477: Typewriter

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Typewriter

Title text: Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: I was able to get the basics but still needs work If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Randall is writing a letter to his grandmother on a typewriter, thanking her for taking them on a trip. However, because of a very specific muscle memory he developed after working in the Internet browser known as Firefox for so long, Randall litters the letter with large chunks of whitespace followed by website URLs. What's happening is that Randall is attempting to switch to a different "tab" with the Ctrl+Tab command, then open a specific website in that tab, before using the Ctrl+Tab command a second time to return to the message he was typing. If Randall were typing an email this wouldn't be a problem, but since he's on a typewriter all he's doing is making a huge mess.

Transcript

[A typewriter is shown with the following letter in it:

Dear Grandmom, cnn.com

I hope this reddit.com letter

finds you well. I wanted to say I

really news.google.com enjoyed the

trip you boingboing.net took us on,

and am looking forward to bbc.co.uk

visiting later fivethirtyeight.com

this year.

Love, slashdot.org

Your grandson,]

I didn't realize how bad my habit of tabbing to Firefox every few seconds to check news sites had gotten until I tried writing on a typewriter.

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Discussion

The spaces are because he's trying to alt-tab. 98.201.111.246 22:21, 31 January 2013 (UTC)mr

You are absolutely correct, and the is much more missing. So I did tag this as incomplete.--Dgbrt (talk) 18:31, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Ctrl+Tab, next tab in tab bar. Alt+Tab, next top level window on desktop. If he uses a browser based email program it could be either 108.162.249.117 01:44, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Ctrl+Shift+Tab is back a tab. 108.162.245.40 20:08, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't know you , but it looks like a "Madlibs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madlibs) meets Firefox tabs" kind of letter to me. 141.101.103.206 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Technically it's the carriage that holds the type hammers for the letters. The platen is the rubber cylinder that holds the paper in place for the hammers. The ribbon is between the hammer and paper. -gateway mike 173.245.55.119 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The platen is indeed the rubber cylinder. The carriage, though, is the larger piece the platen is part of, which moves back and forth as you type. Hence "carriage return" at the end of a line. Either one works in this case, since the position of the next character is determined by moving the paper, not the hammers. 108.162.221.64 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Unless there was a change in the way a browser worked between then and now, Ctrl-tab is not something you would type an URL into after hitting as it switched between already open tabs. You would need to use Ctrl-T to open a new tab where the cursor would then be in the address bar to type an URL to go to. CTrl-Tab with only 1 tab open does nothing. 108.162.216.166 16:44, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

This is less about Ctrl-tab but rather about Alt+Tab. The joke is that he would be typing within some text processor or email client, Alt-tab to the browser and enter an address there. --SlashMe (talk) 22:48, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I had always seen this one as a somewhat unrealistic exaggeration, though lately I have found myself occasionally attempting to 2-finger tap to undo a line written with pencil on paper, with no success. Oh, the magic of technology. PotatoGod (talk) 05:45, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

i do this sometimes too! i'll mess up some drawing or misspell a word on physical paper and instinctually reach to hit ctrl+z before i remember that that isn't how that works. i've actually gotten frustrated before thinking my keyboard wasn't working before i snapped back to reality too, lol. (also - i do this in minecraft sometimes. like i'll misplace a block and i'll try to ctrl+z on java ed on my computer, and hell even on bedrock ed on my xbox, where i have a friggin controller and i know there's no ctrl+z'ing to even have the possibility of being done, i'll still try it, lol.) -lance (162.158.212.224 01:47, 21 January 2021 (UTC))

Maybe I'm missing something; why is this listed under 'Comics featuring Nate Silver'? BlackHat (talk) 22:52, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Because of there being 538.com in the list of sites he tried to alt-tab to. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]}U•T•S•c 22:15, 30 March 2021 (UTC)