The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Yes I'm back with a new prompt, because, hey, I enjoy doing them, and even if it doesn't get people writing I like to think it at least gets people (including me) thinking. So today's prompt is going to be slightly different, and it is:

'Your characters are training.'

Let's see what we get.

Novastorme

When you get right down to it, in a universe where fictional worlds are places you can go to, what is "fictional"? What is "real"?

It's clearly all equally real. You're not gonna look someone like Agent Thoth in the face and tell him he's less real than anybody else. (I mean, you could try. Just tell me before you do it so I can make popcorn.)

But it's also clear that somebody, in some weird universe called World One for dubious reasons, wrote a book, or a film, or what have you, that purports to be the definitive record of a universe that most people in World One don't even believe exists. This is obviously nonsensical, even insane.

And what about agents who are supposedly from World One? Do they have authors? Clearly the answer is yes—but do they know that?

Some do, some don't. It used to be fairly common for agents to know they were just as fictional as anybody else, and to complain about the things their authors did to them. There's even precedent for agents reading the Words of their own stories in TOS 7, when Lux reads Acacia's "subtitled-thoughts" and nicks an arrow for her. Nowadays that's out of style, but you still get the odd duck like Jenni who is perfectly happy with the paradox of existing both as a wholly real, independent, demi-god-like entity on the one hand, and a figment of my imagination subject to my whims on the other. For her, there is absolutely no conflict with both of those things being true, depending on where you're standing at the time. Even Nume has literally glanced at the Fourth Wall once, and if pressed very hard, would probably confess that he suspects everyone has an author, including himself; he just avoids thinking about it most of the time.

And I think that's what most agents do: just try not to think about it too hard.

But that's not to say you can't have fun with it if you want to. {= )

~Neshomeh, rambling past her bedtime.

I would really like to see more crossovers between Nanoha and Madoka, especially finifshed ones, and yours ended in a perfect way... Whfg jung fbeg bs zntvpny tveyf jrer Zbzbxb naq Whaxb?

And if you don't mind it, What sort of Nanohaverse Devices would you think the girls with use? Sayaka and Kyoko looks like tthey would fit perfectly with Belkan style (I can already imagine Kyoko's spear having a 'Skorpion Form'... Yes, it seems similar to the Schlange Form, but it just fits with the way she uses her Puella magi spear), but what about the other girls?

Or, in the other way, what sort of weapon and magic would have Nanoha, Fate or Hayate with Madokaverse magic?

Anyways, good luck with your future writing and life.

Okay, sheesh. You guys are going to think I'm some movie nut at this rate. I'm really more of a books-and-video-games kind of guy, but they take a lot longer for me to get through, and my friends and family have bugged me to watch movies with them lately, so uh. Here we are.

I was planning to watch Moana eventually. I'm tragically far behind on Disney movies. I always preferred the classic, 2D-animated style, but wow, did Moana sway me a bit away from that. This movie is beyond gorgeous. The water, the plant textures, the clouds, the hair of the characters, they're all amazingly detailed and realistic. The one drawback to this is that the human and animal characters are still so stylized and cartoonish by comparison, they almost feel like they don't belong on the same screen as the backgrounds.

(Also, brief note going forward: I may get some of the spellings wrong up ahead, since I don't know any Polynesian languages. But I'm also not going to look them up, because I don't like my initial-thoughts reviews to get tinged with anything I read about the story on the internet.)

There are two aspects of the plot that I really liked. The first is that the writers remained aware of the plot's weaknesses as they went, and examined it during the movie. I'm so used to accepting the hero of any given story as the "chosen figure" that I didn't really stop to think about Moana-as-chosen-one . . . until the character Maui actually pointed out midway through that the ocean choosing Moana seemed baseless, and therefore, arbitrary. This leads to Moana having a moment of doubt, during which she is visited by her grandmother's Force ghost, who admits that perhaps making Moana go out on a dangerous mission by herself was, indeed, a bad thing for the ocean to have done. But Moana, being offered the opportunity to go back, chooses to continue all the same. And that, ultimately, becomes the real justification for the ocean's decision: it wasn't anything supernaturally or physically inherent in Moana that made her the right one for the job; it's simply the fact that she was willing to do it. Her character, not some arbitrary magic or anything about her heritage, made her the best candidate.

The second thing I liked ties a little bit into that, actually. The main "hero team" of this movie is Moana and Maui. Moana is a teenage girl who's never been on a boat before, and Maui is a hulking, strong, agile man with shape-shifting powers and a mystical, literally god-given weapon who also knows how to steer a boat and navigate at sea. On the surface of things, it certainly seems like Maui brings everything to the table, and the story lead me on to easily believe that the final conflict against the lava demon would be settled by Maui; that Moana's only real purpose was in un-stranding Maui so he could get back to the island the lava demon had taken over. But the first attempt to return the stone to the island, with Maui making a frontal assault and leaving Moana in the background fails miserably, and the second hardly goes any better, with its focus on Moana getting past the lava demon. The demon was never an enemy to be defeated or avoided, but the actual island brought to life in fury at the theft of the life-giving stone. It was never a conflict that could be solved by violence or supernatural powers in the first place, and that makes another reason Moana was "chosen." Maui's attitude and strength would never have led him to do anything but attack the lava demon, and therefore he could never understand the true situation of the island. It took a mortal who could be generous and forgiving to solve the conflict. I liked that there was clearly an effort from the writers to not give this movie a violent solution, as there's certainly enough focus on solutions-through-fighting in U.S. media as it is.

One weakness of the movie is a bit of tell-don't show. We're told in the legend at the beginning that Maui's theft of the life stone is filling the sea with monsters that preyed on boats, and that it's slowly corrupting the islands. We do see the crops and lack of fish in Moana's village, but once she gets out on the open ocean, it feels like a pretty normal ocean. Lots of non-fantasy wildlife, and no monsters, except in an underwater cave named the "cave of monsters," which I assume already had monsters in it before the rot began to spread across the ocean.

The character of Moana's father felt a bit flat, too. I understand the reasons the narrative gave for his attitude towards any of his village traveling too far from the island, but when all the fish have disappeared, and your crops are turning to dust, you have to get food from somewhere. And since he doesn't really offer another solution, shutting down Moana's idea to fish outside the reef without any discussion feels pretty ridiculous.

I really liked Heihei (sp?) the chicken. I know chickens are dumb, but they're at least good at aiming their beaks at food—painfully good, as I can testify from experience. But I still enjoyed all of Heihei's mannerisms and constantly haggard look, despite the inaccuracy there.

We seem to be good at filling in the preview area with non-spoiler things, but I'm going to keep making spoiler blocks, because it amuses me. Deal with it.
"What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!"

—doctorlit, easily impressed by good CGI

Although they're usually a bit more sensitive than that when breaking it.

Is it common for a character recruited from another continuum to be told that they are from a work of fiction? If it comes to it, how do agents go about explaining "you come from a story that someone wrote" to someone else?
"Listen, Harry. A long time ago, a woman named J.K. Rowling sat down at in a cafe..." (Not with a canon character, but that sort of thing.

They were aaaall goofs, especially the daisy clock part. I have absolutely no idea how that even happened - I didn't even know daisies had parts on them called clocks.

Blame those gremlins.

Cheers for the nitpicks you managed to get in, anyhow! Gotta fix up all those gremlin-ridden Larfscribblings, we got to.

It's called Sophia Black, and it's pretty bad. Not as bad as most of the fics on this thread, but bad. It's basically just an OC daughter of Sirius Black who exists solely to be a love interest for Fred Weasley. There was a subplot about her writing her father letters in Azkaban, which I followed for a while before realizing it was just an excuse for her to cry on someone's shoulders. (I forget who; I haven't read this fic in a while.) Sophia also takes Alicia Spinnet's place on the Quidditch team, and Alicia is obsessed with Fred, giving him a love potion to get him away from Sophia. I'm 65% sure she had to cure him with true love's kiss, but that might've been something else. I haven't read the story in a while, and i'm not doing it again.

Here's the link: https://www.quotev.com/story/3880293/Sophia-Black

I don't hate you, you're good people, and I think you're a perfectly fine community member and welcome around here. Sure, I disagree(d) with the position you took during the whole Sprinkles thing, but that doesn't mean I don't like or respect you. (Heck, I've disagreed with hS, Nesh, and the like a good few times and I still think they're good people.)

- Tomash

I appreciate it. Honestly, I kind of *still* feel like that. I don't understand why, and it's not fair to hS, but I'm frickin' scared to death of him and I think I'm gonna make those amends at a later date.

Again, if you still want to talk about what happened, you have my e-mail address.

If you're feeling better about it, though, I think you owe hS a specific apology for acting like he's some big bad wolf out to get you. I understand why it felt that way at the time, him being a big name around here and you just a kid, but he really wasn't—he even said in the original post, "I accept that they did this for emotional, not malevolent reasons."

Also, you are not a sheep, and I'm betting you wouldn't taste good even with ketchup. {= )

~Neshomeh

I can definitely use your 1337 skills. Look for my e-mail in your inboxes. {= D

~Neshomeh

My HTML is a bit better.

One thing I can do pretty well is automagically fix (or "fix") large parts of your site, if that becomes needed.

- Tomash

Regardless of what wrongs you my attribute to yourself, most of the PPC, at least to the best of my knowledge, considers you a perfectly fine community member, and you are absolutely welcome here. And at the end of that thread, from what I saw of the resolution, I think that remains the case.

But... I mean, I don't speak for everyone. So that's just what I've seen.

My skills are... hmm. Acceptable?

I mean, I've worked with HTML and CSS and the results haven't made anyone's eyes bleed. I never used <marquee> or <blink>, and I know what features not to use, more or less.

But really, I would be happy to help you Nesh :-). Could be fun!

But it was totally worth it. (Yep, surreal is the word I was looking for.)

Since your writing is so unique, I hardly dare to nitpick, but I guess these repetitions aren’t intentional narrator’s quirks:

In the third part: The voice was faint and wavy and unsure, exactly, of what it was it was meant to do.

In the last part: Anne looked back and and saw the rest of Shift Twentieth marching down the corridor

Also in the last part, how did Ninetwo get a daisy clock? Isn’t she a dandelion?

HG

Just so you all know, I've finally started converting The Lost Tales to CSS. Some things (e.g. dividers, which I've renamed to make more sense) may look a little broken for a while in unconverted areas of the site, but don't worry, everything is under control. I'm starting with TOS, of course, and will work down the list from there.

If you're comfortable with CSS/HTML and want to help, let me know!

~Neshomeh

Apologies. I definitely did skip town sort of in the middle of that. Now that I've read over it more carefully, I kinda understand better.

Congratulations. I know how hard it is to finish long fanfics firsthand.

I also checked over the other Article Number references, and patched a few of them up, too.

hS

Well, two threads, since Tomash accidentally started a new one instead of replying to the original.

I understand if the stress was too much in the heat of the moment, but if you can bring yourself to read over it carefully now, you'll find that hS apologized to you, profusely, and that the matter was only closed after I, not he, suggested a solution that I hoped would satisfy everyone. I waited several days for any objections or suggestions for improvement, and there were none.

Please take some time to look it over, and if you still feel unsatisfied with the result, you can e-mail me at neshomeh [DOT] soul [AT] gmail [DOT] com (with obvious punctuation substitutions), and we can talk about it.

~Neshomeh

So it's been a while since I've really done anything on here, or been on the Discord (I'm actually not on the Discord right now so if y'all want to reach me, DM @ Quincy Jones#6104), and this is because I've reached a point where I don't feel comfortable really interacting with the PPC at a whole. Let me explain why.

Not too long ago, I was involved in a Board issue regarding something I said over the gen chat on the Discord. People thought I was being malicious; I maintain that I was definitely not, and furthermore, I accept no accusation of wrongdoing. I am not the type of person who says things deliberately in order to hurt people. I apologize that I wrote something that may have been taken that way, but I honestly don't think I DID, and I feel as though I've done nothing wrong and have suffered an attack out of spite. I could very well be wrong on this front, however.

You may be thinking to yourselves, "Okay, but... we resolved that, didn't we?" And I am here to tell you that maybe you guys have reached closure, and the issue is well and truly in the past, but I have NOT. In fact, it has been weighing rather heavily on my heart. Why? Well, I don't really know. I think it's because I never really saw a decision made on whether or not I was wrong/right/whatever, and because the person who had a problem with my posts hasn't said anything beyond the initial ping to Huinesoron, at least not to my knowledge.

The deal is, I don't know what's going on. I have no idea if everyone hates me, if everyone loves me, if I'm right, wrong... I can't sort the issue out because the person I offended hasn't said anything and quite frankly I'm afraid to seek them out... and this seems to be a trend that happens a lot. I dunno if I'm imagining things, but the way we seem to deal with our issues here is to bring it to the Board, argue a bunch, wait for Huinesoron to say something, and then just shut up about it and never speak of it again. We gloss over it and act like it's all okay. And maybe it is okay. Maybe most of us just move on and forget it ever happened. But I CAN'T, and it's eating me alive, to the point where it makes talking to you guys and hanging out with you guys awkward and scary. I don't know what I want. I don't know what to do. But I do know that I don't want to stay silent, because even getting kicked out of the PPC is better than spending the rest of my days in limbo.

(BTW, it's official, my parents blocked the Board on my computer. I don't know whether it's about the distraction or whether it's about "negative influences" and "criticizing things" and "people who dedicate all their time to fanfic need to get a life" and all that stuff my dad keeps saying. Either way, I'll be on the Board less from now on.)

-Twistey