The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Because the impression I'm getting is that you're thinking 'things that made us laugh'. Which... would frankly feel like 'look how funny we are/haha you weren't there suckers'. I know that's not the intent, but that's how it would feel, in my poor Elvish heart.

If 'Best Of' instead means 'topics which led to interesting discussions, which got long enough that we'd like to continue them on the Board'... then great! I think the idea of picking up a debate that's ignited the Discord and bringing it here is a fantastic one. You don't even need to Best Of it - just repost the origin and a summary whenever they happen.

hS

I always hate discussing community-communication issues with you, because I know I'm going to disagree vehement with virtually everything you say, and that makes me sad. :( (This is not an attack on you - it's a statement of different personalities.)

Let the disagreements begin!

1/ It is not hard to check the Board. It takes me about 5 seconds on PC, less than 30 on the phone. We have bright grey highlighting for new posts, even! And, honestly? It's nice to be able to take it at my own pace. One of the (many!) reasons I stay off the chats is because the idea of missing the conversation due to having to do something else for a while is awful.

(You can also get a daily update of all the new posts to the Board, delivered direct to your email. I... hmm, actually I should check if I still have those archived somewhere; might be useful for the Board Archives.)

2/ This is true! And to my mind it's a good thing. The PPC is a community which tends to long-windedness and analysis, so it's good to get to spend several hours - or days! - thinking over your reply.

3/ Yes - directing all PPC conversation to the Discord means you exclude not only the people who don't go on there, but also anyone who doesn't happen to be there right when you post. ... that's a bad thing.

4/ Well, I can't argue with subjective. ^_~ To me, subjectively, chatting in a chat client feels like a bunch of people talking past each other, and getting caught in a conversation I have no interest in but have to read anyway in case it turns interesting again - whereas the Board lets me pick and choose which ones I have to look at.

Moving on to your non-numbered comments:

-Publishing writing goes well on the Board (gasp! Agreement!). Though people don't respond as much as they should.

-Personal rants/celebrations/etc: And yet, we used to do this on the Board. Not for the little things, but the slightly larger ones? Yes! Heck, 'I did well on my exam, here's what it was about, here's which bits I really excelled at and here's the bits that I was weak on' is great - it lets people talk about your topic, but also branch out into their own exams (it's exam season, after all - you just took one). Whereas on the Discord? You can only do one of those options, because the conversation will move on. I'm guessing most reactions are just 'well done'.

-RPs: I don't disagree with your division here. Though in the old days, 'micro RPs' like you describe still took place on the Board - heck, the Snowfight down below is one-such. It makes it more open, letting other people join in if they want to. There's more grey areas here than you're acknowledging.

-Sharing news/pictures/etc: 'a quick general indication of approval/appreciation' is not what the PPC is about. If you lot flood the Board with threads of random pictures, I shall be Upset. >:( The Board - and, to my mind, the PPC - is a place for discussion and debate, not 'yay you still exist and so do I'.

You say:

When you share that sort of thing, you often are looking for social reactions or just to inform (and maybe to spark a discussion, but that's not the entire goal).

I disagree. When I posted this, I was expecting people to comment on which parts of the linked 'story' they found funniest. I was expecting 'there's this other thing like that'. I was expecting people's feelings about Pterry, and memories of him. I wasn't just saying 'I am capable of finding cool things' - I was sharing two things that I thought the Board would react to.

They didn't. So maybe you're right about how people are reacting.

-Badfic posting: So... why don't people do that here? I've never understood this. If you think a badfic is interesting enough to bring to the Board, tell us what's so bad about it! We're not actually a bunch of masochists who click on links just because we're told they're bad.

-Your hypothesis: our underlying operating system might generally like the chat more than the Board. It gives you more of a social-interaction fix for less effort.

I disagree emphatically. Spending time on a chat with more than one other person is a much larger effort than 'click refresh and skim', and much of it is spent on conversations that give me no 'fix' whatsoever.

You are probably right that some people are wired that way - that's why we've had three (four?) successive chatrooms after the previous ones collapsed or faded out. But the extremely prolific history of the PPC Posting Board proves hands-down that there is a massive liking for this style of interaction, common to hundreds of people in the PPC (though most are now gone).

hS

... even though it was my idea.

1) What should go in such a thread is a non-trivial problem and sort of a matter of consensus. Actually picking out the best moments of the chat (especially those that would make sense without a massive pile of context) is not an easy problem for one person.

2) The quoting kerfuffle. It feels kinda unsettled when you can/can't/shouldn't grab things people in the chat and post them somewhere else (say, on the Board) and under what circumstances you should/must get the permission of the person you're quoting first. There's a massive pile of gray area around this.

(Hm ... technical solutions to social problems? We could, for example, have a custom emoji you could use to signal that you think something ought be posted to the Board whenever that thread happens next, and post authors joining the vote would be a signal they don't mind this? ... Darn, Discord doesn't let you search for emojis or reactions, so this'd be hard to find. Then again, we have a bot, but he's hibernating at the moment, so eh. Who knows? At least two people think this might be a way to do it though.)

I basically agree on all of this.

One suggestion on the census was "Best of Discord" threads. I'd love to compile such a thing, but sadly, I can't: I can really only use Discord on my phone, Because Reasons, and it's hard to archive from there. But if we can create some kind of voting system, or someone can volunteer, that could be cool.

Definitely reflects the caption. {= )

On the shadows, acknowledging that this might be due to a bad scan, it looks like you went too far on the face and not far enough on the robe. Partly because the the shadow across her nose and cheek has a mottled texture, it kinda looks like a bruise. I think the others would work if I weren't distracted by that one, though. It would also help if the skin tone were more saturated to begin with. I tend to use at least three tones for skin: First, a base layer, usually light peach for a fair complexion or beige for a sallow one. Everything gets layered over and blended back into it. Second, a pink or near-red for areas of high vascularity, like the cheeks; and third, a browner shade for less vascular areas. Plus whatever looks right for lip color, pockets under the eyes, etc. For Gall, the base tone was Deco peach, the pink was blush pink (this is very aptly named and I use it a lot), and her "brown" was light peach, because she is very fair. Plus the henna, sandbar brown, and teensiest bit of indigo for shadows, and white for highlights.

Skin is complicated. Hair is, too, and I use more or less the same process to do that: soft base coat of the lightest highlight color, mid-tone, dark tone. (Except for black hair. I'm working on how to make black hair less flat.) Definitely get good pencils if you want to keep going with this.

A good point: her right sleeve looks pretty good! The shape of the shadow brings out the roundness of the cuff, and it all looks cohesive.

~Neshomeh

Okay, so the 'DON'T POST ANYTHING EVER WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE' message embedded all over the place is a result of the period when we were clearing out the Front Page in about three days, mostly because people were posting six consecutive threads saying 'I found another badfic!'. That is no longer the case.

PLEASE POST THREADS ON THE BOARD, FOLKS.

I thought we'd cleared most of that language out; I know I got rid of it in the Board header a while back. I don't see it in the FAQs... is it in the Constitution?

... yes. 'Never start a thread' is implied in the blasted Constitution.

[Face, meet Palm]

Right. I think it would be worth a Constitutional Amendment to not only remove the Article 21 implication that we don't like threads, but also to specifically point out that the Board will only be fun if everyone works to make it fun - that just lurking around waiting for Somebody Else to do it doesn't work. I'll work on a concrete proposal.

hS

A good starting point seems to be to list out some of what might be the important differences between the Board and the Discord, and then see if we can figure out how this leads to the different ways people interact with them and why there might be a split.

1. You have to poll the Board, chat notifies you. To find out if people are talking on the Board, you have to open the page or hit refresh and then look. For the Discord, as long as you have the client open, when people are talking, you (unless you've muted the channel) hear a [boop]. There is therefore a lot less friction to becoming aware of activity on the chat. (In other words, compared to the Discord, being on the Board is a lot of work. That will likely keep people from checking the Board too often, slowing things down.)

(In the interests of "technical solutions to social problems", some coding that would allow people to be actively notified when someone posts on the Board would take a few programmer-days or weeks, I suspect.)

2. The Board is significantly more asynchronous. A thread on the Board usually has a maximum response times measured in days, a message in the Discord usually gets all its responses in minutes or hours (depending on what it is and how busy the chat is).

3. Messages to the Discord have a smaller intended audience. The intended readers of a Board post are all PPC members and assorted lurkers, the intended readers of a Discord message are whoever happens to be looking at or near that moment, plus in some cases folks who scroll back later.

4. To me, subjectively, posting on the Board feels like sending an email to a mailing list, while chatting in the Discord feels much more like a bunch of friends sitting around a table talking about whatever.

Now that I've got a bunch of general principles out of the way, let's look at a few of the things people in the PPC do and where they do them.

Publishing writing: Board. There are basically no exceptions. Publishing your work is a situation where you want a whole lot of people to read it ... eventually. You want your concrit with detail and a lot of pondering on the concriters's part. This type of post fits very well on the Board.

Personal rants/celebrations/... (significant things aside): Discord. Again, almost no exceptions. If you want to, to pick an example of mine, complain about how your GRE paper has disappeared into a black hole, leaving you without scores or celebrate doing well on an exam, you'd like reactions near-immediately, not several hours/days later. That sort of thing also isn't historically/doesn't feel like a matter for the attention of the entire PPC.

RP: Depends, in significant ways.

An RP thread on the Board is basically an open invitation for a whole lot of people to start a bunch of RPs that are somewhat asynchronous and last several days. It's expected for people to slowly wander in and slowly wander out a good few days later. If you want that, you post an RP on the Board.

RP is the Discord is smaller and more immediate. The typical sequence of events is that someone pokes #rudis for RP (often with something along the lines of "((waves))" or "((pokes))"). Then, if there's anyone around within the next minutes/hour or two (if you're still around), they respond to your request. There are usually one or two respondents. A few details of scene/characters are often quickly worked out, and the RP starts, and then continues until people run out of ideas or someone has to leave for a longer period of time. Sometimes, a particularly good scene (or one where everyone was in the middle of something and got interrupted) will be restarted later, usually the next day, usually only once.

Sharing news, cute pictures, and the like: Happens on the Board, but leans Discord because the general interaction pattern with that sort of thing is to give a quick general indication of approval/appreciation, and the Board is much less amenable to that.

Heck, just about anywhere people are, posting a "Orange Party wins election in Randomland" article would typically get either crickets or a few "That's good"-type messages and maybe some "That's bad" ones. You don't typically get discussions of that sort of thing. (Similar if "article" above is replaced with "picture of a cute animal" or the like). When you share that sort of thing, you often are looking for social reactions or just to inform (and maybe to spark a discussion, but that's not the entire goal).

Badfic posting: Again, it works differently on the Board and on the Discord. On the Board, you basically post a link to announce the existence of the fic. It's very rarely responded to. Badfic is usually posted to the Discord in the form of a few quoted phrases/sentences/paragraphs, and it is often responded to ("Wait, what?", "Geema why", and the like can often be seen after a block of bold).

All the above is mostly a rambling blob of things that are probably facts. It does, however, now that I've written it, lead me to a hypothesis: our underlying operating system might generally like the chat more than the Board. It gives you more of a social-interaction fix for less effort.

The existence of the dynamic is non-ideal in that people who aren't in chat miss out on a lot of the community's goings-on. But what, if anything, can/should be done is not something I have too many thoughts on (technical solution to a social problem from above aside).

- Tomash

If you lot go download the GNU Terry Pratchett plugin for Firefox (or its Chrome equivalent), you'll see a tiny semaphore blinking on any site that has GTP set up.

The semaphore will now blink on T-Board.

It's not so much a deliberate thing...

Speaking for myself, It's just hard to sort what SHOULD be posted to the board, a place where space is at a premium and we're encouraged to think hard before starting a new thread. Because starting new threads isn't encouraged, there's rarely new content, and because there's rarely new stuff to talk about and while occasionally a cool thread pops up, it frequently dies before a new thread that grabs my attention is posted, leaving me with long stretches where I'm not posting at all.

The results

Random thoughts:

-It kind of saddens me that the PPC has shifted so much to being predominantly male. Perhaps I just enjoyed being special.

-On the other hand, only a third of us are straight. That sounds right.

-Haha nobody uses IE.

-Nearly half of us don't write original fiction, which is kind of sad - but over a quarter of those who do admit to writing erotica! :D

-On the other hand, no-one writes political thrillers, even though the example is about me. TSK.

-I really hope there's not significant overlap between the non-fanficcers and the non-originalficcers. I like to think of the PPC as a writing community.

-One person claims to finish every fanfic they start. YEAH RIGHT.

-I see that Phobos listed his wife as LOs, but Neshomeh didn't reciprocate... >:D [/stirring]

-Fandom is all the internet's fault. WORD.

-A good half the Board don't get through more than one book a month. o.O I cannot even imagine being that. (Kaitlyn is, because she has not time, and I still can't imagine.)

-Almost everyone reads fanfic! (Now I feel bad...)

-We have 3 2003-vintage PPCers... yep, sounds about right.

-Sweet mercy, half of the PPC is Tropers. I thought we'd moved on from that. ;) ;) ;)

-Two of you are unrepentant TOS-ignorers. >:(

-I've just gone through and sorted the list of 'What spinoff did you read first':

Architeuthis
bjam
Ekwy
Herr Wozzeck x2
Huinesoron x5
Indemaat
Iximaz x7
Kippur
KittyNoodles & Riese
Matt Cipher
Miah & Caddy-Shack
Nenya & Rosie
Neshomeh x3
Scapegrace
SkarmorySilver
Trojie & Pads x7
WarriorJoe

... & My Immortal, which doesn't have a mission.

So Iximaz is neck and neck with Trojie, while I'm trailing in third and Nesh is fourth. We've got a fair number of Legendary Badfics on there... including My Immortal. Somehow?

-I'm not doing the same for favourite spinoffs, but I see myself, Ix, and Trojie in there several times each.

-Apparently there's a Board/Discord split developing, which is interesting to know, because I didn't know. Apparently you lot are talking over there, but not posting here.

Not gonna lie, that kind of stings.

-Yes, the Friday Forum ended because it was too miserable, and because it didn't succeed at sparking discussion, just people posting their own news and wandering off. That's not a conversation.

And yes, I am aware that I haven't yet finished adding 'translations' to the Plort Cyclopaedia. Though I will repeat that they were actually there on the pages Miah asked about.

Okay, sorry. Rant over. Sorry, whoever that was.

-This is a very long survey.

-3/4 of PPC writers have written cowrites. That's good!

Yeah, that's me out.

hS

This is kind of cheating, because she's a pre-existing AU character in her own right, but...



Connie of Wessex, battlefield medic with the Transfictional Canonical Defence Authority. And yes, she really does dress like that. (It's Steampunk, what can I say?)

I've tried out multiple 'new' things with this image. It's drawn about twice as large as my normal scale, to hopefully work more details in. It was also drawn from a photo which includes none of the details - the costume design was done freehand, including the hair (and in fact her face - I realised with this image just how different mine and Kaitlyn's face shapes are).

This is a picture I've wanted to draw for a long time. If I can figure out where the shading goes (and fix that crossbow!), I probably will colour it - her outfit is entirely white, so it's just her face and arms. (She's wearing white silk stockings, because style is one thing, and cold legs are quite another thank you very much.)

I think this is the official halfway point, or near enough. Never thought I'd get this far.

hS

Including a somewhat different facial expression that I like rather better.

I think this one has gone better, but I'm still not that happy with it. I think I'll probably stop trying to use colour until I can figure it out - it's a lot of effort for results that aren't working. Connie here has a combination of greens and probably-blues in her shadows, while her dressing gown is mostly greens.

One of the problems is that I don't have any truly dark colours in my pencil set. Heck, I had to use graphite for the hair, because my 'black' is a mid-dark grey! If I ever get the hang of this, I may need to buy something different.

But it's been a learning experience, which is what counts. :) Thank you for your advice.

hS

Fire it across to the email above and I'll take a look. Might take a few days, though - it's been a hectic week. (But feel free to prod me if I don't get it done fairly soon.)

hS

Basically racism, harassment, repeated ban violations, and refusal to accept any responsibility for her actions or recognise that she might have done anything wrong.

hS

Wait, do I even count anymore?

What exactly is her story?

In light of... Things, *looks downstairs* is there anyone who can beta my permission request?

I started this morning, but ran out of time. I hope I didn't forget anything.

~Neshomeh

I wouldn't be too surprised if the console designs varied from RC to RC, and I also wouldn't be surprised if some poor agent pair somewhere got stuck with, and have to somehow make do with, a bunch of stone abacuses tied together.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Yeah, back in those days since they lacked screens, they had to use teletypewriters: huge, slow and noisy contraptions that would display the text by printing it to a continuous roll of paper. I thought this might be a nice photo reference if you're looking for that "lots of buttons and switches and dials" aesthetic, though.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iLUEARMKAB0WIQTfllUBtaeNnRzzfmVK3+74uImA+wUCWjHiAAAKCRBK3+74uImA
+9scAf9g3IQqJQ5yqj7AWOG1CBp01jjCc7SooCO6FtLKUOakNPNCYoKNDCUfQmfC
465zz5OGztmjNsupxn7FMJbHwbO9Af4m8hHHNUEvqWuJLoEzl+blGNBrkrs4twuT
tnVR3cm3IVvcGunx8dyv3T8kFwJ9KgPLbFmfszBz9zVzMcYp8WJs
=5026
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

I THINK IT'S BITING ME

GET IT OFFF

WHAT IS THIS SENSATION? IT'S A BIT LIKE WHEN I DRINK COKE OR A COLD DRINK, BUT MORE

[hopelessly spasms on the ground, clawing at face]