Subject: That raises a question
Author:
Posted on: 2016-01-17 22:02:00 UTC
Have we actually had anyone die? Like I know we've had boarders disappear, and I've personally witnessed a few close calls by several people, but I don't recall hearing about any PPCers actually dying.
I just get the feeling that we need to do an agent/boarder headcount. Just so that we know for sure who's active, who's inactive, who's dead, who's missing, and who's insane. Basically, an "all hands on deck" thing. We dont really have to do this, but I just get the feeling that the current wiki database may not be complete. Should we try do this, and have an "at least x amount of boarders, and x amount of agents have ever been part of the ppc?"
Have we actually had anyone die? Like I know we've had boarders disappear, and I've personally witnessed a few close calls by several people, but I don't recall hearing about any PPCers actually dying.
But, like, how would we? It's difficult to spot the difference between 'stopped posting' and 'stopped being alive', especially in this post-LJ age.
Two events spring to mind that relate, though. Way back in 2006, we had a pair of posters called Union Jack 2.0 and SergeantHeretic. At one point, someone claiming to be Union Jack's cousin posted to say that he had been killed in a traffic accident. Reactions ranged from distress to outright skepticism.
Yeah, UJ posted a few hours later to say that he wasn't dead. Turned out they'd basically been tag-team trolling the Board for a month or so. 'Funny', no? (No.)
The other incident is the curious case of Boz4pm, who apparently simultaneously vanished from the Board and the rest of the internet. Someone asked after her back in 2014, and a couple of us looked into it, but there's no trace of her. It's a weird case, because her best friend of the time was twitchy enough about the internet to ask for her username and any links relating to her to be removed from the Board. So she might have died (of swine flue, which was going round at the time and her last LJ post was about going to hospital because she had a cough - but it didn't exactly kill loads of people), or she might have just... up and quit. Who knows?
hS
To be fair I suppose it is hard to tell when someone you've never spoken to outside a message board is dead vs when they've just dropped off the radar. I have contingencies in place to make sure all my friends know if I bite the bullet, because I go way too long without contacting anyone sometimes. I guess I assumed other people would do similar: Have someone notify people, though I suppose the notifier has to know who to tell, and to be fair the board is not actually on my list. Mostly because I'm friends with enough people who post, or used to post, here that I guess I assumed they would spread the news.
Sorry if this is uncomfortable for anyone, I just have been thinking along those lines a lot lately because apparently my brain enjoys morbidity in the intrusive thoughts.
Sometimes, we have Boarders write their agents into death. This is a very rare thing, but it has happened. Ask hS.
I'm well aware of the death of the fictional agents. Celebrian was the first mission I read after Trojie and Pads' stuff, after all.
That's as of October last year. That number includes quite a lot of misspellings, plus the 'people' who post during the Badfic Games, but it also excludes a whole bunch of people who left before the archives really kick in in 2008. 2005 is a particularly bad year for records - which is a shame, because it was probably the time the Board was most active.
About 230,000 posts have been made on the PPC Board (which tallies with the fact that the current post number is around 280,000 - those numbers skip sometimes), and the person with the most posts is... well, it's me. ^_^ I have over 5000 recorded posts, with an estimated total just over 8500. (The next down is Neshomeh at 4100 recorded, 5000 total, followed by Iximaz at 2500 total.)
(And if you assume those posts took an average of five minutes to write, that comes to a solid month of my life spent writing on the PPC Board. Yeeeeeah...)
hS, who does this sort of thing
I what now?
Authors above, what am I doing with my life...
Every year I'm around I do a census survey, which pretty much achieves exactly that for boarders.
I can't fish up the link to the survey results for 2015 right now, but I'm sure there's someone about who can find it.
As for the wiki itself, said database is the most complete one we have, much thanks to Neshomeh. If it's missing any characters, it's very very few of them in comparison to the ones present.
Original post.
Results.
Headcount: 49 Boarders as of September 2015.
HG
Just take a look at the [in]Complete List of PPC Fiction. So many agents whose authors just disappeared. So many names to compile.
It would be easier to list who's currently active, though I don't really know why that would be necessary since we can tell that just by looking at, well, who's been publishing.