The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Zara and Diamond are up for cameos. Here’s the links for their pages: Zara and Diamond

Sooo I am currently working on an interlude (never written one of those before, how exciting!) and I am in the market for some agent cameos. I’m having my crow character Mellon fly around HQ making a general nuisance of himself, and I am letting him pass by a few select spots where characters may congregate. If you want your agents to have a cameo, please throw them at me! Can’t promise that everyone will have lines, but they’ll all be there.

I shall need the following to do your agents justice. Name, Department, pronouns and appearance kind of goes without saying, as well as general personality traits. Feel free to link to missions with them if you want, or their Wiki page if they have 'em. A small special request, if they have a particular small, shiny thing that a thieving crow might conceivably steal, you can add that too! (They’ll get it back, Agent Moira will make sure of it.) Finally, is there a place where they are more likely to hang out? I am planning to visit the PPC Cafeteria, an Escher Room, the Courtyard, some random corridor, and the office of the Marquis de Sod, and maybe a fly-over of New Caledonia, since Mellon will be flying through random portals/plotholes. Some places might be added or removed, depending on pacing. Some places are more likely to get brief mentions, others might have Mellon check them out for a few minutes before returning to what he was doing.

The interlude is still being hammered out with only chunks of writing here and there so it might take a while yet to finish. I was reaching a point where I realised that I can literally go no further without other agents. XD

Promise I’ll give them back when I’m done!

EDIT: Timeline-wise, this interlude would take place in early July 2021 at the very latest. Please fit in your agents accordingly. (With allowances made for wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey HQ stuff, of course.)

/Ekwy

Today is the Dragon Boat (or Duanwu) Festival, which is a day of warding off bad luck (the 5th month of the Chinese calendar is supposed to be unlucky) as well as commemorating BL1.

Since one of the traditions is boat racing, I have to ask: your agents are in the same boat in an All-HQ Boat Race. How do they fare?

(For example, we know the Disentangler and the Agent won't actually get much rowing in...)

But I distinctly remember meeting an elf in 2016! We even had a Noble Quest for the Chippy! ;P

Anyway, speaking of musical verses, would this RP count? It appears to be an AU where the PPC is an orchestra...

Because an entire multiverse's worth of shiny tech is, in fact, shin, and would leave me unlikely to get bored (or at least provide enough projects to swap to if things go stale).

Also, Medical and FicPsych are quite solid job benefits, and them alone outweigh the risk of mystery meatloaf attacks or sudden angry robot incursions.

I mean...okay, yes, some parts of it would be fun, but...I think, ultimately, I'd prefer to just visit. Maybe go there on vacation, which feels like an ironic thing to say. I think it would be really fun to get to play around with some of the tech and general multiversally acquired items, and I'd love to (safely) step into some fictional worlds and have a look around, but even in a non-Action department, I wouldn't be too interested in staying. It would be difficult to explain to people, not to mention (more importantly) that there are aspects of my life that couldn't really follow me in and that would suck. So my gut reaction is absolutely not, followed up by well, actually, visiting would be really fun, especially if it happened multiple times.

I suppose my semi-ideal scenario would be to have a friend or two in HQ whom I could visit and go to stay with sometimes :D Best of both worlds! I'm not sure how well that works with in-universe rules, but I have actually written author!me in before (see: the Blackout). There was an early idea that Dawn and I would occasionally chat, though it's rarely made it in outside the Blackout, especially in posted stories. In the Blackout, though, you may notice she knows exactly who DawnFire (my previous screen name, changed in 2017) is and has clearly been in touch with her before. Outside the Blackout, I think the main thing I've actually got written is Dawn finding a pair of notes from "~DF" - one cutting her off on Bleeproducts (I think that one's been excised in the rewrite) and one giving a note on where to send a character who can blend into canon (which I think has stayed). So there's that.

~Z

The question I have to consider afterwards, of course, is "how long would I last?"

and I'm pointing out that it fell flat to me. Another aspect of comedy, particularly of the dramatic irony type, requires the writer to have more knowledge about a given situation than the characters themselves do. Winfrey's recruitment gave a better sense of Noman talking a big talk without much knowledge to back it up, but the PPC Continuum joke didn't give as good of a sense of that because HQ existing in a weird cascade of plotholes with bits and pieces scattered through various continua within the Prime Multiverse is... kinda foundational.

Basically, it's one thing for Noman to be like "Wait are we our own continuum? That'd explain [noodle incident here]", it's another for him to be "We have a continuum?"

It might seem like small potatoes to you, but it comes off as having not read other PPC writings other than TOS. That's why people keep saying it feels like you haven't fully gotten the gist of the setting.

ETA re "extreme scenarios": You can have extreme scenarios in perfectly SFW fics stemming from bad description. The PPC is meant to be PG-13 with some NSFW missions peppered here and there and perfectly opt-outable. Not being able to get important introductory information about your agents because of squick regarding an "extreme scenario" would be upsetting to any potential reader who wants to know more about what you plan to do here.

ETA2: For what it’s worth, I would 300% read a spin-off about Agent Vojtek Bearington, an actual bear who is fooling HQ into thinking it’s an actual PPC Agent. That’s the kind of comedy that lands with me :P

Didn't see the post saying it was off-limits. I'll find another target, I have a big list of things to whack and so it's no big deal to discard another Mission draft.

I did the basic check and passed it well a few months back, my technical error wasn't shown there.

but the general feeling that you might not have read relevant articles on the wiki or other people's spin-offs before asking questions about basic tech. If you plan to write missions for Pokemon or Naruto, we do have existing missions in those continua to refer to for a sense of precedent. The setting is flexible enough that you can go your own way and justify it however you want, but it's recommended, especially for newbies, to have at least some precedent to refer to. Heck, I've been here since 2008, and I still trawl the Wiki to see what's come before if I want to do something that I think might be new.

Precedent is key. That's why one of the new suggestions for gauging whether you're ready to ask for Permission is being able to answer which non-TOS agent pair is your favourite, and why.

As for the feeling of impatience regarding your personal schedule -- I'm sorry to hear that this has been frustrating for you and that the Board seems to move too quickly for you to be able to keep up with things. That being said, Permission once granted doesn't expire with inactivity, and -- let me quote myself from last year -- the Board won't sprout legs and walk away. If you're going to be busy, that's okay! This Board will still be here when you get back.

Off the top of my head, Bookworm was denied twice before their life got busy, came back in January this year, and got Permission. So maybe some time away to clear your head and focus on other things will be good for you, too!

hS, this is fantastic! I'm sorry we lost the original, but I promise this is even better. I especially love the implication that multiverse crossovers can beget further multiverses, which should make for lots of fun as future stories and RPs unfold and produce further opportunities for ideas and connections!

There's one other timeline I know of, although it's only a minor one, and rather unpleasant. It's the one where Lorac killed Alec's wife and son, and was cryogenically frozen as punishment. Alec and Teena then had kids together. It has exactly one crossing point per direction! Relevant links are here (NSFW, mention of rape) and here. The Cold Storage isn't something we have in the prime timeline, but since there's no indication of anyone besides Lorac being there, it's easy enough to surmise the facility was created as a result of Lorac's crime, and not that this is some crazy police state timeline.

—doctorlit is stuck typing on his phone for a while, as his desktop tower is refusing to turn on

Before I begin, I must say that comedy is a lot like a frog: it stops living when you dissect it to understand how it functions. However, I'll flash my scalpel and explain this joke.

The joke there is that Winfrey is wrong and her erroneous hypothesis literally blew up in her face. It was intentionally incorrect to set the stage for "it's going to do something stupid." Winfrey was wrong for the sake of setting up a gag and Noman was wrong because he's stupid and it's in character for him to be wrong on multiverse physics. Noman says he's the "most Agent-y there is" because he's a cocksure, zealous moron and his name is Agent, not because he's actually the most competent. He's not competent and having him be competent doesn't comedically work as well as the gag around him: He's an idiot but he's 150% sure he's right. So when he messes up: that is the joke. Winfrey is also gullible so when she believes him and then does something that immediately results in her suffering, that is the joke.

They were wrong and saying half-right things because Winfrey is inexperienced and Noman is stupid. I needed to establish them as incompetent now so it would make sense if I pull up their incompetence later. So I made them wrong. I imagined this scene almost like a spirited argument between two men, one who is saying 2 + 2 = 3 and one who is saying 2 + 2 = 5.

It would be out of character for them to be correct, it would be unfunny for them to be correct, so they are not correct. This is why I have so many gags of them suffering on Missions: because they are operating on wrong ideas and get hurt because of it. Their knowledge isn't my knowledge and their opinions aren't my opinions. They are characters and have license to be wrong, especially when it's setting up for a joke.

I'll look through my notes for something milder to mock if the target is objectionable, it's no big deal. I've discarded another Mission already, it only takes me about a week to make a finished first draft (although that's changing). I wanted some highly extreme scenarios for the sake of making some gags around Winfrey freaking out.

I'd swapped targets before, I think I saw the remark on that first target being unacceptable, but not the second one. I'll fish a bit more, and make a new draft. Honestly? I think I might look for something in the Madness Combat department... that would be very funny.

The error I had with the tech was thinking the R.A. was the object that generated portals in every instance, although that technical error never showed up in the permission request. The joke on finding the hidden text may've been poorly received (it's immediately in Winfrey's bio, a throwaway joke about shipping Winfrey and Noman that I included because I was bored, and I was always going to include a note of secret text if there's ever any, and admittedly that was the only time I had it planned) but it feels at this point that there's an unreasonable amount of hoops to jump through.

Asking questions in private and having single erroneous lines in first drafts that are wholly unrelated to the initial request is apparently grounds for denial. I think this is going too far, especially because I immediately corrected the mistake when I recognized it was wrong and have always been amenable to editing. I've thrown out entire drafts and remade things anew without much hassle before.

I'm getting rather busy and wanted to leave a few good missions and interludes to look at while I'm off, that's why I was stockpiling all of this writing. I've been here six months and wanted to give some output, because I'm not going to be available and I wanted to amuse a community I had fun with... six years ago now? That's why I had so much stuff lined up now, while I had time. So that I could polish them up while juggling my personal life and my half-dozen other projects. I really don't have much time anymore.

After the first draft of the slip was rejected on relatively minor errors (IE, an Agent in disguise was wearing green, which was accurate to the canon he was disguised in, but isn't in PPC colors) I wanted to iron out everything. Me asking questions for a more accurate final result so it fits as grounds for disqualification feels off. I uploaded segments of something explicitly to ask if I was getting all the technical details right.

I'll come back in a few months when my schedule clears, but I don't have the time anymore, that's why I was so impatient, I knew I would enter this crunch.

I'm sorry I miss things over here, I don't have the time to comb through every single thing and the layout of this forum leads to topics getting buried and responses being lost. Contact me on the Discord or on my email at Internetstuff3412@gmail.com if you want to have a longer talk on this, I really won't be able to respond here in a reasonable timeframe.

I added another canon to the page and added my name under a canon I happen to know really well. While it's still outdated, it's nice to know it's there!

We also have a Beta Reader Directory, which I want to note so that this post isn't for naught, so to speak.

Betas, I will admit, are hard to find, so I understand Sier not being able to find them.

-kA

If I don't make it back to this tonight, I'll try again tomorrow.

~Neshomeh

... is add a section for something like "rumoured multiverses", to cover things like the dragons and the musical-Verse (and I guess Plort), where there's a solid narrative presence but it's not entirely accurate to call it a full Multiverse.

hS

I like the dynamic Mina and Carlisle have! I was definitely picturing Carlisle as younger in the WWS RP, though, because he was acting so unhinged, so his real age did throw me for a loop there. I would be hesitant to call any agents psychotic, though -- background radiation insanity is kind of a given in this setting, but psychosis has some more serious implications. I think as you continue to write Mina and Carlisle, you might realise there's other reasons why they are what they are -- I originally conceptualised Agent Eledhwen as ataxophobic (aka having a phobia of mess), but after a couple years of writing her I realised her real issue is the culture clash between her Elvish cleanliness sensibilities and Christianne's tendency to be a slob. TL;DC, agents that seem insane at first may not be completely insane after time spent with them.

Activity-wise, you're probably like about 85% responsible for making the Board active again, which I also appreciate. A couple toe-treads here and there, but nothing too serious. I would suggest you hold your horses on making agents in all of the departments you're interested in until you have a better handle on Mina and Carlisle, but I see that the Troll Division is your special focus, and personally wouldn't mind seeing your take on it eventually. I will note, though, that trollfic is deliberately created, thus authorial intent matters in its level of awfulness, and it'd be very tricky to spork something bad on purpose while avoiding bashing the author.

And in terms of badfic sample, I don't know exactly how kosher it is to spork something that only seems to exist on a wiki page for something else. As I don't have a hat, I'll defer to Nesh's judgement there.

So, no hat, but if I did have one, I'd lean towards granting the keys with the caveat of looking over your first mission to see how you handle something trollishly bad.

ETA: I realised this might come across a bit like sniping Nesh’s decision, to which I can only say that that is not my intention and please don’t take this as any sort of endorsement — just wanted to offer some feedback!

-- that not everyone shares the same fandom anymore. A lot of us ancientbies share the LotR fandom, so we're generally eager to jump for things pertaining to Tolkien, but outside of that I'm not entirely sure who'd read what. There is a Canon Advisers page, but it's outdated with people who are no longer active, plus the active people still on there may be very busy.

That, plus it being NSFW and possibly NSFB can also be off-putting. I don't have enough working knowledge of Naruto to be a good adviser on any badfic, much less a NSFW one. The only reason Agent Christianne worked in the Anime/Manga division of the DMS for Naruto is because my friend who created her drew her killing Naruto Sues!

-dons a cardboard knock-off Hat-

Firstly, writing. Novastorme in his last read-through said your writing passes muster, and I agree with that. Your agents have a pretty decent banter going in your samples, and the "Dummy's Guide to Being a PPC Agent" is a pretty funny touch.

That being said, there have been some concerns about your levels of understanding wrt the basic setting. Nesh mentioned the tech, but I'm going to mention:

“Wouldn’t the Narrative Laws work in the PPC Continuum, but not elsewhere?” Winfrey asked. Noman hung up the phone and scratched his head.
“We have a Continuum? What happens if someone writes fanfic of us?”
Winfrey scratched her head, baffled. “Wait, hang on, hang on. If we’re in the PPC Continuum, do we ever enter another Continuum, or is it just a story in a story? Anyway, I think we can kill any Sues who crop up in our own-”

There's been a fair few recent conversations about the Multiverse and how the Prime Multiverse (the "PPC Continuum") plays into it. There's also a well-known reason for why PPC Badfic doesn't affect the agents, too, especially since we actively write PPC Badfic during the Badfic Games in September. I know this conversation is played a bit for laughs, but it also seems to be written without much of the existing knowledge about the PPC in mind. If Noman's the most "agent-y agent there is", he would be aware of these things.

I also side with Nesh on the interactions. I noted in previous requests that people have mentioned you being a very harsh beta. I personally do not think harshness is a good trait for a beta or a PPC writer. Concrit should come from a place of genuinely wanting the person to improve, not just angrily nitpicking the problems in their stories. It's taken me, personally, a long time to realise this myself, and thus my older missions are much angrier and harsher than my new/rewritten ones. Being firm on, say, grammar rules or when characters are doing OOC things is one thing, but being harsh is another.

Finally, the mission target. It doesn't appear to have changed since the last request, and Novastorme specifically denied you because of the mission target having been taken down for rewriting. You said there was a new one, but I don't see it, so I hope that's just you linking the wrong Permission slip and not because you didn't hear Novastorme the last time. I would honestly recommend staying away from NSFW and Bleepfics for your first mission altogether, because PPCing isn't about being able to take on the ~worst of the worst~, and having a NSFW mission first go might alienate potential readers before they can even get to know your characters enough to want to read more missions about them. Not to mention that newbie PPC writers might not know the balance between "showing how awful the fic is" and "forcing the readers to read the worst parts of the fic".

So all in all, if I had a Hat, I'd deny you based on the mission target not having changed, and be very concerned that you've already got a first mission ready to go for what appears to be a fic that was already discouraged for a mission target. I apologise if that's not the response you want to hear. I would strongly recommend you take part in more discussions on the Board in addition to the Discord and get to know the setting well enough that you can pass the Self-Check (hS worked very hard on that! So use it!) before you send another request in, and that would probably mean, as Nesh said, not to apply again for some time in order to better understand what's going on.

But please, don't sweat this. Nesh denied me Permission my first go back in the day because of concerns regarding my agents and having a very weird writing sample. I took some time away from the request, posted a ton on the Board (I think I had like the third-highest number of posts on the Board that year?) in response to other people in addition to talking about my own agents and plans for them, and then I got Permission. I noticed that you tried doing the Multiverse Monitor RP, which led to the World Without Suvians RP, which is really good! I enjoyed interacting with the Gossip Monitor and the cashew running gag was funny! So more interactions like that, and you might have a better chance of people trusting you with the keys to the sandbox. Ganbare!

Okay, while I’m obviously not a PG, I’ve interacted with Sier and would like to say a few things.

He’s been pretty active, starting and participating in a lot of RPs. And (from what I’ve seen) he tries to listen to feedback. He seems to really want to write for the PPC. He responded to my beta request, and has helped me with my Permission Request.

However, from what I’ve gathered, he has a tough time finding anyone who will beta his stuff. Perhaps an oldbie could help him out with that?

—Some thoughts from Ls, who is definitely not a Permission Giver.

I might be of some use in the Nursery or teaching in New Cal. Maybe Department of Intelligence at most, though. I'm not suited for experiencing half of the stuff I throw at my characters, haha. But I do think it would be fun to visit fictional worlds, and HQ's healthcare seems to be better than what I'd get in the US!

~Lily, who has actually self-inserted twice

You're right: the first of the Jacques-meeting-his-AUs stories actually does feature the Potterverse counterpart! Well. One of them. You get the idea. It isn't up yet, but I do think I've shared some excerpts, which might be where the confusion came in.

Anyway, yeah. Currently, pretty much every Jacques AU should be considered extracanonical; I'm not actually sure any of them have made contact with...I guess let's call it the Prime PPC timeline. A couple have had pieces posted (Young Wizards AU, Potterverse AU - that one was on the Board and I don't think it's actually listed on his wiki page, which is probably an oversight), but according to what's currently been posted, I don't think anyone officially knows either AU exists. And if we're considering 'canonical' or whatever to mean 'put up in a doc or other story posting format', I think it's only those two, really. Happy to be proven wrong, of course.

~Z

Disclaimer: I am not a PG. I've been here since Decemeber 2019 (almost three years), and I feel rather well-versed in the PPC Multiverse (Omniverse? Universe?), but I'm still not a PG. Please take this lighter than hS or Nesh.

That being said, I have some points to add:

• Having two beta requests the same-ish day is not entirely a new thing. GeniusGamer and I posted our requests on the same day-ish, as Genius noted. Granted, in this case, it was nearly 24 hours apart and it happened in 2020, where a majority of us were probably less busy due to, well, current events. I am a little off-put by the fact that Sier's request was seven hours after Ls's, but two-in-a-day Permission requests have happened at least once before.
• That being said, we recently discussed needing more PGs because a lot of them have drifted away or are busy with their personal lives. The thread recently-ish dropped off the front page, but it was a monster. It seems like a lack of situational awareness, especially added onto the fact that Sier is still going off on the old requirements on Permission (which is understandable somewhat, since Sier said he was out of town when that happened, and I wouldn't have wanted to completely start over if I had messed up on a couple of little things).
• Like what hS said, it makes me (and a couple of other members, I think?) uncomfortable that Sier requested a beta for his first mission without Permission (I think the interlude is wrapped up in the Permission request? Might be wrong), especially when Nesh pointed out that he doesn't have a strong grasp on esstential PPC tech. I get being excited to write PPC missions, but one of the requirements is that you have to use PPC tech and somewhat understand it.
• Yeah, the badfic Sier wants to tackle as his first mission (?) is distasteful since the author has taken it down. Did he already write the mission for that fic? Or is the badfic listed a badfic he might tackle in the future? I'm a bit confused.
• Also, more of a personal opinion, but saying "can you find the hidden text?" makes it seem more like a game to me, which throws me off. A Permission request is meant to see how well you write and how well you do in the PPC 'verse. Again, more of a personal thought, but the "find the hidden text" reminds me of "Where's Waldo" in not the best way.
• He does seem to be making steps towards not being so self-centered in his interactioms, although he still tends to drive discussions in #writing (to my knowledge. Please correct me if I'm wrong!) towards "this is how my characters would react" or "this is what I'm doing with my agents" with little connection to the topic. Again, I could've misread some context, so please correct me if I'm wrong!

All in all, I think Sier has some work to do when it comes to his interactions with the community and his knowledge on the PPC. Again, I'm not a PG, so please take this lighter than any PG's opinion, but I personally agree with Nesh. Pause on trying for Permission for a little bit, get to know PPC better, and then try again. Try not to stress too much on the writing aspect.

-kA, not angry, just putting the points the best way that they could think of.