Hopefully I provided enough info to be sufficient. I promise I'll start reading all those spinoffs and the rest of the Original Series very soon.

-Twistey

Roseveare's dashboard

She has artwork and fanvids and podfics of her stories in addition to the fanfics. I know she crossposts on ff.net with a similar if not same name, but I don't think all of that stuff is allowed over there. I don't know. I rarely check ff.net.

This was one of the first ones of hers I read. It's a good intro to the type of body horror she uses a lot. This one is M for violence (no sexual content), but fair warning to anyone heading off to read her stories, a lot of them are NSFW. This particular story is in Duke's POV, but most of her stuff is in Nathan's as he is her favorite.

Body Parts

Summary: Duke and Nathan are taken prisoner together and it will require extraordinary trust for either of them to emerge intact.

Here's a line that I just love from the story. It's early on before the horror: Duke turned to Audrey Parker, one of the few people to whom he could state, "I am being stalked by creepy harbingers of death," who would both know what he was talking about and that he hadn't gone insane. He added, plaintively, "Can't you arrest them for that?"

I’ve been waffling about even making this post, mainly because I worry it’s going to turn into me whining about how little free time I have any more. I don’t want it to turn into that, but it’s also unavoidably related to my comparative usage of the Board and the Discord chatroom.

Let me get the doubly embarrassing part out of the way. Some folks here already know this first bit, but the zoo I work at is privately owned, and the owner is a complete cheapskate whose only concern is turning a profit every year. He intentionally keeps each zookeeper team down to the bare minimum number of staff needed to care for their area, to ensure that he’s not wasting money on paychecks, and also to avoid the Arizona law that requires a business to give its workers insurance once it reaches a certain number of full-time employees. Secondly, I’m a naturally slow person—I don’t mean intelligence, but actual physical slowness—so I need to go into work about two hours early each work shift to make sure I get everything done. Between the extra time I spend at work, getting a full night’s sleep every night, and the time I have to spend on shaving, lunch packing, dish washing, laundry, etc, I have very little free time to actually spend on the PPC any more. I’m trying to keep pushing forward (an interlude in the beta stage, a fanmix planned with no cover art yet, some filks on my mind, occasional bursts of archival), but if I’m being honest with myself, I am basically more job than person right now.

The PPC Board is still my home page, as it has been since 2008. But the limits on my time before and after work (if I even turn the computer on after work; sometimes I just pack lunch, eat and go to bed) have turned every new thread posted into a potential time sink that I can’t always afford to engage. If I want to thoroughly read through every post, consider my thoughts, type up a response, double-check it before posting—just kidding, the Leave-For-Work alarm went off before I even started typing, and if I’ve been staring at the computer screen that whole time lost in thought, that means I didn’t get the dishes done, which will now have to be washed tonight, cutting into my sleep time. And, I’m probably not ready to walk right out the door when the alarm goes off, which is going to cost me a small but critical chunk of that early work time, and maybe make me miss some or all of lunch break if I haven’t finished morning animal feedings by then. What I’m trying to say is that my whole work day is so regimented, that adding participation in a Board thread to my already stretched mental to-do list can be a pretty morale-destroying prospect right at the outset of a day. (I’m already upset at myself for drafting this when I still have dinner dishes to wash, and I need to be in bed in thirty-five minutes (down to eighteen as I proofread).) And yes, I could just hold off until the weekend, but then all the interesting Board threads of the week that I wanted to participate in would pretty much eat the entire weekend, and then I would never have time for my own PPC writing, PPC archival, PPC wiki editing, or CD cover design. (I’m allowed one non-PPC hobby, right?)

The chatroom is nice for me because I can have it open while I scarf food without any real sense of obligation to join in. Any time a fandom I don’t know is under discussion, or, you know, just cute animal pictures or memes are being posted, I can simply not join in. It doesn’t feel like an obligation to have long, well thought-out and proof-read responses, I can just talk like regular spoken dialogue when I feel like I have something to add.

I know all of these issues I’m having are entirely on my end, and largely my fault. It’s absolutely not a community problem, nor the responsibility of the community to fix. I just wanted to speak from the place I’m at in life. I desperately want to spend more time on PPC stuff, and I wish I could spend more time participating in Board threads like I used to . . . but I literally don’t have enough hours in a week. And that’s why the Discord has become my base of PPC activity.

—doctorlit, disappointed with himself

I always hate discussing community-communication issues with you, because I know I'm going to disagree vehement with virtually everything you say, and that makes me sad. :( (This is not an attack on you - it's a statement of different personalities.)

Let the disagreements begin!

1/ It is not hard to check the Board. It takes me about 5 seconds on PC, less than 30 on the phone. We have bright grey highlighting for new posts, even! And, honestly? It's nice to be able to take it at my own pace. One of the (many!) reasons I stay off the chats is because the idea of missing the conversation due to having to do something else for a while is awful.

(You can also get a daily update of all the new posts to the Board, delivered direct to your email. I... hmm, actually I should check if I still have those archived somewhere; might be useful for the Board Archives.)

2/ This is true! And to my mind it's a good thing. The PPC is a community which tends to long-windedness and analysis, so it's good to get to spend several hours - or days! - thinking over your reply.

3/ Yes - directing all PPC conversation to the Discord means you exclude not only the people who don't go on there, but also anyone who doesn't happen to be there right when you post. ... that's a bad thing.

4/ Well, I can't argue with subjective. ^_~ To me, subjectively, chatting in a chat client feels like a bunch of people talking past each other, and getting caught in a conversation I have no interest in but have to read anyway in case it turns interesting again - whereas the Board lets me pick and choose which ones I have to look at.

Moving on to your non-numbered comments:

-Publishing writing goes well on the Board (gasp! Agreement!). Though people don't respond as much as they should.

-Personal rants/celebrations/etc: And yet, we used to do this on the Board. Not for the little things, but the slightly larger ones? Yes! Heck, 'I did well on my exam, here's what it was about, here's which bits I really excelled at and here's the bits that I was weak on' is great - it lets people talk about your topic, but also branch out into their own exams (it's exam season, after all - you just took one). Whereas on the Discord? You can only do one of those options, because the conversation will move on. I'm guessing most reactions are just 'well done'.

-RPs: I don't disagree with your division here. Though in the old days, 'micro RPs' like you describe still took place on the Board - heck, the Snowfight down below is one-such. It makes it more open, letting other people join in if they want to. There's more grey areas here than you're acknowledging.

-Sharing news/pictures/etc: 'a quick general indication of approval/appreciation' is not what the PPC is about. If you lot flood the Board with threads of random pictures, I shall be Upset. >:( The Board - and, to my mind, the PPC - is a place for discussion and debate, not 'yay you still exist and so do I'.

You say:

When you share that sort of thing, you often are looking for social reactions or just to inform (and maybe to spark a discussion, but that's not the entire goal).

I disagree. When I posted this, I was expecting people to comment on which parts of the linked 'story' they found funniest. I was expecting 'there's this other thing like that'. I was expecting people's feelings about Pterry, and memories of him. I wasn't just saying 'I am capable of finding cool things' - I was sharing two things that I thought the Board would react to.

They didn't. So maybe you're right about how people are reacting.

-Badfic posting: So... why don't people do that here? I've never understood this. If you think a badfic is interesting enough to bring to the Board, tell us what's so bad about it! We're not actually a bunch of masochists who click on links just because we're told they're bad.

-Your hypothesis: our underlying operating system might generally like the chat more than the Board. It gives you more of a social-interaction fix for less effort.

I disagree emphatically. Spending time on a chat with more than one other person is a much larger effort than 'click refresh and skim', and much of it is spent on conversations that give me no 'fix' whatsoever.

You are probably right that some people are wired that way - that's why we've had three (four?) successive chatrooms after the previous ones collapsed or faded out. But the extremely prolific history of the PPC Posting Board proves hands-down that there is a massive liking for this style of interaction, common to hundreds of people in the PPC (though most are now gone).

hS

I basically agree on all of this.

One suggestion on the census was "Best of Discord" threads. I'd love to compile such a thing, but sadly, I can't: I can really only use Discord on my phone, Because Reasons, and it's hard to archive from there. But if we can create some kind of voting system, or someone can volunteer, that could be cool.

Okay, so the 'DON'T POST ANYTHING EVER WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE' message embedded all over the place is a result of the period when we were clearing out the Front Page in about three days, mostly because people were posting six consecutive threads saying 'I found another badfic!'. That is no longer the case.

PLEASE POST THREADS ON THE BOARD, FOLKS.

I thought we'd cleared most of that language out; I know I got rid of it in the Board header a while back. I don't see it in the FAQs... is it in the Constitution?

... yes. 'Never start a thread' is implied in the blasted Constitution.

[Face, meet Palm]

Right. I think it would be worth a Constitutional Amendment to not only remove the Article 21 implication that we don't like threads, but also to specifically point out that the Board will only be fun if everyone works to make it fun - that just lurking around waiting for Somebody Else to do it doesn't work. I'll work on a concrete proposal.

hS