Steve,
Perhaps the all caps person is reacting to the work of Archie the Cockroach, who, like e.e. Cummings wrote only in lower case because, unlike e.e. Cummings (presumably), he could only press letters by leaping on the keys one by one. (I guess, if the typewriter had been in cap locks mode when he found it, Archie would have composed his poems in UPPER CASE, like the correspondent we are discussing. Archie's most famous poem is a paean for the cat's life, written in honor of and in the voice of his very good friend, Mehitabel, the alley at. I quote in part: I once was an innocent kit wotthehell wotthehell with a ribbon my neck to fit and bells tied onto it o wotthehell wotthehell but a maltese cat came by with a come hither look in his eye and a song that soared to the sky and wotthehell wotthehell and i followed adown the street the pad of his rhythmical feet o permit me again to repeat wotthehell wotthehell my youth i shall never forget but there s nothing i really regret wotthehell wotthehell there s a dance in the old dame yet toujours gai toujours gai By the way, in case any of you are still with me, my (windows) computer stopped doing caps lock willingly, about two months ago. Now, I have to wait 5 seconds for capslock to take effect, and then five seconds more, after I am done with it. Microsoft help files suggest that this small problem can be corrected easily by following instructions that seemed to amount to first hitting my computer with a hammer and then reformatting my hard drive. I wonder if any of you had a less drastic solution. Nick From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2013 9:21 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users. Arlo - What are the points awarded/detracted for using other people's arguments? <http://everything2.com/title/fASCIIsm> fASCIIsm - Everything2.com versus www.textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct -Arlo James Barnes How about points for stirring Doug *and* Glen up at the same time? Score! I recently noticed a fASCIIsm yet more extreme. It is not new, but in the light of our whining about whether ASCII should be enough (not unlike whining about the time/clock change?). I call it half-ASCII. When people find it too hard or unnecessary to use Case... and sometimes even punctuation (or correct spelling or grammar!). They only use (much less than) *half* of the ASCII character set. Most recently, it was a woman correspondent who is not merely a regular (and articulate) blogger but is also a published book author. She began her ALL CAPS-SOUNDS-LIKE-SHOUTING message by cautioning me that she was NOT SHOUTING, she just preferred ALL CAPS because it was easier for her to SEE (apparently). None of her books nor blog posts were written in ALL CAPS, so I have to assume that she has "people for that"... copy editors, etc. who can add all the appropriate clues to make it easy to gather. I tried, I swear I did, to not hear her message as shouting... but finally gave over to shoving it all into *lower case* wherein I found her to no longer seem to be belligerent but now rather semi-literate and timid... hmmm.... same *content*, different *form* and it was rather difficult (impossible) to read her message as she must have conceived it... the BELLIGERENT and the _timid_ version just didn't sound like her writing. I finally settled for some mangled average between the two. I was SHOCKED that someone as (otherwise) sophisticated didn't realize the effect of writing in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME! I even suspected it was a test. In the early days of developing WSIWYG text/graphics tools, I remember the shock I felt that letting people write *rough drafts* with full formatting yielded all kinds of unintended consequences. This was before we fired all our copyeditors and even typesetters... so there were still professionals helping make sure the *final product* was of high quality. Suddenly I found myself reading (for content, not format) my peers' work *formatted* as if it were a finished product (with plenty of formatting errors along with spelling, grammar, punctuation, emphasis, nuance, etc.). It was really eerie! Cognitive Dissonance. I *longed* for a tool that had just enough smarts in it to not allow the rough draft to have any more formatting than straight ASCII, and then gradually introduce more sophisticated formatting as the status of the revisions evolved. I still do... but it ain't happening. I've worked with teams writing together who by convention eschew formatting until after the content is 90% hammered out. I *much* prefer to work with formatted text myself, but don't like the confusion I feel when someone throws me text that is still "stream-of-consciousness" with "stream-of-consciousness" formatting as well as content. Unsurprisingly, I prefer CamelCode style in my code as well. I'll cope with those who like to live in FLAT^H^H^HASCII-Land... and even those in Half-ASCII-Land... it's really only a minor inconvenience. And while I'm quite capable of clicking through a weakly identified link/URL, I also appreciate it when the author/submitter offers a hint of why I would want to, where I might go, etc... - Steve
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