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Grazhir (

grazhir) wrote,
@ 2008-02-13 02:38:00

Current music:

Final Fantasy XII | The Stilshrine of Miriam

Today's Minor Rants
More things that make Nimby snarl, and me almost happy that they aren't bad enough to cause a full blown Nimby attack. I almost indulged earlier, actually, when one story at HP Fandom made one of my eyes start to twitch, but then it was over and I moved on. I'm feeling downright petty and nasty these days, though. (Note: I think it sucks that Semagic doesn't have a built-in spell checker like Firefox. Murfle!)

The Rants

Archives that don't give common categories. Oh, they might give you warning options, but not stuff like humor, romance, drama, etc. And what is the deal with all these D/s fics? Sheesh.

Jesus fucking hell! Write an actual summary, people! Do not babble. Do not provide a "quotation" that's supposed to be mysterious and instead just pisses people off. The summary might still suck, but at least it'd be a summary.

News flash, but Harry was born in 1980, not 1981.

I hate that stupid movie mistake. James was not a seeker!!!! Death to peasants!

If I never see Harry and his Flavor of the Story resting foreheads against each other again, it'll be too soon. Now, I realize I have a memory like a sieve, but I'm fairly certain I've never done that in my life with such alarming regularity. I'm not certain I've ever done it, but I have to allow for time and insanity having done a number on my brain cells, so maybe I have. It just seems like such a stupid thing to do, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to. Well, unless you're a highly paid actor in a role which calls for such a sappy display. *shrug*

I am beginning to seriously hate the use of 'spat' as it seems eleventy billion people just lurve to toss it around like sherbet lemons at a Dumbles convention.

Archives which do not choose to allow for a popup dialog warning bypass in one's preferences (age related). Why yes, I just love having my god given right to 'right-click|open in new tab' be revoked by sadists! I do! I just love one or two extra steps to open a story! Yay! I love having to extra-click my way to the story, copy the link I finally got, open a new tab manually, paste in the link, then hit back a time or two in the original tab to retrieve my place in the stories list! Whee!

Unnecessarily complicated inheritance schemes. You know what I'm talking about. In order to inherit Harry has to marry one girl for every family he's head of, for instance. The obvious translation there is that the author adores polygamy and wants a legal fiction of an excuse to indulge. Or in another story, someone can't inherit unless they meet the terms, which happen to consist of producing an heir (the normal way, not any kind of adoption), before a certain age, and his partner must have the blood of at least one founder (and we all know those are just jamming up the queues at Flourish & Blotts since Tom 'Slytherin' Riddle was whacked into the next greatest adventure). Gee, hm, I wonder who he'll have to marry. Frankly, I'd rather see (though I'd never read, either) a story where Harry is Lord Potter, Lord Black, and Lord Whatsihoozit, and CHOOSES OF HIS OWN VOLITION to legally swing himself three wives to keep the inheritances straight.

I've been reading a lot of stories again lately, just because I'm in the mood, and not so much looking for things to bitch about or even ones to rec. However, it's become very clear to me that one thing is really obnoxious. I get it that Harry (in a Dumbles story) has every reason to be yelling and screaming and whatnot, but it's annoying when everybody in the know is yelling and screaming and showing just how freakin' manly they are. Has Harry learned nothing yet from all his years at school? Maybe Vernon is intimidating to a degree with his shouting, but I should think that Snape, with his quiet malevolence, is far more frightening. And I know, I do have my Harry yell at times, but it's infrequent, for when it counts and would have actual impact. Maybe it's because I hate confrontation. I hate yelling and outbursts. You can do so much more by remaining more quiet and in control. I can accept canon fifth year Harry. His age alone is a good basis, plus the circumstances, but it does him very little good. He's not a stupid boy, even if he is impulsive.

Harry buys a new watch. Okay, but do eleventy billion stories all have to feature a Diagon Alley snot who gets offended when Harry says something like, "Don't you have any watches that, you know, tell the actual time?"

I understand at times why people can get so pissy about language. Pronunciation, enunciation. . . . I see so many spelling mistakes that wouldn't happen if people were actually pronouncing the words correctly. Like seated/seeded, or integrated/integraded, or congratulations/congradulations. I mean really, we tend to spell as we hear things if we aren't sure. I'm sort of reminded of one year at Mallory Towers, where the American girl, Zerelda, is forever saying "wunnerful" instead of "wonderful." Of course, whenever I see a word I don't recognize but uses either an IE or an EI, I automatically assume that the second vowel is the pronunciation key. So, er, gheist would be GUYST, with an I. I think that comes from my two years of high school German, actually. (On a side note, I almost always spell inheritance and mercenary incorrectly. I keep using an E instead of A in the last syllable for the former, and add an extra R for some reason for the latter.)

Bonus

I've run across eleventy billion fics recently that all go on about how Harry was never taught how to properly structure an essay. Too many, really. But that's not the focus of today's bonus item. It made me consider things, and think back. I think I've said before that I don't remember a whole lot from my own schooling, and especially what happened in most English classes. I don't know what most diacritical marks mean (and in fact, only understood what the word meant thanks to contextual cues), and I don't know how to diagram a sentence (or even why I'd want to). I don't know what dangling participles are and other interestingly termed stuff unless I take the time to go hunt down a definition (and even then I know I'll forget within a day what I researched).

And I most definitely haven't got the foggiest idea how to properly structure an essay. I know I wrote eleventy billion essays during my school career, and did damn well, but it's all just a blur, you know? I might have some vague idea about summary, content/arguments, and conclusion, but...? Oh, well, and a bibliography. I mean really... is that it? Have I actually remembered something and just don't realize it?

It's like, I write something (or do so and go back to it a month or months later) and realize that something isn't right about a sentence, that I've made some sort of mistake that makes comprehension awkward and is most likely against some rule. So I fix it. But I don't know what the mistake is called. I did once, but only because I ran across a term I couldn't define and looked it up, then promptly forgot it a few days later. Sometimes I think I've learned more about "English" from reading than I ever did in a classroom setting. Dunno, but it's strange.

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