The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

For the NA: I think we ought to expunge that link from the Board, please, just to be safe.

~Neshomeh

While I doubt there are many, if any non-PPCers watching the Board to find people to harass, yeah... I very much need to know how Ares found this.

I don't think you necessarily need to reach out to the author instead of missioning, but I've done that before, yeah.

We aren't the fanfic police, and nobody even knows who are for the most part, frankly.

As for the alters, that's apparently a term for alternate personalities in DID. Or something.

--Ls

Edit: mobile typos.

Why did you link us some kind of unreadable in-progress writing? What would we have possibly been meant to do with this? The fic isn't done, it isn't published. There's nothing to criticize, let alone mission.

I don't care if some random person is twenty and refers to themselves as an "it" or comes up with weird Star Trek lore. If it's published, we can reasonably discuss it. Until then... leave well enough alone, for goodness' sake.

--Ls

First of all, you're sharing a link to someone's in progress work - I doubt they gave you permission to put it out in the wild, and through Google Drive you're basically exposing their email address AND their work to anyone on the web. And we all know that out there in the web there are all kinds of trolls and malicious people. On top of that, I don't suppose the author would give you access willingly if you were upfront with what you were going to do with said access, considering you've defined them as "clown", so I have to ask this: how did you get access?

Second, stalking authors like that, before they even publish their work, is simply not what the PPC does. It is a very mean thing to do as this is a point in which constructive criticism can still be given with hopes that the author will be willing to listen. We only go after the worst of the worst, and many of us attempt to give constructive criticism first. I have dropped fics from my, let's say, target list several times in the past because the author was willing to discuss with me what I had found to be troublesome - a constructive discussion about writing is always a better thing to have than tossing your agents at a fic, because here we love writing, we love discussing about writing, and we love to see everyone improve - even those who wrote the worst things out there, if they're sincerely trying to improve!

And, for the truly irremedeable, well PPC missions are there not to police the fandom but to have some fun making a disguised, comedic form of criticism. If your mindset is to hunt bad writing like a vigilante to save the fandom... well, it's the wrong one. We mock the bad writing, not the person behind it. Calling authors names, like you did, is right out. We don't do that. Period.

That aside, I'm taking the chance to ask about something that left me confused in you other post. You said "note that this is a different alter using ares' account, he isnt around anymore" - care to elaborate what you mean by that? If you're a different person using Ares' account, you really should make your own instead - and I do hope he gave you the credentials willingly?

I managed to get access to a badfic-in-progress. Some clown - who i have word is twenty - is making a crossover between Star Trek: TOS and its (it uses it/its, i'm not being a dick) OC lore.

[Link removed. Just no. -Nameless Admin]

In which Helena shows her teammates her new handiwork.

*I will stop trying to think of obscenities specifically targeting agents I don't like, most of them don't make sense to begin with. *I will stop trying to create oath-based creative versus for non-god like canons, Zordon's energy tube isn't going to catch on anyways. *Just because we all dig giant robots does not mean I'm allowed to summon one in HQ

I'm pretty sure at 29, young people think I'm old and old people think I'm young

So I'll just take both options!

• Tomash

Congratulations on being old/not being old [delete as appropriate]!

hS

It's my birthday!

While it feels like rambling a bit about the last year might be in order, I need to get back to Aperture Science before they notice I borrowed their cannon, so maybe I'll so that later

Who wants cake?

Uh, hi Ares (I guess?). This is certainly an edgy fic. The sentence "There were no bodies to step over, just the nauseating stench of roasting pork." was just so horribly stupid I laughed out loud. It's too short, and not in a canon I know, so I'll have to pass, but... edgy indeed.

For future note, if you want to write a mission, you'll need to get Permission first.

--Ls

i dont have time to write a mission on this myself, but i found a fic featuring captain kirk (tos) having an overdramatic, edgy, poorly written nightmare with a side of projection. i thought yall might want to be aware

(note that this is a different alter using ares' account, he isnt around anymore)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63472939

The tone of that scene with the purple was so different from the others, I assumed it was signifying something else going on.

Oh, I had forgotten about "Rest Well!" So Molly certainly didn't cause George's end, but it's still interesting that she seems to be assigned partners with a particular arrogant and heartlessly pragmatic attitude. Interesting pattern . . .

—doctorlit, puzzling

i do think i should mention, though, since maybe I didn't explain it well enough, but Molly's 'purple swirl' isn't exactly some latent magic power. It's a similar case to the exclamation mark that appeared over her head near the start, or the sweat drop that appeared in Rest Well, where they're more meant to be a cartoony physical expression of emotion. That's not to say there isn't something I have planned for her, though! She just isn't a wizard.

Here's hoping future entries for this spinoff can also live up to the start, haha.

This dropped yesterday, but appears to be real: NaNoWriMo is shutting down (link is to Reddit post of the text of the email, followed by a summary of the associated video; LitHub and The Guardian also covered it).

To be clear, this is NaNoWriMo the non-profit, formerly known as the Office of Letters and Light, which owns the website and runs National Novel Writing Month (50,000 words, 30 days, no plot? No problem!). They've been in a bit of a spiral for years - the forums vanished a while back, for example, and last November they made a big deal of Large Language Model AI being the future of writing. But this appears to be the finale.

What does that mean for NaNoWriMo the event? Well, personally, I never spent much time on the forums, and never attended an in-person event, so not much. ^_^ I'm not one of the people who sneeringly say things like "you have my permission to write any time you like"; the whole point is that it's a specific event, and you know other people are doing it too. But... I think I'll know that even once the venerable NaNo site goes away.

There are a bunch of word-count tracking tools to lean on, and I suspect there will be a NaNo clone site by November, but for now I recommend TrackBear, which has a handy option for importing your NaNo data. It's focussed on your own wordcounts rather than anyone else's - I've got my covers, summaries, and tracking graphs loaded in from NaNo (very quickly too!), but you only get to see the titles. But it does hold the data.

So... it's sad, but it's not the end. Two years ago I got four members of my family NaNoing with me, and I plan to do the same this year (do I know what I'm writing yet? pfft no chance). So NaNoWriMo will live on, even if the website has gone the way of the lovely embeddable word-count trackers we used to have back in the LJ days. Those were fun, I liked those.

hS

I must assume that Sam will get less bloodthirsty as the spinoff goes on, since that's the overall sense I'm getting ... and I like the idea. I'm curious to see where this'll go, and I enjoyed the character dynamic (and did find id different from your existing ones)

Well, uh. Wow! OrangeFox, I’ve never before read a mission that had quite this vibe to it! Um . . . I’m trying to phrase this properly, because the mission is well-written, but the vibe is like, clutching at my heart and filling me with a low dread for the future? Like, you obviously wrote Sam to have clearly visible red flags, but there’s something else wrong below the surface here, something slightly off in the interactions between him and Molly that I can only describe as the same feeling as: “I could not imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” —Edward Smith, five years before he captained the Titanic’s maiden voyage. But I should back up a bit. When you first introduced Sam, I not only liked his attitude, he also reminded me of . . . myself. Whoops! But the “felt like he could do so much more” and the “His hand itched at his side, yearning for action” sound a lot like me, doing extra projects off the clock, getting frustrated when my teammates are slowing down . . . But rereading those opening paragraphs, I can see there are more red flags there than I caught at first, too. In “From World One college student to interdimensional assassin to potentially a godslayer” I initially read “assassin” and “godslayer” as job descriptions; DMS agents are called assassins in-universe, and “godslayer” is a reasonable shorthand description for an ESAS agent. But Sam is wearing those more as cool titles than descriptions, isn’t he? And “yearning for Sues to slay and canons to save” shows a little bit of a hero complex, doesn’t it? He puts a little too much emphasis on the power and violence aspects of his job. Moving forwards, I did catch that the flyer Sam was recruited through catered more towards “the old days attitude,” but thought that was intentionally wrong, since it was also being roundabout overly honest about the Cafeteria food. My first REAL red flag regarding Sam was when he admitted he would get any kind of enjoyment out of killing Bella and Rey. That really gives the lie to the earlier language he used that sounded like work ethic to me; killing canons is extremely against the rules, so working hard to uphold canon clearly isn’t his motivation. He actually makes me think of Nick Angel from Hot Fuzz: they’re both characters who appear to be very straightforward professionals at first, but are later revealed to be very immature, and uncritical of the systems they find themselves in.

I know I’ve already talked about Sam a lot, but just a little more: part of the . . . “mask he’s wearing,” I guess, is that throughout the mission, he seems very supportive of, and patient with, Molly, like he really wants to treat her as an equal partner. But towards the end of the mission, you give us “’None of this counted as torture . . . I don’t trust Legal to get it right’” and “’ Everything I say here gets put in the report, right?’” And those make everything he says or does suspect, but he basically knows he’s being watched read. So was he really wanting to support Molly, or were those just lines he was feeding to his perceived future audience, a role he was playing? Same with some of his other statements, like blurting out he isn’t bigoted towards transgender people when the topic hadn’t even come up. He’s performative in a manipulative way, and it’s kind of scary.

I don’t have nearly as much to say about Molly, beyond the fact that you clearly have something up your sleeve to reveal about her down the line. She seems so naïve and undissembling, and yet there’s that purple glow . . . also, when I first heard her recounting her history of partners, I felt frustrated with them all for coddling Molly over her size, and not letting her develop self-confidence to get better at missions. But after that purple glow, and the odd shifts her dialogue sometimes takes, and seeing what Sam is like . . . I’m wondering if Molly’s track record with partners isn’t just bad luck or coincidence. Could Molly be used by the Flowers to offload problematic agents onto? Does she, knowingly or unknowingly, cause her partners to die if they become dangerous? I’m both interested to see where this goes, and dreading to do so. After all, “God himself could not sink” the Titanic . . .

The only bit of critical input I can give is that I have no idea what Sam looks like (or, if he did get a description, I missed it somehow). But perhaps that’s coming in the next entry, from Molly’s perspective?

—doctorlit, buried in a forest of red flags

I shared this to the Discord, but figured may as well share this unfinished snippet here too.

write-off ix

Cadmus carved his sign into the banister with the silver knife all house-guards carried. It was the only way to know for sure where you'd been, and even that only worked for a time. At any rate, this floor was clear. Clear of what, exactly, he wasn't sure. People who found out generally weren't people for much longer.

The signs were passed from house-guard to house-guard. Not just anyone could be one. You had to have the Knack. Be able to See the house, feel it in your boots. And you had to be quick.

Silas hadn't quite been quick enough.

He hadn't seen it happen, not beyond the first instant. Nobody who did lived to tell the tale. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw the way that the drawing room had folded and twisted itself into an infinite spiraling fractal of flesh and teeth. The final scream echoed in his nightmares. Too many nightmares.

Cadmus's stopwatch clicked. He should be coming off shift in 15 minutes. He wasn't far from base: these were just regular rounds, not an exploratory mission.

Before he headed downstairs, he carved one more mark. Silas's mark. It technically wasn't permissible to carve another guard's mark, but nobody had caught him yet. Silas had no successors. Cadmus was just borrowing time before his mark faded, and then was forgotten entirely.

But it wouldn't be today.