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I would deposit it, but I already sold it to Golentan over at the Giant in the Playground message boards...

The wiki says it's where a lot of people end up, and that it's one of the largest departments.

I was just kind of randomly wondering what other people find really, really cute (in anything from fanfic to real World One life). I, myself, love odd or "voluntary" families, situations where a bunch of people come together and end up with parent/children dynamics. (Stormsong, Skyfire and the M kids are sort of an example). And people sleeping together in the G-rated sense, with person A's head on person B's shoulder, or lap, or lying down with A's head on B's chest or they're just snuggled together. I think it's because it shows that they're really comfortable with each other, and trust each other, but even without analyzing the appeal, I think it's really cute.

Now, spill your cute buttons, pretty please - whether they're big brown eyes or long slimey tentacles?

I look forward to the results, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for surveys.

Defiantly could be refined, but still critical nonetheless. We should get together and talk metaphysics sometimes. On a chat program or somthin' somethin'.

The Department of Random and Useless Mathematics and Science

\^o^/

Oh, I see; thank you. You are a boon to the newbies.

One moment... After much rummaging, I have found you a very shiny clockwork monkey on a tricycle. And one authentic copy of Hermione Granger's Beaded Purse of Holding.

Have fun at the party! ...However that works.

Yes, I had already figured out that D would be troublesome.

I know that the point is to be free and creative, placing no limits on the writer so that they can craft what they want, that IS no point of fiction. But some people like a good limitation here or there, and writing within limitations can certainly be more interesting at times. These are not rules for what is a target and what is not, everything is still a target, this formula just calculates the effort and skill and agent would theoretically need to successfully resolve a badfic. Its so much a limitation as a quantification of why agents are successful, as the dice are stacked in their favor.

I agree that there is a difference between deviation from canon and a badfic. But the deviance is the measure of the badfic to other badfics. The more twisted the and revolting the story is from other badfic, the more effort the author has put in to make it so (im not accounting for the author being randomly divergent as the end result is the same). So I don't see how the divergence from canon matters, when the measure is their hidiocity relative to other badfic, which puts emphasis on the most particularly horrible ones.

I will admit that it is neither particularly useful nor elegant, but I wrote it when I was sleep deprived. Now that Ive had some rest, Im looking through my thought process to see if I can refine it. At this point, you may are may not accept/like/want/need this, but I probabily wont be able to stop myself from thinking of it this way.

The though of a Department of Random and Useless Mathematics and Science popped into my head. With something along the lines of it being run by an artificial intelligence that has gone insane attempting to quantify badfic. It could be closely tied to R&D and I laugh thinking about the exploits possible involving such a department. But I digress, I am new.

As for the multiverse, the way I see it, you have this large cable of story threads stretching on into infinity that is canon. Surrounding it are the writers of fanfic. The good fanfic are like needles inserted along the flow of the story threads and hardly make any kind of distortion. Badfic, however, is like a giant tumor shoved into the story thread. It stretches the lines out of shape, causing them to fray and even snap with enough pressure. They will continue to grow as the author feeds them,impacting more and more threads. The agents go in and destroy these abomination and then reconnect/smooth/fix the threads of canon.

This cable is holding up all goodfic and canon, and if enough badfic is ever inserted in one place in time at a time, the cable snaps, plunging the multiverse into a darkness of fiction, and the cable must be woven again. No one wants this to happen, so the PPC protects the Grand Story Thread of Canon.

p.s. The misspelling of canon was intentional. He referred to canon as CANNON because if you deviated from canon, he would fire the Canon Cannon and obliterate you.

Hello! I see Neshomeh came through, so I'm assuming you have your links (xie is an angel about posting them), and I'm new enough to be sorta useless anyway, but have a big cookie and a magician's top hat to keep things in. (I don't recommend putting it on...)

Spreadsheet results.

You can view the summary through the 'Form' bit if I set it up right.

That question about system equipment made me realize how little I know about televisions...

Which reminds me...

Let us celebrate, until the next evil comes (as it must, for even Sauron was only a servant/emissary)!

I was inspired to create...the Characterization Variation Ratio (C):

C=(#OOC Canons + #OC's) ÷ #Major Canons

Or, in words: You add the number of out-of-character canons to the number of original characters. Then, divide that sum by the number of canons who figure prominently in the fic. The closer the answer (C) is to zero, the closer the characters in the fic are to their canon selves; the closer to 1 C is, the further from canon they are.

As an example, let's use a hypothetical HP badfic which heavily features Harry, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Dumbledore, Snape, the Weasley twins and a Mary-Sue. In this fic, the Sue figures things out before Hermione, the twins are fighting over who gets to date the Sue, and Dumbledore is ignoring Harry in favor of some prophecy or other involving the Sue.

This leaves us with eight canons, four of whom are OOC, and one original character. For our ratio, this gives us an 8 in the denominator (bottom) and 4 and 1 in the numerator (top). So C=(4+1)÷8 which simplifies to the fraction 5/8. This is a little greater than one half, so this fic's characters, as a whole, are a bit more than halfway against canon.

If all these canons had been OOC, C would have been 9/8 which is greater than 1, signifying a very OOC group of characters. If all the canons had been in character, C would be 1/8, which is relatively small, signifying that the Mary-Sue is maybe the only real problem (barring weird occurences in the story itself).

There are a few things to keep in mind here. This ratio only takes the characters into account. Whether or not the story they appear in is good or bad fic depends on how it's handled; an alternate universe fic could still be goodfic despite having the characters behave differently than in the canon. Additionally, OC's may themselves not be Mary Sues or otherwise fit into the canon universe well. In these cases, you may want to ignore them if they're bit characters, or even include them as canon characters if they are an important part of the story. Finally, if the story includes ALL original characters, you may want to split them between canon-friendly and canon-unfriendly, to avoid dividing by zero (mathematically impossible).

In conclusion, this ratio probably won't work in every case, and it may be a matter of opinion as to whether any given canon is acting OOC enough to be counted (likewise whether an OC is bad enough). Still, it's a relatively quick way to generally determine how far the characters in a fic have fallen from where they should be.

I'm taking a human interface design class this semester, and am doing some data gathering for the final project. The only requirement is that you use a TV and a remote control.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGNvRWJZWGdRblluRHNoRFR4Z2I3a2c6MA

Thank you in advance!

Happy new year!!!

It's been a few years, and the fic is hiding somewhere on the Pit. There was something about Paris being the White City (underground, to get out of nuclear winter), so that should be a few keywords, at least.

Also, now I really, really, would like a link to that story if it's still floating around and you happen to know where it is.

I've been playing online RPGs with Golems in them for too long. I meant Gollum, not Golem.

Yay for stewed rabbit, not raw rabbit, like Golem. And yay for miruvor and mushrooms!

D seems to be hard to compute, but that's more of a sidenote than anything.

There really isn't any unified science to what we do - we write for fun, we pick targets based on their potential for entertainment, and so on. As what we're writing really isn't saving the universes, I don't see any massive need to enforce rules about what is a valid target and what isn't.

That said, multiversal metaphysics are fun. I've always thought of a continuum as a sort of a rope - each story is a strand, and they're generally heading in the same direction. Badfics deviate from that in some dimensional space (as characterizations are at least several dimensions each), and thus weaken the story line. What we do is running around pruning badfics, keeping storylines at least roughly in line.

Also, I'd like to note that there's a difference between deviating from the canon and badfic. There was one fic I read in which the West was North America, history continued about as it has (with the elves hiding when Columbus et all arrived), and the various characters from LoTR reincarnated at some future, post-nuclear-war point. Obviously, said fic couldn't touch the events of canon with a ten-foot pole, but it was goodfic. The biggest complaint I had with it was the amount of angsting that Arwen did.

(And yes, it is 'canon' with a single n. A 'cannon' is a large gun, a 'canon' is the body of work that is agreed upon as official for any story.)

"Frodo! Frodo Baggins! Bravest little Hobbit of them all!"

Hello and Welcome to the PPC Posting Boards! Have some chocolate, won't you?

Hello and welcome to the PPC Posting Board! Have some chocolate, and enjoy your stay!