The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

as in below the actual F word.

I love that Helena and Sheen have such strong personalities that you can shove them into a simple, run-of-the-mill Tolkienverse Suefic, and they still have philosophical arguments to get into, rather than just following the action of the fic. It's funny; I find myself siding with Helena here, but on my actual work shifts, I'm probably more like Sheen. I think the difference is that, while I'm happy to Sheen at myself, I'm not so controlling as to attempt to Sheen at my teammates. Remember, there's nothing wrong with Sheening in public, but if you're going to Sheen with someone else, you have to get their consent first.

One nitpick:
. . . and she's less concerned about the whole Ring business than she should.
That line should end "should be."

—doctorlit is amused by the mental image of Scottie Pippen, height 6'8", towering over the Hobbits while playing poker with them

A skim of the Fanzine Archive shows there were very roughly the same number of fanzines per month in 1984, 1992, and 1999. Let's take that to mean there were the same number of zine fanfic. My notes for A&O randomly guessed that half of all fanfic was online in '99, which means there must be half as much fanfic being created in '92. (An average of 30 new stories a day, was my figure.)

My '99 notes peg the PPC "breaking even" at ca. 250 Action agents, supported by 20 Spies and 100 other Infrastructure agents. That puts the 1992 figure at 120 Action agents - 40 trios, which is a nice tidy number. Let's say half of that is in the Big Three, giving DMS, DBS, and DIC roughly 6 trios each. The remaining 20-odd are split between a bunch of small departments - DAVD, Despatch, Emergencies, Godplayers, and the like. A lot of them are probably just one trio. Divisions, unless I've said differently in Lofty Skies, probably don't exist - or rather, each trio specialises. There are still Flower agents, some of them as part of trios with humans.

To give the '92 a different feel, perhaps most Infrastructure roles are still held by Flowers. The exception is the Spies, of which there are (relatively) a lot - probably that same 20 figure from '99. The key difference is that they have to acquire the zines themselves to check, so it's a much more out-and-about role.

Various Department Heads will be different, of course. A possible retcon would be to make most of the "agents" who went mad in Lofty Skies into Flowers - the Infrastructure Agents. That would pin Skies as the point where the PPC shifted from Flower to human dominated. That depends on what I wrote back in 2013,of course, and I'm not checking tonight.

So, 1992: a small, busy PPC, where agents and Flowers work side by side under the leadership of the Sunflower Official, First of the Firstborn. It could work.

hS

So, here's the discord link. Sorry, I've been busy: https://discord.gg/dQQYjn8Q

Discord links on the board expire after a couple of people use them, or one week has passed. This is for abuse prevention.

Nice to see you, and welcome aboard.

Apples & Oranges (about halfway down the page) uses actual fanfic from the very first days of FFn, back in 1999. So I got the "old" part, but not quite the "zine".

My Timelines have the first agent trio starting work in 1984, so there's a decent backlog of fanfic to work through. The difficulty is finding badfic in the limited selection available. There's certainly some terrible "comedy" stuff that foreshadows the "sugar-high" material of the early oughts, but I'm not sure it's even worth a mission.

Still, it should be possible to find something. I'll have to look at my calculations on what the '99 PPC looked like, then work it backwards to Lofty Skies in '92. It might be fun to set a series immediately before that Emergency: early enough to be different, but late enough that most zines we have access to will be appropriate.

(I should also put A&O on AO3, as one of my "modern series".)

hS

I would swear I've got it marked as currently missing on the archive hub page... glad to be wrong!

hS

It is here.

—doctorlit was all ready to get rehosting today, but now it is nap time instead

For instance, "shards" definitely does not mean "f**k." It's more like "crap" or "dammit," and a Pernese kid probably wouldn't get in trouble for saying it any more than a kid from World One would.

On the other hand, while people in World One may say "kriff" without offending anyone because it's not a real swearword in this universe, kids in Star Wars would absolutely get in trouble for saying it, and kids in Headquarters might, too.

In the middle, you've got "fork," a word from the same language as "f**k" which stands in for it because it sounds similar, but doesn't actually mean "f**k," and any kid could probably get away with saying it.

So, what I'm trying to ask is: is "flitter" more like "shards," or "fork," or "kriff"—or something else entirely? I can't tell just by reading the current page entry. Would you please expand the entry with more detail to explain it?

~Neshomeh

Also, you know the badfic I claimed? Yeah, I’m not doing it. Sorry.

Pepekyky has posted about nuts before. They also have Claimed a badfic and signed the Constitution.

—Ls would like a Canon Cookie

Though, honestly, given the personalities of Newt Scamander and (in the video games, I think) Professor Kettleburn, being a reckless Steve Irwin seems to come with the magizoologist territory...

It does suck how quickly everyone jumps to that conclusion. But that's Purityworld for you--and purity culture irl, too. Everyone's so obsessed with abstinence and avoiding temptation that basically everything is read as sinful and sexualised. And honestly, given how people irl joke about different-sex babies and young children "dating" each other... are we any better than everyone at Purityworld!Hogwarts assuming two eleven-year-olds out of bed after hours are snogging?

I'm glad I was able to give Greengrass some complexity here. And Malfoy, too--Lord and Lady Malfoy clearly model a much better relationship than whatever's happening here with Greengrass and her lord.

The lyrics are reversed on purpose, because Malfoy in a previous chapter told Harry that the Wizarding district is Constantinople not Istanbul. It's a brick joke!

Honestly, JKR put way too much emphasis on the House Point rivalries. I've found my irl students do get competitive in group point-earning activities, but not to the point of bullying each other...

I appreciate his excellent, calm bedside manner with animals, but he has a penchant for putting himself in unsafe situations, so I just can't give him the Zookeeper Seal of Approval™. Alas!

I was initially amused by McGonagall's false assumption of what Harry and Hermione were doing in the Astronomy Tower, because it made for such an easy out to avoid revealing Hagrid's dragon, and because the weird Pureblood enthusiasts basically set the alibi up themselves. But then, it dawned on me: the fact that this culture places so much emphasis on underage kids "courting" each other, that even McGonagall thinks two eleven-year-olds sneaking out in the middle of the night for a make-out session is a perfectly plausible thing to happen is pretty (please insert several lines of internal screaming, I'm too tired to type it all out). And then the rest of the school has the same reaction, and Lavender brings up the whole Maiden's Kiss thing and assumes Harry and Hermione are definitely getting married in the future based on eleven-year-old feelings, and (more screaming here please). It's like this entire society are all mutually roleplaying that they're in a soulmate AU, without any fanfic writer actually writing it onto them!

Okay, Professor Greengrass is way more complex than I gave her credit for last chapter. Maybe she really is in love with Quirrell! Either way, and in spite of how cruel and authoritarian she is, I hope she does manage to get her hands on some Un-ceinte and escape from Gaunt, or whoever her actual Bond person is. No one deserves to be tortured like that . . . It was interesting to see that even Malfoy, as brainwashed into the bonding system as he is, was visibly sickened by Greengrass's treatment as well. Whether Gaunt or not, her partner is some real trash, even by this society's standards!

I hate to nitpick this, because it's an 11-out-of-10 joke, but you've got the lyrics reversed: it's ♪Istanbul, not Constantinople♪

—doctorlit had kind of forgotten what a disastrous concept the House Points system is from canon, and how easily it lends itself to students bullying their classmates in retaliation for losing points

Specifically, a euro peahen.

and treating it as a title would give the impression that it's only referring to the game. "Flitterific" is canon; I intend for "flitter" to be like other continuum-based curses on that list.

(Edit: Bloody Enter key.)

I wasn't sure if you meant it wasn't a title just in that context or if you just didn't know it was actually a title, too. Thought you'd want to know if you didn't.

So, "flitter" does carry the same sense and weight as "f**k"? Is that if anyone says it, or is that only relative to fairy language?

What about "flitterific"? That's a canon term, right?

~Neshomeh

and "flittering" is used twice: "the flittering One Ring" and "flittering turns good Legolas…"

And also it would have been mashed potatoes, but no one actually bought regular potatoes, so we only had mashed sweet potatoes that my sister made last-minute. They were good.

I made apple crisp and pumpkin/cheesecake bars for dessert. They both turned out very well, but I had so much pie crust and pumpkin filling leftover from the bar that I made a whole pumpkin pie and two small pumpkin custard sort of things. That recipe was a good recpie, but I think the proprotions may have been messed up. This may have been due to the fact that I used a baking sheet with sides only 1 inch high. Here is the link to the recipe, if anyone is interested.

Edit: I also doubled the cheesecake part of the filling, so that is potentially another reason why the filling didn't all fit in one tray.

https://smittenkitchen.com/2016/11/cheesecake-marbled-pumpkin-slab-pie/