Monday, August 9, 2010

The Second Easiest Contest on the Internet

It's been a long time since we held a contest, so it's high time for us to give away free stuff again. This time, it's three $15 Amazon.com gift certificates.

Whoa.

Here's the deal: We like it when people go back through the archives and read material they may have missed the first time around, and we also like those old posts to be as polished and up-to-date as possible.

FACT: If you find something in one of our old posts that needs to be changed, we'll enter your name in the drawing for one of three $15 Amazon.com gift certificates.

Specifically, we are looking for the following:

- Broken hyperlinks
- Hyperlinks that totally link to the wrong place
- Embedded videos that no longer exist
- Typos (such as identifying the actor who played Iron Man as "Robert Downer, Jr."--that happened once)
- Major grammatical errors
- Internally inconsistent formatting within a post (we really don't care if it's "superhero" or "super-hero" as long as we pick one and stick with it for the whole post)
- Out-of-date information that, in the context of the post, should be updated for the sake of posterity/accuracy

*We reserve the right to tell you that the "error" you found totally doesn't count.

All you have to do is leave a comment with your name (if you're posting anonymously), the name of the post, and the error you found. If you find multiple errors, please post a new comment for each error. This will help us keep track of everything better.

YOU CAN ONLY WIN ONCE. There will be three different winners, regardless of how many or how few errors they've found. Clearly, more findings increase your chances of glorious victory.

Also, you may only include posts that were published before today. Alex and I often catch each other's mistakes the day a post goes up, and it's no fair if you beat the proofreader to the post.

...

Okay, that's all the basic stuff. You can go ahead and take our challenge now. Or, if you want to dive into all the little details, keep reading.

Once the contest deadline arrives, we'll pick the winners by the dork equivalent of drawing names from a hat: each comment will be assigned a number, and we'll roll a die--whatever number comes up is the winner. We'll do this three times, and we'll re-roll if it's a number that's already come up.

Please note: If you point out an error that someone else has already identified, we'll just ignore it, so kindly pay attention to what's already been mentioned. Just to be perfectly clear, you can enter this contest as many times as you like, provided you've got a different error to share with us each time.

Confused about where to start? Check out the sidebar. There's a search function if you've thought of an error you've already seen; the blog archive is easily accessible so you can jump to a specific month or year; there's even a list of posts by topic if you're more interested in looking back through specific kinds of posts for errors. Our Month in Review posts can be invaluable here.

Don't just go back for the errors; go back to catch up on the posts you've missed, or to be pleasantly reminded of the posts you've forgotten. The contest is open!

EXTENDED CONTEST DEADLINE: Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 11:59 PM Eastern US time. (Extended from Tuesday the 24th!) Winners will be announced on August 27th, and if we announce your name, it's up to you to provide us with an e-mail address so we can send you a gift certificate. So, don't just read the old stuff--keep up with the new stuff, too!

20 comments:

Luigifan33 said...

Nathaniel, in your post about how you got into gaming, Hudson's Alley isn't a real game. The game you were looking for was Hogan's Alley.

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Hey, Nathaniel:

Not sure if this counts as a "major grammatical error," but in your entry titled Your Cloak of Resistance is Futile, paragraph seven, last line, the word "is" should read "in."

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Also, sorry to nitpick about grammar, but this is in Alex's post...although it's Nathaniel telling the epic story of a Tolkienesque geek journey.

In the entry 1 Day, 2 States, 4 Stores, paragraph nine, the very first line reads very awkwardly: "Our LCS was unlike Alex had ever seen it before."

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Additionally, in that same entry I believe the link Legends of Superheros may be broken. I clicked on it several times and I got the same message: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." All the other links worked fine.

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Here's another one: In your entry A Visit to the 24th Century, Part 3, you link to a YouTube video of Data's Song from Star Trek: Generations. However, the video you linked to was taken down due to a copyright claim.

A Philosophical Nerd said...

I'm almost finished for tonight, honest. lol I just figured I'd start with some entries that were particularly up my alley for tonight; the Star Trek entries.

In your entry Star Trek and Mega Man at the Movies, the link where you linked to Eddie LeBron is broken.

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Finally, on your entry "Weird Al" Yankovic: Three Decades of Listening and Laughing, the music video you posted from YouTube of I Love Rocky Road has been taken down due to a copyright claim.

Flashman85 said...

Awesome so far; I'll take a closer look later.

APN, you've inspired me to add to the contest rules a little bit and put a cap on error posting per day. Nothing against you; it just didn't occur to me that it's technically possible for one person with a long span of free time to locate every single error before anyone else has a chance to look.

Keep 'em coming!

A Philosophical Nerd said...

I understand and I would agree that's a reasonable restriction. I tend to have excessive amounts of free time, and I certainly don't want to monopolize on the error-finding.

Scott said...

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/10/nyaf-not-your-average-festival.html

"1) Cosplaying as a character who naturalLY carries . . ."


http://www.exfanding.com/2008/10/anime-not-just-saturday-morning.html

Just a nitpick, but that lump of pictures is unlike the rest of the posts, generally speaking. You're usually pretty good about spreading them out nicely for effect.


And one that's been catching my attention for a while... "pore over" vs "pour over" -- the later meaning to dump a liquid and the former meaning to examine.

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/08/8000-hits-or-our-super-secret-origin.html
http://www.exfanding.com/2009/03/exfanding-your-horizons-watches.html
http://www.exfanding.com/2008/09/potty-mouth-batman.html
http://www.exfanding.com/2008/09/potty-mouth-batman.html


The link to the Spiderman story is broken. Yahoo News tends to (re)move stories for some reason.

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/03/waiting-for-wednesday-issue-5.html


A little confused about why the link for SDCC goes to the hotel page instead of the main page or something...

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/03/couple-things.html


The link to You're Welcome America is dead; may want to replace it with a link to the corresponding Wikipedia page.

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/03/waiting-for-wednesday-issue-3.html


Not sure if you want to change the link to the Wolverine movie's official site since it's changed from an official site to a, uh, bluray DVD advertisement page.

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/02/friday-links-and-things.html

Scott said...

Also, the would-be Season 5 link for Enterprise was changed to: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise#Proposed_Season_5_stories_and_concepts

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/05/star-trek-thinking-mans-sci-fi.html

Flashman85 said...

Good good good! So much for the daily posting limit--it's been abolished. No sense restraining people from doing something that's not terribly enforceable.

Scott, concerning the lump of pictures in the anime post, that was just for the sake of comparison; I figured it'd be easier to see the contrasts between visual styles if they were all next to each other.

Scott said...

I just picked a few random months and read through everything, for the most part... I guess ideally you'd have everyone picking different months and doing that. >.>

... you didn't plant easter eggs, did you? Like a post on some random day saying "Hey, good job! You found our post for the contest!"

zharth said...

I guess this counts under the "out-of-date information" category. In the post on the Ghost Hunters TV show, there are four mentions of the "SciFi" channel, which is now the "SyFy" channel. Ironically, the two other times I saw mention of the Sci-Fi channel come up on this blog, they were both accompanied by a disclaimer for how stupid the rebranding of "SyFy" is (which I pretty much agree with). Nevertheless, a newbie geek who loves to watch shows on the SyFy channel might stumble upon your Ghost Hunters post and think, what is this "SciFi" channel they talk about? Am I missing out on something?

Flashman85 said...

Scott: Neat! Though we didn't add any new posts, some of the old posts have been updated to include info that couldn't possibly have been available at the time the post was written, so that's sort of Easter-Eggy.

zharth: Hm... We can add in a little note about the name change.

Michael Gray said...

Okay, this isn't a huge error or anything, but in the article about Deja Vu, you talk about me playing the GBA version of Deja Vu. I actually played the GBC version. Paul made the exact same mistake, too.

http://www.exfanding.com/2009/11/stepping-outside-digital-comfort-zone.html

Michael Gray said...

Oh, and some of the videos in the literal music videos post (http://www.exfanding.com/2009/09/literal-music-videos-parodies-that.html) have been taken down due to copyright issues. The last embedded video, and the links to the original versions of A-Ha's "Take on Me" and the Beatles' "Penny Lane", to be specific.

Luigifan33 said...

http://www.exfanding.com/2008/09/todays-post-concerns-my-all-time.html

Both of the screenshot links no longer work.
And also, the first four of your review links don't work because either the page doesn't exist or GC.net has removed them.

Luigifan33 said...

http://www.exfanding.com/2010/03/because-i-must-be-insane.html

You sporadically switch between calling Mega man 10, MM10 and Mega man 10.

Luigifan33 said...

http://www.exfanding.com/2008/12/star-trek-and-mega-man-at-movies.html

The trailer, even though it doesn't matter anymore, doesn't exist.