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That’s...quite something. And frankly, I don’t see what any of it has to do with Harry Potter. It could be an (still not good, but unsporkable at least) original work. But instead we get this.

—Ls

I'm not sure this precise thing was linked before, so here, have a primer on the "Pureblood Culture" AU by its chief perpetrator.

It's scary.

The fics based on its concept are scarier.

~Neshomeh

I don't want to have to look at the Board on my phone to find out what the little black boxes are supposed to be. {= P

But that's probably something I could remedy by downloading a character set or something, and I just haven't bothered, so don't take this as a serious gripe.

~Neshomeh

I realized I definitely came off as wanting to censor Urine Guy, which is not the case. As far as I'm concerned, he's got the right to say whatever he wants on his own private channel or feed or whatever. What I object to is powerful platforms like Facebook or traditional media outlets spreading around pseudo-scientific garbage in the name of "balance" when all they actually want is to generate ad revenue. Insane stances generate more views/clicks than sane, boring, peer-reviewed facts, you see.

But no, outside of the class of speech including hate speech and threats, I generally subscribe to the view that the best remedy for bad speech is more good speech.

~Neshomeh

I stand by my offer to make Recolor.me avatars for one RC's worth of agents per participant. It's exactly the kind of break I want between bouts of job-hunting. {= )

~Neshomeh

Normally I'd advocate for letting a non-harmful OC integrate with canon, given whatever memory modification is necessary to let them. That's because rescued/recruited characters often fall by the wayside, and I don't see the point of recruiting a character if you don't intend to do anything with them.

Since it sounds like you have ideas, though, that's great! If you're excited about it and feel like there's good story potential in recruiting this character, then I'd say go for it.

~Neshomeh

But none of them really strike my fancy.

--Ls

But I'll nose about on the wiki to see if I can find an workable alternative.

--Ls

Mostly for the sake of continuity (nothing wrong with introducing a Tulip - seriously, how it is that there isn't one with all those weird plant species already represented?) but I suggest having a look on the Wiki if there is some "unemployed" Flower already around that strikes your fancy. I think there is at least one or two since when I wanted to make a Fighter Squadron Division I had found an already-existing Flower to toss the ordeal to, since it would both explain where said Flower ended up, and avoid adding a new Flower basically out of the blue.

...you'll forget to complete it and I'll finally have a fair shot at the leftiest lefty spot. Alas, this wasn't my year. But I'm biding my time.

Though, given that I’m gonna introduce Troll-wraiths, I could simply say that the wraiths are a malevolent force created from too much concentrated badness, regardless of authorial intent...

Though I think I’ll keep it a Division, because precedent.

Look out for the Tulip, newest Flower, coming to a Linstar fic near you!

—Ls

Behold.

A PPC Badfic, one day early.

You could probably even make PPC badfic if you wanted. And considering that tomorrow is September, I might just do so.

--Ls

A very authoritarian one, that is.

Er...not much else to say in response.

Perfect for constructing mission material.

Capitalism and Socialism are economic systems, models, or ideologies. Capitalism says that the means of production (whether resources, factories, labour, or companies - literally, what you use to make Stuff) should be privately owned and operated for individual profit. Socialism (/Communism? there are some distinctions but I'm just going to use one word for simplicity) says that they should be owned by society in some way, and that the profit (whether money or products) should also be shared by society. There are other models around - feudalism, for example, where the means of production are restricted to a specific social class, with the lower classes explicitly excluded from owning them. (Compare capitalism, where there is no legal barrier to you or I becoming a billionaire.) But we're talking capitalism and socialism

During the Cold War, these two models became strongly associated with political systems. It's really hard for me to think "capitalism" without thinking "western democracy", just as it's really hard to think of socialism outside of a one-party dictatorship. But Russia, now, is effectively a one-party capitalist society - there's nothing preventing one-party states from operating on a capitalist model!

So when we talk about socialism, we need to avoid getting stuck in the Soviet Union mindset. Most/all socialist states ran under the Soviet model, because the USSR was deliberately exporting it, but there are other ways to do it. The UK has been described as voting in a revolution after WWII - we introduced public ownership of healthcare, transport systems, utilities (electric, water etc) by electing the right government. We kind of mixed socialism (for essential industries) with capitalism (for the rest), and didn't wind up with an uber-rich dictatorship. (In fact most of our self-enriching-politician scandals have been the pro-capitalist right taking and giving handouts from their buddied in industry!)

Which isn't to say it had no problems. Every nationalised industry either overspent or was under-budgeted, depending on your viewpoint. And of course, when the opposition next got voted in, they were free to start dismantling the changes - either directly by running on a privatisation platform, or obliquely by running the industry into the ground and then selling it off. They're still at it today.

So... yeah. No big finish here: just that we all need to remember that our ideas of Capitalism and Socialism were shaped by the Cold War, and that's not the only way those systems can be run.

hS

My concern is that trolling is a deliberate act of the author, whereas (say) writing bad slash is/could be unintentional while trying to write good slash. Any time you say a story is a troll, you are making a judgement call against the author.

If you say a story is a Suefic, you can point at specific evidence that proves the character meets the PPC's definition of a Suvian. If you say it is bad slash, or an implausible crossover, you can point at proof that it is a) slash/a crossover, and b) bad/implausible. If you say it is a troll, you can (usually) only point at evidence supporting that claim - not proving it.

As a concrete example: I'm positive this fic was a troll. But I, and Agent Kaitlyn, did not treat it as one, because there is no way to know for sure, and to say there is is to claim to know something about the author.

Sometimes - rarely - you do know. Maybe they post an entire chapter bragging about it. Maybe they're known for other trollfics. Maybe it shows up in the reviews, or in the story itself. So a Troll Division is reasonable and supportable. But I don't feel like there's enough out there to support a Department without causing issues.

As for a Division Head, I have no problem with that; there's enough of them around that, if you're actually writing for the division, you should be able to give it a leader.

(Usual disclaimer: hS is not the boss of you. His word has no more weight than anyone else's.)

hS

Here is Fanfic Maker, a website that generates custom badfics. Essentially.

And here is a badfic I generated. Sesame Street has never made less sense.

—Ls has found something fun

...how would you, and the Board in general, feel about me making the Troll Division into the Troll Department? I can make an argument that trolling is distinct from parody.

Or, how would you feel about me just creating a new Flower to be the Department/Division head? I have a concept I’d like to float.

—Ls

But Communism and Socialism inevitably result in even more inequity by rolling the über-rich roles into government leaders—no one is selfless enough to avoid self-enrichment when in control of a country. Those revolutionaries simply take wealth for themselves, eliminate the middle class, and make everyone else equal—in utter poverty.

It’s always easier to criticize than come up with alternatives, innit?

Anyway, I’m not pro-worker exploitation.

—Ls

This (very incomplete) Manual, from around 2006. That's before the days of the Wiki, so the Manual was the first ever effort to get to grips with what, exactly, was in the PPC.

At that time, the only collected reference material we had was whatever Araeph had put up on the LJ community. The List of RCs was there, along with the Complete List of PPC Fiction and List of Everything PPC. But they were purely archiving - Araeph just wrote down whatever people said on their missions. (Also, huh, apparently I once hosted the List of the Slain, aka the Killed Badfics list. That's fun.)

In 2006, I had just finished The Reorganisation after two years, ending it by creating the Board of Flowers. That story had begun life as a page of notes called "PPC power structures and the Reorganisation", so it seems fitting that it ended by not only creating a PPC power structure, but also helping to formalise what that power structure controlled.

I distinctly remember having long conversations (I think in HTML comments somewhere on the Manual site?) with Neshomeh and whoever else was on the project while working up volume 3, on which tiny departments and divisions were "really" the same as each other. We didn't really consult with the Board - just smashed things together as we pleased. The department closures which I (much) later placed in 2003 were actually just us not wanting to put them on the lists.

In a way, it's almost a shame. The days when anyone could just up and create a new department - Angst, or the Pyros, or Author Correspondence - were fun, while the long discussions which accompanied... is Temporal Offences the latest new Action Department? ... were drab and dull by comparison. But if you want a PPC that can reasonably have agents meeting in the halls (which has been awesome), you need a consensus on what's in it. And, to be fair, most "new Departments" just wound up killing Suvians anyway. (The Pyros certainly did!)

hS

One of the key failings of capitalism is in forgetting that money, as we know it and in all its various forms, is a subjective and arbitrary unit measure of worth and not something of worth itself. Another is in the fundamental abstraction of finance and its dogma of constant quarterly growth from what trade actually is, which is to say, the movement of goods and services from one party to another; the fast-fashion textile industry, for instance, forces Bangladeshi workers into hideous conditions for slave wages to create clothes in such vast quantities that they end up dumped in a landfill having never been worn. The total uncoupling of supply from demand is what has directly led to the climate crisis we now face, as well as literally every other kind of crisis. It is the direct, one-to-one conversion of resources into waste.

Does this make even the slightest bit of sense from a human perspective? Of course not! But from a capitalist perspective, and I feel it vital to differentiate the two, production is just a number, and if the number is bigger that means the business is better. Capitalist ideology demands that this be so, you see, because if the business was not in fact better, then how would it be producing more things? It does not matter if the production is waste. The Number Went Up. The Line Went Up. Capitalism has therefore succeeded. I use the garment industry as an example but it applies to every single industry, and yet there are still shortages whenever actual human need gets in the way of what The Line That Goes Up has decided the world needs.

Capitalism is the delegation of social responsibility and morality to an algorithm. Bezos and his ilk know this. This is why the present plan for people like him and Musk and the others is to be the Cool Billionaire, doing space stuff and electric cars and so forth. I consider it analogous to a deadbeat dad who spoils his kids every visitation to make them hate their mum while never paying a lick of child support. One need only look at the Gates Foundation forcing Oxford University medical researchers to patent their CoVid-19 vaccine through AstraZeneca rather than make it open-source, as was initially the plan. No, philanthropy as exemplified by capitalism is a myth. The owner-class is incapable of actual philanthropy; to truly love their fellow human being would require them to improve their material conditions at their own serious expense, i.e. giving away a portion of their wealth which would genuinely impact how they live their lives. For context, if Bezos gave 99% of his net worth away today, he would still be a billionaire. But all this is moot, because all this is anathema to capitalist ideology. If you give money away, you are losing at capitalism because your line is going up less; thus "philanthropy" and charity for the owner-class is more about diversifying their portfolio of interests rather than benefiting humanity as a whole. Returning to the Gates Foundation example, the Oxford CoVid-19 vaccine researchers were part of Oxford University, which receives large amounts of money from the Gates Foundation. The Foundation itself also invests the money it has -- and wouldn't you know it, it has a considerable stake in pharmaceuticals company AstraZeneca! A vaccine against a deadly plague that was intended to be free and open-source was instead forced behind a paywall by pressure from the Gates Foundation, who threatened to withdraw their funding from Oxford University if the vaccine against an incredibly deadly pandemic virus was not made the property of a pharma company in which the Foundation had invested heavily. This is what the owner-class considers philanthropy. And this is the foundation of Bill Gates, who is constantly held up as a philanthropist.

It is therefore my considered opinion that billionaires should be forcibly divested of everything they have and that the stolen wealth be returned to society. The billionaires in question -- of which there are approaching three thousand around the world -- may complain that such a thing is unfair. They are wrong. Not only is it fair, it is merciful. The downtrodden and dispossessed will rise up and depose the capitalist ideologues that have desecrated our planet in the name of nothing more than avarice. The victims of settler colonialism, of capitalism, of the autocracy of the owner-class capitalist in the little fiefdom called their business: they bay for these people to be driven from their gated compounds and subjected to the justice of the mob. For all that I disagree, I still empathise with that position. Their palaces are built on foundations of innumerable corpses, and justice must be done in the memory of all the dead whose bodies greased the wheels of alleged progress. I only want redress from the owner-class and its loathsome inhabitants; they may thank their lucky stars that I and others like me do not want vengeance.

...

Well if you weren't seeing why before, you probably are now. =]

As in, the wackyness and short life of early divisions. Special Sue Unit, Department of Emergencies, ESAS... its quite the the bunch, now mostly consolidated into the Special Operations Division (though apparently only part of ESAS got merged into it?) since they overlapped a lot.

I guess there was a time in which everyone went "hey, there should be a whole department/division about this!"? I admit I would've been kinda guilty of this myself if I hadn't asked, as I was considering making a separate division for missions set in Ace Combat when it got pointed out that SpecOps would've been a perfect fit anyways. Considering my spinoff ended up not focusing on Ace Combat anyways, I would've created another pointless division with little to no mission records...