The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

This is wonderful, thank you. I can’t quite put a finger on why, but something about it caught me in such a way that I genuinely spent five minutes or more just reading and rereading it. It’s... hopeful, maybe?

(Also, I love the government-mandated small talk. It’s perfect.)

Fandom News



Uncanny Magazine

The Uncanny Magazine 2018 Favourite Fiction Reader Poll results are in (I know you've all been on the edge of your seats), and the winner - richly deserved - is the classic Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat. If you've not read it before - you should!

Once upon a time, long, long, long, long, long, long, ago, there were three raptor sisters, hatched beneath a lucky star. They lived in a wood together, they stole sheep and cattle together, and all in all, there was no tighter-knit hunting pride of matriarchal dromaeosauridae between the mountains and the sea.

Old News



Wikipedia

A long, long time ago
Sixty years last Sunday
Buddy Holly and his pals got on a plane
But somewhere over the Midwest
Twixt clouds and snow and fog, I guess
The pilot lost control and down they came

A hundred seventy miles per hour
The plane came down under full power
No chances of survival
No prospect of revival

I couldn't name the songs he'd write
Or say who else was on that flight
But Feb the third I always find
The day the music died

New News



The Atlantic

After dinosaurs and rock music, what could be better than a dinosaur with a mohawk? Bajadasaurus was announced on Monday, and it has huuuuuge bonkers forward-pointing spikes on its neck. Why? Who knows! Apparently they were too weak to use for defence (also, 'I'm perfectly safe as long as they try to jump on my neck while my head is down' is a terrible defence mechanism), so were they just display structures? Either way: dinosaurs is weird.

PPC News



Darkness descended on the corridors of HQ this week when the Nightshade (Head of Operations) negotiated an exclusive license for the use of the famous non-light-reflecting paint Vantablack. For far too long, dust has gone unnoticed in our halls, she is reported to have told the Building Maintenance team. By painting all walls and floors with this new material, you will be able to even a single speck of dirt from a hundred meters away.

While most BM teams opted to treat discretion as the better part of valour, one particularly enthusiastic unit was able to paint half the cafeteria before being tackled by a mob of agents who had gotten fed up at walking into invisible walls.

At press time, the Nightshade was in discussion with the Quartermaster over the possibility of working Vantablack pigment into agent uniforms, for 'camoflague purposes'.

Clerical News



DeviantArt

I forget who I'm blaming for this, but yeah, there's a DEX cleric now.

DEX: "Um, I'd like to travel with you, if that's okay?

INT: "I vote yes! I like her skirt."
CHA: "I like her pockets."
WIS: "I like having an extra person to help with my plans."
CON: "She seems nice. She'll never fit in."

The stronger colours in this picture are down to a gorgeous set of Prismacolour pencils sent to me by Neshomeh; unlike my previous set, they a) lay down thick, vibrant colours, and b) actually have more than one purple. (So, naturally, the one I've worn down the most so far is the brown...)

hS

Here, have a chainsword!

I'm also a fan of Harry Potter and LOTR, although I haven't seen the movies.

Woo, another feather! A couple more and I'll have enough for a down pillow.

Too bad I'm allergic for them :)

Skipping straight to the hard questions, eh?

I'm sure I'll forget a few, but let's start with *takes deep breath*:

Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica (old and new), Marvel MCU, some of the comics here and there, LOTR (books and movies, and Hobbit, Silmarillion etc.), Harry Potter...

Oooh! A tribble! I'll make sure it won't overeat.

Hi! Have another exploding chocolate bar!

Book of Lost Tales all the way!

In fact, if you can find genuine BoLT smutfic - without cheating and going 'this part didn't change between the two versions, so it counts' - I will try to translate at least part of it, into Gnomish or Qenya as appropriate.

Ball's in your court. ^_~

hS

Hi fellow newbie! As I don't have much I'll give you a feather that you can put on a hat that changes patterns every day.

What are your fandoms? Here, have a furry object, I don’t... think... it’s sentient, but I’m 99% sure it’s not evil...

After all the government-mandated small-talk - you know, 'are your intentions hostile', 'will you trade us your spaceship', 'are you now or have you ever been a supporter of the Communist party' - one of the scientists piped up: "Where are you from?"

The alien spokesbeing pointed up at the night sky, picking out a hazy light. "We believe your people call our galaxy 'Andromeda'."

"We know that," the scientist said, "we've been tracking you." She reached into her bag and pulled out a roll of paper, black and speckled with gold and white. "I meant, which star?"

~hS

It's not much, but have some chocolate I guess. Be careful, it has a tendency to explode.

Thank you!

Woohoo! Lovely shiny suit! I think I'm gonna paint it red.

Or blue, just to throw people off guard. (Looking at you, Disco!)

I’ve lost the article that linked me to it, but have any of y’all seen the (relatively) recent photograph of the Andromeda galaxy from NASA? It’s stunning. It’s the sharpest ever image of the Andromeda galaxy, and if I remember correctly, it’s something like 1.5 BILLION pixels, so warning, this is not necessarily data- or mobile-friendly. You may need to wait for things to load every time you zoom in, but give it time - it’s absolutely worth it.

https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/

Personally, one of my favorite spots is the bright red dot at the very top edge, at about a quarter to a third of the way in from the top left corner.

Aside from one of my own shed feathers, have a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III and Unbreaking III and a plushie of your favorite Yokai! Choose wisely~!

Have one of my own shed feathers and a complimentary kit of Spikes! :D

First off, Artifexian. Hands down the best worldbuilding channel on YouTube. Covers everything from constructing a solar system to using plate tectonics in your fantasy world map.

Second, a pretty nifty fan project converting D&D 5th Edition into Star Wars. Currently running a game using it for my cousin and my brother, been a ton of fun so far.

And finally, SeeThroughCanoe. They post a ton of cool footage of manatees, dolphins, rays, alligators, and other such wildlife from the eponymous canoe. It's great.

...hS began writing Gnomish smut. I feel like this should be a CAHQ card now... and I'm half-tempted to find Silmarillion smutfic for you to translate. I feel like there could be a market for that. Muahaha.

I'll just be in my corner doing this.

Though you probably already knew that. =]

In any case, the map for CKII actually is almost entirely Europe-based. While the potential for Very Odd Things is obviously far higher in CKII, especially since the Holy Fury patch that allowed your ruler to be a dog, that wasn't really the brief. Crushing nations beneath the proverbial booted foot was, and that's why I plumped for EU IV. =]

The vassal doesn't get the money.

This is a game related to EUIV, and it has lead to an Aztec Pope, Horse assassinations, and every Greek character running a "Can I castrate?" check on every other Greek character.

Also, you can farm gold by using your 17-year-old daughter to matrilineally marry rich old men (to bring them to your court), and then use your vassal patriarch to excommunicate them so you can imprison and execute them without penalty (causing their funds to revert to him as their liege).

Have a suit of Imperial Guard flak armor, guaranteed for life! (Average lifespan of deployed Imperial Guardsman: 15 hours.)