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I’d like a second opinion that this is a troll and not just a regular badfic, as it should be my first Troll Division fic.

—Ls, who’d also like to create a new Flower for the Troll Division.

That's very nice, thank you! And we can date those documents to between August and October 2002 based on capture dates for the main page and the individual pages. Yay!

~Neshomeh

...Because I try to avoid making them absurdly tall and have no sense of average height.

When Ix dragged me into trying out FFXIV, I didn't make my Miqo'te max height, and as a result he is shorter than Ix in real life (we know this because Ix made their character the same height as they are in real life)

Most Markdown parsers actually won't turn things into blockquotes unless they actually start with a > followed by a space, for exactly this reason. Since we were hitting this issue, I assume that redcarpet (our markdown parser) doesn't do this.

I checked, and it will autofork and setup a PR if you don't have commit bits. I don't have privs on that repo, so it should be the same for me as anyone.

For future reference, Github, much like git itself, has a tendency to frighten and confuse our non-technical colleagues (I mean for that matter, git has a tendency to confuse our technical colleagues, hence James Mickens' aphorism about git being Donnie Darko as a service—i.e., a confusing movie about time travel that you put your source code into) and I would recommend against pushing people to interact with it directly (although of course everyone is welcome to get their hands dirty if they want to).

The TOS Badfic Archive is over here, by the way; there's not a lot in it. TOS16 is the last one we have any text of the badfic for.

hS

PPC Contiuum - Defining and Clarifying

According to Araeph (as archivist), that text was originally posted by Meg Thornton herself! A really big clue to it being the document Jay mentions is that in the list of Untanglers, the four names are Shelley & Nia, and Jay & Acacia - in that order. So it looks like Meg wrote it up while working on "Teddy Bear", and then silently changed the head of the DIC when Jay invented a new one.

This document, archived two days later, is almost certainly the other half of Meg's notes - her plan for how Despatch would work, including her two candidate stories. Between this and the DIC material in the first one, Meg seems to have been the first person to have written what we would now format as a wiki article!

Hmm... here is the Despatch home page in its original form, linking to both of those documents (& did you know Meg was Australian?). But it also has a reviews page, on which Architeuthis says, on June 22nd:

"Oh, your reference sheet lists poor, overworked Sub Rosa as the Director of both Intelligence AND Implausible Crossovers. I'm HOPING that 's not really the case...."

So I think that's the answer: the Flower Jay couldn't remember was the Sub Rosa moonlighting for the DIC.

(I assume Meg was in correspondence with J&A, and that's where the doc came from. It's also another possible explanation for the anachronistic mention of their transfer - but it seems a bit off for her to mention it before they made their big reveal.)

hS

—Ls also wonders.

Interesting theory there, hS! It is rather odd that Shelley never responds to Nia's point that J+A are in the wrong department now, so I can see how that might have been shoehorned in after the original text was finished. But yes, still learning!

And speaking of Meg, she must have been over the moon when J+A mentioned Despatch kits and whatsits here! TOS has name dropped other writers characters before, but I think this was the first really big piece of another spin-off's worldbuilding they adopted back into their own story. Exciting! And perhaps part of the reason Meg felt it necessary to allude to J+A's department transfer?

I love that the SO admits that missions are assigned based on how they'll stress out the agents, but then says they still want to conserve agent sanity. Thoughtless dialogue for a side character, or an early bit of the idea that the Flowers just don't understand human psychology as well as they think?

Interesting that Makes-Things had to rewire a console to make it receive missions from a different department. Was HQ not running a fully connected internet service in this time period? Also, funny to think that J+A were no longer expected to keep a charge list in DIC, even when there were still original characters they wound up assassinating. Same with the neuralyzer detail: they never bothered in their DMS missions, with no consequences, but because Meg included it as part of Despatch's kit, they included it here. And now, both are fairly ubiquitous in all the major action departments!

So, Jay's author note: she says, "In the official PPC document (which neither of us wrote, in a subclause I missed), it says what the Implausible Crossover director is, and what the flash patch is. The flash patch is a flying pig, which is fine by me. But I LIKE the lichen that sounds like John Cleese, and so it stays." So, it sounds like a lot of department heads and flashpatches got brainstormed ahead of time, rather than letting published stories determine canon? And it also sounds like there was another intended head of the DIC, that J+A decided to supersede because they didn't want to edit out the Lichen once they concepted him. I wonder what the original Flower was, and whether they're someone we know, who got moved to another department? . . . I don't suppose this "official document" still exists?

—doctorlit wonders

And since I don't know if the remedy to the edit button not working for you is "being logged in" or "Delta needs to tweak a setting" or what ... I'll fix the links this evening when I'm not at work.

Thanks for clearing up what you want the replacement to be, and I'm sorry for giving off the impression I was irritated with you.

And there are a lot of other, dangerous-looking buttons that I don't want to touch for fear of a "congratulations, you have deleted" message.

And... Tomash? That message feels very much like "irritated IT department to colleague who should know better". You're making me want to raise a ticket!

Your request has been logged with id ##hS-7219.

Title: Inhumed links

Description: PPC Board header (url: plotprotectors.org) contains obsolete links. Request correction of string "http://plotprotectors.tripod.com/TOS/" to "https://plotprotectors.neocities.org/TOS/", and "https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=18hztHpDehxcfrjaXoFUew1vb0BdZPDAusHxMHzHiCzM" to "https://ppc.fandom.com/wiki/PPC_Constitution". All other text to remain the same. Attempts to Do It Yourself via github have been unsuccessful (see previous ticket ##DIY-1666).

Submitted by: Huinesoron Eagleshade, etc etc

Click here to Close Request

Note: DoSAT reserves the right to close this ticket without notice or resolution at any time. For more information, please reread.

hS

The text of the header is stored [ in the highlighted part of thhis file, more or less. That page should have an edit button that'll allow you to make changes and then send in a "pull request" - or at least it did for me.

If we can get the editing thing to work, I think you sending in the changes you'd want to see in the header will go more smoothly than me trying to work out the exact tweaks you're after.

Because I wanted to do members of FicPsych, but the chart only allows six figures, and each AHAIRQ team has six members, which made narrowing it down easy. I had characters on three of the five teams formed for the 2012 season, so naturally I had to make a chart for each team.

First up, Team Physical Therapy, composed entirely of FicPsych nurses. Team Captain Mirrad is a Minbari (Babylon 5), but the rest are various flavors of human. They're a pretty average lot, really. Nathonea's height is a guess, but I imagine her being kinda tall and gangly.

Then there's Team Blast Hardcheese, co-captained by Derik and Gall. It's an all-human team, but it has an ex-dragonrider and a Scythian warrior on it. They'd be formidable if they could actually function as a team. I had to guess Saline and Noir's heights: Saline is "one or two sizes" smaller than Ellipsia (a Warcraft human who'd be about 5'8" according to game information), and Noir is "tall." I feel pretty okay with this.

Finally, Team Nevermind, which has precisely one human on it. Team Captain Earwig is a Kender (Dragonlance). Kur'nak, Barid, and Brightbeard are an Orc, Troll, and Dwarf respectively (World of Warcraft), and it must be noted that Barid habitually slouches; if he stood upright, he'd be 7'1". Ilraen actually plays in his Andalite (Animorphs) form, so I should have made him 6'1" for this chart, but oh well. Decima is a witch from the Potterverse and likely thrilled not to be the shortest person here.

There, that gives a broader sampling of adult agents' heights, too. {= )

~Neshomeh

where you can upload without an account, and doesn't have a search engine or allow search engines to index their contents, which is great when you want to keep your contents private and/or only accessible to people you share links to.

Same reason we turned off superscript with ^ , because we go ^_^ far more often than we need superscript. And of course sometimes we also go >.> or even >.< at the start of a line, too. {= )

~Neshomeh

GDrive, etc links can’t be embedded like this. If you uploaded to a site like Tumblr or Discord (but, iirc, not Twitter? maybe?) you can get a direct link to embed that does work, though. But if this isn’t something you care about too much, that’s fine!

~Lily, who sort of wishes she could just directly post pictures on the Board but knows the hosting abilities for pictures can get unwieldy really fast

The TOS link currently goes to a redirect page, and realistically, there's no good reason not to point the Constitution link to the wiki page. I was being silly when I insisted we treat the GDoc as primary.

hS

...But we seem to have turned it off.

I asked Tomash why we did this, but neither of us actually remember. My best guess is that we wanted to avoid breaking emotes that start with "> " at the start of a line. This is particularly pertinant because of an implementation detail of the board: posts are stored to the database as written, and formatted on the way out. This is a Good Thing, by and large, but it does create a problem here: any adjustments we make to formatting apply retroactively to every post ever made. Making that not happen would... actually be a good bit of work, so we haven't and may not.

But yes, we can actually allow this relatively trivially, in theory. It's just that the consequences may be undesirable.

... is almost certainly late.

As doctorlit pointed out, "Teddy Bear" from Despatch is dated 5 days before this, but mentions events in it! This is weird, because both dates are pretty solid: Despatch is the last update date on her story (which has some big names in the reviews... Architeuthis, Miss Cam, and technetium are all there!), while TOS17 has a release date on Oddlots.

The key passage (in "Teddy Bear") reads as follows:

"I was thinking of bringing in Jay and Acacia," I said. "They're the best in Lord of the Rings, and Acacia in particular has very good reason to want this Sue dead."

Shelley shook her head. "Yes, but I'd say that Meg's got pretty good judgement on this one. Jay and Acacia are probably the best pair to get in. They've got the right balance of professionalism and vindictiveness to do the job properly. They've also got those assassin skills — the best assassins around for a long time."

Looking at that, I reckon it was a last-minute change to Meg's story. If you tweak Nia's line to something like "Aren't they the really scary ones?", it would work just about as well - nothing in Shelley's reply references the DIC, and Nia's next line seems to be written as if they're still Assassins. So I think TOS17 was posted to Miss Cam's site on the 24th or 23rd, and then only uploaded by P@L to Oddlots on the 29th.

So there you go! This one's late, and that's cool, because it means we're still learning more about the early days.

Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Darkness Awakened by Jay and Acacia

hS

Honestly though, I'm not, like, too invested in getting this to work, so I might just leave it as is.

Thoth is on the small side for a Marine, and he should still be at least half again as broad across the shoulders. Like so:

As opposed to like so:

So basically what I'm saying is dooo it, dooo it, dooo it...! ^_~

~Neshomeh

Like I have here for Mina and Carlisle.

Helpful?

it should be < img src = "link" width="width" / > (remove spaces, except between “img src”). You can link from Discord and anywhere else that gives you direct links to images.

(Hopefully that’s what you’re looking for?)

Hopefully this link works, but if it still doesn't (which is probably the case), then I'm not really sure what to do anymore. Um.

For those interested anyway, Charlie is 6'6" (198 cm) and Jiwon is 5'5" (165 cm). Ocotillo and Dr. Glocktopus didn't work for the graph, but the former, being a dragon and whatnot, is over twenty feet tall (10 meters and 66 cm) while the latter is the size of a normal giant Pacific octopus (small).

Sorry about the link.