General
neekabe - All ur Base r pastede on - The Internet is a place with no physical boundaries. Anyone can say they are of one group or another with few ways of testing that knowledge. The Internet is also a text based medium. The written word is the primary method of communication, and that communication is fast. This leads to situations where jargon, created within an in-group, can quickly be spread through the community to the point where members can be identified outside the traditional context based on their language usage.

carlanime - Reading Comprehension? Under review. Plays Well With Others? Not so much. - One of the more-frequently-abused of the notions to come out of deconstruction is the idea that authorial intent may not matter all that much. It’s an easy idea to mock, because it sounds like it’s saying that any reader can make any claim about the text, and you can’t dispute their opinion, at all, ever, you big meanie.

twilightofmagic - First time meta. - What are these men we create in our fics?

Fandom-Specific ( Cut for possible spoilers in Supernatural and Harry Potter fandoms. )

On Creating and Criticism
rynne - AUs paralleling canon - BbtS is my AU version of the original trilogy, and there are certain necessary things that have to happen, especially in the beginning. Thing is, everyone knows about those necessary things, since they've watched the movie, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on things that don't diverge very sharply from canon. That's one of the things I dislike about most of the OT AUs I've read--they follow canon far too closely, only changing things here and there to fit around whatever makes the fic AU in the first place.

isabelnight in fanficrants - I've got pride, I'm taking it for a ride - However, when I see stories that are rushed, have bad formatting, and bad grammar, as well as writers who cannot spell a character's name correctly, or that cannot even spell his or her title correctly then it makes me wonder if today's fan fiction is no longer the pride and joy of a writer, but a mass production of words that are to be posted on the internet.

telesilla - Dude, the little thing turned blue! - First of all, not only is mpreg not a bullet-proof kink of mine, it's not actually something I'd consider a kink at all. It's not about the porn or the sex, although I don't mind sex mixed in with it because sex is one of the many things in people's lives that is impacted by pregnancy.