RatCreature's Journal

I've already ranted several times here how computer translation is not your friend if you want to litter your English story with German words (even disregarding the characterization issues or the likelihood of random language switches occurring in the first place). That includes swear words, because believe it or not, swearing works differently in different languages. For example you can't just translate "fuck" and use it like in English for a swear word. Argh.

Well, the story wasn't very good otherwise either, so I don't regret the back button use, but seriously. And now I have the urge to write an introduction to swearing in German to explain, but that probably would only encourage people to avoid using betas, and make things even worse.

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.

Authors should really indicate if they spread out the posting of parts. If they have a posting schedule I like to know when to check as to not miss anything, and I also like to be prepared that I won't get to read the whole thing right now.

I don't mind even following unfinished WIPs but if I see a post linking to 1/3 in community and the notes talk about the story as if it is finished, I assume that all three parts are posted in the linked journal. But recently, especially it seems in Star Trek Reboot, headers neglect to mention staggered posting/WIP status. I guess I'll have to remember to check myself in advance. *grumble*

That said, the Reboot time travel murder mystery of which I just read the first part is a really promising opening, which probably explains why I'd have like to get the rest right now.

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.

It drives me absolutely crazy when in ST:AOS fic the older, time-traveling Spock is called "Spock Prime" within the story text, assuming the story is told from a POV character withing the fictional universe rather than some jokey outside parody narrator or omniscient meta fiction narrator. It's fine for a pairing label, but please, please find some other way to distinguish the character from the younger Spock in the text. I am usually not that picky about narrative voice, but this just throws me out of the story in a way from which I can't recover. It's one of the few things that will just make me stop reading immediately in this fandom.

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?

Okay, so in general I don't care that much about safe sex issues in fiction, not even in contemporary fandoms where you could reasonably expect it to come up. But if characters are about to have unsafe sex, then one actually comments on this being unsafe, and the other replies with something like "It's okay, I'm always careful." and the first one is then okay with it, my reaction is pretty much WTF? because isn't s/he just about to engage in unsafe sex just then? That pretty much contradicts the whole reassurance. It's different if they have this conversation once they're exclusive and assure each other that they've been tested for STDs recently or whatever, but during first time sex, not so much. And it's not that I don't believe that people sometimes act stupid like that, and there's a few characters for whom behavior like that might be in character, but in general I'd rather not see my favorite characters act stupid.

So I've seen Missed the Saturday Dance by zoetrope recced several times on my f-list, and I get why people like the multimedia, and it's kind of cool and what not, and I like a mix of images and text (or I wouldn't love comics) and the video and sound is neat too. And I love AUs anyway. However, that choice to display much of the story text that is letters as graphics may be visually cool, but it really grates on me that the images don't come with an alt-attribute or a link to a text version of the letters.

I get that full transcriptions of video, sound, and image parts in a multimedia story for accessibility are not very practical, and it's not like I expect fanfic to go that far, but those letters are already text. And text that is an integral part of the narrative too. And it's just too small to read comfortably for me on a screen, especially with the typewriter effect, and I'm not even visually impaired or anything. Some stories displaying letters like that provide accessible alternatives, sheafrotherdon for example did in one of her Farm in Iowa stories, and I very much liked that, since I could take a look at the visual of the letter, then read the text in a comfortable font at a comfortable size.

With as much work as went into the presentation Missed the Saturday Dance, and I agree that it looks very nice indeed, how difficult could it have been to provide a link to a transcribed text of the all those letters as well, and make it possible for more people to enjoy it?

Why do so many automated archives only have the archive name in the page title of stories, not the story name? That sucks for bookmarking. I'm usually too lazy to rename my bookmarks, and most times it isn't a problem. Most commonly I bookmark stories I come across that looked interesting for later reading, and I can just go to the site again, even if the bookmark title is somewhat cryptic. But every once in a while it happens that I go back to a story later (sometimes several weeks later or even longer), only it vanished from the archive, and then I have no idea what the title or the author was, and can't even look whether the story might be archived elsewhere. Gah.

Well, I guess I'll never know now what that story in my HP to-read bookmark folder was, since I have only the archive name and the cryptic database generated URL, that's no hint either.

I've wondered in the past about the peculiarities of eyes in fanfic, but I just read a passage describing eyes with "ice and ichor" and I was like wtf? Isn't ichor, like, pus or something? I know it's originally from some Greek mythology thing or other, but still. Anyway, regardless of the potential nuances of "ichor" I might be missing, I was just grossed out. Eyes like ice and pus?! Ick. Also, it didn't much sound like the voice of the POV character either.