The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

It's an Amazon tablet, and I have no idea what happened. I was charging it, once it was at 100% I removed the plug... and then it just died on me, and no amount of charging could help. I have no luck with electronics, I swear... I think I have the warranty, but I'm also relying on my laptop. Only issue is not being able to pictures of my art for DA anymore...

A state senator (in the state congress) got spotted at a furry convention and wound up stepping down.

Oddly enough, one of my guesses for Tailgate, was some drama about a tail vendor at a furry con being blown way out of proportion.

Or a sexual harassment scandal involving a bunch of messages about "getting some tail".

Gategate would be a budget scandal, probably with the military: "They paid how much to repaint those gates?". This is likely to be some combination of contractor-related bloat people should be unhappy about and the general public not realizing that you can't just have random people do certain painting jobs.

When the gates meant to hold back an army break due to improper maintenance in a time of peace, and the overseers are thrown into controversy about doing their jobs properly.

I'd like to add one more to this growing list of memes.

MoonMoonGate. The growing trend of "find your wolf name" memes on the internet can be used as a way of harvesting personal data about people, like names, ages, addresses, and potential answers to security questions. The scandal which people haven't really realized is something scandalous.

Tailgate is the inevitable scandal in which a congressperson is discovered to have attended a furry convetion. (in my state, this scandal already happened).

Talegate will be the scandal over children's fiction authors conspiring with publishers to promote The Gay Agenda in their work. Much like Pizzagate, it won't actually be happening because the Gay Agenda isn't real thing. But that's never stopped them before.

Telltalegate is just the controversy over Telltale Games's poor treatment of its employees prior to its bankruptcy. That one's real, albeit not named *gate.

Retailgate is the conspiracy between large chain stores to band together and form a committee to develop a method to assassinate Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately for them, Bezos will buy a Tesla Cybertruck two months later, which will halt any and all assassination attempts because no assassin wants to associated with something that ugly.

Stargate is the conspiracy theory that Goa'uld are actually real and in control of the government.

Gategate is the public outcry over the press naming every single conspiracy, outrage, outcry, or anything else "somethinggate", followed by the discovery that there's actually a committee to decide on the best "gatename" for a given event.

It's a free remake of the very first Elite, and while it's nowhere near as polished as ED it might be the sort of thing you're looking for if you want to experience that first-time-playing feeling again.

I don't just mean I want to play again.

I feel longing to play it again.

I have honestly never felt this with any other game. A lot of games to me are just ways of passing the time when I'm not busy with other stuff. Call Of Duty is just there to kill a few hours in the Employee break room while a computer diagnostic finishes up. Destiny is there if I want some mindless loot grinding. Path of Exile is much the same.

But then there's games I play for the experience, to immerse myself in a game. Subnautica is my all-time favourite survival crafting game. Stellaris is by far the best 4X grand strategy game I've ever played. Fallout: New Vegas is among my favourite RPG games, along with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Then there's Elite Dangerous.

I began playing Elite back in 2016, right after a house fire destroyed my high-spec PC rig. I've tried replacing the damm thing, but considering that I originally started building the rig in 2009, and I just kept upgrading it till the year it got totalled, and that I spent countless hours and insane amounts of moolah building it...I just haven't had the time or budget to rebuild a proper rig.

After that fire, I had my Mac, and that was it. I still use my mac for Uni, despite its ever growing age and level of wear. Since then, I've had a loaner laptop from my Dad, but it's a Lenovo Thinkpad, and I think that's all I need to say. But I digress.

Back then, I had to use my puny mac for gaming, and it did work pretty well. I can safely say that it is possible to run high-end games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Stellaris on a Mid-2013 Macbook Air without running into significant framerate drops. I've become accustomed to dealing with framerates in the single digits. That's when I decided to purchase Elite Dangerous, and I swiftly fell in love.

Prior to playing ED, I had attempted to play the popular space MMO Eve Online. I quickly discovered that the game was more complicated than a Tzeenchian Cultist's shopping list, and stopped playing after about twelve hours. Thankfully the game had gone F2P at this point, so there was no money lost at my end. I was at the time interested in space sims, and I quickly noticed that there was a significant amount of positivity about Elite Dangerous. So, I purchased it on sale, downloaded it onto my Mac, and my god...it's full of stars.

Despite my Mac being a piece of shit when it comes to running games, I managed to get an insanely good experience out of Elite. While my framerate issues made combat significantly harder than it should have been, I soon found that space trucking around the milky way delivering cargo from station to station was fun in its own way. I'd get a mission at one orbital, load up a playlist on my iPhone, pop in my earbuds, undock from the orbital, engage supercruise, and head to the next destination. I quickly moved up from the puny Mk I Sidewinder to a Cobra Mk III, which was my ship at the time I stopped playing. I loved playing the game, and I even took some vacation days just to participate in one of the big events (I think it was some agricultural crisis in a star system, but it's been a while since I last played).

Then came the infamous day when Frontier Developments decided to slash Mac Support from the game in the next major update. By this time, I'd only played about 12 hours, but had thoroughly enjoyed the game. I was really pissed, so I tried getting a refund.

Nope, I'd had the game for longer than two weeks, and I had twelve hours of playtime. Steam support said to go to Frontier.

I asked for a refund. Nope! You have to get that from Steam.

I asked if they could give me a free copy of the PS4 version in recompense, so I could at least play on the PS4 that survived the fire. Nope! Even I think that was a bit much to ask, and I was the one asking.

Finally, I asked if they could transfer my progress to the PS4 version, of which I aimed to buy a copy. I think you know what the answer is there.

I'm not mad about it really. I know macs aren't meant for gaming, and my use of one was only meant to be temporary. But then came the long period of insurance paperwork and legal stuff to deal with the fallout from the fire, and with it also came a long period of time off going to uni. I had to put my life on hold while I sorted out my issues.

It wasn't until about a week ago that I started to feel a longing to get back in the cockpit. To play the game again. This is something I've never felt from a game before. It's not addiction, since I really didn't play all that much, and the vacation day I took off wasn't really a vacation day, since I was also sick with the flu at the time. Twelve hours is nothing compared to the 435 hours I've played Stellaris for. It's more like a desire to experience the game again, and to feel the way I did when I first booted up the game.

If you want a great experience with a brilliantly realised universe, with a huge amount of detail, and enjoy the space trucking experience, get Elite Dangerous. It's well worth the price tag, and it's still being updated and improved by the devs. Maybe I'll see you out there one day. o7, PPC.

Sometimes a bit of writing just falls into place.

Last week, I happened to glance into the Discord at exactly the right moment to scroll up slightly and spot a reference to the PPC version of the superheroes RP AU I'd been involved in developing. I was looking to write something...tempestuous at the time, and, as it turned out, a version of that AU was perfect for it.

Funnily enough, it wound up completely losing the PPC element in the process. Given the most similar version of this AU had only one of my own PPC characters in it (Jacques), and between the AU and the scene most of the characteristics that set him apart from Jack weren't really being showcased, I wound up switching him out for Jack and, well, welcome to a Doctor Who/Torchwood/Sarah Jane Adventures DC superheroes AU fanfic! Who knew?

-

Currently unbetaed, though I've read it over several times. If you spot anything, do feel free to let me know! (Also, @Brits: is "potato crisps" at all valid? Especially in England/London? Or is it always just "crisps" without the "potato"? Of all things, that's the main one I'm unsure of.)

-

"Blazing Fury", T-rating (reason and warnings posted on AO3)

Summary: Blaze has gone off the rails. Captain Charisma wants to know why.

Or, in a superhero AU, Jack Harkness wants to know what's up with his friend and superhero partner John Hart.

-

(Also includes a good three pages of setting notes. Anything past very basic knowledge of how superheroes work is unnecessary; Torchwood/Doctor Who knowledge may be more useful, since there's a fair amount in the notes about how various relationships have changed or been translated over, but should be mostly unnecessary for understanding the actual story. Sarah Jane Adventures knowledge is...pretty much only necessary to know who one background character is)

~Z

PS: Wow, we can do really long subject lines now! I actually have space for another word or two up there. Very impressive.

PPS: It's been...kind of a while since I wrote much non-PPC fanfiction. There's been a bit, probably more than I realize off-hand, but not a lot, and even less that's been posted. Hopefully this isn't a bad way to break that trend.

Tailgategate: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is caught on a traffic camera driving less than one car length behind a little old lady in a Morris Mini Minor (known as tailgating in the UK, at least). The Liberal Democrats try to make this A Big Thing, and use it to indicate that Boris is A Threat To Our Safety. Then a photo emerges of former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg doing the same thing (back in 2014)... The Tailgategate scandal rocks the British Parliament as more and more MPs are accused of tailgating, and a string of high profile resignations follow.

Talegate: French President Emmanuel Macron undertakes a tour of the nation, reading stories to school children as part of his L'ecole, c'est moi education platform. When it emerges that Macron was actually in Andorra, engaged in secret negotiations with his co-prince the Bishop of Urgell, and had sent a professional impersonator out to read tales to the kiddies, the media goes wild. There's probably a riot or three before it dies down.

Watergategate: Conclusive evidence emerges that US Twitter personality and President Donald Trump had a string of "assignations" with women from the Russian embassy. Since the affairs took place in one of the apartments of the Watergate complex in DC, a totally clueless political editor unironically dubs it the "Watergate-gate" scandal. The Republican party completely ignores and/or praises it by turn, the Democratic party use it to argue that the real threat here is other Democrats, and Vladimir Putin is photographed with a secret smile on his face.

hS

The story so far

You fire the arrow at the Mary Sue. It hits her square in the chest, but doesn't kill her instantly. Instead, she falls backwards off of you and onto the floor. Her eyes are wide open and she's breathing heavily.

((hS: The AI had a bit of a sulk at me here: every time I included any detail, it just sullenly repeated exactly what I said. Still, this worked out okay.))

> Say "It serves you right. Now die already."

You say "It serves you right. Now die already." The Mary Sue's eyes roll back in her head and she begins to fade away.

> Thank Lord Elrond politely for his help

You thank Lord Elrond politely for his help. He nods and walks out of the room, leaving you alone with the Mary Sue.

((hS: Hurrah, nobody kissed anyone!))

> Kick the Mary Sue to see if she's all the way dead yet

You kick the Mary Sue to see if she's all the way dead yet. She starts moving slightly as you try to keep her still.

"What... what is this? Is this some sort of dream?" she asks as you continue kicking her body.

((hS: Oh gods, not a death speech!))

> Look at Agent Apple and say "Oh gods, not a death speech!"

You look at Agent Apple and say "Oh gods, not a death speech!" She sighs and shakes her head.

"No, no, no. This isn't real..." she says as you continue kicking her body.

"This is just a nightmare," you reply.

((hS: Omigosh the AI gave us a sassy one-liner!))

> Shoot an arrow into the Mary Sue's face

You shoot an arrow into the Mary Sue's face. The arrow goes through her nose and then into her brain. She collapses backwards off of you and onto the floor, dead.

((hS: Yaaaaaay, go PPC! The bodysnatcher is dead!

((... anyone want to comedically dispose of the body?))

The story so far

You let Agent Apple exorcize everyone in the room. She quickly finds all traces of magic and dispells them from the area.

"I'm glad you were able to get rid of most of it," she says.

((hS: Good job, Agent Apple! I'm sure she's giving us too much credit here. But at least we can finish the job.))

> Aim an arrow at the Mary Sue and ask if she has any last words

You aim an arrow at the Mary Sue and ask if she has any last words. She looks up at you and smiles.

"Thank you for saving my life, Master Aragorn!" she says. "And thank you for helping us save our world from evil."

((hS: Insipid to the last. Interesting to note that the AI caught my mention of Elrond and has concluded we're in Middle-earth. Okay - I'll let someone else do the honours.))

English (at least the flavor of US English I've picked up) has "-gate" as a reasonably general suffix for scandals,or at least in cases where it doesn't sound really dumb. So you get things like "Bridgegate", an affair out in New Jersey where someone set up some pointless "traffic studies" in order to massively slow traffic to ad from a place that didn't vote for them (IIRC).

This all seems to be by generalization from "Watergate", where Nixon had some people break into a hotel to get info on his rival's campaign, and also seems to require a capital letter on the words.

So, while "tailgate" has a few meanings (the bit at the back of a pickup truck that folds down, teating and drinking in a parking lot that often involves a truck's tailgate, or, unrelatedly, getting into places by following someone through a security thing they can open but you can't), what sort of ridiculous things could "Tailgate" be? Or "Tailgategate"?

I guess it's pretty clear I haven't worked with this program before . . . I was amused that the bot tried to go for a more traditional exorcism, but now I'm not entirely sure how to fix this.

I guess let's try:

>Let Agent Apple exorcise everyone in the room.

—doctorlit, hopefully not making things worse this time?

• Television does not exist in Star Trek. Remember the season one finale of TNG, "The Neutral Zone"? Remember how Data says that " I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty."? Yeah...way to go, Kurtzman. Way to go.

• Seriously? A single positron can be used to clone an entire computer brain? The writers do know that a positron is a antielectron, and that Data's brain is not made of the things, right? I don't care what your technobabble is, you cannot make a brain out of antimatter.

• So, Dahj has a robo-brain, but she has an organic body, right? How in the name of Roddenberry does that equate to her jumping 50 feet into the air?

• "My Daughter" my ass. That's Lal who's Data's daughter. Or did the writers completely forget about S3E16 "The Offspring"?

• Romulans are apparently xenomorphs now, and can spit acid. What the fu-

• I love how the scene where we're introduced to Dahj has her and her boyfriend talking in a very 21st century way. It's almost like this isn't the 25th century at all. It's almost like they've forgotten how people talk in every other TNG-era show.

• So, these Romulans who try to kidnap Dahj apparently forgot all about transporting her away, stun settings on Phasers, or (y'know) anything that wouldn't result in her "activating" and killing them all. Did the entire species get hit with the stupid hammer, or do the writers just not know Star Trek very well?

• You'd think that Picard would at least want to know a rando's name when she shows up at his house babbling about how she feels safe with him. He could be face-to-face with a crazed drug fiend, or some wierdo fangirl. But no. He just gives her tea, and lets her sleep over at his place. Without even asking her name.

• The hell? They destroyed Utopia Planatia? Like, the primary shipyard for the entire Federation? This somehow doesn't result in aggression from any of the Federation's enemies? Also, they do know that the majority of the facilities are on the surface of mars, right? It's just the easily replaceable drydocks that are in orbit.

• So, because Starfleet mishandles a single rescue, Picard goes emo and quits Starfleet. snerk...OOC much?

• Romulus has a population of 8 billion. But apparently there's only millions of Romulans living there at the time of the supernova. How the hell do billions of people just disappear from reality?

I used to watch it with my parents; I distinctly remember the test pilot one (was that the first episode?) and the lab monkey one. Very fun.

... come to think of it, didn't I parody it once? Yep, there it is, over in the TCDA.

Theorising that a Constable could travel within her own transfictionally-algorithmised vitallic field, Feamintë Fioncarnë stepped into the Phantasmic Leap Accelerator... and vanished. She awoke to find herself trapped in the Fictional Realms, facing mirror images that were not her own, and driven by an unknown force to change the plot for the better. And so Feamintë finds herself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that her next leap will be the leap... home.

hS

Another minute passes before Agent Apple comes back with a man dressed in black leather pants and a tattered white shirt.

((hS: The game actually got a bit confused here and quoted her returning with the Sue again first. I've clipped that out, but not reverted it, because this is too good!))

> Say "Are the Elves In Black Leather going to help exorcise me?"

You say "Are the Elves In Black Leather going to help exorcise me?" The man smiles and says "Of course, we've been working on this project for years now. We just need a human sacrifice."

((hS: O.O. Though I guess that's pretty on-point for OFUM. Um... if we're Sue-influenced, can we really offer our Twu Wuv up to be sacrificed?

((Sure we can! We Suvians care only for ourselves.))

> Say "All right, Lord Elrond, you can sacrifice the Mary Sue to exorcise me."

You say "All right, Lord Elrond, you can sacrifice the Mary Sue to exorcise me." The man laughs and says "Well I'm sure your mother will appreciate that one more than we do." He puts his arm around the woman and kisses her on the lips.

((hS: DANGIT she got to Elrond!))

The story so far

>Wait for Agent Apple to exorcize me!

—doctorlit, feeling this plot twist in the worst way

Dammit this manga is good. But I really wish I liked it more.

Let me back up. Planetes is a manga by Makoto Yukimura, the same man who would later go on to write Vinland Saga, one of my favorite mangas ever. It's set in the near future and follows the crew of the DS-12 "Toybox", a ship tasked with cleaning up space junk and debris from earth and lunar orbit—an unglamorous but important job. Yuri knows this all too well: He lost his wife when a single screw hit the spaceship they were in at low-earth orbit. To Fee, it's just another job—a way to support her family and pay for another pack of smokes. For Hachirota, it's a way to get into space, a gateway to better things, to becoming a real astronaut like his father. As for Tanabe... well, she just seems to be glad to be here.

I'm about to rag on this series a bit, so let me just be clear—Planetes is good. Like, really good. It's full of strong sociopolitical commentary, memorable, lovable characters, and the whole story has a strong central message that ties everything together.

But.

The ending has... problems. It really feels like Yukimura was planning something longer and was forced to end it abruptly. Fee's arc does complete, but it doesn't really feel completed—it feels cut short. Hachi's ending scene feels like it came too far along and his arc should have been wrapped up earlier. More to the point, it was wrapped earlier. And new characters like Baron and Colonel Sanders (yes, really. Yes, he does look like the fried chicken mascot. Yes, other characters make fun of him for it) didn't really get the screen time and development they needed to feel fully realized. It feels like the story should have either ended sooner, or later. As it stands, it's somewhere in between and everything feels unresolved. Far too unresolved for the series to end with a big ending speech.

Maybe the anime, which ends earlier and changes around some plot elements, fixes this. I haven't actually seen it so I can't guarantee, but by all accounts it is a very good anime so... yeah.

On the whole, I do recommend Planetes if you can find it. The anime is impossible to purchase or legally stream now so you'll have to either buy it used or pirate it. Meanwhile, the manga got an extremely nice two-volume omnibus release from Dark Horse, which is great... but only the first half is in print. Copies of the second half are available online, but they're going for twice the price of the first half.

Or, if the ideas and strengths interest you but you don't want to go to all this effort, go read/watch Vinland Saga, which is even better and by the same author.

1917 is the best gorram war film I have ever seen.

I’ve seen a lot of war films.

I can safely say it’s better than Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Black Hawk Down, Full Metal Jacket, or even Apocalypse Now.

So, if you haven’t seen it, and ignored the spoilers tag, here’s a quick run down on the film. It’s 1917, and the world is embroiled in WWI. In France, two soldiers are sent on a dangerous mission across No Man’s Land to deliver a urgent message to another Allied unit that is about to fall into a deadly trap.

Right off the bat, the movie draws you in as the protagonists walk from the relatively untouched grasslands of the rear lines, and into the ever more cramped and grimy world of the trenches. The whole movie is cleverly shot as if it is a single take. There’s never any noticable cuts, and there is only ever one camera filming the pair. The camera appears to just be a floating portal in the air, following these soldiers on their mission.

The uniforms, equipment, and other period stuff are entirely accurate from my ammature historian’s perspective. To make the film, they recreated a entire trench system, with parts of it scattered across the British countryside. IIRC, a part of it was built two miles from Stonehenge on the Salisbury plains.

In terms of how it plays out, there’s moments of relative calm- which can even be quite beautiful (for example, the scene of a soldier singing to a massive group of his comrades right before they go into battle is a almost otherwordly scene, both strange and entrancing). There’s a equal amount of action setpieces, from a collapsing German bunker near the start to a battle with a German sniper near the middle.

Overall, 1917 is a extremely thematic film, representing not the blood-soaked, testosterone-driven action of more tasteless war films; but the melancholy and pointlessness of war; where a small number of men can sacrifice so much, but achieve so little in the end. I highly reccomend this film for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

I have recently bought a copy of Rouge Leader on eBay. It’s a very enjoyable game, it reminded me of Star Wars battle pod, an arcade game that I enjoyed when it was around.

You play as Luke Skywalker, and Wedge Antilles, Luke’s other best friend. Missions have a time limit and you have to blow up your targets. They can be Tie fighters, or in the battle of Hoth, AT-STs.

I think that the game has captured the feel of the original trilogy( even though I’ve never watched the trilogy), and the cheat codes are quite a nice addition.

One of my favourite codes is the Car code. You can fly a car and it can fire multiple ion torpedoes. My favourite Starfighter is still the Y Wing. It looks like. a very reliable and powerful Starfighter.

Unfortunately, I was scammed on eBay and I now have to play this great game with a faulty GameCube controller. The analogue stick drift makes Luke walk around, even though I’m not touching anything. And no, I have not mastered the force.

Played on an unmodified Wii.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount