The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Just be aware that it's bad form to force a reading onto a text that doesn't support it, even if the text is a badfic. I'm having a hard time imagining how the equation "generic HP-esque magical potion ingredients" plus "logic" equals "extremely specific explosive chemicals" and not just, say, "bad tea, possibly toxic; don't drink it." That's why it's better to start with the text, then come up with the jokes, not the other way around. Humorous extrapolation from the text is good fun; crowbarring a preexisting whim of the author into the text is dishonest and unfair, and may cost you your audience's faith in you as a critic.

TL;DR: Please don't try too hard to make this or any other joke happen at the expense of a fair(ish) reading.

~Neshomeh

We are not the only organization whose acronym is PPC. I always end up finding content on Pay-Per-Click when searching with the keyword "PPC!"

That's a very noisome and incendiary (metaphorical) wrench.

The premature introduction of logic in an HP/LotR crossover throws a wrench in a Suvian's attempt to brew a potion in Imladris.

That's an extremely specific chemical compound you've got there. What badfic scenario could result in something that precise being produced by accident?

~Neshomeh

"plotprotectors.[host].*" is the domain name I've always used for The Lost Tales. I think it's a great name! However, is there any potential concern about The Lost Tales being mistaken as the home page of the PPC?

... Alternatively, if that name wins the vote, do we WANT https://plotprotectors.neocities.org to function as a landing page for the PPC, much as Odd Lots and Miss Cam's site used to do? That is a thing we could hypothetically make happen with a few changes to what's presented how.

~Neshomeh

.So, I just got done watching the Good Omens miniseries with my partner and I can say it definitely lived up to all the excited recommendations I’d gotten.

I read the book a good many years ago, so I don’t remember all the details, but I can say it felt like they did a very good job adapting the book. The humor from the books made it across fine, and they didn’t (unlike many book adaptations) remove or change much of anything from the plot, which was very appreciated.

Spoilers from here on down:

The fact that this was a show allowed for some good visual effects, like the bit with Adam summoning up the tornado and having glowing red eyes, and the scene with the burning Bentley.

I also think many of the added plot elements worked quite well. Aziraphale and Crowley had a more explicitly romantic relationship in this version, which added some more emotional weight to their interactions with earth other. Gabriel and his insistence on keeping Armageddon moving forward also fleshed out Aziraphale’s motivations and inner conflict in a clever way.

The part at the end with the body swaps was very clever, and even though I knew there was going to be a body swap, I didn’t realize quite what had happened until the two of them switched back.

Overall, this whole thing was funny and wonderful and I recommend it to anyone who has about six hours (and not even all at once).

- Tomash

So! As people have pointed out previously, dear old yourwebapps dot com is shutting down in October. The local nerds (by whom I mean, mostly Tomash) have built a replacement, and we're now looking at proper hosting - and have run into a topic that could use some discussion:

Proper hosting means we also will need a proper domain name! We get to choose (and register, but that's the easy part) an actual URL just for us.

As soon as we choose one.

Suggestions from the Discord include:

protecttheplot.*
plotprotectors.*

(in which the final '.*' represents some convenient TLD - .org, .net, .com, etc.)

If people have clever thoughts for domain names, I'd love to hear them! And then we're going to have to process our way to some sort of consensus on what we actually want.

It isn't mercury; M stands for metal cations in general, as X stands for halogens in general.

I have not decided whether the chemical alluded to is accidentally produced on-screen or off; it depends if I find the right lousy crossover or not.

So let's have a look. (CH₂SH)^- is going to want to bond to the metal through the sulfur, which means what you'll actually get is CH₃S-M-CH₃.

With just the thiol, that compound would be the salt [metal] methanethiolate, but we've got two ligands. According to this, you always put the ligands first, and always alphabetically - so you end up with methanethiolatomethylmetal.

Except that's a horrid name, and very difficult to parse. I would suggest injecting a mono-, to give methanethiolatomonomethyl[metal].

That's still pretty horrible; can we clean it up any? Well, Wikipedia allows for methanethiol to be called both methylthiol, and methiol. Methiomethyl[metal] has a lovely ring to it, particularly if you manage to stick them on mercury (I can only imagine how horrifying methiomethylmercury would be!). If forced to give it a useable systematic name, I'd probably go for that.

The forula would be, as you say, [M(CH3)(SCH3)]. And if you do use it with mercury, a) what are you DOING?!?!?!, and b) you should probably call it methyl mercaptan (and the complex mercaptomethylmonomethylmercury), because 'mercaptan' comes from thiols' propensity for mercury capture. Apparently.

hS

What would you call a small, lively organometallic thiol of the formula M(CH₃)CH₂SH? Methyl[name of metal] methanethiol?

On the subject of fitting architecture, I've also found that New Cal has a very fittingly designed hospital; those curved roofs (and particularly that entrance porch thing) really fit with the theme, I think.

And the reason I was looking into that is that I was working on a sketch of the city. It's totally full of holes, but shows most of the key buildings from the town centre, as seen from the Rue Jay on the way down from 1-Nou-1. The Clocktower and the Market Square are in the foreground of the Square.



There's a bit of a blend of styles: a lot of thatched roofs and rooftop seating areas, but also a mock church for Abbot's, and a English/Morporkian pub for Deepdelver's. The ice cream place (front right) forms part of a square around a courtyard, while Chez Thorondil forms part of a terrace with an exterior upper walkway.

I've treated the Clocktower as one part of a larger building here; it extends into the square, but doesn't stand alone. My logic is that if it was entirely free-standing, it would probably be in the middle of the square, a la Machynlleth.

(And yeah, the TARDIS docks use the Kanak cultural centre swooshes. Traffic control is integrated as part of the nearer one, and the whole area comes off as an art installation.)

Thank you for doing so much work on this; it's really made the city feel more real, and it's great to have something to conjure visuals from.

hS

Just a little miniseries of Nume being a grumpy babysitter to Henry. :D

After much browsing through Google and Pinterest, I think I've settled on Trinidad's Plaza Mayor clock tower as the closest to what I think the PPC city's would be like. It might actually be Spanish, not French, but eh, close enough to my eye. Model the dome at the top a little more after the Kanak style of roof, maybe tone down the color just a bit, have a super cool clock face much more in evidence, and have your four-door square base at the bottom, and that would about do it.

The Plaza Mayor is pretty beautiful in general.

The blogger who visited Pondicherry (which is still my favorite; the grass-roofed terraces are exactly the sort of adaptive blending I expect would happen in the City) has also visited Portuguese Goa. Apparently, under Portuguese rule, home-owners used to be fined if they failed to paint their houses. They took appearances seriously!

I'm learning that there are a lot of really colorful places in the world. I think that's pretty great. I also think it's exactly what people would do to make the City as un-Headquarters-like as possible. Bit of a shock at first, but undoubtedly very welcome once you get used to it. The Giver definitely remains required reading in school. ^_^

~Neshomeh

I wasn't going to waste effort fixing something that wasn't broken, but since it turns out it was, I'll shift those, no problem. {= )

Thank you!

~Neshomeh

I've gone ahead and realigned the street grid to fit the geography, and shuffled the Cultural and Civic markers to fit. What I haven't done is moved the Food and Shopping districts, because if my suggestions hold, it's impossible to have one north of the centre and one west. I don't know how much of your plotting was based on addresses given, and how much was just 'feels right'.

hS

I think it's safe to assume a bit of terraforming, so if it's not totally 100% true to life, well of course it isn't, they fixed it. {= ) But I'm all for getting it as close as possible to fitting what's already there, and I'm sure the landscapers would agree.

The position of the clock tower on the NE corner of Rue Jay and Rue des Fleurs is one of the few things we've had set down in writing from early on, though, so if we could keep that orientation in place, it would be good. Other than that, though, the only description we have of the city plan that I know of is "so regularly laid-out that getting lost is well nigh impossible" (Tawaki interlude 4), which doesn't have to mean a perfect grid. Whatever we end up with just has to be intuitive and well marked.

Oh, speaking of which! I've been thinking about Tour Prend Pion some more, because while it makes a certain amount of sense for it to be placed up by the earliest residential area, I'm guessing that is not what Tawaki had in mind when writing about it. I've told him about this thread, so I hope he weighs in himself, but in the meantime: to solve the numbering problem, what if the city follows apartment building rules, where instead of each hundred being a floor, each hundred is a block? So, 104 North would be the fourth door on the first block north of center. This may have been how I was looking at it at the beginning, but I honestly don't remember. ^_^'

Anyway: feel free to make those changes if you're so inclined. I'll admit to getting a little tired of that activity. {; ) But, I'll get around to it at some point if you don't want to.

~Neshomeh

... of what I'm suggesting for the town centre. It's at the bottom of the list of layers, and currently turned off.

hS

"I know," thought I, "I'll do some colouring of that digital art I've got going. But first, maybe a little topography work."

An hour or so later... ^_^

The images below are the OpenTopographyMap (like OpenStreetmap, but topo) overlaid onto Google Earth. OpenTopo has 10m contours, so it at least seems more precise than GEarth. Onto that, I've drawn the 800m contour in yellow, then highlighted peaks and ridges in purple, troughs and lowest points in red, and areas with a less than 10% slope in green.

10% is a pretty steep slope. There's a hill leading up to Bath Uni which is 5% for slightly less than a mile, and it is murder to climb. Anything over 10%, you're not going to want to climb for anything other than short distances. (That's not to say you can't build outside the green zones - but you'll want to follow the contour lines pretty closely.)



Starting in the north, we can see the basin immediately below the door is a beautiful spot for farming. Following the Rue Jay along, we find that it prefers to follow the contour than the ridgeline; that's probably fine. That ridge, the one visible in the farm image, is pretty flat; there's going to be some farms up there.

Cemetary Hill has a relatively gentle approach. The Sportsplex is on a steep slope, but you can see from the satellites that it's terraced, so no issues there.



Moving into the American Quarter, and I believe the term is 'zoinks!'. The whole thing is tumbling off the hilltop; down on the slope there, you're looking at a 50% or greater incline! I'm pretty sure that's impossible to walk.

I think the best solution is to cut off everything west of the Rue Jay. Have the American Quarter occupy the ridge running from the north, then run up to the ridge running west-east (that'll give it a beautiful view overlooking the city), and onto the green ridge/peak section to the east. The region north of that peak should be okay (the roads will just follow the contours), but the whole area will be an eastward fan from the Rue Jay.



Coming down into the city centre, a lot of the roads in the northern regions look good, contour-following or obvious hill-climbs between them. It's a bit odd that the Three Peaks are unused - perhaps the American Quarter could extend south along them? The park is on a steep slope, but that can either be terraced or simply heavily built-up.

The centre itself... I feel so bad about this, but how do you feel about moving the whole thing to the east? If the Rue Jay followed the main track (dotted on the OpenTopo map), it could run NE-SW through that green basin. You could have one district stretching down the valley heading NW, and another spanning the SE corner and that minor peak. The central square would be around where the TARDIS docks are now. (You can actually see this on the image from last time - there's a big basin with not much in it.)

(To make myself feel slightly better, I'm reminding myself that the MyMiniCity is isometric, so a NE-SW grid is actually true to the source material...)

That would probably swing the hospital down somewhat lower on the slopes, but keep the pub in the same place, which is a great spot between the two basins.



Ending on a positive note, the French Quarter looks pretty good! I'd probably curl it a little more around Pic Poya, and maybe trim off a bit of the hillside stuff at the north end, but if the roads follow the contours, those areas still work.

hS

I don't know exactly how I'd go about writing these into existence if I had that power- I'd be happy to just supply bits for other people to use. I could add it to the wiki page as not-quite-canon if people are cool with it.

(Maybe spoilers, but no details, because frankly the details are above the Board's rating!)

I finished the show and the rewrite of the end of the show.

Yay?

I don't really have that much to say, though, for the simple reason that I feel unqualified. The show turned into a psychology thesis, and I'm not familiar enough with Jungian or any other branch of psychology to comment in depth. To really do it justice, I think you'd have to be a serious student of psychology, religion, and philosophy, or at least get one of each to discuss it together.

I can say I wasn't impressed with the original ending, and I can see why the creator wanted to redo it. The themes are there, but they're told, not shown, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Worse, the last episode rehashes stuff the second-to-last already covered, so it was like a second hammer-blow of unsubtle delivery. It wasn't just odd, it was boring. Up to that point, the show is really good at conveying what's happening in the characters' heads without an actual play in a play, with a stage and everything. They seriously dropped the ball there.

On that score, The End of Evangelion is way better. It shows. Boy, does it ever show. To the point that it's equally unsubtle and maybe not better at telling the story.

Okay. So. There's a sub-theme about sex and sexuality throughout the anime. It hides in the usual sort of anime fanservice at first, so I didn't catch on right away. It gets more overt in later episodes, but still, when anything "adult" happens, it's off-camera (if not off-mic). There's some pretty strong imagery of penetration and pregnancy at one point, but it happens to one of the Evas, not a human character, so while it's weird as hell... no, I can't finish that sentence, it's just plain weird as hell. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think there's a point to it, and it's conveyed cleverly.

Well, take all those ideas and remove the requirement to be safe to air on TV. I still think there's probably a point to the sexual imagery, but it's so extraordinarily blatant that it was distracting. I can't even begin to figure out what the point might be. I'm still just reeling from it, and it's been like a week.

But, the big question is, is Neon Genesis Evangelion worth watching?

Yes. Absolutely yes. For the most part, it's smart, it's well done, and it made me care. I'm glad to have seen it, and I want to watch it again sooner than later to see if I can piece some things together now that I know more about what's going on.

Do be aware that it turns on a dime from what seems like a pretty straightforward story of post-apocalyptic coming of age with giant biomechs into a serious psych thesis with dreamlike, trippy, possibly disturbing, sometimes adult imagery. That's a thing, and I think most people probably need a bit more of a heads-up than "it gets totally weird." Knowing a bit about the specific direction it takes, I hope people who are interested in psychological stories will give it a shot.

~Neshomeh

And the PPC sort of is a nerd paradise except for the terrible hours and risk of total mental breakdown, so why not? {= D

Can I grant conditional Permission for you and Grundleplith and anyone else who's interested to write good ideas like this into existence? Is that a power I have? (Would you guys do it if I did?)

~Neshomeh

I continue to be impressed! I don't have the spatial relations and/or trigonometry skills to figure this stuff out. So, if you see a way the satellite map could be improved to better fit the terrain, please fix it! For instance, if the romantic overlook could be better placed on a point that's actually higher than the city?

Actually, switching to the Terrain view tells me how to fix that one, but in general, though. {= )

~Neshomeh