good at skimming and filling in gaps.

Today, I was reading an old submission and it jumped off the page that I had misspelled multiplex as multiples. None of us spotted it at the time. Laziness? Nope. None of us want documents with errors going to clients.

It's just really, really hard to get large volumes of text 100% error free.

 

Exactly. Hence, the multiple layers of editors most publications used to have. When I got my first newspaper byline the chain went:

writer
fact check
two copy editors
section editor (that's the entertainment editor, sports editor or whatever)
paste-up (it was a small local that still did manual paste-up very late in the game and switched to computerized layout during the first year I was there)
section editor to approve the paste-up
managing editor

I never even had to see my article again after handing it off to fact check unless there was a major question about something. And that was a small local in the middle of nowhere. Now even at large city newspapers three or four of those layers are gone.

 

All very true, and I'm used to seeing lots of minor errors in even large, mainstream publications, but how the hell "pneumonic device" (mnemonic device) slipped through is beyond me, that sort of eggcorn indicates that someone just doesn't know or care about English.

 

TBH, a lot of the things I end up reading are weird little online gigs that mostly just post memes and stuff from Reddit, and the one I referred to gave off a distinct sense of being some guy in his bedroom.

I didn't realise they'd scrapped half those steps. Of course you can't expect perfection from any one human.

 

My washing machine is dying. Errors out due to a fault in the cover lock for the spin cycle every couple minutes, and this time I did it enough violence that it's decided to start the whole wash run over again. Without detergent, but since the clothes are already clean, that doesn't matter, just that this means I'll have to fight another eight-- just got errored-- or ten beep beep alerts, hit the start button, open the lid in the moments that it's unlocked, wait for it to continue, close the lid, wait for the next error...

I really don't have the money for this sort of thing right now. Y'know the 40% of Americans who couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense? Well, I'm not one of them, but after needing a new computer, a new mattress (when the old one is so broken down your back is giving you problems standing, it's time), a vacation that I'd booked and paid for before the above items became an issue, new glasses, and a change in the Japanese tax code, I'm getting stretched pretty thin.

 

Look up the model. There should be a way to put it in SafeMode or test mode or diagnostic mode. There's probly YT cheats n bypasses. Still three years over warranty on a dishwasher with a chip fault.

 

I don't know. I think I'm pretty good with the English language and a few days ago I wrote 'maid' instead of 'made.' It wasn't picked up by spellcheck and it's quite possible that a second reader would have read the sound in their head and not realised the spelling was wrong.

 

I wrote "there" instead of "their" in my revision notes yesterday and hated myself.

 

Aww, there, their, they're.

 

It is about three days that I got cold and was sick. Fever and shiver during the nights and days. I often was asleep because of Acetaminophen codeine that I used. These days and nights were very annoying for me. It is told, this cold was a type of influenza. It made me very weak and my face turned into a white color because of the continuous fever and shiver.

 

My infected scalp cyst is hurting like a SOB. I have painkillers to last me until I can cash in my prescription for the antibiotics tomorrow. But right now-OW OW OW OW OW!!

 

You'd have loved my old newswriting professor, who was also the college newspaper advisor. After each edition came out, he went over the entire newspaper line by line, and the newspaper staffers' grades were docked for every error he found. He was brutal.

There were also an automatic Fail: confusing its with it's. If that error made it to print, the entire editorial staff received an F for that week's edition.
It was especially annoying when the error in question was in a section that fell under someone else's responsibility. It was a good lesson, though: the reputation of a publication or publisher is on everyone's shoulders, not just one or a few.

Every time my phone autocorrects its to it's, I picture Doc handing Apple (and me) an automatic Fail (and I'm not happy about it).

 

If you pop it, make sure to put the process on youtube for us

 

cold pak? ephemorol (clove oil, et al) for pain? stuff to dry it out? leeches? mallet? mallard?

Sorry, sweetheart, pain sucks. I hates it for both of usses!