The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Has it only been five years? Five years, nearly a hundred missions, a wedding, a very traumatized time lady... You've shaped a lot of what the PPC is and can be, and we're a better place for it.

*Gives a box of sporks*

Even if she does have an artfully-placed scar on her forehead...

...

omigosh

hS

Did you know there's at least one PPCer who frequents Mumsnet? You might want to consider how responding to 'looks like you're accidentally using a broad brush' with 'no, it's full of that' is going to feel for them.

~

Thank you for the article; I think it:

1/ Suffers a bit from trying to group a lot of loosely-connected details into a single narrative stream. The timeframe under discussion jumps around quite a lot, though by a weird coincidence three of the four actual years named are '2000'.

2/ Does a strangely lackluster job of discussing harassment and assault against trans people, which I know from other sources can only be describes as a vile flood of abuse right now. I think it only mentions 'who are themselves disproportionately vulnerable to violence' once, whereas there are repeated mentions of the idea of trans women as a source of violence. My guess is I'm either misreading the purpose of the article slightly, or The Outline works from the assumption that said vulnerability is going to be at the top of its readers' minds anyway.

3/ Highlights well, though through a strange mix of naming names, naming groups, and vaguely pointing at loose assemblages, that horribly large numbers of people behave awfully to and about people who don't slot neatly into the old-fashioned sex-gender binary. That's a terribly indictment on society and I wish it would go away.

4/ Seems to presuppose acceptance of the idea that sex is subordinate to gender. The phrase 'gender segregated hospital wards' is clanging quite hard against my skull: due to the way legal terminology has been changed, it's probably true at the moment, but they were pretty clearly originally sex-segregated (if a 1950s nurse had discovered that their patient was what would now be recognised as a trans woman, I'm positive they'd have transferred them to a different ward).

'Gender segregated hospital wards' is an idea that makes absolutely no sense to me; 'sex segregated hospital wards', given some of the stories Kaitlyn has told me about elderly patients, I can see some logic in.

5/ Is a showcase of hyperbole from both the article - it compares Mumsnet to 4Chan, which is laughable whatever you're comparing to 4Chan - but far more so from the people it's discussing. Claiming to 'debunk' what's basically someone's personality - or saying that you can get 'rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat' for it - is utterly ludicrous, and pretending that society doesn't (stupidly) treat men and women differently is not just wrong, it shows a dangerous disregard for experiences outside your (not your-your, obviously) own.

hS

Closest, that is, to something I can justify as a version of Kaitlyn.

My theory is that she's weaponised being unobtrusive, kind of like a prettier-looking Igor. She's very helpful, very quiet - and when you need her, she's just there, without seeming to move between places. A sort of combination nimble fingers, rapid movement, and intuitive stealth (at least until she fails her roll...!).

That fits with the costume and personality, so I think she's set! It remains to be seen whether the Order will accept her...

hS

Like, this is not new information; the whole forum's full of posts "debating" trans rights, most of which are an excuse for handwringing about how they're the ones who are really being oppressed by trans women doing unspeakable things, such ask them not to be exclusionary towards trans people, or exist. The MumsNet mods have also banned "cis" and "TERF" as slurs.

For more information, read this article from The Outline, which covers a lot of points about transphobia in British media in general and from ostensible feminists in particular.

Can I please ask where the 'of course' comes from with regards to MumsNet? The way you've phrased it, and I'm sure this is unintentional, comes across like you're painting a very large website with a very broad brush.

hS

I needed something with layers that I could access at work from an undisclosed location, and I'd at least heard of it, so. The reason they're so small is that it was all done with the standard paintbrush - any larger and you'd start seeing block-filled areas, which never look good. ^_^

I don't think yours is as bad as you think. The saucer works very well in the sky, just as the TARDIS does on the beach; the sea and sky go together well too. The tree is kind of jarring, but silver leaves, right? I'm sure I remember Eight going on about silver leaves.

You've got a few artefacts around the islands, but the easiest way to eliminate those would be to shrink the image slightly. ;) After that, I'd mostly be looking at the shadows - under a burnt orange sky, I think they'd take a different colour to standard black. I would say highlights as well (eg, on the leaves), but if the Doctor says they're silver, that must mean they appear silver even under Gallifreyan light, so that works.

hS

Five years ago today, I wandered here via TV Tropes after reading the Original Series. I introduced myself on someone else's thread, accidentally used my own email address as a username on my own introductory thread, and proceeded to make a fool of myself while accepting everyone's newbie gifts. (I still have that potato cannon, by the way; I just need to find a reason to use it.)

Back then I was still going by RinaAndRanda (Rina) and... well, a few months after that, I switched to Iximaz and I've been going by it ever since.

Hard to believe I was just a little baby sixteen year old at the time. My twenty-second birthday is in a few months now, I've gotten engaged, I've moved to a new country... amazing to think what can happen in five years.

You guys are the best online group I've ever had the pleasure to be a part of. I've made so many friends and grown so much as a person and a writer since joining. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Here's to many more! *raises glass in toast*

Did you put this together with Photoshop? I love how the dragons feel like they're part of the original painting. :)

My own contribution to fandom art: I call this one "Eve of War". We had to create a fake landscape as part of my Photoshop class last year, so naturally I had to do something related to Gallifrey. please ignore the obvious errors it was one of the first things I did and I should really retouch it but I'm too lazy to

Graham Linehan, who you may remember as the sack of depressed luncheon meat who wrote parts of a good show called Father Ted twenty years ago, is a ghastly TERFy moron. In the run-up to Christmas, he heard about how the charity Mermaids (a support organization for trans youth) was getting a grant from the Big Lottery Fund and got a bunch of equally TERFy morons on MumsNet (because of course) to bombard the Big Lottery Fund with thousands of badly-spelled form letters expressing dubious and non-specific "concern" until the Fund put the grant under review.

This, the astute among you might have realized, is not good news.

Harry Brewis, known better around the internet as HBomberguy, is a leftist YouTuber who streams sometimes. During an episode on why speedrunning is awesome, he said that he'd stream Donkey Kong 64 and beat it 100%, with a donation button for charity (yet to be chosen when the video was recorded) running while the stream was up. After seeing Graham Linehan's latest bit of manufactured outrage, he elected to give the proceeds of the stream to Mermaids.

I should mention here that Donkey Kong 64 is a collectathon made by Rare, and that therefore attempting a 100% completion run (actually 101%, because even Rare knew their games were complete BS sometimes) is, to put it mildly, an act of outright self-harm. One of the listed requirements for a player to submit their 101% complete speedrun to speedrun.com is that they must literally hate themselves. Harris took it further. You see, you don't actually have to get all the collectibles to get a 101% completion run in DK64. Harris set out to collect literally everything - all the bananas, all the battle crowns, all the ancillary guff you can think of, in an almost non-stop stream. His initial donation goal was $500. He thought that'd be a pretty good goal, given how his streams tend to be very small affairs. He did not get $500.

After appearances from people like Chelsea Manning, Owen Jones, John Romero, Mara Wilson, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and with the stream retweeted by everyone from Lindsay Ellis to Cher, Harris finally finished his 57-hour ordeal this morning.

The final donation count, raised by an unbelievable number of people, was...

Well, it's best if I just show you:-

With sincerest apologies to Albert Bierstadt, whose painting Among the Bernese Alps I heard of and decided had to be a typo.

Also with direct inspiration from this image by, uh... 'MrGro', apparently, and thematic inspiration from Jeff Bennett's War on Kinkade series.

hS

How so? Well, let's use clerics as an example:-

The young elf boy watches in awe as the beat begins, elders of his faith moving and swaying in time with the instruments. The air thrums with the power of their god, and before he knows it - and before his father can stop him - he hurls himself headlong into the dance, flowing like wind in branches to the glory of the divine. And as he dances, the whole forest dances with him, pulsing with divine magic and the blessing of a benevolent summer.
---
Torches flicker overhead as the moaning of wounded shield-dwarves fills the makeshift field hospital in the tunnels. The old dwarf, whose beard is so long it's tied to his belt like a bullwhip, scuttles to and fro, fingers dancing as he sutures wounds and lays on gentle hands. Suddenly, a noise from the hallway. The goblin horde is coming. The old dwarf uncurls his beard and hefts it in his hand, the weighted end heavy with spikes. Let them come.
---
The guards never suspected a thing. Clambering up the walls, she hops over them and clings to the curtain wall of the black fortress. It's taken her days to find this place, and she can't blow her chance now. The rest of her abbey has been taken by a horror from beyond death, and Avandra guides her every step. Sheer walls, locked doors, undead guards, none halt her progress. At last she breaks into the vampire's chamber, draws her old school fencing rapier, and charges.

You want him?

>Balancing on a narrow plank
>Avoiding or minimizing fall damage
>Attack/damage for ranged weapons (bows, javelins, etc)
>Add to armor class depending on the armor (so you'd have a lightly-armored Dex-based cleric)
>Sneaking
>Sleight of hand
>Pick locks
>Dexterity saves (avoid the fireball!)

...So what I'm seeing is a rather Rogue-ish Cleric (maybe a cleric of Avandra or Tymora (deities of luck and good fortune). Seems to fit with a sort of easygoing, cocky character who'd flip around the battlefield and whack people with their holy weapon while firing off quippy one-liners.

At least, that's the sort of character I'd make. :P

Shouldn't be too much of an issue... hopefully!

hS

... I really do like the sense of limitless bizarre possibilities. Like this, and Phobos' response: the fact that you can not only come up with them, but that there are rules in place to play them. :)

So yeah, Dexterity Cleric is now in the works. I've got her design and personality sorted, I just need to figure out what to do with the DEX other than tying bandages.

I know, 'jump on things'. But it seems a bit out of character. What else is DEX good for, you D&D types?

hS

Have a celebratory cupcake! It's chocolate with chocolate chips and chocolate icing!

Hello newbie! Here, have some chocolate and enjoy your stay!

It'll probably take a while for me to read the whole thing, I'm kinda pressed for time right now.

The Guardsman. 4156 years old from a linear standpoint, not counting all the recursive timelines in the Time War.

I'm not sure how old the Agent and the Disentangler are (besides "old as balls"), but they were the only Time Lords who weren't visibly affected by the de-aging potion in "Gallifrey Shrinks"...

As for nonhuman agents, I have that one defunct draenei agent—Arinellya in Bad Slash—who I really need to brush off and give a fresh coat of paint to sometime. She's somewhere around 8000 years old but the exact number eludes her.

I'd take the psion option for preference. It seems slightly simpler. Though I must point out that I don't know whether psions are any good in 3.0.