The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

It's nothing terribly huge, really - especially after reviewing TVTropes's page on Notability, which did a good job of shooting down one of my arguments, what I have to say really boils down to this: I think that if we list every trope that might apply to the PPC on the main PPC page, we'll very quickly loose the feel of the organization into the forest of tropes. A week ago, the page was 14,000 words long - bigger than Firefly's 11,000 and huge compared to the Star Trek TOS's 5000. I suppose it goes without saying that we've had our fair share of newbies from TVTropes who were really excited about the PPC without really grasping the feel of the thing, so I would really appreciate it if we could try to keep the main page at least slightly sparse.

I'm in a very similar boat to most of the people here, I suspect - I've never seen a trope I didn't like (or didn't want to subvert), and the PPC, being metafiction, is a very nice platform for lampshade hanging. I'm just trying to prevent a flood of misinformed newbies.

If you want me to take down all the bits I've posted about my agents, I will. I'm sorry, I got carried away. Won't happen again.

Although I don't know how you would get the Star Fleet uniform to stretch over a huge spider.

I found out they were playing on Tuesday (concert was Wednesday). Bought a ticket within a minute of finding out. Fortunately it was a standing-only venue so there was no such thing as bad seats.

I've said it before: I'm a Harmonian. And as a not-quite-so rabid example of the fandom, I'm willing to concede that the Ronald/Hermione relationship could have worked... with a few tweaks. Say... beginning of book 5, it becomes obvious that Ron is no longer mis-pronouncing the names of common Muggle devices, that he's gotten the hang of decimalization and the New Pound.. he's even gotten intellectually curious.

That's the kind of fanfic I'm looking for: where Ron realizes his feelings and actually begins to try and improve himself, in fits and starts, with old habits and ingrained prejudices dying a lingering death.

But failure is not an option here.

Aditionally, my preferred fic of this type would NOT have Harry paired with Ginny. I'm sorry, but for some reason I get a weird incest vibe from it (my own bit of fanon is that they're Irish Twins and the whole thing was memory charmed out of existence). To wit, either a successful thing with Cho Chang or something with Luna might be nice.

So... any suggestions?

Forgot to put "Ollivanders" up there.

Unfortunately, I can't invoke the Rule of Funny and have it dress up like Westley from "Princess Bride", since it's not the right misspelling.

I have to agree with Techno-Dann's scientific assessment. The kudzu is a plant, so at any given time, different parts of its body are male or female, so either pronoun assigned to it is equally correct. (Or equally incorrect?)

As for Wikis, the three I'm active on (ours, Bulbapedia and TV Tropes) seem to log me out every couple of months or so, but logging back in only takes a handful of seconds, and then I'm set for another sixth of a year. So it really shouldn't be a problem for anyone to remain logged in. (Make sure you're checking "remember me on this computer" if you're not on a public terminal.)

...and would span pages while everyone wrote veritable essays on why it would be a plus, or a minus, and why can't we just leave it the way it is now? and we can't get stuck in the past! sometimes old things aren't best! --wait, what are you trying to say, here? because we are NOT moving to another forum! but that's beside the point! why can't we just leave things the way they are? the wiki is a PPC staple! we didn't even HAVE a wiki before, it is not a staple! it is now! which is why we need to keep it clean from trolls ore people editing without thought! but we have never required such registrationy things! we aren't an authoritarian group! yes, but even we need lines sometimes, and FURTHERMORE--)

And so on, and so forth, for ten pages, until it was eventually pushed off the edge of the dreaded First Page, and lost to easy access (but not to memory) without anything having been decided at all.

Thus, Neshomeh is right. It would be very much a Herculean effort, from the starting point (of getting the 'Board to agree more or less unanimously), to the mid-point (of finding enough people with enough time to do such a thing), to the finish (of actually going about doing it).

_{Not that I'm complaining. I love the long, rambling, tangential discussions here, whether they be snowball fights (Hell's Bells, I could go for a snowball fight right now), Agent!cosplays, or actual debates. And the fact that as soon as they disappear off the first page, everyone moves on to other things and they're more or less abandoned... whether they're snowball fights or debates on the canon of the PPC itself.}

My next mission, which I'm in the middle of writing up, has a lot of mini-Aragogs in it, and I wanted to know if anyone wanted to pre-claim one (or a couple) before it's posted. Those with a * next to them means that it's going to be sent back to HFA during the mission, and are therefore out-of-bounds. The list is as follows:

Mini-Aragogs:
Gringgotts
Berty Bott's
Ginerva
Mr. Wesley
The Borrow
Wesley's
Longbottem
Slythern
Miss Wesley
Slytherns
Angela (Angelina Johnson)
Wesley*
Servus
Sevrous
Harrry*
Bat-boogy
Finnegan
Huffelpuff's

In Total: 18!

We need to have a bit of a chat about TVTropes - I'm usually online at techno.dann on Gmail/Gchat, or I can dust off my AIM, if that's more convenient for you.

1. Even if you can't log in, you can leave a comment identifying yourself.
   
   2. Yes, other people can edit the pages, and when it comes to general cataloging, like adding links to missions or tidbits of information, that's fine. The problem here is that KG wasn't adding information so much as altering it, and since this change (if we decide it sticks) affects me and my past, present, and future PPC writing directly, I would have liked some notice before he went ahead and switched it.
   
   Suppose someone arbitrarily went and changed every instance of "agent" to "constable" because that's how Jay and Acacia were referred to in the early OS missions. That would be annoying to everyone for the same reason this was annoying to me, I think.
   
   In this case, I don't contest the validity of the point (which is why I brought it up for a vote), just the way it was handled.
   
   As for locking the pages: as July points out, it's a rather Herculean task at this point, since we would have to do each page individually. Furthermore, I'd do no such thing without notifying and getting the approval of the Board first. {= p
   
   ~Neshomeh

I like the idea that gender in Flowers is just assumed. Maybe it is for the psychological response the particular gender garners from the agents (which would also explain the idea that different agents have different impressions of some Flowers gender). No matter how much we may bemoan it, in our modern society, males are still typically seen as more authoritative than females, so the Sunflower Official and Marquis de Sod take on strongly male personas, because that is the effect they are trying to project. The kudzu may have decided to take on a female persona to come across as more warm and caring to aide its work in FicPsych.

Thinking out loud here: Maybe it would seem male to a canon character or agent recruit traumatized by a Sue, because for that character the female persona wouldn't be trusted as much. Whereas a Grrl power character might perceive even the Sunflower Official as female. I agree with the others. I could see these kinds of perception differences making for interesting conversations.

Overall, I support leaving the wiki page with all female gender references, because that is how she is referred to most of the time. However that gender assignment came about.

Like most Flowers, physically, the Kudzu is both male and female.

Actually, there's a human parallel: The difference between physical and mental gender. While most people have a set physical and a set mental gender that match each other, there are quite a few whose mental and physical genders don't match, or whose mental and/or physical gender is ambiguous. For example, you might be physically female, mentally androgynous; or physically androgynous, mentally male; or any combination; or even change somewhat as your personality changes.

Those configurations are the minority for humans; but what about Flowers? Most plants (including kudzu) are both genders at once. Maybe the Flowers' gender is simply more fluid than human gender. Maybe, instead of a small minority having no particular gender, both at once, or changing gender, that's actually the norm for Flowers. Maybe gender doesn't really matter to them very much--would mental gender matter very much to you, if you came from a species where anyone could reproduce with anyone else?

It's entirely possible that the only reasons the Flowers have genders at all is that they deal with two-gendered species so often--species who insist on assigning them gendered pronouns. (It doesn't help that English doesn't have a very good pronoun for an ambiguously gendered person. "It" sounds like an object; "they" is bad grammar. And English is probably the predominant language at HQ because it is the predominant language on World One.) It could be that for the Flowers, a gender is about as important to them as our hair colors or our names are to us--something that you associate with yourself, and other people see you as; but something that really isn't all that fundamental to who you are.

BTW, I didn't edit the Kudzu's page, but I may be part of the problem, since I was the one who added the link to "The Dark Elf" on Jay's and Acacia's wiki pages...

As July and Dann have said, there are ways to explain it, And personally, I've always thought of the Flowers' genders are more or less arbitrary choices on their parts (therefore there being no 'wrong' pronoun), and also, it's always possible that an agent simply gets it wrong. Sacriligious though this may sound, Jay could've just made a 'mistake' (speaking within the fourth wall, of course).

And it would likely have to be set manually, or would have to involve going over and making sure every single new article is locked, if there is a macro function I am not aware of.

I think it makes a lot of sense to keep it a mystery-- Agents refer to it as a he or she based on, as has been said, personal projection. It's more fun that way! It could be a soure of inter-departmental gossip, and curiosity, with the Flower itself carefully never giving unwarranted clues-- or contradictory clues. I like the idea of the Flowers being mostly amused by our need to assign gender to them.

On the Wiki: agreed.

Would just like to say that at times it is hard to log in. For instance, I've made several visits to the wiki in the past week or so where the log in button simply disappears after the page has loaded.

--

I've noticed people get quite upset when someone has made changes to a page they consider their own. Isn't the point of the wiki that others can change those pages too?

If you don't want anonymous users to change the wiki then have the whole thing looked for registered users only, like the front page is.

Kudzu is a member of the Fabaceae family, which tend to be hermaphroditic - thus, the Kudzu could be either or both. It could change personas to deal with different agents, it could simply not care about pronouns, or it could have gotten bored with being make at some point in the past.

On the side of the Agents and Boarders.

While person Y might think "Oh, this Flower is definitely a male" person Z might privately think that that Flower seems to be more a female to them. Since as far as I can tell, we pretty much assign the gender pronouns we use for each Flower somewhat randomly, going by whatever whoever wrote it first concluded when they first started that character.

It could always depend on the personalities of the Flowers themselves, as well, if they notice or mind our silly use of gender pronouns for all of them. I'd suspect, for one, that while the poor Daisy would really care either way, the Marquis or the S.O. might flutter their petals in annoyance at being called female or a 'she', and I suspect the Queen Anne's Lace wouldn't exactly be amused either at being called a 'he' as well.

In short, I don't see anything wrong with you referring to the Kudzu in your work as a 'she', while the use of 'he' is notable in TOS.

We're anthropomorphizing flowers after all, and the key thing to that is perception and opinion- which could always lead to a hilarious moment in a spin off, if two groups who have different opinions on what gender certain flowers are met and argued about it-, and it's not there aren't other spinoffs that ignore things set as 'canon' by Jay and Acacia.



______________


On the subject of the Wiki, I agree that people seriously, seriously, need to log in or at least state who they are when editing to prevent people from thinking it's trolling or otherwise. It's not very hard to put a wrong fact in somewhere and have people be fooled by it. That should also go for people who use different usernames on the wiki as compared to the board, so they can be recognized as not a random person editing the whole thing into their private view.

After a while I sorta started taking for granted that I was, but it still logs me out at random. Anyway, I'll not vote because I've caused enough trouble with this already; was just stating why I wasn't logged in.

In a manner which I shall discuss later, it has come to my attention that the Kudzu is mentioned as a "he" in the Original Series. This mention takes place in "The Dark Elf", which is currently only accessible via the Wayback Machine, so I've grabbed the relevant passages for you and highlighted the gender bit:

What have you two brought me now?

"Solaris, the Dark Elf."

She doesn't look particularly dark to me.

Acacia rolled her eyes. "She claims she was given the title by the Rangers while she was posing as a man among them because she was so tough and killed a lot of stuff."

"Which is stupid," Jay added. "She doesn't seem to know what it means."

Enlighten me. Something to do with the Valar or Valinor, I cannot remember...

Acacia sighed. "We have a Fictional Psych director who doesn't know the canon," she said sadly.

"He has to know ALL of them, Acy, at least the really important bits. He can't know it all."

Acacia shrugged. "Anyway it just means Elves who never went off to Valinor, and she seems to think it's really significant..."

Solaris (who in the course of going to the Department of Fictional Psychology had in fact had to be gagged after all) glared.

Jay sighed deeply. "At any rate, she has a good grasp of movie-verse canon, gets the lines right, and appears to have glanced at the book. Despite this, she is a first order Mary Sue who made the Men around her misogynists, and intended to breastfeed the fellowship."

The Director looked astonished. Or might have. It was hard to tell, with vines.

Please repeat that? I don't believe I heard correctly...

Jay repeated what she had said exactly, only a little more slowly.

"And she had decent grammar for the longest time, and then did horrible tense-shifting at the walls of Moria," Acacia added.

The Kudzu looked at the Sue not with horror, but with a dreadful curiosity.

I can see why you chose to bring her to me. Vines reached out to ensnare Solaris. Lie down on the couch, my dear.

Jay and Acacia beat a hasty retreat towards the door.

So, there you go. Now, my feeling is that three to five years ago, when this story was still accessible on Odd Lots and before/right after I started writing about FicPsych, would have been a really good time for someone to point this out to me, but now it's shutting the barn door after the horse has gone. I missed it, which is embarrassing, but so did everybody else at the time. I can handwave it away easily by saying that the Kudzu, as a sentient vine, doesn't truly have gender as we know it, so maybe it just decided to make a change since that mention. However, it's really up to all of you to decide what happens now. TOS is canon, so if you all really want me to slog through every mention of the Kudzu as female over the last few years and change it, I can do that. Either way, please speak up. Just because someone else has said what you meant to say is not a reason to keep quiet in a vote, which this is.

---

There is one other issue I want to bring up here, and that is the way in which this thing was brought to my attention: someone went on the Wiki and edited the Kudzu's page. They weren't logged in. They didn't bother dropping me a line about it as the person it most affects. They didn't bother mentioning it to you guys, either. Personally, I don't think that's okay. I think that was underhanded and rude.

Now, if they had been logged in, I could be having this conversation privately with the individual involved, and I could possibly be more understanding, since I would have some sense of where they were coming from. As it is, all I can do is try to impress upon all of you to log in when you edit the Wiki. Not doing so is like wearing a mask in a public place: it's suspicious and it makes me, at least, feel very uncomfortable. It is not hard to know whether or not you're logged in, so don't try "I didn't know" as an excuse--all you have to do is scroll up to the top of the page and see if your username is up there or if it's prompting you to log in. If you're afraid of getting logged out while editing, make sure to use the "Preview" function before you save (which you should do anyway), or set it to remember you when you log in.

It's this sort of thing that makes me wish we could enforce logging in in order to make edits at all, but since we can't, please, please have some respect for the community and identify yourself when you edit.

That's all. Don't forget to say what you want to happen re. the Kudzu.

Thanks,

~Neshomeh

I looked and couldn't find it, too. Hopefully they got the hint from you, or maybe they're just not there anymore.

~Neshomeh