The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Everything is up on my AO3 account, except the first part of my first mission, which is still in a Google Doc becuse I haven't gotten it up on AO3 yet, with one thing and another.

I imagine you'd be delighted if people went "have you read Kittyauthor's RC Hyperbola?", for example.

hS

If it were up to me, I'd call the spin-offs after the main agent(s) purely out of spite and go back to pretending that neither non-numbers nor numbers longer than six characters exist. (And I think numbers longer than four characters are pushing it, too.)

Fortunately, since you're here to make the call for yourself, it's not up to me. {= )

~Neshomeh is kidding about the "spite" bit; she'd do it for usability.

But at least it has better SPaG than the fic I'm sporking. Also, about the He Who Fights Monsters thing. I am sort of trying to play around with that trope. It is going, well, it's going somewhere. I hope it's not going to be too bad, but then again, I don't have a whole lot of experience with writing.

• Bw, attempting to put their two cents in

That way I can update the whole page in one go, eventually.

~Neshomeh

My Immortal Wiki’s Related Websites page. (Three guesses as to who added it.)

—Ls

Seeing as they’re all nonfunctional.

cough All of my RCs cough

Would we (well, could I) have a sort of "preferred nickname" for the RC as the title? The only reason why I ask is both of my spin-offs have the RC number listed as the series name (I can't recall O'Ryan and Kittyauthor's name, but I know it includes the RC number, while David Null's is... well, the formula for your basic hyperbola). Here's what RC Hyperbola's number looks like in one-line: 1 = x²/a² - y²/b²

So, I guess it isn't horrible, but O'Ryan's and soon-to-be-Paye's are gonna be a pain to write as a title of a wiki page (at this point, it's a running gag with all of my agents and IDK if I'll stop, but soon-to-be-Paye's will be the logical extreme and nothing will be more extreme than RC 1(((S1)²/n1)) + ((S2)²/n2))) / (((1/(n1-1))×(((S1)²/n1))²) + ((1/(n2-1))× ((S2)²/n2)²)) = df AKA RC Satterthwaite Formula. That is the longest equation I'll use I promise!). So, I'd prefer if I could, if I don't give Paye and Crow's series a title, if the wiki page is titled RC Satterthwaite Formula rather than... the actual formula.

-kA

(Edit: And by "don't give [them] a title," I mean a title other than the RC number or RC number nickname.)

Yes I'm still bitter about that, especially because it leads to poorly informed takes like this.

~Neshomeh

First preference: Spin-off name, e.g. "Tales from DOGA".

Second preference: by response center, e.g. "Response Center 999". (This will cover a lot of ground.)

Third preference: by featured agent(s), e.g. "Tawaki Penguin (spin-off)". (And may I just say dangit, Tawaki, for switching everything around so much—even though that's something I genuinely like about that spin-off. {; P )

2 and 3 may actually have a nearly equivalent preferability. Some spin-off sites give the RC number as their name, some give the agent pairing, and I'd go by what's listed on the site when possible. When in doubt, though, RC numbers tend to be more consistent than featured characters. With some notable exceptions. {; P

~Neshomeh

Cards Against HQ

FicPsych

Neshomeh's Archive

Inevitable Holiday Deck

Names have been changed slightly from the original versions due to the character limit on CrCast.

And... that's almost everything, really. I haven't done the Flower decks because I don't think anyone really liked using them, and I haven't done Cards Against Boarders because I don't have it (and I didn't think it was a good idea anyway).

For what it's worth, they're PG-13 at worst. Still marked NSFW due to mild swearwords and allusions to naughty things, though.

~Neshomeh

For myself I'd be happy to go with just the title of the spinoff, plus "([Department] Spinoff)" if there's ambiguity, but I'm not sure that works everywhere. What, to pick a random example, is the title of Tawaki's spinoff? (Maybe the order of preference is: title of spinoff, then RC number, then chief agents.)

How much consistency do we want? I would much prefer to have "Tales from DOGA" and "Driftwood" as pages in their own right, but for consistency do we want something like "Driftwood (Floaters spinoff)" or "Driftwood (Huinesoron spinoff)"? But the latter case falls down with "Tales from DOGA (Huinesoron, Raven Firedragon, Vemi, and Kaitlyn spinoff)" - all of those are featured coauthors, and RF was co-creator.

We could also put them all as sub-pages on Spinoff, so that it would be "Spinoff/Tales from DOGA"; that removes all ambiguity, but I feel like sub-pages aren't easily searchable.

hS

At least the major ones - Tales from DOGA, Newbies (DOGA Spinoff), PPC: Driftwood and so on. It wouldn't capture anything like all of my writing - I wouldn't call "Beginnings", my collection of agent backstories, a spinoff - but it would snag some of it.

"Things added to continuity" might be trickier even than you think, though. You don't just have to read the spinoffs - you have to know the order they went up in, down to specific missions! If you only went with a vague "late 2010s", you might think I created snrfs, for example.

hS

And I know you know that very well. {= ) So how come it needs a page on PPC Wiki, too?

THAT SAID, I'm not seriously suggesting we should delete it. It doesn't make sense to do that unless we also do rewrites on all the other Legendaries, and I don't see that happening any time soon. Plus, in this specific case, it's practically a byword for "the worst fanfiction ever" and gets referenced often enough in PPC stories that there is a case for having our own take on it. The current page isn't really about that, though. That could stand to change...

~Neshomeh

Last weekend's planned edit spree got cut off suddenly by an impromptu trip to my students' baseball game.

Yet another person deciding we're Teh Ebulz without doing any research or, y'know, actually talking to us. Yawn.

In fairness, sporking does mean squaring yourself with the fact that you may offend or discourage someone in some way. Personally, I'm content that we are doing the best we can not to hurt anyone, and if people somehow find out we've sporked their stuff, the ball is then in their court when it comes to choosing what to do about it. If people are gonna take a random stranger's criticism of their writing and characters as a personal attack regardless of it being explicitly not a personal attack (how can it be if we know nothing about them personally, eh?), there's nothing we can do about it.

And, I mean, I would also rather assume that people are not generally so emotionally fragile that a single negative experience can push them over the edge into declaring they Shall Never Write Again? Especially if they've decided to post their work out in public? I'm sorry, but I don't want to live in a world where no one ever says anything critical of a creative work ever, so I'm not going to bite my tongue on the off-chance that I might happen to upset someone who shouldn't have gone public in the first place. I learned a long time ago that everyone has to take personal responsibility for themselves; it's not my job to do it for them.

Citation needed on that stuff about egging on trolls, too. Where? When? Links or it didn't happen.

~Neshomeh

TV Tropes is not a good place for media analysis, even in a comedic way. As a site, it suggests that listing all the ways something does or does not conform to genre conventions is in and of itself engaging with the work critically on its own merits. It isn't. At best, TV Tropes is a first step, a comedy guide to criticism and media literacy. Personally, I don't think it's even that. By way of evidence, I offer the many dreadful novels that Tropers have written over the years, which as (not to harp on this topic) someone with a literal postgraduate degree in creative writing feels like being an architect looking at Groverhaus.

Dissection is an apt description of what TV Tropes does to fiction, but in my view it's more akin to dismantling. It's a fundamentally destructive process. It renders down a work of fiction into however many component parts, lays them all out in a row with neat labels that occasionally have something funny on them, and considers it a job well done. It doesn't do anything beyond that. It doesn't teach anything about the parts, how they fit together, how any of it actually works. You're presented with a tray of bolts and screws and bits of bent metal and told it's still a car. Or possibly a frog.

Wikis aren't works of criticism, they're works of reference. A dictionary is not a style guide. TV Tropes is neither a work of, nor a guide to, media criticism. Its stated goal is to be a comedy look at media, and in my opinion and experience that does not lend itself well to engaging with media in good faith or on the work in question's own terms. You don't get an understanding, you just get... snark, I guess? Which, if that's the best the site aspires to be, then more power to it and its user base. That's not a good formula for understanding how to write well. I'm sure it has inspired a lot of people to write more, but it's a start, not an end. If you treat it as such, it will make your writing worse.

That's... really all I have to say on the matter.

I just didn't think the extra few sentences were contradicting the notion, and some people might come away with the idea that Sue Hunters are no better than the Sues they hunt. Apologies on my end!

But, I want to say to not respond to those reviews until you're emotionally steady or just... don't reply at all. Not meaning to be rude, but I don't want to feed the flames, so to speak, and have a member of the PPC get in an argument with a TVTropes (non-PPC) member. Does that make any sense?

-kA

I'd personally want to delete one of the pages made for one of Eledhwen and Christianne's mission targets, for one. At the time I was annoyed that people kept assuming that decent writing meant an OC couldn't possibly be a Sue; now it just feels mean-spirited.

But yes, having a page for each spin-off would be nice. When I mention "things being added to continuity", I don't mean every last detail, but rather bigger things. Like, for example, Derik's spin-off involved a Reality Room that didn't impose solely World One reality but rather reality as defined by his home continuum. That's a pretty important thing in my opinion, since it confirms that there's different Reality Rooms with different takes on the reality contained within. And also, I solidified that in one of my own missions, so there's more than one spin-off using that aspect of the continuity.