• Member Since 3rd Sep, 2011
  • offline last seen 7 hours ago

PresentPerfect


Fanfiction masochist. :B She/they https://ko-fi.com/presentperfect

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  • Saturday
    Twilight the 没用

    Yesterday, a fellow named SoothingBell asked if they could translate Twilight the Useless to Chinese, and no way was I gonna say no. :D

    And they turned it around in 24 hours, amazing!

    https://fimtale.com/t/64723

    4 comments · 130 views
  • 1 week
    Idle musing

    so-called because that's what led me to the realization

    What is so compelling about the idea of "warrior woman runs afoul of a wizard and is flung centuries into the future" that I made it happen twice?

    ...And with slightly more musing, I also realize, in a roundabout way, it was with the same wizard. >_> Huh.

    Read More

    7 comments · 163 views
  • 1 week
    Fic recs, March 20th!

    Posting a day earlier than usual because the next reading is a long one!

    H: 1 R: 2 C: 1 V: 1 N: 3

    Read More

    6 comments · 191 views
  • 2 weeks
    Fic recs, March 14th!

    Lotus Moon has done a reading of Fleety's What's Philomena's Name?!

    Hey, help out Regidar, he's looking for experimental fics! Self-promotion allowed!

    Read More

    5 comments · 235 views
  • 2 weeks
    Fic recs, March 8th: Top Ten of 2023!

    Whaaaaat, two review blogs in a row?

    Well hell yes, because I have done much better with the top ten this year and I am inordinately pleased with myself! :3 here's the explanation of the setup, for all that it has never adequately explained what's going on to like, literally anyone:

    Read More

    19 comments · 273 views
Sep
1st
2014

Fic recs, September 1st · 2:01pm Sep 1st, 2014

This is mostly the last of the stuff I had saved up before my laptop crashed. So don't freak out that there are audiobook readings in here when I said I wouldn't be doing any for a while. :B Also, I have a theme planned for the next one, assuming I decide to just sit and read a lot over the next week.

My main dude Solitair is reviewing The Immortal Game bit-by-bit over on his journals. You can catch the first installment here and the rest in his blog area!

H: 0 R: 0 C: 4 V: 2 N: 3

With All My Heart by Serina
Reading by TheLostNarrator, et. al.
Genre: ScratchTavia
The moment I heard the EKG beeping in the reading, I knew I wasn’t going to like this. By the end, I was in tears. Though, I was laughing uproariously at the same time; something tells me that was not the author’s intent. We start off with Octavia sitting by Vinyl’s hospital bed. She’s led out of the room and conveniently thinks about how they got together. It’s pretty standard, as ScratchTavia goes, but when the characters in your story comment on how cliche the story they are in is, it’s time to rethink the plot. Vinyl ends up in the hospital because of a heart condition she’s had since she was a filly, which she never told Octavia about because why would you do something like that. (Actually, this can be taken as actual character building for Vinyl; the doctors didn’t expect she’d live very long, so she decided to forget about her heart and live life to the fullest.) Let’s skip ahead to a scene that baffled me: Vinyl wakes up, is thirsty, hits the nurse call, and is inundated with an entire team of nurses. She never actually asks for anything to drink, and the nurses just happen to bring with them Lyra, Bon-Bon, Derpy and Carrot Top. What? Then they tell her she got a heart transplant and that’s why she’s not dead. The she asks “Where’s Octavia?” This is where I started laughing. Yes, it’s as melodramatic as you’re thinking. Fact is, this was ingratiating itself to me as a hospital drama for most of its run. I was a tad leery about the staff’s behavior, but at least the idea of keeping Vinyl asleep so her heart doesn’t have to work as hard is sound. But I don’t think doctors are in the habit of killing a healthy person so a sick one can live. Why do writers do things like this?
Not Recommended

Fluttershy’s Infernal Adventure by butterscotchsundae
Genre: Comedy
Fluttershy goes to hell Tartarus to save Angel after he’s bunny-napped by the Queen of the Underworld. It’s a really funny adventure, as she uses her powers of kindness and adorability to stave off the horrifying demons of the underworld, blithely stumbling her way to victory time and again. (The four stallions of the apocalypse are particularly hilarious.) I didn’t even care that Slendermane made an appearance (he is thankfully used as a generic Underworld monster rather than a vehicle for horror). That said, it does have some issues, nothing a good proofread wouldn’t fix, but still enough to be noticeable. It nevertheless pulls off “black and red alicorn OC” and “Seventh Element of Harmony” rather well, and years before the Most Dangerous Game even!
Recommended If You Don’t Mind Typos

In the Rain by EbonMane
Reading by sharpieboss
This guy did a reading of Hiccups for the Doom Pie Network. (I’ve added the link to the review.) I liked what I heard, so I figured I’d check his channel out. He’s got a really great voice and good volume. He could stand to edit his readings, but I’ll take pauses and restarts over commentary any day. The only complaint I’d have really is that he has a tendency to laugh for no particular reason as he’s reading. It was weird.
Genre: Shipping
Apparently I read this long enough ago that I didn’t review it. (March 1st of last year; I left a comment!) I kind of have to disagree with myself from back then. Rather than “a lot of buildup for little payoff”, I would characterize this more as “a lot of imagery porn with a little shipping”. Or not, depending on which ending you read. Yes, the writing is excellent, as I expect from Ebon, but the long passages describing the storm don’t accomplish a whole lot save to show that Rainbow Dash has other things on her mind than romance. Yet that notion comes through just fine in her interaction with Twilight; the extra evidence isn’t really needed. So yes, this is TwiDash, with Twilight the instigator, quickly finding out that she’s had the misfortune to fall in love with the most oblivious pegasus in Equestria. That aspect of this piece is rather amusing, honestly. After their impromptu sleepover doesn’t go the way Twilight wanted it to, she stalks off into the rain and we get two possible endings. I have to agree with all the commenters who say the "sad" ending is better. If anything, it’s more natural. Dash hasn’t ever thought about liking mares, she wasn’t expecting Twilight to kiss her, and she has to deal with the knowledge that her friend loves her and she can’t reciprocate. It flows from everything set up in the first two chapters. The happy ending is just there to make the shippers happy, and I can’t say it’s terribly satisfying. It’s that lack of natural extension of Rainbow’s actions throughout the rest of the story that keeps it from feeling like anything but a contrived flip-flop. So, you takes your chances.
Recommended for Shippers

Brother of Mine by Bachiavellian
Genre: Character Study
Not to be confused with the story of the same name by The 24th Pegasus, this was from the last writeoff, and made me realize that Scorpan stories are a new genre of fic that I really like. This one features him overseeing his brother’s initial imprisonment in Tartarus, and speaking to him one last time. It’s got a lot of great scenery, plus Scorpan’s regrets are writ large. It’s maybe a little heavy-handed with the “poor, pitiful Scorpan”, but then I’m also seeing the second half expanded quite a bit from where it was in the writeoff. This is decent!
Recommended If You Like Scorpan Fics

Ah Ain’t Go No Ack-Cent! by Conner Cogwork
Reading by Savrin Drake
Reading by Agent0Fluffy
Genre: Comedy
Many times, when I read a really good story by an author I’m not following, I will afterward go through their gallery and add anything that looks good to my RIL, if I don’t follow them outright. That’s how I find new authors. Once in a great while, however, a story will be so bad that I will double-check to make sure I don’t have any of the author's other stories on my RIL, and remove any that are there. On a Cross and Arrow was one such story. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Conner Cogwork had written a story I consider a comedy classic and one of my all-time favorites. Digging into things, I found out I reviewed it back in July of 2013, but… it wasn’t much of a review. So I am going to take the unprecedented move of re-reviewing a story, to try and do it right while seeing if this is really as good as I remember it.

The comparison between the two stories that first comes to mind is the copious use of referents. It is far easier to ignore when reading a dialogue than a six-character conversation. You know who’s speaking if they’re speaking in turns, and can skip over the bits specifying, as opposed to having to take that half-second to go, “Wait, who’s ‘the student’ again?” So this is a lot less work to read. (To be honest, it’s a breeze.) That said, it’s also plagued with systematic dialogue punctuation errors and AJ’s overblown accent, which, given the subject matter, could be forgiven, but still, there’s a line. Also, the author could stand to invest in italics. Still, the reasons why I liked it originally remain, namely Applejack having to talk in her cultured Manehattanite voice for a weekend in order to impress high-class ponies at an agriculture convention. I mean, just the fact that an agriculture convention is the next biggest gathering in Equestria to the Grand Galloping Gala, and is visited by high-class ponies, is in itself a fantastic bit of world-building. As a comedy, this is fairly light, but there’s a lot to enjoy based around Applejack’s general discomfort. She also gets a real character workout, having to weigh how much doing well at the convention means to her versus being honest with herself. Writing aside, very little of this doesn’t work, mostly relegated to a lengthy cameo by the Pie sisters that does nothing but bog the narrative down a little (learning that the whole Pie family has Pinkie Sense was likely more thrilling back during seasons one and two). It’s also pretty easy to figure out where this is going to go, but that hardly makes it a bad story. No, it all comes down to how much “this needs proofreading” you can really stand. So I’m going to downgrade my original rating for this, though I won’t remove my fave on it (I still liked it). I’m also not going to make a habit of going back over old reviews; that’s an ouroboros I can live without.
Recommended If You Don’t Mind Proofreading Errors and Overblown Accents

The Challenge of Fleur by PaulAsaran
Genre: Horror/Shipping
Fleur de Lis invites Fancy Pants and Princess Luna — two notably difficult-to-scare ponies — to her annual Nightmare Night festivities, in the hopes of scaring them once and for all. The first thing that strikes me about this is that it’s exactly eleven thousand words long. All the chapters are exactly either two or three thousand words long. I’m not sure what to think about that. The second thing is the Slendermane on the cover art; it would have turned me off this story had I not been reading it for ulterior motives. And I would have been right in avoiding it. As shipping (this quickly turns out to be a LunaPants vehicle), this moves too fast, and as horror, it moves too slow, banking, as so many things do, on the “Slenderman is scary” trope. There’s even a passage where Luna essentially reminds herself that she needs to be afraid of it because it’s scary. Had an original monster been used, this might have worked: there’s a lot of really clever imagery, though there’s also a lot of the characters standing around declaring how not-scared they are. Unfortunately, for any reader aware of the internet, the punchline just becomes “Slendermane is here, be scared now”. Maybe I’m being cynical, but that’s not scary at all, though at least the characters being scared is sold well. As for the shipping, well, “get two people into a scary situation so they grow closer” is kind of a stale trope, though I was at least sold on Fancy Pants’s affection for the Princess, and it ends with them agreeing to go on a date, so it doesn’t overstep its bounds that way. Otherwise, the writing is above reproach and I really liked this interpretation of Fancy Pants. The horror imagery, Slendy aside, was pretty unique and gave the story’s dual POVs a lot of traction. Still, I can’t recommend this too highly. (I will make a final note: While this is listed as the sequel to The Weed, it has nothing to do with that story. I gather that they are both in the same continuity, and Ordinary World, which is my goal, is actually a sequel to both.)
Vaguely Recommended

Drunk Shipping: Starring Soarin and Octavia by DBP12012
Genre: Comedy
Totally not breaking my promise. Nope! Crack Ships just had three stories to vote on, and I felt like reading something, and hey, those two things happened to coincide, and besides, it’s maybe 15k altogether. Totally fine. :V Anyway, Octavia plays a private concert for all four princesses and all three (???) Wonderbolts. It turns out that once a month, Celestia gets drunk and tries to get two ponies together. You can guess from the title who that is this time around. Unfortunately, the Drunklestia is not strong with this one (not even Twilight can deal with being around her), and the whole thing is rather perfunctory. It skips along at breakneck speed, the characters are flat, and it needs proofreading. Celestia and Soarin fight over Octavia, and they’re both horrible boors about it. The epilogue feels completely disconnected from the rest of the story, and not just because it’s “less comedic”. This is not worth the read.
Not Recommended

Downturn by Creed
Genre: Shipping
Another SoarinTavia! Octavia, despondent and out of luck after the Grand Galloping Fiasco, wanders into a restaurant Soarin owns. This is all telling and full of tense shifts, and the dialogue is nothing but exposition. That said, this does set up a romance pretty well -- I'd rank it the highest out of the three in that regard -- since both of them have hit rock bottom and decide to climb back up together, it just needs a tremendous amount of work in the writing department.
Not Recommended

Later Than Planned by Harmony Charmer
Genre: Shipping
Minuette wants to go home after the Canterlot wedding, but her fellow would-be bridesmaids don’t seem to be taking their brainwashing at the hands of the changelings quite as roughly as she is. She ends up meeting Octavia and walking home with her. Lyra is amusing in this — Octavia and Minuette get talking because of the nicknames she gives her friends — but the shipping is a little flat. Octavia just sort of starts hitting on Minuette because her gaydar goes off. The bonding over nicknames and the changeling invasion were definitely the better ways to go with this. Still, the writing is better than the other two, if only just.
Vaguely Recommended

Sorry I didn't have anything better this time around. :B Consider it a reprieve if you've filled up your RILs after Outside Insight. Unless, y'know, you're into shipping.

Report PresentPerfect · 456 views · #fic reviews
Comments ( 20 )

Consider it a reprieve if you've filled up your RILs after Outside Insight.

I keep trying to get that number lower, and then I read your review blogs...

My RIL shall forever remain empty, for there is no later for me, only the now!

So you're not going to start reviewing your reviews? Ahh man, imagine all the potential for recursion!

Wanderer D
Moderator

Fluttershy’s Infernal Adventure by butterscotchsundae

You forgot to mention that it was her submission for the League of Extraordinary Gentlecolts first big thing on Fimfic, when she 'traded places' with Obselescence. :raritywink:

Regarding your broken laptop, you should really get out there and buy an adapter for the hard disk from it, unless the actual disk is physically broken.

Iirc, your laptop was kaput, but most likely that means that your data is safe... Was it new enough to be a sata disk? Or was it older pata ? If it's sata, then a cheapo sata to USB adapter will get you all your stuff back...

Edit: this means opening up your old laptop and getting the hard disk out, which ranges from dead simple to Chinese puzzle box levels of difficult...

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2419624
Same thing happens to me. :B 3900 currently, and that's after cleaning it out last week.

2419638
And if I was really anal, I'd go back and adjust all the milestone markers (Xth review of year, review #X) because stuff like this changes the numbering around!

2419641
That's because I had no idea. :B

2419682
No, the HDD was degrading as time progressed. I ran a surface scan on it, got 4600 errors, ran it again immediately after and got 4700. When last I turned it on, it said there was no bootable device. There wasn't anything on it I can't recover, anyway. I gave it to my friend who collects busted old computers. :B

2419629

I've never used the "read it later" feature, either, I've just now realized. But then I've always been a "dessert first" kinda guy... :scootangel:

Mike

Well, I see some bright spark was a fan of Seven Pounds... for some reason.

Hooray for reprinting old stuff from Wordpress! I'm just going to say that by PP's own rating system, I'm giving this fic a 3.5/5, or a Recommended If You Don't Mind Action Porn.

Ah Ain’t Go No Ack-Cent! is a fic that, for me, didn't really work. The idea is great, much of the execution is enjoyable, the world building is believable, but the setup for the punchline hit me hard where my suspension of disbelief usually lies. Still gave it a like for the comedy, but wasn't enough to make me want to read the author's other works.

2419689
Ahhh, well. In that case you could just replace the drive :)

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2419781
I think we just went with the "cheaper/easier to get a new one" mindset. :B I dunno, my parents were just like, "Hey, you want us to get you a new laptop tomorrow?" and really, what can you say to that? :B

Also, you can't review stories you've already reviewed because that messes up the big master list I'm doing. I only got space for one link per story/reviewer.

Get a red laptop! Those are faster.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2420832
It's gunmetal grey, pew pew!

In regard to that heart transplant thing, remember the one where Sweetie Belle gets a brain transplant from Rarity, which is apparently a thing in Equestria, and even though it always kills the donor (!), they still get volunteers?

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2421022
Please tell me this is a real story I can read.

2420815
yeeahhh, I know that feeling :pinkiecrazy:

I have a few ancient pieces of shit history in my closet that work, they're just older than the dinosaurs (I think they were used by pre-pre-historic societies in some sort of dark rites that sealed off the ancient gods...). I don't really want to throw them out because hey, they work, but I don't want to actually use them because they suck...

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

Your presumption is accurate; the only reason "The Weed" and "The Challenge of Fleur" are connected is because they are in the same continuity and I wanted to make it plan the chronology of the stories, and that's it. I tried to explain this in the description of one of them (or was it for Ordinary World? I can't recall), but I keep thinking perhaps I should remove the connection at some point.

Oh well, let us see if Ordinary World tickles your reader's taste buds.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2422736
I think you told me directly at some point, actually. :B

And I'm rather still interested in Ordinary World, if only because out of the three, it has the most interesting premise. :) Won't get to it for a while, though, computer issues and all.

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