The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

And, my results:

http://politiscales.la-commune.net/en_US/results/?t1=24&t0=31&c0=38&c1=31&j1=19&j0=45&m0=55&m1=12&b1=10&b0=64&s0=62&s1=7&p0=36&p1=29&e1=40&e0=40&prag=67&femi=24

Can I just say, I have the absolute worst flag ever? Just magenta, nothing else. Not even a dot or something. I'm half tempted to try the test again to see if somehow I get a better flag.

I can't say I know a whole lot of really, really awesome people like Quincy does, but there is definitely one person that comes to mind as someone who's saved my world. He's this one guy who's the best person I know. He is 100% a hero who has helped me up more times than I can count, and I can only hope to be like him one day. He's unbelievably selfless, heart-meltingly kind, and just... so, so caring. He's never judged me about anything I've done, and I can't imagine he ever will; he's the most supportive person I've ever met. He can brighten up my day with just a few words and one of his funny and random jokes. I'm not ashamed to say that I have absolutely no idea what I'd do without him.

Thank you for saving me; I owe you everything. If you're reading this and you're the guy I'm talking about, you know who you are and you know there isn't anyone else I'd say these things about.

I thought the person who donated the gift picked by the previous person was supposed to go next.

So... now what, Skarmory?

~Neshomeh

I know a lot of really, really awesome people. Some of them are heroes who've helped me through some of the toughest times I've ever gone through. Others are diplomats who've stayed calm in the face of drama and refused to harbor bad blood. Still more are just delightful, quirky souls who bring a smile to my face every time I interact with them. I'm talking about the people who support their friends, who love their friends, who make their friends' days. I'm talking about the people we love, the people we'd fight for, the people to whom we owe more than we could ever repay. And it saddens me that often times, those heroes go unsung. Let's fix that. Let's sing praises of those people who've saved our worlds. If you've ever met someone like this, please show your admiration and your appreciation below.

It was your turn to pick a gift (with Gall Knutsson) according to the list given in the opening post, Neshomeh. I answered because the gift which had been picked up was one of hte ones I had offered, and well... I thought 'why not have my agents drop a comment about it?' to start another discussion beyond opening the gifts.

And while I'm asking, do you just pick one off the list, or is it randomly determined somehow?

~Neshomeh may have missed an obvious thing?

The 2018 PPC New Year's Gift Exchange is still ongoing. If you guys want to spectate, feel free, but this reminder goes specifically to Neshomeh, Hardric, Zingenmir, and eatpraylove, who are participating alongside me; I believe it's Nesh's turn last I checked.

The link to the masterpost on the T-Board is here!

Made by the comedy bois The Technical Difficulties, who have a youtube series of it that is very good and funny, and they are all very good and funny people.

Essentially, the host finds a Wikipedia article, introduces it and such, and asks the contestants a variety of questions about it. The contestants get points for answering them correctly and particularly good answers get MYSTERY BISCUIIIITS (oh yeaaah)
It's more an excuse for improv comedy, more than anything else, with all the rules and points and such being quite loose, and I know of multiple episodes where the host just straight up forgets who's winning.

Scape didn't, though. Scape's got a mind like a rattlesnake and I would bet on her side in a fist fight between her and Tom Scott.

I finally felt that I had the time, so for the first time in a long, long time, I'm posting on the board again.

I'm here to say that I am alive and in good spirits, but slightly disappointing at how I've just dropped off the radar here. Sorry about that.

I'll try to be more active here again this year.

General summary, I liked this movie.

One thing I quite liked was that the protagonist (Eliza) was mute, and that we got subtitled sign language.

Another was the movie did a good job of having some rather not-good 1960s bigotry woven in somewhat seamlessly (see, for example, that bit at the pie place). This also brings me to Strickland, who was a really good villain: heartless, bigoted, a ... I think "attempted rapist" works... etc. and he doesn't see a problem with any of this because he's superior to that monster and all those other not-quite-human folks (like Eliza or anyone who ain't white).

Shout-out to the fact that the amount of language passed on during the montage where that was an element was reasonable (given how short a time span it happened in).

Getting a happy ending pulled out of all the shooting near the end was nice.

One complaint is that they roughly spelled out what the ending would consist of right at the beginning took a bit of the tension out of the film.

These have been scattered, late-night thoughts.

- Tomash

Poor Charlotte just keeps finding out one thing after another that can hurt humans. Just wait until she finds out about overeating. :P

Dey engaged! It an engagement! Now watch the wedding go horribly wrong

Thanks for the correction.

I really enjoyed the tone of this. Just calm and peaceful and simple, and really no PPC weirdness or supernatural whatever drawing focus from the characters. I also like the shift from the beginning, when Ix is unsure and Charlotte is supportive, and the reversal after Charlotte gets sunburned, where she becomes panicky and needs to rely on Ix's experience to stop the hurt. It's a creative way of getting to the proposal as well, without the usual set up for that kind of scene.

One error!
Ix’s palms were slick with sweat by the time they got past the Security Dandelion guarding the exist, and when the heat of World One’s sun hit them, it only got worse.
Dandelions may guard the exist, but remember that tires don exits.

—doctorlit heavily recommends "kids" sunscreen for anyone spending time in strong sunlight. It's at least as effective as the adult stuff, but a bit less questionable-chemicals-y.

... that I'm a little disappointed I'm not the closest to the center anymore? I liked being the most moderate. Come on, let's get some more ultra-progressives to straighten that out! ^_~

~Neshomeh, Scion of Balance?

Undeterred by her initial failure positive learning experience, Neshomeh went back to the lab, certain she had worked out the kinks in her genetic matrices, and soon produced three new lines of creatures:

Response Center 1110



(Golden shark-thing, possibly blind. Okay, sure.)



(Gall only gets her first name because it comes out way cooler this way than it does with her full name.)



(LOL, wut? {X D )

Response Center 999



(Pointy hedgehog-wolf-thing. Appropriate!)



(Headgear. Kinda cute. Appropriate! Also looks enough like Dafydd that I can understand people getting them mixed up. ^~ )

Response Center 31-C-14

<img src="https://pre00.deviantart.net/d3cd/th/pre/i/2018/020/9/7/jenniferrobinsonnichelingbyneshomeh-dc0moab.png" width="500">

(Dat jaw. Wow.)

<img src="https://pre00.deviantart.net/b8e2/th/pre/i/2018/020/6/0/henryrobinsonnichelingby_neshomeh-dc0mobb.png" width="500">

(Definitely not related to Jenni, despite sharing a surname. [How does this thing work, anyway?] You can't see it here, but he has a dorsal shark fin, too.)

Clearly there are still some bugs to be worked out, particularly a tendency toward wildly mismatched forelimbs, but overall, I have to say this was a vast improvement over the first experiment!

~Neshomeh couldn't be bothered to combine the images together; the background gradients make it impossible to do cleanly without way too much work.

My results

Not quite sure if this is entirely accurate since some of the statements seem to be really up to interpretation.

The PolitiScales site asks 117 questions, in order to plot your political opinions on 8 scales: Constructivist-Essentialist, Communist-Capitalist, Rehabilitative-Punitive Justice, Regulationism-Laissez-faire, Progressive-Conservative, Ecology-Production, Internationalist-Nationalist, and Revolution-Reform. It also provides you a flag and a 'motto' (generated from your results); those sets of three words most people have posted are the 'mottos'. Finally, it can give you extra stickers for things that don't quite show up on the bars - so Kaitlyn got Radical Feminist, Horvat got Monarchist, and most people who aren't me got Pragmatist.

This isn't the first time we've played at political profiling; we've actually done it three times before, 2014-16. But that was done just on two axes: Left/Right and Authoritarian/'Libertarian'. I took to plotting everyone on a graph using their results, and drawing things like maps to turn the graph into a story.

For this year, with its 8 axes, I've had to dramatically expand the scope of the map. I've added height, alignment, land type... well, lots of stuff, as I said. And I've been adding people as they come in.

I think you're still Imgur-deficient? In that case, here are the three maps: 2015, 2016, and the current 2018 one. The 'story' (such as it is) has Plortitics progressing from a medieval world (2015) to a steampunk Age of Brass (2016), to the current magical world. The Eastern Mountains are the traditional home of various evil overlords (because the first people plotted out there were Dark Brother 16 and EvilAIUberOverlord, so, y'know...), hence War-Queen Alleb.

If you would like to guesstimate your position on the 8 axes (as a percentage: so, for instance, '67% Communist'), I can add Twistey as a rumoured hidden city after the weekend; I can even generate what your flag would be if you could fill it out. But no obligation. :) (Oh, for the flag part, please also say whether you strongly support any of the following: anarchists, radical feminists [ie, the abolition of gender, according to the site], or monarchists [ie, every country should have a monarchy]. The other 'stickers' don't count for flags.)

hS

I did two: one based on my username and one based on my nickname...

http://makemegoogly.com/1XRHV

http://makemegoogly.com/1ZB9L

These both look kinda weird. I am first a weird purple squirrel-thing and then a creepy predator. Both with sheep horns. It's weird.

-Twistey

Because sadly I can't participate in it. My computer blocks political/activist sites (and I can't say I'm sad about that...)

-Twistey

That was stiff and a bit- eh? I mean, I'd argue that they were better people (circus folk tend to be), but it didn't come across well. And for the big finale number, that was a flop.

Huinesoron & Kaitlyn. Apparently I am a flightless bat, and my wife is a... sort of bear crossed with a fiddler crab.



The Illian family - Dafydd, Tanfin, Jasmine, Belladonna, Daphne, Oleander, and Constance. :D Mooooost of them seem to take after their mother, though Jas' has inherited Dafydd's spines.

This is super surreal. :D :D :D

hS

This is the greatest spoiler. This is the greatest spoiler. This is the greatest spoiler. This is the greatest spoiler. This is the greatest spoiler. This is the greatest spoiler.

His money is gone, his credit is shot, his properties are ruins or foreclosed, by the way he'd been seeing the world, he had nothing- except for the people he'd given a family.

My problem with that is, that I don't feel Barnum is entitled to that family's support any more. He turned his back on the performers, and they never confronted him over that. Then they're suddenly there to bolster him in his moment of disaster? Why? I mean, I guess you could simply argue that the performer characters are better people than character!Barnum, but . . . from my standpoint as a viewer, it still feels like a very arbitrary and artificial moment.

—doctorlit

So! First off, to prevent people stumbling across spoilers: shout-out to the aerialists just sorta hanging out on hoops in full arabesque in the background of the circus shots. That pose is hella painful and they were rocking it. This has been a spoiler block.

Elephant in the room: That was almost entirely unlike P.T. Barnum's actual life. He started poor, made a fortune primarily in showbiz, and had a slip into financial trouble when a business didn't turn out. And that's it- everything else in the film is made from whole cloth. His tour with Jenny Lind was wildly successful, his circus never broke up or burned down, the one big financial problem he had was when he tried to get into major real estate. (Although it was then his circus people, many of whom had gone on to their own acts, who got him back on his feet. But it wasn't a moment of desperation. And his home burned down during the process, not his circus.)

The music was incredible. It was perfect- because it was, very specifically, circus music. Too much story to be pop or modern dance, too much beat to be theater, and I've got half a routine choreographed for each of those songs already. It's very cirque nouveau, specifically- the modern circus movement that's more about telling stories than just spectacle. All of it makes me want to get back into the air.

And the choreography... I'm still a bit envious. That bit in the bar, particularly- that was such a circus piece, a discussion and decisions and dance, and the choreography was glorious and small and fast. You couldn't perform that piece for an audience of more than ten, because nobody else could be close enough to see all the details that make it sparkle. The big stuff was equally good- both the choreography and the performance.

So, now drifting into the stuff that wasn't so good.

You're right, the whole thing felt rushed. They banged around from scene to scene, it really feels like they could have let all of it soak in more.

I'm not sure I see that one failing as a movie-ruiner- it's the arc of Barnum's story. He keeps chasing bigger and bigger things, and never stops to think about what he has- and that piled-up karma leads to his ruin. Jenny bails on him, destroying his fortune, the circus burns, Charity leaves- all of that crashes down on him in the fourth act. (And it's an extra twist of the knife to have Jenny singing "all the stars in the sky, and it's never enough...") That's the consequences of his selfishness, his lack of awareness. And that moment where the people come back together? That's not just "a moment of doubt," it's full-on ruin. His money is gone, his credit is shot, his properties are ruins or foreclosed, by the way he'd been seeing the world, he had nothing- except for the people he'd given a family.

Some of the editing also really didn't work for me. That moment at the end, where Barnum suddenly runs out of the bar, jumps on a train? I had no idea what he was doing. Was he running away? Were they jumping ahead to when the Barnum and Bailey circus traveled by train? Was it something else entirely?

Final shoutout- Zendaya worked hard to play an aerialist, and it showed. She... well, she wasn't doing anything terribly difficult? But she had really good form, and she sold it so well. And for someone who only had months to learn, she must have worked really hard.

...I'm at 69% progressivism, yet I'm still to the right of most of the Board. Everything I thought I knew about myself is wrong!

*happily skips off to find out what sort of adorable creature is a Neshomeh*

...

Oh.

...

Oh dear.

Um.



*wibble* You poor, poor misshapen thing. I... I will love you always, for I created you. II^II

~Neshomeh has a sad now.