Hello you wonderful, wonderful person! My name, here, on fimfiction, and few few other places around the internet, is World Theory. My name does not have to be taken literally, but that's an option. It can, I believe, be taken poetically. I first really fell in-love with reading fan-fiction when I followed a link from TV Tropes, to a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, fanfic. I gave it consideration because the TV Tropes page described this particular fan-fiction to have a few attributes which I wouldn't usually associate with my, at the time, extremely limited knowledge of that franchise. The primary attribute that the story, the fan-fiction, appeared to posses, was that it seemed interesting! There were also a few things in the story description that seemed to be contradictory to my image of My Little Pony.

As luck would have it, the story was under heavy revision at the time, and only the first few chapters were readable. So I soon found myself out of story to read, but still hungry for more... I discovered that the site I found the story on, was dedicated to hosting many thousands of other fan-fictions of that same fandom, and that it had a search feature. :)

I found many good stories to read, and after a while, I was able to piece together what the show is like, as I had never watch the show that all these stories were based on before I read a large number of the fanfics based around it. There were some stories that I wouldn't consider very good of-course, but I'd like to think that I honed my skills in using the tools available, to picking out stories that I'd enjoy, over time.

After what seemed to be a long time immersed in the fandom culture of MLP:FIM, I chanced upon some recommendations, by someone in the community that I trust, to read a few specific stories out-side of the MLP:FIM fandom. That story was: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. (HPMOR for short.) I too, recommend this story, which happens to be hosted here on fanfiction.net, among a few others.

And so, I read this rather excellently written story, and have realized that it would be silly to limit my reading choices to the fan-fiction of a single fandom. And so I eventually found this site, which appears to host fan-fictions of a dizzyingly large variety of fandoms, and has a passable, though not great, search feature. This site's as well as many others' search system, could use a lot of improvement.

Even before I got into reading fan-fiction, I found out that I liked to write, even if I can't write a story. So after I got into fan-fiction, I discovered that sometimes, people would take the time and effort to post spelling and grammar corrections in the comments of a story. I have found, as the case may be, that comments, or reviews as they're labeled here, are not always the ideal place to post such corrections. That is not the point though. I started paying more attention to the spelling and grammar of what I read, and even learned a few new things about proper grammar from the corrections I would sometimes see in the comments of a story that I would be reading. Soon, I built up the courage, and sometimes annoyance, to try giving out spelling and grammar corrections and advise to some of the authors of stories I would be reading at the time.

Now I consider myself to be somewhat of a volunteer spelling and grammar checker. Though I sometimes branch out into the domain of logic and fact checker, for cases where a sentence otherwise has good spelling and grammar, but doesn't make sense in the context of the story. I do not always submit corrections to an author though, for various reasons that often different from case to case, such as the story being very old, and the author showing no sign of still paying attention to the site his story is hosted on.

One of the fastest way to get me to stop reading a story though, is to fill it so full of mistakes, that I actually have to work hard to understand what the story was meant to say. And having some mild OCD does not help me to read such stories.

Here are a few things that annoy me to varying degrees…

Overly Complex Disclaimers

I groan every time I read an overly complex disclaimer. You know those disclaimers that fan-fiction writers put at the beginning of chapters, to say that they do not own the characters or story, on which their fan-fiction was based? I'm talking about the ones that say things like: 'I don't own Goldy Locks and the Three Bears, because if I did, I'd be rich.', or 'I don't own Marry had a Little Lamb, and I never will, so please don't sue me!'

Please; if you're going to use a disclaimer, keep it simple. I think that a disclaimer should not be any more complicated that this: 'Disclaimer: I do not own, or claim ownership of the story "Rumpelstiltskin" or the characters within. I only claim ownership of any original characters that I invented, not in the original story.'

I realize of course, that my example of a good disclaimer is longer than the examples of bad ones. It does go into more detail though, but does not have any strange or uncalled-for excuses for why I do not own the original story or it's characters.

Another semi-related annoyance, is when writers feel the need to re-mix their disclaimer every chapter, and then go ahead and actually do so.

If your worried that your readers are tired of reading the same disclaimer over and over every chapter, don't worry; because if they are tired of it, they can just skip over it, especially if they can quickly recognize that it hasn't changed, and that it is a disclaimer, not a part of the story your writing. You can help them recognize these things by not changing it up every chapter, and by keeping it in the same, predictable spot from one chapter to the next.

Here are a few things that I like to varying degrees…

Long Stories

If I'm going to invest my emotions, and memory space, in a story, I want that story to last a long time. I do sometimes read shorter stories, but when I look for a story to read, I pay attention to the length of it, in words.

Cascading Style Sheets

I am experienced enough with CSS that I think I can say that I'm okay at it. I don't use my CSS skills all the time, but I use them often enough that I've gotten some experience solving various styling problems over the years. I currently use custom "user stylesheets" on various websites, including this one, to improve things like readability for myself, and to tweak things like the size of profile images, to stretch them out to a size where I can see the smaller details in them, often allowing me to actually tell what they're a picture of. I also don't like rounded corners on certain images, so that's a thing I tend to change to fit my sense of aesthetics.

Serifed Font Families

Among those that I like, the font family "Crimson Text" is currently the one I use the most.