The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

My apologies for precisely cancelling out doc's response and being cheeky about it. {; P

~Neshomeh

I appreciate that. ^_^

FYI, I noticed you're using links to the older version of my site, which is no longer updated. The current version is here on Neocities. Main spin-off stories are also mirrored on my AO3 account.

Also, welcome back!

~Neshomeh

Admittedly, this is kind of a silly thing to bring to the Board, but some of you folks might enjoy weighing in on it, or so I hope, at least.

Now that my LotR insanities are in full swing again, I'm making a lot of DIY stuff to channel some of my overflowing love for this story and this world into something. I have some plans for some fanart, and the debate I'm currently having with myself is about a t-shirt I want to make. I do a lot of custom work on cheap plain t-shirts to turn them into fan stuff, with embroidery, bleach painting, homemade fabric paint, or just plain old acrylic if I'm in a hurry. I made one a few days ago that looked like this... and this when I put it on. I have another shirt lying around that I wanted to make into another LotR-themed bit of clothing, but I'm kind of stuck on the design. The current contenders are:

• the names of the Fellowship in a nice column,
• the "One ring to rule them all..." poem in its entirety,
• the White Tree of Gondor,
• Andúril on the front of the shirt and the shards of Narsil on the back,
• oooorrrr maybe the illustration from this book cover.

Which of these designs should I put on a shirt? The materials used would have to vary depending on what color I need and how complicated the pattern is going to be, but either way, I'd love to hear your opinions and would also love to share the end result here, if anyone wants to see.

Some of my all-time favorites are not for this Board (I got super into the Saw franchise while I was away from the Board, which has a very active fandom and quite a lot of goodfic, surprisingly, but it doesn't exactly strike me as something my fellow Boarders would be into). I have a few from older fandoms that are still very dear to me, though, and which I'd love to share here.

• Three Stories, written by Gimli son of Glóin on occasion of his imminent passing: One of my Big Favorites. This is a short, bittersweet and beautiful Gimli/Legolas fic that rips my heart out every time and then makes me cry happy tears at the end :')
• downbeat: Kylux orchestra AU where Hux is an uptight conductor, and Kylo Ren is an insufferable but insanely talented piano soloist. I have conflicting opinions on the Star Wars sequel trilogy and was never very active in the fandom to begin with, but I love, love, love this fic.
• The Student Prince: One of the classics of the Merlin fandom, and for good reason.
• Particular Peculiarity: My favorite Sherlock Holmes/John Watson fic. (Classic Holmes, not the BBC series, which I absolutely loathe.)
• Veritas: I also have conflicting opinions on the Star Trek reboot movies (for the most part, I don't really like them), but this fanfic is epic and stays truer to the spirit of Trek in more ways than the first two reboot movies did.
• Aeneas, Orpheus, Pollux: A Coriolanus fanfic written in iambic pentameter. Yes, really. And a damn good one, too.
• And, as a member of the PPC (even if not a very active one now), I'd be neglecting my duties if I didn't mention my favorite spinoff works: Ring Child and Blood Raining Night by Neshomeh and Tungsten Monk, which have given me many moments of mirth and are still the spinoffs I like revisiting the most. :)

Hello, everyone! It's been a hot minute since I last posted here on the Board, but I hope to be more active as spring rolls in. I doubt many of you remember this, but back in 2021, when I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, I asked you for help with a LotR tattoo. I eventually decided against it (my family made tattoos sound like a scary commitment and I was accordingly scared). Now, I'm rereading the books and watching the movies again as a slightly more mature adult, and they hit me so hard that I decided to get that tattoo after all. I have two others and several piercings now, and I realize that I'd regret missing out on this more than I could regret getting it done. I've made an appointment for April. Would you folks like to see it when it's done?

Also, I wanted to say hello to everyone who still remembers me. How are y'all? I've been active in the Discord server, but I hoped to drop by at the Board too eventually.

I've not played it myself, but I've heard nothing but good things about it and now seems as good a time as any to pick it up. Thought folks here might like to know.

I don't think I ever finished reading HFA, actually, so this would be the perfect opportunity to do so.

--Ls

I started in January, I think. It started with just compiling lists of students, because I was curious about how many were also Boarders and/or agents, but there was so much text eaten away from the sequel, I had to try the Wayback Machine to continue. At which point I basically thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. {= ) It was a nice thing to work at a little bit at a time, when I didn't have time or focus for other stuff.

~Neshomeh hopes to have both time and focus for other stuff soon!

Congratulations on hard work well done! Crazy to think such a major work from the old days was starting to decay . . . but now both of them are safe and stored again, thanks to you!

—doctorlit bows to Neshomeh

Agent Kaguya does not have French ancestry. Just thought I should toss this out.

Check it out.

To copy my notes off the index page:

Although both The Hogwarts Fanfiction Academy and its sequel In the Keeping of HFA are both still accessible via Fanfiction.net, the latter in particular has suffered from terrible formatting decay and is practically unreadable. With the help of the Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to restore most of the original text of the latter. (Though sadly not quite all; a couple lines are still missing from chapter 14, “The Fanwriters’ New Clothes.”) Therefore, since I decided to rehost the sequel, I thought I might as well rehost the entire contents of Meir Brin’s original HFA website.

As usual in this archive, I have made conservative edits to correct indisputable misspellings and other errors. I have also attempted to standardize orthographic features across both stories, including the capitalization of special words, the use of hyphens vs dashes, and the placement of end punctuation in relation to quotation marks. Additionally, I’ve replaced asterisks denoting emphasis or internal thoughts with italic text formatting. If you spot any errors I’ve missed (or any I’ve introduced), please let me know!

~Neshomeh

Hello, hello! I've written a short fic with several sections in the style of some of the most memorable badfics over on the Asylum, it can be found here. It's very similar to a Badfic Games piece, though it's a little more specific in what I'm imitating. You can guess who each one is by, but if you're unfamiliar, the answers are at the end. It features me, Shoe, and epl, too. Hope you guys enjoy!

--Ls

Lily, congratulations on getting into grad school! I hope you’re able to get all the funding you need, and that your research projects are successful! You are extremely cool!

Ugh, I hate to say this, because I do love Hermione, but . . . I can understand Ron’s frustration with her a bit, too? She cares about her friends, but she expresses that care as a “mom friend,” enforcing rules and such. Hogwarts kids have enough adults in their lives; they don’t need more parenting from their own peer group! But . . . I’m also being a hypocrite, because that’s probably the type of friend I was as a child and teenager, too! We partly grow out of it???

Oh wow, the . . . Avalon cult is even more significantly worse than I realized! That hymn is dark beyond dark, like, the violence—the MURDER—is right there in the text! On the page! And they teach this stuff to children! (Yeah, I know the real Bible holds the record for “most characters murdered on page with an animal jawbone,” so real life isn’t really any better, but I’m still horrified.) Oh, and what a surprise, belief in Mother Magic comes with its own variation of rapture ideology. What’s the word for a religion that’s obsessed with the afterlife being more important than the living world, and looking forward to dying? Gosh, it rhymes with “breath tult,” what was it . . .

And speaking of things that were even more significantly worse than I realized, Cygnet Lodge needs to be, uh, razed to the ground and the earth beneath it salted? Because you are telling me, on top of all the troubled teens camp/gay conversion therapy coding, that the Carrows were also kidnapping Muggle children and telling the magic children to MURDER THE MUGGLE CHILDREN? And Draco refused, of course, but I’m betting some of the students actually do it? That is A LOT, wow. Now I’m scared to find out what happened between Draco and Lavender at Cygnet, because I’m scared it involved that Muggle boy somehow . . .

Little boy Gaunt isn’t quite as bad as his canon counterpart, in my eyes. Still malicious for sure, with his ire being focused on anyone “beneath” him, fitting with him growing up in privilege in a stratified society. But it’s also obvious that growing up with a parent has been good for him. He’s not a solitary figure lashing out with harm at anyone for any reason; he’s more calculating and indirect about what he does, with more concrete goals than “make others feel my misery.” It's also interesting that his name preference is chosen for a much more shallow reason: instead of Voldemort constructing a new name out of the old letters to forge himself a new future, Marvolo just wanted to “sound wizardy,” to fit in with (his perception of) his new culture. And of course, we know from Myrtle just how desperate he was to fit in . . . Oh, and Agatha cute, more Agatha please?

The ending scene was very lovely! After all the, uh, heavy? scenes between Harry and Draco this year, it was nice to see Harry just comforting Draco, and giving him somewhere safe to sleep. A nice cuddle for two tired kids!

—doctorlit is amused that if Harry had left Draco at the Slytherin common room, Harry would have been caught by Filch on the way back to Gryffindor’s

I got into all the grad schools I applied for, but now I've got to secure funding for them...

Gaunt is definitely hewing close to home, isn't he? And yes, he's gerrymandering--or, in UKpol terms, creating pocket boroughs.

Heck, Harry’s nightmare later in this very chapter confirms that following the heir of Slytherin is actually taught as part of the Avalonian “scripture.” Terrifying! It assumes that lineage will never produce an abusive monster!

Yeah that's a worldbuilding thing from the OG worldbuilder and it never ceases to give me the heebie-jeebies. Divine right of kings much? She tries to justify it by saying that if a member of a given bloodline with an attribute acts contrary to that way, there's magical consequences... but I'm sure Tommy could make anything seem just if he framed it just right.

Lavender does have her good points, and her Karen points, and I have to admit that at the time of writing this and the next chapter I was in the throes of having just watched the new Wicked film for the first time...

Nice, you picked up on the UHC shooter vibes :P

I suppose when your alternative is County Paris a creepy older guy pushed on you by a patronising family member, your better option is Romeo the local hotheaded teenager that you actually like...

Basilisk at lastolisk is so funny to the part of me that got exposed to Homestar Runner through one of my uni friends...

Nott is certainly acting shady in Harry's perspective!

Ron and Hermione have a falling-out over Lavender, while Harry and Draco get closer.

BL 9, 10, 11 warnings for this chapter. Please check the content warnings at the start of the chapter for more context!

I would love to respond to all of this in detail, but the show will do that itself, and it's better if I let that happen. Basically: You're not wrong; keep going. ^_^

I will say that the Farscape fangroup I joined back in the day was called the Friends and Defenders of Pilot (FaDoP, pronounced like "fed up"), and that is why to this day my emoticons wear Pilot's carapace on top. {= ) And I'll clarify that he can direct Moya, but since she's a living ship, she can also direct herself.

And yeah, it's rather planet-of-the-week to start and maintains elements of that throughout, but the overarching plot (beyond "evade pursuit, survive, try to get home") cometh in due time.

I shall be following along with the episode transcripts by FaDoP founder Sojushisan, which are blatantly opinionated and very fun. ^_^ Caution: May contain spoilers, I'm not sure.

~Neshomeh

Assuming "S1E1 - Pilot" is the first episode, obviously... ^_~

There's a lot to like. The muppets are shockingly Labyrinth, which shouldn't have taken me by surprise but did. I enjoyed the fact that John Crichton (Kaitlyn, incredulously: "Is his name actually John?!), Human Manly Adventurer, actually isn't a pilot. He's a scientist! The fact that he latches onto the first person he meets who looks like him is a problem, but it's a problem because of the character, not the writing. (I also giggled at the reveal that he apparently thinks Pilot is actually transparent and blue. Has he never seen Star Wars?)

In terms of plot, there wasn't much to say on the basis of one episode. It feels like it's setting up a "planet of the week (because we're being chased)" show, a la Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, arguably Voyager and Quantum Leap... there was a bit of a growth industry on those, wasn't there? But for all I know, they could have escaped the Peacekeepers at the end of the episode and will now spend three seasons floating in a nebula.

The Peacekeepers... would operate a lot better if they weren't being led by '90s Lin Manuel Miranda. The dude repeatedly watched clear footage of his brother harassing and sideswiping a stationary ship, and still went with "you killed my brother, prepare to die". If we could just promote him to a desk job, the rest of the crew should have this whole escaped-prisoners malarkey locked up by lunchtime.

Moya is beautiful ^_^. I'm less instantly enamoured of her crew, which consists of Ood Klingon, Sex-Cultist Twi'lek, Evil Muppet, Transparently Blue Guy, and now Adventure Scientist and Literally The Enemy. They're good TV, but I don't find myself liking them as people straight off.

Except Pilot, who... isn't a pilot? I'm confused. He seems to be the Ops officer, keeping ship's systems going and maybe telling the "autopilot" where they want to go. I would have expected him to have the manual flight controls, but I guess the translator microbes got a bit mixed up. (Love those, by the way, though them being given in childhood makes me wonder whether anyone speaks the same language as anyone else, or if everyone across space just invented their own language which the microbes translate.)

hS

In which the Skystreakers discover just how much their past got rewritten due to them being accidental casualties of Kaito's rewrite.

I'm taking this chance to announce that The World Without Authors has kind of entered the "end of service" phase. Kinda. I still have two arc planned after this one, but after that this story will be fully wrapped up (an estimate of around a dozen chapters more, 15 at most, from now), but this thing has become a bit too big to handle.

As such, since the fifth arc will already provide a good climax for the entire thing, I will take the chance to wrap this thing up and do other projects. What exactly I haven't given much though about already - I haven't even decided if it will still be stuff about Sergio, Nikki and company or if it will be an entirely new setting (I might end up doing actually both, since I plan on doing MUCH shorter things - no more several hundred words behemots from me!). I have time to decide, it will still take me at least one year to finish TWWA...

I'd go with incoherent, myself.

--Ls

Amazing how Gaunt just contradicted his own logic, right there in the newspaper! “Hogwarts students have outsized influence on elections” and “there are only double digits worth of student voters in a given year” are a square peg and a gerrymander-shaped hole. But I’m sure his friends in the Circle of Avalon won’t notice, because they think they deserve to win all elections; he’s telling them exactly what they want to hear. Heck, Harry’s nightmare later in this very chapter confirms that following the heir of Slytherin is actually taught as part of the Avalonian “scripture.” Terrifying! It assumes that lineage will never produce an abusive monster! Thank goodness there aren’t any real life religions in the United States that would look to a particular politician as a figurehead, and vote him into a position of power on the assumption that he would destroy their perceived enemies and place their religion in ascension over the rest of U.S. culture! That would be destructive and harmful indeed! Anyway, I’m glad to see Marvolo Gaunt is finally making New Avalon great again.

Welp. I must be just as dense as Ron, because when Ginny said he had “three girls on the hook,” I had the exact same reaction. Who’s the third girl? Lavender, and Hermione . . . after three to five minutes of contemplation, I finally remembered Ron is interested in Cho in this timeline. I am not, uh . . . smart! (And yes, I know Hermione is the one Ron is failing to recognize, but obviously I wasn’t going to forget the local book nerd!) Also, speaking of Lavender, I know she isn’t “the one I’m supposed to be rooting for,” but I really do love that she got her hands on the commentator microphone and just immediately started talking up her man midgame. I like to think that even without Harry’s placebo ploy, Ron would have gotten a good enough confidence boost from Lavender’s words to get the job done satisfactorily. Lavender’s pretty okay, actually!

Oh ho ho, Brutus Malfoy played fast and loose with people’s safety, and paid a price! It seems that power and money can’t always save you after all! If Brutus hadn’t denied all those coverage claims, Luigi might not have—shoot, sorry, I moused over the wrong tab!

Ooooooooooooh, Rabastan is a bad dude. Like, I already knew that, for at least a couple reasons, but holy cow, that is a baaaaaad maaaaaan. He’s, um. That scene was kind of ill-making, you know what I mean? My stomach was upset with my eyes? Blegh. No wonder the Malfoy parents have ramped up their protagonist vibes this year; I’m impressed Narcissa had the pateience and strength of will to not murder Rabastan and join the Order of the Phoenix on the spot. Yeah, we need to, uh. We need to “finish the bonding” as soon as possible, so there’s no chance Draco can get forced into marrying Rabastan? And also, maybe, possibly, kill Rabaatan?! Because there might be more skinny teenage boys??!? And we need to??!?!?! Not let that!!?!?!?!?! Happen?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Boy, I did not catch the name during the Pensieve scene; that was Gregson? Man, she was on both ends of the Marvolo Gaunt situation, and didn’t even realize it . . . I love it as a writing detail, though, linking two separate years through a minor character. I’m also glad Draco was able to communicate the basilisk’s presence to someone close to the Order, too; They’re already lucky no one has run into the basilisk during the spying work! Progress! (My note-to-myself for this section reads, “basilisk at lastolisk.” Because I am a child.)

Some minor stuffs:
-Pansy immediately dropping Draco from the team is such a quintessentially Slytherin solution to a problem! “Teamwork not teamworking? Just cut off the weakest link and move on!”
-Pointless to keep ranting about it, but Nott is maneuvering in the background AGAIN. Although . . . interesting tidbit about one of his family’s elves getting MURDERED! Like, for what, the unionizing situation? But Nott’s father would seem like the logical suspect there, but he’s clearly concerned by it, AND seems to think it’s related to his own wife’s death, too? Extremely weird stuff going on there, and maybe Nott isn’t up to something dastardly after all . . . Oops. I ranted again.
-Noooo Hermione, calm down! You can’t go around attacking other students, you’ll get in trouble again!
-New word, sort of: “secateurs,” though I learned them as “garden shears.”

And a possible missing word, though I may have read the sentence wrong because it was very early this morning:
Harry dove into another fight with the Snargaluff, just Dean and Seamus’ whispered row . . .
I think you wanted “just as” after Snargaluff? Also, how dare you remind me Snargaluffs exist, I hate them so much.

—doctorlit makes his first post on the board since being declared cancer-free!

I’d have to recommend the Official Fanfiction University of Redwall by Laburnum as well, seeing as that’s how I found the PPC.