Aesthetic (Woebegone)
Aug. 11th, 2010 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jheti
Christ.
Fanfiction.net: dedicated to making your writing look as ugly as possible since 2004.
Sir or Madam:
You put a hypen in, you take a hyphen out, you put a hypen in, and you shake it all about; you do the switcheroony with your TOS again, and that's what it's all about!
I appreciate the stereotype that badfic authors are addicted to asterisks. I understand. I've seen it, too. But asterisks made excellent scene dividers in an environment where you'd already taken away the industry-standard double carriage return. (Why did you do that? You've never said, and it would save most of us a lot of hassle if you just gave it back. Anyway.)
But, but! BADFIC. So you removed them. I learned to deal with it eventually. In time, you also removed series of dashes. Like this: --- Those were a no-go.
In return, you promised us magical horizontal scene dividers that were supposed to run the length of the entire page. I spent a week and a half reformatting all my work accordingly.
The magical horizontal lines are gone. Again. From what I understand, they appear and disappear at will, never showing themselves to unbelievers--not unlike the faerie folk, or Santa Claus.
It's been a month. The horizontal lines won't reappear, no matter how hard I clap my hands. I'm starting to doubt.
Let's take a moment, now, to leave the world of magic and re-enter the world of standard written conventions. I won't plague you with the laws of en and em; I'm neither a priestess nor a rapper.
Generally, a single dash, - , is used to make compound words, Eg. tractor-trailer, mealy-mouthed, hunter-killer. A double dash, -- , is used for a pause in thought or speech, and often indicates a change in direction. It functions like a lesser cousin of a parenthetical aside (that's these things, for those playing along at home.)
I use them frequently. I always have. Since I could actually use a pencil to form words on paper that looked like this, I've been using the goddamn double dash to indicate a pause in thought.
You can see why I'm frustrated with this latest development.
For some reason, you've chosen to spare the proper double dash as encoded by Microsoft Word. It may just be that your little code-stripping process hasn't detected it yet. Or you're getting a kickback somewhere. I don't care.
But the use of Microsoft Word to protect formatting doesn't extend to italics.
Why would you strip those? There is no logical reason on earth. Therefore, I'm hoping it's a format glitch brought on by your latest round of fuck it, let's nuke everything! That way, the few people still using this site who expect their work to be taken even halfway seriously will have to replace all their chapters again, exponentially increasing our server load and losing us even more money! SCORE.
I. I. This doesn't work the way you think it does. Though it does make me wonder what the fuck is wrong with your coding, your scripts, or your programs that you're nudging up against some kind of built-in limitation you don't want to reveal to the rest of us peons.
That's got to be what it is. Otherwise, you'd just pull an LJ and start nuking accounts that have been inactive for two years or more. Unless this is some sort of weird thought experiment and you're just fucking with us.
On that note.
Why can't I center anything anymore? What have you got against titles actually looking nice?
The magic is dead. You've killed it.
...I'll be clogging your servers again as soon as I've got the spare time for it.
Fanfiction.net: dedicated to making your writing look as ugly as possible since 2004.
Sir or Madam:
You put a hypen in, you take a hyphen out, you put a hypen in, and you shake it all about; you do the switcheroony with your TOS again, and that's what it's all about!
I appreciate the stereotype that badfic authors are addicted to asterisks. I understand. I've seen it, too. But asterisks made excellent scene dividers in an environment where you'd already taken away the industry-standard double carriage return. (Why did you do that? You've never said, and it would save most of us a lot of hassle if you just gave it back. Anyway.)
But, but! BADFIC. So you removed them. I learned to deal with it eventually. In time, you also removed series of dashes. Like this: --- Those were a no-go.
In return, you promised us magical horizontal scene dividers that were supposed to run the length of the entire page. I spent a week and a half reformatting all my work accordingly.
The magical horizontal lines are gone. Again. From what I understand, they appear and disappear at will, never showing themselves to unbelievers--not unlike the faerie folk, or Santa Claus.
It's been a month. The horizontal lines won't reappear, no matter how hard I clap my hands. I'm starting to doubt.
Let's take a moment, now, to leave the world of magic and re-enter the world of standard written conventions. I won't plague you with the laws of en and em; I'm neither a priestess nor a rapper.
Generally, a single dash, - , is used to make compound words, Eg. tractor-trailer, mealy-mouthed, hunter-killer. A double dash, -- , is used for a pause in thought or speech, and often indicates a change in direction. It functions like a lesser cousin of a parenthetical aside (that's these things, for those playing along at home.)
I use them frequently. I always have. Since I could actually use a pencil to form words on paper that looked like this, I've been using the goddamn double dash to indicate a pause in thought.
You can see why I'm frustrated with this latest development.
For some reason, you've chosen to spare the proper double dash as encoded by Microsoft Word. It may just be that your little code-stripping process hasn't detected it yet. Or you're getting a kickback somewhere. I don't care.
But the use of Microsoft Word to protect formatting doesn't extend to italics.
Why would you strip those? There is no logical reason on earth. Therefore, I'm hoping it's a format glitch brought on by your latest round of fuck it, let's nuke everything! That way, the few people still using this site who expect their work to be taken even halfway seriously will have to replace all their chapters again, exponentially increasing our server load and losing us even more money! SCORE.
I. I. This doesn't work the way you think it does. Though it does make me wonder what the fuck is wrong with your coding, your scripts, or your programs that you're nudging up against some kind of built-in limitation you don't want to reveal to the rest of us peons.
That's got to be what it is. Otherwise, you'd just pull an LJ and start nuking accounts that have been inactive for two years or more. Unless this is some sort of weird thought experiment and you're just fucking with us.
On that note.
Why can't I center anything anymore? What have you got against titles actually looking nice?
The magic is dead. You've killed it.
...I'll be clogging your servers again as soon as I've got the spare time for it.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-11 11:53 pm (UTC)For centering, you have to use their rich-text edit thing. <hr> has not failed me, but this, really, this is egregious. what. the. hell.
You know, ff.net, if you want to keep people from posting things that offend your delicate sensibilities, you need to institute an approval queue, where things don't go up unless you say they can. It's THE ONLY way you will ever get what you want. Chasing off everyone on the site who has the slightest shred of talent is not the way to redeem yourself from being the sewer of fandom.
I may have ranted a bit on my ff.net profile and directed everyone to my website instead, and if they find out and kick me out? DARN.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 01:51 pm (UTC)Long story, this. I've figured out Shadows, so I went to go take a look at my most recent stuff, and no italics. NONE. They were back in as of yesterday, though.
(I'd love to have a look under the hood and see just WHY exactly whole hunks of the site randomly do barfy things every time they "fix" something. It's so weird.)
Still, what the. Just. WTF.
Ohmygoodness thank you for the em-dash code! ♥ I really, really need those. My writing can't function without them, especially not in Mileena-voice. I'm so not kidding.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 04:13 pm (UTC)