A Model 15 Teletype is really old. So old it doesn't have lower case and SHIFT is used for punctuation and numbers. I didn't learn to type on those things; my dad had a pair in his ham shack that he let us bang away on. What I learned to really type on were IBM Selectric IIs. Big, loud typewriters. Selectrics had a ball instead of a basket, so they didn't jam. I didn't have to be careful of going too fast. Also, I got a bit spoiled because some would argue that the Selectric had the best mechanical keyboard ever made. My parents made me (in a good way) take actual typing class in high school, so I spent an hour a day for a school year in a room full of cheerleaders doing typing exercises and learning to format business letters. This means I still type "correctly". I even use the CAPS LOCK ferchrissake. The downside is that pure touch keyboards on tablets give me fits--I really need mechanical keys to feel comfortable typing. A year of real typing class has ingrained habits into me that internet typing has yet to erase. I capitalize. I type two space after a period. I want the TAB key to tab, dammit. Now bring me my Geritol and a can of Cheez Whiz!
@Starcrossedsky Heh, I strongly dislike using the tags for commentary because it clutters up the autocomplete and that upsets me for sperg reasons, but I may be all alone about that particular feeling. XD I don't like clutter. I almost always type in Formal English when I'm sperging, because I'm used to typing Formal Thoughts in that register, too. And that comes up a lot in this forum, because I have a cognition sperg and we talk about brainweirds a lot. (And I'm actually parsing words like sperg and brainweird as specialized jargon instead of informal slang, because BRAINS.) Although I just also had friends for whom Formal English was a deliberate marker of Adultness, so I just stuck with that due to osmosis. We were all at that super annoying teenaged age where we were TOTES ADULTS GUIZ TAKE US SERIOUSLY. It's habit now. :P
Ooh, this is a fun topic! (I add commentary in text rather than tags. I also tag my criticism! Because Tumblr Tag Culture can go host a drug-fuelled orgy with its elaborate set of rules regarding how I'm supposed to use a fucking organisational system. Or just fuck a cactus, whichever is simpler.) My typing style is fairly consistant across websites, but my style for Skype has been very much influenced by the fact that it's more-or-less talking in realtime and I want to get my message across as fast as possible so i drop caps and like 90% of punct shorten words break up my lines kije whoa *like don't bother w/ fixing my typs bc lmao aint got time for that bullshit i am a v low-quality skyper tbh and I tend to use more emoticons in Skype, because it's easy to respond with ":D" or ":c" in chat but it feels pointless to reblog or make a post just for the sake of adding a little face to what another person said. I've heard that a sign of someone unfamiliar with a computer is that they won't use contractions, but I don't talk to enough computer-illiterate people to know how accurate that is.
Idk most of my typing these days is informed by it being one-handed on my phone while trying to dodge a baby helping press buttons and/or stick the whole thing in his mouth, with a minor helping of autocorrect. Its amazing anything I type is even legible at all. That said, the tags-for-feels thing is cute? But i much prefer the fake tags thing we do here because tags are for sorting dammit. Talking in tags erases that functionality and it bugs me. I also like to break things into short paragraphs cause tl;dr. ESP when texting, long things make for long waits and I always feel like people are going to think Im ignoring them or im making it awkward with long pauses. True story? When I was in elementary school i got it in my head that contractions werent Proper English and stopped using them and everyone gave me hell cause I sounded so weird when I talked.
I don't do tumblr much, so I don't really understand all the nuances. When I read tumblr though, I really hate it when people put their commentaries in the tags. I find gigantic walls of tags really hard to read, and I can't really follow/understand them. I like it when people use proper punctuation and capital(capitol?) letters in their writing. I get annoyed when that gets thrown overboard. Especially the latter.
*passes rigs the Geritol* I'm cleaning out my closets and found an ancient, oft-xeroxed xerox of a xerox. It occurred to me that the advent of the internet was not the advent of things gong viral. It was the xerox machine and in particular the xerox machine in churches where every Tom, Dick and Harry could produce multiple copies from a single source. It was more underground and secretive than the internet, but weird stuff really got around. No one knew where these things originated but passed them on as if they were nuggets of rare occult wisdom until the copies leaned half off the pages and were virtually unreadable. BUT everything in it is spelled correctly. :D I would say that my typing speed is much faster than it was. I now type like a bunny on speed. But it's not increased skill so much as an adaptation to the ease with which mistakes can be corrected. When you have to stop, erase the original and six carbons with every mistake, manually back up and somehow squeeze seven characters into a space that formerly contained six, you take a certain amount of care to get it right the first time.
The other day I found, not one, but two identical manuals for how to use aol instant messenger. my roommate was horrified I'm a giant fan of breaking stuff up into separate paragraphs even if I don't always break those paragraphs up into separate messages And typing - I can type without looking at my keyboard pretty fast, but only if I totally ignore how you're "supposed" to type, like two hands on the keyboard blah blah blah I type with my full right hand and the thumb and index of my left. Typing class was hard. Warehouse 13 is one of those fandoms where they're all known for insane tag fics, so tagging policy is very important over there.
IT'S MAKING A COPY NOT MAKING A XEROX /IP lawyer sperg rage Also, a lot of my classmates take notes on laptops, maybe 85% of them in classes that allow it. Half of my peers use "two-finger" typing, where they only use their index and middle fingers to type. How even? How does that. I'm also the kind of person who types in eir head to fall asleep, and I can touch-type at 88 WPM without breaking a sweat (timed by a temp agency, they were amazed).
I think you need some advil and a kleenex, man. :D :D :D I used to do that "two-finger" typing thing, because the keyboard I really learned to type on was too small to fit my whole hands on comfortably. My current laptop has a marginally larger keyboard, so I'm up to a whole 7 fingers. :P
In high school in the days of the Vietnam War, I published and edited my town's underground newspaper. You cut a stencil (typed real hard on special paper), then attached the stencil to the mimeograph machine and printed your copies by rotating the drum. (I paid a print shop). I mostly used volunteers to type, because making corrections was a freaking nightmare. This is not really relevant to this thread, except that I loved that photo of the old typewriter.
Me. Especially when angry or excited - simply hitting caps lock doesn't express the energy that caps are supposed to represent to me, in those circumstances.
