fishpatrol (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fishpatrol) wrote2011-05-13 12:30 am
fishpatrol) wrote2011-05-13 12:30 am
I don't understand how it can be mid-May already...! D:
1. I keep writing up LJ entries in my head, but I guess they are of very little use if I don't post them. ;;; ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
postingwhore kindly nudged me to remind me that I haven't posted in over three weeks. I want to post more regularly, but I keep getting distracted by other things! Also, school is still kicking my ass, big time. If I posted more regularly, I suspect my entries would be filled with things like: "And today, I tried reading fifty million articles and write up a paper in one go and I realized that it was a Very Bad Idea."
I did my Presentation of Doom back in April and I thought that was going to be the major hurdle. It was a pretty massive hurdle, but now I'm inundated with all the work I've neglected and I have supervisors and collaborators emailing me with stuff like, "Where is the data/write-up/analysis/study design" and I'm all, "D: D: D: *hides and procrastinates more*" My way of dealing with stress is to read fic and let me tell you, that is a terrible coping method.
2. MEME!
1) Comment to this and (if you want) I will give you 3 (fictional) people.
2) Post this meme to your LJ with your answers.
3) Provide pictures/text descriptions and the names of the 3 people.
4) Label whom you would shag, marry and (push off a) cliff.
postingwhore gave me: Dean Winchester (SPN), John Sheppard (SGA), Atobe Keigo (PoT)
These were tough choices! But it did give me an excuse to go through my SPN/SGA/PoT picture folders and ogle at all the pretty. I also realized that I have very few pictures of Dean (if Jensen were on this list instead of Dean, I suspect my answers to this meme may be very different...).
Shag:
Dean would be a terrible choice to marry, but he'd make a lovely one night stand. Or a two night stand. Or a month-long stand, whatever, I'm flexible. :>
Marry:
He's pretty and he's rich -- I understand that those are two very good attributes as far as "marriage material" goes. ;) Out of these three dudes, Atobe would probably be the most logical choice for marriage. XD
Cliff:
Omg, I'm so sorry, John! D: D: D: But he would have that green-turtle-force-field-generator on him because Rodney somehow recharged it and snuck it into John's pocket and so John would bounce harmlessly off the bottom of the cliff while he waited for his team to swoop in and pick him up in a Puddlejumper! So it would be okay! The best case scenario would be if I could have both Dean and John for a threesome (I'd still marry Atobe though :> Dean and John would be terrible husbands. I need someone to cook and clean for me! Atobe would provide me with housekeepers and cooks and I'd be able to do my research in peace without worrying about pesky things like feeding myself. :D) and no one gets cliffed!
3. The keynote speaker at last week's conference talked about some really interesting research about the psychology of scarcity and how people can be "money poor" or "time poor". I don't get financial support from my parents anymore, so I'm technically a poor student, but I have enough to pay for rent, food, and whatnot, and it always boggles my mind how people can, in the same sentence, complain about not having a job or struggling to make rent for the month yet boast about the new, idk, make-up or DVDs or whatever luxury product they just bought. It's not really rational, y'know?
So this speaker was saying, those of us who are not money-poor are often time-poor and we often use (and even borrow!) time irrationally. As soon as he made that comparison (and presented a few studies to show the effect), it all made a lot more sense to me. XD I definitely treat time irrationally, saving here and borrowing there, ignoring the consequences (how can I complain about not having enough time to work on all my projects even as I'm considering my TV-watching schedule??). Because time feels scarce to me, I don't use it reasonably. Now I just need to figure out how to optimize my use of time...!
4. The topic of marriage comes up more frequently now that I'm often with people who are several years older than me. One of the fifth year students expressed her surprise when I told her than I'm not particularly invested in the idea of marriage for myself. I despise clingyness and she said that I should try to habituate and get used to it. Personally, I have no interest in seeing anyone, not even my closest friends, every single day. I don't have an issue with having the presence of someone around every day (e.g. roommate, parents) -- in fact, it's nice to have someone around -- but I don't feel that it's necessary to engage and interact with any particular individual on a daily basis. I don't really like living alone (I haven't actually lived completely alone before), but I'm also a bit of a picky person to live with, so perhaps I should habituate to living alone rather than to put up with having someone around constantly.
5. So, despite my antisocial mannerisms, I had a lovely, brisk walk withcantarina1 around the neighbourhood. That was a particularly efficient and healthy way of "hanging out" (as opposed to huddling together in front of a computer screen, as we often do ;)). If we make this a regular thing, perhaps I'll be able to shed a layer of padding around my middle that I've picked up during my semester of thinking-about-going-to-the-gym-but-never-actually-going.
6. Now for something completely different: so, the other day, I came across a discussion about the importance of technical quality in stories posted online. Some of the people involved in this discussion were appalled that some readers would completely skip over stories that had grammatical mistakes and other errors. "The authors are writing these stories for fun!" they said. "They're even posting the stories for free, you entitled readers!"
As for myself, I have three general rules that I use to decide whether or not I will read any particular story (I would've sworn I'd written about this at some point in time, but maybe it's one of those in-my-mind!entries that I'd never gotten around to writing out and posting). I developed these three rules-of-thumb back in high school, during my Harry Potter days, when I realized that there was more fic being posted than I had time to read.
1)* Epithets. If I see an epithet (e.g. "the blond Slytherin", "the green-eyed man", "HIS LOVER" D:) I will click the "back" button immediately. Well, okay, maybe I'd let one or two not-so-irritating epithets slide (e.g. "the hunter", maaaaybe "the taller/younger/shorter/whatever man" if it doesn't jar the narrative). But seriously, the brain is wired to skip over repetitive names when reading! It's okay to use names! Epithets are far more jarring than using the same name over and over, especially if the chosen epithet doesn't fit with the POV of the narrator at all.
2) Comma placement in dialogue. If a statement is directed at another character, there should always be a comma before that character's name. "Kiss me now Dean!" is incorrect; "Kiss me now, Dean!" is correct. One or two missed commas are okay, but if the author consistently leaves out the comma, then I'm clicking the "back" button.
3) End of dialogue punctuation. "'Kiss me now, Dean.' Said Sam" is incorrect; "'Kiss me now, Dean,' said Sam" is correct. The ["dialogue,/!/?/..." verb noun] is one complete sentence! The "said Sam" or "Sam demanded, leaping into Dean's arms" or whatever is not a complete sentence on its own. \o\
*-I'm willing to listen to podfic of fic that have errors described in points 2 and 3 (because it's not as if I'll be able to hear the punctuation placement, right? ;)), but I can't listen to podfic of fic that feature epithets without physically grimacing. Entitled reader/listener is entitled!
If I'm not familiar with a particular author's works, the first thing I do is glance through the text quickly for these three issues (I find that just skimming though a few snippets of dialogue and the surround text is often sufficient for me to decide whether or not I want to read the fic). Granted, I might miss out on some fantastically awesome fic this way, but I find that there is definitely a significantly positive correlation between technical quality and storytelling/characterization/etc skills. Not one-to-one, for sure, but it's a good enough way to figure out what I want to spend my (relatively scarce, as mentioned in a previous point XD) time reading. ;) The nice thing about being in large and prolific fandoms is that there's never a dearth of good!fic. A couple of fandoms ago (i.e. my brief foray into the Kpop world, *cough*), I definitely didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing fic based on technical quality (don't get me wrong, there were some excellent works, but they were generally few and far between).
So, back to the original point on the importance of technically quality -- as a reader with a lot of choice (choosing the mainstream ships definitely help! :>:>) and limited time, I place technical quality pretty high up on my list. My method of picking and choosing is far from perfect, but it's efficient enough and it has yet to lead me astray. ;)
Tell me about what makes you click the "back" button!
7. I should post more often so that I don't end up spending 40 minutes trying to write up an LJ post.
8. Is Firefox 4 actually faster or does it just look Chrome-like, with no actual redeeming qualities?
eta: Adding more Lj-cuts because long entry is long. ;;;; [/spamming your flists]
postingwhore kindly nudged me to remind me that I haven't posted in over three weeks. I want to post more regularly, but I keep getting distracted by other things! Also, school is still kicking my ass, big time. If I posted more regularly, I suspect my entries would be filled with things like: "And today, I tried reading fifty million articles and write up a paper in one go and I realized that it was a Very Bad Idea." I did my Presentation of Doom back in April and I thought that was going to be the major hurdle. It was a pretty massive hurdle, but now I'm inundated with all the work I've neglected and I have supervisors and collaborators emailing me with stuff like, "Where is the data/write-up/analysis/study design" and I'm all, "D: D: D: *hides and procrastinates more*" My way of dealing with stress is to read fic and let me tell you, that is a terrible coping method.
2. MEME!
1) Comment to this and (if you want) I will give you 3 (fictional) people.
2) Post this meme to your LJ with your answers.
3) Provide pictures/text descriptions and the names of the 3 people.
4) Label whom you would shag, marry and (push off a) cliff.
postingwhore gave me: Dean Winchester (SPN), John Sheppard (SGA), Atobe Keigo (PoT)These were tough choices! But it did give me an excuse to go through my SPN/SGA/PoT picture folders and ogle at all the pretty. I also realized that I have very few pictures of Dean (if Jensen were on this list instead of Dean, I suspect my answers to this meme may be very different...).
Shag:
Dean would be a terrible choice to marry, but he'd make a lovely one night stand. Or a two night stand. Or a month-long stand, whatever, I'm flexible. :>
Marry:
He's pretty and he's rich -- I understand that those are two very good attributes as far as "marriage material" goes. ;) Out of these three dudes, Atobe would probably be the most logical choice for marriage. XD
Cliff:
Omg, I'm so sorry, John! D: D: D: But he would have that green-turtle-force-field-generator on him because Rodney somehow recharged it and snuck it into John's pocket and so John would bounce harmlessly off the bottom of the cliff while he waited for his team to swoop in and pick him up in a Puddlejumper! So it would be okay! The best case scenario would be if I could have both Dean and John for a threesome (I'd still marry Atobe though :> Dean and John would be terrible husbands. I need someone to cook and clean for me! Atobe would provide me with housekeepers and cooks and I'd be able to do my research in peace without worrying about pesky things like feeding myself. :D) and no one gets cliffed!
3. The keynote speaker at last week's conference talked about some really interesting research about the psychology of scarcity and how people can be "money poor" or "time poor". I don't get financial support from my parents anymore, so I'm technically a poor student, but I have enough to pay for rent, food, and whatnot, and it always boggles my mind how people can, in the same sentence, complain about not having a job or struggling to make rent for the month yet boast about the new, idk, make-up or DVDs or whatever luxury product they just bought. It's not really rational, y'know?
So this speaker was saying, those of us who are not money-poor are often time-poor and we often use (and even borrow!) time irrationally. As soon as he made that comparison (and presented a few studies to show the effect), it all made a lot more sense to me. XD I definitely treat time irrationally, saving here and borrowing there, ignoring the consequences (how can I complain about not having enough time to work on all my projects even as I'm considering my TV-watching schedule??). Because time feels scarce to me, I don't use it reasonably. Now I just need to figure out how to optimize my use of time...!
4. The topic of marriage comes up more frequently now that I'm often with people who are several years older than me. One of the fifth year students expressed her surprise when I told her than I'm not particularly invested in the idea of marriage for myself. I despise clingyness and she said that I should try to habituate and get used to it. Personally, I have no interest in seeing anyone, not even my closest friends, every single day. I don't have an issue with having the presence of someone around every day (e.g. roommate, parents) -- in fact, it's nice to have someone around -- but I don't feel that it's necessary to engage and interact with any particular individual on a daily basis. I don't really like living alone (I haven't actually lived completely alone before), but I'm also a bit of a picky person to live with, so perhaps I should habituate to living alone rather than to put up with having someone around constantly.
5. So, despite my antisocial mannerisms, I had a lovely, brisk walk with
cantarina1 around the neighbourhood. That was a particularly efficient and healthy way of "hanging out" (as opposed to huddling together in front of a computer screen, as we often do ;)). If we make this a regular thing, perhaps I'll be able to shed a layer of padding around my middle that I've picked up during my semester of thinking-about-going-to-the-gym-but-never-actually-going.6. Now for something completely different: so, the other day, I came across a discussion about the importance of technical quality in stories posted online. Some of the people involved in this discussion were appalled that some readers would completely skip over stories that had grammatical mistakes and other errors. "The authors are writing these stories for fun!" they said. "They're even posting the stories for free, you entitled readers!"
As for myself, I have three general rules that I use to decide whether or not I will read any particular story (I would've sworn I'd written about this at some point in time, but maybe it's one of those in-my-mind!entries that I'd never gotten around to writing out and posting). I developed these three rules-of-thumb back in high school, during my Harry Potter days, when I realized that there was more fic being posted than I had time to read.
1)* Epithets. If I see an epithet (e.g. "the blond Slytherin", "the green-eyed man", "HIS LOVER" D:) I will click the "back" button immediately. Well, okay, maybe I'd let one or two not-so-irritating epithets slide (e.g. "the hunter", maaaaybe "the taller/younger/shorter/whatever man" if it doesn't jar the narrative). But seriously, the brain is wired to skip over repetitive names when reading! It's okay to use names! Epithets are far more jarring than using the same name over and over, especially if the chosen epithet doesn't fit with the POV of the narrator at all.
2) Comma placement in dialogue. If a statement is directed at another character, there should always be a comma before that character's name. "Kiss me now Dean!" is incorrect; "Kiss me now, Dean!" is correct. One or two missed commas are okay, but if the author consistently leaves out the comma, then I'm clicking the "back" button.
3) End of dialogue punctuation. "'Kiss me now, Dean.' Said Sam" is incorrect; "'Kiss me now, Dean,' said Sam" is correct. The ["dialogue,/!/?/..." verb noun] is one complete sentence! The "said Sam" or "Sam demanded, leaping into Dean's arms" or whatever is not a complete sentence on its own. \o\
*-I'm willing to listen to podfic of fic that have errors described in points 2 and 3 (because it's not as if I'll be able to hear the punctuation placement, right? ;)), but I can't listen to podfic of fic that feature epithets without physically grimacing. Entitled reader/listener is entitled!
If I'm not familiar with a particular author's works, the first thing I do is glance through the text quickly for these three issues (I find that just skimming though a few snippets of dialogue and the surround text is often sufficient for me to decide whether or not I want to read the fic). Granted, I might miss out on some fantastically awesome fic this way, but I find that there is definitely a significantly positive correlation between technical quality and storytelling/characterization/etc skills. Not one-to-one, for sure, but it's a good enough way to figure out what I want to spend my (relatively scarce, as mentioned in a previous point XD) time reading. ;) The nice thing about being in large and prolific fandoms is that there's never a dearth of good!fic. A couple of fandoms ago (i.e. my brief foray into the Kpop world, *cough*), I definitely didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing fic based on technical quality (don't get me wrong, there were some excellent works, but they were generally few and far between).
So, back to the original point on the importance of technically quality -- as a reader with a lot of choice (choosing the mainstream ships definitely help! :>:>) and limited time, I place technical quality pretty high up on my list. My method of picking and choosing is far from perfect, but it's efficient enough and it has yet to lead me astray. ;)
Tell me about what makes you click the "back" button!
7. I should post more often so that I don't end up spending 40 minutes trying to write up an LJ post.
8. Is Firefox 4 actually faster or does it just look Chrome-like, with no actual redeeming qualities?
eta: Adding more Lj-cuts because long entry is long. ;;;; [/spamming your flists]
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On the plus side, you're probably more likely to enjoy what you read? :D Hopefully?
but bad dialogue, bad characterization and shoddy grammar have really been getting in my way lately
What fandoms have you been reading in lately? I find that with some fandoms, the quantity of fic is low, but the quality can still be quite high. With other fandoms though, the quantity is high but the quality is low. I hope the next fandom that I migrate to after SPN (not any time soon though! :>) will not lack in good!fic. ;D
no subject
Some Supernatural (although not nearly as much as I used to purely based on the fact that I've kind of fallen out with the show over the last season and change), some Inception (good writers, but no one writes my ship haha) - mostly where I've been running aground has been with anime fandom - Tiger & Bunny - and, ALAS - Thor. Unfortunately in both cases I think it's that...burgeoning fandom moment where there's a lot being written, but only a fraction of it is good - and the truly awesome stuff isn't here yet.
no subject
I fell into the Inception fandom hard, back in August of last year. I shipped Arthur/Eames something fierce, so I was totally being catered to, but then eventually grew tired of the characters' dynamic and wanted to turn to Arthur/Cobb, but the number of options, in terms of fic, was far more limited. ^^;; (what do you ship, for Inception? Arthur/Cobb, right? I think...?)
Maybe the fandom for Thor will explode the way it did for Star Trek Reboot and Inception? I haven't seen the movie yet, but I've heard good things about it.
no subject