The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I have successfully moved to a new city and am currently attempting to learn a new language (Hungarian). Why, you may ask? It’s because I want to learn how to sing along to some of my new favorite songs. Other then that, I’ve been doing a lot of bed-rotting because I am a lonely little creature with no life.

And hi again, since I've not visited the Discord in a while.

--Ls

But it's good to see you all around and (hopefully) in good health. It's been up and down for me but still living and surviving on my own. I'm happy to have some of you guys around on Discord. I started writing a D&D campaign for my Polish table. I'm slowly looking to buy my own apartment. Overall, life goes on and sometimes no news is good news :)

I've looked at it before, but not in all that much detail, but I like its phonology. And, like, conlangs are fun!

I find myself skeptical of Bluesky; I'm sure it has a lot of neat features, but I doubt it'll end up anything more than a small-ish alt-social media site, like Mastodon, Threads, or Tumblr. But, like, if that's what you're looking for, maybe it's perfect? I dunno, I doubt I'll join.

--Ls

Continuing the eternal work of being the best version of myself, and recognizing that what that means today won't be the same as what it meant yesterday or will mean tomorrow.

I've reached out to some of my neighbors to foster greater community. As an introvert, this is difficult, but I feel strongly that it is necessary. I am seeking a path of local involvement that will let me be of service to others and help resist changes that bring harm.

My focus on writing and other creative projects is more scattered than ever, but I'm not abandoning them.

I continue working as a pet-sitter, and lately made great progress in working with a difficult cat. She's fine with her guardian around, but is very protective of her territory when her guardian is away, and will lash out aggressively at "invaders" (i.e., me); I've previously avoided harm through careful attention to her body language (not always intuitive!) and patience so as not to provoke her into lunging. Also through keeping shoes/boots on, because I'm not perfect. >.> I was pretty sure this was fearful aggression, motivated by territorial/resource insecurity, so I wanted to see if it was possible to help her enough that I could keep her as a client. In working with her and her guardian together, I learned that she's motivated by play, which is good because successfully "hunting" helps a cat feel secure in their territory. During the last series of real drop-in visits, I still had a bit of a hard time getting in the door, but once she engaged in play, she no longer felt the need to growl, hiss, and threaten violence to remind me that this was HER place. In fact, she chose multiple times to give me space by hiding under the bed, which just reinforces my belief that she's a deeply insecure cat at heart. She's been through a lot of changes with her guardian as the only constant, so I don't blame her. After this, I have a lot of hope that she might eventually see me as a friend! Especially with the aid of treats, too, when I come in and when she's doing well. {= )

~Neshomeh

I've been doing anything to keep myself going and functional. I'm still looking for a job but it's hard not to despair during the hunt so I'm trying to do some programming projects to keep myself sharp, employable, and not going crazy. I've also been doing a lot of other things: I've been working on creating my own 78-card tarot deck in pixel art, I finished watching The Good Place, started digging into Klingon as a language (and also examined some other conlangs and conscripts, like the tiny and simple language of toki pona and its sitelen pona writing system).

I've also been spending time on Bluesky, the new Twitter clone everyone is raving about. It's typically framed as a Jack Dorsey project, which is a little misleading: Bluesky was funded by Twitter while Dorsey was CEO, and he had a position on the board, but he was never the primary person in charge of the project and he actually left and deleted his account quite some time ago when it became clear that the people working for Bluesky the company weren't interested in building an entirely moderation-less libertarian hellscape.

But there is a lot that is cool and interesting about Bluesky. You can make and publish blocklists that anyone else can subscribe to in the app, but you can also make lists of people to subscribe to ("starter packs", they call them). You can even make a list of users and get a feed of only posts by those users, whether you're subscribed to them or not. So if you want to, say, corral all the posts from news organizations into a feed separate from your normal subscription feed that you have to click to read, you totally can do that. Or make a feed that only shows posts from artists you like. Or a feed that only has your friends on it so you can go to one place and make sure you've seen all their posts.

Bluesky's also very technically open. The people in charge are hardcore about making Bluesky an open system (up to and including doing their best to protect users from their future selves should they ever turn evil). You can export your data from their servers and stand up your own personal server to host all your content, if you want to do that, and the network will transition over seamlessly so your followers may not even notice it happened. Basically all the software is open-source, even for the bits of the network that are currently centralized under bluesky's control (short version: there are some critical pieces of the network that Bluesky controls that would be problematic if Bluesky turns evil. Bluesky says they are actively working to change this, and they have been willing to put their money where their mouth is on that front in the past so I trust them for now). It's pretty clear the end goal for Bluesky is to ensure that the network can live on even if they become evil or go out of business.

Also if you're a programmer there's a ton of really cool stuff you can do. I already mentioned how you can make a custom feed from a list of users, but programmers can actually create custom feeds with their own algorithms. For example, I follow a feed that only shows posts made by people I follow, but not reposts. There's a science feed that shows science-related posts (marked with a 🧪 emoji) from confirmed scientists and science communicators. There's a cat feed, which I think is using computer vision to recognize cats?

You can also create what are called Labelers, which are kinda like user run moderation services? They can attach content warning tags to posts and users and then you can decide what you want to do about those posts/users. People have used this so that you can, say, have your pronouns labeled on your profile, but there are also a lot of more niche things labellers detect that you can warn, notify, or block posts based on. There's one labeller that only IDs social media screenshots and even tries to identify what site they were from, so if you want to block twitter screenshots, hide reddit screenshots behind a warning you have to click through, and show Tumblr screenshots by default, you can totally do that. It's all very cool and interesting and it makes me want to build something stupid and fun. Social media just hasn't been this open since... when was livejournal again?

(I mean, I was never on livejournal, but I know it was open enough that you could interact with alternate journal sites. Actually, fun fact: the "sign in with Google" etc buttons you find in websites now rely on the descendent of the system Livejournal originally developed so you could post comments on alternate journals using your LJ account. This is kind of a digression but I don't think people give Livejournal enough credit for how influential it was, socially and technically. It was hugely important for the free press in Russia since it had good international language support at a time when that was rare and was hosted in the US and therefore safer for dissenting voices. Of course, they got DDOSsed a lot. And then LJ was sold to a Russian oligarch so they could get information on these folks and get a ton of them arrested...).

So yeah! That's what's up.

You don’t have to give all your characters perfectly balanced attention. If you feel like you have more to write about Kaguya, then write it!

—doctorlit

'Guya and his parents actually hang out at a high-society event.

I have a few more backstory ideas for Kaguya, given his background, but I'm hesitant to write them because I'm afraid I'd be unfairly favoring him. What do you think?

I've been managing my relatively fresh hEDS diagnosis while planning for a move to California. The boyfriend and I don't plan on staying there long-term because it's just too expensive, but we've got his friends as housemates to share the cost and I'll be near the ocean again. (The real fun part will be fighting for the internet bandwidth on FFXIV raid night, because boyfriend tanks and I heal for the same team.)

I'm going to meet his family this Christmas, and apparently they're all very excited to meet me, so I'm both excited and nervous about having to impress them.

I just switched departments at work (new one is a much nicer place to be so I am happy), I'm finally in talks to buy my own house after something like four years of searching the right one, and oh just yesterday evening I discovered I'm going to be an uncle.

Lots of things, still processing.

I also plan to draw some of my agents soon.

(I'm also jealous of the 20k word interlude. That's a huge accomplishment! I look forward to reading it.)

We're spending New Years in the Netherlands, so I've been planning that. Have to focus not to overplan these things... I always get stressed about getting to places on time but it's never necessary to be fully booked every day so it's mostly unneeded for me to get that worked up. A couple of plans are in motion though! We'll be doing an award-winning escape room in Amsterdam, which I am really excited about! (I have also really, really overspent on Christmas calendars this year. We will be all set for porridge, noodles, a variety of Asian snacks, puzzles, tights, and beard oil in the coming weeks. My bank account is crying but I am not.)

Finally finished my Psychonauts interlude! It's going through a second round of beta-ing right now, but it'll be up after that. It took me literally a year to finish and it is my longest PPC-related story to date at just over 20K words, but I did end up really pleased with it. It was a lot of fun to really dig deep with the psychology of my characters and play around with metaphor, so I hope people like it when it comes out.

The escape room I work for will hopefully change locale sometime after New Year's, and we will design entirely new rooms! As a result I've been focusing a lot on puzzle design and pitching ideas, some of which have worked. It's a group effort and I work with some really creative people, so I'm sure the results will be amazing.

No snow yet. Hasn't been quite cold enough, but I'm expecting that to change fairly soon. Right now it's just DARK. Snow would brighten things up around here. And put me in the holiday spirit. Meanwhile I will have to brighten up the darkness with advent stars and candles, and wait for the city to join me.

Aside from that... not much? Just chilling, mostly.

Still no snow; I'm far too far south for that, at least this early in the year.

--Ls

College and video games have been taking up a lot of my time these day, but on the days I've put my mind to it I've tried to get to work on writing, especially with Nanowrimo going on.

There is a lot on the mental backlog at the moment - I finally started seriously trying to write original fiction earlier this year, and while progress has been slow on the half dozen distinct ideas it could be a lot worse. I even finished one this summer, though it's pretty weak compared to my average writing in exchange for the ability to actually finish it.

Adding on to the writing backlog is my PPC stories - I recently finished another mission/interlude combo pack that's currently in the betaing stage, and I'm currently trying to figure out how to continue the cowrite I started with Linstar back in I think February. I've also been planning another Ocotillo DIA story, and possibly a Cafeteria piece, since both have been neglected for some time now. (Also, if things go particularly well, I might be starting a new spinoff with a new agent pair - wanted to try something with the survivor of Rest Well.)

Of course, none of these will likely be finished before the year ends, but that won't stop me from trying.