Subject: Or here's a different idea.
Author:
Posted on: 2011-10-04 21:12:00 UTC
Drop the PPC theme all together. We're a bunch of aspiring writers, right? We ought to be able to put together at least one volume of short stories worth reading. I know I've got at least three I'd donate to, let's call it Continuum - published through some internetty people, a volume of stories from the young (mostly) authors of the PPC. Who knows? It could be a real thing someday.
hS
Or an anime? Or a published book series? It it was, I'd be the first to watch/read it. :D
There've been a couple of efforts in this direction (er... mostly by me, see Generic Surface and The Children's Book), but you're thinking of something more mainstream...
There's an Australian children's series called Fairy Tale Police Department (FTPD) which is alarmingly close to being the PPC on TV. This one. I won't say it's brilliant (it was free on LoveFilm.com last I checked, so we watched a couple of episodes), but it is surreal watching, well, a pair of bickering people in uniform trying to fix stories which keep going wrong. Surreal as heck.
The main problem with the PPC-as-show is, er, two problems. First, the PPC itself still belongs (sorta) to Jay and Acacia. Otherwise, I'd be the first to try and sneak it into the real world. The second problem is that it consists virtually in its entirety of playing with other copyrighted works - which, yeah, doesn't go down too well. If we could overcome the first part (which... would pretty much consist of the Board agreeing to) we'd still have to make it all Sherlock Holmes, E. Nesbit and H.G. Wells. Or Dickens... well, it could work, I suppose.
On the /other/ hand... if we had several PPCers living near each other, they could probably get together regularly and make film versions of specially-written missions. Sure, they'd have to be set in whatever environments they could reach, but it could be done.
Any volunteers?
hS
Why couldn't we make a collection of short stories with a PPC theme? Avoid copyright issues at all costs, sell it at cost through whatever online thing publishes it -- why not?
hS
I'd be down for that if you needed extra voices. I'm afraid I wouldn't be much use for anything else.
1) Contact Jay and Acacia about it, since the PPC does belong to them, after all.
2) I don't think there's really any way to fully sell at cost; give a charity the remainder, perhaps to an organization like Building With Books?
Drop the PPC theme all together. We're a bunch of aspiring writers, right? We ought to be able to put together at least one volume of short stories worth reading. I know I've got at least three I'd donate to, let's call it Continuum - published through some internetty people, a volume of stories from the young (mostly) authors of the PPC. Who knows? It could be a real thing someday.
hS
... keep the rating down - after all, we want the entire PPC to be able to read it comfortably, and probably friends and family as well - but don't specify a theme. At least for the first volume. After all, if it takes off, we might end up with a series.
The most pressing practical problem is finding someone who'll print on demand - I doubt there's anyone on the Board willing to pay up-front for however many copies on the hope that others will buy them. And unfortunately I'm not somewhere I can search for that right now.
hS
I know a group that helps writers get published, and they now keep information on self publishing. The lady who owns the site even runs an epub site. I don't know what her requirements are, but she'd know the answers we're looking for.
Forward Motion for Writers
They had some trolling and spam issues a while back, and now you have to register for the site to use the chat, but it is a simple registration.
Not 'on the Board'. Sorry - years of habit getting the better of me. It's like how I still sometimes say Suefic when I mean badfic.
hS
I mean, there's no point starting a thread on it if everyone will say "Nah". I can come up with at least one argument against it myself (ie, that it's a pointless exercise in vanity and we might as well just make a website). I happen to think it would be an /awesome/ exercise in vanity, and therefore okay, but... :P
hS
...Is how we tend to fall apart at actually doing things. We are excellent at volunteering, though.
... is that for most people, it comes down to "Write or find a story! Then edit it in response to concrit!". At least the first part, we can all do standing on Benjamin Franklin's head. Then it comes down to pretty much one person to put it all together.
hS
Animation might make it possible, if anyone's willing to draw.
I recall, ages ago, someone suggesting a theme song for a PPC soap opera - the Decemberists' "Odalisque" with the lyrics modified to "What do we do with ten dirty Sues?"
... is that we've tried it before, and it's always the point where these projects fall down. SilmFilm and the PPC movie both had wonderful scripts and loads of volunteers for voice acting; the Radio Plays prove it's possible to get people to record all the voices (and I think the Movie had a lot of the voice work done); but I've never seen a single frame of animation for any of these.
As far as I'm aware, there's no one near enough to me for me to get involved (other than Kaitlyn, of course), and I don't really have the time anyway. Otherwise you can bet I'd be working on it.
hS
And you're right. Trojie had masses of the voicework collected; we were waiting for (IIRC) three people to turn in lines before Darth Real Life attacked and left Trojie helpless.
I still have the scripts stored away safely, including one heavily annotated printout copy.
We could easily make it into a PPC Feature-Length Radio Drama, if there was someone with the time, technology and patience to do it.
But there was no animation. it's just not something we could do as the loose confederation of amateurs we are.
It would still be cool, though.
Only storyboard things, though. I don't have the time or talent for much else. Maybe come up with some fairly short skits?
Every new topic made pushes an old one off the edge of the page. And since most of us don't read past the first page for replies, that ends the discussions on them very quickly-- not to mention that our space here is finite, and eventually the topics past disappear forever. So we generally prefer that you keep the new threads to a slower pace-- you can reply to old threads all you want, but creating two new ones in a row, unless you have very good reason, is generally a bad idea. Likewise with badfic threads-- if you have a new badfic to report, first check to make sure there's not a thread already up to report/claim.
This is especially right now, since we really need people to see the Permission Givers topic. If you are interested in poking people at higher speeds, check out the link to our IRC channel up at the top of the page-- it's a fun place to hang out! Lots of fellow PPCers about.
(But yes, watching the PPC Cartoon Series would be awesome. We do have a webcomic in the form of LEGO, by hS somewhere, and there's a radio play.)
"not to mention that our space here is finite, and eventually the topics past disappear forever."
You mean the oldest threads get deleted as new one gets posted? I didn't know that. How long back are they archived?
The farthest-back thread that can be found with the lowly "Next page" button is from June 18th 2008, so one day after the one Fish found.
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=199610;article=172089;title=PPC%20Posting%20Board;pagemark=3125
I assume that's because any before that would fall onto a page that contains non-existent threads, and therefore the page container has been deleted from the DB.
Took a minute or two to find the oldest accessible thread with a script I have for similar purposes (old forum-dredging, long story).
This is the oldest thread you can read:
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=199610;article=172061
From this it can be inferred that yourwebapps stores 44,640 threads, although whether this number is affected by spam-threads that have been nuked by the admins is not clear.
... I remember a year or so back, Kaitlyn pointed out to me that our wedding announcement (October 2008) was near the beginning of the archive. So is it possible that the store is no longer being emptied? After all, that thread you found is still readable as I write this -- although, of course, it pre-dates most of the spamfloods. But still - might YWA now be keeping everything?
hS
So it seems to be somewhere around 2008 right now. Seems awfully short, but is of course quite a long time on the internet.
I always pictured it as the room in Death's library, where you keep going, and the lighting gets dimmer, and slowly you find threads written in archaic tongues, arguing about topics like "Do Balrogs have wings?" and whether or not Fëanor was a tragic hero, or a villain in his own right, bound on animal skins and written in charcoal, and then you get farther on and find stone tablets, with incomprehensible hieroglyphs carved in weird triangles, which, when translated, would give you the ultimate origins of the Flowers or where Glitter really came from, but alas, their translations are lost forever to the sands of time.
Except, unlike in Death's library, infinity is a steep drop off a perfectly cornered edge, and it inches closer with every new volume written.
I love that idea. And it sounds like something the PPC would have, a huge library with a step drop into nothing in one end. Thanks for that awesome image!
Nesh can probably tell you more, but as I understand it, the Archives are a near-infinite library in HQ that has records of everything ever.