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Okay, there is no way this isn't a joke. An amazing, wonderful joke.

~Twiggy, giggling helplessly with every paragraph

...whether to thank you or curse you. XD

Is this a parody? Please tell me this is a parody. It reads like a milder version of Full Life Consequences. LIGHT WAS CRAZY AND PUNCHED TABLE!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4615680/1/LightandDarkTheAdventuresofDark_Yagami

I hope you get to the part with the Everything Note!

...your mention of "Dark Yagami".

Dark Yagami?

Dark Yagami?

I'm imagining some kind of YuGiOh! crossover and a Yami Yagami, but I doubt it's even as sensible as that. o_o

Although... no crossovers or cross-posting? I am so going to hell. I see no problem with uploading fics to multiple sites to reach a wider audience.

~Twiggy, who has an ulterior motive for thinking this, since she does it herself

Equally vaguely, if I'm honest, but your name is definitely familiar. You obviously have a memorable handle.

Thank you kindly for the gifts! I feel very well-equipped now. Wouldn't want to go into a mission without knowing where my towel is.

I can't wait to try it out! >:D

But what a glorious meeting this is.

I'm now wondering what the hell the guy at the counter must have thought if he overheard that conversation. Even if he didn't hear the squicky bits it was still two people talking about glue and grapefruit juice and laughing uncontrollably ... eh, given that I was in drag at the time he's unlikely to recognise me if he does see me again.

Figured you didn't swear much, hence not just emailing you about this. There's a whole other question though - why's it so much easier to compose a thought in written words than spoken?

I don't entirely buy the time to think view based on my conversations with Trojie - we both type so fast and respond so instantly to messages that there's not much difference, in response time, between our written conversations and our microphone-based ones, and yet I still don't swear with her. With most people, however, I accept that's a valid point and an excellent interpretation for a less specialised version of my question. The bit I'm really pondering, though, is the instances where, for example in your case, you're talking to your close friends and family online - is there any difference in how you talk to them on and offline?

With you on the excellence of being as proper as you like though.

I don't swear much either way, so there's not much difference there, but there is a difference in my language overall. For one thing, I can always get a coherent sentence out on the first try online. {= P IRL, I have a tendency to misplace words. I'll be talking along, all innocent-like, and then I'll say kumquat when I meant kiwi. It's incredibly embarrassing, because I know what I mean, but it comes out wrong, like I reached for one thing and grabbed the one next to it instead. It's almost always something that begins with the same sound. More often, though, I just can't string the words together the way I want to, so I end up saying "I mean" a whole lot in an effort to clarify and correct myself. If I get the chance.

The big difference is that online there's time to think everything through before it goes out where other people can see it. Out loud, you can't think about it too much before speaking, or you look like a moron.

Another difference is that most of the talking I do offline is with close friends and family, who will forgive me (or won't even notice) if I use informal/nonstandard language, including the occasional swearword. Most people's language gets more formal/standard when talking to people they don't know, and for me, that extends to the internet, where most of the talking I do is right here, on this Board, where it's in public and everyone can see. I'm less formal on AIM or in e-mails with good friends.

I think that about covers it, though. My language is different online both because I have the luxury of being as proper as I want to be, and because the situation calls for it.

~Neshomeh

I have just wasted my day on this. Dammit. {X D

The comic and the "autopsy," that is. I just... couldn't look away. It's so mind-bogglingly awful. o.o Wow.

~Neshomeh

I try really hard not to swear in RL, to the point where I occasionally spew an incoherent stream of gibberish when I get upset with something, in an attempt not to swear. I do swear at inanimate objects, but only when I'm alone (it's a victimless crime, unless you count my laptop).

I do swear in front of my old high school buddies (all guys, like me), but usually only when quoting dialogue or otherwise being humorous. In college I mostly hung out with girls, who swore more than me (and taught me some new ones), but I still tried to avoid a lot of casual swearing out of politeness (probably unnecessary). I very very VERY rarely swear in front of my parents, even with minor curses like damn or hell.

I don't often swear in online writing because when I'm typing, I have more time to compose my thoughts and think of the right words to use. I don't have that luxury in RL social situations (my kryptonite). I also tend to swear more over instant messenger conversations.

Is there no difference at all in how you phrase things on and offline, then? Not the content of what you say, but the words you choose to express it, I mean.

I think we all do that - it may have been eaten by the ether, but try scrolling back through a few pages on here; someone asked about politics a few months back, and my drunken reply was expletives every other word. The brain deals with expletives differently to the rest of language, and they come out when you're impassioned.

Having lived with you for two months, dear, I can safely say that you allcaps your swearing out loud too.

Hmm. It's a curious one, effort. I think you may have a point, but perhaps in a roundabout way. Consider my usual exclamation of shock and surprise: out loud, where ' is a glottal stop and capitals denote the emphasised syllable, I would say 'kiNELL. Typed, I wouldn't say f*cking hell. I might say bloody hell, which is only one letter less, or I might, more likely, say Christ on a proverbial, which is rather a lot more to type, and also rather a lot less strong a swearword, and also a lot more complicated semantically.

I think I swear a lot out loud for the same reasons I drink to a degree the rest of you find odd: I grew up in a culture where swearing is the norm. F*cking has become a very versatile word, with a variety of meanings dependent on subtle subtexts, intonations, contexts, body languages, and formalities. It's usually not even used as an expletive. I can see why I'd either cut the f*ckings or else bowdlerise them online, for the sake of the people I'm talking to; I certainly had enough conversations when I was a rebellious teenager, online, with people who objected to my swearing, and I've come to recognise their point about appropriate registers. I can also see that not everyone views these words the way I do, and I can temper my language to converge with them.

The bit that I'm particularly pondering is the fact that I don't use the f*ckings when talking online to people I know in real life. My brother, for example - out loud, it's at least one apparent expletive per sentence, and yet online, I use nothing stronger than a bloody or a bugger. I'm not talking the difference between the spoken "So he f*cking comes to me and he f*cking ses this, and I thought f*ck that sh*t man, if he's gonna f*cking think that he can f*ck right off" and the written "He said this to me, and I thought sod him, because if he's going to think that then sod him."

...

Except actually, I am, in a way. Note the way the written version lacks the effing adverbials - that's a score for you in terms of effort. But I wrote the above without thinking, and the online version has sod in place of f*ck; the spoken version took effort to type that the written version didn't. Adverbial expletives are easily lost because they add nothing to meaning; they only add emphasis in spoken language. But what about the verb? Why have I changed that? Why do I change it to something less strong, even when talking to people to whom, out loud, I'd use the strongest language at my disposal?

I'm clearly not altering my language in order to not offend my brother in the example, because he hears me use all sorts of colourful language all the time out loud. So there's got to be more to it than just degrees of formality.

As for time taken to type, I've been considering that bit, and I think it's more about transience - out loud, all your effing and blinding is gone as soon as it appears, but online, it stays, and it's binding in some way that I haven't worked out the specifics of yet (help?).

I talk like this all the time, really. Online and IRL, I'll quote random things at random times and try to make people laugh.

I swear pretty much equally online and in real life. The only difference, I think, is my tendency to shout a bit more (i.e. all caps) when I'm swearing online. Interestingly I've been swearing less at uni, since one of the group I hang out with there doesn't like people swearing and will object to it.

As for grammar... definitely better online. Especially when talking to people I know are ESL.

Hard as I try not to, I do sometimes find myself muttering bad language in real life, and I think that's because there's so much less time taken to vocalise than to type, and when typing you can almost always take it back. I hear people swearing around me all the time, and feel like the habit's been forced into me, and I hate it, whereas when typing I have much more control and can use language (like "bloody") when I choose.

Of course, I'm the odd one out, but it could work both ways. For cases like yours, Pads, I think maybe it has more to do with effort? Not to call you lazy, of course, but if you do swear that much in a verbal sentence, then to do the same in text would take a lot more typing time (even with shorthand), which would make it a lot less efficient for you when you're trying to get information across - whereas in verbal conversation it takes a fraction of a second and can be easily screened out by someone trying to understand you.

As for grammar, I think that any text-based medium is always going to be closer to Standard English just because we can't be understood if we don't conform to more of the rules. In face-to-face conversations we have body language and tone and so on to help. Here we have to use Standard English or else people get confused.

Or so I think.

Mind, that's partially because most of my online time is spent talking to people who swear every few sentences when they are angry, which is a noticeable portion of the time.

Thank you.

And yeah, those first few chapters were my first writings, so I know there's a lot of inconsistencies with later chapters. I need to go through and rewrite them.

As for the question on whether the fic follows canon (that seems to be what your question is), the wiki has strict canon-friendliness rules, so other users let me know if there's a problem.

Sorry this took so long. We had an early Thanksgiving with my fiance's parents, so I didn't have a lot of time.

Anyway, I don't know much about Halo, but speaking just to the writing, you'll want to watch out for little errors of punctuation and spelling, and make sure you're clear about who's who. In the second chapter, you don't really introduce Wings at all, you just drop the name in. I had to guess that it was the same boy from the first chapter, which I couldn't do until it was clear that you were following him and not just mentioning the name in passing. Remember, the readers are smart, but they can't read your mind. {= )

As for the fic, I can't really help because I don't know the fandom. Sorry. Good luck with the mission.

~Neshomeh, who wonders where the other PGs are.

Obviously this is going to be an issue with more than one explanation then. Shouldn't have expected anything else, really.

You could probably make a case for the anonymity factor and the comfort level being the same thing; the anonymity increases your comfort, so both explanations work. Re: the Dube Lube laughter, I can understand that - it's a lot easier to talk frankly about things in public, that would normally be off limits, if you're in a different city surrounded by people you know you'll never see again. Easier to do things differently too, as I discovered many years on a trip to Manchester - got into the habit of wearing vests, which I'd been too self conscious for at home, because none of the people who'd see me would ever see me again. Handy trick, really.

As for the c-word, don't get me started. I hate its use as the strongest of expletives, because it also refers to ladybits and the idea that they're the harshest and most horrible thing to be likened to doesn't sit well with me. And yet people who've seriously pissed me off and behaved appallingly, I'll still call them it. To make this worse, the milder word that I'd normally use is dick. My language, it unconsciously supports male dominated phallocentric patriarchal wossnames. The shame.