RatCreature's Journal

Going to your bookmarks on AO3, that you tagged with "To Read" for later, only to see a blank "This has been deleted, sorry!" placeholder in your list. :(

Okay, so this probably has happened to many of us, that you read a story, that intersects with your life or experiences in some way. When that happens to me and I start writing a comment, my own experience is then what's in my head as reaction, and basically I recount whatever episode or life experience resonated with that story. Only then at the end of this, I come to the realization that my comment on the story doesn't actually talk about the story as such at all, but just about me. Then I feel really awkward, and more often than not I don't post that comment, and just click the kudo button instead.

However, most authors seem to like comments better than kudos. Does this still hold true for comments that don't actually talk about your story as such but are more or less (over)sharing of personal experiences a story resonated with?

Like okay, say you wrote a roadtrip fic where your characters look at a giant ball of rubber bands or whatever, and then you get a comment that is along the line of "here's my roadtrip experience of looking at a giant rubber band ball". It's not totally unrelated to your story, but not about praising your great characterization, awesome writerly skill or perfect timing either. And of course often it's not about a rubber band ball but some more personal resonance.

What do you think about such comments? Awkward? Still better than kudos? Better not posted because you don't really want to hear random strangers' anecdotes?

For the first time in some years I checked my rec pages to see how many links don't work any more (trying to gauge how horrible it would be if I decided to update again -- answer: very horrible), and so many stories have moved or worse vanished. A few of the vanished ones can still be found through archive.org, but many seem gone entirely. Depressing.

OTOH thanks to the import of 852 Prospect to AO3, I didn't just come across many moved URLs, but also rediscovered some authors whom I really liked in TS in the late 90s, then lost track of, only to see that they are actually still writing fanfic and posting new stuff to AO3.

I'm still not reliably back online, because the eye issues are still ongoing... but since I can do screen reading right now, and just came across another story with the trope "soulmates reveal their names to each other in body writing", I just have to ask: Are there any of these stories that actually have any explanation for how that is supposed to work?

I mean, I love soulmate tropes, and I can put aside the general, inherent practical problems of just two people being fated to match each other and be compatible, but -- It's one thing to handwave a premise of "humans recognize their soulmate when they see them by some magical or biological impulse" but in these particular universes how did the name thing even start? The stories never seem to say whether these name marks just started to show up (by some magical? means presumably) once a group already had developed writing (and if so, do not all humans have them, but only literate societies?), or whether humans in these universes developed writing based on the odd marks that showed on their skin (and if so, do all societies have the same writing?).

Also if the marks precede the writing, how did humans even find out these symbols referred to their soulmates' names? If every human was born (or developed) a mark rather than both soulmates showing the same symbol or something, you'd think the natural assumption would be that this was their own mark/symbol.

Are there any stories that offer any explanation for the mechanism?

I watched a bit of a nature documentary about spotted hyena sex, the difficulties they have with copulation due to the female pseudopenis (it looked quite hilarious to watch the male trying to get the position right) and problems they have giving birth, when apparently their pseudopenis tears and they are left with a large wound of which many hyenas die. Anyway, my first thought after watching that was why I've never encountered any MPreg with damaging painful birth through penises. After all it seems to happen like that when females have penises.

Dear XMFC fanfic fandom,

computer translation is not your friend for creating German sentences for your fiction. Not even short ones, or single words. It will inevitably get all sorts of grammar wrong, like cases, tenses, sentence structure, form of address, word choice...

Then, just as inevitably, I will be thrown out of your generally well written story by the hilariously wrong German, or stumble while trying to figure out what it was supposed to say, and along with me scores of other German speakers (seriously there is no shortage of German speakers around in media fandom). On the upside that also means that there are many, many German speakers available to you, who'll be willing to write you a quick translation as a beta-type service.

But what if you're shy, or afraid to break anon-status, and don't want to ask a German speaker for help? In that case you should consider to skip the dialog and just settle for paraphrases such as "he cursed in German" or the like.

Yours,
RatCreature


As an aside, I also notice that I skip giving feedback to stories I otherwise like that have
this unfortunate problem, because I feel awkward to tack on some sort of red pen correction section onto my squee, but otoh I also don't want to not say something when there are such embarrassing errors there, and pretend I didn't notice. If I know the author, I usually have no problem to mention such nitpicks, but it's different with strangers or anon posters. The same goes for deciding whether to rec things. Argh.

I just came across a header with the line "Warnings: miscsquick". What is that supposed to mean? I guess there is a typo in there somewhere so the warning could be "misc. squick" which has to be the most useless warning ever, because just knowing that "miscellaneous squicks" are in there doesn't help you any to decide whether to read or not, unless you are sure that you have no squicks whatsoever. After all "miscellaneous" could mean the story was say someone killing puppies and then molesting their corpses in necrophiliac bestiality. (Glancing through the story I think the warning was just intended for a worn underwear fetish, not puppy necrophilia. That was just my mind combining the first miscellaneous squick I thought of, i.e. animal harm, with the PWP genre of the story, in a guess.)

Or the line could have been intended as "might squick" which is equally useless, because any kink is someone else's squick. I guess both could just be a variant of "caveat, author doesn't use warnings", which is fine, but then why not say so?

Seriously, if you warn for some squicks, say what the potentially squicky things are, or say outright that you don't warn.

Am I the only one who gets horrible associations if in a romantic scene the POV character describes their partner as having "liquid eyes"? Like horror images of liquefying eyeballs.

(ETA: It does not help if later the eye colors -- don't ask why there are several, it's that "hazel" phenomenon -- are described as "melting" into each other.)

I am not actually in the "adverbs and adjectives always suck" camp of stylistic advice or anything, but wow, I just tried to read a story in which the overabundance of them threw me right out. I don't think I've ever had that happen before. Not recently anyway.

I counted over twenty adjectives and adverbs in the first paragraph of six sentences with 130 words in total. And that was not including nouns being modified by other nouns in some sort of tacked on thesaurus, like if I wrote "the purple prose, this murky miasma of adjectives,..." I counted only the two adjectives, not the whole mess -- what do you call that kind of construction anyway? (The story didn't do it with alliterations though, I just did that in my example for humor, it was just two nouns, both modified with adjectives, saying the same thing, one after another.) That was even more jarring than the adjectives. The writer should just have settled on one of the two choices.

I've been reading a slash story in which a heated argument between the couple (who are also friends) results in punch being thrown, and then the one punched actually finds the aggression a turn on and it goes on to sex. Somehow this combination of sex and violence doesn't work for me at all, not even in fiction, where I'm not averse to combinations of sex and violence.

Like, I can go along fine if the aggression is against some kind of third party, and one character is turned on by the other being violent, or they are turned on mutually, say if they are both in a barfight or even slaughter others. I can also go along with non-con that involves violence with the victim not being turned on, but I as a reader like it. But if the violence is between the couple (and they are supposed to like each other), uncontrolled violence segueing into sex (rather than say rough sex that is mutually agreed upon) is squicky for me, more so if the violence is not mutual (the latter would be more fighting leading to fucking in some kind of hate sex, which I also don't like, but it is not as bad as one sided violence).

Most often this is shown from the POV of the character the aggression is turned upon rather than the violent character being turned on by the escalation, i.e. A hits B, usually after some provocation, then B somehow finds that aggression/violence (or sometimes the loss of control) hot, and sex follows. I have to admit that I find this particular combination of sex and violence to be surprising as a kink, and it always startles me, but I see this every now and then, and I'm wondering whether it is something that many people like in sex scenes.

So, a poll:

I know I have ranted about the usage of "Spock Prime" in the narrative and dialog just a few days ago, but since then I've come across this far more often. Like every day I see stories doing this. More than one. It occurs even in stories that I found on rec lists, not through random, at-your-own-risk browsing. (In case you're wondering, musesfool recced this offender.) Just, WTF? This is getting out of hand if you can't even trust recs to protect you.

Please tell me that some fan somewhere has written a Greasemonkey script or something to do word replacements on the fly in your browser to fix epithets, and I can adapt this to replace every "Spock Prime" with "Ambassador Spock".

ETA: Thanks to the awesome gnatkip I have now indeed found a script that will do this word replacement for me. Greasemonkey to the rescue.

I've recently watched The Listener, and quite liked it. So naturally I'm now wondering whether there is any fanfic to be found for it. I've tried del.icio.us with various likely tags without success, asked google, looked on ff.net... and nothing turns up. Not a single story anywhere. An interest search on LJ yielded a single community the_listener_tv (no comms on DW or IJ), but the only fanfic posted were two very short comment ficlets.

I just can't believe nobody has written anything for it. It has a main hero Toby who is pretty, angsty (with some past trauma), orphaned and a telepath, and can be easily shipped with both his on-and-off again girlfriend Olivia, but just as well slashed with his paramedic partner Oz thanks to Toby and both Olivia both being somewhat waffling about their relationship, or paired with any number of other people. The whole series is like a fanfic blueprint what with the mix of mild supernatural SF elements, crime/medical drama, tragic mystery past and relationship options. And yet, thirteen episodes of this and I can find no fanfic anywhere? How can that be?

I have been awfully quiet lately for no particular reason except feeling somewhat down and uncommunicative, and incapable of producing interesting content. Also, public commitments to fanart projects -- now already ages ago in internet time -- don't really seem to counter sloth sufficiently in my case, sorry about that, I kind of suck wrt creative output right now.

Anyway to come back to my subject line, besides squeeing over the SCC finale -- but feeling too much like "flail!!" to produce any interesting or coherent thoughts about it, but there better be a third season or at least a lot of long fanfic exploring things -- and playing online flash games, I have also rewatched a whole bunch of Joan of Arcadia episodes recently. I've never read fanfic for the series when it first aired, but now I'm wondering whether anyone on my f-list knows where to find good JoA fanfic or has any recs. I looked at crack_van but don't see any there. I thought it can't hurt to ask before I venture on my own to look whether any of the JoA on ff.net is good.

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?