Jul 2013 Archive, part b

I prefer the games to the anime personally, I've watched up to about halfway through Sinnoh and I got tired of Brock. Now they've got Cilan instead I keep meaning to swatch the new episodes but haven't found the time.

Hey. Yeah I've read the Consitution and most if not all of the original series.

A Ditto? Seriously? Can't I have something cooler like a Crobat?

Thanks. In terms of Fandoms I know about quite a few but especially Pokemon, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Starcraft and LOTR.

Oh and thanks for the inside joke, I think I got it.

Nalfien wasn't fully grown by any means. He didn't even complete his first year of weapons training before death. So he's in the odd position of still needing guidance in the world. I imagine that he's also quite a bit weaker than Mazarun. So that could end up interesting. I'd love to write his back story and some of his time in FicPsych with you.

I think he has an interesting case, and a suitable partner. Agent Rowen isn't a schemer by any means, and is rather naive for a PPC Agent in regards to out-of-job interaction. I was going to write Nalfein as struggling with new feelings such as compassion for his fellow Agents. Although, he'd never admit to having such feelings.

So...no confusion plausible.

Mostly in that no organisation worth the name that does this kind of thing wouldn't require its field operatives to file reports on their assignments and such. Half of patrol work as a police officer is reporting on what happened that day, for instance.

The idea they were the first to actively publish their reports in HQ for other agents to read makes sense though.

Thanks for the snow globe! I may have broken it however, because it can't decide what my favorite fictional city is. Let's go with a model of Hogwarts for now, eh?

Haha, thanks! But, please, what is a Kookie? Is it a smaller super-deformed version of yourself? My deep-thinking hat is my Kumajiro. He likes being on my head.

Thanks! I have enough problems with toasters already however, meaning I start screaming in shock whenever my toast pops up. I like toast with Nutella.

It didn't seem to specify what I should expect when I came on here. So, at first I drifted towards the live-talk one and nearly crashed my computer. *cue embarrassed laughter* Also, there are so many threads on here that I wasn't sure where to start.

Thanks for the unwritten novel, by the by. Those are the best kinds.

Thanksies much for the mathom, now what is it? Nope, no Tolkien here unless you count the times I've read the Hobbit. Love that book, but can't seem to get into Lord of the Rings. Unfortunate, really.

Pfft. What loss of brain cells? I had none to begin with. Ooh, cupcake! *bites, then pauses* Anyone lose a cell phone in here? Cause I think I found one. Oh, no, wait, it's my nonexistent one. Never mind. XD

Uh hi? I am the creator of an orginization called the Sue Slayers. Its basically the same as the PPC and I was wondering if our orginizations could link up. The ppc seems pretty inactive though...

Hm, I'm under the impression that it's too late, as I'm positive my eyes aren't normally consumed in gray fire. Yes! Yet another notebook to join my army! Rise, notebooks and destroy the world with your mind blowing words! Thanks for the recruit!

Well, as long as you don't know and I'm not going completely bonkers with trying to figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be saying, hi! Ooh! A porpoise! Fun! I shall pick up said porpoise and run about my house with it and therefore drive everyone within completely mad! And no, I'm not British, although I do indeed like the language!

I shall keep it in a place of honour.

but for now I'm quite happy with these Oreos! Thank you.

I wonder what happens if I prepare tea with them?

Snark and humour create an enticing mixture, for sure. Thank you for the welcome, and welcome back yourself!

Swiss beepolate is always handy to have around. As for the Doctor's office, I'm sure the TARDIS would happily supply one if he bothered to use it.

I rescued them.

Awkward family reunions were mentioned earlier, after all. Most of my father's side of the family's there (excepting a crowd of great aunts and co. on the East Coast of the US), and one of my other maternal aunties lives in Hangzhou.

We also went on some tours of Beijing and Sichuan. I recommend Chinese tour groups; they at least make a conscious effort to book you into five-star hotels for cheap. :'D

They look and feel like the real thing but if you cook it and then throw it on the ground it's said to bounce like a bouncy ball
I was tempted to see if I could buy one and prank my friends with it.

Wifi in China doesn't allow Facebook or YouTube or Tumblr tags, and hates Google (takes a long time to search stuff on it). Also, there's always wifi but it's part of a mobile phone network; you gotta have an ID and password for the major mobile providers to get in. Even the free wifi comes at least at the cost of a mobile phone number because they send you the activation key through text. It's really convoluted.

I've been presumed dead by the Flowers for over a year. However, I was merely enjoying Maritius home of the Dodo, the Maritius broadbilled parrot, the pink pigeon, and countless other species that were driven extinct. On the upside, I found a time portal after I went to Tasmania, and brought back 245 extinct thylacines. But before I get off topic, welcome back!

By Sporking I meant putting on the unclaimed badfic list. I know I'll need permission first and I was planning on waiting for a couple of months time before asking.

Thanks for the advice, I suppose it's quite obvious once you think of it though.

Yes, he is rather clueless over nonmilitary life.

[He seems to believe more in practical things and guidelines than in the concept of a god.] I think there is once a sect that follows this tenet, that is the Mu'tazilahs. But the Sunnis had absorbed them in, forming the basis of Islamic jurispudence and the Four Imams. This also reminds me of Alawites,who are very lax in their interpretation of Islam.

I defer to your judgement, since you watched the manga and read the anime. What's the main sect of Helmajistanis? Are they mostly Sunnis, in which case I can drop the idea for my fanfic easily? Or other sects? Could sectarian difference be the reason why Helmajistan be at civil war, or is it just KGB's plans?

Or let's just put this discussion to rest by assuming Sousuke is nonreligious, just as he's not attaching himself to any nationality.

It's part of his backstory, Sousuke Sagara was a Japanese stranded at Helmajistan, and was taught Islam by KGB and a faction that he was forced to join as a child soldier. So yeah, he will be considered a Muslim.

I want to explore him as a Muslim, since it will bring new challenges to the world. Sousuke is having feelings for Kaname, and if he thought that the Islamic Law applies to him now, he may have new problems to consider. How is he going to Salah when his charge is at risk? Can he fast and maintain energy? (there are pills for that, but I never tried it). Thus the requirement for late puberty.

Or it can go in other direction; Kaname discovers Sousuke is a Muslim, and when confronted Sousuke says 'yes', which doesn't fly with him willing to eat pork. Then a twist reveal is that Sousuke, and in extension Helmajistan, is a nation whose majority amount of Muslims are of a 'heretical' branch. No, don't look at me like that, there are many 'heretical' sects of Islam, with many weird interpretations.

Oooh! I go on around your time!

Thanks for sharing this. It's very interesting, and I'll definitely have to try some of the recipes out myself.

Also, if it was "chicken and tomatoes" in an early edition of The Hobbit, does that make Denethor's meal in the Movies a really weird homage? O.o

~Neshomeh

One day I'll publish my my list of fanfic/PPC-themed mixed drinks. Sue blood is on the list. It is disgustingly sweet and sparkly.

I saw the other day on Pinterest a little homemade glitter recipe. It was salt and food coloring mixed and then spread the salt out and bake it to dry it back out from the food color. If you aren't opposed to food color (or if you used something natural like beet juice) then it is edible and could be used on food.

It might even be a neat trick that it is salty instead of sweet, as Sue's aren't really what they seem to be.

Of course the same trick would work with sugar if you wanted it to be sweet. The original was for something you'd glitter and leave lying around and wouldn't want sugar to attract ants.

... is... hot-chocolate-coffee-cinnamon-nutmeg?

Huh.

Um.

Huh.

That actually sounds nice enough to make me do it. And I don't put coffee in things, er, ever.

I think you get a round of applause for that.

hS

The post

It appears that the recipes for that one were submitted from the cookbooks of agents.

-Phobos

I'll post a proper recipe later, but my version of ryshcate is something between a date loaf with delusions of grandeur and a fruit cake.

I use walnuts to substitute for vweilu nuts (my local grocer just can't seem to get vweilu nuts in stock). Other than that, my version is basically a fruit cake with dates, raisins, crystallised ginger, plus cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg and allspice; a bit of brown sugar for sweetening and then I mix in a glass of whisky into the cake mix to give it some fire (again, my local liquor store can't seem to stock Whyren's Reserve so I usually go for a lighter single malt that's been finished in a sherry cask for a bit of honey/spice flavour).

I've made this version of ryshcate three or four times now and it works pretty well.

Elcalion, culinary

It's essentially a repository for any non-mission-related stories I write about the families. It tends to be just the 'present' I update, though.

As to Origins... okay: I've just (as in yesterday) found a framing that allows me to tell the parts of the story I want to tell. I'm working on my version of 'the complete Origins' now.

However, I'm deliberately leaving a lot of things vague, so as not to stop you writing yours. The Cascade and Civil War will be in there, but I won't be using any of the named characters you came up with - I'll just be leaving it, as I say, vague and undefined. And in general, the whole story will be suffering from 'unreliable (and occasionally outright lying) narrator syndrome'.

There is definitely still a place for your version, and you are free to keep writing it, with two caveats:

1/ Since there will be a 'Huinesoron's Origins', it'd be good if you could change the title of yours. Otherwise it could get confusing. I plan to at some point break up the Wiki article into three - 'Origin of the Plants', 'Origin of the PPC', and 'Origin (planet)'.

2/ You'll need to find somewhere else to host it. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I prefer to put my own stories up on my site where possible.

The history of the PPC is not my personal playground. Anyone is allowed to write about it, and write anything they want. That point has been made recently about the future (both Phobos and the Irish Samurai have written 'future-AUs' of late), but I don't think people have quite realised it about the past. The PPC, past, present and future, is an open book: anyone (with Permission) can write in it, whether they want to add to, update, or outright contradict what's already there.

hS

Have you written any chapters in story form yet? The summary is nice, and it provides more information at least, but it would be nice to see more of it as a narrative. I've been interested in the Origins project for a while now, partially because it has so much free space to tell its story in, even after the new summary described the basic sequence of events, and I'd enjoy seeing more of it.

Since at least the first few lines of that were co-written, yes, you did. You decided it.

hS

(Wait, space cadet? Are you making references I don't get - again?)

And let's just say his partner is over-emotional and prone to teasing and leave it at that.

I knew tribble slippers were real, and I've wanted a pair since I found it out. Thank you! Also, sehlat snuggie! Awesome!

because being "mass neutralized" sounds like Pinkie will be giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "to die for"!

(but really, it was an HTML error)
*rummages through bag of holding*
than a Delibird! All it does is give presents! (but beware, they may explode!)

And Outhra, thanks for the cake!

Unless, of course, you want me to deliberately write badfic in which a material is poorly described in a manner that produces this substance, allowing samples to be retrieved and studied.

The chances of me ever writing an agent are [favourite mathematical term dealing with numbers close to zero], so if I have to introduce concepts via writing stories that's as close as I'll get.

I don't think movies would work. However, a Game of Thrones style series...that could be done.

Also, honestly, there are a lot of things that I could stand to see cut.

-Phobos

What I wouldn't give to see a mini-series depicting The Last Light of the Sun, or Lions of Al-Rassan, or a pair of movies on The Sarantine Mosaic. They're not even effects-heavy, so it would be doable, and his characters can be so lifelike...

Protector of the Small would be particularly cool, given the mechanical creatures involved - I'd love to see those animated. I'm wondering how they'd manage to animate the magic in Circle of Magic properly, though. How do you show the scenes of the connection between Briar and the shakkan, for example?

In the end, I think that's why Tamora Pierce's books wouldn't work too well as movies. There's just too many details that can't really be expressed well through visuals.

I feel like it would be really easy -and really, really likely- for a Circle of Magic movie(s) to turn out terribly. But if it were done well...

-Aila

Consider how massive, and massively episodic, the Belgariad is... I'm not sure you could actually fit it into five films and do it justice, and when was the last time anyone reached five in a series of films? The new Narnia adaptation appears to have stalled out at three.

But a TV series... yes, please. I think (if I were making it) I'd probably start with the scene where Garion runs away from everyone in Arendia - it's a nice active start, pretty close to the beginning, without too many characters already introduced, and it lets the audience share his 'who are these scary people' experience, rather than going 'Garion, what are you on?'.

Then I'd probably split the stuff before that up into a few chunks and give it as flashbacks, dream sequences and conversations where it seemed to fit. It would help fill out the impression that Garion's trying to figure out what he's gotten himself into...

Of course, if I were the obscenely rich person I'd have to be to make it, I'd make sure before we started that we could pull off three things:

-The corrupt decadence of Tolnedra
-The sheer mind-numbing terror of Maragor (and specifically the capital)
-The holiness of Ulgo

There's other things that I'd look into (the Stronghold, for instance), but if we can't do those three, we wouldn't have a hope of doing the whole story.

hS

(All names from memory, sincere apologies if I got them mixed up)

... IF they can find a child actress capable of playing Flute/Aphrael. That would probably be the hardest part, because she's clearly described as a child, not a teenager. Knowing Hollywood, they'd probably cast some 30-year old as the Child-Goddess.

(I was thinking after last Costume Con that if I could scrounge up four males to wear them for the Fantasy/SF Masquerade, there's enough description in the Elenium to re-create the formal armor of the Church Knights. Then I started looking at prices for Wondra and Wonderflex. Ouch!)

I suspect it wouldn't be all that hard to do a movie/TV version of any of the Elemental Masters novels. They're all set in the Victorian/Edwardian/very early WWI period, so the costumes are already sitting in theatrical warehouses. Current CGI is definitely up for creating the elemental creatures and any visual effects of spellcasting.

And thirding, and fourth...ed...ing - or whatever.

And, having just finished re-reading Midnight, I agree with you that it'd probably be the best one to start with. Although it would be nice if they expanded on the section where they're travelling through the Deepwoods by including some of the stuff from Beyond the Deepwoods - they kind of gloss over the danger and sheer variety of fantastic creatures in Midnight.

…is Disney's Treasure Planet. It has the space pirates, the flying ships, and engaging characters you said that this has. It's also animated, and all the steampunk/cyberpunk glory that is this movie is visually spectacular.

It also really needs more love, because as Disney animated movies go everyone forgets about it.

But if I did, I'd end up writing a five-page rant about everything that's wrong with the movie, which would probably end up going into the mythological errors in the books, which would trail off from there... so I won't.

The Sea of Monsters looks slightly better. At least this time they got Annabeth's hair color right. Somewhat of an achievement. Kane Chronicles movies would be awesome, too. Those remain my favorite Rick Riordan books, although that's possibly just because of my fascination with Egyptian mythology.

I'd like to see the rest of the Narnia series, but I really, really disliked the first HDM movie, and I think I'd be ambivalent about another one.

A Good Omens movie would be amazing, but the film would have to be done really, really well for it to come anywhere close to the book.

Oh, and a Discworld TV show about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in the works. Has anyone else heard about that?

From the looks of the trailers I think Sea of Monsters is going to be closer to the book than Lightning Thief was. Well apart from Grover, but not everything's perfect.

As a hopeless dingbat of an INFP, I don't compute well with organization. Or "statistics and hard logic." But who needs logic anyway? Point being, it's not my place to decide that sort of thing, but it sounds awfully formal, a little bit contradictory to the general hectic siliness of the PPC that makes it so endearing. Since it's hardly plausible that we'll be able to spork every badfic in the world- even every badfic in a popular fandom would be a feat of unfathomably epic proportions- couldn't everyone just patrol the fandoms they're interested when they feel like writing a mission? Report the rarer abominations that are so horribly eye-bleeding that they cannot go unchallenged? Wouldn't that just be simpler?
Maybe I'm just not processing the more advanced thinking behind this, but that's my thoughts. Meh, it's an old thread anyway.

-- Len

Ahoy!

In case you've been wondering, the vast majority of people on the IRC are in continental north america - which means that a reasonable hour for you ends up being something like six in the morning our time. Thus why nobody seems to be paying attention. It's nothing personal, we promise.

:)

-Dann

Just took a glance at the story (actually, at the chapter titles). Is this writer for real, because there is no way that any halfway-educated person can write that badly unless it's on purpose. Trollfic, maybe?

Honestly, at this point, it's just funny. It's not even bothering me anymore, it's too entertaining to watch it spiral deeper and deeper into insanity. I'm actually curious to see who she finally ends up with. Are they going to find Janeway? Will Chakotay become an adult again? Are the Borg involved anymore? I really want to know!

Maybe I'm going insane.

The first one... Well, in the summary we are cheerily informed that "Sophie" was kind of short and teased because she had brown hair and an Irish accent.
Here's an excerpt: ""Hey, are you okay? And what is a human doing so near to the Shire?" Weird memories of a world beyond the Grey Havens, and its destruction, came to her and made her feel momentarily offended. She brushed her dark brown hair out of her deep green eyes and her Irish accent became very noticeable.
"I'm not a human, my race has no name, and as I said before, I am lost." She told them. They nodded,

"Well," Kili spoke up, "You can travel with us. We are heading for Hobbiton where we might be able to get you directions home."Sophie sighed.

"My home shattered and burned. The Spire of Glass was collapsed, and the wooden homes burned to the ground." This information was provided by her Middle Earth memories, her Earth memories telling her that this was all fake, but she played along."


The second one is a good argument against slash, featuring a particularly mind-bending love triangle between Elrond, Bilbo, and Thorin. The writing is so machine gun paced that it makes my head spin. And the whole thing is one paragraph.
And another excerpt: "Radagast and Gandalf start talking and then Radagast takes off on his rabbits. "We need to go now!" Gandalf says. "We can't! We have no ponies, they bolted!" Ori yells and we all freak out. "We need to hurry. This way now!" Gandalf says and starts running. We take off running and trying to stay out of the Warg's sight. We end up being surrounded and Gandalf pops up behind some boulders. "This way, you fools!" he shouts, and we all slide down the rocks"

was going to put this on the Unclaimed Badfic list and then realized I had no idea how to. It may be something obvious and I'm just being a ditz (actually it's highly likely this is the case) but I just can't see where I edit the page.

I mean, the summary alone...

*goes off to melt brain read the badfic*

~DF

BWAHAHAHA...*ahem*. I apologize for that deeply regrettable outburst. What I really meant to say was, this story is quite...interesting..in a very...trainwrecky...way...