Question Story/article comments not to your liking

This week's story introduction brought up that people are putting content data in the comments. Perhaps there's a way to inform users who don't read the forums what the rules are right after the story before the comments. Some CMS systems put a warning text in front of the comments, usually used for "be nice, no swearing, etc" type comments. Perhaps the information about how to use the comments could go there.

Well, currently, the message is:

Please remember that the Comment system is here for immediate reactions and feedback to the author. If you are looking for a place to discuss the issues of the piece, speculate on its meaning within the context of a larger world, or talk about the points of the work in greater detail; please join us in the forums.

As the Comments are accessible to the public, please keep them from straying into the vulgar.

If you do not have a registered account / are not logged in; your post may not be immediately available / visible. Moderation will get to it as quickly as we can.

No spam. No advertisements. Lots of praise and kudos to the authors!

[sincere]What more do you want?[/sincere]

It COULD be said that the authors need a little thicker skin - such as me, but that's not really fair. If we were being paid, different story. I know I'm taking a risk by having a foreign character and trying to set stories in her country; no matter how much research I do (example: a LOT of time with things like Google maps and streetview to get a proper feel of the setting!), I know I'll botch something. The vast majority of readers just ignore that as the price they pay for free reading material. Some though ...

I might have to quite writing Charge in France. Every time I do, I seem to draw a herd of Francophiles who take umbrage at something or other - whether it's the setting, the number of stations in Paris, my slightly inaccurate translations, something that's different in WU vs. real-life, or such things - and for some reason feel the need to publicly correct me. But I try not to get really upset because I know Kristin has my back and if it gets nasty, she'll whack them with the Ban Hammer (TM).

If someone contacts me via PM with a minor correction, I'll listen and consider the error. If they do so publicly and less-than-politely, I'll growl and mutter to myself about their probable ancestry and social habits, all the while reminding myself of one thing:

If people were paying for Whateley in Kindle, how much would y'all have had to spend? And would the most vocal critics shell out even a fraction of that money? (Somehow, I doubt it.) Why is it the curse of humanity that we have to look a gift horse in the mouth, that we feel compelled to be overly critical of something that was given freely?

Hey, give the authors a break. I happened to google a number of things regarding the trip to France... here's a few of them I found:
- The villages and towns? Actual villages and towns.
- The hotels? Actual hotels.
- Tourist landmarks? Yep, all there.
- The museum? Yes, there is a museum by that name, in that place, and it does have fossils.
- TGV is planned to be extended to Bordeaux; the WU is just a few years ahead (which is not surprising)
Elrod DID his homework.

How accurate any of you critics would be about somewhere you never have been, or maybe visited once something like ten years ago?

For pretty much any fiction I read/watch, there are going to be mistakes I can point to. That's because
(a) I know lots of trivia, and there are bound to be things I know more about than whoever wrote the story. Or maybe it's not trivia, it's something I actually studied. Case in point: Portuguese language. Pretty much every time I see Portuguese text in fiction, there is something wrong with it. That's because most people don't have access to a native speaker to fine-tune the language. Even if they do, they "consultant" might not be trusted enough to see the full context of the dialogue beforehand... and therefore get the nuances wrong. Or the "consultant" may be just a poor writer. But do I bitch about it? No, I (for starters) appreciate their knowing that Brazilians do not speak Spanish, and applaud their making at least an honest attempt at it.

(b) Lots of time, the precise details are irrelevant to 99.9% of the readers. Consider, for instance, pre-CGI war movies. One problem they had is that you simply couldn't find enough fly-worthy, say, Messerschmitt Bf109s for your big air-battle scene. So you made do; you found some plane that had similar lines and did stuff to enhance the resemblance. Airplane buffs would be able to tell the difference, but so what? They are a very small minority.

If you can watch... pretty much anything that comes from Hollywood and still enjoy it despite their numerous fails (I consider anything under 10 blunders per hour a success, and anything under 3 blunders/hour an example of astounding quality), you can read some free fiction without making an asshole of yourself.

There's another thing that critics seem to forget in their eagerness to dive into ridiculous levels of detail; the Whateley Universe is NOT our universe.
All those mutant butterflies flapping their little wings like mad have caused changes.

Astrodragon wrote: There's another thing that critics seem to forget in their eagerness to dive into ridiculous levels of detail; the Whateley Universe is NOT our universe.
All those mutant butterflies flapping their little wings like mad have caused changes.

Dunwich, NH has more commuter trains stopping there than Chicago or New York, possibly combined.

Valentine wrote:

Astrodragon wrote: There's another thing that critics seem to forget in their eagerness to dive into ridiculous levels of detail; the Whateley Universe is NOT our universe.
All those mutant butterflies flapping their little wings like mad have caused changes.

Dunwich, NH has more commuter trains stopping there than Chicago or New York, possibly combined.

And the commuter trains go places other than Boston, which may or may not be a relevant factor in Gen 2 (or Gen 1, for that matter).

Just sayin' it's different...

Valentine wrote:

Astrodragon wrote: There's another thing that critics seem to forget in their eagerness to dive into ridiculous levels of detail; the Whateley Universe is NOT our universe.
All those mutant butterflies flapping their little wings like mad have caused changes.

Dunwich, NH has more commuter trains stopping there than Chicago or New York, possibly combined.

Well, surely you dont expect Eldritch Abominations to travel by bus, do you??

What I found fascinating is that many of the "corrections" seem to be wrong. You said six stations, somebody else said five stations, and Wikipedia says seven. (One is an auto-train station and probably doesn't count.)

Some of the "errors" also seem to be based on things that were planned. In our world (reality as we perceive it), all of the long-distance trains in New York City leave from Pennsylvania Station. In the Whateley Universe, they all leave from Grand Central Terminal. Many years ago, there was consideration of digging a tunnel between the two stations and using Grand Central Station for all long distance trains. (Pennsylvania Station would be used for the New Jersey trains and the Long Island Railroad).