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Seeing someone take a mathematical-scientific approach to HQ and get smacked in the face for it is always fun. The other shoe dropping maybe could've been a little more dramatic, but I can see the more simple premise working well.

Prosperity for everyone? Prosperity for some? What percentage? At what exchange--i.e., since no society is perfect, what is it acceptable for a society to give up in order to achieve your definition of prosperity?

And, do you actually dislike Marx because his ideas didn't work in practice? Do you apply that rationale to everyone, whether or not you like their ideas?

Feel free not to answer, but do think about it.

~Neshomeh

...namely that it forces people, like Elon, to entirely align their actions with the profit motive to survive. And those who do not? Don't. Under a profit system there are simply no resources to spare for anything that does not make a profit against its competitors, no matter how valuable.

You can see this in the progression of media centralization as documented in Chomsky and Herman's seminal work Manufacturing Consent. In Britain and America, the radical, working class press, despite its own readers ranking it higher than readers of other papers ranked their own papers, was pushed out of business by the fact that they weren't profitable. One factor that led to this was advertising: it used to be that papers had to cover the entire costs of production in their sales. But when advertising came along, suddenly papers that could attract ads could not only afford to produce much lower prices, but could make their papers much more salable. And guess which papers attracted the most ads? The ones which marketed to the affluent of society, the people who had money to spend on purchases -- and, just as importantly, did not threaten the capitalist status quo that advertisers depended on. Working-class papers were disadvantaged on both counts. News readers thus switched to those papers, and working-class papers, no matter how well-liked they were by their own readers (the Daily Herald had twice the readership of the Times, Financial Times, and Guardian combined, and was ranked more highly by its own readers than those other papers were by their own readers), fell apart and died.

Advertising and the profit motive also sanitize the content of existing news outlets: Anything that doesn't put consumers in the "buying mood" risks getting shelved. I'll just post some passages from the book here:

These are direct, concrete negative effects on journalism caused by the profit motive, and exactly the same phenomenon as Elon Musk being forced to repeat the previous Twitter admin's policies because that's what is profitable. In a world where you have to make money to survive, money becomes the sole measure of value -- and everything else dies.

Do you have a counterargument?

I know that because I wrote it.

PPC: The Musical

The Wiki page has links for those that wish to read it. While parts of it make me cringe close on two decades later, there are also parts that I have an immense fondness for, so you know, mixed bag! But it did end up giving me one of my current agents: Blank.

Why yes the 20th anniversary IS coming up in a few years. I may have something planned for it.

/Ekwy

So, I pick a starting portrait with approximately the right hair style, face shape, expression. Cool. I go to the next step, "tune the color palette," and do that. Cool. But the step after that, "fine tune the details," then presents me a whole bunch of options without the hair and eye and outfit colors I selected for in the previous screen, or if present, they're not in the places I want them. And if I finally do get something I like, the final step, "Pose," presents options that mess with the hairstyle, expression, and outfit all over again.

I've figured out that I shouldn't focus too much on where the colors are in the "Color" step, just make sure the ones I want are there (like for green eyes, make sure there's a lot of green in the option I pick), but overall I'm afraid I find this frustrating to use. Is it just me, or is anyone else finding it better to just ignore the final step?

Or is it just that there are no curly-haired redheads with green eyes in anime? {= P

~Neshomeh

the canon continuum is a ballet, and thus the Word World stages the fic environment like one. That means the agents can't talk during fic events and their bodies are forced to perform demanding, physically taxing dance moves for most of the mission.

I could totally see an event where all the agents are forced to sing or speak in verse for a day happening. The concept has that sort of old-time minor-scale incident feeling to it.

I wouldn't be able to make the musical analogy, or come up with the Bandverse idea at all, without them.

I have not read any other missions by these agents, but—man, that was good! It had a TOS vibe, and the gags were just so funny (I particularly liked the badfic ship). I was laughing out loud.

—Ls

A game with a cast of nice-looking characters but no voice acting is right out.

Just like actors in live action movies, voice actors play a very important role in giving characters an interesting, vivid and "true" personality - but often don't get considered as much as they're a name in the credits roll instead of a face we see during the entire thing.

Which is a shame - taking the latest anime I watched as an example, Chisato of Lycoris Recoil just wouldn't have been able to hit so much with the audience if it wasn't for her voice actress. True, her dialogue's writing and characterization were superb already, but it was Chika Anzai's energetic and peppy rendition that really secured the homerun.

And, uh, because I didn’t say so, I was rude in my last reply to you on the other thread. I’m sorry for that.

Anyway, I dislike Karl Marx mainly because his ideas, when put into practice, do not produce greater prosperity. They instead produce authoritarianism.

Separately, from what I recall, he spent his entire life mooching off his best friend, and I believe he cheated on his wife.

—Ls

I only eat the finest watermelons. Mmm, watermelons...

I don't tend to think much about actors or voice actors, myself. In fact, I think I learn about them more from PPC missions than from actually consuming canon content in real life . . .

—doctorlit is more interested in fiction than reality, and there's nothing wrong with that(?)

Seven of them, wow.

After visiting the page for agent Corolla, I decided to give it a shot and, after a series of futile tries, finally made a new profile picture for Momoka:

Why don't we all try generating images of our agents/ourselves/whatever? Do be warned though that I added the speech bubbles and dialogue in editing; it's not part of the generator whatsoever.

Agent Peregrin was, once again, trying to experiment with an Escher Room. A reasonable person would have taken covering a room - and several agents - in paint while getting nothing remotely resembling data would be a good reason not to try similar experiments, but Peregrin was not a reasonable man. He was a mathematician. Who dabbled in physics. And had had an Idea (tm).

The winter weather that some parts of HQ were experiencing was great for the idea Peregrin had had just a moment ago when he stepped into the Courtyard planned out extensively in his notebook. He opened the door to the Escher Room he'd come out of and brought in a pile of snow over several trips.

Now, he was forming snowballs out of the loose pile and hurling them around the room. His absolutely terrible aim (despite several years as an agent) didn't help his attempts at working out what was going on with the gravity, as it wasn't always clear whether the ball went wildly off course because of the room or because he'd wildly missed his target. Still, Peregrin dutifully added to the notes he'd taken on his way through the room to get here, recording how the snowballs flew with quite careful drawings (despite his handwriting).

After he'd gotten most of the way through the snow, Peregrin looked down at his notes and smiled. "There is definitely a pattern here," he commented. He then scribbled down a diagram of where he thought the nearby gravity wells, dimensional discontinuities, and other things that aren't supposed to happen were.

Then, he scooped up a pile of snow, formed it into a ball, and threw it, watching to see if it would behave as expected.

The snow curved in a low arc. Peregrin nodded - he hadn't missed.

Then the snowball suddenly began to fall upwards. That too was expected.

Then it started to what was, from Peregrin's perspective, the right wall. Still good.

It hurtled towards the wall, gaining speed. But then, instead of plopping towards the ground near the exit like Peregrin knew it should, the snowball kept going. It bounced off the wall, and then quickly bounced again off of the wall above the exit. As Peregrin twisted his head around to see what was going on, the snowball had one last surprise for him.

It hit him right in the face.

"That ... should not have been possible," Peregrin said before wiping the snow off his face and his robe. He wrote down the results and sighed.

Headquarters is strange, he thought, annoyed, as he walked out of the Escher Room. But I do have to admit, it is never boring.

(( This has been done in approximately one take so that I'll've written something today - Tomash ))

I edited the main page a bit, fixing zero-context examples and indentation.

So, you said to talk here some more so people can get to know me. Well, I thought I'd start by sharing my favourite mission. It's Love and War.

It's got so many great gags! Characters sprouting bad accents due to typos, Voyager being "entarred" which turns into being covered in tar, the cup of "coughee", and of course, the fact that the Stu's name is Jack Russell and so he's rendered as a dogman!

Some outlets say in the original version of the tale, the boy wasn't born directly from a peach; the old couple eat the peach, become able to make babies again, and produce Momotarō the normal way.

The original Beauty and the Beast had an epilogue where it turns out Belle is half-fairy and destined to break the Beast's curse, and the Beast was meant to be nice, just ugly, because he was a decent prince who refused the advances of the evil fairy that cursed him. The story itself was meant to be an instructive tale for young upper-class girls in finishing school, encouraging them to look past the external ugliness of a potential husband, especially if the guy in question is good and kind.

Very different from, say, the Disney version of the Beast who's beastly in both senses of the term!