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((Nume the lit teacher? At what level? Did he get very far in setting himself up for it, or was it more of a plan for the more distant future?

Yeah, the PPC is...not the typical canon. I've also now got the lovely mental image of the Reader staring down a classroom and then going "Nope" and heading for the door. (Whether she gets out it or another Time Lord drags her back in is up in the air. The class is probably Time Lords of HQ...for short. The official title, provided by the Notary, is much longer and more pompous. The entire Continuity Council is meant to be teaching it in shifts. This...goes about as well as you'd expect, although almost all of them gain a new appreciation for the Notary after they see her going on at the students instead of at them for once. It's probably dispelled at the next Council meeting.)

I'm now *also* thinking of how the PPC OFU got set up. I mean, can't you just see a group of agents and Flowers arguing over what should go in, and how, and 'I saw them do it this way at OFWho' and 'No, they did it much better at OFUM' and 'What about OFUDisc, they have this one class that could really--' and so on. I mean, there are OFU *graduates* in the PPC. And former OFU liaisons and co-coordinators and so on. They'd have a lot to say, wouldn't they?

As to Lemony...huh. I...hm.

It's not so much that Avlates isn't a fan as that I misread a bit of what you wrote for them and then maybe didn't really get across what I was thinking when writing. I had the impression that Lemony was less playful in their condescension, certainly; what I was going for was a sort of discomfort over most of the people in the crowd and...yeah, basically, I was off. Guess the Lemony in Tofu Hop, at least on my part, is now a weird caricature! Oh dear. IIRC, I was kind of intending them to be the 'straight man' (no pun intended): the person who can recognize canon and good writing a little better than half the student body, and who kind of disapproves. Although it's actually more the "Oh, *honey*" kind of disapproval, isn't it?

Well. Good to know. Can't get everything right, can we? Especially in the Badfic Games. So...whoops, and I now look forward to a nice argument with Lemony Eggnog...

~Z

PS: I'm about half an hour of actual energy away from writing an interlude titled "Continuity: Pedagogy." Help?))

The ship has hit the atmosphere, and contact has been lost. The Deep Space Network (at the time of posting) tragically shows Canberra 43 and 35 standing open on the CAS channel - but nothing coming in.

So long, Cassini.

NASA have also released the compiled version of the last photo it took, several hours before impact.

hS

I'm afraid I don't have much good to report from my corner of the world, either.

Local news
This actually happened back on 9/11 and it freaked me out.

Officials say gas leak caused New Albany house explosion

It was close enough to my house that I actually felt the explosion. Scary stuff, but luckily nobody was home and nobody got hurt.

Local serious news
As my brother put it, "That moment when you realize you were taught sex ed by a sex offender." Yeah... we always knew something was off about my vice principal in middle school, but that's just... *shudders*

Serious news
Just when you thought we were done with hurricanes. Thankfully, these two are only tropical disturbances for now, but I really, really hope that they die down before they get any stronger.

More serious news
North Korea's fired off another missile, this time with the range to hit Guam.

I'm legit scared about this.

And that's all I'm going to say because this has been a bad week for news.

Have a smiling baby pig to make up for it.

((I'm very glad you like it :D Dafydd's lines were very fun to come up with (though I have this feeling I may've cribbed them from somewhere...? Possibly actual lines of his from the past...? Hmm. Not sure. Probably won't remember anytime soon, either, unfortunately). And JayBird just kind of sprang into being fully-fledged. She's pretty easy to imagine.

And hm, I'd forgotten about that story. I also hadn't quite realized it was canon, so, good to know. Should be interesting to eventually work in, I should think.

And dear oh dear. That should be a fun scene, especially if she brings it up in a class with them. I wonder what Jay and Acacia teach?

(Igotcapslocksqueeingyesssverygoodyes)

~Z

((Ah. That makes sense, and I'm sorry for bugging you about it. Also, abstinence-only education is... while not quite a trigger for me, not exactly, it certainly makes the red mist descend. I'm going to have a doughnut and calm down.))

Today is a sad day. In about two hours, the NASA space probe Cassini will be plummetting into the atmosphere of Saturn. It will keep transmitting the data from its instruments for as long as its thrusters, operating at full power, can keep its antenna pointed at Earth.

But the force of its descent will be too strong. It will lose lock. It will tumble. And then it will be gone.

It won't be sending pictures back on its way down - they would take too long to transmit. But over the thirteen years of its mission around Saturn, it has sent back literally tens of thousands of beautiful images of the planet, its rings, its family of moons, and - on one memorable day in 2013 - every single human being who has ever lived.

This is a sad day. In fact, it's a sharding miserable day, particularly for those of us who used the probes maps of Titan on our Gathering there. There's no other probe like it - of the four other probes beyond the Belt, the Voyagers are just looking at the stars, New Horizons can only make flybys, and Juno is locked into a close orbit around Jupiter, and seems to be ignoring the moons. Cassini is unique, and in a very short while, it will be gone.

... which is why I wrote/compiled a small tribute to it and its years of work.

Goodnight, Cassini

hS

Actually...you used that exact same misspelling? Back in your first chapter when Supernumerary introduces himself. So. Yeah.


((*Yeah*, now I'm smiling :D Badfic gaaaaaaames. ~Z))

Does it look any better? Not sure the style of narrating does the crossover any favors still, but at least the author's got a plan (as said in another author's note)?

Very useful.

Question for everyone:
What are your personal tropes in terms of characters, plots, settings, etc? I'm curious to see what everyone usually does.

-Twistey

Can't wait for you to publish it. I would buy copies.

-Twistey

(Well, I'm glad, because there's going to be a lot of it.)

((Hoo boy.))

Soa friend of mine said I should read this, so I adid, bt IDK who these ppl r or what's goingon onr anything. I think mabe u should use spellcheck? Or like Google tanslate or sumthing?

But its nice that they call in love at the end Iguess?

XOXOX

(( Yeah, no, she's lost. You have to have a solid grasp on actual written English before you can comprehend deeply accented written English. Plus her sexual IQ is approximately 2. She probably has an inkling that there's sex going on, and that's fine with her. She Just Doesn't Get It^TM. Abstinence-only education, no doubt. ~Neshomeh ))

(( *snerk, snort, lol* ))

Yeah, I agree with all of that. There are a lot places where systems break down, or are unfair, and we should examine and question those systems to see if they can be improved. I'm a programmer - or at least, I want to be. This is the sort of thing that I might do as a job someday, although in a very different context.

Everyone who has covered this previously has been smug, incomprehensible, seemingly focused on making me feel guilty, or all three.

So congratulations, Nesh. You win the Thoth Award For Remarkably Lucid Explanation Of A Poorly Explained Yet Uncomplicated Topic (TAFRLEOAPEYUT).

And yes, I often buy Fair Trade chocolate when I have the choice. I don't often buy my own chocolate, though...

Always a difficult subject.

I don't want to get too deep into this, mostly because I'm not really very well-versed in the topic, but what I've heard from various quarters is this: you don't have to feel guilty for the things you didn't do. However, we do exist in a system that is set up to unfairly benefit some people more than others, and as such we have a responsibility to challenge that system rather than passively sitting back and enjoying it. How you choose to bring a challenge is up to you and your individual ability, whether it's active campaigning or making educated decisions about how to spend your money or voting for progressive policies or just trying to be decent to people, but it always starts at home, by challenging your own assumptions about how the world works and how it should work.

For instance, that "one little thing" you want. You've got the ability to be upset by that because (I presume) you're not currently worrying about food, clean water, shelter, physical safety, and other basic necessities. Can you have that little thing? Yeah, you can. That's the essence of privilege. That doesn't mean it's not cool, and you can enjoy it, but be grateful, don't take it for granted, and make sure you buy it from a fair trade source.

It sounds like you probably know that really, and that you're on the right track. It gets easier to recognize these things, if not nicer, the more you work at it.

And it doesn't excuse people being jerks just to be jerks, either. Justice should never be smug.

~Neshomeh

Also, dibs on Supernumberary, mini-console or otherwise. It's my favorite misspelling of his name. ^_^

~Neshomeh

I've seen a documentary about growing and harvesting the cocoa seeds. People over there, working for decades never in their life have tasted chocolate.

Ah, found it. [CLICK]

Yes, I am aware, more or less. I understand. And it is terrible.

The reason I don't like it is that, judging by context, the person who raised it didn't do so to make a point or start an intersting conversation about colonialism and European exploitation, which, while uncomfortable, could be interesting. They did it, so far as I can tell, to be a flippant buzzkill towards my genuine enthusiasm about there being a new type of chocolate. And frankly, "new in bar form" is new enough for me.

Yes, I know that the world sucks. But can I at least have this one thing, just for a little while?

Okay, there is another reason, too. I hate feeling guilty for things that I have no control over. When people talk about how some horrible thing is done "by white people," I feel implicitly implicated in something I never did, or was even involved in. And I hate it. So that's another reason.

Although I do love chocolate. So I suppose I'll shoulder some blame for the demand for the stuff.

(( Also, apropos of nothing, the radio is currently playing the Ride of the Valkyries on piccolo. It's like the tiniest heroic charge is happening. This is hilarious and I had to share. ~Neshomeh ))

I know, "fascinating" is rapidly becoming my catchphrase. But it's interesting nonetheless.

That's also central to how I make my characters. Not so much the badfic recruits, because everything about them is already known, but Nume is a good example.

For him, the basic starting concept was Dr. House, or "brilliant misanthrope with a chemical habit." Well, once he decided he wanted to be his own person and stopped being Generic Agent #2. The Bleep habit actually came from the very first Fill the Plothole I wrote with him, though, in which I interpreted the summary as Legolas coming across an agent's Bleeprin, accidentally dropped in-fic, and the agents having to go get it back. Proto-Nume was very upset about losing that Bleeprin. Why? Well, wouldn't it be interesting, I thought, for a PPC agent to have an eidetic memory? He'd know his canon backward, forward, and inside-out, but he'd also be stuck with all the disturbing and awful things that can happen on missions. So that made Bleeprin a vital necessity to normal function and also set him on the road to "brilliant." "Misanthrope" came along for the ride.

So why does a guy like that do a job like this? Few people become PPC agents who aren't in some way passionate about it, and that holds true for Nume, too. One of his stealth traits is that he loves his job. He wouldn't trade being a PPC agent for anything. Why? His life back home was kinda rough. He was a huge geek in a time when being a huge geek wasn't easy. He grew up wanting to be on the bridge of the Enterprise, or at least somewhere in Middle-earth. He loves his canons better than he loves himself. And every so often, it shows.

But how do I know he comes from that time? Oddly enough, because of his voice—and, I'm embarrassed to admit, a bit of my own teenage arrogance. I thought I needed to explain my tendency to use big words and unusual turns of phrase somehow. That is the sole reason Nume is from the 70s: because I thought I sounded older than I was. Sigh. But, once I'd made that call, I was stuck with it, so I had to actually learn more about the 50s-70s and how growing up in that time would shape someone. That's how Nume ended up taking some inspiration from my dad, and sounding a bit like him sometimes. I think that's how he ended up being a Trekkie, too, because Star Trek was on the air then, and it's kind of the original modern fandom. It worked. So I had to learn Trek, too. >.>

What else... Oh yes, why does Nume swear the way he does? Catholic upbringing, deeply resented. Why does he know medical stuff? His parents were a doctor and a nurse. Why is he squicked out by sex? That repressed religious upbringing fits the bill again. Why does he hate people? He was a freak in a less tolerant world, and people were pretty much never good to him, so why bother?

Eventually, all the pieces just kinda fit together and you end up with a whole, solid character. The more you ask why, the more you find out, and every answer makes them more unique and more them. {= )

~Neshomeh

There's two questions here, really:

Is it actually 'a new type of chocolate'?

That depends entirely on how you define 'chocolate'. If you're referring specifically to the bars (and their derivatives), then yes, it is: until the Ruby Chocolate project began 13 years ago, this stuff had never been made into chocolate bars.*

*Actually even this isn't strictly true. The Guardian reports that the beans are grown in Brazil, Ecuador, and Côte d'Ivoire - the latter being in Africa, meaning these trees have probably been in use in the chocolate industry for a while. But they weren't used exclusively, as it were.

But is that a fair use of the word? 'Chocolate' derives from the Nahuatl (Aztec/Maya) word xocolātl, and if you allow the native drink to be included as 'chocolate', then the first 'Ruby chocolate' probably pre-dates the European discovery of the Americas.

So, like so many things, the question ultimately comes down to semantics.

Does it matter?

Sadly, yes. There is a long, long history of white people Europeans more technologically-advanced/richer nations exploiting the product of poorer ones. Sometimes, those poorer nations/peoples were even deliberately constructed - the tobacco and cotton industries, for instance, were built on the backs of African slaves in North America and the Caribbean. Other times, they were just taken over, politically and economically.

Nor has the problem gone away. Vast swathes of Africa are short of food because farmers can make more money growing bananas for Europe and America than they can growing their own crops. They're not being forced to do it (any more)... but the economic structure the First World set up is meticulously designed to keep them doing it.

So, ultimately, the point your friend should have been making is: will this give any benefit to the Brazilians, Ecuadorians, and Ivorians who actually grow the stuff? Or will it just product more incentive for European and American corporations to keep them growing cash crops that leave their country in ruins?

One thing's for sure: there's no chance the people growing the cocoa trees will ever get to taste Ruby chocolate.

hS

(The third question, which doesn't need discussing but which might be worth thinking about, is 'why didn't you like that?'. Had to say it; consider it dropped. ~hS)