The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

iPad? Surface? A pukes on the inside Android machine? It’s a Android, isn’t it?

Do you at least have warranty on it? Is there a 1st or 3rd party repair vendor you can bring it to? Have you tried turning it off then on again?

I caught a handfull of episodes on SBS (a Australian F2A broadcasting station) a few years back. I think. I definately remember watching a couple of episodes with my parents at some point in my childhood, but I could be misremembering.

The shows I do remember from my childhood are the reruns of Tom Baker’s stint as the Doctor; Red Dwarf, Voyager, and pretty much anything by Gerry Anderson. In fact, I practically was raised on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Space 1999, and U.F.O.

Now that I think about it, I think I have a DVD boxset of Thunderbirds sitting in a box somewhere. Maybe it’s about time I gave it a rewatch...

You activate the app to switch your body with the Mary Sue's. As soon as you touch her, her face turns into yours and everything changes back to normal.

The two of you smile at each other and then kiss. Then, you both fall asleep together.

((The story so far))

((hS:...))

((hS: I think the AI has quite a good understanding of badfic actually.))

((hS: WAIT maybe this is the result of our app being malware! After all, you can't spell 'bi-curious' without 'you decide to try it anyway because you're curious what would happen'!))

I love QL! I discovered it as reruns on Sci Fi Channel back when that was still spelled "Sci Fi." I think it's the first proper "grown-up" TV series that ever really hooked me. It's just such a unique and interesting premise! I've got the entire series on DVD; need to binge re-wacth the whole thing someday and maybe do some missions into it!

—doctorlit, always hoping that the next leap will be the leap home

I need to catch up on some Disney films, especially the ones the Kingdom Hearts series already spoiled for me. I decided to start with Tangled, since it’s a standalone, and I’m ostensibly going to finish watching The Mandalorian with my brother next week.

Spoilers follow for Tangled and Kingdom Hearts 3.

It’s interesting that the movie actually gives away the twist (or what I thought of as a twist) right in the prologue, so that’s it’s actually not a twist at all. We start out knowing Rapunzel is the kidnapped princess right out the get-go, which made for quite a different feeling from when I played through the Kingdom of Corona level in KH3, where I only figured the connection out just before the scene that revealed it. It kind of feels like they were wanting to keep the plot simpler to emulate the feeling of the older Disney adaptations of fairy tales, rather than newer Disney films that seem to always have a twist lately. And it’s fine. I still liked the movie quite a bit, though I don’t think I rate it among the crazy-good Disney films like Lilo & Stitch or Frozen.

I’m amused that the token “I want” song of the film’s opening is basically a song about keeping busy to avoid boredom. I can relate. (Could Mother Gothel really not get more than three books for Rapunzel? I know she’s the bad guy, but come on, lady!) I don’t think Rapunzel can quite replace my girl Cinderella as the workaholic’s token spirit Disney princess, but it was still kind of fun imagining myself locked in a tower and coming up with projects to keep busy . . . What do you mean that wasn’t the takeaway of the scene?

Mother Gothel’s character is something else my KH3 play-through skewed expectations for. In the game, she gets manipulated by a villain from another world, and generally doesn’t have a lot of early scenes alongside Rapunzel, so I found myself sympathizing with her more there, up until she kind of snapped at the end. In the film, though, I was very quickly shocked out of that mindset by their very first interaction, where Gothel’s blatant insults straight to Rapunzel’s face are just . . . just horrible, and felt enough like realistic verbal abuse among family members that it even made me a little uncomfortable just to be listening to it. The writers also gave Gothel some lines that have very different meanings than they would in a more normal context. The ones that stood out to me were “Rapunzel, I’m not getting any younger down here,” which Gothel means literally, and the fact that Gothel calls Rapunzel, “Flower” as a pet name—except it’s not a pet name, but a sign that Gothel only sees the princess as a replacement of the object she needs for her eternal life. Gothel is quite a nasty addition to the Disney villains pantheon, and her vanity and selfishness come through with just about every word. I was glad to see her meet her end, after so many centuries of bonus life.

Flynn’s vague, G-rated womanizing and general attitude turned me off almost immediately, because those sorts of characters tend to get on my nerves pretty quickly. Fortunately, he turned out to be more tolerable than I was expecting, and I like that the development of his relationship with Rapunzel made a lot of those negative character traits vanish by the end. A volunteer I work with in Small Mammals building had told me that the horse was the best character in the film, and he really does carry a presence to him every time he appears onscreen. Despite being fairly natural-looking and non-anthropomorphized, at least by Disney standards, Maximus’s facial features and body movements are so incredibly expressive, even without saying a single word. In a movie that’s so human-focused, it’s delightfully hilarious to see this horse behaving so dutifully and seriously, to the point where it sometimes feels like he’s defying the laws of physics in hunting down Flynn. Pascal is well portrayed, too, and with the same lack of speech, which is impressive. But Maximus is definitely my favorite of the movie.

I found the music to be largely forgettable, which is unusual for Disney. That opening boredom song has a decent beat, but it just doesn’t grab me for some reason. Actually, I think the song with the most energy is the reprise of “Mother Knows Best.” The voice actor put a crazy amount of emotion and power into her voice for that, and it’s sticking with me longer than the rest of the film’s music, even the original version of the song that the reprise is reprising.

—doctorlit isn’t going to watch any of the modern Winnie the Pooh films, for the record

“No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!” “No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!” “No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!”

I wish I consumed media faster. I miss the old days when i could get multiple entries on these posts before they could fall off the front page . . . I guess there are drawbacks to getting my dream job under an abusive employer!

—doctorlit, trying to get more hobby stuff done, he swears!

"Huh. There really is an app for everything!"

—doctorlit, continuing?

Whether or not that was the impression you got, better make sure your posts don't have complaints in the future!

If I was to choose a race to be Trumpists in space, I wouldn’t choose the Klingons. For one, Klingons are actually honorable warriors, not fanatically racist rhetoricalists. I would have picked the Romulans, but even that’s a stretch.

They would have done a better job if they just came up with a new alien species

This is a fan project to make a fully explorable, fully interactable simulation of the entire USS Orville from the TV show "The Orville". While it's currently only in early access right now, you can play what they currently have done on Steam for free:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096200/TheOrvilleInteractiveFanExperience/

[edit: The italics are due to the formatting stuff. Just put some _ formatting between "The", "Orville", "Interactive", "fan", and "experience".]

It's been endorsed by Seth MacFarlane himself, and its made by the same group who tried to create a fully interactive simulation of the Enterprise-D (but were shut down by CBS because CBS hates their fanbase). I've been playing it since release, and it's pretty damm detailed. So far, they only have the top two decks (including the Bridge, Sickbay, Mess Hall, Captain's quarters, and a handful of other rooms), as well as the shuttle bay, main engineering, and one of the holographic simulators. The latest update added the armoury, the Chief Security Officer's office, flyable shuttles in the shuttlebay, the shuttlebay control room, and a few other spaces to the ship. It's still very much a WIP, so don't expect too much from it. The game is available for PC, Mac, and (IIRC) Linux.

So.. my tablet, which I have Discord on, just up and died on me. I don't know what happened, one moment it was working, and the next, I couldn't turn it on, despite it apparently being fully charged. I'm paranoid as heck about what went wrong, and I don't want to get another one since this one was already a replacement for my first one...

Er, yeah. If you don't hear from me on Discord for a while, this is why.

So, someone showed me a TED Talk done by Ted Urban, a blogger, about why we procrastinate, and I would like to recommend it.

Here is the link: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

To summarize the talk, procrastination and wasting time occur because each one of us has two people in our minds: A rational decision-maker, who does what makes sense how and is willing to do hard and unenjoyable things for the sake of something greater, and an instant gratification monkey, who only wants to do what is fun at the moment. In a non-procrastinator's mind, the rational decision-maker is in control, so the person is capable of doing things that make sense. In a procrastinator's mind, the instant gratification monkey takes control and eats up all the time we have on doing things that are fun in the moment, but are not necessary now. This leads to procrastinators being stuck in the "dark playground:" in which they are supposedly having fun, but not really, as they are ridden with guilt, anxiety, and dread.

The one thing the instant gratification monkey fears, however, is the panic monster. When deadlines get too close, when time is crunched and things take longer than expected, the panic monster appears and is able to shoo the monkey away, allowing the rational decision-maker to take control once again. This is what allows procrastinators to somehow meet deadlines even though they did not leave themselves enough time to properly finish their tasks.

And yet, even though they meet their deadlines, procrastinators are still unhappy. Why? Not because they cannot finish the things that have deadlines, no: Because they cannot finish the things that do not have deadlines. Because the panic monster, it turns out, only appears when things absolutely cannot be put off until later. But you know what you can always put off to later? Pursuing your passions. Developing good health habits. Writing. Drawing. Getting a better job. Making that Board post you really want to make. And that is the real burden of the procrastinator.

I feel like this talk spoke to me on a personal level, because I procrastinate on a lot of things. I cannot tell you how many hours I've wasted in that dark playground, browsing Reddit or checking on the Discord. And did it make me happy? No. Because I have a short story I want to write, and because I have a drawing I want to finish, and those things just aren't getting done. I procrastinated on writing my Permission attempt a lot. I procrastinated on taking steps to becoming a better person. And I can't afford to do that, because there is only so much time. What matters is not the present, but the past and future as a whole.

But this video helped, because it gave me the jolt I needed to finally start breaking out of that dark playground. I'm still getting distracted quite a lot, and things are still taking me a much longer time than necessary when I don't have a deadline (seriously, writing one paragraph shouldn't take a whole hour to do). But I felt very accomplished yesterday, because I procrastinated less. I didn't get on the Internet; I sat down and fulfilled my responsibilities.

And at this point, after watching a video once? I think that's all I can expect of myself.

Because Minh, you've started this exact same "discussion"* with this exact same tone over and over and over. It's getting real old.

*And I'd call it an actual discussion if you had offered something constructive instead of, or at least to go with, "[x] sucks because [y]" for once.

And, given what I remember you being like even from my earliest days in the PPC, entirely what I'd expect. XD

As in, if I was asked to name just one person who I'd think would tell the story of Arda to their kids, it would be you. This is awesome to hear about, and my only regret is that I can't hear/see for myself how you do it, because I've seen so much of your creations.

. . . the shift in attitude amongst U.S. (and other) citizens. Earlier generations in the U.S., especially around the mid-1900s, tended to be a lot more trusting of the government and authority in general. Their sci-fi future seemed comfortable and prosperous because it felt like the world's future would always remain prosperous, as it had since World War II ended. Nowadays, we're learning more and more not to take things at face value, and to question our authority figures. Economic disparity and climate shift are forefront and center in most folks' minds, and we know now that there are many trials ahead to secure a safe future for our species. Our sci-fi reflects that lack of guaranteed success, and is more grounded and pessimistic because of it. It's not just the sci-fi, either.

I can understand not liking it, though. I prefer a more adventurous feel to my fiction, although sometimes fiction can swing too far into the realm of the lighthearted and lose too much seriousness and character to feel like it's anchored in reality any more. I didn't like Guardians of the Galaxy for that reason; too many of the characters didn't feel like they were taking the plot seriously, so I would should I?

I am confused by a point you've made about allegory. Since you approve of using Klingons as an allegory for Soviets, why do you not like them as an allegory for Trump supporters? Isn't that essentially the same thing? Or did the two ST series handle the allegory differently?

—doctorlit, adventure seeker

I don't really have a lot to say past that point, I just think it's really cool that you're doing this, and I agree that Tolkien would've approved as well.

(Also, making up details on the spot when questioned on stuff you didn't have answers to is something that, as a game master, I can 100% respect.)

So! On the Discord server, I recently plugged some short horror stories I've done for a friend's project over the past few weeks. Tomash suggested I plug them here as well, so this is that post.

(CW for language, self-harm, death, and mentions of harm to animals. Let me know if I missed anything- I did a quick sweep and I think that's all the relevant CWs, but I might've overlooked something by accident.

...Man, this whole project seems really bleak when I list all of this, doesn't it? :P I guess it is horror, after all.)

• Log 6 - Statement of Oscar Martins
• Log 7 - Statement of Damien Rook
• Log 8 - Statement of Helena Barton
• Log 9 - Statement of Amy Fall
• Log 10 - Statement of Simon Fall, PsyD
• Log 11 - Statement of Nicholas Keyes

You put the Handmaid's Tale in the category of "needlessly political, edgy, and grimdark wankfest" and when you said that you don't really have a problem with it, that's just going to confuse people.

Going by the definition of a complaint, it's "to express grief, pain, or discontent", so yeah.

...this is complaining?

I just have a problem with the author being snotty about sci-fi

... always (often?) seem needlessly dark to the people who aren't being oppressed.

Which, to make it clear, includes every single person in this community, to greater or lesser extent. Some of us (eg, myself) sit right on the summit of the pile of oppression, prejudice, and general nastiness that makes up our world, but all of us are high enough up the heap to have, for instance, reliable internet access, and time to spend worrying about affronts to fictional characters in fanfic.

We're not meant to be comfortable with Major Kira's status as an unrepentant former terrorist (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1993), to name just one example, because we're not the ones whose country is (viewed as being) occupied by a foreign power. The purpose of including those characters - of telling their stories, not ours - is to let the people who aren't on top of the heap have their voices heard - and, hopefully, to get us to empathise with them, understand them, and make our society a better place for them and, ultimately, ourselves.

hS