The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Thanks! Oh dear, that's pretty fast.

Have a suit of very used and slightly holy Imperial Guard flak armor, guaranteed to last you your entire career! (Average lifespan of deployed Imperial Guardsman: 15 hours)

Hello! I recently joined the Discord. I'm AstraSupra on FANDOM wiki. I've read a good amount of missions, but I really need to finish TOS. I don't really participate in fandom beyond talking to friends I RP with, so I'll list some of the things I like. I like Pokémon, Mario, Smash Bros., Fire Emblem, SPORE (video game), Crimson Skies (video game), Minecraft, The Familiars book series, City of Ember books, and the How To Train Your Dragon movies. I'm also partially familar with Harry Potter, Golden Sun, and a little bit of WoW, The Unwanteds first book, and Splatoon. (WoW and Splatoon were due to RP friends, which is also how I got into Fire Emblem.) I absolutely love playing video games, especially Pokémon Black, though I have been playing Mario Kart lately. I've replayed Pokemon Black five times. (My favourite Pokémon is Reshiram.) I also like to draw, roleplay, and read about genetics, epigenetics, evolution, and various other sciences.

I go by xe/xir or they/them pronouns. I lived in Canada for awhile, so you may see me mix American and British English spellings, and please let me know if I do. I slso have vision loss which leads to a lot of typoes, as a heads up, so I generally try to reread and fix typoes before and after posting.

Hey, I'm...not sure what screen name I want to use yet. I'd like to join the PPC! I was introduced to it by a friend, and I'm pondering ideas for my agent. What's the next step I should take? Thanks!

(Beta for nottheLonePower here! As it has been determined that there are some things she cannot do without descending into gibberish (and not the usual storm of typos), I told her she could either settle for 'Ikea Erotica' or go for the humanization.

Considering who's writing this chapter, I think you can imagine how that went.

So, uh, enjoy?)

"Sooo, this is the code I'd want to mess with in order for you to perceive sensations like I do?" Marisa asked, poking the relevant area of the laptop's screen for good measure.

/I contest the use of 'mess with', but, in essence, yes./ her Manual admitted.

Marisa whipped her hair back and forth quickly looked behind her at her already-closed door, suddenly nervous.

/You do remember your parents won't be home for a while yet, yes?/

Privately, her Manual wondered if being called on errantry so often over the past five years had left her twitchy - but telling her to not do work came with its own host of problems.

Meanwhile, independent of her Instrumentality's considerations, Marisa nodded.

"And Sam has his meeting, and none of my friends come to my house to hang out; I always go to theirs."

Turning back, there was an unexpectedly vulnerable look in her eyes.

"That's not a bad thing, is it?"

Considering the fit your parents would throw over you having a sleepover here, it's exactly the opposite.

Well, that was what it wanted to say - but really, this was not the time. Instead:

/No, Marisa. And,/ it added, addressing the other question the wizard hadn't brought herself to ask.

/I do like spending time with you./

The smile that graced her face then was truly splendid.

Consent exchanged, they finally got to - ahem - business.

Attempts to describe just how it was (i.e., explicit details) fall short. I cannot properly convey whether a 'kiss' felt like a kiss upon flesh-and-blood lips, whether their caresses on the astral plane went upon curves and planes that humans even have, and of course orgasm is as hard to encapsulate as it always is.

But rest assured, it was had.

;)

And I wasn't disappointed.

More of General POV, that is. He is the best.

Or is it a she? It? They? I dunno. The creature of ambiguous gender is the best.

Marisa gently touched her laptop - then frowned.

No, not this way. I want it to be MUTUAL.

Her Manual, still confused, shuddered, and Marisa briefly thougth she'd had the right idea after all.

/Haven't we been through this?/ it said, however, and her face fell.

"Aww, I wanted it to be a surprise!"

Her Manual said nothing, loudly.

"Okya, fine, let's start this over. If I wanted to show you physical affection, how should I go about it?"

It sputtered. /You are fifteen! I have known you since you were ten./

Marisa giggled seducitvly. "Now who's being irrational?"

If it had been human, it would have gulped. Very dramatic.

A/N: Yes, another cliffhanger! I've gotta take SERIOUS time to think through these mechanics! |D

That was fun. ^_^ So, now it's to be a four-way truce between the horses, the wolves, the Feegle, and the povs?

(And, darnit, now I'm mad I didn't get around to writing my story that would've given Delroch a new name and him and Alice offspring of their own...)

~Neshomeh

A nuanced language, indeed!

And the reasonable leaders continue to be reasonable, much to the relief of all involved.

Also, horse language doesn't normally have a past-tense, if I understand that part right? Interesting...

And the reveal made me laugh. XD

THESE REVEALS, THEY ARE LIKE OGRES... They come in LAYERS.

What Cats were Blue running from, again?

Lastly: I want a SNRF- I mean, a POV!

((From what I remember, I started it as a straight-up rewrite of the original with a bunch of OC agents, then you made it more like a proper OFU with representations of those characters' authors. So, uh, continue on those lines, I guess? Glad you have something prepared; that's better than yours truly.))

Man, now I wish I had the time/mental energy to write more original stuff...

In other words, my favourite kind of PPC writing. =]

Not much else to say on that score. It was interesting to see the different points of view and different narrators - none of them human - and the writing was light and well-made. It's a quite simple story, and I enjoyed it very much.

Also, I love that my abiding contribution to this mad shared universe can be summed up in a single word:-

Snrf.

Using these links (2006-2014), these ones (2015-17), and the results right now.



Three different things plotted on this graph:

-Gender breakdown (yellow, grey, and black lines): In 2006, we were over 80% female. Here in 2018, that's down at 40%, having hit an all-time low of 23% back in 2016. Part of that drop has been the inclusion of various 'Other' options since 2010, but mostly it's a rise in male Boarders.

-Percentage straightness (blue line). The questions on orientation have offered a wide range of options over the years (2011 had eight choices, the last few years have settled on 5), but for a simple graph like this the 'straightness' trend is easiest to plot. It stood steady at 50% for the first few years, but has dropped steadily since 2016. (Now, does that say something about the PPC, about fandom, about the internet, or about society as a whole?)

-Modal age, because how else am I going to plot age on these things (green triangles)? This has mostly kept rising, though the polymodal years obscure this a bit (see 2014's three triangles, or 2017's two). On years where there is one clear leader, however, it's tending to increase.

hS

Or the Dark Watchers, who are a relatively obscure group of cryptids/folklore, contained within California - specifically the Santa Lucia Mountains.
They're pretty spooky.

Huge, featureless shadow figures, sometimes adorned with wide-brimmed hats and walking sticks and cloaks, seen motionlessly watching travellers and hikers through the mountain from higher peaks and so on. At least one of them has been the shadow of a horse standing, which is real bloody creepy, in a weird fairy tale kinda way. So you'll have hikers look up at a higher up ridge, in the daytime, and see an 11 foot or so shadow-man, silently watching them. In a few cases, people have felt the sensation of being intently stared at. When they take their eyes off them, then, they vanish!

There's one case where someone and their friends were out, stargazing, in their car, and the Watchers supposedly surrounded the car and were staring in at them. They drove right out of there, of course, driving right through the fellas.

They never seem to really do much but stare creepily - they don't even create that kind of, sense of uncanny, unnecessary fear that a few of these kinds of cryptids tend to cause (like shadow people, or the Ben Macdhui Grey Man.) There's been theories that these are all cases of Brocken spectres, in which a person's shadow is reflected off the mist on a mountain - this theory has been posited for the Macdhui Grey Man, too. Infrasound has also been suggested, but that's a pretty bad theory, if I'll be honest, considering that it's only a very small per centage of people affected by infrasound, and it's never enough to cause full hallucinations or so on.

Also notably is that, while it is claimed that the local Chumash people have folktales regarding these fellas, er, they don't, really. It's clear that there is folklore of them in the area, as references to them appear in literature from the place - famously 'Flight' by John Steinbeck and a poem from Robinson Jeffers. Some of these older sorts of folkloric references describe them less as giant shadowguys and more like fairy-like little people. P'raps the folklore stems back from immigrants who brought in fairy stories that got evolved and such, ay?

Anyways they're cool and spooky and are probably nothing. But they're cool and spooky! I'd like to see Hellboy get beaten up by one or so forth.


Also, mate, the other name for dry water - 'empty water' is even cooler.

2014 (raw data)

2012 (raw data)

2011 (raw data)

2010 (raw data)

2009: partial graphs (full data appears to be lost; the links no longer work).

2006

... I think I feel a graph coming on.

hS

Over the past couple of years, I've been playing about a bit with the Miss Cam Courtyard, home to Alice the telepathic horse and her herd. I've dropped off a pack of mini-wolves there, and in general have repeatedly made the place larger and more complex.

I decided that meant it was time for the residents of the Courtyard to get their own story, and here it is:

Courtyard Life

(While Kaitlyn and Selene do not appear, this is technically a Driftwood side-story. You shouldn't need to have read the missions to get it, though.)

hS

To try and get some discussion going, I figured I'd start a thread for folks to post something(s) they've run into recently they thought was interesting because other folks might find them neat too.

In my case, I've been at a local conference for the last day or so. One of the more sharable interesting talks was about Helena, which is a system that will automatically generate a web scraping program from a user clicking around in a browser to demonstrate how to get one of the things they're trying to scrape. I was surprised this was a feasible thing, and I'm tempted to see how well it would scrape the Board

I also ran into a Wikipedia page on dry water, which has a cool name and also appears to be a good way to store certain explosives and maybe CO2.

- Tomash

Right, that's it, Jennotary is definitely next on the docket. That or maybe G-Squared, which is less plausible but possibly more fun.

In the meantime, here, have this educational illustration about hyenas.

--Lemony

She writes them like they're lesbians. All love and purity, no savagery, hierarchy, or intense, physical expressions of love.

I can’t believe I enjoyed your story earlier if you can’t even appreciate the nuances of hot gay relationships. Like, for reals.

I actually wrote original stories decades ago (and got one SF story published), but the current answer to "Do you write original stories?" is "No" and thus I didn’t get to answer the other questions for "Original Stories". (I didn’t create outlines and didn’t use beta readers then, and I don’t remember much of what I wrote or how much I finished, but there were only two stories I actually dared to show to somebody.)

The long answer to "Do you write fanfiction?" would be "Yes, three very short Harry Potter stories over the last four years, which may not be enough to give valid answers to the fanfiction questions, but I answered anyway."

My answer to "Do you create outlines for your fics?" has always been and still is "No", but thinking about it, I usually take excerpts from the canon scenes I want to use as background, and then write around them, so you might say that J.K. Rowling did the outlines for me.

Over the last few years, I finished everything I started, but that’s not surprising, considering how short my stories are and that I may think about what to write for years, but only actually start writing when I’m sure that I can finish it within a few days.

I don’t feel like writing my annual Harry Potter fanfiction this year, but since I can’t even decide what I want to write, the answer to "How often does writers block hit you while writing fanfics?" is still "Never".

I actually knew about fanfiction long before I discovered the Harry Potter fandom in 2007, but never felt inclined to join a fandom. Thus, the discrepancy between discovering fandom in 2007, but reading fanfiction before 1990.

Apparently I caught a severe case of writers block on getting Permission, and being made a Permission Giver didn’t help at all. (Because I’m now responsible to do it right and write something worthy of the PPC? I have no idea whether this may be the cause.) So, I didn’t create a spin-off yet.

But I did prepare an outline for the one mission I didn’t write yet (as a workshop exercise done long before I got Permission).

I did write non-mission stories that still use the PPC universe as the setting, but all but one (the Friday 13^th event that may or may not have been just a nightmare) are non-canonical writing exercises done before I got permission.

HG

Hope your spin-off will be long and interesting to read.

Also, now fellow knight of Plort, let me give as a gift a self-updating guidebook of all the deathtraps in the multiverse. Throw glitterbags to the Ironic Overpower's nonexistent mercy has never been easier.

I mean, if they were more pragmatic and left the Agents some actual regular sliver of hope for some down time (like a week of vacation each year, for starters), they'd leave them with something to yearn for and soldier on through the madness.

But naaah, gotta work the Agents to the bone and sanity's end, then complain about them keeping snapping when they pretty much use the most destructive policies regarding their employees, all this while they're 'busy' relaxing inside their offic– Oups, you're Security... And actually one from the division backing up agents and the likes, nevermind.

...Yeah, one hour a week guaranteed to do interesting things feels like it woud be nice. This conversation would have probably been going more regularly than this.

(Join the revolution!)

((Really, though, in case someone gets the wrong idea: Yeah, this very much isn't consent and it's terrible. Also, I maaaaay have lifted some of those descriptions straight out of Legendary Badfics. Fair warning, I'm planning--hoping?--for the focus on kink above all else to only get worse from here.

--Good Mod Addict, which should surprise almost no one at this point))