The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Hmm, I was going to suggest naming the schools after Digory "Why Don't They Teach Logic At These Schools" Kirke and Paul "Learned Rapidly Because His First Training Was In How To Learn" Atreides, but it looks like you're way ahead of me with some very functional Headquarters-esque names. {= )

Where d'you reckon we should drop in DoP and DO branch offices? Those should probably exist, yes?

~Neshomeh

... a story about your characters at a petting zoo. Throw in Agent Thoth for extra lulz, too. The idea of huge men awkwardly playing with adorable fluffy animals amuses me. *g*

Actually, I'm pretty sure there's a BuzzFeed video or two like this, which I would go find, but I'm sneaking a post at work. >.>

~Neshomeh

But no, we don't go after SCP. For a number of reasons.

...Sues by their very nature are a species the SCP Foundation would probably want to contain. They certainly wouldn't look out of place, that's for sure...

Or do they merely self-police?

by Cressida Cowell. The novels, that is. Not the movies. From everything I’ve heard, the movies are vastly superior to the novels in just about every way. But what can I say; I’m a paperback boy, so I’ve never seen them movies. (And when it comes to movies, I’m a Disney boy, so I don’t do Dreamworks junk.)

Spoiler warning for How to Train Your Dragon and How to Be a Pirate. Since I’m sure you’re all going to jump on the doctorlit bandwagon and start reading really rudimentary children’s literature because of this review.

I know I’ve read children’s literature multiple times before, but this series more than any of those other novels really wears its age demographic on its sleeve. There’s really not much here for me to appreciate directly, though I do like a couple aspects of the series that I’ll get into in a bit. Both novels have been full of the kind of humor an adult woman author might assume young boys are into: slimy descriptions, random underwear appearances, fart jokes, over-the-top fantasy violence. And maybe she’s right about that, but it certainly isn’t how I remember my youngest years.

What I do like is that after pulling in the intended-target-audience-of-very-much-mostly-boys, Cressida uses the novels to show that the old-timey might-is-right mentality that the Viking society of Berk espouses is not the best way to approach problems, and that it has a propensity to lead to bullying behavior. Hiccup, despite being so young, does his best to guide the rest of his society through thinking skills and non-violent problem-solving, which are usually ridiculed and shot down at first, but are proved right in the end. How to Be a Pirate also had a similar message about greed, with a rather quiet and sad ending that points out that we still aren’t ready to have wealth and power, any more than these ancient Vikings were.

I also like the stupidly over-the-top design of a lot of the dragons, even though it gets a bit much sometimes. So many fantasy dragons are the sleek, scaled massive kind, it’s nice to see some fat and slimy and small ones for a change. HtBaP introduced two that I especially liked for their uniqueness: an eyeless, earless wingless one with a mostly-mouth head, which I pictured having a movement style somewhere between a canine and a crocodilian; and a massive blob of dragon/snake/octopus/scorpion/cave fish horror that’s degenerated so much from living underground that its tentacles function independently of the central nervous system. Most continua probably wouldn’t have counted them as dragons, so I like the open-endedness of this world to include such creatures among the dragon roster.

So yeah. I’m ultimately reading way outside the intended age bracket, but I still managed to enjoy some things about these stories.

—doctorlit, not on the Dreamworks bandwagon

“’This is the second time the Gods have sent me a spoiler.’” “’This is the second time the Gods have sent me a spoiler.’” “’This is the second time the Gods have sent me a spoiler.’”

... fit very neatly into a standard structure. There are eight parts, varying in length from 'and ease pain' to '—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in the One from Whom they proceeded…' (which as a dedication is directly synonymous with 'till Universe's end' or 'later it all works out, honest'; it's just a bit more long-winded).

The Activist's Recension falls pretty well into the same setup, though it doesn't mention pain (though you could just merge 'guard growth, ease pain' into a single section); it also intersperses the checks-and-balances section throughout the Oath. In general, people seem to be following Diane closely enough, and the sections I've drawn out are broad enough, that you could pull it off.

I think what you'd end up with is some form of 3-point scale for each section: how wordy should it be? 'I will guard growth and ease pain' is very concise, so would be a 1; the 'Heart of Time' dedication is probably a 3. Throw in a ranking of which pieces are most important, write enough variants, and you've got a generator.

Then all you need is some quiz that will pluck the relevant numbers from your mind... that's the tricky part.

hS

In working on the Guidebook, I've instructed Agent Huinesoron to write a little about the process of mapping the city.

He's... not best pleased.

---

When originally constructed, the road that now leads from Door 1-Nou-1 to the city centre was one half of The Loop, an ellipsoid road that encircled the Farmlands. By the magic of multilingual punning, this swiftly became known as The Wolf, but the contingent of French-language recruits tasked with tending the farms defiantly reverted the name to Le Loup. This trend of naming the city's roads in French has proven surprisingly resilient, outlasting almost every other characteristic of the settlement.

With the onset of the fanfic explosion, the concurrent population boom in HQ, and the establishment of the École pour la Formation des Agents (Agent Training School, now New Cal Elementary High), Le Loup was split in two. The western half became the Rue des Agents, while the east (now disused) was named the Rue des Fleurs (a name since reused for an entirely different road).

As settlement continued, the Rue des Agents was extended down the western side of the American Quarter (at the time known only as New Cal). For a time, a student at Elementary High with a basic grasp of French managed to get it known as the Rue des Protecteurs des Scénarios, but the more concise Rue PPC quickly took its place.

In 2006, the Black Cat invasion shook the PPC's self-confidence. For the vast majority of agents, who had joined the Protectors in 2002 or later, the death toll during the attack was like nothing we had ever seen. As the settlement was expanded into a true city, a major push was made to name the roads being planned after the agents who had laid down their lives in service to the PPC - or who had managed to escape in retirement.

For a while, the Rue PPC was immune to this shift, but the installation of street signs brought its doom. The road feeding into the Town Square from the south was named the Rue Jay Thorntree - and due to a strike by the Quartermaster, it received its signage some six months before the Rue PPC. By the time the signs were ready to be installed, the Jay Thorntree name had been adopted for the entire length of the road.

In the aftermath of the Macrovirus Epidemic, the French Quarter was laid out south of the civic centre, with its chief access road being the Rue Verra Rose. An adjustment of the plans for the northern end of the settlement led to the Rue Verra Rose becoming a direct extension of the Rue Jay Thorntree, reopening the question of how many names a single road should have.

By this time, the Musée des Univers Perdus had become prominent in the city, and its chief curator, Doctor Cornelius, joined with other early recruits to the PPC to argue for representation of the very first agents. The American Quarter's original streets, until then known simply as La Tête and Le Pied for their positions on and below the ridge, took the names of Agents Josephine and Suzay, the first known victims of the Mysterious Somebody. And the northern reaches of the Rue Jay Thorntree - previously the Rue PPC, previously the Rue des Protecteurs des Scénarios, previously the Rue des Agents, previously Le Loup, The Wolf, and The Loop - were named in honour of the very first of us: the Rue Anya, and the Rue Elisabeth.

(Excerpt, 'A PPC Agent's Guide to La Calédonie', DoO)

---

I... kind of expected that to take one paragraph, but it's fun, so it stays.

hS

I've come up with at least three separate ones; a personal one (which I may or may not have shared here; it's in the Tumblr tag, at least...), Marisa's Oath, and one I coined for the WWW Trilogy crossover fic I made a while back.

The last one's the least standard, if I remember right, since it uses a rather different phrasing altogether.

I'm sorry this took me so long, but good grief, this Sue was irritating. (It's a Pirates of the Caribbean badfic, by the way.)

I was adjusting Rue Anya/Jay so that Rue Jay starts at now-Rue Anastasia, on the south side of that ridge. I THOUGHT I'd fixed both lines, but I guess not. Done now.

I can't take much credit for the French Quarter, since I was just following the paths that were already there. ^_^;

Change completely approved. *g*

~Neshomeh

You've done an amazing job fitting it all together. I love how the French Quarter has come out looking like a river or a tree; very nice.

I confess to giving in to temptation and making one minor change: I've given the south end of the Rue Tawaki to the Rue Dafydd. This was done purely do that there is a location in the city addressed 'at Dafydd and Constance'. ^_~

(There seems to be a missing connection between Rue Anya and Rue Jay; was something else going to go in there?)

hS

Not the speciality quiz, that's just bog-standard Quizilla work. But the Oath generator?

You have to come up with something that will give both (variations on) the classic Oath, but also the full version of Darryl's from the intro to Alone:

Life:
  more than just being alive (and worth the pain)
but hurts:
  fix it
grows:
  keep it growing
wants to stop:
  remind check / don’t hurt
be sure!
  One’s watching: get it right!
later it all works out,
  honest
meantime, make it work now
  (because now is all you ever get:
  now is)

(I'm not positive why this is described as an excerpt, since it starts and ends with the same points as the classic version, but there you have it.)

Are there other canonical Oaths? Skimming through On Ordeal, I don't think Roshaun or Mamvish get one, and Ronan uses the SoYouWiz version... still though, we have to assume that there's variety out there.

I think what you'd have to do is split it up into parts. You have an initial dedication (In Life's Name...) and a final invocation (Where All Our Sundered Times Are One). Darryl's Oath mentions pain, growth, various other concepts; so you have variants on each of those for the generator to plug in.

You also have a structure. Nita's Oath is prose; Darryl's is... whatever it is. But you have to have rhyming poetry as an option, too, as well as (presumably) other options. For each of those, you need at least 3 variants for each part, which the generator can choose from.

I guess it would also want to re-order them? Some people are going to want 'guard growth, ease pain' to come right at the top; others are going to need the 'in Live's service alone' to take priority.

And all of this comes from a quiz... which hopefully is more actually inquisitive than the Potter wand quiz.

(Kaitlyn has said, and I agree, that it's quite baffling that fan oaths aren't more of a thing. It seems like the very first thing you'd come up with, right? I guess the original is so good that we all think it's too hard to beat... though Tumblr throws out a few options. Kaitlyn's favourite is The Activist's Recension.)

hS

Self-replicating in that you can bring it back with you and replicate it, or in that you can self-replicate?

... probably both. Both sounds good.

- Tomash

...I mean, surprise.

I would find me a nice queer posthuman future, stay long enough to recover from capitalism and learn how to bootstrap the future, and then bring it (and an awesome post-human body or three) back with me to start here.

Someone might want to, uh, maybe mentor this person???

Preferably someone who has a FFNet account.

On the other hand, if this person (A) continues the fic and (B) rejects help, at least it looks missionable?

Have a triple chocolate cupcake and don't forget to blow out the candle!

Sorry for the lack of capitalization. And the Zero Punctuation.

email is neo.skater.ppc@gmail.com

After rewriting my character profiles and permission draft, I would like some others to look over it to check for basic spelling/grammar slip ups and to see if I have improved enough on the characterisation front. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm in!

Also, where do we start? London? Chicago? Seattle? Somewhere in Oheo?

- Tomash