Tryptophan IV

Today is Thanksgiving, which means a lot of things to a lot of people, but primarily: family, food, rest, I dunno, maybe football or some other Americanized bullshit like that. Here's what Thanksgiving does not mean: blogging. We're taking a break. I've taken a "break" on Thanksgiving for the past three years. This is the fourth year of Thanksgiving blogging because it's the fourth year in a row during which I'm attempting to "publish on the blog every day," even Thanksgiving, and so you can see how silly this all is and why we need a break.

Since I'm just filling space, let me get rid of some words that have been clogging my draft folder for a while now. It's a superfluous blog post (what isn't?), and I want to get rid of it. Also makes me seem like I'm taking all this way too fucking seriously, and so I'm cool with burying it here. And then we can reconvene back here tomorrow for some RC, and then end our year strong with another month or so of blogging in 2023.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I love you. Thanks for checking in. Now go take a nap and eat some turkey, but not necessarily in that order.

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Editing the Blog Until I Need Glasses

Let us pull back the curtain for a moment. This is not necessary, and it's possibly a little boring. There's a reason why hundreds or thousands of people are still writing for a blog in the year 2023 but only like three people max are running one and editing one. It's because formatting a blog and proofreading the content is fucking dull and tedious at best. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was worth it, or I wasn't ultimately proud of the outcome. But still.

So this one is for all zero of you who are curious about what I'm going to change or edit about the blog post that you submit to me. It is an incomplete list, but definitely skims some of the more frequent self-imposed punctuation and formatting issues. The uncurious may skip this part, and continue to use curly quotes until I need to visit my ophthalmologist.

• I'm told by various websites that curly quotation marks are "correct typography," and I say in response to kiss my ass. I think it looks a lot neater to say "kiss my fuckin' ass" than “kiss my fuckin’ ass.” See the difference? I don't know why some people always send me curly quotes, and some don't. Is it a copy-and-paste-from-Word thing? Or maybe the type of email you use? I don't know. I don't care. I can straighten those fucking curlies in my sleep at this point.
• Song titles are in quotation marks, and album titles are in italics. Always.
• If an artist is "The ___," and their name is in the middle of a sentence, then the "the" is lowercase. The Rolling Stones would be the Rolling Stones.
• Numbers from zero through nineteen are written out as words. E.g. eighteen-year-old, not 18-year-old. There are exceptions to this, including fractions and decimals, episode and season numbers if you are talking about TV (Reba's "Grannies Gone Wild" was Season 5, Episode 8), and a lot of sports stuff ("3-point shot" looks more correct than "three-point shot," for instance).
  
• That reminds me—movie titles and TV series titles are in italics. TV episodes are in quotation marks. Video games and books are italics. I'm trying to think of what else. I think paintings and ships are in italics, but poems are in quotation marks? Once we move past a certain point, I have to do some googling.
• No need to do two spaces after the end of a sentence. I don't always catch it, but when I do, I turn it into one space. (I can eyeball it maybe 90% of the time at this point.)
• If there is a comma or period after something in quotation marks, then the comma or period goes inside the quotation marks. E.g. "Bohemian Rhapsody," the worst song of all time, sucks shit. But I don't do that if the end of the phrase in the quotes also has a question mark or exclamation point. E.g. "Do You Realize??", the official Rock Song of Oklahoma, is a billion times better than Queen's best song, which is certainly not "Bohemian Rhapsody." And then, of course, the question mark or exclamation point goes outside of the quotes if it's not originally connected to the quoted thing. E.g. I really fucking hate "Bohemian Rhapsody"!
• Quotation marks are always double, unless it's a quote within a quote, in which case it's a single. E.g. He said "I really hate 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen" and I said "Yeah, it sucks." If you are a quote-in-a-quote-in-a-quote, then it's back to double. All even-numbered quote-in-quotes are single, and all odd-numbered are double.
• Parentheses have similar +punctuation rules as quotation marks do. Commas and periods come after the parenthetical, unless there is a sentence in the parentheses that constitutes a complete and separate thought. E.g. While I think Queen sucks (and the do suck), I will grant them my own ignorance. (I'm saying that it's possible they have a good song that I just haven't heard yet.)
  
• The em-dash is used without any spaces in between the dash and the two words that it's connecting. Hyphens are not em-dashes, and while two hyphens might do in a pinch, we're not in a pinch here. We can hit alt+0151, and we have an em-dash.
• The difference between an em-dash, a semicolon, a colon, a comma, and parentheses are not well-articulated, but I know it in my heart, and I'm not afraid to change yours. The big one is that I see the em-dash as more of an interruption between two equal thoughts, and a colon is a directional arrow to a thought that branches off from the original. E.g. I think that Queen is overrated—everyone is rolling their eyes right now, but it's true! E.g. There are plenty of reasons why I hate Queen: they suck, their music is bad, and they are the worst. But sometimes, maybe a comma is the best way to go about it. Keep it simple, silly.
• I follow standard rules of capitalization, which really only comes into play when we're talking about song titles and album titles. The first and last words are capitalized regardless. Everything else is capitalized too, except articles (a, an, the) and prepositions when they are four letters or fewer. It gets tricky with those four-letter prepositions, because the words themselves can also sometimes work as adverbs, which are not capitalized. Fixing capitalization is easy as shit, though, so don't sweat this. I got you.
• Capitalization rules are only negated by the artist if they make the aesthetically displeasing but artistically sound choice of going all-lowercase or all-caps. I abide by that choice. But if Queen tries telling me that it's "Another One Bites The Dust," then I'm just going to go behind the artist's back and say that, no, the "the" is lowercase, and fuck you for not knowing the rules here.
• I don't have any hard and fast rules about what words get attached to the hyperlink, but in general, I give words the hyperlink instead of keeping the full URL separate.
• Plenty of typos make it through, so if you see one, tell me! I will be the opposite of offended. I'll be grateful!
  

And now here are some really advance tips. These are for anyone who wants to dip their toes into the editing scene, and request access to PoYB's Blogger account, and actually submit and format and edit and proofread their own blog posts right here in the blog. So far, Sam is the only one who actually does this, and if you ask him, I'm sure he'd tell you I'm still really annoying about it, going in and changing all kinds of bullshit in his blog post after he finishes it and hits submit.

But if you want them, here are some formatting tips:

• The one dropdown box should read "Normal" and not "Paragraph." It defaults to Paragraph, which is a pain in the ass, because it fucks up a lot and makes the html really unwieldy. When you start a fresh blog post, you have to hit backspace twice, and then go in and manually change it to "Normal."
• If you want to make text bigger, don't use that box to change to "Heading" or "Subheading" or anything like that. Keep everything on Normal. To make text bigger, use the dropdown box to the left of that. It has options for Normal, Large, and Largest. Highlight the words you want to make bigger. The Heading/Subheading shit fucks up the spacing badly, and I hate it.
• Pictures should be "Upload from Computer." If you do the other options, especially "By URL," the picture doesn't show up in the thumbnail on mobile, for some reason, and that annoys me.
• If you're copying and pasting from anywhere besides another blog post, you have to use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste while stripping the formatting. Yes, you have to redo the italics/bold and the links, but I prefer that then the janky ass formatting that gets carried over from any other website, including email, when you just do regular Ctrl+V.

This is all just personal preference, honestly. It's not like the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition is telling me that all editors worth their salt are going to wield the em-dash appropriately or use lowercase Ts for artist names mid-sentence or that they really fucking hate Queen too. I'm just doing all this because I think it looks nice, and I want Puke on Your Birthday to have a clean appearance.

However, I will allow (and already very often allowed) ample room for subjective creativity when it comes to any of this. That usually comes with time and mutual trust. Eventually, with enough submissions, I get to know when you're purposefully writing something a certain way, as opposed to making a typo. And if I'm not sure which way it goes, I usually just email you and ask you about what you'd prefer. And if that's annoying, well then, welcome to blogging, BABY!!!