How about the people that end emails with a warning to think twice before printing it for the environment? Then when you have to print it, that message bumps it to an extra page? That’s what bothers me.
@KDemo that’s just the result lazy and irresponsible printing. Use the print dialog to limit your print to only the portions of the email that you actually need to print, if you even really need to print at all.
I don’t remember which feature it was, but the newest versions of Outlook got rid of my favorite tool for limiting what prints in an email. It was either “print selected text” or “print pages X - Y”
@jbartus that is the result of lazy and irresponsible posting. For legal reasons I had to include all disclaimers and notations when printing emails from the Attorney General’s office.
@jbartus I think it’s an exact copy of the phrase used in the manual that prompted me to make it. That or it took some creative grammar torturing to get an available .com; I don’t remember now. It’s been a few years since I did it.
@jqubed How do you just create those domain names like that? Actually, I know how to create them but it costs me money whenever I do. Do you have a free way of doing it or something?
@cengland0 there’s no free way of doing it except maybe to be an affiliate with a registrar and acquire enough affiliate credit to pay for your own domains.
@cengland0 how do you know I didn’t /giphy and then copy the image URL and edit the post to insert the image and get rid of the silly command?
I mean, I totally didn’t, but you can’t prove that. Besides, relying on /giphy would prevent me from being sure I’d be posting what you should have posted since your /giphy posted a GIF I’d have liked to use in response to your bubble popping GIF if your GIF had rolled properly. Is that convoluted enough? xD
@cengland0 I use Namecheap. It’s not free but they’re some of the cheapest .com prices you’ll find, as well as other domains. .xyz is often ridiculously cheap. Right now they have a sale on for .xyz domains for 2¢. I have far too many domains. Some I never use and let expire; others I hold onto in hopes of someday using them.
@cengland0 I’m afraid a hobby I’ve developed is collecting domain names. I’ll critique them and if I come up with a good one I’ll want to buy it, especially if I can fit the TLD into a word or phrase.
I’ve seen pages like that in two places where I understood why it was done: standardized tests and product documentation in 3 ring binders. On standardized tests it makes sense as mentioned in the video, as one area to eliminate confusion. And sure, if that’s confusing college kids they might be approaching test meltdown and it doesn’t really matter, but when you’re talking elementary students taking their first standardized test I suspect that kind of reassurance is important.
The second scenario is what prompted me to make http://thispagehasbeenleftintentionallyblank.com/. Most Evertz product manuals are delivered in 3 ring binders. They usually include extra blank pages throughout the manual to allow room for updates, and because all the pages are numbered they include the blanks so they don’t have to come back and renumber the pages later on or print an entirely new copy. The statement about the page being intentionally blank is to reassure the user that an important page is not missing from the binder.
As an Engineer, sometime I have to generate some sort of document that requires a page “Intentionally left blank” due to format or other cover-page-on-the-TPS-report reason. Without exception, I always mark the page “This page accidentally left blank.”
This might be the first BMMTIS where I think Irk is way off base. While I can accept that Irk is bothered by the oxymoronic nature of the message on the page, most his rationale for being bothered is flawed. Marking blank pages as “intentional” isn’t for the benefit of the disseminator to prevent that person from looking stupid, it is for the benefit of the reader, to alleviate any fretting that he got a “bad copy” that is missing a page of vital information.
@DrWorm Yeah, but if that blank page is in a reasonable placement in the overall document/book/whatever, a rational person would realize it was left blank intentionally as a separator page or something without having to be spoon fed. “OH NO! There is a blank page right at the beginning or end of this book! What did I miss?!” or “Oh No! There is a blank page between these to sections of content! There was probably something really important there even though I can tell the page before ended and the page after begins as expected!” Those people are easily confused, I guess. Just think of how much ink has been wasted on people who are perceptive enough to know whether a page is supposed to be blank or not.
@medz It’s not so much for the reader as it is for the printing press operator. That person naturally hasn’t read the document, and the pages might not appear in order anyway since printing is usually done on larger sheets that are folded down and then cut. But the press operator does need to know, at a glance, whether or not there has been some printing glitch.
I just dug around in Google Books, and the earliest reference I can seem to find is from 1927. Looks like a convention that was established before that, because it’s suddenly used, so either a trade group agreed to adopt it for certain kinds of government or financial reports, or the earlier record isn’t in books scanned by Google. There are a bunch more in the 1930s, though not 100s.
@brhfl Ooo, that’s clever. Lends credence to the Google Books search. Not paradoxically, because Google has better full-text availability of pre-1923 U.S. books, if it were heavily used before 1927, it’s more likely we’d be able to find it more easily.
This comment intentionally left blank.
@Collin1000
How about the people that end emails with a warning to think twice before printing it for the environment? Then when you have to print it, that message bumps it to an extra page? That’s what bothers me.
@KDemo that’s just the result lazy and irresponsible printing. Use the print dialog to limit your print to only the portions of the email that you actually need to print, if you even really need to print at all.
I don’t remember which feature it was, but the newest versions of Outlook got rid of my favorite tool for limiting what prints in an email. It was either “print selected text” or “print pages X - Y”
@jbartus that is the result of lazy and irresponsible posting. For legal reasons I had to include all disclaimers and notations when printing emails from the Attorney General’s office.
@KDemo ah, I see. Ain’t compliance with that crap a bitch?
@jqubed hit Print Options below the Printer selection drop down for the pages. Selection is sadly gone I think.
@jbartus Then it’s the selection one. Fortunately I rarely need to print emails.
I consider this one of my better ideas: http://thispagehasbeenleftintentionallyblank.com/
@jqubed I hate to say it, the grammar’s off.
+5 Points for the attempt
@jbartus I think it’s an exact copy of the phrase used in the manual that prompted me to make it. That or it took some creative grammar torturing to get an available .com; I don’t remember now. It’s been a few years since I did it.
@jqubed the latter wouldn’t surprise me at all. Still, fun idea.
@jqubed How do you just create those domain names like that? Actually, I know how to create them but it costs me money whenever I do. Do you have a free way of doing it or something?
@cengland0 there’s no free way of doing it except maybe to be an affiliate with a registrar and acquire enough affiliate credit to pay for your own domains.
/giphy burst bubble
@jbartus Okay, thanks anyway. I was hopeful.
Dang, image not even close to what I expected
@cengland0 that’s not fair, you stole my image! Guess I’ll post yours.
@jbartus Nice but you cheated. I used the new slash giphy command to generate a random image hoping it would be something like yours.
@cengland0 how do you know I didn’t /giphy and then copy the image URL and edit the post to insert the image and get rid of the silly command?
I mean, I totally didn’t, but you can’t prove that.
Besides, relying on /giphy would prevent me from being sure I’d be posting what you should have posted since your /giphy posted a GIF I’d have liked to use in response to your bubble popping GIF if your GIF had rolled properly. Is that convoluted enough? xD
@cengland0 I use Namecheap. It’s not free but they’re some of the cheapest .com prices you’ll find, as well as other domains. .xyz is often ridiculously cheap. Right now they have a sale on for .xyz domains for 2¢. I have far too many domains. Some I never use and let expire; others I hold onto in hopes of someday using them.
@jqubed I use 1and1 and just checked current prices and they are running a 99 cent deal right now too but for the dot com TLD.
@cengland0 I’m afraid a hobby I’ve developed is collecting domain names. I’ll critique them and if I come up with a good one I’ll want to buy it, especially if I can fit the TLD into a word or phrase.
I’ve seen pages like that in two places where I understood why it was done: standardized tests and product documentation in 3 ring binders. On standardized tests it makes sense as mentioned in the video, as one area to eliminate confusion. And sure, if that’s confusing college kids they might be approaching test meltdown and it doesn’t really matter, but when you’re talking elementary students taking their first standardized test I suspect that kind of reassurance is important.
The second scenario is what prompted me to make http://thispagehasbeenleftintentionallyblank.com/. Most Evertz product manuals are delivered in 3 ring binders. They usually include extra blank pages throughout the manual to allow room for updates, and because all the pages are numbered they include the blanks so they don’t have to come back and renumber the pages later on or print an entirely new copy. The statement about the page being intentionally blank is to reassure the user that an important page is not missing from the binder.
@jqubed Those are the two places I have seen it also. Product manuals and standardized tests.
Cue @glennf for vacat page article!
ok @glennf that took 2 months, but seems worth the wait.
https://meh.com/forum/topics/nothing-is-lacking-the-long-history-of-intentionally-blank-pages
@thismyusername Turns out, the story went deeper than I ever could have imagined
I remember the first time I came across this was in a novel where all the chapters all started on the right hand page.
Should it say “This page unintentionally left blank- oops, now it’s not blank”?
As an Engineer, sometime I have to generate some sort of document that requires a page “Intentionally left blank” due to format or other cover-page-on-the-TPS-report reason. Without exception, I always mark the page “This page accidentally left blank.”
Nobody has called me on it yet.
Fifteen years doing this.
@PocketBrain Ha, TPS report.
@cengland0 In my second engineering job, we had to generate the “Test Program Strategy” reports. The irony was indeed appreciated.
/giphy blank page oh no
This might be the first BMMTIS where I think Irk is way off base. While I can accept that Irk is bothered by the oxymoronic nature of the message on the page, most his rationale for being bothered is flawed. Marking blank pages as “intentional” isn’t for the benefit of the disseminator to prevent that person from looking stupid, it is for the benefit of the reader, to alleviate any fretting that he got a “bad copy” that is missing a page of vital information.
@DrWorm As a fellow doctor, I second this.
@DrWorm Yeah, but if that blank page is in a reasonable placement in the overall document/book/whatever, a rational person would realize it was left blank intentionally as a separator page or something without having to be spoon fed. “OH NO! There is a blank page right at the beginning or end of this book! What did I miss?!” or “Oh No! There is a blank page between these to sections of content! There was probably something really important there even though I can tell the page before ended and the page after begins as expected!” Those people are easily confused, I guess. Just think of how much ink has been wasted on people who are perceptive enough to know whether a page is supposed to be blank or not.
@DrWorm I feel like Irk attempted to cover this starting at the 1:12 mark…but i’m not a Dr.
@medz It’s not so much for the reader as it is for the printing press operator. That person naturally hasn’t read the document, and the pages might not appear in order anyway since printing is usually done on larger sheets that are folded down and then cut. But the press operator does need to know, at a glance, whether or not there has been some printing glitch.
@cinoclav I kept sitting there, waiting for the image to load…
@jqubed
I just dug around in Google Books, and the earliest reference I can seem to find is from 1927. Looks like a convention that was established before that, because it’s suddenly used, so either a trade group agreed to adopt it for certain kinds of government or financial reports, or the earlier record isn’t in books scanned by Google. There are a bunch more in the 1930s, though not 100s.
@glennf Sounds like a fun task for the Ngram Viewer…
@brhfl Ooo, that’s clever. Lends credence to the Google Books search. Not paradoxically, because Google has better full-text availability of pre-1923 U.S. books, if it were heavily used before 1927, it’s more likely we’d be able to find it more easily.
@glennf Just found this in a 1908 newspaper! An ad joke, but same spirit.
Holy cow, also this gem (from 1984, but hilarious)
The look on my face was intentionally left blank.