Tag Archives: fanfiction

When spell checks go wrong

Spell checks are wonderful things.  They help people locate errors that had been overlooked for various reasons.  I know for sure that I have had my share of typos that have been caught by spell checks.  They definitely can save a piece of work, that’s for sure.

However, one must always be careful when utilizing an automated service to look over a product.  There’s always the chance that the program will guess the wrong word when attempting to decipher bad spelling.  Sometimes, the spell checker is not programmed properly, so it doesn’t know the word is wrong.  So, it’s always best to double-check the spell checker either on one’s own or by asking someone else to review it.

However, despite how sloppy it may look when a spell checker does come up with the wrong word, I manage to find a fair deal of amusement from the results.  Results such as these two.

“He could feel burning heat around him as he struggled to the service, desperate for some air. Once he reached the service, he swam slowly over to a rock ledge and pulled himself out of the lava.”

and

“While Ada was on her mission and reported to him about Jake Muller, he was surprised that he had a sun, but he did not show it.”

Both of these examples came from the same mediocre story.  In fact, there’s other points that I can pick at, such as the author’s notes being longer than the actual chapter, but those two sentences simply stuck out.

Thanks for the laugh via wrong word usage.

Holy wall of text!!

Sorry that I haven’t blogged in a long time. I’ve been busy at work for the most part. I’ve also had a week of whining to my ISP to get things running properly. So, I just have been drained for a bit.

The good news is that my work is restocked with people filling the spots that I was filling. So, I’m no longer doing 2.5 people’s jobs. Still, it is summer time, and that’s the busy time for the moving industry. So, expect me to be tired still.

On the same note, that’s the main reason I didn’t stream this past Saturday. The secondary was because I was supposed to help out cleaning and needed to get to that anyway. So, I just took a day away from my normal schedule to sleep and relax.

However, that all isn’t why I’m making this post. I’m making this post because I have once again stumbled upon a horrid fanfic.

I’m still on a Hellsing kick because Alucard is awesomesauce. While the section doesn’t have nearly as many stories for me to hunt through as Final Fantasy VII or Resident Evil, it still has a healthy supply of them. Sadly, this also means that I have a large chance of hitting stories that just simply should not be.

This story is one of them. I was once again running low on good stories, so I started to lower my standards of searches, which is usually stories that reach above the 10k word mark. Though, I’m still rather stringent about looking for stories that average over 1k words per chapter. Sometimes, this produces some interesting forming works. Other times…

Well, other times, I get stories like this one. Please, author of this story, learn to use paragraphs! It hurts my eyes! I didn’t get past glancing over it and seeing that wall of text. I just simply cannot think of reading through that.

Read at your own risk, I take no responsibility for headaches that occur.

Also, sorry I haven’t done my normal stream roll blog post. With all my test streams and whatnot I’ve had the last few weeks, I figure I’ll leave that be for now. If you want to watch the latest streams, feel free to check my twitch channel.

Also, just for the record, Malek, you have competition. 13hxane leaped off cliffs left and right last night.

I actually found a good one

Well, I actually find gems more often than I let on. I just figure that most people would not agree with some of my definitions of gems. Sometimes, I’m attracted to well-written stories that have strange premises that sell me to their ways. However, that’s not what this article is about. So, don’t worry.

As many know, I’ve been on a Hellsing kick still thanks to Meez. I blame Meez for all of this. It is all his fault. Anyway, I’ve been browsing the stories there, digging and scratching in hopes of finding things that actually entertain me. Most of what do entertain me are so desperately old that there is no hope that they will ever be updated again.

However, I’ve recently stumbled across one that has only recently started up and seems to be building up to something that should hopefully keep me entertained. It also passes the tests of being well written with no distracting grammar quirks. That is always a good thing.

Also, it does not look to be romance-centric, which works perfectly fine. I rather just enjoy reading character interactions and do not need people trying to force characters onto each other. In fact, most of the stories that I read that do include romance usually force it on the characters. That is not the way to go at all.

Anyway, I do highly suggest checking out this story. As I was hinting, I see a writer that has stayed as close to the original characterizations as possible. Not to mention, it looks like this character is willing to beat up the characters just a big, which always entertains me. It will be interesting to see where this story goes.

I don’t really want to speak much of the plot, for I fear that may spoil the fun of the story. Not to mention, it’s only just barely started.

Yes, I know, Seferia’s being boring and actually praising a story instead of tearing it to shreds. So, sorry those that love my little rants. Perhaps next time.

I need to get back to these!

It’s been a good long while since I’ve posted about one of the stories that I’ve found during my daily travels across the expanses of fanfiction.net. In part, this has been because I’ve found a few good stories that I spent time reading and am following. However, who really cares about those?

Ok, maybe someone does. However, I’ll post about those stories on some other day.

Instead, today, I shall point out another story that I’ve bumped into while scratching at something to entertain me before I lost interest in a section. I’ve been recently on a Hellsing kick, because Hellsing is just awesome. It always has been awesome, and always will be. However, there aren’t all that many stories there. There’s even less stories that get past 10k words. So, I’m starting to scratch at the dregs.

Well, while scratching, I decided to finally click on a story that I had ignored over and over again: Usagi, Hellsing Maid and Alucard’s plaything! I can’t imagine why I ignored something with a title like that. Can you imagine? I absolutely don’t know.

Yea, I don’t believe me either.

Anyway, I decided to finally click it in hopes of getting a chuckle over some bad Mary Sue action. However, what I found was even more interesting. This author has made their own rules on grammar. I do not know where they came up with these rules. However, there’s mixtures of chat speak found within what almost would be normal prose paragraphs. To say the least, the story is bizarrely written.

I didn’t even get around to learning anything about the plot. I just stared at the grammar then started laughing.

I hate it when I find this stuff

So, when someone finds a story that’s counting at near to 150,000 words, one would believe that story would have some potential of being written in some semblance of a proper way, right? It’s only logical that someone who writes a lot of words learns something by writing a lot of words. Or so, one would think.

However, it has been proven to me on many occasions that this belief in the ability of humans to learn from their activities is not quite right. It seems that doing an activity a lot does not mean that they grasp the basics of that activity. Oh no, there is absolutely no correlation to the number of words one writes to how good the story is. Ok, there’s some correlation, but not much.

So, anyway, I’ve drained dry many of my usual spots, so I wandered away again to another section to look for stories. Thus, I encountered this story. The first few sentences looked acceptable enough to entertain me for a short bit, then it went downhill. I soon found that all the dialogue was being shoved into single paragraphs, which made it next to impossible to read. The grammar was nearly as bad, but I regularly give people breaks for being strange with things like having periods outside of quotations.

So, I decided to do something insane just to see if perhaps the author improved while writing 60 chapters. I skipped ahead to the last few chapters. At that point, I didn’t last long at all.

I saw Megatron and Hydra mentioned before I crossed my eyes. Even if the ability to write a story had improved, the plot did not appear to be worth the time to attempt to stomach.

So, yes, lesson fermented even more. Long story does not insure good story.

Why Betas exist

Authors really should look for fanfiction circles to find people willing to beta read for them. There are simply way too many stories that clearly go without them and show. It’s painful to see a story where it almost looks like the author has some semblance of half a grasp on grammar, yet they randomly drop important things like quotation marks and capitalization for names.

Not that the perfect grammar would likely bump this story up to the “gem” statue. However, it definitely could have used someone to look over it and mark all of the obvious errors for the author.

Just a real shame.

How do people come up with this stuff?

I think I may have possibly found a new fetish.  I’m not certain.  What I discovered last night was simply strange and bizarre to say the least.  I never would have expected to find anything like it, and I don’t even know where it’s going.

Anyway, I’ve been getting myself hyped by indulging myself in the mythos of the Xenomorph, AKA ALIEN.  I have the Quadrology and the AVP movies, so a lot of my time has been spent watching the films.  However, I also decided to side-track for a short bit and check, for curiousity’s sake, what existed in the land of fanfiction.

What I discovered was rather strange, as I said earlier.  This story is almost well written, if it were not for the strange lack of the proper punctuations for speech and dialogue.  However, the content is simply disturbing.  I’ve only gotten a few chapters in, but I’m guessing that this might possibly be something that’s going to lead to a romance with a Xenomorph hybrid.

If I might say so, mind blown.

I also have to admit that I am continuing to read this story simply because I just want to see how insane the plot can get.  This is definitely the train wreck material that I look for.

When a bad fic can be spotted by just the title

Seriously, do people even think sometimes? Any effort?

Master Chief vs Chris Redfield vs Darth Vader vs Harry Potter by christopher1235
Who would win in a battle.

Yea, I’m not even clicking this one.

Words: 299

Really am not clicking on this story. I don’t even need to look at it more than that…. Well, it could be worse. I mean seriously:

A Coming Out Story by Yooney
Cloud and his girlfriend Tifa move to Midgar, city of the gays. After being introduced to the homosexual lifestyle, Cloud becomes curious and fascinated. All it takes is a man with beautiful long silver hair and a hidden motive to remind him of a long forgotten past and turn his life—along with his sexual orientation—completely upside-down. Yaoi/Seke Cloud/Shota/Cheating

It could be much worse.

Disclaimer: click on these stories at your own risk. I did not read them at all. I only saw the summaries.

When will they learn?

First and foremost, Seferia found something strange in the last few days of browsing stories in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer section.  At least for now, she isn’t coming across any extremely horrible stories.  In fact, she’s come across a lot of promising ones that she might dig into more later.  Of course, there were probably ones that are easy shots at having something beyond headache-inducing; however, Seferia did not feel like venturing into the twisted scene of Spike/Xander stories.

So, instead, Seferia decided to wander around and check out other usual haunts of hers.  Guess what?  Devil May Cry is still full of a bunch of fools that write stuff that shouldn’t exist.  Seriously, people should have learned by now that the “pulled into the game” stories do not work and are a sure recipe for failure.  At least, one would think that somewhere along the line, someone would tell a new author not to use that plot device, right?

I guess not.

Amazingly, from what little I could stomach of the story, the author has enough grasp onto what they are doing in order to maintain proper grammar and sentence structure.  So, I cannot use the excuse that they have a malfunctioning brain when it comes to thinking for a reason as to why they would use this plot.  Nope, the largest grammatical quirk that I can find is an apparent love for caps lock, since I suppose that people enjoy screaming above what a simple exclamation mark can indicate.

Also, I must wonder why these authors always find names like “Akina” when coming up with their original characters.  It seems to me that the author is trying to come up with an average teenager on most cases.  Yet, they have a strong tendency to have names that just scream that they are a anime fanatic.  I can’t think that Akina nor Tera are very common names at all.

Well, this story is mostly just a “meh” to me.  It garners no rage, for it’s just standard fare.  I come across these sort of tales all the time.  I just wish that someone would smack sense into authors before they write these.