The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Quick, avoid the Pun Police!

—Ls

Sometimes, when even the lightest Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple story is A Bit Too Much, all you need is incredibly low-stakes tales about kids solving mysteries. Well, good news!

From the Casefiles of Daphne Illian-Sims, Diminutive Detective: The Case of the Stolen Snacks

We got kids (they're half-elven, but they're still kids). We got mysteries. And the stakes could not possibly be lower. Enjoy!

(I've also added the story that moved the Illian-Sims family to New Cal to AO3: The Road to New Caledonia. If you want to know what their house looks like, that's where the picture is.)

hS

No, stop, I'll throw myself out—!

~Neshomeh

P.S. Yes, the Arbitrary Censorship Division of Legal is responsible for forcing WTF to become WhatThe. {= )

(so is that 51 ways haha i'm going to keep making this joke whenever there's a number in the title haha)

This is one I avoided ever reading, because the title makes it sound like another example of gratuitous hostility from our earlier days. So I opened it today not expecting much, but uh . . . it's good? The opening confused me, because it made it seem like HQ was a building with an "outside," but further reading shows that the girl is a student from OFUM, which explains how she got covered in dirt and plants before reaching HQ. Oh, and uh, OFUM's library sounds nice. I support her expression of lust object! >_> But as for the gratuitous hostility, I was pleased to find that the actual list is more "here are some interesting details and references about Tolkien's canon" rather than "punch stab main haha die!" So yeah, it's a fun little piece. The censor/sensor joke is great. (Would a censor be a member of Legal? Legal did force WTF to change their name, after all!) Saying the Flowers are "prone to hysteria" might feel a little weird, but at the same time, I can kind of see it; their mental communication has the potential to form a feedback loop, perhaps? Plus, I might characterize the Civil War on Origin as feeling a little hysterical, to my reading, and the Mysterious Somebody manipulated HQ into a panic to justify his presence as a source of order. A lot of that latter may have been triggering panic in the Flowers?

—doctorlit keeps forgetting what actual dandelions look like, and needs to stop picturing them as daisies in his head

Urato isn't a sweets guy in general, so no favored sweets for him. As for image sweets, he's named after Urashimatarō, so perhaps his image sweet should reflect that a bit. I opt for taiyaki – a fish-shaped griddle cake usually with red bean paste filling.

Inasuke will like it if it's cute enough, so no pinning down one favorite sweet for him. He's named after the Hare of Inaba, so his image sweet should be something white and fluffy – cotton candy for starters.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione investigate further, feat. a clandestine conversation in the Forbidden Forest.

I’m not really sure how wiki admin-ship is bestowed, but... I nominate Ki No Shirayuki as wiki admin! ...if she wants it, of course.

As far as I know, the active wiki admins are Nesh, hS, and doc. But it seems like they often don’t have enough time to get around to spam maintenance.

She edits a lot, and is good at combatting (well, reporting) spam that we seem to get a lot of, and I think she’d make a good admin.

—Ls isn’t making an unnecessary thread again!

On a completely different note, of the PPCers who took the test, it appears I was the only extravert.

—Ls

Carlisle is definitely a stale plain bagel—no fuss, no fun.

—Ls

Read that one recently. Easily one of my favorite spinoffs ever, even though it only has one mission. I wish there was more.

And it certainly looks like doc will have plenty of material to review...

—Ls

I almost forgot I explicitly and repeatedly established Sheen's obsession with poppy seed scones. I gave him a taste for scones and a posh accent in order to play up his fussy attitude, but why poppy seeds I myself don't know.

Finding a treat that represents or is favored by Helena is a challenge. I figure it would be something obnoxiously colored, drenched in all sorts of pixie food coloring (think blueberry juice, raspberry juice, several-kinds-of-flower juice), and tasting just as obnoxious to boot.

As established in this interlude, Kaguya likes anything autumn-flavored – mainly to reflect the fact he's named after Lady Kaguya, a folklore character from the moon. That means chestnuts, sweet potatoes, ripe apples, persimmons, maybe even pumpkin. He's also a tea ceremonist, which means he would have had ample experience in traditional Japanese tea treats. As for a sweet that represents him, I keep associating him with monaka (sandwich rice wafers usually with red bean paste filling) for some reason.

Momoka's name means "peach flower" and is named after Momotarō, thus I imagine her sweet (both criteria) to be either something peach-based, or kibi-dango (millet cakes), the favorite food of the folklore character. Oh look what I found: Kibi-dango made from white peach jam, with Momotarō characters drawn on the packaging. My life is complete.

(may be continued)

It's a busy day today! Actually it's a busy day yesterday, since two of the three stories here were announced by Miss Cam on November 16th, 2002. The third was created today though, so I've merged them together.

31 Ways to Kill a Mary Sue, by Shauna

A slightly odd story - well, the story is mostly an excuse to provide the list at the end - which is notable for introducing the Security Dandelions. When Vemi and I created the Weeds for The Reorganisation, this was what we were working from.

PPC: Special Sue Unit, Case: Whatever Happens, by Miss Cam

We've actually talked about the SSU recently, and I wondered whether Skuld and Cass are reworked versions of Dead and Heal (from Miss Cam's cowrite with Jay). Sadly, like a lot of early Big Names, Miss Cam never wrote very much in the PPC - this is the only Skuld & Cass mission.

The DAVD Files: Killer in the Dark, by Katharine the Great

The second half of the DAVD files, chopping off heads and introducing Fizz R the Bizarre ("it's not a nickname!"). It also has what might be the first piece of Multiverse Theory ever written:

"Think of it like this, Dour: a kind of 'nexus' formed at whatever point in which you interrupted the fic's flow. In order to dissolve the fic's universe and restore the canon—as we of the PPC are supposed to do—you not only have to mend or remove the source of the discrepancies, but you also have to repair any damage done within that nexus. After that, the fic's reality will break up, and the canon will snap back into line. Does that make any sense?"

I guess this is the ultimate origin of the "entanglement" concept I tend to use in my theoretical writings, though I can't prove it.

hS

MBTI is not my cup of tea but I'm up for sweets any time.

I've been thinking about this probably more than I should. XD I suppose there are two ways to interpret the prompt. 1. What kind of baked good is the agent's favourite? and 2. What kind of baked good best represents the agent's personality?

I don't think Blank is fussy on what baked goods she eats. Food is fuel to her and anything tasty goes down a treat. She might be any type of massproduced snack cake that's cheap and easy, even better if it's individually wrapped for convenience. It's definitely quantity over quality with Blank; she'd prefer a box of Twinkies over a posh little French pastry any day of the week. That being said, if I got the chance to like... design a dessert to represent her best I might go for some sort of white chocolate dome to represent her colouring and the shell she puts up, perhaps tempered with something unexpected like salmiak powder to offset the sweetness of the chocolate and make it angrier. Blank carries an awful lot of anger. The cake base would be similar in profile but not as intense, because if you find the right angle with Blank you can have an actual conversation with her without her walls being put up, so it would be sweeter, maybe with some almond flour for texture. The filling would be raspberry mousse, tart and not too sweet. I detest salty licorice, but it's very common to pair it with raspberry so it's a combination that works. Maybe I'd decorate the dome with a little white chocolate rainbow, which obviously represents Blank being gay but mainly her desire to display a lot of colour.

....You know, based on this it feels like I should have as much of a think about Moira's pastry. Cinnamon roll is still good for her, though. She's a people pleaser and would want to be liked by as many as possible, and I would assume most people like a good cinnamon roll. A proper Swedish kanelbulle doesn't have icing on it, but pearl sugar, and are baked with cardamom in the dough. I think that would give Moira a bit more dimension and crunch!

/Ekwy

Confession... I considered asking you if you remembered anything, but residual memories of you being one of The Oldbies spooked me. ^_^; (We recently celebrated the Board's 20th anniversary, and you got namedropped.) Thank you Linstar for doing what I couldn't. And thank you Andy for helping out! It's really interesting to hear how it all came to be.

Anyway: interesting! I'm actually pleased that the anachronistic Avenue Q is a later addition - it means my timeline isn't wildly wrong, though it also means that there's an "Original Suedom" which is completely lost. (It might actually not be, but I've never managed to find the FFn story ID, so I can't find out if it was archived.)

For the later version, lotrfanfiction.com is on the Wayback Machine; it's our source for the later Suedom chapters, down to Gondor. It looks like that's actually the version I archived from, and... yes, the version we're all talking about is significantly different from the Misssandman.com version. Cool! That might explain why I didn't really recognise it. I'll have to archive the old version too, for posterity.

... oh my gosh you had a Geocities, and the whole thing is archived. This is amaaaaazing. XD

EDIT: The 'Misssandman Enter the Dragons' is now archived as well. There is no escape. And it does line up better with my memories, so I'm pleased to understand what was going on there.

hS

I think Mina would be a doughnut of some sort. Sprinkles, with strawberry frosting?

--Ls, going on a tangent

So! This chapter is NOT what I remembered it to be. Does that mean I read a pre-revision version (per Andy's comments)? Probably not; I'm pretty sure I only ever saw it on Miss Cam's site, so I've probably just forgotten the details in the past, uh, 18 years or so. :D I do remember the arrow, though.

It's interesting to contrast Kate and Kira against Mary Sue and Sue Mary from "The Broken Plot Continuum" a few months back. Mary and Sue deliberately entered Middle-earth knowing the PPC were gone, and mucked everything up themselves. K&K got there by accident, found the PPC, and at least believe that someone else is mucking things up. The stories are almost mirror images of each other at this point.

Speaking of contrasts... Rincewind and Odorf couldn't be more different, could they? It seems clear that Odorf was created for Kate, but Rincewind already existed in some way (at least, the version after reaching Middle-earth did). I am intrigued.

And to top off a completely backwards post: the pre-ME section adds significant emotional weight to the whole story. I don't recall it explicitly coming up much, but both of these people have folks they want to go home to. (Another related story: Bast's "Taken Far Too Literally", which pushed that same button.)

hS

Nume comes up INTJ-A, and strongly so: his lowest score is 68% Intuitive. That said, him coming up Intuitive tracks, though it may seem surprising. He works hard to stay grounded in the here and now rather than getting swept up in overly vivid memories, but it's no accident that he's a fantasy/sci-fi nerd instead of a math/computer nerd.

Ilraen has consistently been the most difficult for me to get to "show up" on the page, and his ISFJ-A result suits him, right down to being quiet and polite by default. I'm a little surprised he came up more Assertive than Turbulent, but then I was answering more for how he is now than how he was in the beginning, so, yeah!

Jenni is ENFP-A, but her Feeling/Thinking score is 50% on the dot and she's only 57% Prospecting over Judging. She has the experience to know when to follow her head rather than her heart and when it's better to have a plan than to wing it (though she's pretty sure winging it will turn out fine, she'll figure it out).

Derik is ESFJ-T, but not so hidebound as the description suggests. He grew up in a society undergoing a massive shift in its way of life, and he learned the value of embracing new ideas (while not rejecting tradition out of hand). Demonstrate that a new idea has practical value, and he'll support it.

Gall is ESTP-A, aptly called the Entrepreneur. I don't have anything to add here; the description is pretty accurate for her.

I think it's interesting to note that each set of partners has two traits in common and two in contrast. Which ones they are accurately capture their dynamics, too. Pretty cool!

~Neshomeh

Thank you for asking! You all have such eyes for detail! If I'm ever wrong about anything that can be proven with timestamps, it's because: I have ADHD and it was 20 years ago. My memory is not what I wish it was. Some of my answers are likely to be "lol i forget" but I'll do my best.

We first uploaded to ff.net, got kicked off for being interfic, reuploaded, and did a few updates before sending to Miss Cam for hosting. In that time I'd become a community theater kid so that's where the Avenue Q references came into play.

The first 3 or 4 chapters that we initially posted to ff.net were, iirc, pretty different from what made it to Miss Cam's site. I think the stuff with the bridge and the prologue didn't get written in the original ff.net upload. That was added in after we had about 3 chapters of material and Saphie, who is a plot savant, went "but what if there was more going on actually" and came up with all the foreshadowing.

What you have to understand about the whole 1st and 2nd chapters, not counting the prologue, is that they came from an AIM rp that Saphie and I banged out for fun, starting literally with the "i want a dragon too" scene. We had zero plan. We were just two creative writing nerds who had never met someone else who could pick up the ball and run with it, "Yes And"-ing our way into a story (and a best friendship). The planning came after we realized we could be having even more fun if the story were going somewhere dramatic.

Suedom got a few updates over time as it got reposted in places. For a little while there about 8 years ago I was pushing to revisit it, and I think there's a significantly edited version of a handful of chapters on a lotr fic hosting site somewhere. We both agreed that our energy was better focused on our original work so we didn't get far in, and we no longer have access to the email account we used to put the fic up, but I'll see if I can find it.

EDIT: the briefest of investigations indicates it was on lotrfanfiction.com and that is no longer operating? So I guess the Latest Edit is also gone into the void, unless I backed it up on a hard drive somewhere. Archiving really is a full time job.

I’ve never claimed otherwise (although I will add she’s in better shape and I don’t have Bloodwrath).