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Awww I actually thought that I figured out a reason on why you changed your username. : (

But thanks for replying though!

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

I’m not trying to come of as rude, but if you were once part of the PPC, then what’s your old username?

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

I didn't know. It said, "name", not "username", so I thought it meant your real name.

Your username can (and usually should) be a made-up nickname of your choosing. It's not personal information. Plus, you gave an e-mail address that I assume is not sensitive since you're concerned about privacy, so why not pick a username that matches it?

That said, no one else can use "Anonymous" as their name now, so I guess it does technically count as a unique identifier here. Doesn't help us to know what sorts of questions you've asked before, though.

~Neshomeh

I'm of two minds about how to look at it. On the one hand, I think the ability to take down something you no longer like might be a nice thing to have, and I wouldn't want to cause anyone harm by dredging up something they were trying to move past. On the other hand, taking down a fic seems like an acknowledgement that it was bad, and a sporking might not tell the author anything they don't already know (if they even see it, which they shouldn't). Plus, Internet 101 lessons include "don't put anything out there you wouldn't want [your mom/your boss/your kids/the police/everyone forever] to see," so I don't tend to feel too bad if people put questionable things out there anyway.

But, it just depends. If the fic is bad because it's one of the millions of poorly executed fics out there, I'd probably let it go if deleted. If it's bad because it's offensive, though, I'd probably have no ethical qualms using a sporking of it as a platform to confront things that should be confronted. Probably—legitimate repentance does happen sometimes. Unrepentant dodging of justified censure happens a lot more, though.

For myself, I routinely make copies of things I'm missioning for note-taking and backup purposes. If something does get deleted when I'm in the middle of it, I'm not likely to abandon a story I've already put a lot of work into or force a sudden ending I didn't plan (though writing your agents getting caught in a deletion is an option not to be ignored!). If it's something I haven't started yet, though, I'd probably let it go.

I don't usually make a copy until I'm ready to start on it, anyway. I would definitely not suggest downloading every fic you think you might spork so there's no escape. That seems skeevy.

I would suggest preferring older badfics over new ones. This mitigates a lot of concerns, likelihood of deletion among them.

~Neshomeh

So, a term that gets used quite a bit on LotD is "Gary Stumanity", where there is not only one Stu or Sue, but an entire race of them. An example in fiction is the Chakats from a certain series of Star Trek fanfics; but the designation can also describe civilisations rather than species. For example, the Systems Alliance from the Mass Effect AU "Mass Effect: The First War"

...how would you correct the plot continuum in this case? With the Chakats, they're spread out over a entire galaxy, and you'd basically have to wipe out each and every one of them until there were none left. That'd be too risky for the PPC, methinks.

For something like ME:TFW, you'd need to basically kill every named character in that fic who registered as a sue. Which is a lot of them.

The bigger question is...would something like these fics be considered their own seperate works, since the canon is so drastically changed, and the problem is as large as the ones presented?

And I used to be part of this club but suddenly it doesn't remember me, so I re-joined.

I don't want to give out personal information.

Only, you seem to have chosen "Anonymous" as your actual username, which is not useful for identification and is seriously distracting me from answering your question even though I want to. Why? O.o

~Neshomeh

I may have asked this before, but I forgot, so bear with me. As far as I understand, possession is when someone is highly out-of-character in a Sue-ish way, so the solution is an exorcism, character replacement is when a character is 100% OOC and might as well be somebody else and the solution is to act as though they are someone else and replace them with a more IC version of the character, and character rupture is when someone is highly OOC but it's clear they're not possessed because they're not acting like a Mary Sue.

Now, if it's a Mary Sue that's causing a character rupture, then that's easy: just kill the Sue! However, what if there is no Sue around to kill? How do you fix that?

So, with BSG returning to our screens sometime this year, I thought it'd be nice to go over the 2003 miniseries once more, and see how well it has aged. Spoilers ahead obviously.

But Tl;dr? It's actually really good, even after 17 years.

The CG and other effects still stand up to close scrutiny despite their age, and the ships and sets still look amazing 17 years onwards. Not surprising on the second point, since Star Trek, Stargate, and Star Wars are all older properties that still have amazing looking sets and ships after (INSERT TIME PERIOD IN YEARS).

I still love the opening scene of the minseries. With only a few spoken lines of dialogue, they convey so much about the tone and themes of the show, and also set up the whole premise of the series. Tricia Helfer as one of the #6 Cylons immediately stands out among the meeting room, her red dress the only bright colour in the otherwise dull metal space. There's so much thematic weight in this scene that I could go on for hours about how the red dress represents the themes of rebirth and repetition in the show; how it represents the Cylons as the "children of humanity"; how it represents the personality of the #6 models.

The next scene loses none of this weight, as we are introduced to the Battlestar Galactica and her crew. As the camera follows various characters around the set, never cutting away once, we are introduced to the characters that will eventually drive the show. Just some of them are

• Commander William Adama- played by Edward James Olmos- the commanding officer of the Galactica.

• Colonel Saul Tigh- played by Michael Hogan- the XO.

• Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace- played by Katee Sackhoff- one of the Galactica's top pilots.

• Lt. Felix Gaeta- played by Alessandro Juliani- the Watch Officer

We also get a good glimpse of the crew's reactions to the Galactica's imminent decommissioning. The deck crew are annoyed with the new museum, as the massive glass windows installed over the ends of the starboard flight pod leak constantly. Adama and Tigh are probably going to muster out of the service, their careers at an end. Starbuck will probably be mustered out due to her attitude issues, as Adama won't be there to protect her anymore. Gaeta and Kelly are both at the beginning of their careers, and will probably move on to more glamorous assignments aboard newer vessels.

The location changes to the planet Caprica, where we get both a crossover cameo featuring Serenity; and a introduction to Laura Roslin, the Secretary of Education. We're also introduced to both Dr. Gaius Baltar, a prominent scientist on Caprica, and his lover, a unnamed woman whom the audience will recognise as another #6 Cylon. She'll later become known as Caprica 6.

I could continue to explain the plot and other stuff, but I'm sure anyone reading this far has already seen the show anyway. The fact is that BSG is still one of the best shows ever to be produced in the sci-fi genre. For better or worse, it started the current trend of dark, edgy sci-fi in current media, and also revitalised a franchise that had previously been associated with being a Star Wars ripoff. It's such a shame that the fourth season was absolute HoH, since the first three seasons were good until they introduced the Final Five and killed off Starbuck. Then it just devolved into madness.

Still, if you've read this far without watching BSG, go watch it!

I was made aware of Trapped in 40k by erttheking of LotD. Not from the sporking (which was pretty good), but from the many, many jabs at it placed within ert's very excellent listfic (sort of), "Avoiding Stupid Deaths in the 41st Millennium." Which is a "things X is no longer allowed to do in Y" affair (yet another Mr. Welch and/or Skippy's List derivative) except it has a plot and established narrative voice. And a gradually developing story about fighting chaos and the importance of family. It's really good. 40k fans, totally go read it.

But yes. Even among the 40k self-insert Isekai fanfics (which are... uh... usually really bad, because aren't they always? Also, sidenote, who wants to be put into 40k? What kind of vicarious fantasy is that?) "Trapped in 40k" is... uniquely bad. It is among the worst 40k fics I've laid eyes upon, and that includes fics riddled with gratuitous and genuinely disturbing sexual content (no, not the setting-appropriate kind), incoherent trollfic, bad imperium fixfic, confusing attempts to replicate Warhammer High's success (which usually fail because most people aren't Someone Else), and Space Marine self-insert wish fulfillment.

It's bad. Entertainingly bad. So yeah, I'm totally recommending this.

Usually, it's just that they can't cross running water. And all of those weaknesses naturally depend on the themes in question- for example, a vampire that needs invitation to enter a house is more likely to emphasize the terror of a predator that passes itself off as human, one that counts rice will have an alien mindset and some themes of madness, etc. And my name's just a coincidence- I like garlic for completely coincidental reasons that have nothing to do with any vampire-slaying powers I may or may not have.

... since I didn't think of the Google Doc approach when initially titling my post

...namely because the author has removed it from the net because he didn't like the reviews he was getting (which is only speculation, but since the author in question is pretty damm predictable, I'm probably right).

The fic in question is "Trapped" by EclipsePheniox, an author well-known to us from Library of the Dammed. During the course of my ongoing riff of his story, he deleted it from FF.net, and thus the story may only survive in the form of the downloaded .txt file I saved from the site before its deletion.

"Trapped in 40k" is a self-insert Warhammer 40k story, and is a rewrite of EP's previous smutfic/SI Stufic "Trapped" (which TMK is still available). It is by far one of the worst Warhammer 40k stories I have had the displeasure of reading, and features a complete Gary Stu. Here's some of the things that identified it as a badfic of the worst kind:

• Gary-Stu SI character. Chris, or M3, is a (ERROR! AGE GROUP NOT FOUND) from the 3rd Millennium, who is transported to the 41st Millennium by the way of a random bolt of lightning. He immediately is enlisted into the Inquisition- who have metamorphosed into some kind of hybrid between the US military and the FBI-, and proceeds to embark on a nebulously defined mission that makes him nobility by chapter four (or something), has him gather a harem of 40k character types/tropes masquerading as OCs (who share the same personality, behave in ways no character should believably act, and essentially just exist for eye-candy/sex scenes), and basically be a run-of-the-mill OP Gary Stu.

• Boring As Frak: Trust me, even riffing this is a chore. While there is enough there to mock or (in this case) charge for, the actual story progresses at a snail's pace. What passes for a plot is so nebulously laid out that the story seems more like a series of disconnected scenes than a tightly-woven story; any plot points that are introduced often change into different plot points on a whim, and there isn't even the shocking smut of the original to break the monotony...as far as I've riffed.

• Bad grasp of 40k Canon and concepts: I know that 40k isn't really consistent with canon. But there is no excuse for the butchering that takes place in this story. The Inquisition is treated like the Imperial Guard, the Imperial Guard is treated like the PDF forces, and the PDF forces are treated as the Imperial Guard. There's a strange obsession with ballistic weapons (to the point where every single person in this story is using some kind of autogun, rather than lasguns, plasma weapons, or literally anything you would find outside of a run-of-the-mill Call Of Duty title); and there's really bad frak-ups like the Emperor's Holy Inquisition having existed for only 150 years. Like, what?

• Bad grasp of basic SPaG. Enough said.

There's more, but I'll let you read it for yourselves...which brings me to my next bit.

So, as this is no longer available online, I'm going to have to provide a link to this Google Doc I've set up to share the text of the story. There's been no editing made to the .txt doc, and included are the tags and other stuff that ff.net features for story info. Here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FjaFYZ7Yh7_tyLgJN1x6TmztWRb0IyKawpG5EdBlYNE/edit?usp=sharing

Running water can also kill Vampires. Now where is that Water gun…

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

I realise that your new nickname on Discord was related to Vampires…

Why didn’t I think of that?

Anyway, according to the Bullfuvg man( I censored his name), when Vampires see rice( anything that has rice), it they will stop and start counting the individual grains! They will count the amount of rice one by one. If you don’t even eat rice often, seeds can work as well. Any kind of seeds.

Huh, finding Vampires must be really easy. Also by Bullfuvg man, you have to invite a Vampire into your home before they can attack you.

Thanks Bullfuvg man and Cicada!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eHEItvqF-tg ( Language!)

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

...I am making a post for the Edification of all on common vampiric traits.

The nice thing about the incredible diversity of vampires is that you can pick and choose all sorts of traits depending on the theme your story is going for. A common question asked about vampires is "do they reflect in mirrors? If they don't, is it only silver mirrors that don't show their image, or photography methods that don't use silver?" The answer depends, of course, on the vampire type being used, but the answer to this fairly simple question shows how these traits can tell you about the vampire in question.

For example, two common answers are "They do have reflections, except in silver mirrors because the purity of silver is deadly to vampires" and "they don't reflect at all- the undead have no souls, so they can't be captured in photographs or reflections." Though these have somewhat similar mechanical effects and use similar reasoning (something about the vampire is corrupted/missing/wrong), they result in a vastly different thematic energy.

A vampire that doesn't reflect in silver mirrors will go largely unnoticed, since most people don't use silvered mirrors anymore. This results in a message somewhere along the lines of "the Old Ways protected us from vampires, and discarding them has left us vulnerable to evil." Would-be vampire hunters might retrieve a mirror from their attic that belonged to a great-grandmother, literally reviving tradition to defend themselves.

On the other hand, our alternate scenario means that our modern technology is capable of quantifying evil and defending us from it. With our modern resources, we'll be able to sniff out the undead before they pose a threat. Our heroes might set up camera rigs or check people coming into a safe zone to see if they reflect. They'll probably also use other modern technology to defend against the undead threat. Altogether, this results in a vastly different story. Another story with different goals might decide that vampires do reflect, because their souls are either human or unquantifiable by something as mundane as a mirror.

Another question I get a lot is "Wait, silver? Isn't that a vulnerability that werewolves get?" Well, yes and no. Werewolves and vampires have often been intertwined in mythology. In one Eastern European account of a village supposedly threatened by vampires, one of the undead was said to "walk in the shape of a wolf". Dracula draws on these traditions with his command of animals, and some vampires even borrow the shapeshifting gambit entirely, covetous corpses that they are. Either way, the malevolence of these early legends meant that the supposedly pure-natured silver was used to combat them.

However, the legends eventually grew apart. Vampires often retained their aversion to silver, as their more subtle and social predation didn't conflict with the original symbology. It's only now, when authors seek to make vampires and werewolves more distinct from each other that vampires have lost that. However, werewolves got a lot burlier in their later forms. Expecting a cross or string of garlic to hold off a 300-pound slavering beast didn't make much sense to people, so they lost many vulnerabilities that couldn't be made more convincingly threatening. Silver was melted into bullets or onto daggers while fire was still employed to hold the beasts back, but garlic and holy water went out of fashion for our dear wolves.

Thanks for reading! If you have more questions about vampires, I may or may not have an answer– but I can promise you that I will have an opinion.

I'm so glad Physic will be put to good use.

Yeah, saw the final(?) Star Wars, and it was good. Getting reeeaaaal tired of seeing massive amounts of negative press about movies and such, and then actually watching them, and they’re fantastic.

Big spoilers foooooor sheesh, let’s just say the entire Star Wars nine-ology. That should be safe.

Man, that opening title card and text crawl still give me such tingles when I see each movie’s version for the first time. Weird to drop the first mention of Palpatine’s transmission during the crawl, because it feels like the sort of thing we should have seen the characters’ reactions to. (Plus, it would have been even more Ian McDiarmid voice, the sexiest sound there is.) On the other hand, it does feel very original trilogy, since A New Hope’s crawl basically skipped over what would later become Rogue One, and The Empire Strikes Back pretty much skipped over how the Rebels reached Hoth. At least it jumps straight into very clear goals for both the Resistance and Ben Solo. (I officially refuse to refer to him as Kylo Ren any more.)

I don’t usually pay much attention to actors in movies, but I sure got excited to see Dominic Monaghan in the early scenes of this movie. And with Greg Grunberg still around, it’s like a mini reunion from the very first episode of Lost! I am a happy fanboy, even though Grunberg’s character gets killed at the end of this film. I’m annoyed that Rose got sidelined from the main action so much in this movie. Clearly, the powers that be cowed before the whining of the fans who disliked her so much the first time, for reasons that I still don’t understand. Her romance with Finn seems to have been entirely dropped as well, which I would normally appreciate for making things more aromantic, except . . .

. . . that Finn and Poe are rather suddenly vying for Rey’s affection? Where on Earth in the galaxy did this come from? I did get the feeling that Finn was a little smitten with Rey in The Force Awakens, but that didn’t really get picked up in The Last Jedi, and Poe barely knows Rey at this point, since the only met at the end of TLJ. I know some time has passed since that movie ended, but it still feels out of nowhere. And it goes nowhere too, because Poe has his helmeted lady friend at the end of the movie, and Rey clearly has feelings for Ben. Even with Ben dead at the end, we don’t really see any romantic connection between Rey and Finn by the end of the movie, so that little subplot felt very hackneyed and unnecessary. Plus, that would have left us with three neat pairings among our power trio, so let Rose have her Finn smoochies! I guess I am suddenly a shipper now?

It was super-fun seeing Billy Dee Williams return as Lando! (And another Lost alumnus, yay!) He brought the same great energy to the role as he did in the original trilogy; what a great treat and honor to have him on again. I love his rapport with Chewbacca, and also the fondness he shows for Leia. And speaking of Leia . . . I almost don’t even want to talk about the matter of Leia being all archive footage. I tried very hard to accept her scenes at face value, but I was unable to refrain from reading into her dialogue as the cut conversations from TFA that I knew they were. But let me clear: I don’t blame the filmmakers for doing so, or for using the editing tricks they were forced to in order to include Carrie Fisher in the film. Fisher clearly had such a big emotional investment in being a part of SW that it would have been shamefully disrespectful to leave her out, or write her character out between movies. This was the right choice, and I think they did the absolute best they could within the circumstances.

I’m also glad Harrison Ford came back one last time to play Ben’s memory of Han, despite him being a lot more over SW than Fisher was. That scene was great, and a beautiful mirror image of Han’s murder in TFA. Actually, the entire character arc between Ben and Rey is pretty magnificent throughout this movie. I very much wanted Ben to come to the Light Side, but wasn’t sure how it could be done realistically after the way TLJ ended. I love that the final death of his desire for the Dark Side comes from a dual effort between Leia and Rey, with Leia making him feel her love for him even after what he did to Han, and Rey sparing his life after fatally wounding him. I, at least, found his shift to the Light very believable, considering all he has gone through. His willingness to give up his entire life to the Force in order to save Rey at the end is such a powerful moment, and really cements how far he has come from the fearful follower of Snoke we met at the beginning of TFA.

I also liked the turn General Hux took towards trying to dethrone Ben by supporting the Resistance. It makes him more complex than he seemed as the propaganda-spewing mouth he was in TFA. It’s nice to see SW villains with a little more dimension to them.

But speaking of villains, let’s get to the Big Boy. Oh man. I feel like I should actually be disappointed a bit, considering I felt like TFA rehashed too much material from the original trilogy, and here we have the original trilogy’s villain at it again. But I just can’t say no to Ian McDiarmid’s sexy, sexy voice. And even being hooked up to a machine with his eyes clouded over, he commands such a presence once he’s on screen, just through that voice alone. I loved the early moment where Palpatine mentally spoke through the voices of Snoke and Vader to show just how deeply his orchestration runs. It also informs the end of the original trilogy with a new meaning: we’ve always assumed that him telling Luke to “Strike me down” was just to make Luke surrender to his anger, but now we know the Emperor literally wanted Luke to kill him, so that he could possess Luke. There’s a frightening alternate timeline to think of! My one quibble on the subject of Palpatine is that indistinct crowd that was watching his confrontation with Rey. “Always two there are,” so presumably they aren’t all Sith . . . but then who are they? Fans? Cheerleaders? I mean, they’re obviously bad guys, but they didn’t lift a finger to help Palpatine when the protagonists got the upper hand. Maybe their job was to protect the bleachers from boulder damage? If so, they performed their duties admirably.

Big props for actually using C-3PO in an emotionally stirring way. I’ve generally enjoyed C-3PO’s presence throughout the other movies, but I was actually starting to find him a bit grating throughout the beginning of this one. (I don’t think he works as well without R2-D2 in the same room.) But the prospect of having to eliminate all his memories in order to save the galaxy . . . that actually stung quite a bit. Even though his memories of the prequel trilogy had already been wiped, the fact that we as the audience know he dates back all the way to ten-year-old Anakin makes him such an anchor in SW, and the threat of him maybe not coming back as the person we knew ever again was surprisingly hurtful for me.

Some small moments that especially spoke to me: -Chewbacca’s reaction to Leia’s death is utterly heart-breaking. Leave it to furry bear-man to get across the closeness of the main characters’ friendship, and the pain of their loss. -Throughout the rest of this series, stormtroopers have always defaulted to being male (other than Captain Phasma). This is the first SW where we hear a diversity of voices coming from under those helmets. -We get to see Porgs again! We get to see Ewoks again! We get to see Jawas again! -But the absolute best thing in this entire movie is when Rey reaches out to the past Jedi in order to connect to the Force, and pretty much all the major Jedi actors reprised the voices for it. I heard Luke and Yoda and Qui-Gon and Anakin and Obi-Wan and Mace and I think Ahsoka? I never watched the cartoons, but there was at least one female voice, and I don’t know who else it could be. But it was a glorious, powerful moment.

So. Extremely good movie. Don’t care what the critics say. There’s only one thing more for me to say: Let Star Wars end now. I don’t mean no new content forever. We can get side stuff like The Mandalorian, totally. But this galaxy far, far away has been through so much strife and violence. It really feels like it has reached an end to its wars now, and I hope, for everyone who lives in it, that it maintains that peace from now on. The theme of peoples from literally all across the galaxy, including former Stormtroopers, rising up to stand against the fascist forces that have been hellbent for decades on subjugating everyone . . . it was beautiful, and I don’t want that victory to be marred by further movies that bring back more fascism, more loss of life and limb, more exploding planets. It’s time to take the “Wars” out of Star Wars, and let minor conflicts fuel future stories from now on.

—doctorlit was wrong about Hayden Christensen being an on-screen Force ghost, but he did technically reprise Anakin in this film!

“I will earn your brother’s spoiler, someday.” “I will earn your brother’s spoiler, someday.”
“I will earn your brother’s spoiler, someday.” “I will earn your brother’s spoiler, someday.”