User blog:Neshomeh/What Neshomeh Is Up To

Hi, guys! I've been thinking for a while that I might make use of this blog service to give myself a handy checklist of what I'm doing on the wiki and elsewhere PPC-wise, and to make myself a little more transparent and accountable. This might also give me a place to talk about stuff like obscure orthographic rules, or whatever else is buzzing in my bonnet. We'll see!

Treatment of Titles and Capitalization
Status: Ongoing

The "titles" project started with editing all the continua pages, continued into editing all the agent pages, and keeps on anytime I see a page with incorrectly styled titles.

Just a reminder: titles of long works get italics. Titles of short works get "double quotes" on pages with American usage or 'single quotes' on pages with UK/Commonwealth usage. Please remember this when you're editing. It feels really bad when people don't bother after all the work I've put in.

As for capitalization, we in the PPC have a bad habit of capitalizing lots of words that aren't generally supposed to be capitalized, like "agent" and "department," and not capitalizing words that should be capitalized, like "Bleeprin." I wrote a whole article about capitalization to clear things up, and it covers the treatment of titles, too.

Updating Department/Division Pages
Status: In progress

This is a current project. After finishing all the agent pages, I decided my next move was departments and divisions. Lots of the current pages are not very informative, the information that is there is sometimes dubious or just plain wrong, and there's no consistency from page to page. I'm converting them all to a standard format and updating them with properly sourced information. I've started with the most popular action departments and their divisions. I'll go through the rest in alphabetical order (probably), then move on to infrastructure, then security and the defunct departments with pages.

My progress:


 * Action Departments
 * Department of Mary Sues - Complete
 * Division of Multiple Offenses - Complete
 * Department of Bad Slash - Complete
 * Division of Bad Het - Complete
 * Division of Mpreg - Complete
 * Department of Implausible Crossovers - Complete
 * Despatch - Complete (Not technically a division, but so closely related I think it should be.)
 * Department of Floaters - Complete
 * Division of Cool and Unusual Punishment - Complete
 * Eclectic Subdivision of Advanced Species - Complete
 * Special Interdepartmental Elven Languages Unit - Complete
 * Special Operations Division - Complete
 * All-Purpose Department - Complete
 * Department of Angst - Complete
 * Department of Bad Parody - Complete
 * Troll Division - Complete
 * Department of Character Protective Services - Complete
 * Department of Geographical Aberrations - Incomplete
 * Department of Improbabilities - Incomplete
 * Department of Improbable AUs - Incomplete
 * Department of Misplaced Flora and Fauna - Incomplete
 * Department of Out of Character Hobbits - Incomplete
 * Department of Plagiarism - Incomplete
 * Department of Redundancy Department - Incomplete
 * Department of Technical Errors - Incomplete
 * Department of Temporal Offenses - Incomplete
 * Department of WhatThe - Incomplete
 * Disturbing Acts of Violence Department - Incomplete
 * Repetitive Department of Repetition - Incomplete


 * Infrastructure Departments
 * Department of Dead Author Electricity Generation - Incomplete
 * Department of Fictional Psychology - Incomplete
 * Department of Finance - Incomplete
 * Department of Intelligence - Incomplete
 * Department of Mary Sue Experiments and Research - Incomplete
 * Department of Operations - Incomplete
 * Building Maintenance - Incomplete
 * Janitorial Division - Incomplete
 * The Nursery - Incomplete
 * Department of Personnel - Incomplete
 * Department of Sufficiently Advanced Technology - Incomplete
 * A/V Division - Complete
 * Testing & Applications Division - I'll probably make a page for this.
 * Legal Department - Incomplete
 * Medical Department - Incomplete
 * Medical Research Division - Incomplete
 * Veterinary Ward - Incomplete
 * Postal Department - Incomplete


 * Security and Defunct Departments
 * Department of External Security - Incomplete
 * Department of Internal Affairs - Incomplete
 * Department of Internal Operations - Incomplete
 * Department of Internal Security - Incomplete
 * Admin Department - Incomplete
 * Department for Elf Protection - Complete
 * Department of Author Correspondence - Incomplete
 * Department of Clichéd Humor - Incomplete
 * Department of Culture - Complete
 * Department of Emergencies - Complete
 * Department of Godplayers - Incomplete

Mary Sue Article Rewrite
Status: On hold

This is an effort to describe what causes a Mary Sue rather than the symptoms of a Mary Sue. This is a sensitive issue and requires careful wording, and I take it very seriously. Unfortunately, that makes me a little scared of it, but it will be done when I've worked up the nerve to tackle it again.

Redirects
Status: When I feel like it

This is just something I can do to keep busy when my brain isn't firing on all cylinders. Basically, I'm going down the list of redirects, looking for ones that are unused, misspelled, redundant, needless word forms (i.e., you can make CAD into CADs just by sticking "s" outside the square brackets around "CAD," so we don't need a redirect for "CADs"; this is also why naming articles in the singular is important), or otherwise stupid. When I find one, I fix the links on pages that need it, then delete the redirect page.

This is useful because it gets me editing pages that I otherwise wouldn't think to look at, so I can make general improvements while I'm at it. Also, when you type three or four characters of a link, the wiki prompts you with options to finish the link. I think actual pages are supplied first, but redirects are also included. You can't select a term that doesn't exist at all, though, so getting rid of dumb options means people won't be able to put them on pages by accident.

However, I'm avoiding redirects that are used to a great extent. For instance, the plural redirect "Agents" is extremely widely used. I'll fix it if I come across it on a page I'm editing for other reasons, but I'm not gonna sit down and plow through all 50+ of them. >.< Generally, if the list of "What links here" looks bigger than 5-7, I'm outta there unless it's really, really stupid.

Writing PPC Stories
Status: In progress


 * Co-write with Phobos - In progress
 * Nume & Jenni prequel - In progress
 * Derik & Gall mission - In progress
 * Nume & Ilraen mission - On hold

I'm mostly focusing on the Nume & Jenni prequel and the Derik & Gall mission. Some part of my brain is trying to figure out how to proceed with the co-write, but I'm at a tricky place with lots of moving parts. I have a mission picked out for Nume & Ilraen, and in fact I have an intro written for it, but they needed some downtime after "Blood Raining Night" and "Ten Years Thence."

Updating My Website(s)
Status: On hold

Neshomeh's Archive was old and clunky and ugly. I've made it new and nice and shiny with CSS. There's real site navigation! There's new content to actually explain what's what and make the site approachable for new visitors, even ones who haven't necessarily heard of the PPC before! It has a few problems with Internet Explorer, especially older versions, but... it's Internet Explorer. It's hard to care. {= P I'm waiting until I get a new laptop, which will actually have IE on it, to put more effort into this.

Eventually I'll convert PPC: The Lost Tales to CSS, too. The appearance won't change, so this should be pretty quick and easy after practicing on my main site. (Assuming Tripod doesn't decide to freeze my account for no good reason again.)

Indexing the Original Series
Status: On hold

The Irish Samurai is helping me out with this by doing most of the actual work of hunting down mentions of significant people, places, things, and concepts. I'll just have to look it over and encode it when he's done. Irish, you're my hero!

March Madness Prizes
Status: '' I swear to god this is still a thing I'm doing! ''

I'm working on it. I am. Just very, very slowly. Here's what I have done and still intend to do:


 * Trojie - drawing of Lasa and Mombi - Complete
 * Miah - mission beta - Complete
 * Bronwyn - drawing of plushie!Bryn - Complete
 * IndeMaat - beta for NCIS mission - Complete
 * Makari - drawing of Samuel - Complete
 * Elcalion - drawing of Logan - Complete
 * Cassie - drawing of Cara, William, and Stephanie - Complete
 * Ekyl - drawing of Basilico Andretti and the Tiger Lily - Not started
 * hS - drawing of Dafydd and pregnant!Constance - Not started
 * Tomato - a constructive review - Not started (Tomato, post something and I can do this right away!)
 * Araeph - drawing of Mara and Isaiah - Not started
 * JulyFlame - drawing of the Board of Flowers - On hold
 * Phobos - drawing of Barid & Brightbeard - On hold

July and Phobos kindly told me they'd wait until I'd done everyone else's. Also, I took some folks off the list who aren't around anymore&mdash;my deepest apologies to them, and to everyone who's still waiting. > /// <;

PPC: The Complete Archive
Status: This is going to take forever

Also known as Project Save All the Things, this is my mad scheme to prevent any more loss of old spin-offs by copying them to my laptop so I can easily replace anything that goes down. I'm going to start by saving all the remaining spin-offs I don't already have that are listed on Miss Cam's site, then move on to fanfiction.net, LiveJournal, anything that looks particularly old or vulnerable to random deletion, and anything I would particularly hate to lose. Next, I take over the world everything else.

I'm going to aim to save at least one spin-off a week. There will be no list here, because dear god, that would get huge.

If you want to help, please do! Jump in wherever you like! Duplication is not a bad thing when it comes to backing up data. {= )