The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Percy has landed.

The helicopter (named Ingenuity) is set to be deployed sometime in the next month, so I'll be keeping a close eye on that.

hS

The reason slash is called slash is because pairings are traditionally written Character A/Character B. Note the slash mark. {= )

Note also that any pairing can be denoted this way, not just same-sex ones. According to Fanlore, "slash" came to refer to male/male pairings via the Star Trek fandom:

Fannish tradition holds that the word "slash" originated with Star Trek: The Original Series fan fiction, when K/S was used as the label for a story where the relationship between Kirk and Spock was laced with sexual tension, whether it was acted on or not. This label allowed fans to differentiate those sexual relationship stories from the ones about Kirk and Spock's friendship, which were sometimes labelled using "&". As fandoms gathered around new films and television series, the / mark became common as an indicator of a sexual relationship between same-sex characters.

Read more here!

And, yes, seconding Nova's answer: slash is still slash regardless of canonicity and quality. Well-written slash is good. Poorly-written slash is bad. QED. {= )

~Neshomeh

I forgot how many time I'd go to edit a page in Neopets apparently. All this time, working from a white background, is just scream-worthy for me.

I need a background. I'll design one once I get the basics "sketched in," so to speak. Here is what I have right now.

Kittyauthor, AAAAAAA!

Edit update: Got it off of white. Forgot CSS existed hahaha.

It looks a bit better now, with the much softer "linen" colored background. The light blue... clashes horribly, but I can fix it.

Eventually.

I'm just glad I got sub-pages to work, dang it!

I'll probably do some digging, make a website using that, fiddle with HTML, make me not scream, and fiddle some more.

All in all, though, privacy from search engines isn't something that'll make me not use a blog or Neocities it's just that I am used to it for blogs at the very least (I had a blog in school... 6th or 8th grade? with that enabled).

That's what my mind thinks of in terms of a separate webpage hosting PPC missions: as blogs, for some reason.

No I shall do some info diving.

Kittyauthor, who just remembered they really, really need to at least post a CPP interlude and fetch the logo to post sometime.

LiveJournal hasn't really been a go-to service for... I dunno, probably a decade? People who used to like LJ moved to Dreamwidth. It is better because it's owned and run by a small group of non-shady people who are transparent about what they do and how. LJ, last I heard, is owned by a Russian corporation? Something like that. I remember much dissatisfaction with LJ from people who used to use it, anyway.

~Neshomeh, waiting for a train that is late.

When talking about Slash in a fanfic context it means an explicit Male x Male partnership (unless it's Femslash which is Female x Female of course). Although yes, it is the case more often that not that Slash 'fics are written about two characters of the same gender that do not canonically have a same sex relationship, it doesn't stop explicit 'fics about canonically same-sex couples from being counted as Slash, because that does fall within the definition of a Slash 'fic.

And of Course, Bad Slash doesn't really matter if it's canonical or not, Bad is Bad regardless.

Nova

Like, we can all agree that KirkxSpock is slash, but... using another example from the Star Trek continuum, what about StametsxHugh? They're canonically together, so if someone writes a fanfic about their relationship, is it slash?

And what about if they're canonically compatible but not a couple (say, a Doctor Who fanfic that ships Jack Harkness with Ricky)?

She decided not to show this time. We've actually seen her twice in Aquarius, but this has been our only heavy shower (and the weather report says we get none at all in Pisces!).

(Ooh yes, sometime! Not sure when time - it's all a bit busy here. Will have to see.)

hS

I don't suppose Celeste is hanging out on your island? She gives DIY recipes based on what astrological sign is up each month. :)

(Also, Lunar Cove is about done with renovations if you're interested in checking it out sometime!)

But not actually, because:

• Neocities is free! You get something like 1 GB of storage, and a very smooth UI for editing the site. You /can/ give them money, but basically all that gets you is even more storage you'll never need. (My sites, total, are sitting at around 30MB so far.) They also promise they'll never sell, put ads, or penalize free users, which... well, it'll be nice if it's true. (Webs is the one that's cutting us off, and they've been clunky for a long time.)

• I don't know about preventing search engines from catching it, though. Not even sure what I'd be looking for...

hS

It might be because I know basic HTML.

But, anyways, hS, that sounds interesting, especially since I know some basic HTML because gestures vaguely at a popular pet site so that sounds like it would work for me as well.

It just depends on two things (which I'll probably find the answers to on my own, but noting them down anyways):

• Cost. If it's free, I'm good. If not, then I'm not (was Neocites the one closing down free webpages or was it something different?)

• And privacy options, like "Can I disable people finding it through Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/etc.?" and the like.

But, like I said, I can probably find the answers on my own once I'm done with other stuff, so you don't need to absolutely positively answer them :P

~Kittyauthor, who is wondering how they got all this from |interested noises| they originally wanted to put down.

NASA's Perseverence rover will be making Mars fall at 20:55 UK time, slightly over an hour from now. As far as I can tell, this is the official livestream.

And yes, Perseverence is carrying a tiny helicopter, to test whether powered flight is possible in the Martian atmosphere. Fun stuff!

hS

Ix or anyone else who hasn't yet made their presence known, if you want to get in on what's either the last Aquarius meteor shower or the first Pisces one, I'm available for the next 2-3 hours to open the gates and let people in. From what I've read, wishing on stars while visiting will make them fall on your own beaches.

hS, standin' on a rock makin' wishes

Some people seem to post missions there, and it’s what I plan to use.

I've been a little busy with work and life lately, so it might be a while before I manage to get more in-depth into this, but learning HTML is something I've thought about in the past, and now is as good a time as any to start. I've always had a ton of fun fiddling with themes and templates when I set up a new Tumblr or something similar, and being able to build something of my own is definitely a nice thought. I remember being... not terrible at HTML back when we learned it in school, it was just a long time ago. I'm sort of eager to get back into it now. : D

One of the things that makes me the happiest is to hear that my missions remind people of classic PPC writing. It's not like I'm actively trying to imitate the greats, but they've been my introduction to this continuity, and they influenced the way I write missions a lot. As for this one, I still feel like I missed a lot of notes I could have hit (including the comedy that I was so unhappy with), but hearing positive concrit for it has helped my insecurity a little. I'm definitely more partial to it than to my older, squick-filled writing (except for my third mission, where I think I did a better job with the characters than in this one), but I'll try harder next time. Either way, I do have a lot of fun writing missions, so the only thing I need to do is polish my writing until I can reread them later with a smile instead of a frown.

Thank you for reading! :)

Start learning here! W3Schools has been my friend for many, many years, and they will help you avoid making the techies scream. Heck, even I cringed at the lack of <p>paragraph</p> tags in hS's example. ^_~

To answer your question to me below, I'd say HTML is pretty simple. Each tag tells a browser what sort of thing it's about to read. "This is a paragraph," for instance; "this is a link"; "this is a header"; "this is an image"; and so forth. And the closing tags tell the browser when the thing stops being that thing.

CSS is a little trickier, but it goes hand in glove with HTML. That's how you tell the browser how a certain type of thing should look. At the very least, you'll want to know how to do inline styling like <span style="font-family:comic sans; font-weight:bold; color:darkgreen;">the style of the text inside this tag is Comic Sans MS, bold, and dark green</span> which you can add to most HTML tags. CSS is also how to position blocks of text on the screen if you want to do anything more complex than a single column of text with links and top and bottom.

But, start with HTML. {= )

If you have any questions that W3Schools can't answer, you're out of luck I can try to help, as long as it's not much more in-depth than "how did you do X thing?" Oh, and know that the "View page source" option when you right-click on a webpage is your friend. That will let you take a look at how other people (like me and hS) have done things on our sites. If you see a bit of code you like, steal it! It's a fine old Internet tradition. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Edit: I noticed that the Board doesn't seem to support font-weight or font-style. Dunno why. Tomash?

...if we're a kinder, gentler PPC than we were in the past, then it makes sense for people's overly perfect personal fantasies to be less acceptable targets, and as a result, for us to take aim at more things that are objectively horrible.

I don't think focussing on things which are objectively horrible is the way to go, because... they're objectively horrible! Everyone can see that squicky smut and ultra-gore are nasty; there's no value added from having a character standing there saying "yuck".

I think the space the PPC works best in is the things which are non-obviously horrible, or subtly wrong. If Legolas is doing the urple nasty with a Suvian, that's horrible; if the scene changes imply that Aragorn and Galadriel are having a chat in the same room, that's non-obviously horrible.

I like to think of "Rambling Band" at this point: it's not obvious that the Suvian must be playing terrible music, but by applying logic, J&A were able to realise that Led Zeppelin wouldn't actually work on the harp. They spend a good half-page of writing exploring the consequences of that; they don't spend any time at all on the horrible injuries Laurel sustains while jumping a van through a movie screen, because the badfic knows about them, and we all know too.

Which isn't to say squick can't contain those things: badly-written smut can be a whole heap of logistical mishaps! But that's while being obviously horrible, not because of it.

I emphatically do agree, of course, that the PPC should always be fun. ^_^

hS

First of all, I really enjoyed the classic flavour of this mission (which I read once people started mentioning LotR characters in their comments... might be worth naming the canon in the plug, so people can see if they know it). It was fun to see the good old 'here is a thing about LotR which is wrong and goofy'; it's been a long time since I've gotten that. (Partly because I so rarely read missions... :O)

So, humour. Humour in PPC missions can come from a range of places. Free-associating here:

• Comments on the badfic. You have this down nicely. As someone said, the agent's aren't just saying "hey, that's wrong", but also using it as a teachable moment for the audience. You've done a good job of turning ambiguity ('hair the colour of the woods') into outright absurdity. I also liked things such as 'roll you down a hill', where you take a badfic turn of phrase and use it to your own ends.

• Physical manifestations of badfic logic. You did this to an extent with the minis, but I think you didn't go much further. We never saw green-haired Elrond, for instance, or the fact that Airhead apparently takes her skirt off all the time (nobody mentioned trousers!), or much else (even Aragon doesn't seem to have taken Aragorn's place, just popped up unnoticed next to him). Showing us some of the badness would help break up the agents needing to tell us about it.

• PPC tech and logic. Lots of this! From Ironic Overpower [BEEP] to the CAD, to the minis again and even "errr... she's not really that bad, maybe we should rethink the murder plan", you do this very well.

• Agent interactions. This is always the trickiest one; if you let them stray too far from the subject at hand, you wind up with an interlude-as-mission, where the badfic is background to the agents' banter (or drama). You've played it very much on-topic, which is good for badfic snark (and mission length), but limits your opportunities to play around with the agents. It's a balancing act, and one that plays out differently every mission.

From all that, I feel like finding the humour - and having fun at it - is about that balancing act. Do I want to write my next mission as agent- or badfic-centred? Will the badfic work best as a subject for snark, or a bizarre manifestation? There's no right answers, just what feels best to you when writing.

This was a perfectly good mission; it slid quite hard to one end of most of the scales above, but that's fine! Some missions do (I'm writing one starring a mini and a pov, which wipes out the snark and tech possibilities completely), while others are more balanced. Just do what you enjoy. :)

hS

The attitude over there seems to be pretty heavily on the "do whatever you want in fanfic-land and to heck with anyone who says otherwise" side. So from what I've seen, the community isn't too kindly disposed to fanfic criticism, especially the snarky kind. As I said to Neshomeh, I might end up trying to learn HTML after all so I can have a more... private space is probably the wrong word if I want my missions to stay visible, but definitely something I can tailor more to my needs. And posting my PPC fics to fanfic sites is kind of a double-edged sword in my opinion, especially because most of the content I've sporked is from there. I think my best choices are either staying with Dreamwidth, Blogspot or HTML, and out of these I'm leaning mostly towards HTML. We'll see if I can hold my own in the scary world of code. ^_^

But given the fact that the tone of my writings varies pretty wildly between fluff, and... er... some rather more interesting things means that I'd have to do some serious organizing if I want to migrate to AO3. Not that that's necessarily a problem. It might be the best option I have if I don't want to stay at Dreamwidth, after all. It's just that the idea of hosting PPC stories at a fanfiction site kind of gives me a weird feeling? I don't think AO3 has policies against it, per se, but non-PPCers finding my stories there isn't necessarily something I want to happen. Darn me being so picky with my hosting options... I might take a stab at learning HTML in my free time after all so I can create a more personal space for this kind of stuff. Would you say it's difficult?

Setting up a Dreamwidth account isn't that difficult, or at least not compared to some other sites (I still have nightmares about the time I tried to set up a Wordpress account), and I'll admit that it's a tried-and-true option for PPC-ing... but the user interface isn't very customization-friendly, and editing entries is particularly a hassle. And what bothers me the most: it only allows you to have one post draft at a time as far as I'm aware. I'd advise you to give it a try and see if you like it better than me (it really isn't that hard to use once you get a little used to it), but if I had to start over again with the missions, it wouldn't necessarily be my first choice.

If you haven't run into it yet, it's possible to publish Google Documents, which strips out any identifying information (like this), so in the unlikely event that your only issue with them is that your name is attached, there's that.

If you wanted to create your own website (I will join Nesh in plugging Neocities), you can actually make a very simple one with no in-depth HTML at all. This:

<html><head></head><body>

<a href="a_page.html">Link to a page</a>

This is the text of a mission.

<br/><br/>

And this is some more text after a line break.

</body></html>

Will give you a white page with left-formatted text, and a link to wherever you put in. It also has the advantage of making the techies scream whenever they see it. ^_^

I know a few people have posted missions to Tumblr, but can offer no advice on that. Blogspot allows you to create a permanent sidebar, which would meet your disclaimer requirement.

And of course there's always Fanfiction.net. Rumours of them kicking off PPC missions on sight have been greatly exaggerated; Kaitlyn and Selene have been stable for seven? years. And posting to an actual fanfic site means the possibility of drawing in new readers to the community...

hS

AO3 is probably your best bet for low-hassle, fandom-friendly story hosting. If you're not keen to learn HTML/CSS, you don't want to join me and hS on Neocities, though I think it's great. I can't recommend any of the older site-building platforms I used to know about. Tripod served me well for a long time, but it was never without issues, and I dunno if they've improved their visual site-builder since the last time I had anything to do with it. Maybe someone else can speak to something like Wordpress, which is fairly popular, but I haven't tried it myself.

So, tagging. As far as I've determined, there are two reasons to tag: 1) to help people find content they want to read, and 2) to warn them of things they might wish to avoid. The first is to your benefit if you want more people to find your story. The second is courteous. You don't have to do either of them. The bulk of your audience for PPC writing is here in the PPC community; you don't have to work that hard to drum up readers. You also don't have to bear the responsibility of thinking up everything that might hypothetically upset someone. The BIG things (graphic sex, graphic violence, any intersection of the two), sure, and AO3 has a special set of tags for those things that show up in bold text at the top of your tag cloud. Things you already know are sensitive for people around here, sure. Beyond that, though? The reader bears the ultimate responsibility for choosing either to risk seeing something upsetting to them or to stick to things with a G rating. That's life.

(For the record, this isn't anything I don't expect of myself. There are things I may choose to avoid in certain contexts or frames of mind, but one* is a totally normal and non-threatening aspect of life for many people, and the other** is a particular idiosyncrasy of mine. In neither case do I expect special consideration.)

So, while the enormous tag clouds on AO3 may be mind-boggling or intimidating (they put me off at first), I don't think they need to be. I think people just go way overboard with them, and also that they could be formatted better to be less bloody dense. Tag only as much as you want to, and know you can always add more later if you think of something you missed the first time. It's not a big deal.

~Neshomeh

* Alcohol. Especially irresponsible drinking being treated as no big deal. Daughter of an alcoholic here; I must sharply disagree that it's no big deal. That said, I've learned through exposure to deal with people drinking responsibly and to develop some curiosity about types of alcohol, how it's made, mixology, etc. I'll even taste things! It sure makes writing about it easier. Hence, no need for anyone to tiptoe around the subject generally.

** Bad things happening to cats. And, I mean, cruelty to animals and children and anything that can't contextualize its existence in general—but cats in particular. I've just always had a thing about cats. Like, there's this song from the perspective of a witch's familiar, and the witch is killed, and I cried the first time I heard it because the cat is left all alone. >.> It's weird. And it doesn't come up all that often, so I don't expect anyone to devote precious brain-space to remembering my weirdness.

Anyway, I take pride in being able to manage my stuff, even when confronted unexpectedly. That's not a boast or me looking down on anyone with a brain that doesn't work that way; just a thing that makes me feel good about myself.

I was honestly thinking about dreamwidth but I feel that it would be a nightmare for me to set up and possibly not be the best for me. And I'm not super sure that AO3 is the best for me, either. I feel like I keep not tagging something important.

Kittyauthor