Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Though it is apparently left to the reader to decide what counts as foolish or not foolish. If you web search something along the lines of "pictures to drive OCD crazy" you'll find some pages like this one with various photographs of things that are not quite right. It's interesting that some don't bother me at all, especially the ones that you can tell were set up deliberately to provoke the effect. One of the common themes is manhole covers that intersect painted street lines, and were put back in the wrong direction. I often try to fix stuff like that, time permitting and when practical. An actual manhole cover I'd have to go fetch a crowbar to really do anything. Another common theme is patterns on tile floors, with a mere two tiles switched from where they should be. Those photos trigger my "Y U NO" face because it's too late to do anything about it, and it's always going to be like that.

So I've got this proofreading/nitpick list I made up for the upcoming MegaTokyo omnibus, collecting the original volumes 1 to 3, coming out this spring or so from Dark Horse. It would print out to about 50 pages and is filled with stuff like this. It's impressive in that "I'm going to back away slowly now" sort of way. A lot of the dialogue Fred has written over the years has certain elements with two ways of going about it that are arguably equally valid. The problem is Fred tends to pick one of the two approaches at random each time he encounters the situation, and by "problem" I mean things that few people would ever notice and even fewer would be bothered by. Oh, yes, there's a good number of genuine grammatical errors to be fixed, missing punctuation and the like, some continuity snarls to iron out, a handful of art mistakes to adjust, and a few weird errors that were introduced in the original print editions somehow, but mostly I'm skittering around, trying to realign manhole covers before they become tile floors, like some kind of madman. I'm not sure how much of it will even make it through to the final print version, but at least I made the effort.

As the old saying goes, you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. Though perhaps we actually DO have to be crazy to work here. That would explain a few things. Hobgoblins, indeed.