The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

PPC Cookbook from approximately forever ago. I don't remember who compiled this, but there it is!

There's also the Mini-Balrog Cookbook, but I don't recommend trying to prepare any of these recipes in Real Life. ^_~

~Neshomeh

Ron didn’t exactly have the best track record with house-elf rights in canon, so I reckon it’s not incredibly off the mark for him there. And Mrs Weasley did send a Howler in canon about Arthur having an inquiry at work because of the car thing, so she’s also been known to be concerned about his standing!

That being said, yeah, they still care a little bit about society’s perception of them, since the Prewetts are Most Ancient Houses and the Weasleys used to be!

Haha oh my god take care.

Everything I learn about peacocks tells me they’re terrible creatures to raise. I suspect they’re the bane of the house-elves.

~Lily, happy you reviewed on her birthday

Nice to see the Weasleys are mostly unchanged! They're teeny bit off, with the way Ron talks about house-elves being like furniture, and Mrs. Weasley worrying about Arthur's standing in the government, but they're mostly untouched by the phoniness and performativeness of the culture. It's nice when people get to act like people, yeah?

I was going to say something about Ginny dropping off the roof, but then I realized it would be hypocritical of me. montage of doctorlit dropping off ladders and throwing himself over fences at work

(Incidentally, Ron is probably objectively right to prefer gnomes over peafowl! Peafowl are nice to look at, but their waste is large solid splops, like a mix of dog waste and soft serve ice cream. Also, their voice can be distracting, especially when you're still asleep in the morning!)

New Terms You've Taught doctorlit Today:
-kissing gate
-Wellies (though I'd heard of the brand before)

—doctorlit, Lord of the Embarrassing and Ignoble House of _________

Blueberry Pie

a 9 inch double pie crust

4 c blueberries

¾ c white sugar

1 tablespoon butter

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 425° Fahrenheit.

2. Mix sugar, cornstarch, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and sprinkle over blueberries.

3. Line pie dish with pie crust. Pour berry mixture into the crust and dot with butter.

4. Press another crust on top of the blueberries and crimp and flute the edges. Cut a hole in the top of the crust to let steam out.

5. Bake pie on the lower shelf of the oven for about 50 minutes or until the crust is golden brown.

Pie crust

2 ¾ c all purpose flour

1 ½ tsp salt

3 tablespoons white sugar

1 cup shortening

1 egg

1 ½ tsp distilled white vinegar

5 tablespoons cold water

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, and sugar. Mix well, then cut in shortening until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

2. In a small bowl, combine egg, vinegar, and 4 tablespoons of the water. Whisk together, then add gradually to the flour mixture, stirring with a fork. Mix until dough forms a ball. Add 1 more tablespoon of water if necessary.

3. Allow the dough to rest for 10 minutes in the fridge before rolling out.

Thin Butter Crackers

Ingredients:

1¼ cups flour, whole wheat or white; plus more for dusting

1 tablespoon sugar

½ teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

¼ cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

⅓ cup room temperature water

1. Preheat oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. Put the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor.

3. Add the butter and process until the butter is fully incorporated. With the blade running, add water and blend until a smooth dough forms. If you need to, pause the food processor and push down any bits stuck to the sides of the processor to ensure all the ingredients are added to the dough.

4. Once smooth, remove the dough and divide it into 4 equal-sized pieces.

5. Lightly flour your work surface and roll one of the dough pieces into a large rectangle. As you roll the dough out, lift it up frequently and turn it to keep it from sticking to your work surface. Make the dough as thin as you can. The thinner the crackers are, the flakier and tastier they will be.

6. Use a pizza cutter or butter knife to cut the dough into 1 1/2-inch square crackers. Form a ball from all the scraps and make more crackers. Repeat the process with all 4 pieces of dough. Place the cut crackers on the baking sheet.

7. Bake the crackers until crisp and lightly browned, about 12 - 13 minutes. Cool before storing in an airtight container.

Notes: You need to watch the crackers carefully after about 10 minutes so that they don’t get too dark.

As the spawning of the snrfing cute furry creature is meant to bring attention to the wrong practice of of telling which POV is it explicitly with a small note at the beginning of the paragraph, when it should be clear from the story itself.

I don't remember reading any mission in which P.O.V. is used instead of POV, but I dare say it might cause the creature to be spawned with a dotted pattern on its fur? Otherwise, the only hard rule seen so far is that the size of the individual POV is dictated by its capitalization - all caps is roughly the size of an elephant cub, no caps is around rabbit size, and first letter capitalized I think is something in between.

As per the "mini's POV", Iximaz and I ran into this issue in Runs in the Family, which while non-canon being a Ten Years Hence-type mission I believe still adheres to proper PPC mechanics. We settled on indeed having both the mini and the POV spawn, but we also had the POV spawn at a much smaller size - despite being an all-caps POV, Dumbdores POV was spawned roughly the size of a large hamster or a guinea pig (with the implication that a small-caps pov would be roughly the size of a smaller hamster species), and was promptly adopted by Keiko.

Asking about the mini-adjacent creatures that go snrf, not actual points of view.

The wiki page about Point Of View is somewhat vague on what variations of the phrase "P.O.V." have the possibility of producing POVs in a mission. Could any form of "P.O.V." potentially make a pov, or only the specific spellings "POV" and "pov"?

Additionally, what happens if there's a typo in the point of view change? If a fic has a character named Frisk and makes reference to "Frisk'a P.O.V", would it have any notable effects on the resulting pov, create a mini, or make a pov and a mini at the same time?

I'm surprised how much the AI managed to hit a lot of Nume/PPC related character beats. And it was pretty fun to read.

Harry visits the Burrow.

The Burrow has been modified from its canon appearance to better reflect the Weasleys as an (ex-)Most Ancient House. It's inspired by Woolton Hall in Liverpool, particularly the stairwell.

It's called "Exalted In Passing (Fate/Fire Emblem Awakening Multi-SI Feat. Xan, Luckychaos, The Oldman, and Lord Trent Blackmore [no closing parenthesis]" (archiveofourown.org/works/43353381/chapters/108979776#workskin which is deliberately not clickable), which, aside from having an overlong title, has three massively overpowered Stus who are each a one man army, and there's even a Stu named after the person they're based on. It also looks like there's a fourth Stu coming based on the tags. On top of that, every Awakening canon introduced so far is sliding out of character, and two of the three Stus are rather clearly being set up for romance with canons.

I asked what was up on Community Central. Apparently the font is called Rubik, and Fandom has been using it for a while, but the font itself has been updated to a new version. With, as far as I can tell, crappy kerning.

So that sucks.

If I can get enough brain juice flowing this weekend, I'll see if I can improve it by changing the font size and/or weight in our wiki's CSS, and if that doesn't work I'll try switching to a different font. Probably Helvetica, since that's next on the font-family list and should look familiar.

(Times New Roman is fine in print, but as a serif font, it's harder to read on a screen than sans-serif fonts like Helvetica and Arial.)

~Neshomeh

Caddy-Shack's stuff is also still up, just in individual Google Docs linked from the agent pages. I seriously don't know what was up with me this morning . . .

—doctorlit is tired and cold

I never saw any announcements, either.

—doctorlit wonders whatever is wrong with simple Times New Roman

Google isn't omniscient, y'know. The algorithm is selective. Some content is hidden. Old websites go down. Whole swathes of fan content and discussion were lost in the shutdown of GeoCities, just to name a major one that happened to die in 2009.

I think the fact that there's a PPC mission discussing the thing from 2002 is sufficiently clear evidence that it existed and was discussed in 2002. Which is before 2009. In case that needed pointing out. {= P

~Neshomeh

About half that list has been or is slated to be PPC'd. Fun.

~Neshomeh

...2009. Which it doesn't. So while that is possible, it seems quite odd to repost an unknown badfic and claim it as your own.

--Ls

Can you name them all?

I couldn't.

--Ls

We don't seem to have a firm publication date for that, but clearly it was before this story. Miss Cam says in the author's notes on AO3 that MUSM was started around the release of the Two Towers movie, and the prologue suggests it was written before the movie came out. Since the general US release was December 18, that all tracks.

But I still can't tell how long before the movie (and this story). Chapter 13 is a Christmas special, so I'm guessing, like, a little while? Could it have been September, when a normal school year would start? I'unno. On a quick scan, I can't find a mention in the story of TTT actually being released. Further investigation needed.

~Neshomeh

I will point out that the fact that I have an agent named Mina should make this mission fun. (And, uh, side note, the author’s name is also Mina Potter. So...)

—Ls