The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

... So I was going to find a nice picture of a beautiful variety of veggies to post here, but my Google search turned up a short political satire article I found pretty entertaining, so I'll just link to the whole thing:

http://vanderbiltpoliticalreview.com/vegetables-a-liberal-conspiracy/

Eat the rainbow! Join the conspiracy! {= D

~Neshomeh

If you believe the Histories, the Nursery started off being for Plants, and likely would have had a Plant in charge. At some point, it moved away from that, though, so Christine could be the woman in charge of the human part.

... D'you reckon the Nursery might actually be a department, with divisions for infants, housing/daycare, schooling, and so forth? And maybe a tiny one for Plants, if new ones still happen?

Tangentially, the other day, I was looking around to see if I could find the earliest, or at least an early reference to agents bringing a Sue's kid back to HQ instead of assassinating it. I could swear I remember reading something to the effect of "we can give it to the Bleeding Hearts back at Headquarters," but I have no idea where it is. I could only find a couple references to the Bleeding Hearts Unit of the DMS, too, and nothing to do with taking care of kids with them. (I think they were more about non-violently dealing with Sues?)

The Nursery wiki page is in a sad state, though. It would be nice to fix it, which is why I was poking around. If you (or anyone!) know where to find some good references besides the couple on the Complete List of PPC Fiction, I'd love to have them.

Anyway: Thanks! I'm glad you like Jenni's POV, because there's more steadily working its way down the writing pipeline.

I love how details align like that, too. ^_^

~Neshomeh

I'm not going OTT like my original post.

Alakazam is now Mega Alakazam
Mega Altaria has been replaced by Tapu Koko

Yay! Good to read some more of Jenni's backstory, especially with a rare glimpse from her perspective. It goes a long way to explain the way she tends to react around people, and why she's so attached to Henry. I love how focused she remains on baby Henry, even when the two Nursery staffers keep trying to talk to her.

It's amazing how details from years ago seem to have a tendency to slot into place for us, isn't it? "Edward" "Henry" and "Christine" were all named by different people, but they all fit together to write a joke about stage musical references in 2019 that took place in 2009.

We'll collectively have to work on fleshing out Christine a bit. "The woman in charge" isn't very specific, but I can imagine the Nursery as being one division that didn't receive a Flower as its head, since understanding animalian minds and bodies is a little more critical to child-rearing than it is for most divisions. Or maybe the Flowers just find humanoid development cycles too squicky, and none of them wanted the position?

—doctorlit really needs to make progress on his Nursery spin-off. Just as soon as he finishes Kingdom Hearts 3.
ghc

This year's theme is Saved from the Cutting Room Floor!

Hal the Metagross
Kilauea the Volcanion
Regina the Honchkrow
Aramis the Virizon
Altaria (can mega evolve)
Bambi the Sawsbuck

Reserve: Ibuki the Toxicroak

I'm sorry that my apology came off that way. I didn't want it to sound robotic, so I tried to make sure y'all knew it was me speaking. I completely understand how you're feeling, and I definitely care. I also kinda wanted to show you guys, "Look, I'm apologizing, and you didn't even have to ask me yet! Look, I haven't sent you a fountain of self-deprecation! Be proud of me! I'm getting better!" :P

On my stupid obsession: It'll take a while. Most likely I'll turn into a real history buff like hS. I'm prepared to forego asking for Permission for however many years it takes, since I know I'm not someone who should be trusted with writing the PPC universe. But that's all right, I continue to feel like a newbie anyway.

In the meantime, at least keep me around 'cause I'm good at recruiting my sane friends.

-Twistey

Incidentally, I don't really trust sites like PayPal that would need to have my credit card number online. I would much rather pay by mailing a check somewhere . . .

I don't trust ads much, either. I tend to assume all of them are downloading something nasty onto my computer, so I would continue running an adblocker as well.

You know, I used to be super into carrots for a while. It drove my coworkers nuts, not only because of the crunching, but also because I refused to peel the skin off the outside of the carrots. I mean, the carrot flesh is basically the same all over, right? But veggies and fruits just aren't very filling, so at some point, I switched from carrots to apples as my token plant food. Apples are juicier, which helps more with my constant state of imagined dehydration. So yeah. I'm on team fruit at the moment. Perhaps, someday, I'll get tired of apples and switch back to carrots for a while.

—doctorlit, a former carrot man

This did give me an opportunity to put down in words some of the things I'd sorta-kinda had figured out about her but never really articulated before. I think it makes sense, even, if you don't examine it too hard. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Henry-Jenni bonding is always cute and that got a proper grin out of me. But I have to say... I think getting a little more insight into Jenni's true nature was the most interesting part about this. :)

It kinda takes away from the apology if you try to make it about acknowledging how hard it is for you and moving on right away so you feel better. An apology is not for you, it's to show the other person(s) you actually care about their feelings. The other party is the one who gets to decide whether or not to "be sad anymore."

Personally, I never was "sad," and I'm not boycotting the Shipfest; I just didn't have that much investment in it to begin with. Also, so far I've assumed you're about thirteen at most, so I am patiently waiting for the day you have enough life experience and corrections under your belt to truly understand why this fixation you have on WWII stuff makes us uncomfortable and drop it. You are learning, so I'm sure you'll get there, and we will continue to help by giving said corrections as needed.

~Neshomeh

Sign-up on the T-Board just requires a valid e-mail address, I think, like almost every other site there is. Pretty basic, standard Internet stuff. It's not like we're doing a background check. Being cautious about giving out information is good, but that's why you have an "Internet" e-mail address that's different from your "real life" e-mail address, with no real personal information attached. {= )

Though, I'm not sure you're actually talking about that. So, what are you talking about?

~Neshomeh

Yeah, running off a Pi would be nice, but last I checked T-Board tends to grind even on its current setup under a heavy workload. This could probably be fixed (i dunno), but it hasn't been yet. To make matters worse, Rails is generally just very expensive RAM and computation-wise (although not as bad as it once was: Twitter used to use a frankly insane amount of RAM with each request because Rails would fire a large number of exceptions as part of normal operation (falling off the end of a list while iterating, deliberately, and then just catching the exception)).

So, hosting. EC2 is the standard, and it's pretty cheap on an hourly basis, as is Amazon's associated storage. Thing is, of course, that we're running over years and stuff. That adds up. However, assuming PGSQL and Ruby don't do anything stupid, the compute time we use in a given year will be a lot less than a year's worth of compute: in theory, they ought to be spending most of their time waiting for requests, that is, doing nothing. In light of this, I suspect we could comfortably run off a T2 small, or maybe even a micro, which costs a few cents per hour. Storage is ten cents per GB per month. I suspect $10 a month would cover us. Take that with a grain of salt: I'm not an admin. So we're probably looking at $15-20 a month, maybe? Probably less? Plus DNS costs, unless we get a free subdomain off someone (quite a number of services offer that).

Seriously take this with a grain of salt. I got all of this by squinting at EC2's website and guessing.

I think that if we had a site with required sign-up, meaning you’d have to get an account to join, sure we’d keep various perpetrators of drama at bay, but it’d probably also discourage some newbies. I know I wouldn’t be here if the Board had had required sign-up, because *insert backstory about what I was like when I joined and how that may or may not have contributed to my family hating the PPC here*. Willis wouldn’t be here either, even if I was here, because the required sign-up would only make joining more intimidating, and he was hecka intimidated about joining as it stood.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not as much of a problem as I thought.

-Twistey

He has been conceived in the heat of a mating flight for her brown queen dragon...
– don’t you think this should be "had been"?

(How do I get this on a casual read when I miss the obvious in full beta reader mode?)

HG

And I apologize for being lazy or too hasty, deviating from my usual beta habits. Now I’m wondering whether I would have caught these errors if I had slept over it another night and then read it once more. (Note to self: three times on three different days is an absolute minimum.)

HG

Congrats!