The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I usually don't post on the board, but today I decided to remind people that I still exist.

It's very nice to have new blood around here. It is traditional to shower newbies in gifts, so you can have this belt of awkward conversation avoidance. It has saved me many times.

Enjoy your stay, and try not to lose your mind all at once.

Have a plate of welcome SPaGhetti!

If you haven't yet read them, may I point you towards the Original Series and the Constitution? They're pretty much the only required reading around these parts. Another useful resource you might use is

*clears throat*

Hi. RL friend of Thoth here. Hoping to pop into the Discord but he recommended I post here first. So...yeah. Hi.



Preferred Fandoms:
BattleTech/Mechwarrior
Warhammer of all flavors
Redwall
Ender's Game (Sometimes.)

Outrage is the appropriate response to things like, e.g., murder and destruction. There is LOTS of room for subjectivity in the world, but at some point, isn't the media failing in their duty if they pretend there's a debate where there isn't, or shouldn't be? Fact-checking is extremely important, and sometimes not all sides of an issue are factually valid. I have a particular example in mind, but I don't want to make the conversation about that, so I'm not going to say what it is. {= /

Anyway, I figure you can get information from just about anywhere, just as long as you keep certain things in mind. First, that there is a bias of one kind or another. Second, that somebody is trying to manipulate you for their own agenda, whether you agree with it or not. Third, somebody is profiting from it somehow. Fourth, not all data is created equal, and seventy-two percent of statistics are made up on the spot. I think my dad put it something like this: What do we know, how do we know it, and where's the money?

~Neshomeh

Author's Note:

Okay, so nobody seems to be reading any of the ffW fics in general, so I guess I'll finish this somewhere else... I guess?

(Probably going to start putting all this into a Google doc, since the fic is going to be a lot more chapters long than the Board can pay attention to, and I seriously want to finish this.

-Twistey)

G'bye for now and have a Foxytastic day!

-Nightmare Twistey The Demon Fox Animatronic

(Foxytastic. Wow. Great.

-Twistey)

01010111 01100101 01101100 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01010000 01100001 01101100 01101010 01100101 01110010 01110011 01101001 01110100 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 00100001

Mostly-wild guessing here, plus a lot of time playing KSP: Cassini broke apart early in atmospheric entry, probably not long after loss of signal. At that time, everything was still moving unbelievably quickly, and anything that was not destroyed by atmospheric forces would have been melted by the heat of reentry. (For example, the iridium-graphite fuel pellet containers.)

This analysis comes from a few things: First, as a deep-space probe, Cassini was not designed to deal with significant force on her frame. The worst she experienced was launch, which was while everything was bolted down and aligned in a single direction to survive it better. Secondly, entries into gas giants happen unbelievably quickly - multiple times faster than escape velocity here on Earth. So, forces would rapidly have piled up to unsurvivable amounts. And finally, as a vehicle not designed for reentry, Cassini would not have had anything resembling stable airflow around her hull- she would have tumbled in an ever-worsening tumble until failure occurred.

((It might help with knowing how to proceed, and there's no law that says we have to switch every chapter instead of every other chapter.))

I suppose I'm in no position to argue with that. Stupid sexy Nume. Carry on!

--Lemony

Just about every news source except for Fox has shown a great deal of frustration at Trump.

But yeah, Op pieces pretty much throw all the rules out the window.

The Beeb is generally decent. I usually get my news from NPR. And AP is also quite good at its job.

So yeah, AP, BBC, and NPR are my go-tos. The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian are also good (well, I mostly know The Guardian from their tech reporting, particularly in regards to the Snowden leaks, so take that suggestion with a grain of salt).

In addition, I'd suggest staying as far away from cable news and other TV news as humanly possible. Sure, FOX News is the one you hear about, but the others are also pretty bad.

Oh, and remember: The Daily Show is not news. It is entertainment. Yes, I know that's obvious, but in the whirling madness of cable it gets confusing, as evidenced by the fact that Jon Stewart was once voted most trusted newscaster. See why I told you to avoid the place?

CNN has a fairly strong bias, and a variety of other problems (like poor reporting standards, and wave after wave of trivial nonsense news stories to fill a 24-hour news cycle - although that complaint can be levied at just about any network).

The thing is, "by comparison," it IS much better than other TV News Networks. But that's really not saying much, now is it?

The final - and trivial - danger sign is this: 8f Jon Stewart featured you and your repoting as a topic of discussion regularly over his decade, that's generally a bad sign. :-)

As a state-funded news network, the BBC is actually /required/ to avoid bias in their news. Some slips through anyway, of course - they've shown a great deal of frustration at Twitter Personality & President Trump, and they do enjoy using unflattering pictures of politicians they dislike - but by and large they do it well.

Be aware, though, that some articles are filed in things like the Magazine section, and aren't under the same rules. Opinion pieces, basically.

hS

He probably finds it too biased.

The major three American Cable News Networks have all be accused of bias in some shape or form. MSNBC in my opinion is generally very left-leaning, and portrays itself as independent and unbiased. Fox News is incredibly right-leaning, to the point in my opinion it is borderline propaganda. Too be fair, MSNBC is pretty much as bad. But Fox, for the most part, never really pretended to be unbiased. MSNBC tries to paint itself as unbiased, but isn't.

CNN is a bit more complicated. At times people have accused them of being Left Leaning. At a time certain individuals would call it the "Clinton News Network" or the "Communist News Network". As for me, I have never seen too much of an issue with CNN. Sure their Op-Eds do tend to adopt a more liberal view, but their actual mainline reporting is fairly unbiased. Now to be fair, American Cable News does tend to be biased in some way, all news is. I just find CNN is balanced in comparison.

I couldn't think of anything entertaining, so I posted something stupid instead and made up snarky excuses. Maybe I should've just said I couldn't think of anything entertaining.

~Neshomeh

I like most of those. Except CNN. CNN is not very good.

In addition, I am a fan of NPR.

-A questionable understanding of how the pantheons could mix (and redundant referencing of "Powers That Be" when just "Powers" makes things less cluttered).

-Seemingly casting Artemis as the villain??? Or at least the most antagonistic of the gods the protagonist meets.

-Time travel??? With no indication of the perspective switches from past to future!Alex.

-Unnecessarly italicization in use of The Speech (and continuous dropping of the The there, as well) when talking with inanimate objects. The whole scenes end up italicized.

-Apparently the whole fic's plot is about an AU where Percy dies on his first quest (I wasn't quite sure where the author was specifying that things screwed up, but I'm not as much a canon expert on Percy Jackson these days, so. =P), and all the gods are at war with each other. So presumably Alex's Ordeal is about resolving all of that. Not necessarily a charge, but at least there's context.

-Oh, and Alex using a spell to siphon off Artemis' power so she won't be able to kill him (temporarily). I'm not sure if this is actually impossible or if it's just rubbing me the wrong way.

-And then, while Alex has no godly parents, there's a conversation where the gods collectively decide he's Artemis' bastard son and make her deal with it (narration/Alex indicates that they're being ridiculous, but see that first bulletpoint up there on this too).

On the one hand, he looks to have a beta. On the other hand... well.

In no particular order:

1. CNN (Probably best Cable News in the US)
2. BBC
3. Associate Press
4. Financial Times
5. New York Times
6. Washington Post
7. Economist
8. France24

I personally use CNN and BBC the most.

In my desire to stop being such a general dope about things, I have decided that I should actually start bloody paying attention to the news. Like a not-dope. The thing is, is that it is so easy to come across news sites that are so very biased, so very political, so very concerned with making people that agree with them very angry, and with simply not being read by people that don't agree with them.

I don't want objectivity, don't get me wrong! Objectivity is impossible in things written by humans, and an objective news site would probably have articles such as 'billions of years later, gravity still works' and 'how I took oxygen into my body and exhaled carbon dioxide in order to make sure the muscles in my body didn't shut down.'

There's nothing inherently wrong with opinions and subjectivity and politics and biases, but what I think is wrong is when the possibility for reasonable discourse between people of differing opinions is thrown out the window in order to pander towards people who already agree with their articles and make them boil and rupture furiously with exploding outrage and argh how could those idiots do such disgusting things I can't even believe it arrrrrgh I'm so mad that I could just agree with every single thing this person is saying without fact checking ARRRRGH.

So, on that note, I have taken to trying to figure out: which news sites are trustworthy?
MakeUseOf puts, in their article, the top three to be Associated News Press, BBC, and Brief.news.
Forbes puts their top three to be the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
TopTenz (now if that isn't an erudite-looking realm of carefully-researched scholars! It's the 'z' that really gets that across, wouldn't you say?) puts their top three to be Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and BBC.

Well, isn't that handy! Jolly old lists, just spread out, right for me!
Except, well, er, on an internet in which I don't know what to trust, I am using said internet (which I don't know what to trust on) to figure out what I'm meant to trust (on the internet.)
But what possible group of people out there are both intelligent and not hell-bent on getting my sweet earned human teeth (which is what we use in Australia instead of currency)?!
The PPC!

So, what do you lot think? You agree with the particular links I found, on trustworthy news? Got your own sites or opinions on it? Do you just want to pop in and call me an idiot? I'm fine with that. You can do that, if you really want.

We'll have to continue this in the next badfic game, Zingenmir. :/ It was fun seeing everyone throw ideas at us, though!

And now I'm imagining how it fell. Did it burn? Break apart? Simply get crushed by the gravity?

A fourteen- to sixteen-year-old girl who doesn't know the name of the author whose character she purports to have married.

Or really anything about the character at all, judging by your fic.

I'm genuinely curious here: what about Nume makes you like him, exactly? From the missions, I mean. What was the first thing that got your attention before the cancer that is 50 Shades spread to the image of him in your brain?

--Lemony

(( No, Lem, don't try to understand fangirl logic! It will only end in tears! ))

Time Lords, ex-Suvians, Flowers, aliens, magic, technology, PPC science, history, Narrative Laws, culture... and that's not to mention the basics of doing the job itself, for the various departments. From an internal perspective, the PPC is really huge. Wow. o.o

But yes, Nume the lit teacher! College-level, because anything less would no doubt result in murder-suicide and there's a little more room for eccentricity if you get tenure. He was in grad school at the time he wandered into HQ, so I suppose he was pretty far along. The idea was to eventually see fantasy and SF treated as serious literature and not brushed off as "genre fiction," which is sadly a thing that still happens today.

As for Lem, no worries. {= ) Your plan for them sounds about right, and that initial look of Malfoy-esque disdain could be down to any number of factors. And maybe lightfairy will write them totally different. ... It would be funny if they randomly switched sex every other chapter or so.

Student 1: ... Wait, weren't you a woman yesterday?

Lemony: *shrug* Eh, I'm not fussed.

Student 2: But are you a guy or a girl?

Lemony: Does it matter? Gender is a largely artificial social construct used to force people into prescribed roles that may or may not actually suit them for the sole purpose of making it simpler for the privileged to control the disadvantaged. Who needs it?

Students: But... uh... bwuh? O.o

Lemony: *sigh* Just stick with "they/them" if you're not sure. It won't hurt, I promise.


... That was fun. ^_^

~Neshomeh