The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I don't think the original board game (here) is fixable; you're better to start from scratch.

Shiny Newbie is still vaguely ongoing. I don't know what kind of game it is to be honest.

hS

But at the moment, the only actual content for the setting is five one-shot pictures and a fistful of character descriptions. There's not really anything to attract attention to, and Scape has kind of said that she doesn't see hers as fitting in the same universe.

I think you'd want to wait until either there's something with narrative content (either a story or a true strip-comic), or until someone else has published their own non-narrative comic (like my 5, and as opposed to just character portraits).

Bumblepedia is a DeviantArt user, who drew... uh, bumbles, I guess? Looks like they haven't done anything for a couple of years. There used to be an associated wikia, but it's gone now.

The derived term Bumbleverse looks like it's in use for a number of unrelated things, though none of them are particularly prominent.

hS

I'm Iximaz—the Board's resident nutcase. I was just starting kindergarden when you were around. Nice to meet you!

[Squee] Hi, Oldbie!

The Board archives (over here) place you as early as January 2003, which in PPC terms is well old. Looking through the lists of names from back then is like looking at mythology: "And lo, in those days was Otik the Progenitor incarnate in the Board, and the twin dragons Saph and Leo did walk beside Suzine the Magnificent; yea, and even did Leelee and Saphie bestride the Board like Colossi."

hS

There was a tumblr post that brought me here and I was like "PPC"...that sounds so familiar?

WHOA. I was "Leelee" on the board and was in the "Troll-Slaying Division". I also cannot believe I have my own wikia page???

Thanks for the blast from the past. My mind is blown right now.

I presume your quadruple negative cancels out to mean that you will give them flamethrowers?

Due to the ongoing Shenanigans^TM on both sides of the Atlantic, I've been thinking a fair bit about the role of the opposition. (The specific prompt for this was seeing Jeremy Corbyn lambasted for not supporting a People's Vote, in exactly the same way that he was lambasted for not calling for a vote of no confidence... which he did... and then lost... so what did that achieve, again?) Specifically, the fact that in both our forms of democracy, the opposition is supposed to be just as invested in the good of the country, but with a different view on how to achieve it. In UK parlance, they are Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition.

And that got me thinking, as is my wont, about fiction. How often in fiction is there a Loyal Opposition? For that matter, how often is there an actual Opposition at all, rather than straight-up rebels? It's a really interesting concept, but most of the time it gets reduced either to 'hi, I'm the Sultan and this is my Vizer, Sneery Al-Twirlymoustache', or to 'the government is literal demons and we ousted politicians must fight them'.

A few examples which occur to me of actual Oppositions:

-The dynamic between Denethor and Gandalf in Return of the King. Both of them are trying to do what's best for Gondor, but they have wildly different ideas about how. Complicated by the fact that Denethor is under evil influence, and Gandalf has no official power in the first place.

-David Weber's Honor Harrington books. These devote a lot of time to parliamentary politics, with the good guys being both the government and the opposition at times. The problem is, Weber fervently paints the other side - whether it's the Manticoran Conservatives & Liberals, or the Havenites following Giancola - as utterly evil and corrupt. There is no Loyal Opposition, because the Opposition (or the government, for a while) is working for itself, not for the country.

-The Republic Senate in the Star Wars prequels. Ignoring the fact that Palpatine is evil (because his government don't really know that), Amidala and her allies seem to form an unofficial opposition, working against the increasing centralisation of power on the Chancellor, while still supporting the Republic. This got a bit more attention in the old EU; I don't think there's much in the new canon.

... I might be tired, but there's not much else that's springing to mind. Maybe it's because fiction thrives on conflict, and 'they are evil, we must beat them' is the easiest kind of conflict. There's something faintly unsatisfying about 'we got our way, but the other side also had a viable plan, and next time they might win the day'. It doesn't lend itself to proper conclusions - you don't get The Heroes overcoming The Enemy - but I feel like there's a lot of space to explore in the concept?

The thing is, I'm sure it has been done. So now it's up to you to share how. ^_^

(Within the PPC, I imagine the Sub Rosa often taking on the Opposition role; it seems like her kind of deal. And of course, there's the Notary...)

hS

by J.K. Rowling Newton Artemis Fido Scamander, allegedly! To be clear, this is the book, not the films. I haven’t seen those, and don’t particularly feel any great draw to do so, for some reason.

Do I still warn for spoilers when the book is composed almost entirely of summaries of organisms? Of course I do. Reading is an experience, regardless of the content. Spoiler warning for the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but not for the films, probably? I don’t exactly know what the films took from the book, really.

I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while, though I’m not really sure what I was expecting. Although I enjoyed the “beastiary” section well enough, I actually found the introductory sections, about the history of classifying magic organisms, and the pains the Wizarding World goes to in continuing to hide them from Muggles. I think I would have preferred a lot more content in that section. In fact, that kind of answered a question I had never really articulated to myself: why do the magic animals need to be hidden at all? Why wouldn’t Muggles just accept, for example, that unicorns are just an odd member of the Equus genus? For some species, like dragons, it could be written off as protecting Muggles from dangerous organisms, and for others, it could be to prevent poaching. But now I see I’ve been wrong to think of “magical beasts” as just “animals, but different.” Some of them are indeed magical themselves, and would demonstrate to Muggles that parts of their physics is wrong. Others were produced purely by magic, and would seem to break the rules of biology, again showing Muggles that there was more to the world than they realized. (Would an analysis of basilisk DNA reveal it to be a combination of chicken and toad DNA? I somehow doubt that—the toad only warms the egg, but then . . . what is a basilisk’s DNA? It’s clearly not pure chicken!) And some beasts are pretty clearly not organic at all, or at least I don’t think so. The Lethifold seems to be an enchanted sheet or cloak, although perhaps I’m wrong there; fabric shouldn’t be able or required to digest food.

The tone of the actual beast entries varies from the purely humorous and whimsical to the dark and creepy, just like the actual Harry Potter series itself. It’s pretty clear that they share the same author (no offense to Mr. Scamander). Funnily enough, that also makes the magic beasts feel that much more like real animals: the Muggle world has its even share of frightening, dangerous big cats, monitor lizards and thick-skinned giant grey mammals, but also the small and tamable rodents, songbirds and pets. It seems reasonable that the same range would be present in magically produced or influenced organisms.

I know it’s a little mini-book made for charity, but boy oh boy, would I love to read the actual, full in-universe text. (You can’t tell me Hogwarts has for decades used an 88-page book as the primary text for one of its classes!)

—doctorlit will have to find a copy of Quidditch Through the Ages eventually, though he is not looking forward to the sportsball book, even if it is about magic sportsball

I figure since a lot of us kind of do reviews of the fiction we consume, we might as well make an explicit thread to load them onto! I'll be adding one of my own in a moment.

So let's get some discussions going! What have all you folks been reading/playing/watching/role-playing lately?

—doctorlit, bringing all the nerds to the yard, he hopes

...I definitely won't not refrain from not handing all these newbies flamethrowers so they can participate in my army. :D

-Twistey

She said that she wanted to invent a DEX-casting class, and then you (hS) said that a DEX cleric was in the works.

By the way, is anyone in agreement when I say that Order of the Bumblebee needs a wiki? If we count the Knights spinoff and the League spinoff as canon, we have 19 characters in the three parties alone. There'll definitely be more background characters on my side at least, plus there's all of the League's worldbuilding and one for how Aldegund's patron works, etc. A wiki would be a really good place to store so much content, plus it'd attract more attention to the comic, and through it, to the PPC. That's my thoughts on that. Please tell me the name "Bumblepedia" isn't taken.

-Twistey

...I still forget who inspired you, though.

Knights art update: Sakura and Jacqueline are finished, now working on Elinya, for who I already have a design. Pretty sure I've got Scarlet's design planned out.

-Twistey

Not via Google Docs or anything, just by offering tips on writing a "badfic except it's good" story. Let me begin by saying that you'll have to find some legitimate way to sustain the book once the gimmick of it being a parody runs out. In my game Sue VS Sue, I do this by making the Suvians actually likeable characters who have good personality behind all those cliches and power. You could try taking that route, or you could possibly add a third character who's actually sane, the real hero of the story, for the readers to invest in. Otherwise it'll be just like badfic itself - people will only read it for cheap laughs.

-Twistey

Here, have a very flat flamethrower and a pin shaped like a luna moth. You might need them eventually. I won't say why.

-Twistey

Have a triple chocolate cupcake! (It's chocolate with chocolate chips and chocolate icing.) Don't forget to blow out the candles and make a wish!

You did a good job of sporking the "badfic" while also giving us a good sense of who the two agents are.

Casually finding out halfway through the story that Gibbs is a lizard (though it's possible I missed an earlier mention) seems really PPC - like "Oh, yeah, my partner's a lizard. That's normal around here."

The ending where Bradbury tried to pull rank he didn't have at the end was really funny.

"Isn’t the point of this to provide adequate training for new agents, so why is it unable." should maybe have punctuation that isn't a comma after "agents". Maybe a question mark?

You also seem to have changed fonts halfway down page 6.

Those are minor points, though, and overall I'm looking forward to reading more of your stuff.

- Tomash