Subject: So Many Good Tips in One Thread
Author:
Posted on: 2014-04-23 05:28:00 UTC
Do we have a page on the wiki that has little tips like this? Things like how long it usually takes to write missions, a general outline or something for missions, and stuff like that for us shiny newbies to read through and learn from?
Is it possible to claim badfics before asking Permission?
Because if it is, I'd like to claim the Rose Potter series and Chatoyance's works, because I already have missions (and suitably ironic deaths) in mind for them.
I'd have liked to ask for My Inner Life, if only because a hilarious reoccurring spelling error resulted in the Sue dancing minuets in the middle of sex, but it's already claimed. Such is life.
If you are allowed to, which it seems you are, I am going to claim some. Like, right now.
I have another question that has to do with this. Can you still do a mission if it has been done by someone in the past?
...given the fact that in the PPC universe the badfic has been killed by an agent team.
Besides, a redundant mission seems... redundant, I guess?
Though usually it's the same agents going back in again. See: Littlefoot x Cera series.
I claimed preemptive dibs on "No One Refuses Mi Amore Cadenza!" when Tawaki posted it, after all. I have absolutely nothing planned in the way of a mission for it or the other badfic I have in mind, though...so yeah, Your Mileage May Vary (to borrow a TV Tropes term)
I always wanted to spork that one if only for how Link's eyes had the magical abilities of changing size, shooting beams to melt the Sue (no, seriously) and being 'sexy.' There was also how everybody said 'soo' instead of 'so.' You would think that they were calling pigs…
As you said, LonelyStar, such is life.
Well then, I guess I can claim this badfic... Right? http://www.quotev.com/story/2944608/The-queen-Legolas-love-story/
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You're talking about the six Rose Potter stories, which are classed as Legendary Badfic -- My Inner Life, which is LB and ridiculously long -- and multiple works by someone else. At minimum, that's nine stories, of which seven are LBs.
How long do you think it'll take you to write those? According to the Claimed Badfic list, 'be aware that very old claims (generally 18+ months) may be bumped back to the Unclaimed Badfic page'. I... find it difficult to believe anyone could kill My Inner Life in a year and a half, let alone it plus the entirety of Rose Potter (which I believe has already been tried and failed, though I may be wrong), plus whatever else.
Glancing over the history of the Claimed list kind of supports this. As I write, the first 50 edits include a total of six removing information - and one of those is Neshomeh doing some cleanup. So only 5 badfics have been actually killed for 25 claimed in the same period. Eighty percent of fics claimed are not being killed.
But despite all that - no, there is no problem with you doing that. However, also despite all that, I would advise against trying to start off with Legendary Badfics. Take a look at Dafydd's 'Tales from DOGA' here; I eventually took on two LBs, yes, but after eleven other missions - and Clbr__n was the last fic Dafydd ever took on. They're a big deal in-universe, and they're also a royal pain to write about.
hS
I remember reading that four agents went in and it was a disaster. Since I can't find the record on the wiki, this is all from memory, but one agent made it back, with two more found hiding in a Redwall goodfic afterwards. One agent still unaccounted for.
This is all from memory though, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
That sounds an awful lot like Neshomeh's attempted mission to the hermaphrodite-Snape fic "Subjugation". She, Tungsten Monk, and two other people stored a copy of the fic before it was purged from the Internet, and sent their agents into it. The mission was never finished, and the other two people never got around to writing anything else for the PPC. It was in-universe established at some point that Supernumerary came back alone, with everyone else MIA, though Tungsten Monk's agents were later determined to have been hiding in World of Warcraft until the All-Purpose Department stumbled on them by chance years later.
In 2006, someone (I don't remember who) reported "Subjugation" to the Board. Everyone was duly horrified. It was decided that it must be sporked, but it was too much for one person, so Gundamkiwi, Tungsten Monk, Rez, and nscangal stepped up, each volunteering to spork six of its twenty-four chapters. Kiwi took the lead and wrote the prologue, where the eight agents were recruited. I got involved when nscangal bowed out, or disappeared, or something; anyway, I took her place. Tungsten Monk took the first six chapters, but she only got through chapter two, which ends on the lovely note of Dumbledore declaring "I have not yet begun to debauch!" as he's about to forcibly consummate his marriage to Snape. Sadly, it never got any further writing-wise.
Eventually, due to people having lives, I was pretty much the only one still active on the Board. Much of the current backstory regarding "Subjugation" was created when I moved to Chicago in 2009 and started talking more with Tungsten, who also lived in the area then. It was already my headcanon that Nume was the only survivor of the mission, and Tungsten got on board with that. We decided we liked the idea of taking another crack at it, and that was when I discovered the fic had vanished from the Internet and had to dredge up a copy from the Wayback Machine. We brought Suicide and Diocletian back in "The Dark Side," which was a co-mission between the APD and the DIC, and they made their first reappearance as agents in "Ring Child."
Rez actually made a surprise comeback in 2011, posting two new missions with her agents, and she got on board with the backstory, too. Sadly, she faded out again.
And here we are now.
~Neshomeh
-he vanished again, 'cause it was fun. :(
It'd be nice to see the Subjugation saga finally concluded though, I'm sure you'll manage it. :P
(Since the story no longer actually exists online, why not just say it got deleted?)
Then again, my knowledge of Boarder history is not very well-formed compared to that of the in-universe history, so this may have been inevitable, given the Boarder history portion was formed by my piecing together what I found on the wiki and remember from previous times you mentioned it here.
You said that eight agents were recruited in the original prologue. Were there some recruits that were specifically brought into the PPC to kill "Subjugation"? I shudder at the very thought.
Gundamkiwi's Gunny and Wayne, Rez's Rez and Flip, Tungsten Monk's Suicide and Diocletian, and nscangal's Jo and Shae. Some of the links go to the Glossary just because no one has made full pages for those agents yet... and unfortunately, it looks like the agents-shae-jo LiveJournal got deleted at some point. Dammit... as far as I know, it's impossible to get LJ stuff back. {= (
Board history is pretty sketchy thanks to the Board losing things and the fact that nobody really thought about preserving it in the early days. We're pretty much stuck relying on the memories of us old-timers and whatever scraps of information can be gleaned from journals, author's notes, old chat logs, and other assorted sources. I don't know how real historians manage when it comes to trying to piece together scraps of information from thousands of years ago. >.
~Neshomeh
As far as LJ goes, I mean. The Wayback Machine archives a fair bunch of pages, as does Archive Today. If you look in the 2004 Board Archives, you'll find the Wayback link to the very first list of Boarder ships, which was quite a find.
However, as far as I can tell, neither Wayback's ~300,000 entries or AT's far more modest ~60,000 include either agents-shae-jo, or dcps_lotr. AT has a few still-extant Agent LJs (Talia and Quen, for instance), but I can't spot anything 'lost'.
Still, it's worth checking. There's several thousand archived LJ entries with some sort of PPC connection, and I have the downloaded list of links on Wayback. So if anyone has any lost LJs they want me to try and track down, name them; the worst that can happen is we find nothing.
hS
I think I was vaguely aware of Archive Today—it's come up when I was Googling other things. I haven't encountered any deleted LJs on it that I was aware of, though. I was under the impression that LJ was protected from this sort of thing, like ff.net. I assume they have anti-crawler scripts or firewalls or something. */betraying her ignorance of higher programming*
And now, the mad proposal: I've been thinking for some time it might be a good idea to save PPC stuff that only exists on LJ, and maybe ff.net and anywhere else it could be subject to removal because the service feels like it. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of hard drive space at the moment, and also that would be a whole lot of work for just one person. I'm betting I could count on your help, though, and I know Calista saved a bunch of stuff and transferred it to LJ, so maybe she'd enlist. Anybody else?
Alternatively, any compelling arguments for why this might be a bad idea? Best to discover any of those ahead of time!
~Neshomeh
You may recall that the Multiverse Monitor (Starwind's) recently went down; I found it all in archives, but the site is just plain gone. That's one I'll be 'restoring' to its own slot on the Webplex - I've adopted her agents anyway, it seems only fair.
My sites occasionally go down when Webs decide no-one's looking at them any more - I can bring them back up, but that means any Webs site is potentially vulnerable after the author has left. Can Google take things down on a 'whim'? I'm not sure; if so, that's most of the more recent stuff. And so on and so forth. So where do you stop? Or start?
Start with what's oldest (Miss Cam's list of spin-offs, for instance) and what we'd be the most sad to find missing one day. A bit subjective, but that's all right. For instance, all the documents on the PPC LJ. It would be devastating if those vanished.
As for stopping... cross that bridge when we come to it? I don't mind if I end up having the entire PPC backed up on an external hard drive some day. Or two—at least one extra would be safest.
~Neshomeh, who did say "mad."
So your plan is to have several offline backups of essentially everything, so that if something goes down, we can restore it? That's not a bad plan - though it is certainly mad. And it would be interesting to see just how large the PPC's file-database actually is...
hS
The other one comes from wherever it was that you discussed the history of the Board... it occurs to me that a huge part of that is referenced in Livejournal posts. 2008 - the point where the Board Archives break down - is also when the LJ craze started to die. So anything which made a big impression is probably mentioned somewhere - heck, somewhere on my Friends' List. I know for a fact that the Thalia Weaver Incident is, in a fair amount of detail, because I just checked.
So do we as a community want to take a stab at that - at finding the 'big events' and linking them back into the archives? To some extent, this would overlap with the archiving of stories - the wilderness of El-Jheycom contains many relics of both kinds.
hS
A very good idea! It would be really interesting to see what shakes out of that. And there's character journals, too, don't forget those. That's sort of the middle of the (stories()community) history Venn diagram.
I fully endorse a spelunking expedition to the Flist Caverns. {= )
~Neshomeh
I will at least attempt to delve into the depths of the Flist complex, though it may be a long time ere I see the sky again. Castle Kwenaya may find itself rather neglected.
And, of course, if I happen to run across anywhere that could serve the Resistance's purposes... well, never mind that.
Are there any events you can think of which probably would have been commented on? I'll try a full archive trawl, but there's a lot of posts out there - I may get worn out before I finish mine, let alone anyone else.
hS
Well, I did just find a post by Sara that's to do with the ban on Emergencies and general unrest with agent power creep that was happening at the time. It's linked from the Emergency page on the wiki. That 2008-2009 period may be pretty rich.
One thing I'd love to have more info about is the 2003 Mary Sue Invasion. I think Techno-Dann's backstory and the A/V Department stories touch on it, but that's almost pure speculation on my part.
The Thalia Weaver thing, you mentioned before... Oh, what about Red Wolf the Weird? I've heard of them (obviously), but what actually happened? What was so weird about them?
There was that whole sockpuppetry drama involving Union Jack and... I forget the other one. It was relatively recent, though. Tungsten Monk wrote her Dissertation on a Troll around then, if I recall correctly. Though I'm not sure that journal is still around. I found her "Know Your Sue!" series deleted recently. {= (
That's probably enough to go on for now (and I can't think of anything else). Good luck!
Meanwhile, I'll start going through Miss Cam's PPC list. I'll try to shoot for saving at least one spin-off a week. That should allow good progress without bogging me down. And I am getting a new laptop soon if all goes according to plan, so I could devote this one purely to storage.
... I have no idea how to translate this quest into Plortian terms. Some kind of archaeological crusade? Maybe I should invest in a leather coat, a fedora, and a bull whip. *g*
~Neshomeh
I'm not planning on doing My Inner Life. It's already claimed. I just would have liked to see my agents' reactions to the Sue dancing minuets during sex.
I'm not going to start with Rose Potter. I have other badfics in mind to start off with. I just want to eventually mission her. I'm probably not going to do all of Chatoyance's works, as she is very prolific.
To anyone who does decide to help with Chatoyance, be ready for flames. She writes Conversion Bureau.
Especially since I can give as good as I get as far as flames go if it comes to that. Also, as an aside, chatoyance is a gemological term that basically means "a special kind of sparkly". Not sure if troll or just really, really pretentious.
Just be warned, it's Conversion Bureau, pony supremacist.
The basic premise is that Equestria shows up on earth one day, surrounded by a barrier that will destroy all of human civilization eventually, and magic is poisonous to humans, who must transform into ponies to survive. This could be explored well to create a beautifully deep story about change and the sadistic choice between dying and changing, and what would happen to human culture.
Usually, it boils down to genocide by assimilation, with the serum that works the transformation fundamentally changing your nature, and the ponies distributing it being the good guys, and humans either being evil brutes or tripping all over themselves to become ponies.
Authors who do it this way seem to fail to understand exactly how creepy this is, and wish for the situation described in the story to happen in real life.
The original story wasn't so bad, just poorly written, and originally supposed to be garden-variety wish fulfillment, in the same vein as most HiE suefics. The author considers the story an old shame.
I mean, I get why people write those stories, but they just... suck at it. If you want an example of the concept being done right, on the other hand, you could do a lot worse than Friendship Is Optimal. The story has a really disquieting tone that reminded me of that one bit from Fallout 3 with the little corner of suburban small-town America. If you've played that game, you know where I mean. Creeping-dread horror: it's what's for dinner!
Also, that'd be an amazing whole-Board event; dredging up every available, interested agent and sending them to clean up the Conversion Bureau. It'd be like herding cats, but the end result might just be brilliant.
That... would be the most epic thing in the history of epic. I was planning on doing it one at a time, but it would be cool if we could coordinate the board and dredge up the TCB badfics, and then do them all at once in a massive crossover in which Xenolestia is exorcised from everywhere, which ends in the Elements of Harmony cleansing Equestria of the Sue taint and then fades out on the note of the agents planning to neuralyze the canon characters... after they go to the gigantic party that Pinkie Pie set up.
I was also thinking that the Elements of Harmony would be a very good thing for most agents in the bad-insanity department. It's made of weaponized good feelings, friendship, and, well, harmony. If it can cleanse Equestria after Discord, then it can be very good for the agents' mental health.
Hey now, to be fair, there is the occasional story that actually explores the CB and what it means for both Earth and Equestria. Every once in a while, there is a CB story that is actually rather interesting, and not too bad of a read.
That said, yeah, it usually boils down to wish fulfillment. Though, I feel the need to mention the other side of the coin: the Anti-Conversion Bureau, the side that hates the CB and what it's usual fans think of humanity. These stories typically show the ponies as nothing short of monsters, lead by Tyrant!Celestia in a war against all of humanity. The humans then roll in, kick some flank, and then roll out, proving that the Equestrian's fears were absolutely right. How ironic. Thee stories are usually just as bad, just praising humans instead of ponies. Ugh.
Wait, what? The original was not that bad? Dude, that fic sucked. I mean, nothing against the author, he's actually a pretty cool guy who can write well enough now, but the original Conversion Bureau was awful. I mean, not like Cupcakes level awful, but still pretty bad.
Actually, if you were not planning on taking the original, I was thinking I may do something with it. I mean, I have My Little Unicorn ahead of me already, so it's not like I need another infamous badfic, but I've been thinking of some things I could do with it. But, if you were planning on taking it on, by all means, have at it.
I meant not that bad in comparison. There are far worse.
There are some good anti-TCB tics out there to. I really like TCB: Not Alone. It really explores what the premise of TCB means, and doesn't do the black-and-white thing in bad TCB fics.
The PPC doesn't flame. We don't condone flaming. You are of course free to be as flamey towards other people in your own right as you choose - though don't expect anyone here to approve - but if you do so in the name of the PPC, there will be trouble. With a capital B. And maybe an L for good measure.
hS doesn't like that, even as a joke
'I'd be happy to help [with the missions]... [e]specially since I can give as good as I get as far as flames go if it comes to that.'
I don't know about you, but I definitely read that as 'If writing these missions results in Chatoyance flaming us, I will totally flame back'. Which comes very close, since it would be in the course of writing a PPC mission.
It may have been a joke, as I (tried to be sure to) acknowledge(...d; parenthetical grammar is hard). But I think it's important anyway.
hS
If she finds out about the PPC-fic attacking her fic and goes after the authors, which could conceivably happen, I will respond in kind - not in my capacity as a PPCer, but as a massive bitch. Which I am. =]
~*SuGaRhIgH*~ (a badficcer): OMG ur so meen! Your mamma was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! *flame flame flame*
Oaken Thorinshield (a PPC Boarder): Oh yeah? Well, I fart in your general direction, you empty-headed animal food-trough water! *flame flame flame*
Suesette (a random outsider): *GASP!* That person just flamed someone! I just found out they're with the PPC, so all PPCers must be terrible flamers who like to make thirteen-year-olds cry! I'm going to blog about it right now! The world must know!
PPC: Well, crap, there goes the last FIVE YEARS OR SO of WORKING REALLY HARD TO IMPROVE OUR IMAGE. Thanks for nothing, Oaken.
{= |
~Neshomeh
That the PPC does not and never has advertised to the authors of the fics we've killed that we have killed them, and that we are not just a bunch of cyberbullies; if an author flames a PPCer about this, they have to have gone out of their way to look for things to be angry about. That would be my response to them as a PPCer.
If they make it a personal attack, all bets are off, and I will say so after reasserting the above and supplying direct quotes from the badfic author.
This is a policy I've had for some time for when I'm forced to deal with the hard of thinking. It seems to work. =]
In-universe, Subjugation is the one the PPC actually tried and failed to kill, if I recall, but out someone (I think Cassie?) tried to take on at least one of the Rose Potters and hasn't got around to finishing it, yeah.
The problem with "Subjugation" is that it's long, most of the charges are purely to do with characterization, and the content is so horrifying that it makes finding any humor in it incredibly difficult. Mechanically, it's actually pretty well written, and it's not like the author doesn't know what she's doing. She even admits, in an author's note, to being disturbed at having written one of the more violent scenes. Not that that's an excuse. It's not a story that has any business involving Harry Potter characters, period.
And, just a reminder, it's mine forever. I have plans. But plans which necessitate lots of other things happening first. I'd like to kill it before I'm 30, but given my track record and the fact that I'm turning 29 this June... we'll see. >.>
This reminds me, I ought to make time to go through the Claimed and Unclaimed lists and clean out anything that's been malingering. I'll make sure to give people an advanced warning or two before I do so they can renew any old claims, though.
~Neshomeh
... that long fics take time to tackle. As an example, TSAB DOWNFALL: Halo War is a little more than 34k words and is a bona fide bleepfic. Its mission is about 30k words long and it took three people about two months to write it.
Rose Potter's first book (not the whole series) clocks at an estimated 100k words. That's... a bit too much for one author to handle. Even if it weren't LB, and it is.
A lot of people do that, of course, but killing fics before their designated end has always been a thing, so if you get a missionable badfic and find yourself looking at it and going "there's way too much fic here," it's just a matter of finding a point in the text where you can kill it off. After that it's all up to how the story of doing the mission is written, not necessarily how long the agents allowed it to go on.
Do we have a page on the wiki that has little tips like this? Things like how long it usually takes to write missions, a general outline or something for missions, and stuff like that for us shiny newbies to read through and learn from?
For something specific to DBS, there's also this: http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Slash-Sporking_Guide
Just make sure you edit the wiki to protect your claim.
You should also include a "Permission Pending" tag on the claim as well just so we know what's your status.