The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

You seem to be set to receive messages from friends only, so you will need to accept that so I can get you in the server. I am thoth#4271, for the record.

Hi! I remember reading your stuff before I joined. I lurked around the wiki for about a year before showing my face on the board XD

I am an oldbie who joined around 2008 or so and have poked my head back in a few times! Hello!

Hello! There are so many people here who were Way Too Cool For Me when I joined in mid-2003 or so. This is amazing! Canon Cookies for everyone! {= D

~Neshomeh

It's so good to see you here again. ^_^ (But you can't be a skellington - you're too busy being a bog person!)

hS

Also, welcome back! I hope you enjoy your stay.

If you want a look at some of the best stuff from modern PPC, I highly recommend Larfen's Flaming Broomsticks spinoff. It takes the PPC shared universe in an amazing new direction and Larf's writing has this incredible vivacity and flair that's almost addictive. Shift Twentieth's misadventures in janitoring changed what a spinoff could be, at least to me, and I recommend it without qualifier or hesitation.

Same goes for everyone else in the thread too. Larf's one of the best we've ever had and if you haven't read their spinoffs you are seriously missing out. Here's a handy link to the first story in the sequence; you can find the others in the series yourself by searching for Shift Twentieth, because you'll want to. =]

I've only been around here for a couple years oh jeez does that make me a newbie or not? what is time?? but I'm almost certain that a few facets of myself that are particularly important to me right now wouldn't be the same without this community.

And I guess the writing skills are nice too. :p

Yes, I joined in the summer of 2002. Can you believe it's already been NINE YEARS?!?!

(Yes. I know. Shhhh....)

The fact that there are oldbies here who joined in 2008, and I was, like, fully gone from here in 2008, blows my mind. And I am in no way throwing shade - if you've been here since 2008, you are most definitely an oldbie. I just can't believe I'm so old I'm essentially a skeleton that just crawled up from the PPC cellar. :P

Nearly 18? Yes, I'd say that sounds about right! Couldn't possibly be much older. Can't believe I'm almost a full adult, though. I'm not sure I'm ready! :P

Really doesn't help that my significant other is essentially also my high school sweetheart. I mean, it doesn't help the space-time continuum in my brain. I'm always like, "We were just 16/17, right? So surely we can't be more than, what... 21? 22?"

Obviously the fact that PPC High also has flower names for all its staff is just coincidence, right? It couldn't be any sort of conspiracy... :O

Apparently I replied a lot to that thread, and yet it's never made it into any of the multiverse diagrams. I do have a scribble of a story somewhere that assumes the existence of a High School AU, but nothing coherent.

(Does the school have houses? If so, I know what they should be... >:D)

hS

... Apparently it was in 2014, good lord, I thought it was more recent. But anyway: https://www.plotprotectors.org/posts/72329

~Neshomeh

Or lack of progression, in my case. Growing and changing within the community has had its own set of challenges (how do I be one of the group *and* a Responsible Adult^TM??), but at the end of the day, I love the setting, I love my characters, I love my friends, and I love all the wacky, creative shenanigans I get to be part of here, so I stay, and I help look after the place while I'm at it. {= )

I will say I've become more careful about missions, and my personal rule now is not to spork anything less than five years old—and the older the better. That way, if an author ever happens to come across the mission, they'll theoretically have had enough time to get some distance from it and also grow up a bit, if they happened to be on the younger side when they wrote the story. I don't spork to pick on people who are less experienced; I spork because I genuinely enjoy the "so bad it's funny" stuff and stretching my creativity to interpret the mistakes as matters of consequence to my poor, long-suffering agents. It's just such a unique form of critique, and storytelling in general. There's nothing else like it.

I also love the PPC setting's potential for unique character interactions it would be difficult to pull off elsewhere, like my ex-dragonrider being best friends with a Space Marine. Like, who knew that could work so well? {= D

And I like RPs and cowrites. So, y'know, if you wanna do something sometime... {= D

~Neshomeh

I'm about four pages into the student prospectus, complete with handwritten comments by Huine Soron. Currently working on the greetings message from the Merry S.U., which should strike the appropriate fear into everyone's hearts.

I'm trying to decide, since this is a Boarder AU, whether having the agents as an honest-to-Mandos High School AU just down the road is too over the top. Perhaps PPCNCMU has a mentorship/tutoring program with PPC High, so Huine Soron is tutoring Dafydd Illian in Chemistry, and Selene Windflower in Not Setting Stuff Too Much On Fire.

hS

Well, probably. I don't know if we remembered a "PPC University" specifically when we were talking about schools in New Caledonia (there's a PPC town in New Caledonia, btw, and there definitely always has been since about 2008), but the agents' guidebook says there was an Agent Training School there by early 2004, so that must be it. {= D The university bit has since been superseded by the Paul Atreides Lycée Collège et École farther south, though, and the original school is now called Digory Kirke Elementary High.

There is also education provided within HQ through the Nursery, too. The New Cal schools are probably somewhat more grounded in Real World education systems? Prospective agents at Paul Atreides LCE can probably take semesters at their OFU(s) of choice for credit, though, I bet!

~Neshomeh

P.S.:

Fezzik: "I"m on the Brute Squad."
Miracle Max: "You are the Brute Squad."
—The Princess Bride

^_~

I reread my Agent profiles and apparently Nea was educated at the "PPC University" (and failed to get a passing grade, which is why she was a trainee) whatever that was, unlike my other Agents. I do not for the life of me remember if there was a precedent for that, but it doesn't sound familiar. But hey, if there's a nursery then there ought to be some sort of higher education. A more academic approach to the otherwise more School Of Life deal PPC Agents usually seem to get.

I foresee a lot of shenanigans and possibly questions if this counts as a OFU.

If we ever have another UK Gathering you're welcome to come along. XD

hS

Those are some goooood numbers. I like "Seriously Ancientbies", even if parts of me that is in denial about that whole passage of time thing is vehemently protesting it, because surely there are those older than I? I can't be that senior, can I? Because I recall being in such awe of a lot of people here that were like... staples of the community and thinking I could never aspire to be that. But yeah... that is how time works.

It is nice that there is a presence, and that we still get new people! The warm welcome was just incredible too. And even if the initial high of nostalgia wears off and I decide to mostly lurk, I shall at least be in good company.

(This nostalgia itch will never be fully scratched, btw. It is such an easy wormhole to fall into! All these names just keep smacking me in the face with their familiarity, and I hope they're all doing okay.)

...If you're ever in Stockholm. XD I'll tell you, designing an escape room experience is its own kind of madness. There's a lot of moving parts. And outdoors is a different kind of challenge if you can't control the surroundings. (We had a fun experience the other week when we discovered the exterior of a church we've been using for a puzzle is being renovated, covering essentially everything we needed people to see. So that was a treat, figuring out a replacement.) I will say, there is a lot of creativity in the world of escape rooms and it looks like it's a way of entertainment that is here to stay... I would love to make like an Alice in Wonderland thing for kids, playing with perspective and mirrors, and of COURSE the whole idea of magic portals in always appealing, going into different times or different stories... Wonder where I got that idea from? Weird.

Everything still being here does honestly make me wonder why I didn't check in earlier. Like, I knew it was here, and I just never thought to do it. I had this idea of the importance of forward momentum and thinking it would somehow be a step back, like I would regress into a teenager somehow? But it definitely doesn't feel like that now. I've changed a lot since I've been away (thankfully, it would be weird if I hadn't) but it was never a bad community to be a part of. It wouldn't be what it was like when I was fifteen, but that's because of me and not the PPC. So who knows how much I'll be involved from now on. Permission doesn't run out, huh? Well, well. How about that...

"PPC New Caledonia Memorial University has always been regarded as a bit odd - and not just because it's thousands of miles from New Caledonia, which isn't noticably in need of memorialising, and nobody knows what 'PPC' is meant to stand for. Perhaps it's due to their insistence on hiring only floral-named lecturers, or their... eclectic selection of courses, or the way the chemistry and engineering departments seem to be competing over who can burn down the most frequently.

"But even in a university whose campus nightclub is aptly named Discordia (at least /this/ week), and whose cafeteria is both legendary bad and weirdly popular... the residents of the conjoined Jay and Acacia dorm buildings (known with passive aggressive affection as 'the Board') stand out as even odder than the norm.

"To quote one student of Sue block, who wished to remain anonymous: 'Don't try and understand their dorm numbers, don't ask them what they're reading, don't let them invite you to their "Shipfest" or "Badfic Games", and for the love of Twilight, /don't turn your back on them/!'"

...

I already have strong opinions about "Huine Soron" (not the name on his driving license) and his repeated attempts to get the university to let him start a Pyro Club. "I know I say this a lot, " he tells his girlfriend Kaitlyn as he runs out of the last workshop of the day, "but /this/ time they're /sure/ to listen...!"

hS

(The delightful Aoife McLysaght courtesy the 2018 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.)

As Neshomeh rightly predicted, I Have Numbers. Or rather, I Have Graphs:

This is us! Posts per month, for every month I have full data on. The picture is pretty clear: we had a huge spike in 2004 (the partial data makes this massively clear), a broad peak 2012-15, and now we've settled into a gentle downward drift. It looks like it might have plateaued - I'll have to pull in the 2019&20 posts to be sure though. (I think we may actually have picked up since mid-2020...)

But quiet though we may be, there's still a lot of us! Those 1500 posts this year come from 95 different usernames, and while a handful of those are aliases, most aren't. The top posters are pretty prolific, too: here's the top 10.

Huinesoron: 235 Neshomeh: 207 Ki no Shirayuki: 175 Midnight: 105 Kittyauthor: 84 Tomash: 60 Iximaz: 49 Thoth: 45 Zingenmir: 44 Scapegrace: 40

There's another 17 with 10 or more posts across 2021, including one "Ekwy" who's posted 14 times ^_~. We've got a nice solid mix of relative newbies, mid-to-oldbies, and the Seriously Ancientbies like me, Neshomeh, and indeed you. :)

So yeah, things have slowed down - but we're still here.

hS

PS: If you haven't quite scratched the nostalgia itch yet, I, er... have some of the early Board's subject lines archived. It can be fun to look down them and remember all the people we saw them with when they were first created. :) ~hS

Well... Since I clearly never retired the name, my Discord ID is Ekwy#3289 (took me a while to realise I even had a Discord ID, I only ever use it to voice chat one game with friends and we haven't played in a while). I'd love an invite, though of course I have no idea how much I'd actually be on!

Corran's was made from a speeder bike throttle assembly, so that probably won't cut it.

Also, does the red-and-yellow hilt belong to an Agent recruited from the 1880's or '90's of the US who was a diehard Louisville Colonels† fan?

†A now-defunct Major League baseball team, 1882-1899. According to Wikipedia, red and yellow close to those were their color scheme,

We never crossed paths before, with me having joined in 2010, then wandered away after a while, only to return last March, but it's always nice to see old people come back.

In my opinion, college is the perfect balance between independence, responsibility, and not having to cook for yourself if you don't want to, and I aged out of it before I was old enough to appreciate it, and I resent the heck out of that. {= P

(I mean I also ran out of money, but if we're living in a fantasy, then money doesn't exist, so there.)

~Neshomeh