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Pinkie Pie has an existential crisis while painting her room. This self-parody is dedicated to Professor Piggy, who once told me that I could write a story about Pinkie watching paint dry and weave it into an incredible psychological journey. Let's see if he was right.
Dramatic reading by MicTheMicrophoneZero.
Cover art by chaosdrop.
Totally gonna read it
To be honest the first part of the story went straight over my head. 
Pinkie is functioning on plane of thought I have yet to discover myself.
However, at the end I could really relate to what she was thinking. Damn, that was a lot of philosophy for a story about drying paint.
I give you props for making me rethink existence. 
This is genius. I know I said that already, but it really is.
Pinkie's thought process is just absolutely Pinkie - it's perfectly captured, and I can imagine her having all kinds of smaller crisis moments just like this - especially because she seems to base her own worth on how people perceive her. Naturally she thinks the inanimate room is exactly the same way. And I love the idea of Dash being freaked out and doing everything in her power to fix it as quickly as possible - in fact, I love everything about Dash in this story.
I meant it when I said it - but you've proven me more right than I could ever have guessed. This is awesome.
Thanks, AA. 
If Only - Queens Of The Stone Age
So Pinkie is one of those stoners who just likes to go "Duuuude, like have just looked at your hands, dude." Good to know.
Kinda reminds me of Bill And Ted.
What a deep joke story, dude. Oh, by the way...
Pinkamena was Pinkamena. That was all there was to her life, aside from harvesting rocks. Then, the Rainboom occurred. She was changed... She was painted a brighter shade of pink by this spectacular color spectrum phenomenon. There was too much life for her... but there wasn't, at the same time. For Pinkie Pie was Pinkie Pie and not Pinkamena Pie, and for Pinkie Pie, there was no such thing as too much happiness...
OH CELESTIAL BEING BASED UPON THE READER'S RELIGION MAN THAT'S DEEP
Notes while reading:
"Her furniture had been covered in protective tarps, but there had been nothing in place to protect those poor walls – perhaps, Pinkie mused, because painting the walls had been the entire point of the exercise in the first place." Everything in bold is unnecessary. This is entirely a personal opinion, but I've always felt that as a writer, if you make an implication, trust your reader to understand; you don't have to explain it. It makes your stories more interactive, and therefore more interesting.
"and force a knew one upon it." Slight misspelling here.
"as thought they’d forgotten the unicorn was even there." And here.
As for the actual story, I love it. But I'm torn on whether or not I think it would be better if everything other than the first section simply disappeared. I mean, it's obviously a comedy, but in my eyes, that whole first section, with all its deep introspection about paint drying was already comedic.
There were some good lines in the later parts, (particularly amusing was when dash gave her the cupcake), but it felt unnecessary. My first instinct (which I've learned to trust), is that it would've been much more powerful, and funny, if it had ended after the first section.
Okay, that was brilliant. Only Pinkie could learn a life lesson from paint drying. Seriously, her inner monologue is golden. Rainbow and Twilight are great, too. Especially Rainbow with her cupcake. This whole story is just made of awesome. 
Thank you Piggy for inspiring this and thank you AA for actually writing it.
Deep down Pinkie gets into a philosophical stupor that never ends like this;
Sugar snaps her out of it... Sugar is the answer to life's questions as well as... the enigma called Pinkie?
The inner dialogue is worthy of this guy:
I wanted to write "What did I just read", but I found that I understood this completely.
How can...
I mean, that subject....
It's a story about paint for the love of god how....
No, just... I don't know.
Lovely story anyway, I found myself lauging more than I should about it. 
... I know the stuff in bold was unnecessary. It ... it was a joke. Like, "Well, duh. Of course changing the walls is the point of painting a room. Way to be obvious, Pinkie." Like that. And it wasn't actually intended to be powerful or philosophical. I called it a self-parody for a reason - because most of my stories are unnecessarily introspective and "deep."
What... but... how did you...?
Dude. You wrote a story about a pony watching paint on a wall dry whilst having an amazing inner monologue that just... almost makes me think about giving my sapphire blue walls some serious apologies. They weren't always sapphire blue, you know. I don't even remember what they were before.
*sigh* I really want to be able to write like this. Good work, AbsoluteAnonymous. Keep it up.
I simply cannot say that I found any value in this other than the realization that so many people misunderstand Pinkie. It pained me to read the entire thing.
In the first place, you are simply making Pinkie look like an idiot. She's trying to personify the walls ... as the the walls were animate beings capable of emotion or even thought! My assumption is that you're trying to make some kind of parallel here, as though the walls my be symbolic of something, but I simply can't see it. Pinkie would never think about this sort of thing for an extended period of time, because she knows that walls are not living beings. They don't care what color they are and never will. Thus the form that they take is completely up to the owner of the walls.
This brings me to my next point. Your misuse of the terms "nature" and "essence" were hardly tolerable throughout the story and the act of improperly using them shows that you have done no serious research in philosophy. What you are referring to based upon context with these words is actually "form". Nature and essence are words which refer to the innermost qualities that make up an entity; nature being the tendency for and the properties that compel the entity to change its form and essence being the unchangeable qualities that will remain with an entity. Outward appearance fits neither of these descriptions, but rather it adheres more to "form" which denotes the outward appearance of an object which can be changed by external forces and will be changed by the entity's nature.
Both of these problems are tolerable to say the most, but finally, the one problem that I could not tolerate by any means is your method by whichPinkie is freed from her stupor. Your solution to the matter is to have Rainbow Dash give her a cupcake which perks her up. Now, granted that she also went through a mental process of introspection to do so, but ultimately it was the sugar in the cupcake that brought the conflict to a resolution. I can hardly express with words the anger that this brings me. There has been no evidence in the canon that shows that Pinkie is addicted to or dependent upon a substance of any kind, in any way. She may eat more sugar than anyone else but this by no means indicates a physiological disorder. It is for that reason that the idea of Pinkie needing a cupcake to bring herself out of her near-depressive (and completely illogical) state in the same way the a drug addict needs another high to remove himself from his depression is nothing short of insulting Pinkie. My heart breaks when I see all my hard work in trying to show people the redeeming qualities of Pinkie torn apart by a 2,000 word one-shot.
I'm not going to dislike this because it appears to be written with some kind of logical thought process, and as a story, it's well written. My conclusion then is that it's a well written story with a bad moral, but to re-iterate, I dislike it with great intensity.
Now, this is just showing off, is what this is. *grin* Not that I'm complaining, mind. I'm just saying.
Show-off.
The room had been orange, and now it was not.
So, beginning are important, and I love this beginning. It's boring as heck in what it's actually saying, but its phrasing is ponderous and pompous and therefore funny. It is, in other words, the perfect beginning to this story.
Perhaps the walls no longer viewed themselves as Orange Walls. Perhaps they accepted their destiny as Pink Walls and would resent her for altering them further.
The utter seriousness of the writing is, of course, what makes this so funny. Plus, Pinkie anthropomorphizing the walls. (Ponypomorphizing?)
“I have no idea! Once she started crying after eating a cupcake because she missed it - maybe she feels bad about painting the walls?”
“That’s silly!”
Hee. Rainbow is, of course, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CORRECT, and I find it both funny and legitimately cute that she knows Pinkie so well. This is totally your RainbowPie biases showing through, but since I share those biases, I'm completely okay with that.
“Cupcake!” she said fiercely. “Look at the cupcake! Eat the cupcake.”
Bwa ha ha ha! This is my favorite part of the story. Mostly because I am envisioning Rainbow doing all of this while wearing her Serious Game Face, eyes kind of squinted, while barking at Pinkie.
And so Pinkie exited the Formerly Orange Room with no regrets, not looking back even once, instead choosing to look forwards. To the future. To friends. To delicious, tasty cupcakes. With sprinkles.
Like this a lot--just as you're on the verge of putting out something that we can take seriously as a philosophical truth, you immediately undercut it with something like this. Keeps up this serious/ridiculous tension throughout the story that I enjoyed.
Also, I think this is a very good self-parody, as there were phrases and sentences that I could almost SWEAR were in "The Games We Play." Seriously, take this bit ...
Pinkie Pie wanted to make amends, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to make it up to the poor walls; after all, she had already changed them too much, had already stripped them of their identities. If she went any further, what would become of them?
... swap out "walls" for "Rainbow Dash," and you have a paragraph that could easily have been plunked down somewhere in TGWP. Hee.
Dude, it was a parody. Of myself. Because I recently realized that I tend to write stories like this a lot; where I make Pinkie painfully OOC and misuse words to sound fancy and act overly pretentious. Hence the term "self-parody" in the description. I don't understand why people keep talking about how meaningful or lovely or philosophical it was, because I intentionally made it ridiculous. You're allowed to not take it seriously and/or think it's dumb, because I think it's dumb, too.
Biases? What biases? I have no idea what you're talking about. Have you been talking to jailbot?! He's always been against me, from the very start! This could totally have easily been a Twipie story, maybe! After all, Twilight was there, right?!
Don't even say that. You'll break her poor mind.
My hand hurts. From cutting the thumb off and giving it to you, you know.
I hope you can see my thumbs, because I'm raising them as high as I can.
Sure, your misuse of the comma makes me want to cry. And sure, the characterization for Dash and Twilight isn't as strong as I would like.
But it is nonetheless a work of brilliance. Your word choice is eloquent while remaining concise, the pacing is just right to keep the reader's attention, and by Celestia it did the one thing I can truly hope for out of a work of art - it made me think.
Bravo. Truly, bravo.
I'm commander Shepard, and this is my favorite Pinkie story on the extranet.
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Really now Pinkie?
Still confused.
Give her a cupcake, STAT!
with the mind.
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