The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Have a very fluffy blanket!

https://ppc.fandom.com/wiki/ThingsIAmNotAllowedtoDoatthe_PPC I hope that you don’t mind this FourMoonsWatching!

~SomeRandomPersonAccount Sharing links that are hopefully the right link and not a link to his profile page.

Merry Christmas

I'm Moons. One of the local cuddlebugs, an unashamed gremlin, and presently kind of out of it.

Have a self-updating hard copy of the List of Things I Am Not Allowed to Do in the PPC!

It’s me SomeRandomPersonAccount, if my username wasn’t random enough. Have a question mark shaped starfish! It’s also red!

~SomeRandomPersonAccount Giving gifts to newbies for the first time in a long time

Musicals, eh? Did you know that there's a PPC musical? https://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ekwy&keyword=PPC:%20The%20Musical&filter=all It's great to have you!

Hey everyone. I’m Chloe, a straight cisgender female teenager. My pen name is ChampionOrChicken throughout the internet. I go by CaptainStarfish in other, non-writing sites.

I’m from China, and I’m currently living in the US. Chinese is my native language, but I could also speak English fluently.

I follow many fandoms, including many well known ones such as Harry Potter (the books), the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Lord of the Rings (both the books and the movies), Hamilton (the musical), the Phantom of the Opera (both the Leroux book and the ALW musical), Les Misérables (the musical, but I’m halfway through the book, and I love it), and the Hunger Games (the books). I love reading, writing, watching musicals and movies, playing the piano, tap dancing, roleplaying, and listening to music.

I like a lot of foreign (mostly German and French) musicals, including my favorite musical, Elisabeth. It's sad how a lot of people in the US don't know them.

One day, I was trying to explain to a friend what a Mary Sue is. I was lacking in words, so I just looked it up and found the PPC wiki. It was one of the best discoveries of my life. I went ahead and read the Original Series and some other missions, notably the PoTC missions with Agents Isaiah and Mara. I couldn’t bring myself to read any HP missions. I don’t want to lose my sanity yet; I love HP too much. I also enjoy the OFU stories a lot, especially OFUM and OPA.

My L.O.s include Captain Jack Sparrow, King Thranduil (yes, the movie version. Don’t judge), Leroux!Erik, Webber!Phantom, and a lot of real people. I don’t want to be disrespectful (aka creep them out), so I’ll just omit the specific information.

My wiki profile: https://ppc.fandom.com/wiki/User:Captain_Starfish

My Discord: 24601(bushi) #2696

And yeah, here we go. I love the PPC already.

it worked, so I'm persevering! Now featuring also a couple of songs for soundtrack because why not.

Nikki helps Chopper in his attepts to travel to his airbase, and Sergio, Johnson and Ami defend the Wolfram from a sudden attack while everyone is still wondering where the heck they are. https://rc1587.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/the-world-without-authors-02/

No, Huinesoron, Corolla (AKA The Best Character if your reviews are anything to go by) doesn't feature yet. But I promise she'll be in the next chapter, and will also get her own illustration!

Because if it does, then we'd finally get a sequel to The American Revolution.

...actually, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. The worst thing would be for America to become even more of an ingrown toenail without anyone actually doing anything.

...I think it's missing something, and that's digging deeper into the reasons why people procrastinate.

(Disclaimer: I'm going by your summary, and have not seen the video at this time.)

See, yes, sure, let's run with the rational decision maker versus the...instant gratification monkey. Man, what a term (and with unfortunate associations to a common "today's generation's problem" claim, though using it to talk about procrastination is definitely valid). The thing this talk appears to be missing is why instant gratification winds up in control.

Sometimes it likely is just down to "the other thing is boring, so I would rather do just about anything else"...but that's already getting into reasons, isn't it?

Quite frequently, there's a reason why a procrastinator begins to avoid something. In some cases, it's boring; sometimes it's difficult, or similar to something that has been difficult in the past despite this one being easier; sometimes the task itself would be fine, but it's connected to something the procrastinator doesn't want to be doing anymore, and, being now in an environment where distractions are "allowed", it becomes harder to focus on.

Sometimes it's a case of fear. "I don't know how to do this", or "what if I get it wrong", or "I've never done this before, or "this is connected to something serious and I don't want to think about it and oh no I should have done this ages ago aaah"...

The "instant gratification monkey" wins out over the rational decision maker in a lot of these scenarios purely because fear (even indirectly/unrealized) keeps the latter from from taking over right away and redirects actions to the former as a form of avoidance. That's the point at which Ted Urban's "dark playground" shows up: avoidance doesn't exactly lessen fear, and can both heighten it and add in guilt, anxiety, and further dread.

Or at least, that's my theory. Procrastinators don't wind up in the "dark playground" (...I'm sorry, this is starting to sound like something from Partially Kissed Hero, given all the "Dark Ravenclaw" and "Dark Muggle" stuff going on) because their pursuit of instant gratification takes over at random; instead, they wind up there because some negative emotion attached to the task at hand is sending them into avoidance (or, sometimes, it's just become a habit, or, alternatively, seems to have done so because the negative emotion is harder to identify). In the case of pursuing the good things, the ones without deadlines, it may be habit and expectations mixed with guilt: "I couldn't get this other thing done, so obviously this isn't going to work out either, even though it should", or even, "I keep making a mess of important things, why do I deserve for it to be any different with something that's mainly just important to me?"

I think, working with what Neo's said (and bits of past reading/research/talking to people, which have informed a fair bit of this post, actually), that the key (or one of them) to changing procrastination habits is to find ways to disrupt the habit and put the "rational decision maker" back in charge (or back in charge more quickly). Targeted pep talks or analysis of the procrastination process, having another person in the room with the idea that both people are working, taking advantage of a school/work environment to promote focus, setting an evening cut-off time after which the to do list is off limits...they may not work for everyone (heck, I doubt much of anything in this post is universal), or work perfectly or every time, but in the search for ways to overcome procrastination quicker and more frequently, there are definitely worse places to start.

~Z

The fact that CZM has continually ignored requests to stop after supposedly changing is concerning and frustrating to me. I'd like to see some indication that this behavior will stop, because it's becoming increasingly frustrating. I'd like to see evidence that CZM is even aware of the numerous comments on each post saying to please stop the behavior they were asked to stop by a vote.

The Atrocity Archives was the first Laundry... novel? It's a novel, a novella, and an essay by Charles Stross. The short story is Concrete Jungle, and the essay is really about the influences on The Laundry Files. So I'm going to talk primarily about the novel itself.

The novel is first and foremost an introduction to the setting. It follows Bob Oliver Francis Howard (It's time to play Spot The References, because there's more than one in that pseudonym) from lowly IT technician with attitude to lowly field agent (with slightly less attitude) for the UK's ultra-classified secret agency of the occult, The Laundry. This is less a leap than you'd think: the Many Angled Ones lurk at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set and you can generate resonance in the fabric of the multiverse by doing the right (or rather, wrong) sort of math. And computers are very good at doing math veeeeery fast. So when a recent university graduate thinks they've found a cool new way to draw some pretty fractals, Wolverhampton may be well on its way to getting a fresh landscaping of demons. At which point the Laundry steps in and stops them, giving the poor sod a Job Offer They Can't Refuse.

This is a pretty cool premise, and it's worked very well for the Laundry for a number of years now. A lot of people have noticed the connection that sorcerers and hackers are more or less the sci-fi and fantasy equivalents of one other, but Stross makes it all feel real with a think layer of workplace banality: Sure, The Laundry's an occult intelligence organization, but it's also a government bureaucracy and an IT organization, and Stross writes it like he's had ample experience with both, and with the kind of people who would work in either. Everything is standardized, there's an eternal stack of paperwork for everything, and you'd better keep the receipts for all your expenditures in the process of saving the world. Meanwhile, when Bob isn't saving the world, it's his job to diagnose ailing Beowulf clusters and fix computers for those bereft of a clue, an aspect of his job that he treats with as much relish as any real systems type would—none at all.

That mix of dark horror and banal drudgery would stick The Laundry Files, arguably intensifying over time, but it starts strong here.

As a returning reader, I'd forgotten just how well The Laundry sets up its supporting cast early on. Ex Girlfriend From Hell and walking Checkov's Gun Mhari Murphy is as well established as she needs to be (it'll be a long time before she comes to fore), Derek the "Accountant" suitably lampshades his real job long before we go in-depth on what it is, Pinky and The Brain are suitably insane roommates who are a bit like if your roomates with crazy and dangerous side projects started dating, and Bridget and Harriet are eminently hateable bureaucrats even when they do have a point. And those characters are by and large not going to be relevant for a long time, if ever, to the point that I'd forgotten some of them were even in this book. The relevant cast (Alan, Andy, Angleton, and Mo) are all suitably memorable and stick with you, which is good because you'll see a lot of them. And of the lot it's clearly Angleton who steals the show: The terrifying boss who seems to be more than what he appears, one part schoolmaster to two parts force of nature. We'll find out more about him as the series continues, but he makes a strong and immediate impression.

Mo, sadly, is a bit weaker in this novel. As a recently inducted Laundry member, she's mostly serving as confused newcomer, quasi-love-interest, and part time Damsel in Distress. As the novels progress, she'll play a larger role and become a force in her own right, as well as developing into a much more interesting character. But for now, she's more side character than anything else. This will not last.

I'm quite a lot down and I haven't talked much about the horror aspects. So I really should because this is... maybe still the most viscerally scary the Laundry gets. It draws on Nazi occultism and the Holocaust for truely gruesome effect, and the climax has all the Lovecraft you could hope for, save that the world isn't destroyed. There is something viscerally haunting about this book's imagery that is rarely captured. The series wouldn't be this dark again until after The Rhesus Chart, or arguably even until The Delirium Brief. I'm not going yo say much more because I don't want to spoil it.

Is there anything bad I can say about this book? Well... maybe. The other thing I forget about was just how in-jokey early Laundry could be. The later books are more serious about this, but for the first two books, and the short stories from that era, the books had a deep atmospheric steeping in geekery, with side jokes about Sendmail rules, Knuth Volume 4, an early nod to Symbolics, complaints about software licensing audits and Quality Assurance, and a collection of dialogue with some clear nods to Ye Olde Jargon File. These elements flaked away over time as the focus became more rooted in story, even if they never totally vanished (there was a great bit about the Laundryverse's Modesty Blaise expy writing in a particularly Lisp-ey dialect of Old Enochian), and it's jarring to see them at near full-force here. Not quite total full-force, because the second Laundry novel included a short story called "Pimpf" which is more or less a send-up to the BOFH (the second novel was a lot more light-hearted, albeit largely for in-universe reasons).

Overall though, I'd highly recommend the book. All the extra references are largely ignorable and the rest of it works really really well.

I know this is unasked for advice, but I still want to offer my two cents here. Comparing this post, and the one you made about scifi from last week, to your review of 1917 on the recs and plugs thread, I notice that you have a tendency to be entirely positive about something you like, while being entirely negative about something you dislike. When reviewing something, we generally give both positive and negative points about it. To arrogantly use examples of my own creation, I enjoyed the Daredevil series on Netflix, but I had plenty of complaints about its use of fake gore and its over-reliance on ninjas. On the other side of the coin, I did not enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, but I still brought up the two characters that I thought were well-written. Especially Taylor. Thank you, Taylor.

Giving both positive and negative points about something when we review gives other people more points to chime in on and have a discussion about it. Try that next time?

—doctorlit, Team Taylor

It's called 'Press Start to Play', and it has a foreword by Earnest Kline ('Ready Player One'), so you know right away what sort of style you're getting in for.

The book is themed around video games, and specifically about blurring the lines between video games and what we laughingly call reality. There's one story centred on a game character looking out at her player; another protagonist unexpectedly respawns when he dies; another plays a famously unwinnable video game and finds some unexpected things.

It's a bit tricky to say how it does with author representation: a few of the writers have gender-neutral names or just initials, but I'd say it's over one-third women writers, possibly close to half (though not, I think, reaching it). A fair number of the contributors have non-Anglo-Saxon names (mostly Japanese, for obvious reasons), so I think there's a decent non-White contingent. As for queerness, I can't say for sure, but I do know that several of the stories by women jumped out as having lesbian protagonists, so the characters at least have representation. None of it comes close to overturning the cichetwhitemale majority in the book, but it's more than you'd have got a decade or so back.

Would I recommend the book? I'd say yes. Some of the stories aren't easy reading - sometimes because of their subject matter (one is themed around Oregon Trail, which... yeah), sometimes because it's waaaaay outside my genre, but I don't remember any of them being bad. Also, one of them is by Rhianna Pratchett ('Tomb Raider', plus her dad wrote some fantasy or something), so that's always a win!

hS

People were asking you to stop making these kind of posts. What kind of posts did you think they meant?

I wanted to know because I thought you understood.

If you want to talk about this through email, let me know.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that you could also DM me on Discord if you prefer.

Not just in terms of writing, but also camerawork, lighting, editing, acting, directing—the whole nine yards. I will wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

I'm not big on comedies, but you've convinced me to start watching.

Thank you.

Minh, I've honestly gotta ask: exactly what part of "we don't want you to keep clogging the Board with your whiny rants about sci-fi, because we are all very, very, very sick of that by now" are you having trouble with? Because I'm losing count of how many times you've been told that we don't want to listen to that anymore.

Gods, it must be exhausting to rage and whine about things you don't like all the time. I can't even imagine. And how boring is that? To think so much about what you hate? Is this all you do? Because I'm genuinely having trouble remembering a single actually constructive, or hell, interesting discussion we've had with you here that didn't somehow swerve into "I hate politics I don't agree with intruding on modern sci-fi, which means that modern sci-fi sucks and I've gotta outline all the ways it sucks" sooner or later.

(I'm not even going into you airing your hatred for leftist media again, because I don't need that kind of debate - but what you're showing of your opinion on women and POC in sci-fi is painting a less than flattering image of you.)

If Ix reopens the vote, I'm voting for a ban. Because I've had enough.

It shall be treated with the respect that you demonstrably have for science fiction and your comprehension of what went on in the most recent Doctor Who episode, which is to say less than none.

I find it quite curious that you summon such vitriol for this idea, and given your previous burst sewer main impersonations on women in specfic I am obliged to conclude that you would not do the same were it a white man in the same position. Of course, given that what you have asserted was not even slightly what the deal is with [SPOILER REDACTED], I question why you said what you did at all: it's just a meaningless, incoherent stream of invective, trying to invoke some prelapsarian nostalgia for Hartnell-era Who before all those icky girls started doing important things other than scream and turn an ankle.

In any event, I'd appreciate it if you stopped vomiting up any further rants about specfic, or at least know what the blue shpx you're talking about first. I mean, it's Doctor Who, for God's sake, you don't exactly need a postgraduate qualification to understand what's going on.

Though I do have one of those. So. Yeah.

You need to chill. And considering you were nearly banned from the PPC for it last time you were here, claimed you changed upon coming back, and then multiple times demonstrated you haven’t, I’m honestly considering re-opening that vote, because I am sick and tired of your constant crap.

Because I've loved speculative fiction since I was five, and I love discovering new things and new voices - which, luckily, there are more and more of in the sci-fi community every year. I've especially been reading a lot of short stories lately - Lightspeed Magazine is an absolute goldmine of contemporary sci-fi, with lots of queer and POC authors -, and I want to share a few I really loved with y'all.

• Nnedi Okorafor: Spider the Artist | A woman in an African village forms an unlikely alliance with a Zombie. And trust me, it's not what you expect. (Trigger warning: domestic abuse.)
• Terence Taylor: The Catch | Unfortunately I haven't been able to find this story online, but if you can get a copy of this anthology, I very highly recommend that you read it. It's a disturbing, thought-provoking sci-fi tale about a serial killer finding out the true reasons for his killing urges, written by a black author I'm definitely going to read more stories by.
• Sofia Samatar: How to Get Back to the Forest | A dystopian story about girlhood, friendship and surveillance. I can't give a specific trigger warning, but it's an unsettling story.
• An Owomoyela: Undermarket Data | I've absolutely loved the excellent horror story Whose Drowned Face Sleeps by this author, so I was highly excited to read her sci-fi stuff, and I wasn't disappointed. While the plot of this story isn't as good as some of the others I've linked here, the grimy, run-down cyberpunk setting and the characters are excellent.
• Kameron Hurley: The Light Brigade | A sci-fi critique of the military and people literally turning into light? Don't mind if I do!
• Caitlín R. Kiernan: Faces in Revolving Souls While I love this author, the truth is that I didn't like this story about human augmentation and otherness at all. Not at first, anyway - but the beautiful imagery and the though-provoking themes (a bit unsubtle, I'll admit, but I didn't mind) got under my skin, made me think long and hard. And I've always thought that the best kinds of stories are the ones that stick with you. (Trigger warning: body horror.)

I'm trying to broaden my literary horizons this year, so I've made it my goal to read more women, POC and queer authors, especially in speculative fiction. I've got a long reading list in pretty much every genre, but I've been on a sci-fi kick lately, so here's my sci-fi reading list - let's see how many of them I can get through this year.

1. Octavia E. Butler: Dawn
2. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
3. Rachel Bach: Fortune's Pawn
4. Nnedi Okorafor: Lagoon
5. Joan Slonczewski: A Door into Ocean
6. Kameron Hurley: The Stars Are Legion
7. Julianna Baggott: Pure
8. Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Do you guys have any modern sci-fi recs?

It's over here at Lightspeed Magazine. And it's a BLIT story too! I love BLITs so much. It's a fascinating idea.

Also, I've been meaning to read Snow Crash for a while, but Laundry Files sounds excellent too. I shall put it on the TBR list.

I remember reading an excellent horror novel where one of the characters sees something so horrifying that he goes permanently catatonic. It's nothing supernatural or scientific, but the idea of coming across something created by humans that's so awful it permanently breaks your brain is pretty intriguing to me, in a very "bleak horror" kind of way. I haven't said the title of the novel here because this was kind of a spoiler, but I can tell you if you wish.

So, the very first Doctor is now a black woman, right? Right, so apparently all black people secretly desire to be a white man twelve times over. Because that's what this is really saying. She'll regenerate into Hartnell, and then proceed to remain white and male for twelve iterations. In trying to be progressive, this episode actually is really gorram racist. I'm really trying to avoid feeling glee that they've really screwed their own argument for why Doctor Who should be like this, but I'm failing.

If this is what Chibnall is going to give us, then I'm all for him staying around a bit longer. Please, Chibbs, give us some more funny stuff to laugh at. Please, tarnish your reputation as a writer even further. I'll be waiting with some popcorn.