The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I gift thee with an egg whisk! It's shiny, gold-plated, and whisks not only eggs but spambots and author wraiths, too! Use it for good and not much evil.

Welcome to the insanity! Enjoy the ride.

That's amazing.

Well, I decided to take the rite of passage. That is one strange story. I managed to get through it on the first attempt with no more than a raised eyebrow or two, though. I think my mental defences are pobably good enough to survive at PPC for a while.

Well, as just the FAQ cracked me up, I think you're probably headed in the right direction :D

Hi! Welcome!

Here's a link to the PPC Wiki, which has a lot of handy stuff and handy links on it. And some funny stuff on it. It's not quite as addicting or mindmelting as TV Tropes but we're trying to get there, even if we can't possibly get as big due to different targets.

I hope you read the Board Consitution through that link or the one up on top of the board. The FAQ for the Board is handy as well.

Keep the fact that you need to ask for permission before you PPC anything in mind (since that way there's some general quality control over things).

Anyhow, welcome to the board, and enjoy your time here.

July, who is happy she got to link the Wiki for once

You guys are a good team. I'm looking forward to the third (and please, please, final) part, haha.

And I was talking morally. But I disagree with your last two paragraphs because there is no dividing line between where an idea becomes specific. If I wrote a story about a coven of vegetarian vampires, even if I use nothing else even vaguely similar to Twilight, I would instantly get shouted down for plagerism. Whether or not that's right is debateably, but I know I wouldn't be able to do it morally because the idea did NOT occur to me until I'd seen the film.

There's no way to prove whether a second author came up with the idea independantly, but if you know you didn't, then I still say it's wrong.

The others have already said everything of importance, so I'll just wave, hand you some Shiny Things, and offer a potted cactus.

And I believe two of our number (SealRat, was it? And someone else) have already decided to spork it. Though it's a troll, we're just being careful.

Hope you enjoy your stay!

I'm male. As for whether or not My Immortal is a troll, I was under the impression that the debate over that never got settled one way or another. My feeling is that it's genuine, and I would dearly love to see the PPC take her out.

Hello hello hello! Welcome, and have a graduated cylinder! *tosses cylinder*

Also, the fic you want killed is a troll. Better luck next time, by which I mean ha! It's a troll! Troll-picker! But nah, I'm just messing with you. Hope you have fun here.

Lovely to have you here. *presents you with a bag of pebbles and a Random Shiny Object*

By the way, "My Immortal" has been designated a troll by we PPCers, and as a general rule we don't tend to kill trolls, so you might want to turn your sights elsewhere for fic-slaying. Try the PPC Wiki Unclaimed Badfic page, there are plenty of targets there.

By the way, are you male or female? I just have a burning curiosity about these things. :)

Welcomes again, lovely to see more members of the Canon Protection Initiative.

Have some roasted Suenicorn and a Long-Handled Soy Chai Latte.
That one's a troll, though. Right? Please say it's a troll, please! I'M BEGGIN' YA, MAN!

I got a machete, although it didn't scream PPC to me as I only found the PPC yesterday.

'Lo, all. Found the wonderful organisation that is the PPC on TV Tropes and decided to join up. I'm wondering whether anyone has assassinated the notorious Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way yet. If not, I might attempt to take on the task myself, but as I think there is not a single canon character in sight in the fic she comes from, that they have all been kidnapped, I think it would be something of a mammoth task to dump on a newbie.

Any veterans feel like skewering her? She deserves it like no other Sue I've ever seen.

Have you worked out the details of how the TARDIS can somehow turn Rose into a Time Lady? Given that whole thing where, y'know, Time Lords are the ones that have graduated from the academy on Gallifrey and all that. To be a Time Lady she'd have to have all the knowledge a Time Lord would pick up at the academy, and that seems remarkably similar, to me, to the season four finale, and the thing where you can't have a Time Lord consciousness in a human brain. So you'd be having to change her biology to make her into a Gallifreyan, and, alright, the chameleon arch can be used to do the process the other way around, but then you'd need a specific reason why chameleon arches or something like them to turn non-Gallifreyans into Gallifreyans would have been invented and installed in TARDISes.

Short version: how on earth is this going to work? What are your ideas so far?

But seriously, I thought that was only a problem in NIS games, where everyone can be tossed around. Anyway, it's not like you would be wearing it all the time... right?

Sorry about that. Have a Generic Cute Squishy Videogame Monster Thing plush. It can be any generic cute squishy monster thing from any game, usually from RPGs.

Vodka, orange juice, and one small blue hedgehog...

You didn't tell me that when you gave me one! And being thrown is very much a problem for me! Grr!
-Maudlin, who weighs ninety-eight pounds on a heavy day

*gifts you with Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons by Serita Deborah Stevens & Anne Klarner* Enjoy!

~Zoe, off to find her own copy of the book~

Been a while since I read the Thrawn trilogy - and they're down at my parents place, so couldn't check... Anyway, I'd think ysalamiri would be a bit unusual pre-Empire or during the Empire days, it'd be primarily in the New Republic era that ysalamiri would be more readily accesible. That said, Star Wars canon is sometimes hard to pin down on things, and retcons are not unknown! (Boba Fett's backstory, anyone?)

Stealing means taking something so that someone else can't use it anymore. If you take an idea, even one that someone else had before, they can still use that idea. Therefore using someone else's idea is not stealing.

Then there is the issue of whether you should ask them whether they are okay with it that you use the idea they had first. That depends. It's not unheard of that two people independently come up with the same idea. I've had an idea in my head for a Torchwood fic for the past two years, and I'm surprised no one else has used that idea in a fic yet.

Ideas themselves are not copyrightable unless they are very, very specific. This means that it's also not really possible to claim ownership over ideas. Indeed, some authors do, but most of them barely know the basic rules of punctuation so I kind of doubt they know the little details of copyright and ownership laws.

So, technically, you do not have to ask permission to use ideas. Perhaps you feel you have to morally, but that's a different matter. The problem with that is, the author could deny you permission even though it is morally questionable that they do: they are using copyrighted work without permission themselves.

If the idea is specific (to the point where other readers are likely to point you out to an author that wrote this story first) you should give credit where you got the idea. But that does not require permission. If the badfic author think it does, just point out that they are being a hypocrite.

Sporked a story and then wrote my version of it. I did give credit where the idea came from. The only people who didn't like what I had done (or at least the only people to tell me so) were the original authors. Other people have complimented me on a well written story.

Anyway, authors can't actually claim ownership to ideas. Except if the idea is very, very specific. Which may or may not be the case here. I haven't read Lady Clark's fic (not do I tend to; she leaves raving reviews for fics I intend to spork), but I have come across several fics that had elements of the plot she used way back in that short period of time that I still read Whofics.

I've seen a few where the Doctor gets stuck in the other dimension leaving Rose with the TARDIS (heck, one of those even inspired me to write a short fic about Rose trying to get out of the building before it colapsed). There are many other fics where Rose in one way or another becomes a Time Lady (if not the mother of one). And of course there are many, many fics that do a character replacement for series three, though usually of Martha.

But I like your approach to it: Rose will react to changing into a different creature; she will respond differently to things that the Doctor would. I'd say go for it. Good plot ideas deserve good stories.

If you're going to post the spork and your version of the story in different locations very few people are going to notice and/or take offense that you have done both.

Here, have a Greatsword.