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Have a mini snek!

Hello fellow, er, we seem to be called Boarders? Hello fellow Boarders! I'm a long-time fan of the PPC who somehow never managed to stumble across the actual Board before, but today I was clicking around bored while I waited for my partner, er, at work, we work a very normal, boring job, honestly, and, well, suddenly here I was! A big surprise.

I'm very well versed in Doctor Who (well, I'm currently a little bit behind, but don't tell...well, anyone, certainly no one in particular, but just--keep that to yourselves, or Certain People will never let me forget it and there will be paperwork. Er, I mean, because I'll be forced into a viewing party which will leave me with a load of paperwork to do because I've neglected it for the whole...party...thing). I'm also pretty into, er, Star Trek, and in keeping with that star theme, I've seen and enjoyed a number of Starkid shows as well. And don't worry, I've already read the, ah, Original Series and all that! Very interesting. Extremely similar to what I remember reading when I first joined--er, discovered the PPC. Discovered it. Hey, quick question, does this primitive speech to text function erase lines? Backspace. Delete. Delete. Delete, you bloody thing--

Haha, anyway, setting aside what probably looks like a detour into Cyberman impersonation, nice to meet you all! Do tell me all about yourselves--I'm very new here, for all I've known about the PPC for, er, I think it's just about eight years now. Tell me everything there is to know about being a Boarder!

-XG

Turn off. End. End. Oh, for the love of Rassilon in butter-filled jam sandals--

((That moment when you suddenly realize it's about to be April 1st, which means not only April but April Fool's Day, and more or less on the spot decide, well, why not have this year's prank/silly thing be, quite simply, the premise of 'agent(s) find(s) the Board and decides to investigate this obvious weird possible security breach by sneakily(ish) gathering information'? So here, have the Reader! Her screen name comes from her name, Xandrialdimansiumar (Xandria's also used as a nickname for her occasionally), and then Gard from the Guardsman, whom she's pretty close to.

Featuring: possibly the TARDIS in a Mood, and a Rassilon insult courtesy of the butter and jam I've been using as spreads for a snack just now. Also inspired partly by the fact that I went looking and I think my silly thing last year was letting Deadpool run wild on the Board.

Anyway. Feel free to respond as Boarders or in character as other undercover agents! Could be fun :)

~Z, probably posting a little early but it's April 1st in part of the world already, so let's gooooooo!))

Amazing. I'm so glad this worked so well for you! Your description is certainly what I was going for, just...amplified beyond what I expected to achieve, I think. So, I repeat: !! :)

...I still really want to redo Jay's part, though >.> I feel like it could be much better, particularly if I record it while listening to Legolas' part instead of improvising it in isolation (especially since it's pretty much entirely a response to what he's saying!). Very much hoping to get there at some point.

Anyway: thank you!

~Z

I was nearly in tears, wanting to help. But the singing, the singing was... beautiful, yet haunting, almost a love song, but not quite, an edge of oddity...

Oh gods, this has reduced me to comma splices. I'm sorry.

But, great job to Zingenmir and hS!

kA

Lemons in the produce aisle are one thing. But this?

Right now, I'm digging this (which doesn't have a real name) as potential theme material. I've started learning my way around Audacity by adding a shaker that speeds up and fades out at the end, making clips, copying & pasting to make it longer, and so forth. Turns out it's not that scary. ^_^

I think you're right that TOS probably assumed people had read the fics in question, at least at first. It's a shame most of them are lost now, so I'll never know, for instance, what the Sue was doing on the balcony besides kissing Boromir that was so horrible. (Though, I mean, if you're Acacia, maybe that's bad enough...) Lucky that it's just enough information for sound design purposes, though.

Agreed about portaling being a blessing and a curse, too. Like any convenience, it may be prone to overuse and/or result in missing opportunities that might arise from taking the long way, but then, there's only so many times you can write "the agents passed the time by doing X" before it gets a) boring or b) absurd due to escalating attempts to not be boring. If you're going to skip ahead in the narrative anyway, it's nice to have an in-universe plot device for that. {= )

~Neshomeh

C_l_br__n

Eeeexcellent, thanks very much. Is there any chance that concept could sneak into the Formatting Help? I know to a programmer "Markdown characters can be escaped" is pretty obvious, but many of us amp't programmists. :)

I feel like there was some other format quirk we discussed at some point... was it how to insert a code block/plain text block/whatever? I can never remember how to do that one either.

Alsø alsø wik, purely out of curiousity, the Guide mentions both 'i' and 'em', both 'b' and 'strong', but only 'del', not 's'. Is 's' for strikethrough discouraged in modern HTML? (I didn't even know about 'del' until I saw it here... :))

hS

Here

I kinda think me adopting a Time Lord kinda buried OrangeFox's request, and I'm very sorry.

Edit: Not trying to be pushy or sound mean. I'm sorry if it comes off as that way.

(Even though it is, I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole. I'm super sorry.)

(Yes, he's really making one...)

As of about an hour ago, Ever Given is free and sailing north through the Suez. You can track her on this site.

Buh-bye, big boat.

hS

(An idiom not to be translated literally... ^_~)

As you say, a literal translation is often not the best way to go. I've recently had to translate a line from Russian which uses an idiom about "the bitterness of bread" - wait, what? That simply doesn't work in English. I always remember that J.R.R. Tolkien offered specific notes on how to translate the Names in Lord of the Rings - he valued the connections and connotations between them as more important than the actual words he'd written.

From a PPC perspective, though, a fanfic which uses the wrong translation of things - or worse, mixes between translations - would probably be considered bad. I would say that for a translated work, a fanfic can always reference the original language, or it can reference the same language as it is written in. Invoking a third language would be out.

Given how much of fanfic is written in English, this does introduce bias: a French speaker writing in English about Frodon Sacquet of Hobbitebourg would be considered 'bad', whereas it's hard to imagine many English-first-language fans of almost anything non-English writing competent fanfic in the original language.

... honestly, actually, I'd find a fanfic which consistently used a translation's names quite charming. The issue would come, as you suggest, when stuff other than names began to be translated. If a character wound up using a back-translated version of their catchphrase, that would be bad writing.

hS

I love the 'Blueish Danube' re-recording of a 1902 cylinder, that's adorably geeky. ^_^

I see no reason to resist the Star Trekking. I'm pretty sure the script for the (unmade...) first episode of OFUM says Elrond should appear with a Trek transporter sound. ^_~

'First episode'... well, it is. But also, Jay's A/N says "If you haven't read the fic this is derived from", and I think the expectation was that most people would have. It's the approach I took with Clbr__n (though for a different reason): if you assume the audience is familiar with the badfic, you don't have to go through it point by point. It becomes more about your agents' reactions to the whole thing than them MSTing.

As the person with a huge, nearly-finished mission where Agent hS walks the whole way from Rivendell to Lorien, I feel portalling within fics is both hugely overrated, and incredibly useful.

hS

PS: Is there any way I can write the name of Teh Bad Fic with four underscores? I've tried all three semicolon-ending versions here and they still just make the L italicised. ~hS

istheshipstillstuck has updated to "Sort of?". The current status seems to be that they swung the stern away from the bank - possibly on a spring tide - and pulled the bow back a bit, but the eastern third of the canal is still way too shallow, so the ship as a whole is still stuck. But at a different angle now!

hS

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/11019630/1/A-Harsh-Lesson-Lemons (NSFW)

I can't even begin to describe how out of character this is for the characters involved. No. Just no. I don't do NC-17 stuff, but I will offer all my knowledge of the Stormlight Archive to anyone who takes it. This needs to die.

… hoo boy, even the summary is giving me chills.

I’m morbidly curious, how do people write that kind of stuff with a straight face?

But altering a translation to make it work and capture the spirit of the original in a new language is essential to creating a translation that functions as an adaptation of what made the original work. Some translations that I will highlight as Outstanding (in particular the work done translating and localizing Ace Attorney...) have numerous alterations to the original in them.

I wrote a whole board post about this a few months back...

I wonder, can you see my bookmarks? I think you need an account to download things, which is why I now have one, but it may help if you (and other people) can listen to stuff.

I might try my own hand at putting some of the bits together to make portal noises and such, though, just because I have particular ideas about how they should sound. >.> I am VERY tempted to use the one that sounds like an original Star Trek scanner for the CADs, but I will resist. Probably.

I also have about half a script! ... "Rambling Band" doesn't have much narrative structure, does it? It's a bit odd, the things I notice as I adapt it. Like, it really doesn't tell us much about what the badfic is doing, and a lot of the story is the agents waiting around between scenes; portaling within the fic wasn't a thing yet. It's so very much a first episode. {= )

~Neshomeh

Different path, though. I found OFUM on my own, I think, and I was very confused about this "PPC" thing that kept coming up. What the heck was it? I joined the old Yahoo! Groups mailing list (remember those?) for OFUM and asked around, and the kind folks there pointed me in the right direction.

Going back a bit further, I found Fanfiction.net in the first place thanks to people on a Farscape fansite that was my home before the PPC Board. The atmosphere on the PPC Board was similar to the atmosphere there—friendly, fun, and just a bit odd—and that's why I stayed. {= )

~Neshomeh