Life's Mixed Bag

[Samsally]

I realize what a hopeless fangirl I am because my first thought was "My answer depends entirely on what fandom we're talking here." because if it's one of mine I'll make grabby hands for the fanfic.

My recent writing project is fanfic. I'm actually pretty terrible at world building on my own.
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Samsally the GrayAce

[Darqcyde]

I'm getting retweeted by someone every time I post a story, which is cool because the person has a few hundred followers. They're Indonesian, which is kinda neat too.

The real issue is I'm not even sure it's a person, but I suppose having bots spread my stuff is better than no one, so who knows.
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...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
http://about.me/omardrake

[Yinello]

I desperately want this but I'm not exactly rolling in the dough lately.
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No one is every truly alone with pizza.

[mouse]

oooo, that is sweet. it doesn't seem outrageously expensive, though - could you give up something for a few week? coffee drinks, sodas, eating?

meanwhile, i have to talk myself out of the cat pendant.
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aka: neverscared!

[Yinello]

[Echo]

Oooooh, now I want all sorts of pendants with pictures of nebulae on them. And maybe that Fire Dragon Eye one.

Fortunately for my bank balance, dithering between the various options usually mean I don't end up buying any...

[Heretical Rants]

(+) I read a thing and it was entertaining.
(-) IT HAD COMMA SPLICES AAAAAaaAAAAAaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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butts

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[Heretical Rants]

Hmmm. They put commas around a slightly excessive number of prepositional phrases, appositives, interjections, etc? *le GASP*


It looks fine to me. At worst, it's unwieldy.
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butts

[WheelsOfConfusion]

WheelsOfConfusion turned a withering glare on Heretical Rants. The sandpaper of his gaze was matched only by the coarse rasp of his voice, singed by the acid in his words.
"Now I see how you can read fan fiction."
And true it was, for prose so perse thrives only in a punctuation wasteland, desolated of all sense of structure and teleology, bereft of the guiding, cultivating hand of a higher intellect, in which sentences grow large and fat, fed to moribund corpulence by the horribly plump, writhing commas that suckle ever at the foul, putrescent teat of the disheveled, rambling mind, in whose unformed chambers and benighted, unenlightened chasms the noble period dwells no more abundantly than sunbeams amongst the decrepit and haunted abode of the undead.

[Heretical Rants]

Sometimes there's a small part of my brain that tries to throttle me in order to protect itself from the horror of oft-repeated errors in grammar and punctuation. If that part of me gets too loud, I ragequit the fic and try to find something else to fill the awful aching void. Usually things only progress that far if I'm already invested in the story for whatever reason, and I generally won't read a fic at all if it doesn't appear, on first glance, to have gone through a proper proofreading.

But small, consistent errors and unclear patterns of prose build together and start to gnaw at my spirit, feeding off of the energy the rest of the fic gives me to form a dark and terrible amalgamation of annoyance that looms over me and threatens to suck out my very soul. This terror can only be vanquished by either screaming obscenities at the author for inflicting this upon me, or finding a better-composed work of fiction to help me wash away the poisonous sludge it has floated into the weary architecture of my mind.

Alternatively, I suppose I could just walk away and do something else, but I haven't tried that solution yet.

None of the fanfictions I count among my favorites have this problem *cough* with the exception of one sequel that was written by a different author.

Count?

This post contains TEN commas!

Ten! Ahahaha.
and one *cough* used in place of a comma
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butts

[Dogen]

I've come to be less concerned with how other people write. I've decided that if language is for the transmission of ideas then it's merely a question of whether someone's writing works, if you understand them, rather than whether it's technically correct, that's important. People gripe about sounding unintelligent, or the need to be able to write to be respected (job applications? I don't know), but I just don't have those concerns. I don't care if a grocery store misuses an apostrophe, or if someone ends a sentence with a preposition. People hate new linguistic rules, words, and turns of phrase until they aren't new anymore. Worrying about it is sticking your finger in a dam.

Anyway, so I just helped get a friend of mine fired. He groped another friend of mine. At work. They're both married. She called me for advice, and I told her to do the right thing, and she did, and the right thing happened. It just sucks. But at least she doesn't have to see him at work anymore.
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"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

[Jinx]

Oh man, that's horrible. Is this surprising from him?
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The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
- Charles Darwin

[Dogen]

It was one of those situations where I didn't see it coming, but as soon as it happened I went back over one or two situations in my head and could see where signs may have been there. It also turned out he was different when other men were around, and when my friend called me to ask what to do I started reaching out to other women and found a lot of them had had "off" interactions with him that left them uncomfortable (though he didn't grope anyone else that I know of).
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"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

[mouse]

that sounds like this is leaning to the horrors thread - what with finding out a friend is the sort of person who gropes women.

glad you supported the woman in doing the right thing, though.
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aka: neverscared!