The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

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

((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 ))