• Member Since 7th May, 2012
  • offline last seen January 6th

Amit


This is a superfluous feature and you should feel superfluous.

Comments ( 34 )

and have been correctly with a minor exception

This sort of threw me.

Otherwise another lovely and while faintly disturbing, fascinating piece. I'd like to see more of these if you'd be so inclined. *curtsies*

Huh. Interesting!

I wondered by partially because the title reminded me of the Brundisium Fountain

2149994
Fixed. Thank you. :twilightsheepish:

2150126
Nice try, Brinnisi tourism board. :duck:

This is what happens when good authors get bored, huh?:ajsmug:

But aren't Wanderer D who just gets drunk....:duck:

... Trying to figure out why I got a notification for this when I don't even follow you ...

2150673
I'm just that good, I suppose. :trixieshiftright:

"Celestia pwned Luna here"? And the fifth word is 'regrettably'?
:rainbowlaugh:

Writing as doodling. Interesting. I should probably try this sometime, especially since I seem to be roughly as sparse as you when it comes to describing scenery. ("THEY WERE IN A CASTLE. IT WAS BIG. [nine pages of dialogue.]")

I quite like the subtle hints of backstory placed throughout this piece. Love the final line three paragraphs especially, and the tiny, revealing joke from Celestia to Luna. Some of the lines in this story do an impressive amount of heavy lifting.

I'm going to second the request that you give us more insight and detail about your version of Equestria's political history. I realize that by asking you to talk about political history I am probably being an enabler. This is intentional. :raritywink:

2151065
I'm stuck between Here Celestia banished Nightmare Moon and Here Celestia banished her sister; it's a good thing ambiguity lets me be both lazy and indecisive. :trollestia:

2151072
I actually meant to do this somewhat with Dawn, but I'm not sure if I'll ever finish that; not enough interest (it probably has less upvotes than this, even) and holy shit that's a mammoth task I'm not equipped for. :twilightoops:

Ipparionic and Tarbian. Oh you.

It is rather like a picture. Everyone looking at it will find different details that stand out to them alone (and everyone else who thinks in a similar way, but let's not let a little thing like objective reality get in the way of appreciating our pretties hm?) and dare I say be somewhat moved by the experience. Like the best art, it hints rather than making explicit, being suggestive rather than proscriptive.

And that little touch about the homophones? I– I'll be in my bunk. :twilightblush:

Incidentally the wife says that this is how one should describe scenery. You've impressed her. :pinkiehappy:

2151405

homophones

This is actually inspired by the Egyptian minimal pairs [ˈʃæjlæ] and [ˈʃeːlæ] (shahylah and shelah), 'carrying' and 'burden'; hence 'Misresephian', a bit of a mix between Egypt's modern Arabic name, meaning something along the lines of 'country', and Reseph, the ancient Egyptian god of horses and chariots (by analogy of the etymology of Egypt's English name, ḥwt-k-ptḥ: house of Ptah).

Even though I call this a doodle, I think I spent like five hours on it; I'm slow in the head. :raritydespair:

Incidentally the wife says that this is how one should describe scenery.

Really? It seems rather cumbersome to do that when it isn't the focus. :twilightoops:

2151564 I think she meant when it was the focus.

Sometimes I can't tell what she means at all.

Oh! I get it! Because a picture's worth a thousand words, and you literally used a thousand (and fifteen more) words to describe it! Oh Amit, you cheeky little bugger :ajsmug:

But seriously, though, that was some form of enlightening.

2152534
I actually intended to leave it around eight-hundred-eighty-eight words, but FIMFiction's word limits are racist and force me to adhere to the principles of Western culture. :raritycry:

One of the aesthetic ideals in my stories is that I want to find the most mundane scenarios I can think of and still make an interesting story out of it. Then you come and beat all my attempts by somhow crafting an entire story around a friggin fountain! :raritydespair:

Your longest paragraph is six lines, and it is the paragraph that contains the guard's transliteration of the fragment. Your next longest paragraph is five lines. Most of the rest are three. Two are four.

Your shortest paragraph is four words.

I like it. Brevity can be impactful.

a3V

I got here from reading Gardez's fic about a cloud fort.

There's always something interesting in describing objects and places. I guess the exotic names sort of flew over my head, since some other comments make them out to be some sort of reference.

also hey Amit

Some moss has grown, but only around the edges of the east side, obscuring very little of interest but a dialogue on subjective morality.

Contextually interesting that it obscures something about subjective morality on the east side... :trixieshiftright:

I know there's a missing word in there somewhere. I forget where, though.

2538967 I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the exotic stuff is referenced here, and nowhere else, ever.

2538967

I guess the exotic names sort of flew over my head

They're almost all just ponified or calqued translations of actual names. Understudy Florican, for example, is the literal translation of the name of Caliph Uthman, the man who compiled and wrote the Quran; Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia, a study on the education of a perfect ruler.

also hey Amit

2539256

Contextually interesting that it obscures something about subjective morality on the east side...

So symbolic, amirite? :pinkiehappy:

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the exotic stuff is referenced here, and nowhere else, ever.

Well, Machiavelli was inspired by the Cyropaedia and I'm pretty sure a great deal of work has referenced the Quran, so. :derpyderp2:

2151142

I'm stuck between Here Celestia banished Nightmare Moon and Here Celestia banished her sister; it's a good thing ambiguity lets me be both lazy and indecisive.

I think I prefer Here Celestia Destroyed Luna. The writers of the time probably weren't too clear on the specifics of what happened to Nightmare Moon. To them, she was there, she and Celestia fought, and then she was gone.

this was a delightful read, though i'm not sure it's label as a description of scenery is quite accurate. this is much more about meaning and importance left in words inscribed on something and their meaning thereof than it is about the thing itself. it makes the object immensely more interesting, and i imagine an attempt to impart any meaningful emotion purely from describing what something looked like in a mundane fashion would be almost impossible... but that's not to say it wouldn't be interesting to see an attempt.

i feel you leaned a little too heavily on modifiers in parts, where the physical description without embellishment would have accomplished the same thing. i also think the unexplained referential headcanon is a bit distracting, though it's what gives the piece its charm. maybe we can just assume there is depth where we do not have grasp of understanding, and be all the better for playing along.

you should also probably just indent or line-separate your paragraphs, not both.

written in february... are we going to see any stories amidst the snarky blogposts in the future, Amit?

2734781

this was a delightful read, though i'm not sure it's label as a description of scenery is quite accurate. this is much more about meaning and importance left in words inscribed on something and their meaning thereof than it is about the thing itself. it makes the object immensely more interesting, and i imagine an attempt to impart any meaningful emotion purely from describing what something looked like in a mundane fashion would be almost impossible... but that's not to say it wouldn't be interesting to see an attempt.

i feel you leaned a little too heavily on modifiers in parts, where the physical description without embellishment would have accomplished the same thing.

Fimfiction's word limit makes fools of us all; the entire reason that there's a spoken sequence at all is to appease it. I've shaved what microcruft I could see on a single pass, but there wouldn't actually be anything related to the thing's backstory if there wasn't one.

written in february... are we going to see any stories amidst the snarky blogposts in the future, Amit?

No clue. I've been working on a book - getting feedback is hard enough with pony, but this? murder - and I can't really think of any good fic ideas I'm good enough to write. There's was the April chapter of Getting Laid, of course, and I suppose that's a 2deep4u as per usual, but that took a few months to write so I don't think it counts. :twilightsheepish:

I think the thing I found most interesting about this piece was the author's note—which is not a knock on the rest of it, mind. But I felt the single best line in this story, by far, was:

The Ipparionic is perfect and unremarkable.

It has a quality that immediately brought the late Iain Banks to mind, and in a work of description I find it much more powerful than the rest. So to see that the author's note makes mention of such a similar line elsewhere, in a substantially different context? That very much took me by surprise.

In any case, this is excellent. I love it.

It's one of those stories that remind me I should slow down my reading. It's brilliant.

...But what's with the Scootaloo tag?

3779664

There is a slight shift here—a little barb of a quill juts out, too small to be seen, though a foal once cut herself brushing past it

:raritywink:

3784942 holy cow that's a brilliant example of telling a story with more than words! :rainbowderp:

Fountains of blood

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought, for reasons I can't quite grasp. I think it might have something to do with the story caring to explain the hidden detail behind something people would otherwise not give a second thought, which is something I always love in a story.

The phrase

The Ipparionic is perfect and unremarkable.

made me crack a huge grin the instant I saw it. It's probably a lot to do with the irony of the phase, but there's also a section of my brain that swears up and down it's seen similar remarks on the unremarkability of certain subjects in actual history texts.

Some real nice scenery porn here.

Comment posted by Str8aura deleted Nov 16th, 2020

The piece in the grass to the west is mostly charred and unintelligible, but what of it that can be read can—and is, printed on a little bit of brass nearby half-buried in the grass like a tombstone—be translated from the Tarbian:

Fascinating glimpse at so much history in just one object and its surroundings. I'm glad I finally read this.

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