Jul 2016 Archive, part b

Unfortunately it’s not too short in the good, I-wanna-read-more way. I feel disappointed because I didn’t get what I expected.

It starts so good, with a subversion of the narrative laws of comedy, but then the first paragraph already ends in a small anti-climax. She capped her marker. Really? That’s all? No relief? No fear of the Ironic Overpower soon making something worse happen to even out the good luck? Is September even aware that she barely escaped destruction of what may have been the work of hours? Does she just take it for granted, because she feels entitled to be treated in a special way? I can’t even say that September is out of character here because there is no character; it looks more like a paint-by-number robot. (It there were a who-are-you-and-what-did-you-do-to- September moment later, I would praise you for subtle foreshadowing.)

Kelly had been reading ... and then immediately ... hit the acknowledge button. So, did she use the console’s screen to read an e-book? Did she read a physical book, sitting on a chair in front of the console? Why? Is this the only place where she can sit while September occupies the other chair at the table? This is the second time the agents leave the RC to go on a mission, and I still have no mental image of the RC. For the second time, I got the impression that you try to show some of the agents’ life outside of missions – which is a good thing – but then are too impatient to really show it and just want to get into the mission already.

But this time, the problems carry on into the mission that doesn’t feel much like a PPC mission. Kelly and September don’t show any reaction to being dragged out of their comfortable movie-watching chairs again and again (do they even have easy chairs and a wide-screen TV to watch the movie?); they just go in, allegedly watch what happens not ever interacting with the fic, come back and talk about what they watched. They could just as well sit in the RC, read the words and MST the thing.

Maybe the fic just isn’t suitable for a PPC-style mission. I sincerely doubt that it’s suitable for the mission format you chose. True, there are great chunks of story just plagiarized from the movie. But apparently there are also chunks of story where the OC acts on her own, and the agents never get to see them, neither in the movie (obviously) nor going into this parts of the fic. How do they know that the OC is redeemable if they didn’t actually watch her closely? How can I know that the agents are right about the OC being redeemable if I don’t want to read the fic myself?

“They'll be fine without you. Peter's going to get hurt if you don't leave now,” September said.
Now that’s something that works for me. The agents don’t always need brute force, and Kaya’s reaction, putting her duty of protecting the Pevensies above a selfish need to act out her story, clearly shows that the agents are right. (I just wish I could see that this is based on how Kaya acted off-page.)

Technical Error:
“But he is in the movie, and I don't want to take Peter to Medical if I don't have to.” Kelly said as she grabbed her gun.
Since Kelly said ... continues the sentence that started with what Kelly said, the period before this should be a comma.

There is one other point I need to address. I’m not a Narnia expert, but from an (admittedly superficial) internet search I got the impression that elves in Narnia are more fanon than canon. How does it turn out that there are elves living in the High Forest of Narnia? Would sending Kaya back really be a good idea?

I’m sorry that this sounds so harsh, and I want to finish with the last words September wrote: Keep writing. I guess you got the right ideas. Just take the time to flesh them out. (What? There’s another one up already? I’m afraid.)

HG

Nice job with your mission, especially with the good quotes from the fic and recruiting the OC. I'd like to see a bit more about finding the fox in the plothole and perhaps more reason to recruit rather than execute the elf.

You made your mission very accessible to people not familiar with the Narnia universe, which was helpful to me. I look forward to the next mission/interlude!

I like the parts where you said to do a complement sandwich and to wait if something drives you up the wall.

First thought: Yeah, another workshop.

Second thought: Aw, no story-writing exercise. I liked the opportunities to write about my agents not needing Permission.

Third thought: Huzzah, I don’t need to chase those opportunities anymore. Still, coming up with something fitting before the thread drops down too far is always an exciting challenge.

Does this count as at least two points of praise and two points of criticism beyond notes about SPaG? This certainly doesn’t.

HG

Read your other workshops, too, which were all brilliant. This one is also, fittingly enough, brilliant.
I mean, this is all great advice, and you just give it, and it's easy to understand and not a pain to slog through.
Organised into paragraphs, not written like a scientific report, useful examples, and all.

I'll probably bookmark this for when I review stuff.
This doesn't meet the standards of a review in the workshop. Bugger. Sorry about that.

And the Beta Door is closed.
Cheers to the people who offered to beta!

Still have nothing better to do, other than work on my own stuff, and if that takes more than six hours a day, I might be obsessing. So, if you'd have me, I'd love to. Email's here.

Training up the teams I'm going to put in my Ground/Rock gym, and encountered something rather weird, if both pokemon faint in the same turn (say due to poisoning) then the game gets stuck, you have to replace your pokemon as if you lost the battle but the AI doesn't replace their pokemon acting as if it still has HP despite the fact it has fainted. You can't select a move for your replacement pokemon to use or anything, the game gets stuck.

I'm not asking out of a desire for attention (for once); I'm asking because if no-ne's currently playing, I'll stop making posts filled with Pokemon. I can keep updating in silence, until I've got:

a) The whole Henn 'dex done.
b) A welcome message from Prof. Mallorn.
c) A full set of gym leaders.
and d) A permanent hme (ie, Pokemon strewn across my website).

Then do a re-release on the whle thing.

Or, I can keep making these posts to showcase the new Pokemon that I've put in. But I dn't want to take time from upgrading to do that, unless peple are using them.

hS

Behold the new Gym page. This version takes your savecode and a Gym Code and pits you against yur opponent in a battle to the death fainting! Until and unless you can defeat all of their Pokemn, you can't have your savecode back. That's right - no 'kill one, lose, and come back later' here. Unless you win, it's all for naught.

I fully expect this one to be stuffed full of bugs. Anyone who pints some out... well, you can probably figure out what you get.

h

On 1visible's advice, I've gne ahead and implemented status effects. They're quite difficult to fully test, so if you ntice anything weird going on, let me know. You might even get something for your truble.

And yes, the number of Pkemon is still increasing (slowly). Another four added today. I can't guarantee I'll ever make it to the end f the 'dex, but I will at least try.

hS

PS: Yes, the subject line is a jke. Oh, how ve are laffink.

Well, I'm glad you asked me that, hypothetical barder. The reason is that I've spent today taking (some of) Tomash's advice, rejigging the code (to make it better) and the pages (to make them prettier). A bnus of this is that the game is now at least theoretically mobile-friendly: it should automatically stack the boxes into a single clumn on a narrow screen. ("Should" being the operative word.)

Along the way I've discvered that Internet Explorer doesn't do anything the way you'd expect it to, but prefers to bounce portions of a website all around the screen. I'unn. Fixed it in the end.

hS

Yes, as f today, Pokemon Go has been released in the UK, meaning Pokemon Gone!'s unchallenged reign lasted... abut a day. Still, could be worse! I'm sure I've got projects that became redundant befre they were even released.

Does this mean I'm going to stp? No, I don't think so. Go doesn't have Gen III, so I'm still doing smething new. Plus, well, it's kind of fun. ^_^

I hope people are enjying playing with this as much as I'm enjoying making it.

hS

Since you did sort of dare me to look at your code, and I was a TA for a computer architecture class last semester, I felt the urge to give you concrit on your thing.

- Your JS

1) Powers That Be in a bucket, indent your code! (Unless you were deliberately going for the unreadable look, of course). If I didn't know better, I'd accuse you of coding in Notepad. (Note: if you are actually coding in Notepad, I've heard good things about Notepad++ on Windows, or you can pick up Emacs (or maybe Vim, if you like second-best) if you want to jump in the deep end of coding editors, but Google around for a good config in those cases)

2) Several variable should probably be dictionaries/Objects, not arrays. The main reason for this is that arrays use memory proportional to the largest valid index (that is, if you do var a = []; a[200000] = 5, you'll also use memory space for all of the undefineds that go in slots 0 through 199999.

2b) Which brings me to my next point, indexOf(), which is, as the theorists say, O(n). That is, the more Pokemon you add, the slower it will get, especially for errors. This can be avoided by dropping pokindex entirely and making pokedex an Object (var pokedex = {}).

This will allow you to check membership by simply doing numMon in pokedex. Also, you get the Magic that is JavaScript auto-coersion (most such things are terrible ideas but it's presence is not your fault). That is, if you do foo = {1: 2}, then foo["1"] == foo[1].

3) If you ever find yourself copy-pasting the same code several times and making minor changes (especially if there are variable suffixes such as thingA, thingB, ... involved), you might want to find another way to express what you're going for.

For example, here's a very functional-programming way to go from uppercase txt to digits

var digits = txt.split("").map(function (char) { return char.charCodeAt(0).toString(); }).join("")

(plop the .toUpperCase() in there for extra golf)

3) atkset{1-4} should really be an array-of-arrays called atkSet for DRY (don't repeat yourself) reasons

4) "".concat(foo[0],foo[1]...) is foo.join("") So, I might have written var trainOut = trainlets.join("") + document.getElementById("namecode").value)

5) + works on strings, and might be advisable when there's only two

6) Verifier() is O(n) (and uppercase, which is usually reserved for constructors like Monster). To make it faster, you might want this

function setLike()
{
    var ret = {};
    var numArguments = arguments.length;
    for (var i = 0; i         ret[arguments[i]] = true
    }
    return ret;
}

and to pull allowed out into something like ALLOWED_FROBS to avoid re-defining it every time.

7) One-based indexing makes people cry. Are you a mathematician?

8) Similarly, using n as the index for a loop is just a bit odd, since n is often the length of the thing you're looping over, so foo[n-1] feels like assignment to the last element of the array. The usual loop variables are i, then j, (and k if you're doing matrix multiply, or other crazy things)

9) On the positive side, the code is split into functions, is understandable, and uses clear variable names (!).

10) Do you wont to get modern? Do you want to add an optional feature that works for everyone other than people on old internet explorer versions? Try localStorage. It's the hot net thing, and might actually be useful? You could stick the save code in there and re-populate the page on re-load.

Your HTML/CSS:

1) Putting a style on each thing, especially if you're copy-pasting them around, is, to put it strongly, Doing It Wrong.

You can assign classes to HTML things, and then style everything that shares a class at once.

For example

<style type="text/css">
.blockimg {
    width:50px;
    height:50px;
    position:absolute;
    left: 200px;
    top: 95px;
}
</style>

Then, you can put class="blockimg on all the image placeholders instead of copy-pasting. This reduces redundancy and makes it easier for you to change your mind.

2) Absolute widths in pixels make me personally sad. My eyes are perma-not-great, so I have instructed my browser to bump fonts to at least 16pt no matter what the developer wants. This means that I can't read the whole "Go(ne)" button. The exact remedy for this depends on what you're doing.

2a) em is a unit that is relative to the current font (and font size).

2b) If you're willing to rewrite everything, absolute positioning is vaguely considered not a great idea (mainly because cell phones). Many people use some variant of a grid layout (have not used their code, but looks not-bad). If you want, leaving extra padding columns on the right (empty divs) will probably keep the current look.

But, the game is pretty cool, and it's pretty good for something made in three days. (I've seen worse.)

- Tomash, who didn't plan on this getting so long, and hopes he's not being too harsh

Since you did sort of dare me to look at your code, and I was a TA for a computer architecture class last semester, I felt the urge to give you concrit on your thing.

- Your JS

1) Powers That Be in a bucket, indent your code! (Unless you were deliberately going for the unreadable look, of course). If I didn't know better, I'd accuse you of coding in Notepad. (Note: if you are actually coding in Notepad, I've heard good things about Notepad++ on Windows, or you can pick up Emacs (or maybe Vim, if you like second-best) if you want to jump in the deep end of coding editors, but Google around for a good config in those cases)

2) Several variable should probably be dictionaries/Objects, not arrays. The main reason for this is that arrays use memory proportional to the largest valid index (that is, if you do var a = []; a[200000] = 5, you'll also use memory space for all of the undefineds that go in slots 0 through 199999.

2b) Which brings me to my next point, indexOf(), which is, as the theorists say, O(n). That is, the more Pokemon you add, the slower it will get, especially for errors. This can be avoided by dropping pokindex entirely and making pokedex an Object (var pokedex = {}).

This will allow you to check membership by simply doing numMon in pokedex. Also, you get the Magic that is JavaScript auto-coersion (most such things are terrible ideas but it's presence is not your fault). That is, if you do foo = {1: 2}, then foo["1"] == foo[1].

3) If you ever find yourself copy-pasting the same code several times and making minor changes (especially if there are variable suffixes such as thingA, thingB, ... involved), you might want to find another way to express what you're going for.

For example, here's a very functional-programming way to go from uppercase txt to digits

var digits = txt.split("").map(function (char) { return char.charCodeAt(0).toString(); }).join("")

(plop the .toUpperCase() in there for extra golf)

3) atkset{1-4} should really be an array-of-arrays called atkSet for DRY (don't repeat yourself) reasons

4) "".concat(foo[0],foo[1]...) is foo.join("") So, I might have written var trainOut = trainlets.join("") + document.getElementById("namecode").value)

5) + works on strings, and might be advisable when there's only two

6) Verifier() is O(n) (and uppercase, which is usually reserved for constructors like Monster). To make it faster, you might want this

function setLike()
{
    var ret = {};
    var numArguments = arguments.length;
    for (var i = 0; i < numArguments; i++) {
        ret[arguments[i]] = true
    }
    return ret;
}

and to pull allowed out into something like ALLOWED_FROBS to avoid re-defining it every time.

7) One-based indexing makes people cry. Are you a mathematician?

8) Similarly, using n as the index for a loop is just a bit odd, since n is often the length of the thing you're looping over, so foo[n-1] feels like assignment to the last element of the array. The usual loop variables are i, then j, (and k if you're doing matrix multiply, or other crazy things)

9) On the positive side, the code is split into functions, is understandable, and uses clear variable names (!).

10) Do you wont to get modern? Do you want to add an optional feature that works for everyone other than people on old internet explorer versions? Try localStorage. It's the hot net thing, and might actually be useful? You could stick the save code in there and re-populate the page on re-load.

Your HTML/CSS:

1) Putting a style on each thing, especially if you're copy-pasting them around, is, to put it strongly, Doing It Wrong.

You can assign classes to HTML things, and then style everything that shares a class at once.

For example

<style type="text/css">
.blockimg {
    width:50px;
    height:50px;
    position:absolute;
    left: 200px;
    top: 95px;
}
</style>

Then, you can put class="blockimg on all the image placeholders instead of copy-pasting. This reduces redundancy and makes it easier for you to change your mind.

2) Absolute widths in pixels make me personally sad. My eyes are perma-not-great, so I have instructed my browser to bump fonts to at least 16pt no matter what the developer wants. This means that I can't read the whole "Go(ne)" button. The exact remedy for this depends on what you're doing.

2a) em is a unit that is relative to the current font (and font size).

2b) If you're willing to rewrite everything, absolute positioning is vaguely considered not a great idea (mainly because cell phones). Many people use some variant of a grid layout (have not used their code, but looks not-bad). If you want, leaving extra padding columns on the right (empty divs) will probably keep the current look.

But, the game is pretty cool, and it's pretty good for something made in three days. (I've seen worse.)

- Tomash, who didn't plan on this getting so long, and hopes he's not being too harsh

but it looks like I was wrong! This game is pure awesomeness. One question, though, do our Pokégone retain their levels when they evolve, or does it start over? Simply curious because I've been keeping records.

You have amazed me yet again.

You magician!
You wizard!
You sorcerer!

This is cool as hell, and I will partake in it posthaste.
It would be a little bit weird if it doesn't meet the standards I'm setting, now.

Share your gym cdes here! Make sure not to share your save cdes by accident.

To make sure the codes share prperly, please replace any instances of > with &-g-t-; (without the dashes), and any instances f < with &-l-t-;.

And enjy yourself!

hS

First off, I'd have to agree with HG about the balance between the badfic and the mission. There were multiple points where I wasn't sure what your agents were talking about—September being surprised by "the Excaliber blade," the incense being an aphrodisiac—because you didn't show the actual badfic text.

The mission itself also feels very mechanical. Neither agent did or said very much that distinguished them from each other. I feel like you could have switched their names around and the story wouldn't have been all that different. I feel like you missed some good potential moments for characterization by telling rather than showing. The line "September knew that they weren't allowed to drink on duty, but also knew that Synthale's effects could be dismissed easily." is fairly dull on its own. You could have written a much larger scene here that could have allowed both agents to shine.

A few technical things to note:
— There are extra paragraph spaces around the seventh paragraph on the first page (the one that starts "Kelly sighed…").
—It should be "coming to," not "coming-to" on the final page.
— This is more a subjective technical note, but single-sentence paragraphs should only be used for either dialogue or as a means of emphasizing lines. The second paragraph on the first page fits neither category and could easily be merged with the following paragraph. Or you could throw in a line of dialogue; as simple as September saying "What's up?" or similar.

There's a great deal of potential here. You could do so much with these two provided you put in the time and the effort. Maybe try writing some interludes focusing on both agents and their interactions. I've always found that to be a good way to find out who characters are and what they're like.

Best of luck with your next mission.

PC

I didn’t cringe and flail about obviously missed opportunities, and the agents didn’t look like talking heads (does that count as two instances of praise?), so that’s certainly some progress from the previous mission.

Alas, I felt like the mission doesn’t give me a good representation of the badfic. It’s hard to find the right mixture of quotes, recap, and showing the agents’ reactions to events, and since I never actually tried to do it myself, I can’t give good advice on this. Does the badfic ripp off an actual Star Trek episode I should be familiar with? That might explain why some sentences seem still to be incomprehensible even after I read the badfic, specifically:

"The incense is an aphrodisiac, (how does September know this) and I guess it was supposed to be an accident, (in the canon episode?) but then she admitted that she's 'known to screw around with everyone's mind.'"

"Picard wouldn't have that much trouble staying in control around a beautiful woman, not when Riker's just flirting."
Why is this brought up while the agents are in a part of the badfic where Picard and Riker aren’t even mentioned? And looking further up both in the mission and the badfic, I still don’t see to what this may refer.

Technical errors:

In the title, An elf in Star Trek, "Elf" should be capitalized (and in the previous mission’s title, An Elf In Narnia, "in" should probably not be capitalized.

September whispered. "The incense is an aphrodisiac ..."
Don’t English punctuation rules say that the period after "whispered" should be a comma?

Kim set the RA for a couple hours ahead.
Who is Kim? Did you mean Kelly?

HG

... considering that I already did two reviews in a row.

So, for now I’ll only say:

• The wiki has been updated.
  
• I’m taking back the "I’m afraid" from the end of my last review.

HG

First up, I'm going to admit that I haven't opened the doc up yet, but I think a couple of things need to be said before I do.

Right, 'I didn't manage to find a beta...' You put up a post asking for a beta for this mission on the 2nd June, and then haven't really mentioned it since, alright I'll agree that no-one said they'd definitely beta this for you then, but you could have asked again at some other time for people to beta it, like you did with the Harry Potter/Dollhouse mission. Instead there's one post mentioning it over a month ago and after one failed try it's 'I didn't manage to find a beta'. Hell, if you'd emailed me about it I would have been willing to beta it for you, Star Trek may not be my forte but I know enough about it to be able to beta a mission in it (so long as its not DS9) and I'd have been willing to look over it if you'd needed someone to. I always find that the best thing to do if you don't have something is ask, ask and ask again, there are a couple of tutors at my old uni who I swear would be happy if they didn't see another email from me again because of the amount of times I pestered them with questions about how to do certain bits of maths.

Secondly, it's always good to see mission's popping up on the board, but I think it may not be a bad idea for you to slow down just a bit. I don't mean this in any rude way, but I think that slowing down the speed you're writing missions at would perhaps help, I understand that people write at different speeds and I'm quite happy to plod along quite slowly, but taking a breather isn't a bad thing, I always find I spot more of my own mistakes if I take breaks between me writing something and me reading it through, sometimes those breaks last a couple of days, sometimes they're a few hours, but by taking those breaks I find that when I come back to the piece of writing I'm able to give it a more critical eye and spot more errors than if I'm reading it through almost immediately after writing it.

Once again, I don't mean to be rude, or for anything to be taken the wrong way, but personally I feel that these things need to be said. If you want to call me out of either of these points, or want me to explain anything that I've said I'm happy to do so either on the board on by email (ig you can't find my email it should be linked at the top)

Storme Hawk

Anything he imagines comes true ...

How does this work? What happens if he imagines something implausible or physically impossible (supposed the setting isn’t so magically that nothing actually is impossible)?

I imagine "K’eth" attempting to cross a road, and he thinks Uh, this is a dangerous situation. I may be run over by a truck. CRASH!

How would such experiences inform his personality? Would he become overly cautious, never daring to do anything dangerous, because he can’t avoid imagining possible consequences?

Ah, no. I see he became reckless, never thinking about consequences, because that’s the only way to avoid them.

Why does he have all those redundant weapons? Can’t he just grab a stick and imagine that it transforms into the weapon he needs?

Well, I imagine that’s actually how he got "Fearstriker"; he just imagined it, and then he kept it, because carrying a sword around is easier than imagining it again when he needs it again. So, "imagining" isn’t easy, it takes some toll (I wonder what that might be).

Played in the right way, "K’eth" may be an interesting character. Put into the wrong hands, he may become a terrible Gary Stu. So keep him, play him, make him grow!

The others didn’t tickle my imagination in the same way, and I don’t see the point in creating characters when you apparently don’t intend to use them anyway.

HG

PS: Agent Hieronymus’s Power of Imagination doesn’t plagiarize "K’eth". It has been part of his characterization ever since I realized that Androia’s Universal Translator not translating his German expletives (writing exercise, January 2014) can’t be caused by the preferences he may have set on his UT.

I've RPed with K'eth (both the user and the character); K'eth the character honestly doesn't seem like too much of a Gary Stu to me. From what I understand, he's an anthropomorphic personification of imagination; his reality-altering abilities are an extension of that.

As for a personality: he's a trickster god. He delights in screwing with people, and thinks that (among other things) angry demigods are the most hilarious thing he's ever seen. He never causes or intends lasting harm; he's an all-powerful prankster who hates boredom and dullness.

Sues meet their goals without effort... K'eth just happens to not really have any goals beyond his own entertainment. He's a creature of whims, with no far-reaching ambitions or plans. All he wants to do is make life more interesting (even if that involves randomly turning into a girl and making out with someone, which he has done before).

Is he fit for duty as a PPC agent? Absolutely not. While not truly a Stu (at least in my mind), he's still a reality-warper and he probably wouldn't get along with the Flowers. He's too powerful for Action departments, and unlike Jenni he wouldn't keep his powers in check because he'd probably be eternally bored without them.

I can't really speak for the rest of K'eth's OCs; I'm not as familiar with them as I am with the Embodiment of Imagination.

Just looked at your page and - oooooh, Monster Hunter, huh? Nice!

I'll take a look at your characters later and probably talk to you about them by e-mail, that is if you can be a dear and please pass me your address. ;)

It's a halfway between "I HAVE NO IDEA" and me just wanting to see your reactions. If it makes you feel any better, the one known as Voyd, liked the first character shown.

Why ARE you showing thse in the first place? I mean, it seems like you don't want concrit, it halfway seems like you don't even want people to look at it. So... why?

Sorry this is late.

July, I tried to text you today, but my phone is suddenly incapable of sending or receiving pictures over text. So here's what I tried to send you earlier:


Clyde the great, big monitor lizard says, "Happy Birthday to July! Hope you have lots of delicious quail to eat!"

—Don't mind doctorlit; he just takes his massive lizard for a walk sometimes.

Please have this black-hole chocolate cake.

Here's to hoping that you'll still be around for many more fractions of orbits around the galactic core!

you're covered in glue,
the decorations are made of glue,
the table is covered in glue,
my present is glue,
the ocean is all just blue glue,
glue, glue, glue,
happy birthday!
Glue!

Mazaltov!

Happy birthday my elemental opposite! Hope your big day is great!

~Mattman, who beat you with dates but definately not years

Have this Bleepolate ice cream cake... it was not easy to make.

I went into this having no idea what Tokyo Mew Mew might be. I couldn’t say that I know everything about it now, but I got a sufficient impression to see what’s wrong with the badfic.

While trying to whatch Tokyo Mew Mew, the agents get into a dispute about Sailor Moon.It looks just like real life, although I don’t really understand what they are talking about, not knowing much more about this than I know about Tokyo Mew Mew. And then Ami reminds us that she isn’t human, and a totally unreal Delibird accepts the mission throwing a gift. Yeah, that’s HQ.

When gravity kicked in and Wile E. Coyote was referred, I started to smile, and I never stopped until the assassination. I like your humor.

There are some potential continuity errors:

"That’s not how fire works. At all," said Miguel, catching the falling apostrophe.
But then:
Chris caught the fallen apostrophe and put it in his backpack with the spare periods.
Is this another apostrophe? Where did it come from?
Or did Miguel throw the apostrophe he had cought at Chris so that he could stow it away? Apparently not, because later Miguel threw the apostrope at [the Stu].

Also:
Chris pulled out the first volume and looked at the opening pages.
Later:
“Hey, uh, question: What’s a ‘predasite’?” asked Chris, indicating part of the Words and putting away the first volume so he didn’t drop it in the next scene shift.
Even later:
Chris passed the first volume to Ami, who checked the chapter where Mint showed up.
So he still held it in his hand? Or when did he pull it out again? And what does he need Ami for? Last time we watched Chris was perfectly able to check it himself.

And:
“Not for long, you’re not, “ Ami grumbled. She kicked the mini-Stu that appeared into both the other mini-Stu’s body and a back wall of the café.
She kicked "otaci" into whom’s body? Is "ostachui" (or his corpse?) still around after the scene change? I thought "ichiog" and "inchigo" had killed him at "the beach boardwalk amusement park". (This may actually be the body of "itachi", spawned on the roller coaster, but apparently you didn’t notice "itachi" until he respawned at the audition.)

(Who is Kiki? Pudding’s name from the dub, misspelled? Figuring this out took me a while.)

Taking over the fic and telling the confrontation with the agents from the canons’ POV is not seen often and may actually be the first time; if done, it’s usually the Suvian’s POV. It works really well here, as does resetting canon by singing the theme song.

Ah well, the assassination. It put me off. It looked too much like torture for my taste. When I found the scene in the Floating Hyacinth’s office at the end, I expected for a moment that she was going to call them out for that.

HG

Thanks for bringing me along, too.

Thanks for bringing me in as a beta! And good gods, even if I don't know this continuum I could tell this fic was horrible. Well done sporking it! :)

Androia never got further than from Teldrassil to Moonglade and Darkshore (pre-Cataclysm).

The typo S.M.F. noticed is here:
Below them stretched the Jade Forest, green treetops and pink cherry blossoms as far as they eye could see.

You don’t get a proper review because I couldn’t say anything that was not already said better, and since I couldn’t find two points of criticism I can’t take Poor Cynic’s expanded challenge anyway.

HG

I like how you lightened up on the angst.

It seems a little like the question of abortion or adoption with the debugger, but not so horrific to contemplate because she's not bonded to the fetus yet.

Yes! Yes! Love it, love it, love it. This is perfect, and finally these two catch a break. Only one question: Does Zeb know what Ave knows about his existence? I can't believe that just now came to me.

I can tell you know and love this game as much as the Aviator does. ^^ The descriptions of both Azeroth and Mt. Coronet were stunning.

I think I caught one instance of a "they" instead of a "the," but I can't for the life of me recall where it is. |D It's not a big deal, though.

Everything charcter-wise is progressing at a reasonable pace, and I definitely envy your agents for their food. XD

Thank you for writing!

Not much to say, really, except that the bit about Rhonin's speech made me chuckle and that it made my bad mood just a bit less bad?

Aviator and Zeb having some time for themselves, with moderate shenanigans, and mostly fun and good feelings? An as pure as possible moment of calm and heartwarming for both of them, but with enough sadness beneath to keep it realistic (Which could get a bit spoiled by the discovery of Supernatural and its tendance to chew all of its characters...)?

*pinches* It's really happening, woohoo!

I need a track to go with that.

Oh, and a small jab at Ellie's name. It will still be that one, right?

Expanding past for Zeb? Fry says this better than me.



Nuff said.

On a last note, what would be the Department Ave would be transferring for? On one handd, after the DMS, it could be vacations of another sort, on the minus side, it would mean less stories with her... Well, you're the boss, that will be your call.

Please keeps writing, Ix. Whatever the character, you rock.

I especially liked how Rina is finally opening up to the thought of talking about her pregnancy. Yoy did a good job showing her development from "Don't talk about it" to "I could really get behind this".

I just fear that the Flowers might throw a Bleepfic, or even a Legendary, at them the second they return!

Just got back from seeing it myself. Final verdict?

There were enough changes for this to be its own movie, but it retained the same feel as the original. I got the impression it was pretty much one big love letter to the 1984 version.

Definitely can't wait for it to come out on DVD.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

And bigfeet. Remember, where there are yeti, bigfeet will not be far.
We, and our big (or small, or possibly medium sized) feet shall await your return.

and he's ready to build a shack.

Welcome!
And, er, no worries!

I guess I'll have to crank up your angst filter I gave you last time you returned.

Was a bit concerned about your post, but now your'e back. Nice for things to be normal again.

Heh. "normal"

I need to howl my excitement to the moon for a bit. In fact, between this and his appearance in Rebels, I think I'll howl at the sun for good measure.

*Zorencopters to the sky*

It's him! And with Zahn at the commands! Hurrah! Please don't wake me up.

Now, I can only wish than Revan and Surik get the same favor someday. Please.

Hooray for laptops with trackpads! :P

*wanders off to play QWOP*

And if you're still looking for top-quality fanfics, I recommend the "Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail" series by owlet on AO3. Set after "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," the stories follow a deprogramming Bucky as he protects Steve from various HYDRA goons and generally adjusts to the future. Naturally, each of the other founding Avengers (and the Falcon) eventually play a role.

I found them consistently funny and interesting, though the parts dealing with Bucky's experiences as the Asset/Winter Soldier get sad and scary.

So you'll always look awesome. We're glad to have you!

It seems everyone else has covered the basics, so I'll just say welcome to the PPC! Hope you enjoy your stay.

Oh, and take this floating hammer dulcimer as a newbie gift. I don't know how to play the thing and it keeps bumping into my floating chandelier, so hopefully you can give it a better home than I can.

Please have this pot of black-hole coffee, and enjoy your stay here at the madhouse.

Hello, and welcome aBoard! For your newbie gift, take this plate of freshly-made SPaGhetti!

Since it looks like everyone else beat me to my usual questions, I'll just say I hope you like it here!

By any chance, is your username a reference to Pathfinder? Because I'm uncannily reminded of Aroden, the god of humanity.

Welcome, welcome! Make yourself comfortable and have a slice of Infinite Pizza! :D

Welcome, any other appellation. Great to have you here, I'm a big fan, brilliant to see that you've left the cubby-hole, very proud.

My gift to you is: rotten meat, as a healthy reminder of your own mortality.
It's the great equaliser, you know. Even I'll die, one day.
Even me!

Welcome!

Hello there! Congratulations for finding your way to this corner of the internet. You get a guava. *Flees from Iximaz*

Have this Royal Ice Cream Container! Close lid, state desired ice cream flavor, open lid, enjoy. It has infinite refills and doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter, assuming you can make yourself small enough to fit in it.

Here, have a hamster in a teacup.

Have you read the Constitution already? What are your fandoms?

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

Does the writer sell it? I remember someone once complaining about a Lucy Pevensie/Sea Girl fic, but when almost everyone read it, they (myself included) thought it was extraordinarily well done. Personally, I'd rather read a non-canonical shipfic that's well done than a flat, lifeless canon ship any day. In fact, though I know this is heresy, I prefer almost anything* to the official canon ships for Harry Potter. IMO, JK Rowling didn't really sell the pairings. They were all believable for high school sweethearts, but to jump from that to "babies ever after" seemed a bit much, to me.

So - yeah, I'm all for it, as a fic type. As with just about any genre, my first and foremost qualification is Is It Well Written. Everything else is semantics.


*yes, really, anything. Even the canon pairings, which I have seen done well from time to time.

I'm the boring kind of fan who ships mostly canon and strongly-implied-to-be-canon ships. (Except Finn/Poe, because we need more interracial gay relationships between two complete dorks.) I also firmly believe that friendships are just as adorable and worthy of protection as regular ships. Not sure how I feel about crossover ships just yet.

Basically, as long as it's not creepy or stupidly out of character and you write or draw it well, I'll support your decision/right to ship it even if I don't ship it myself. Does that make sense?

When it has a monopoly over all fics and the fandom's culture. Which it does the majority of the time.

However, sometimes there are ships that simply occur just because. A pretty good example is the Plants vs. Zombies continua, as the characters have really bare bones personality, to the point that you could replace them without having to kill them. A pretty good example is Peashooter x Sunflower. While cute in the hands of talented artists and writers, there's no reason that the two would ever want to get together, since they lack any characteristics to do so, because those parts are blank slates. At this rate, Sunflower x Blover would be a more realistic ship, since they worked with each other in the Chinese version.

Speaking of which, I'm considering labeling said continuum as a damaged one with its own rules for badfic (charge-worthy material shouldn't be charged unless it's actually bad/uncreative/Suvian, and unless it's bad psychology) (don't worry, I thought it through), and I'm currently trying to write an agent who comes from it. But I digress.

Shipping doesn't really hurt anyone after all. Certain ships I may not agree with, but honestly I will protect your right to ship whatever you want as long as it's clear you understand what the implications of certain relationships are.

If it's canon compliant, great! This can include anything from canon ships, to ships the creator(s) have said could work even if they aren't canon, to ships that have been blatantly teased. If the characters are in a platonic relationship, that's where things get a little trickier. Are they the kinds of characters who would go "Ew, no, X is like a brother/sister to me/We're friends and that's it", or would they be possibly open to a relationship with them? If it's the latter, then sure, go for it.

If it's not canon compliant, be it that the creator(s) have said "Nope, no way, not in a million years", the characters actively hate each other and would have to be massively OOC for it to work, et cetera.

Of course, like all things, there are always exceptions. I have seen very well-written Leah Clearwater/Castiel before, and they're from two completely different canons. Do I ship it? Not really. (okay, maybe a little after seeing how well it can be done...) But good writing is good writing, and I enjoyed it immensely. I have seen well-written Dramione. I still don't ship that because there's just no way it would ever happen in canon. But the fic made it work, and work amazingly well.

So I would say: For the most part, keep things canon, because that's the easiest way to make it work. But if you can somehow pull off a noncanon ship, then write it, too!

I think that canon ships are obviously fine. I'm also cool with IC, canon-friendly ships. Breaking canon ships, OOC ships and the like are verboten, in my opinion.

Specifically the shipping of people in a platonic relationship.
Romantic 'I want to nob you and make a mini-me burst out of your stomach in blood and poop and screams' love is pretty overdosed, from what I've seen.
There are very few cases where there will be two nice-looking lead characters of opposing gender who don't end up doing the romantic thing. And even when they don't, it's usually implied, or used for tension, or teased.

It's a bit of a breath of fresh air, then, seeing such a cliche not being used, and it then seems short-sighted when a fan comes in and immediately decides that the cliche is desperately needed in this work, too, and omg their so purfect 2gether they both lik massaging sheep omg ^-^!!!1!two!11!!
Seems to imply a bit of an odd, slightly outdated attitude with all that gender relations stuff, but that's really probably just my horrific paranoia. Don't go quoting me.

I mean, I don't doubt it's been done well. I don't have anything against shipping, or romance in general.
Just a bit annoying, to me.

I'm fine with canon ships, and ships that are left ambiguously defined, but my experience with shipping is that it gets wildly out of hand. When people start plotting out romantic/erotic fantasies with characters who have a relationship that's been firmly established as platonic, or adversarial, it causes me pain. That's not even mentioning the OOC of the characters involved, or the sudden sexuality switch when this happens. It's just as ridiculous when the characters that have never interacted, and have no good reason to are shipped.

That being said unnecessary romance has always been among my greatest pet peeves so I'm writing this with a chip on my shoulder.

If you can write a convincing Susan Pevensie/Maglor Feanorion story (for example ^_^), then that's great! Write it! I love it when people write stuff.

If, on the other hand, you can't make Han/Leia convincing... then don't write it. Write something you can do justice to.

For me, the important thing in fiction has always been canon-friendliness, not necessarily canonicity. (Unless you're claiming it's canon, of course.)

hS

If so, I'd like to offer my agents' assistance. Ouran is an amazing show and I didn't realize until now how much I wanted (my characters) to visit that particular 'verse.

Oh hey, this actually applies to me. I confess I did not expect that; I was just killing time while the Minecraft server had a heart attack. *blink blink*

Well, I do know both those canons, as it happens, though only the anime of Ouran. I don't know if I'm up for co-writing, but I can certainly help with any canon questions and possibly beta, depending on timing. Feel free to e-mail me to discuss further: neshomeh [dot] soul [at] gmail [dot] com

~Neshomeh

Can't really help out here, but oh boy that sounds like a ride. Good luck.

Now, there's something about Mudsdale that nobody seems to have picked up on, namely its style. People talk about it being a "Trojan horse" Pokémon because of its mane, which is in large part styled after a Trojan helmet. However, this doesn't tell the whole story, and it doesn't explain the long, thick bits of hair hanging down at the side. I can explain it, and more to the point, I will.

See, I dunno if you know this, but there's a very, very famous record label that specializes in reggae music. Y'all may know that reggae is deeply associated with the Rastafari movement, which demands its practitioners wear dreadlocks. That label's name?

Trojan Records.

I put it to you that Mudsdale's very design is an elaborate compound pun on the part of the Pokémon Company's design team, which features at least one British national in James Turner. He's the first Westerner to be inducted into the hallowed halls of Game Freak's design coterie, where he designed the lines of Mandibuzz, Vanilluxe, and Golurk for Generation 5, and the Trevenant line for Generation 6. While I can't say for certain if he designed Mudsdale, it's not outside the realms of possibility that he may have had a hand in it.

So yeah. We have our first Rastamon. I suppose that explains the weakness to Grass. =]

It's my second Boardiversary today! Yay!! (Well, it's 11:30 PM where I'm at, but might as well put this out there before it's too late... =w=)

Adorable! Why are so many Fairy types just so kittening cute? Of course, Mimikyu is sitting on the line between adorable and scary.

That second last one's no new Pokemon - why, that's just a Pikachu!
What nerve!
What scoundrels!
Who do they think they're fooling, blatantly reusing an old, popular Pokemon in their new game?

Initial reactions:

Wimpod: "Hahaha, it's called wimp, and it runs away, haha."

Bounsweet: "N'awww, it looks kinda like Hoppip!"

Comfey: "Is that a lei?"

Mudsdale: "BIG MAC MUD PONY!"

Mimikyu: "...It's a Doodlebob Pikachu."

Bewear: "It's a pink red panda teddy, huh?"

After watching it again: I want a Mudsdale already, that looks so awesome ;-; Actually, a team of horse(ish) Pokémon to pull my chariot sounds really good now. Rapidash, Zebstrika, Sawsbuck, Mudsdale, Girafarig, Kingdra (What? it's a seahorse...).

(and in general, what's going on with the weird characters)
I'm going to start with a computer history lesson before I admit to silly mistakes made years ago. Part of this is that I'm interested in all this stuff generally. Scroll rapidly if you don't mind being slightly confused.

Internally, computers have to represent the letters we post on the Board as numbers in order to do anything with them. This causes a problem: how do we assign numbers to letters? If two computers don't agree on what the numbers they're sending each other represent, you can get weird garbage text.

In the olden days, most of the Engilsh-speaking world standardized on ASCII (after some politics), which uses numbers between 0 and 2⁷-1 (127) to represent the characters available on a standard US keyboard and some other stuff.

This choice posed a problem for people who wrote with letters other than A-Z, or who didn't use $ for their currency, etc. They obviously wanted the computer to be able to use their characters, and they also wanted to talk with English-speaking people (and/or use their programs) without too much pain.

To solve this problem (at least around Europe[1]), people realized that bytes could go up to 255, and ASCII stopped at 127. This meant that they could fit any missing symbols they needed between 128 and 255.

Now this was a great idea, except that you couldn't fit all the missing letters into the 128 available slots. So, people in different parts of the world simply put in the symbols they cared about and ignored everyone else. And a great confusion was thereby loosed upon the Earth. If you took an email written in one of the Russian encodings and interpreted the bytes with a Western European encoding, it would look like garbage (except for the English). In the worst case, you would have to keep reinterpreting a document with every encoding you could think of until it made sense. Worse, you couldn't mix, say, Greek and Dutch in one document. Madness!

The solution to multiple competing standards is, of course, another standard. A while back, the Unicode consortium decided that the problem was this one-byte thing, and published Unicode. The theory behind Unicode is simple: any character that people have used to write text, or any character that has appeared in a character encoding used by computers somewhere[2], should be given a number (or sequence of numbers, in some cases). The committee has given themselves the numbers between 0 and 2²¹-1 to work with, and they've got plenty of room left.

Then, there was the question of how to represent this Unicode thing in computers. Just storing a sequence of 4-byte numbers seemed wasteful to English speakers (especially since any text would be 3/4ths 0 bytes), which would have killed the project. It also wasn't compatible with ASCII. The committee then came up with a clever solution called UTF-8, which uses [128,255] in a clever way to represent all of Unicode in a way that makes all ASCII text valid UTF-8[3].

Now on to our problems here on the Board. We (obviously) mostly post in ASCII, which is contained by most legacy European encodings and also UTF-8. The Board declares that the pages it sends us are in an encoding called "Windows-1252", which contains several symbols and many accented latin letters on top of ASCII.

However, our posts are all over the place. Sometimes, we post our non-English things in UTF-8. Sometimes, we post in Windows-1252. This is all up to our web browsers, and we can't really do much about it as far as I can tell.

So, when I was scraping the Board, I had to deal with all this. T-Board, like a lot of recent software, stores all its text as UTF-8-encoded Unicode. So, I had to convert the Board posts to UTF-8. However, this would get weird if the posts were already UTF-8. I decided to try to interpret every post as Windows-1252, and re-encode it as UTF-8. If the process didn't work, the text was already in UTF-8, and we could move on. Failed applications of this rule is where all the  and В come from, since some UTF-8 is also valid Windows-1252. If you want to fix them, see the runnable one-liner I created at this link.

This all sound straightforward, but there was a problem. When I wrote the archive script, I made a one-character typo in the encoding-related code. This resulted in, among other things, our love of "Pokйmon" instead of "Pokémon". I have fixed the results of this mess in my copy of the Board scrape, and will probably be posting re-encoded archives with the 2016-2017 archive season (that is, next summer)[4].

Now, I would like to offer a plate of session cookies to the first person that figures out what typo I made. Hint: look at row E of this chart and also this chart.

tl;dr: Tomash is a huge nerd, and also makes silly mistakes. Programming can be tricky, folks.

[1]: I don't know much about historical Asian, Arabic, etc. encodings, so I don't really know what they came up with

[2]: This is so that, you can go from encoding X to Unicode to X to Unicode ... without losing any information ever.[2.1]

[2.1]: This is where emoji came from. Japanese cell phone carriers encoded emoji, each in their own way, and the Unicode committee eventually promulgated a standard that all the carriers could agree on. Then, smartphone vendors had to support the Unicode group's decision, the characters became available on Western phones out of sheer laziness, and here we are.

[3]: This meant many Asian scripts went from a system with two bytes for many characters to three, but you can't please everyone, sadly.
[4]: Unless someone really wants them now. In that case, please ask.

My only quibble is that it's hard to tell where one thread ends and another begins, and what order the posts were made in... but heck, it's better than the spreadsheet. At least this doesn't take half a day to load! {= D

~Neshomeh, who will update wiki links as she finds them and encourages others to do the same.

That's a pretty extensive backlog. Thanks so much for putting it all in one place.

Oh jeez, my introductory post was so cringeworthy looking back. Dear lord.

But I couldn't stop giggling through that. I'm not sure if this MST makes a more compelling case of looking up the source material, or avoiding as for all eternity.

That is a massively fun story to MST, it really is practically written for it. And you still managed to outdo the hilarity of the text itself! Impressive. I really enjoyed the interactions between Binkle and Finch - they're an excellent pair.

Ah, good times, good times. Life is always better with Grignr around.

Did I say 'better'?

I went into this for one reason: to reread some of The Eye of Argon. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the MST part of it actually complemented the experience. So hey! Good job.

I think what makes it good is the parts where you use the MST to highlight something that you'd skip over if you were just reading. 'Lustfully' is probably the classic example here, or maybe the right arm. Or... yeah, on rereading, you've done this pretty consistently. Hooray!

hS, actually reading something this month!

Alas, most MSTs don’t work for me, probably because I miss too many of the foreign language puns.

Anyway, thanks for the warning. The Eye of Argon is unbearable even in this format. I’ll make sure to never read it.

HG

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N2H6rRhmn1gxTOfooQnQBYapCHteZ5cgouzeUk3TJnw

Is having a fifth Pevensie common? I had this old thing lying around, but don't think I'm skilled enough to mission it.

Blueberry seems like she would make a good riding instructor.