Required reading · 5:51pm Nov 28th, 2014
"Collaborators", which I recommend a couple of days ago, turned out to be written by AugieDog masquerading as a demonic rabbit. I added all AugieDog's and Baal Bunny's stories to a pony-writer dataset to see if stylo could have told me that Baal Bunny was AugieDog.
If you already knew Baal Bunny was someone's second account, then, yes, you could've guessed from stylo that it was AugieDog. Also, horizon is secretly Skywriter.
While downloading AugieDog stories, I noticed his story "Half the Day is Night" has only 2090 views. It's an old story that was posted to EqD as a google doc in 2011, which is where most people read it. But lots of folks have joined us here since the Dog posted it to fimfiction in summer 2012. So it seems the newbies (I can call them that, because I joined at least a month before that) don't know about this story. I liked how three plots, about an assassination plot against Luna, Luna finding her own style of ruling, and Ory's love for the disreputable jazz trombone, all came together so nicely. It's one of the stories I consider required reading if you aspire to be well-read in ponyfic.
So I was gonna write a post recommending it (which I see I just did). But then I thought, There are other old stories that the kids these days aren't reading anymore.
This may be a good thing. The old stories, like Shakespeare, get more attention than they merit just by virtue of being old. But it would be difficult to talk about fiction without having a set of stories you can refer to and assume people have read. Even bad popular stories are useful this way.
So I made a bookshelf, "Required reading", made of stories I've read that are not necessarily my favorite stories, but are well-known and that I refer to often when talking about principles of ponyfic.
>mfw I'm on my own branch
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/11/1/755242.png
Probably something to do with the sample size only being 1300 words though.
I see you, Archonix and I are all prose cousins.
Eeeeeeeeee!
Also, I get that the X axis represents some basic relative similarity in word usage, but what do the branches represent?
25 out of 32 isn't so bad, I suppose. Added the rest of them to my read later. If I could add to the list though:
Anthropology by JasonTheHuman
Background Pony by shortskitsandexplosions
The Immortal Game by AestheticB
*Pinkie Watches Paint Dry by AbsoluteAnonymous
*Friendship is Optimal by Iceman
Those Blue Wings by Tchernobog
Twilight's List by kits
It Takes a Village by determamfidd
Yours Truly by Thanqol
The Games We Play by AbsoluteAnonymous
Pony Psychology Series by SaddlesoapOpera
The Party Hasn't Ended by butterscotchsundae
Heart of Gold, Feather's of Steel by Nicknack
Storm by kits
It's a Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door by Jetfire
(asterisks are the ones that are on your Favorites bookshelf)
I'd throw in a few others, but I'm not actually certain how big they were back in the day. However, the ones here are definitely among the most well-known stories of the fandom in my opinion.
5/31 read.
Woo hoo! I know my pony fiction!
I enjoy that The Old Stories is on a list of, well, the old stories.
2621423
I've read a bit over half of them, had most of the rest marked as RL at least. I suppose I'll get around to them... sometime.
I'm about 50/50 on that list myself, added the ones I've missed to my RIL list. Also, I just noticed that I never read Dog's An Infinite Number of Pinkies, which is a little embarrassing since I mentioned to him that I was going to read it over two years ago in my comment on Half the Day. That one goes on my Read It Next list.
The real question is, am I secretly horizon, or is horizon secretly me?
2621421 "Pinkie watches paint dry" is already on it. Most of the others probably should be on the list, but I haven't read them, so I'd feel hypocritical calling them "required". TGWP I gave up on early. I'm ambivalent about listing the rest. I list "My Little Dashie" because I think people will understand that's not a recommendation. But I think Pony Psychology and Yours Truly are overrated, and I don't want to be misinterpreted as recommending them. "Pony Psychology" has plenty of strong points, but it features some very OOC ponies, and I don't like that it tries to psychoanalyze ponies in 3000 words each. That's a thing that shouldn't have even been attempted. It resulted in simplifying them rather than in making them deeper. "Yours, Truly" has fine writing, but would have worked better as letters between friends, without distracting us by centering everything around three unlikely (IMHO) and unexplained romances. I threw up a little in my mouth every time Twilight and Applejack or Dash and Fluttershy talked about their love for each other, because, I don't know, it's like reading a story about the Beatles where Paul and George, and John and Ringo, keep smooching, with no explanation of why. If it's gonna be unexplained, it should at least be Paul and John, dammit.
2621423 Poser.
2621328 I tried to figure out, but couldn't, because it's not documented. You'd need to read the source code. The chart is a dendrogram, of the type used in evolutionary biology. You start with all the texts, and recursively keep dividing them into two sets, until each text is its own leaf of the tree. Exactly how that's done, though, I can't tell. One thing to be cautious of is that two texts can be very close together, but be far apart in the tree because they happened to be on opposite sides of a split made early on. Also, POV and tense make a huge difference.
2621577 Do you even know?
2621593
It is kind of embarrassing. I mean, I am sort of one of the fandom's taste-setters—or at least gate-keepers—and I haven't read a very big chunk of that list.
2621620
I wouldn't have asked the question if I knew the answer!
Well, they certainly maintain the same quality of writing.
It also proves horizon is a changeling.
2621328 That was pretty much my reaction as well...
Who's PP on that diagram?
I'm just asking cos uh y'know no reason :X
17/32, not bad if you grade on a curve.
I had already thought of Horizon and Skywriter as being somewhat similar in spite of writing pretty different stories, so it's nice to be backed up by the data. I think of you and Obsolescence as being similar because of writing somewhat similar stories, but I can tell your blog posts at least are in a very different writing style; have you ever compared yourselves?
Some of those authors are split into categories and some are not, and I doubt stylo knows how to tell "Hard Reset" from the Optimalverse and so forth. What made you decide on the splits?
Sorry if either of those questions have been answered in your previous stylo blogs.
2621673
Seems simple enough:
Neither of you are changelings, ergo, you must be the same person.
Mike, Dusting the Logic off his Hands
Snuggled up right next to Yip and Pascoite? Oh yus. Gewd company, there.
I don't care how good Fallout Equestria or Past Sins are. 200,000+ words is just.....no.
No.
No!
2621803
Nope; I've only done write-off authors, plus a few I added for random reasons.
Setting and characters have a big effect when they're consistent. The Optimalverse has its own cast of characters, corporations, and hardware, giving it a long list of unusual high-frequency words. Plus, Eakin wrote half a million to a million words in each of those categories, so they're each big enough to stand on their own.
That's a big problem with stylo--if two authors both write about Daring Do in Egypt, it'll see "pyramid" and "Ahuizotl", and call them similar.
2621860 I understand, but... long stories can do things short stories can't. You'll never even know what those things are if you don't read any long stories.
2621733 PP = PresentPerfect. It's too confusing to have filenames start with PresentPerfect-3rd-past.
2621909
Aw dang. Not gonna lie, was hoping it would be me cos I couldn't see my name anywhere on the diagram.
What sample size did you use to make the diagram, if you don't mind me asking?
2621909
Ah but I do read long stories, only usually in the physical realm of actual books. Right now I'm on Cloud Atlas, cause I friggin loved the film.
But my free time is so limited that it's simply not physically possible for me to get through fics on here of that magnitude. Where's a damn Time Turner from Harry Potter when you need one?
2621920 The writers are mostly from the write-offs, bcoz it was
evilfun to use stylo to predict who wrote which story, and then look clever. The dataset was about 180 stories and 17 million words.2621928 Cloud Atlas doesn't count. It's a collection of short stories all split in the middle.
2621932
encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTKZSJU2QKw3ubkHogIMr5U9U4u971krdF5S_v4cg3bQpQBIZ03Uw
I'll have you know sir that Sloosha's Crossing n' Everythin After is not split in the middle but is one intact piece! And fairly sizable to boot!
2621821
While it has been thoroughly established that I'm not a changeling, I don't believe 2621577 has ever denied being one of us. I find that remarkably suspicious.
Plus, his favorite princess is the Princess of Love. What's up with that?
I can guarantee you, though, that we're not the same person.
2621948
Come on, Horizon, suspicion by implication will get you nowhere. Clearly nobody is a changeling here.
However, despite his incomprehensible infatuation with Princess Luna instead of Best Pink Princess, and his slinging of baseless assertions in my direction, I can confirm Horizon's assertion that we're not the same person.
2621951
There you all have it, right from Skywriter's mouth. And now that all that's cleared … oh, fewmets.
BRB finding that memory-altering artifact I mislaid behind the sofa
2621953
Uh... look! A huge distracting thing!
2621953
You can't get everyone! I'm protected, cause I made this hat.
derpicdn.net/img/2014/8/27/709132/large.png
2621577
2621948
Clearly, you're both Tyler Durden.
Huh, I guess I'm Titanium Dragon. :B I think? Why are there like five of me?
Interestingly, that list is entirely comprised of stories I either have read or plan to. Nothing new added to the RIL. However, you did get me a couple old favorites to reread for review sometime. :)
2621579
I think you might be sending mixed messages by creating a sort of canon that includes both stories that you think are good on their own and those that you think have some cultural merit—that is to say, the story itself is not so good, but reading it is useful to understand its influence.
As an example, I'm not sure if Sunny Skies All Day Long is considered the former or the latter. Personally, I think it exemplifies all the things we ought not to do. The story is basically, "New pony shows up in town and does the rounds with the mane 6." Except it's Celestia in a disguise. The narration has a number of jokes that are more amused with themselves than they are actually funny. (This is mostly an issue with Pinkie.) The way that Celestia is tired of her status is really surface level for a character that is presumably very wise with old age. It just screams "it's pretty good... for fanfiction" to me, like our standards are low enough to laud a story merely for keeping its characters in character. The story seems well-acclaimed simply because it's "show-like", which is something I've never valued much, and not because the story is, you know, interesting or compelling.
Anyway, I digress. I think inclusions in any canon should fulfill both criteria to some extent. You could argue that by reading My Little Dashie you'll gleam an understanding of a particular audience or form your own opinions about what does and doesn't work in the story, but you could argue that for reading anything (and in particular anything popular). I wouldn't want anyone slogging through Past Sins and cringing at every second paragraph merely because they feel compelled to understand the psychology of its readers. Putting those side-by-side with Twilight Makes a Cup of Tea seems a bit... schizophrenic. Won't your truly great stories be both culturally relevant and Good Stories?
If your list really is just, "Stories you're expected to have read", then you may as well go through the list of stories here with the most views and work your way down.
2621579
My mistake. I must have glanced past it.
Yeah, that's the reason I tried to double check to see if you read the stories first. Didn't work out so well.
I think you're right about Pony Psychology; its sequel was always far more compelling for me. And fair enough for Yours Truly, I guess enjoying it relies a lot on personal taste.
2622234
Good point. I mean "stories I find useful for illustrating principles about ponyfic." I'm removing the ones that are on there just because they're popular and I like them.
Sunny Skies is staying on, though.
2622234 Re. Sunny Skies, it seems to me that show-like stories are the kind of story that we do well least often on fimfiction. They nearly always come out thin and treacly. Maybe when people try to imitate the show, instead of trying to tell their own story, they focus on the general feelings they got from episodes instead of on the specific feelings that made them want to tell that story. Maybe they love the material too much to be critical with it.
When looking for essential classics, I often find myself paralyzed by too much choice. So I'm very grateful for this list.
24/28
I'm not sure if that makes me a master level ponyfic reader or just means we have run in the same circles for a long time.
25/28
Ponies Play D&D and The Vinyl Scratch Tapes didn't appeal to me, so I know why I haven't read them, but I've never even heard of A Very Special Sunshine Princess. Weird.
2621421
Great list. I would add Apotheosis (2k thumbs), On a Cross and Arrow (4k thumbs), Progress (1.5k thumbs), Spark (1k thumbs), and The Moonstone Cup (2.5k thumbs). Quality or not, these fics have been hugely influential.
*I* am Spartacus!
No Dangerous Business?
2627124 Sorry; haven't read it.