The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

...two USAF captains met on an airplane and fell in love. A year later, they were married.

And twenty years ago, they decided to have me.

And... I still have no idea what I'm gonna do with my life even though I just realized it's like a quarter over already.

Eh, whatever. I'm gonna have a party and eat birthday cake. Life is good.

*showers the Board with cakefetti* Happy birthday, me!

When you said "oldbies", I thought of what I'm now going to call the "disputes group". The disputes group are the PPCers who tend to non-trivially (more than casting a quick "yeah, that seems good" on other people's votes etc.) participate in calling people out, discussions about community standards like this one, and so on. (To give an example, you and Scapegrace are both rather squarely in the disputes group from what I can remember). My post was encouraging more people to join that group, since there seems to be a general perception that it's a bit small.

Also, by what I think your standards are, the latest date you can put on when I became an "oldbie" was June 2012, when I started working on T-Board.

Oh, and, hey middlebies! Small suggestion. Those PPC traditions that happen every once in a while, like the Pokemon tournament or holiday RPs? You can start one! You can revive an old one that's lapsed because the last person to do it isn't around anymore!

More generally, take something that's missing around here and make it happen, lest we start coasting on the old folks' memories of the glory days! Join us in keeping this a place you want to hang out in!

Also, Phobos (and others who've been around longer that I have):

- When do you think (vaguely) we started having a distinct group of middlebies?

- Has the PPC gotten bigger, membership-wise? (I think it might've grown slightly, but not by much)

- Tomash

I mean, come on, it's hS' stuff and he's one of my favorites. And, well, it's hard for anything C*l*b**an to not stand out.

Derik's was quite heart-wrenching, and the mission itself wasn't exactly anything to sneeze at, either. What can I say, I'm a sucker for characters getting everything they love ripped away from them.

Dann's can be summed up in two words: Fangirl. Stampede. That is all. :)

...I should really go and give all of those a reread, it's been far too long.

That is pretty much what happens to recruited character replacements. As replacements, they explicitly are not the canon character they've replaced, just someone who might kinda sorta maybe look like them and share a couple things in common.

But if I understand you right, no, I don't think that makes them more unique or "non-standard" than a completely original character. Even characters you made up yourself are going to draw on inspiration from somewhere—more likely multiple somewheres.

Nume, for instance, largely draws on Dr. House, another cantankerous but very intelligent misanthrope with a substance dependency and, maybe, a heart of gold. He's also a little bit based on my dad and a big bit on your archetypal `70s nerd, with a weird memory and some weird hangups about sexuality for spice.

Derik, while looking like the Phantom of the Opera, sharing a passion for music, and being a little bit off his rocker, is mostly an ex-dragonrider with all the selfless devotion to duty and protecting others that entails. He's a product of his badfic, but he's even more a product of my love for both canons, and dragons, and music, and seriousface hero types wrestling with their dark side.

Make sense?

~Neshomeh

I'm on Eastern Time, so I think 5 hours behind you. So I think the best day will be Saturday. I'm available most of the day. I can do 18:00 Eastern on Weekdays.

Because I've begun adding some examples of recruitment to the Recruit page, and a wide variety of examples is always good. Mostly what I've added are the stories of people from World One, with the exceptions of Ranger, Surhat Roac, and Roger Walters.

The last two might be my favorite recruitment stories, because they showcase a pair of original characters finding their way to the PPC from original universes in unique ways. The stories do a great job of introducing the characters and the worlds they come from, which makes them even better. At the very least, they stuck with me enough that I thought to look them up six years later.

What are your favorites? What do you like about them, and what makes them stand out from the crowd? (Please don't nominate your own writing, that's cheating.)

~Neshomeh

(Since I wanted to see if this would pass muster as a character. Although there are a few points:)

1-2. Actually, the character I came up with wasn't a canon originally, but rather a character replacement. Altered by the Suethor (if that's how they come to be) and then convinced of a different backstory by a different person (probably outside of the PPC, as this'd have to be someone who isn't out to kill him.)

3. Yep. In this story, the agents (whoever they are) intended to kill him, but when he had the incident that gave him the burns and the memory loss, they probably either got distracted or thought he'd died/thought he was going to die soon and left him for dead.

4. Definitely. I seriously can't consciously write a Mary Sue without it being a joke. This idea was mainly to generate some interesting plots due to administration having to keep him from finding out his identity and also due to the actual canon also probably being out to kill him.

5. That is a good point. I think I've decided against the idea for using a canon as an agent (as I clarified, this idea was separate from the canon question, and the canon I thought of using had pretty much nothing to do with it.) But still a good idea.

-Twistey

In the words of The Who:
YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

(Attempted to make it as long as it is in the song. Somehow. Hope you enjoyed my really long "yeah". Happy Boardaversary.)

-Twistey

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. If I have parsed what you said correctly, you have a character who is the canon that has been injured and then lied to about his identity. His entire personality is based on lies that have been imposed on him by those that recruited him.

If that is what you were saying then it isn't what I was trying to say. The main distinction I am trying to make with Kelok is the Suethor did the altering, not the agents who recruited him. He's also fully aware of where he came from.

He wasn't a Stu as written in his story. I'd always recommend killing a Sue/Stu or exorcising/deglittering/memory wiping a canon that hasn't been replaced. His was a pretty specific situation with a canon replacement who isn't a Sue/Stu.

Agents aren't meant to the coolest or most super powered either (which the main characters often are in their own canons). I think it actually makes it more difficult to write good, interesting PPC missions with a highly powered agent than one who has to scrape by on ingenuity.

One final comment. If the agent is meant to be the actual canon, then it really limits what you can do with them. You have to constantly think about keeping them in-character with the canon material. There isn't much room for growth and change while respecting that. With a character who is your own (however they came to the PPC or your general fiction) you get to direct their development and decide what is in-character for them. It is relaxing in a lot of ways to be fully in charge of that as an author.

I find myself unable to move on to write a fluffy interlude while I just let this simmer unresolved.

Herr Wozzeck, I don't think you have been singled out for unfair treatment. I see how difficult it is to talk about a complaint when we can only talk in such vague words. But disclosing information that violates privacy was a bad move, especially when we just had this big crisis about that and all agreed that it shouldn't happen ever again.

Nord, why are you furious? You used what-I-don't-know-because-it-was-redacted-before-I-could-see-it as an excuse, so you depended on it being known; otherwise, how would that excuse have worked? I've actually not seen you doing this, but I have not seen you denying it here, so it happened and I don't need further evidence that would reveal personal information. Maybe you didn't intend to use this excuse here and thus didn't want us to know (which would show actual progress from the olden times), so being disappointed or even angra I might understand, but furious is a strong word. Anyway, I hope we have made sufficiently clear that we try to be considerate, if we are in the know, but that whatever-may-be-applicable is no excuse for not even trying.

Both of you, from what I can see, we are looking at the fallout of a friendship that may have been forced and turned out to be unhealthy years ago. I don't know what we can do about that, other than strongly recommend that you continue to ignore each other, like you already started to do. I sincerely hope we don't need to emphasize our dislike of having this blow up in our faces by adding an "or else", like we did for Bramandin.

Actually, it would be nice if you, before continuing the ignoring, could consider Tomash's suggestion of simultaneous apologies, made below.

HG

As promised! Posted below are the notes that JulyFlame gave me back in 2012 for my AU interlude "Five Stages". Yes, I hung onto them for several years because I thought they were that good.

I'm not suggesting that every time you beta, you need to do something like this. I would argue, however, that aiming for something like this would be a good goal.

The notes themselves.

If anyone else has old beta notes they think are particularly good, you are more then welcome to post them here (just make sure to get your beta's permission first).

There used to not be a gap, as I see it. You kinda graduated straight from "newbie" to "oldbie" when you decided you weren't a "newbie" anymore. And that's actually why I use the quotation marks around those terms. There is no concrete rule for what makes someone an "oldbie". It's all perception.

My general thinking on what each term means is this (and not at all a thing anyone needs to take as gospel truth):

Newbies are members of the community that preface posts with things like "I know I haven't been here very long, but..." or some such. They aren't yet comfortable interacting in the community on their own merits.

Oldbies are members of the community that take some responsibility for the community. PGs and Discord Mods are, kinda by definition, almost always Oldbies. There are, however, Oldbies who don't have any title but try to set a good example of how things are done.

Middlebies are people who are comfortable interacting in the community and posting on their own merits, but who maybe don't take an active role. (Technically, I think my previous post is asking the Middlebies to choose to become Oldbies?)

You'll note that there is no designation of time in these definitions. I've seen, in my time, people jump straight to Middlebie in a week. I've seen Newbies of 2 years, and I've seen Oldbies of 1.

But these are just my definitions. And there is nothing wrong with being at any point on this scale. It's just a convenient way of talking about things.


As for you, Tomash, I'd say you qualify as an Oldbie. You take some responsibility for the community and, with the one notable exception, set an good example.

-Phobos

Unless I'm misremembering, the pile of middlebies who hang out here but stay away from the big stuff has been a feature of the PPC for ... about as long as I've been here.

I'm pretty sure you could have made this post in, say, September 2011, and all you would've needed to do is use different names such as Tomash and Shoe.

So, this seems to be a long-standing problem. I worry this might just be something fundamental about how humans act in groups, and I'd gladly be proven wrong. I think it would help the community if people wouldn't do what I did back in the day and stay far back, only tossing in a quick vote on any concrete proposals once the dust has settled. Then again, I've read several posts here where people are saying that they're generally happy with how things have been handled so far and they they don't have anything to add. If that's genuinely the case for most of the people here, then it looks like those of us who've been participating can congratulate ourselves on a job (mostly) well done.

To those of you who've said you're staying out of here for various reasons (you don't trust your judgment, you think you'll make things worse, etc.), please don't take that last paragraph as some sort of "you must participate even though you feel uncomfortable" thing, and thank you for being open about your motivations.

On a personal note, am I generally considered an "oldbie" now? I've been around for six-ish years, so I'm pretty sure I qualify by that standard. But it seems like that's not how everyone uses the word "oldbie" these days.

- Tomash

I would suggest a third, intermediate stage showing the communication between the betas and the authors that comes between the initial comments and the polished product.

I've been around the PPC since August of 2014, so perhaps that makes me a "Middlebie" of sorts too. In that time I've seen a number of debates, but most of the once I participated in involved newbies not yet understanding how to ingratiate themselves into our community as well as the rest of us do. A few have gone off the deep end and either left on their own volition or, in one or two rare cases, gotten themselves outright banned. This may have clouded my perception and skewed it somewhat in the favor of newbies, because speaking as someone who's caused trouble with online groups before due to both lack of familiarity and a massively inflated teenage ego, I can sympathize more with being new than being old, as it were.

With this in mind, it took me a while to start realizing that being an "oldbie" does not automatically make you a voice of authority. Nor does it guarantee that you'll be welcome - look what happened with JulyFlame and Desdendelle. In fact, it was the massive flock-fest this past March that led me to realize that the people who've been around for as long as these two, or hS, or Nesh, or others whom we regard as "oldbies" have burdens of their own. I'm awful at pointing fingers at anyone and certainly won't do so here - we all make mistakes after all - but I can now say that these burdens have been ignored for too long simply because nobody considered speaking up against what we all thought were "voices of authority" - I'm pretty sure anyone who considered it worried that such an action would lead to the community turning against them for opposing a well-respected community member. This same mentality may explain why people are too scared to stand up to oppressive leaders in politics, challenge the views of eminent thinkers, or openly call out celebrities on their poor behavior.

This has to stop. Right now.

I've lived under the roof of a family who's been controlling myself and my brother for over two decades now. I obviously owe it to my parents for shaping me into the person that I am today, and if it weren't for their love and guidance I wouldn't have gotten my graduate degrees, or managed to get myself employed in the first place. That doesn't change the fact that both of them aren't that good at parenting, though - a doting mother who struggles to address our problems effectively, and a father who, as he himself has apologetically lampshaded, has been known to put too much "tough" into "tough love". I've tried to speak up and try to get them both to improve, but for the gods' sake, they're my parents. Talking back to your parents is a societal no-no, even if it's for their good and your own. And so the struggles continue. Perhaps my analogy for the whole "Oldbies vs. Newbies" interaction is not a good one - though our community is very much like family, every PPC boarder is still an independent thinker. But for my taste, I'm very much seeing a sort of an extended family dynamic among all of us on the Board, and while I can't speak for anyone else, I can't help but think that it's become so dysfunctional in light of the events this past March, a feeling which is both depressing and downright cringeworthy.

I still feel I should've spoken up sooner, and I'm pretty sure most if not all of the "Middlebies" feel the same way. But if the Newbies don't know enough to point out things that long-running members need to improve upon, let alone problems that have plagued the community as a whole for so long, then that leaves us and us alone as the ones to speak up. And speak up we should - as soon as we possibly can. If there's one thing this community needs, it's damage control, and perhaps us "Middlebies" may be exactly that - the mediating forces that can help restore the PPC community's collective sense of being one big, happy Internet family.

On top of what I previously mentioned, I'm now on my way to accepting the job invite I received a while ago and need to spend my time preparing for the moving. I don't have the time to participate much in these discussions, and I feel that a lot of what I've wanted to say has been said already. Perhaps I should try to rectify that once I get the time, though.

This is, by the way, directed at the group, not just Scapegrace (though Scape's points brought this to mind).

We seem to be talking about an interplay between "Oldbies" and "Newbies". I can't argue that "Oldbies" don't speak with the authority of experience. I also can't argue that "Newbies" don't quickly pick up on and follow that. These are things that I don't think are fixable.

My question, and possible way to a solution, is this: Where's everyone who isn't an "Oldbie" or a "Newbie"? What part do they play in this? We've forgotten the middle half of the community, and I think they are important. They bridge the gap between the other two groups.

Think about it. They remember what it is like to be new and in awe, but they've been around long enough to realize that "Oldbies" are just people. It makes sense that they should be the fulcrum upon which the scales balance.

The reason I think we've forgotten this group, despite half the community falling into it, is that we never had it before. Do you know what we used to call people who'd been around for a couple of years? Oldbies. Now, what an "Oldbie" is has shifted and the gap between "Oldbie" and "Newbie" has grown, but we've forgotten that the gap isn't empty. It's full of Scapegraces and Allebs and Hieronymus Graubarts and KittyEdens.

I think the "Middlebies" are the solution, but it is going to require them to take more ownership of the community. Be more invested. Answer "Newbie" questions. Question "Oldbies" when they say something you disagree with.

This is your community, too. You have a voice. It will help fix problems if you use it.

-Phobos

... yeah, so what sort of times are you around?

hS

Also, I like both options, but since everybody is so eager to submit stories, it will probably be Proposal One, so I'll try to come up with another interlude. I like the random assignment, but I don't believe that everything can be kept anonymous until the end; the author of an interlude with Agents Androia and Hieronymus is not difficult to guess. Also, there is some uncertainty about technicalities.

Unlike some others here, I'm mostly available now, but may not be around after the end of this month (having some surgery to be done).

HG

I realize tone doesn't carry well, but it was more of an expression of exasperation. Followed up by saying I don't actually want to do it. But if it makes anyone take this situation a bit more seriously, I'll be pleased.

~Neshomeh

Secret Boardversary message!

The drawback to proposal is that we couldn't use our own characters, as that would give away the writers' identities. I don't really have any plotbunnies/interest in non-PPC writing right now. So I guess proposal two sounds best to me.

—doctorlit

I mean, if the purpose of this is to show what good betaing looks like, we would assume that all participants are already good at betaing, and we would just get a more diverse version of Option Two.

I'm under the impression that this, rather than being a demonstration, is an exercise (open to newbies who never beta read before) in doing the full beta process, which in my understanding and to my experience is not done by reading it once and putting up some comments. But I may be wrong. It's up to PC to clarify the details.

HG

I mean, at first, anyhow. It serves to show the betaing process so it can get seen and commented on by everyone else, and also keeps the context of what's actually being beta'd. Which will certainly be a whole lot smoother, I imagine!

Perhaps it could have two stages - the first stage, in which the stories, unedited and commented on, are posted, are seen, get concrit, et al. And then, a bit later on, there'd be the second stage, where the fics are all finished and polished and fancy, with no comments and all the advice having been accounted for, and just get sort've posted. For funsies.

The first stage is, obviously, the one that's more relevant to the whole 'learning to beta' thing, but it's nice to see the finished products, too, innit? Like, Iunno, Masterchef, when they do a close-up dolly shot of the single nugget of beef with leaf on the side, after it's been made and judged. Or some such. I don't watch MasterChef much.