thank you for the new sig!

I just got this, and have done a reasonable perusal, and I just have to say...this may be the worst proof-read book I've ever seen.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, I love the writing, I love the art. But the editors were criminally negligent. Not only are sometimes 3 or 4 word sentence fragments inserted in the middle of other sentences, as well as the usual system of typos, missing letters, etc., but there's also a place (page 137) where Polaris makes a Shadowtalk comment about how something is "not entirely true"...on a part that she's supposed to have written. That's pretty sloppy.

Nope, that section is by Orbital DK. She(?) starts out on page 127 and there is no mention of a switch in author until one hit the desert chapter.

You appear to be correct; I didn't notice the author switch after the history section.

My point about sloppy editing in general still stands, though.

That one i can agree with. Seems to be mostly a case for the fiction bits tho.

If i understood that one right, PROTEUS was in on the whole The Enemy stuff and was building their Arco-Blocks and extreme environment habitat Arcologies to be the next generation Kaers to be set up in Horror-Unfriendly environments, like deep sea, volcanoes, space and the such . .

In addition to what Nath provided, there also is short paragraph in SOTA 64 on p. 161.

As far as the proofing goes, there are indeed lots of typos and other obvious errors (Insect Shamans without mentors, arctic gear having different stats in the arctic chapter vs. game info chapter). Not enough to make you think "OMG, what were they even thinking", but more than enough to leave an impression of sloppiness.
And of course there is no TOC again...unless you consider the list of chapter headings to be one...

As a proofreader I would like to give my 2 cents.

1) We are only given a very short time to proof the book.
2) Whatever suggestions we come up are only suggestions, and are not always accepted by the editors.
3) We have to look for rules, background and spelling/language. Being Danish I tend to focus on the first two, and leave the spelling/language to other proofers.
3) The backlore is way to big for us to catch everything, we do catch a lot, but some parts slip through.
4) We do this to our best ability, time permitting, but most have full time jobs, and have to do it in our spare time.
5) We will never get rich proofreading.

Lars

QFT. Except for the parts about being Danish, since I'm not.

I also didn't do anything for this book.

Heh, i guess some of the back story goofs can be attributed to it being delivered in-universe and from "unreliable" sources

Just consider the kind of edit wars that go on over at wikipedia over the most mundane of topics...

Yes that is part of the 'beauty'(?) of Shadowrun - as long as the Game Information sections are consistent, errors in the JackPoint/Shadowlands sections can always be claimed as error/misunderstanding/misstyping/trolling by the in-universe posters, rather than the writers.

This is why Plan 9's so darn wonderful. He *defines* unreliable narrator, but every so often, he also gets something right. Up to you to figure out where.

a real plothook fountain.

Aha! So you admit it.

Well, THERE'S your problem!

If a QA process consistently delivers bad results, it's not the fault of the testers, but the process sucks (and I've heard my share of stories from CGL proofreaders)...

Also, why is someone who doesn't have English as their natural language proofreading an English document???

Because as you have just demonstrated, native speakers are not necessarily better...

My native language is not English, and I have proofread a lot of both British and American documents/books/publications/etc over the years, without problem

Fact is, a non-native speaker who studied the language often has better understanding of grammar and 'proper' written language than a native speaker who is 'tainted' by slang, local colloqualisms, and dialects (not counting natives who have studied their own language at a higher level).

(Now, don't be fooled by my language and writing on these boards, as I generally don't bother keeping to a high standard of writing when it comes to social media...unless I'm in the mood for it, the discussion warrants it, or I just want to be a smart-ass given that the majority of internet-lingo leaves a lot to be desired).

I blame Newspeak for English's downfall amongst its native speakers.

Because I'm fucking good at catching inconsistencies, and rules fuck-ups:

Running Wild: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=28110&hl=
Street Magic 2nd printing: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=27330&hl=
SR4A: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=25706&hl=
Arsenal 2nd printing: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=24105&hl=
GM Screen: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=16763&hl=
And there more if you care to search for them.

These post were good enough for the line-editors to suggest that I stared proofreading back in 2009.

Slightly more impressive if you replace "show...c" by "showtopic" in the URL, so as to link to actual threads.

Um. no. It's not a 'Fact', that a non native speaker will have a better understanding of it. You might have a technical understanding of it.

I think you're mistaking technical understanding for more knowledge, and comparing it against stereotypical laziness. If a native speaker is educated and TRYING to proof read a document in their own language they're going to have a step up on someone that has that language as a second or third.

Do Americans tend to be fast and loose with the rules of English? Yeah, we do, but that's not typically the type of error that are found in RPG's. The stuff we find are misspelled words or garbled sentences as the result of typos and what not. Hell spell checks should catch alot of the stuff, but routinely don't. lol

As snowRaven said, "not counting natives who have studied their own language at a higher level". The contrast is not between two people who have studied the language, but one is not a native speaker of it. Instead, it is between one who has studied the language, while not being native in it, and a native speaker of the language.

Stupid cut'n'paste. Corrected...

Most native speakers haven't studied their own language, I can assure you of that.

I remember one High School English class where someone did a "Book Report" on an issue of Rolling Stone magazine, and got a higher grade than I did when I did an actual BOOK.

Yes, I'm still bitter. I worked in the damned library!

Minding that a proofreader is supposed to check for fluff inconsistencies and rules errors as well, I fail to see how being non-native English speaker is preventing him from being useful even if his language is sloppy.

As you said earlier in your post, it's 2012: the contributors to a book get paid for the _content_, not for any one particular form of it. The idea that print is core and everything else is just gravy is wrong and should be stopped.

Making money from electronic distribution of content is essential for any RPG publisher these days. It's not magical free bonus money. Expected profit from electronic sales is included in all budget/estimated earnings discussions/numberwork, and it's a delicate balancing act to keep releases profitable when sales are divided into more and more channels. And this also impacts cash flow because different channels -- direct electronic sale, indirect electronic sale, sales to game/comic stores, sales to mass-market stores (including Amazon) -- all pay slightly different percentages at different times. When an end-user buys a book on Amazon, chances are the publisher won't be paid for that sale for 3-6 months.

I haven't seen Hazard Pay, but making good PDFs -- hyperlinks, good bookmarks/TOCs, layers for easier printing, etc -- does absolutely take additional work above and beyond the PDF that is sent to the printer. The amount of work varies depending on book size, complexity, and designer skill, of course, but it _does_ cost money/time.

I'm not saying that customers should like rising prices. But the reasons behind rising prices and differing electronic/print/print-on-demand prices are complicated, and especially so in a niche industry where different publishers also have very different rates, methods, and schedules of pay for freelancers.

Now I remember why I failed economics and bookkeeping.

Fixed.

Because you are not lawyer/bureaucrat kinda evil . .

Jeepers, you aren't evil for knowing or wanting to know some basic book keeping/cash flow/budget stuff.

Geeze, I'm probably the most Hippie-tastic guy around, but even *I* know how important money is. Heck, I have an econ minor. (And PoliSci, and Sociology, and Psychology, and ... well, there's ten of the dang things. They add up.)

The current political campaign is showcasing areas that I didn't know, however... buy rates for newspaper ad space, billboard rates, printing costs based on paper quality, color balance, as well as volume (More for less price, naturally) ... I pity the person who can't balance a checkbook that ever thinks of attempting any kind of finance. Geeze, if I miss a filing deadline, I have a $10K fine sitting overmy head. Makes you WAY more watchful of the ol' mailbox, lemmetell ya.

Hey CanRay, if you ever need help, drop me a line. I doubt you'll need anything on the macro-econ scale, but if you ever want basic intro to Keynes and Hayek, I can do that much.

(Or I can talk pro wrestling, agriculture, and tractor pulls. I *am* Southern, afterall.)

Not even sure I'm evil...Oh, I can budget. I do it. Constantly. It's a mathematical practice I have for my mind to... Well, never mind.I may take you up on that if things come about the way they're supposed to, Wak. As for the Southern Stuff, you'd be better off with other True Northers. I haven't been to a tractor pull in years. And don't know jack about agriculture. Mining, OTOH, I do know.

Wait, I do know something about agriculture. People who grow up learning about that instead of mining get really scare at the guy that can discuss things like the various strengths of dynamite and the advantage of melting plastic explosives into pre-drilled holes for controlled detonations.

When there's a couple of megatons of rock above you, you better be damned sure what you're doing before you even think about getting your hands on the detonator caps.

I was not replying to you or quoting you.

This. <3 The EP crew.

So, Adam, that would explain some of the initial release issues with the SR4 PDF...
Just kidding, love you guys.

Oh yeah, the time crunch on that one + being one of the largest/most complex books (at the time) that I had put together + the weird way that DriveThru's watermarking interacted with the final PDF. Ugh. Then right onto finishing System Failure in hopes of getting advance copies of it to Gen Con as well ... that was a hell of a summer, and I learned a lot.

Based on subsequent PDF's, I'd say so.

System Failure, was that the FARK one?

I happened to notice that on the Almanac world map the southern Sahara seems to be covered by dense vegetation. I wonder if this is somehow mentioned in Hazard Pay?

It's most likely a fuck-up in the Almanac map.

Unless they used some really strange material someone must have deliberately touched up the map. There should be some reason for this ... right?

There should be... in a perfect world. But keep in mind that the Almanac is a product of the "Co-mingling of money"-period CGL has been through.... The quality of the Almanac is shitty.

Lol "Co-mingling of money" How wonderfully PC.

Eh, let's be honest. At this point, we know what it means, they know what it means, and it's pretty much a dead topic now.

Oh I agree. I just hadn't thought about it in some time. It was amusing to see it referenced in that way.

That was the official way of naming it.
Now say it and do the quotation marks with your hands.

I just noticed that the Ares Predator CW and the Ares Arctic Rifle both mention the "Electronic Firing system" modification in their descriptions, but lack the 1 point of RC that normally comes with it.