This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in December 2004.

Grammar on the Internet: The Parenthetical Emoticon

Most people who use email and instant messaging have used emoticons at some point. What’s an emoticon? A smiley. Like this :) or this ;-) and there are many more.

These types of emoticons tend to obfuscate parenthetical comments within a text. If you are placing an emoticon with parentheses, what then is the proper usage?

First, a couple of examples:

John is a cool kid. (He talks way too much though.) He started a campus student group.

Okay, that is all well and good. Look at what happens when we try to add an emoticon to the parenthetical comment (the words between the parentheses):

John is a cool kid. (He talks way too much though. :)) He started a campus student group.

Note the double parentheses due to the emoticon in the above example. :)) is confusing to look at and might be interpreted as a unique emoticon entity and not the end of the parenthetical comment.

So here are some possible ways the text fragment could be rendered with the emoticon:

1. John is a cool kid. (He talks way too much though. :)) He started a campus student group.
2. John is a cool kid. (He talks too much though. :) He started a campus student group.
3. John is a cool kid. (He talks way too much though. :) ) He started a campus student group.

Which one do you use? Which one is correct? Do you think the comment should be structured differently so that the emoticon doesn’t conflict with the closing bracket? If so, how?

Update: Brian J. suggests a fourth alternative as follows:

• John is a cool kid. (He talks way too much though.) :) He started a campus student group.

This works fairly well, but to my thinking, mixing parentheses and emoticons still is problematic visually.

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So long to My Dog Meg

Hope you all had a nice Holiday. I’m back in town, and this being a college town, the streets are deserted. I’m sorry to see tonight that one of my favorite blogs, My Dog Meg, which was written by Shannon Hale, is no more. She writes:

my desire to keep up this site has, after nearly four years, fizzled out. when it gets to two months between posts, it’s time to move on.

Looking back at my own site, I see my first blog entry is from February 1, 2000, meaning I’ll be able to celebrate my first five years of blogging soon. For the first three years, I was blogging more sporadically, but for the last two years, I have been writing online fairly consistently (for a variety of reasons). At any rate, I can see Shannon’s point. When the interest isn’t there, what’s the point of publishing a blog?

For me, self-publishing has always been a strong research interest. Of course, pamphleteers were distributing their message ever since the advent of the printing press. I’m primarily interested in the use of electronic technology for creation/distribution of personal texts. What role does the internet play in the distribution of personal texts? How does the lack of an editorial process in personal publishing hinder distribution and acceptance? Do individual blogs need some kind of editorial oversight to become widely read?

By the way, there’s a two-day invitation-only blogging conference at Harvard happening in January. My friend Jane has been invited to attend. The attendee list (about 40 people) reads like a who’s who of the digerati. Should be interesting. The conference, which is titled Blogging, Journalism & Credibility, has a blog. The entire conference will be webcast as well. Check it out.

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iTunes + Christmas = Err

Apple’s iTunes is a fun little program. It’s definitely faster on my Mac, but here I was on my PC wanting to paste the song titles of a playlist into Microsoft Word. I was looking at the playlist in iTunes, hit Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy. I fired up Word and did a Ctrl-V to paste. Oops! Immediately my computer started inserting 20 MP3 files (my playlist) into the Word document. Things ground to a halt with no way to abort the operation (reasonably). I let it run and a minute or two later the files and not the text were inserted into the document. Whose fault is this? Is it Microsoft’s for allowing people to insert MP3 files into Word documents? Or is it iTunes for apparently serving up links to actual goddamn MP3 files when I did a Copy/Paste? At any rate, I instead did the Ctrl-C to copy in iTunes and pasted it into Notepad, the most basic of text editors. Notepad is dumb, and sometimes dumb is good. The song titles and artist names were pasted into the document just like I wanted. I copied the text in Notepad and then pasted to Word.

Hah. I’m off to the homeland in the morning. Much Christmas cheer to follow. Take care and have a safe trip if you’re traveling this holiday season.

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Festive

I hope you’re all feeling in the festive spirit. J and I did some last minute Christmas shopping this weekend. There were tons of people apparently doing the same thing. I’ll be out of here Thursday morning for a little R&R with the relatives.

The big thing at work right now is that our department is moving to a brand-new building on January 3rd. It’s a busy time. At least the semester is over though, and all of the grades have been turned in.

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Let yo’ soul stand bomb diggity

“Let yo’ soul stand bomb diggity ‘n composed before a million universes n’ shit.” At least, that’s what the Snoop Dogg Shizzolator makes of the legend on this website (a Walt Whitman quote by the way). Funkify your website with this smooth operator. To get an idea, check out the shizzolation of ManufacturedEnvironments.com.

Funny thing is I remember something like this on my old Mac circa 1997 or 98. There was this funny little extension that you could put in your system folder that would turn all the text the Mac produced into slang. It was a total trip (and in my recollection more impressive than the shizzolator), but it’s fun at any rate to fuck around with this stuff. Thanks, BrianJ.

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Wal-mart sued for selling dirty, filthy music

In the curiosities cabinet for today, we’ll note that wal-mart is getting sued because a CD by Evanescence it sells in its stores contained the f-word. As you know, wal-mart makes a point of selling “clean” versions of albums. The lawsuit points out that wal-mart apparently knew about the errant word because it was edited out on versions of the song that appeared on the wal-mart website. News article at Yahoo.

I’d rather see someone sue wal-mart for being the largest music retailer in the US with the most craptacular music selection.

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History of the Internet—Old Domains

For those historians of the internet out there, here’s a list that purports to contain the 100 oldest .com addresses out there. Kind of interesting to sift through if you’re so inclined. [via jason]

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Totally not subtle

I know you’ve been enjoying reading this website for a while. You’ve come to enjoy the repartee I have with myself. I know you’ve also been saying, “Who is this fabulous guy they call Monsieur Stout?” And, “I so appreciate his website, I’d like to do something for him.”

Well, the Holidays are coming up, and my own personal preference would be to get a letter from you. I love getting mail. But the internet being what it is, I’ll leave my address out of this. So what’s the next best thing? Gifts? Certainly. Have a gander at my Amazon wishlist and send me something from the bottom of your heart.

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Some Underworld for y’all

Fans of Underworld, the electronica group, will be pleased to note that they’ve got some major free download action going on over at their website. Three old live shows, studio projects, video files—a whole cornucopia of stuff. They’ve split it up into two archives: Archive 1 and Archive 2. Their main site is over at underworldlive.com. Maybe all this free music is a sign that Underworld is over with. Darren Emerson left. They released a greatest hits collection. Of course, I don’t really keep up with these things anymore so for all I know this will be your LAST CHANCE to get some HOT FREE ACTION from the Underworld chums.

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