Darn I
should be here more often. I feel sometimes I leave for a while, come back, and we all have free energy and quantum teleportation technology.
What is your grammatical pet peeve? (I assume everyone has one grammar mistake that they just don't like seeing).
Incorrect use of commas.
They're · Their · There, among others.
People who use "what" as a substitute for pretty much any wh-question (when, why, who, whom, whose, ...).
Also, although they're gramatically correct, I can do nothing but shiver upon those weird tense constructs for double "to-be"s and mixed past-future. Things like "had been being built" or "will have been eaten". Don't know why...
Now, I shall be fair and answer my own question (from soooooooooooooooo long befooooooooooooooooore...):
Does your culture's iconography (as in: set of cultural, religious, social or economical symbols) play a role in your writing? If so, what symbols and/or meanings do you explore?
I personally try not to let social and religious iconography slip into my work, but won't loose a night's sleep because of it. I still like to make use of some things that are simpler but deeper in meaning and that are more representative of the concept of a global culture. Like that currency often wears the face of a famous person or building, or the concept of hunting with the tribe as a rie of passage, for example.
The reason why I was asking this was to discern, to a point, how comfortable people felt while letting real-world history and culture slip into the Pokémon world, which if I am not mistaken several authors look at as a cultural sponge whee you can toss a boy with a Japanese name who hunts lizard in his spare time in the same three-houses town than a girl with an Ukranian name who likes to eat marshmallows.
Go figure.
What level of involvement do you have with your characters?
High enough. I feel for them sometimes. I see them in a "it would be cool if they were actually here" fashion. I kinda support icomeanon6's view:
icomeanon6 said:
From my point of view, being friends with your characters is like being friends with your right arm.
(... 3 pages later ...)
Laptops and Desktops
I have... no, rather, my family has an Olidata machine that is, by today's standard, ancient: a laptop from 2005. Despite being treated like dirt by my sister and like slave by me (who ran Debian and a network simulation and inspection system on it), it has held up until now. I prefer laptops due to the "take
your job with
you" approach, because with a laptop you take not only your stuff, but also your workflow and work style: how you like your placement of windows and applications, what music to listen, and so on. However, I am more comfortale with desktop because I 1) can't afford a laptop right now and 2) need a machine that I can tinker and mess up with every once in a while.
I like
very very much to see people who appreciate OpenOffice. It is my personal and industry-standard office package. Now if only the Draw component was better and it had some Visio-like labeling capabilities...
*pant pant* Made it to the end! On the laptop heat thing, mine lives on a wooden breakfast tray. It has ever since the first afternoon I got it, when I sat it on my bed all afternoon, hammering away at it like lol. It overheated and died temporarily. So the tray helps. It often overheats if I play Age of Empires for too long, but it's mostly the keyboard that gets hot. so its hard to type my cheat codes
There's a "nocd" "fix" for the game, you know... ;)
And other than that, if you have enough space you're probably better off playing the game from an ISO image due to the energy consumption of the tray.