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Today we went for a big fat lunch at Frankie & Benny & Joon's with the In Laws. It was goooooood. And, we did little else. Apart from wet out knickers at all the 4x4s and Beamers just swinging out from side-streets at us on the way both to and from Ashford, of course. Seriously, it was like the car had been turned into some sort of giant electromagnet for complete fucking cretins who are incapable of stopping at junctions, indicating or simply looking where they were driving. We even had a man carrying a massive sack of potatoes just slowly walking towards us as we drove. You'd think we were actually invisible.
I thought I was going to have to post a long-time-coming rant about "sporkers", nitpickers and self-proclaimed-fandom-saviours today when the STUPIDEST EVER backpedal over an unfunny 'loltypo' nitpick being pointed out to not actually be a typo occurred on one of the anal-retentive LJ Comms that I lurk on so as to scorn them from a distance. I'm not going to go into a full blown rant, though, but this really irked me.
See, my big beef with the people described above is that they tend, in my opinion, to actually be very mediocre writers. Their very public 'snarking' tends to be very frequent and without quality. I'm all for a touch of Wildean Wit in my day, but these posts are generally utterly unfunny, charmless, repetitive and dull. If this is their idea of sparkling, bitchy humour then, no. I doubt they make terrifically entertaining authors. It's not Oscar Wilde. It's not even Kim Wilde. It's like Simon Cowell taught a load of parrots how to come up with the same seven dreary puns in mildly scathing tones over and over and over and over.
Let's take the comment that annoyed me as an example. In a very unfunny 'Summary Spork' (in which, I think the point is to go through the first page of a handful of popular fandoms, select a handful of perfectly valid, coherent, interesting sounding summaries because they can't be arsed to dig for all the mental ones that are buried out there and make at best, obvious and unfunny, at worst, just plain weird jokes about them) somebody started pointing and laughing that an author had warned of 'a sombre tone'. LOL!!! SHE MISSPELLED 'SOMBER'!!!! OH THE HIGHLARITY!!! A non-American pointed out that 'sombre' is the correct way that those crazy-passported Foreign Folk across the water spell the word. Now, if you weren't a cunt, your response to that would surely be 'Wow. Really? Huh. Well, you learn something new every day. Makes sense, what with the whole 'centre/center, theatre/theater thing, now that I think of it.' If you weren't a cunt. The trouble is, that generally, people who make a big fuss and bother publicly nitpicking the fine details of other authors, usually behind said authors backs, in order, I can only assume, to make them appear better writers by comparison and to validate their own startling mediocrities, are cunts. The most usual backpedal I see when it's pointed out to one of these nitpickers (not always Americans, but usually, I'm sorry to say, my American chums) that the poor author they think they're ripping to shreds for their terrible spelling errors is actually just using British English is 'Well, it's a US Fandom so they should be using US English', which in itself is one of the most idiotic arguments I ever heard. Do you go around complaining to non-English speakers that their Harry Potter Fanfic should be in English, not German/Spanish/Whatever because it's an English Fandom? No. If you write a Spirited Away Fanfic do you do it in perfect Japanese throughout? WELL WHY NOT, MORON, IT'S SET IN JAPAN?!?!? Quick, let's all take the piss out of Shakespeare for not writing Hamlet in fucking Danish. Luckily, nobody (that I know of) has whined to me about this in my D&DC or TNG fics because if they did, seriously, they'd get a PM Box full of my uppity Limey rage. However, in this case even that stupid backpedal was invalid, since it was a Dr Who summary she was having a go at. Her answer to being pointed out that she was wrong was simply magnificent in its stupidity and arrogance. You know what it was...? Ready? 'Well, it looks stupid spelled that way'. OH NOEZ! THE AGONY!!! Seriously, I'm halfway through phoning the people at the OED right now to tell them they'd better change it to the proper American way this instant because it LOOKS STUPID!
Actually, this has turned into a rant, for which I apologise. It's just that, as a writer, while I very much value the considered constructive criticism of others, whether they be writers or not, these people drive me up the fucking wall. They don't amuse, they don't inform, they aren't constructive, their arrogance makes them impossible to have a rational discourse with, they just seem to exist to pick away at others in order to draw attention to themselves - like an inept school bully.
If you want to write, then write. If you want to read, then read. If you have feedback, that's what the fucking comments boxes and reviews boxes are for. If you genuinely think someone has room for improvement then tell them to their faces. Bitching's not funny unless you have the mental age of 11. Really. It's just shit.
I thought I was going to have to post a long-time-coming rant about "sporkers", nitpickers and self-proclaimed-fandom-saviours today when the STUPIDEST EVER backpedal over an unfunny 'loltypo' nitpick being pointed out to not actually be a typo occurred on one of the anal-retentive LJ Comms that I lurk on so as to scorn them from a distance. I'm not going to go into a full blown rant, though, but this really irked me.
See, my big beef with the people described above is that they tend, in my opinion, to actually be very mediocre writers. Their very public 'snarking' tends to be very frequent and without quality. I'm all for a touch of Wildean Wit in my day, but these posts are generally utterly unfunny, charmless, repetitive and dull. If this is their idea of sparkling, bitchy humour then, no. I doubt they make terrifically entertaining authors. It's not Oscar Wilde. It's not even Kim Wilde. It's like Simon Cowell taught a load of parrots how to come up with the same seven dreary puns in mildly scathing tones over and over and over and over.
Let's take the comment that annoyed me as an example. In a very unfunny 'Summary Spork' (in which, I think the point is to go through the first page of a handful of popular fandoms, select a handful of perfectly valid, coherent, interesting sounding summaries because they can't be arsed to dig for all the mental ones that are buried out there and make at best, obvious and unfunny, at worst, just plain weird jokes about them) somebody started pointing and laughing that an author had warned of 'a sombre tone'. LOL!!! SHE MISSPELLED 'SOMBER'!!!! OH THE HIGHLARITY!!! A non-American pointed out that 'sombre' is the correct way that those crazy-passported Foreign Folk across the water spell the word. Now, if you weren't a cunt, your response to that would surely be 'Wow. Really? Huh. Well, you learn something new every day. Makes sense, what with the whole 'centre/center, theatre/theater thing, now that I think of it.' If you weren't a cunt. The trouble is, that generally, people who make a big fuss and bother publicly nitpicking the fine details of other authors, usually behind said authors backs, in order, I can only assume, to make them appear better writers by comparison and to validate their own startling mediocrities, are cunts. The most usual backpedal I see when it's pointed out to one of these nitpickers (not always Americans, but usually, I'm sorry to say, my American chums) that the poor author they think they're ripping to shreds for their terrible spelling errors is actually just using British English is 'Well, it's a US Fandom so they should be using US English', which in itself is one of the most idiotic arguments I ever heard. Do you go around complaining to non-English speakers that their Harry Potter Fanfic should be in English, not German/Spanish/Whatever because it's an English Fandom? No. If you write a Spirited Away Fanfic do you do it in perfect Japanese throughout? WELL WHY NOT, MORON, IT'S SET IN JAPAN?!?!? Quick, let's all take the piss out of Shakespeare for not writing Hamlet in fucking Danish. Luckily, nobody (that I know of) has whined to me about this in my D&DC or TNG fics because if they did, seriously, they'd get a PM Box full of my uppity Limey rage. However, in this case even that stupid backpedal was invalid, since it was a Dr Who summary she was having a go at. Her answer to being pointed out that she was wrong was simply magnificent in its stupidity and arrogance. You know what it was...? Ready? 'Well, it looks stupid spelled that way'. OH NOEZ! THE AGONY!!! Seriously, I'm halfway through phoning the people at the OED right now to tell them they'd better change it to the proper American way this instant because it LOOKS STUPID!
Actually, this has turned into a rant, for which I apologise. It's just that, as a writer, while I very much value the considered constructive criticism of others, whether they be writers or not, these people drive me up the fucking wall. They don't amuse, they don't inform, they aren't constructive, their arrogance makes them impossible to have a rational discourse with, they just seem to exist to pick away at others in order to draw attention to themselves - like an inept school bully.
If you want to write, then write. If you want to read, then read. If you have feedback, that's what the fucking comments boxes and reviews boxes are for. If you genuinely think someone has room for improvement then tell them to their faces. Bitching's not funny unless you have the mental age of 11. Really. It's just shit.
