State of the Lemur - 03/06/2015 · 4:52am Mar 7th, 2015
Been listening to a lot of Jim Morrison lately. Not sure why. I guess 'cuz it's there.
Anyways, first thing's first:
This was part three of a trilogy of Twilight/Rainbow nuzzling fics that I wrote. What for? Well, more like for whom. Ages ago, I wrote a sad story, and someone reacted with total sad-face, claiming it was their birthday. That's when I realized that said marsupial was the artist behind several adorafuzzy pics I had fave'd on Derpibooru. So I thought "Fuck it" and wrote the beginning of the A-Fuzz-A-Lypse. We've stalked each other on Deviantart ever since, and the rest is history.
But seriously, go check out CaptainPudgeMuffin's stuff. He/she/they are extremely talented at kitty!pone, and their pastel colored fuzzy cheeks are to die for.
And if you dun believe me, here's a sample of said marsupial's awesomeness:
Seriously, though. They each deserve a fanfic in their own right. Anyways, moving on to even fuzzier things:
This dude wrote a thing. What dude? This dude.
You might notice this dude. You might also notice that this dude is back. And if you have any doubts, go and check out his long-awaited Ponkology 201, which you might recall I had prepared y'all marsupials for.
Or, y'know, if you're as lazy as me:
Holy Nietzsche, this thing is friggin' awesome. The Ponkster does not disappoint, even though he pretends to. So go over there and let him know that he's wrong. Also, thank him for covering the lemur's address on the envelope with his hand when he briefly lifts it to the camera. F'naaa.
But as for his story...
I know I've said multiple times that I don't condone sequels/alterations/additions to Background Pony, but this one I'm going to have to make an exception. Cuz it's stupid. What's more, it's the kind of stupid I would write. I remember Ponky telling me about it over the phone, and I could feel the silly charisma in his voice as he contemplated it. T'was a joyous thang. He wrote it in just three hours and uploaded it by sundown with very little editing. Jeez... almost sounds like a certain lemur we all hate to know. Mesa so proud.
Oh, and he's been singing lately too:
F'naaaaaaaa... eat somethin' ya land mermaid
Moving right along:
Those of you who have read my drivel over the past three and a half years might have wondered just who this marsupial is on my subscription list. Truth me told, he's my best IRL friend. How best of a friend? Well, after we used to work at the same job together, he liked me enough to make me the best man at his wedding. Believe me, it was a supreme honor. I even grabbed his butt once while we were posing for a photograph.
He's not really into the pony thang anymore. That was something I infected him with for a brief time back in 2011/2012. I like to think it helped him get through a few tough scrapes in his life, especially that one time I sent him a Pinkie Pie pic over the phone and he laughed so hard he threw up over the floor of his sports car. The man can kill me in one punch.
Why am I bringing him up? Because just last week, he did the most awesome thing ever. He had been planning to sell his old, beastly, PC Gaming rig. But after he found out in casual conversation that I was looking for an improved computer to do more than butter toasted bread, he pretty much gave me the friggin' thing. Well, true, I paid him several Andrew Jacksons, but in the end it was pretty much the closest thing to giving it away--considering it truly is a monster with 16gb of RaM, an NVidia GeForce GTX 670 graphics card, and about four fans to keep the automaton from imploding on its own mass and sucking up the nearby constellations. The truly awesome thing is that he built it all himself.
Now, I'm sure there are better cpu's out there today (he built this in 2010), but what matters is that beforehand I was wandering around in the major cities of Azeroth at about 8 - 12fps. And suddenly I'm zipping around at a greased lightning 105. It's... indescribable for a microbe such as myself. It's like crawling out on dry land before evolving feet. In so many ways, I'm Amish when it comes to PC tech, and here I've been blessed with the nicest gift ever. Let it be known that Mir is the epitome of generosity... even if his mane has less flounce to it.
So, now I've finally stumbled into a world where I can enjoy shiet I've never touched before... like moddable Skyrim, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Planetside 2, Battlefield 4, and... Civilization V. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh Civilization V.
Lemme tell you. You haven't lived until you've wasted three encampments of barbarians surrounded your capital city of "Belle," produced a settler, and then crossed the Gulf of Mexico to found the bustling river port "Tiana." I've already pooled 10 - 12 hours into this motha, and I don't think it's gonna stop anytime soon. I suck at it, but I don't see it stopping.
F'naaaa. Life is short. Spaceisawaste on Steam if any of you get bored enough. Can't promise I'm talkative. I'm an asshole, n'such. But y'all know that.
And, last but not least, we get to the impetus for my doing a blargh like this to begin with. Just... j-just check this out, will you:
This. Just what the hell is this? Why, I'll tell you.
Someone... some crazy awesome marsupial out there took months out of his own free time to dream up, write, compose, piece together, and synthesize a symphony... a twenty-nine minute long symphony in dedication to my fanfic, In the Darkness Where I Seek You. Why does that not sound familiar? I'll tell you why. I. Never. Friggin'. Finished. It.
But I did hint of it in a blargh. This one, to be exact: http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/142898/in-the-darkness-where-i-seek-you-a-preview
That was back in early 2013, when I had gotten sick of the elephant in the room and said "lulz, you guys, I'm gonna work on this epic instead!", only to construct a different elephant in a different room. For real, though, 2013 was going to be the "Year of Octavia," on account of how epic I had intended that story to be. That's why most!cuddable!pone is featured in the Awesome Pic by Precia-T that jazzes up my user page. "In The Darkness" was going to be my next epic to join Background Pony. After about 50,000 words, I stopped writing it because of... erm... reasons, most of them due to a really convoluted style of formatting that sort of defeated the entire aim of the fic. I've considered going back to it, but most of the times I've been all "meh."
Lo and behold, it's two years later, and someone kaizo enough has dedicated an entire friggin' concerto to it. Now, I'm a supremely lucky lemur, and I've been blessed with fan art, fan music, fan dubs, fan translations, and even an IRL encounter at Megacon with someone wearing a hoodie and carrying a wooden lyre prop. F'naaaa.
But never before has anyone bothered to write me an entire friggin' musical composition for a fanfic I hadn't even finished, let alone published online in any fashion. Well, you can dayum well be sure I've shared it with him since... what I finished of it, at least. All he/she/they had to go by was just the friggin' blargh post alone, and it was one of those cryptic-and-lazy-as-fuck-Skirtsian-picture-spam posts. I mean... who knew that one of those would ever come back to haunt me? And in such a dramatically smexy way, too?
Naturally, I asked him how it came into being. In their own words:
The only thing that is authentic is the playing, I've played all the instruments by myself (through a midi keyboard) so the tempo, nuances, dynamics ecc those are very natural, autenthic to me.
As for the writing, I had the idea of doing something for you since you posted that blog entry (shit was it really 2 years ago?), it was really inspiring and I wanted to do something with the cello. At the time I wasn't sure if it would have been a sonata or a piece for solo cello, orchestra or whatever. For the next 2 years I'd sporadically think of new ideas but never had the chance of doing anything.
Then, about 3 months ago, I discovered Copland's Piano Concerto and I liked its 2-movements structure, and I started writing. I downloaded all the pics from your post and put them on my phone and started composing. Most of the cello part is written on paper as a sketch with some orchestral parts I've used as a guide for building the orchestral mockup. I can provide scans if you want.
Having pictures and the general structure, making the concerto is not that hard if you think about it. Structure in particular, is very important. As I said the 2 movement thing was a big help, (second movement starting at 13:04) and they have different inner structures: the first is in the classical forma-sonata. You can google it, it's like writing a speech or an essay: you have exposition, development and recapitulation. The second part is a free form, so more picture-based I guess, but there are recurring elements too. So yes, it took about 2 months to write but it was very fluid.
How? How does one friggin' deal with that? I am so not worthy. F'naaaa
The marsupial goes by WanderingArtist on Fimfic, and John Doe on Youtube. And it would seem as though the "Darkness" Concerto is not their first rodeo. They've done several remarkable bits before, which you can check out on their channel. Lots of Octavia - influenced stuff too, cuz dayum.
Needless to say, this has inspired me to think about the fic again. I've always believed it would be a good story. A dark story, but still a good one, and very rewarding at the very end. It evokes Odysseus, Orpheus, and several other '-eus' that are too pretentious, even for me. But--as I was hot off the fetlocks of Background Pony when I first started it--the original drafts were far too purple for the likes of Modern Day Skirts. If I ever go back to the story, it'd be a complete do-over, methinks, borrowing only the stuff from it that was worth preserving.
In other words, it wouldn't be terrible of a loss if I just went "Fuck it" and uploaded the original drafts on Short Scraps much like how I did with the Petra arc of a certain story. So, lemme ask the Marsupial Alumni...
Should I upload what I've done of In the Darkness Where I Seek You 1.0? Or should I aim for some nebulous pie-in-the-sky future date for when I might actually finish the legit product, however different it may be? I mean... f'naaa... we all know how good I am at keeping promises.
But, whatever you do, make sure you spam John Doe's page and give him all the thumb's ups, kisses, and genitalia that you can spare. That marsupial deserves a medal.
So, that about concludes this blargh... thingy. Maybe I can do updates on a weekly basis, just to prove to y'all that I'm not dead... even though I really am. F'naa. Thanks for reading my stuff and whatjazz. I know I rarely deserve it.
Back to super vegetating at 100fps. Friggin' Barbarians..
-SS&E
Maaaaan, I wish Civ V would go on sale.
Write more In the Darkness. Write it the way you think it should be written.
I want to read "In the Darkness," so I'm in favor of seeing it rather than some nebulous time in the future. BUT I proffer, why not post it as a story and continue it as "classic Skirts?" While some people prefer less purple, others liked the purple all the same. Var-i-et-y. Posting and finishing out a purple story won't kill anyone, and don't spill the Doctor Pepper on your new box.
For some reason (maybe just cuz I like Octavia so much), In the Darkness has been something I've really, really, really wanted to see ever since that first blog post. Like, more than any other story you've teased. As such, if I had any say in the matter (and I don't), I would prefer to see the finalized story, written as you'd like to present it, even if it meant waiting longer.
That said, feel free to drop the rough draft if you want. I probably wouldn't read it beyond a brief glimpse unless it was clear there was no hope of it being finished officially, but still.
Upload it. I don't care that it'll be the Petra arc all over again, making me want more but there being no more. It exists, it's Skirtsian, and I want to read it. And I'm going to have this concerto playing in the background the whole time
Jim Morrison huh? I remember when I used to listen to the Doors sing about the lizard king and dead presidents for hours an end, good stuff. Also, I'm far too embarrassed to post it haha, but you should know that for a school project several years ago, before college, we had to make a 10 minute short film. I HEAVILY borrowed from the story of Background Pony, and to this day my Highschool English teacher plays it as an example of how to get the best possible score on the project, and to this day, no one knows how much it's about the show My Little Pony. I never took credit as the writer, I said a friend of mine wrote it. Just a neat little thing I thought you should know.
Sent you a Steam request. You should be seeing one from Om-Nom McFaceroll.
It's just Background Pony 2: The All Journal Edition.
So that's why I've been seeing you on Steam lately. Congrats on the new computer; it sounds fairly similar to my own. It's been a long time since I played Civ V, but if you want to be distracted from writing with someone, feel free to pester me. I just need to redownload it.
As for the year of the Tavi, I do hope we see it come around again. You've teased many stories before that sound really interesting but have yet to see the light of day.
Welcome to the PC gaming master race. Where all your dreams can come true.
And since you already mentioned moddable Skyrim, let me point you to a couple mods you may want to take a look at...
Elsa Follower
Princess Anna Follower
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I've seen that. Wish they had someone from a... quieter village.
I do have Matt, Pat, Woolie, and Applejack currently following me, though.
I say upload the draft. It's not like you wouldn't be able to return to it if you ever decided to, and if the changes are as thorough as you're implying, the draft won't really be stepping on the final version's toes much.
"Genghis Bon"
I'm more partial to Bonhis Khan.
i.imgur.com/aZgfcUE.gif
ShortSkirts blogs are like TV Tropes. I end up with like 10 more tabs when I read them.
Because Jim Morrison and The Doors kick ass, that's why.
Nice rig you landed yourself with. The hardware sounds a little dated, but still powerful enough for your gaming needs (as you have found out). Treat it well, and it'll last you a good several years.
I think I'll send you a Steam request because reasons.
Yeah, you should definitely upload Darkness to Scraps. I think it's better that the readers get to at least see what once was even it it's unfinished, rather than let it languish in the shadows. I know I was definitely interested in seeing it come out.
Also, it's good to have a contingency plan just in case.
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Next State of the Lemur, EST 03/06/2016. rip in peace
...Haven't had anyone decent to play against in Civ V for awhile...
...Haven't been able to make time to play anyone on Civ V...
~Skeeter The Lurker
People are strange when you're a stranger.
And let me tell you, Skirts, you are strange. I like that.
I'd be interested in seeing the original In the Darkness. Even if it is a little purple ... I'd read it.
Also, I've been listening to The Doors' "Best of" album a lot recently. And just like you, I can't really figure out why.
yay
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Tell me, Skirts, and be honest here, how bad are you at that game?
EDIT: Those TF2 hours. Ay dios mio.
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Especially if it is a little purple. Seriously, I suggest posting it as a real story and write it olde style.
*looks at old blog post about relevant story*
Just sayin', that story looks really cool, even for just being a picture blog. I would be interested in seeing what's there, and if you do finish it, that would be even better.
Why not both?
I played Civ V(and all its expansions) at one time. Then my laptop started slowly dying and with a DSL connection makes any multi-player game difficult to master. I've been on a Supremacy 1914/FF XIV kick recently. Though I'm probably going to drop FF because sub has actually become out of my reach lately.
Helps that I still have a few already paid-for and free browser games to play with.
Gratz on your new rig. And its enjoyable to hear all the awesomeness you are receiving. They just aren't giving it away; you earned all that with all the effort and writing you have done for the community. The best I can do is comment when I feel the urge to comment. And maybe I'll poke you on Steam. I also have been noticing you have been on a bit more lately.
That Applecat pic felt warm and fuzzy.