terrified of people

So

You KNOW classic SF used the limited displays of CRT television and the static of transmitted signals the way theaters use stage makeup and lighting to make inexpensive props look great fine— take advantage of the medium! But it's hard to imagine how it looked if you've only seen Blu-ray HD restorations.

and like what I believe is a major source of the problem is that many people stop reading instructions as soon as they think they know what's expected of them. and I'm not actually sure a video would help very much!

would someone in the 45% "oh we're making a bell curve okay I can skip the short paragraph directly above the poll then that surely won't contain any relevant information" demographic watch an entire video just so they know what format I expect for a survey question, or would they watch enough of the video to get to the point where they think they know what's expected of them and then fill out the survey incorrectly?

how do I convey how extremely important it is to actually read and follow the instructions without coming across as condescending or scaring people away with how many paragraphs they have to read?

I want to eventually make a survey where people tell me directly in an open answer question what games they think the mainline super mario series consists of. to get useful data out of that, I need the answers to be well formatted.

specifically, I need it to be obvious and unignorable that:

I expect the items of the list to be separated by line breaks, not commas (some video game titles have commas in them so I can't automate the process of turning their list into data if they use commas)

the participant should not write anything in their response that is not part of their list

neither of these are things that are impossible to fix if someone doesn't follow the instructions, but they can't be fixed automatically. I'd need to manually clean up the responses or pay someone else to do it or (worst option!) cross my fingers and hope google gemini isn't hallucinating if I give it my data to clean up.

the thing you've described as a better alternative to a text box is not a feature that google forms has

but ok let's switch to survey software that can do this. this would involve providing a list of mario games for the autocomplete thing. this would do one of the things this format is intended not to do, which is influence which games people are likely to enter by having my own curated list as part of the format

I didn't mention it on this post but one of my other goals for this survey is translating it into multiple other languages so including a list of games would expand how much text I need to be translated by two orders of magnitude

so okay let's scrap the autocomplete thing. what you're left with is the idea that it would be better to click a button on screen to add to a list rather than press the enter key on your keyboard to add to a list. for some reason

This usually works pretty okay, and I only sometimes need to ask someone to repeat themself.

But on this trip to Hawaii the airplane definitely effected my inner ear and on top of that we’ve been messing around in the ocean so my aural perception is waaaay worse than normal.

Which is why when sitting down to eat tacos with my beloved wife I was absolutely stunned when they handed me a fork and said something outrageous. I ran it through my head a few times in bafflement. I knew my wife wouldn’t say that but it didn’t sound like anything I could imagine them saying while handing me a fork.

After an extremely befuddled moment I asked, “What did you say?”

“I just said you’re welcome?”

I stared at them in further confusion.

“What did you think I said?”

“Here, slut.”

We both devolved into absurd laughter. My wife protested, “I would never say that!”

- sneezed wrong

- turned your neck a little too fast

- slept weird

- took the trash out to the curb and stepped at a slightly different angle than usual

- breathed

- failed to breathe properly

- breathed in the wrong stuff. Allergy time

- looked too hard at something too far away