The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

As your newbie gift, have two cents, so you can put them into discussions later.

You've already been linked the important stuff, so, what're your fandoms?

- Tomash

I played this game and didn’t notice these soundtrack shenanigans at the time (although I did feel like the music added a lot to creating the world), so thank you for pointing them out!

Have a blackberry chocolate cake!

In addition to the Constitution, which has community rules, I would point out the FAQ for newbies: http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ:ForNewbies.

How did you hear about this place? What sorts of fandoms (if any) are you interested in?

And this is a really fascinating read! /goes to spread it around.

/passes you a Small White Package. It makes a great doorstop!

Anyway, have you read the Constitution and/or the Original Series yet? :> What are your favorite continua and/or missions?

(The problem seems to be that your link was in smart, curly quotes for some reason.)

Just. Ignore all of that. Clearly this is an argument not to post on mobile.

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1276/1724”>here is a prettier one but the link is the same so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

... that I’m now officially a published fandom academic. If you were on the Board at the time I posted a survey asking people to discuss their fandom platform usage and their perceptions of certain terminology, here’s the writeup of that now!

Anyway that’s new for me, as well as the oodles of fanzines I’ve been writing for, what’s up with all of you?

Hello. Can I join your group?

. . . I could never expect anyone to reciprocate reviewing my stuff without the use of time travel.

—doctorlit should have gone to sleep twenty-eight minutes ago, but that doesn't prove Nesh right or anything

40k doesn't even try to HIDE that. I mean, have you SEEN the Navigator Houses? :-P

Warhammer 40,000 is clearly a massive crossover, and Harry Potter is a Tom Brown's School Days AU.

That if I let myself go, I'd be at hS's ego until it was. Apolgies for the connotations.

Yeah, hS's was one of the first spinoffs I read, and I am... unusually enamored.

The fix is to have a length limit and an end point in mind when you start writing. If you get to the end point and you've exceeded the limit by a significant amount, you go back and figure out what you need to cut. Not every joke is your best joke; not every charge is a vital one. There's always something you can afford to lose. Your beta(s) may be instrumental in helping you identify what that is.

Your end point will, of course, influence your mission length. If you're PPCing 20,000 words of fic, that's probably going to result in a longer mission than 12,000 words of fic.

More agents also tends to result in higher word counts, which is one reason two is the ideal number.

~Neshomeh

P.S. Thoth, I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that hS has an overinflated ego? {= )

Actually, I think you may be echoing something I said about myself at one point... but the rest of that comment was that I still like it, even if I don't need it. ^_~

Notable exceptions being doctorlit, HG, and Tomash, who have a great record of responding to everything they possibly can even if they should probably be eating or sleeping instead doc. ^_~

But yeah, for the rest of us? Input has to equal or exceed output, or the system is not sustainable. That's a thing we all need to be aware of in all our relationships, not just here, and make sure we're doing our part to keep them alive and well.

For the record, I'm awful at this. I've heard you shouldn't keep a ledger for your relationships, but if I don't I'm way too inclined to just take whatever I can get and run. I keep a balance sheet when I care enough not to do that. I reckon our resident Aspies can relate to this?

~Neshomeh

What I really want from a review is to know how the work made you feel when you read it. I want to know if you laughed or not, if you sympathized with the characters or not, if you cared or not.

That's pretty much it. I know not everyone is great at active reading—being aware of your own responses in the moment; having a sort of dialogue with the work as you read it—and that does improve with practice, but there's no special art to conveying this information once you're aware of it. The stream-of-consciousness type commentary you guys do is great for this. Please keep it up!

Technical points are great, too, but honestly, that's of secondary value. If the thing I did didn't have the impact I wanted, that's a sign to me to analyze my technique and seek more input about how I could have done it better. First and foremost: get on the couch and tell me how it makes you feel! ^_~

~Neshomeh

I'm on a bus, though, so I'll keep to this bit for now.

Why I personally may not review:

Sometimes I may feel I have nothing constructive to add (and we did go through a period of people complaining against one-line "this was good!" type comments, IIRC), but it's usually because I didn't read it.

Why didn't I read it:

- As hS says, as an adult, the time and energy commitment is costlier to me than it was when I was in college. If I have a choice between devoting my free time to reading and reviewing a mission or something else, the mission has to be more rewarding than the other thing.

- To be blunt, it usually isn't. It's nothing personal. It's just that I've been a PPCer for fifteen years; I've read a LOT of missions. It takes more to get my attention these days, even if it's in a continuum I know and by a writer I like.

I'd like to stress that I don't think this means the writing quality has dropped off (how would I know?) or that the community has changed for the worse (more thoughts on "drama" another time). Mostly, it's that I have changed. I'm at a radically different place in my life than most of the rest of you. That's no one's fault, and nothing to panic over.

- I may not care for the continuum or the style of the writer. We all have our preferences.

Now, let me answer the corollary of why I may read and review:

- As an older, more experienced member, it's something I expect of myself. Occasionally this feels burdensome, but I figure if I'm going to hang around with you kids, I should at least occasionally make an effort to embrace my adulthood and the position of mentor.

- As an older, more experienced member, I DO often have thoughts to contribute that others may not. Sharing my expertise with someone who values it is rewarding for me.

- If I like you and have a good relationship with you, I'm way more likely to read and comment on your stuff. I know I personally don't make it too easy to get to know me, though, so I don't fault anyone else on this point. More on community another time.

- If you engage with my writing/other output, I'm more likely to engage with yours. More on the social contract another time.

I think that's all the major points? Again, though, on a bus. I may have missed things.

~Neshomeh

So the way I see it, there are a few common obstacles to missions. Here they are, itemized. I'll also try and propose some solutions or something.

1. Mission Length: Missions have been getting longer, yeah. Go reread the Blood Raining Night mission again, and at the front, Past!Nesh talks about how 30 pages is HUUUGE for a mission. Nowadays, that's... pretty average, I think. No real easy fix for that.

2. The Comicbook Problem: As you write more missions, continuity piles up, making the whole thing increasingly inpenetrable to newcomers. A lot of spinoffs get bitten by this, but I think Ix gets it the worst: Ix's spinoffs are really long, but also have a strong character drama focus, with an overarching arc of character development throughout. As such, if you don't read them all, you find yourself at a disadvantage because you're missing stuff—at least, that's the impression I've gotten, part of why I haven't gotten into them yet. Let me know if I'm wrong.

There are a few ways to deal with this:

-Don't build strong continuity: If you don't have a strong arc and character development focus, this isn't so bad for you. Trojie and Pads are a great example of this: that spinoff has a ton of missions, but you can pretty much read whatever you want, and most of them can more or less stand alone. Larf described the spinoff as "like a Saturday-morning cartoon" once, and I think he nailed it. A lot of early spinoffs also did this, as the emphasis was more on the snark and goofiness than the characters in the early days, but they were short enough that it didn't really matter.

-The "Cosmere" Approach: Dubbed as such after Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Sayeth TVTropes, Sanderson created the Cosmere because he "desire to create an epic length series without requiring readers to buy a ridiculous amount of books." But TVT isn't the most accurate source, I can't be sure that's true. Anyways he interlinked a ton of shorter series that all stood on their own into a larger, overarching universe. That way, newcomers had a wide variety of entry points, each series was short enough not to overwhelm, and you still got the benefits of a larger, more elaborate setting if you were willing to read all the things. In the PPC, the strongest example of this sort of thing is by far hS. hS's spinoff stuff is big. Really big. There is quite a bit of it. But see, it never feels big, because it's split up into a large number of interconnected series that can be, more or less, read in any order, each with satisfying character arcs (well, most of them, anyways. The arc-centric ones). I first started reading with Lofty Skies, Crashing Down, Not the DIO, Swan's Egg, and Tales from DoGA. But had I gone through Newbies, Origins, Wanderer, DWT, and Elsewhere In Action, I would have been just as able to comprehend things. This is a massive strength, and a credit to hS's writing. It's also a credit that he uses the large cast he has to make the PPC feel really alive and active, and to keep the goofiness of the PPC alive while he actually does genuinely serious character arcs. But enough stroking hS's ego. He doesn't need it.

-Not writing many missions: This is the simple approach: you don't have to manage complexity if you never create it. Although it has its own problems, of course. Many PPCers use this strategy. Like me! (but I'm working on it.)

3. The Canons-you-don't-know problem: I'll be honest... I don't see this as a problem so much. I mean, it is slightly, but it's not disasterous. The first trick is ensuring that people who don't know the canon don't get lost, which... I am notoriously bad at. Heck, I failed to get my Permission first time around for a large part because I didn't give proper context for my characters and most of my betas knew them already such that they couldn't catch the issue ahead of time. Massive failing on my part. So... if you want your mission to be decipherable to people who don't know the canon, get betas who don't know the canon, and get them to tell you when they're confused.

The other trick is holding the uninitiated reader's interest. This is really a test of your abilities as a writer, and of the strength of your agents. Because in the absence of canon knowledge, the horror of the fic's crimes against that canon aren't as strong a draw, nor is the joy of seeing all those bad tropes you see in your ff.net browsings day after day getting ripped into. So what remains is the strength of the characters and their interactions (and their snark—this is the PPC after all), which really ought to be the central focus anyways. We may be critics, but the primary focus of a PPC mission is to entertain.

Part of the reason this has never been so much a probkem is because reading fics in canons I don't know well or don't care about was a big part of my PPC experience. I don't even know if I'd read LoTR when I first stumbled across TOS, and even if I had, I was mocked at the time for not knowing the difference between Barad-dur and Khazad-dun. I wasn't a dedicated Rings fan, but I devoured TOS and OFUM, because they were funny and clever and enjoyable. Heck, a good mission can even get someone into something. Seeing Nume and Illraen deal with Young Wizards made me want to read it just as much as the board threads that were appearing at the time, a Labyrinth mission is what definitively put it on my list for watching (I will, I swear!), if I hadn't read LoTR by then, ToS inspired me to do so, Suicide put GoF on my radar and got me to read it (and made it weird as hell but that's another story), and while Pern had been on my list for a while, Nume, Illraen, and Derik sealed the deal.

That's about it for now.

I admit I don't know enough about music to really delve into the intricacies of how they're written.

But I will take the opportunity to gush about one of my favorite soundtracks, namely to the musical Hamilton. An obvious pick, yes, but I love the clever lyrics, use of different music styles and the way the story is told. The words flow together smoothly and the music reflects the character and story beats (and being me a history buff doesn't hurt my enjoyment of the musical one bit... even if there are some creative liberties taken).

Sorry for the simplistic terms, I'm not smart enough to understand all the technical details. I could link to someone else who understands it better than I could...

I love id Software. The board ought to know this by now. So let's start there. IMHO, Wolf3D doesn't stand the test of time, so on to the next one.

Enough has been written about the Doom soundtrack. It's great. It's also MIDI, so everyone will probably hear something slightly different. Anyone remember MIDI? Yeah.

Also, it just rips off a ton of metal. All the metal. Still great though.

Quake! Wait, Quake had a soundtrack? Yes. Yes it does. Composed by Nine Inch Nails, no less. You probably haven't noticed it because it's really ambient. Well, except for that title theme. If you have the Steam version, you may never have heard any of that, because Quake had a Redbook soundtrack. Read: the CD was actually an audio CD, and the game won't play the soundtrack unless it's in the drive, because it doesn't exist on disc. So the Steam version doesn't even contain a soundtrack. Thankfully, there are ways to get it working again if you download a modern sourceport.

Quake 2 got hit with the redbook problem too. Which is a shame, because speaking as a metal fan, Quake 2's soundtrack is killer. I mean, listen to this!. Q2's soundtrack is the best part of that game, easy. Which isn't hard, because it's the weakest Quake game, also easy. Throwing out the horror and oppressivenes for sci-fi action and space marines killing borg didn't serve the game well, and neither did the endless brown and grey. The Edge was a bangin' DM level, though.

And finally, Quake 3, the best deathmatch game ever devised by man. I know that's high praise, but I really really really really really like this game. They brought in a few bands on this one, including the Quake 2 guys. Sonic Mayhem 1 and 5 are particularly memorable, but the one that sticks out to me most is probably this one. Because it seems to play whenever I load up Q3DM17, which is probably the most played map in Quake 3 by a mile. It's also not a very good map, but that's another story.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Unreal Tournament, Quake 3's competition. Because that game also has a soundtrack, and what a soundtrack it is. Alexander Brandon is widely regarded as brilliant, and this more theatrical soundtrack doesn't disappoint. The song everyone remembers is Foregone Destination, which backed Facing Worlds, the UT99 equivalent of Q3DM17. Well, that and the fantastic Menu theme. That thing is great.

Even better, and by the same guy, is the theme to Deus Ex. Oh jeez. I can listen to that all day.

More to come, probably.

I'm writing this as you were three chapters in, and I'm very glad you're liking it.