Ten Years of Embasee Construction · 12:46am Sep 20th, 2023
(Title inspired by metallusionismagic)
Y'all might wonder why I changed my avatar picture to something else . . . it's always been the same avatar since day one.
metallusionismagic reminded me that today is the tenth anniversary of Onto the Pony Planet.
I wish I had a new chapter to post, but I don't, nor do I know when the next chapter is likely to be ready. I can post a snippet of the next chapter, which I think is an appropriate memoir for the day:
It was a familiar sensation, yet one Dale hadn't felt in years: the complete distraction of work. He was completely focused on the unfinished wood twirling on the lathe, the tools for working it arrayed around him.
Even Ambrosia, distracting at first, had faded in the background, less of a priority than his workpiece. He wasn't as good with wood as he was with metal, yet the basic principles were the same. A lathe was a lathe, and material needed to be carefully trimmed off to match the template.
For a moment, he was reminded of his apprentice days, of the old machines with their crinkle finish, beloved by machinists. New tools didn't have that; they were smooth and powder-coated and came with warning stickers on every conceivable surface. They could do more, but at the same time they lacked the simple honesty of this belt-driven cast iron beast.
Woodworking tools weren't the same as metalworking tools, but the principles were generally the same, and he eyed the template, not wanting to stop the lathe to match it up, not yet. He could see where he needed to trim off more, and he selected a narrow chisel as his next tool, setting it carefully on the tool rest before moving it in, ever so gently. A thin sliver of wood knifed off, dropping into the pile of shavings, and he backed it off just for a moment, adjusting the angle of the cut. It was easy to take material off, not so easy to put it back on.
He'd always kept up with the machines and most of the process, although the newer CNC machines had run on black magic as far as he was concerned. Still, even if he couldn't program it as efficiently as his younger machinists, he understood the principle of what it was trying to accomplish.
This was no different; this both hearkened back to his apprentice days and paradoxically also drew on his years of experience. Like Ambrosia, Horst had been more of the silently-observing type.
He glanced over to her for a second. Her eyes and ears were both focused on the workpiece as it spun, and he would accomplish nothing by focusing on that, so he slid the chisel forward until it bit into the wood, occasionally glancing at the template and making adjustments.
Have some cute pictures of Lyra, at least:
Source
I could have tagged this for OPP, but figured if I did people might get their hopes up.
Also, I figure most of y'all know why Embassy is misspelled in the title.
Cute lyra pics 👍
Congratulations, AB. It’s been great tagging along on this journey with you.
Hurray for Lyra! n_n
Happy OPP-versary, Biscuit. Thanks for sticking with us.
woooow :O
Contractors, amirite pones?
Happy Storyversary, Biscuit!
Congrats! I seriously need to reread that one. It's beem a while.
We're also approaching 10 years of Silver Glow at ludicrous speed as well, which I'm not ready to accept.
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Thanks! Lyra is totes adorb, and that's an actual fact.
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Thank you! I'm glad you're along for the ride
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Lyra is adorable and that's an actual fact
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Really should be thanking all my readers who have stayed for the ride, even if it's currently stuck on the lift hill.
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I know, right? As someone once said, "Time . . . is still marching on."
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Contractors are best pones. Ambrosia, Silver Spanner, Riven Oak . . . we love 'em all.
Thanks!
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If you wait what is . . . well, honestly an indeterminant amount of time, you can read it with a new chapter tacked on the end!
DO NOT ACCEPT THE TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SILVER GLOW.
DO NOT.
Because I feel like thinking 'wow, that was ten years ago' is gonna give me emotions which I am not prepared for.
The horse words must flow.
Thankyou for your horse words.
And congratz on the milestone man.
I feel like I've read a longer version of that snippet before.
Happy anniversary! It must be getting hard to keep track of human pop culture/tech and the pony canon as we drift further and further away temporally from the setting of the story haha.
Also, I just noticed you have a new profile picture.
You tease us so with that snippet. I wish that one day you will be able to finish that story.
Lyra is so cute! :D
Happy 10 years, OPP!
OPP is one of the most strangely fascinating fics on this site and it was truly a pleasure to read it!
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It's because they can't get down! Please help I can't feel my legs.
Lyra continues to be adorable to this day.
Cute Lyra pics are always appropriate, and appreciated!
I find it somewhat offensive with 3D printer offerings, that the so called G Code can only store every single induvidual vertex as a triplet of 9 digit? values instead of the origional curve functions, taking up vast amounts of memory, when they then offer you a microcontroller not seens since 4 function calculators, and absolutely nowhere near the power of the $4 Pi Zero, in a $400 offering.
The algorithm for plotting point to point from a curve is called the Bressingham algorithm, and was used by 8 bit home computers to plot the pixels on the screen, so its older than many companies, never mind users.
One of th first home additive build machines would be the dye sublimation printer, boiling wax off a solid block to allow it to condense on the paper? Only equivalence I can find prior to that is NASAs experimental aluminium Sputtering system tested in orbit on the Shuttle?
Wonder what happened to those printers, for small lost wax builds etc?
Lyra.
Huzzah for Lyra!
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You're a witch!
The movie The Money Pit
A friend of Hanks character is ragging on him about what a dump the place is.
Hanks "Hey, the builder said '2 weeks, tops.' ".
Friend "You do know that historians say the Great Pyramid took over 600 years to build."
Hanks "So what?"
Friend "So the builder told them '2 weeks, tops.' ".
Hanks (later) "The land has to be worth something, right?".
I haven't thought about OtPP in a very long time. I certainly like what there is of it!
I fell like I'm chatting with Chaucer about these little stories he's writing... 10 years seems like forever ago.
¡Congratulations!
I like "Onto the Pony Planet". An update sure would be nice.
Careful, pretty soon you might start having stories older than some of your readers.
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THE SOUP MUST FLOW
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Entirely possible; I might have posted it before. Or else I'm predictable when I decide to describe a pony or a person doing what they love.
Yeah, although at least that story isn't as tightly tied to an IRL timeline as Silver Glow's Journal was.
In honor of the anniversary; soon enough it'll revert back to my normal avatar.
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Right now teasing is all I can do. If the stars align . . . well, there's a couple projects that have hard deadlines, and after that my schedule is clear at the moment. I don't want to give promises and then disappoint, so treat these words with justifiable skepticism.
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She really is, and I love her so much.
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Thank you!
I hope that sooner rather than later you've got more of it to read
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She really is.
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I'd have to guess 3D printers supplanted them, but I don't know. I remember back in the day when plotters were high tech (for some uses) as opposed to the clumsy dot-matrix printers of the day. Used to want one; these days it's obsolete tech like so many things.
So many things.
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BEST PONE
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She's adorable and that's an actual fact.
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There was a whole bit in Waiting for Godot about tailored pants and the ever-extending time to get them done.
The punchline was more or less "God created the world in seven days, but look at the world and then look at these pants."
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I haven't worked on it for a very long time, either . . .
Yeah . . . when you're looking at it from the frontside, ten years seems like forever, but when you're looking back, it's more of 'where did the time go?'
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Thank you!
I can't promise when it'll happen, but the story's not dead dead just yet.
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Oh, I already do. Not here on Fimfic (as far as I know; it's possible a 10-year-old has read my first posted fic); one I uploaded this year or last on Offprint dates back to 1999, and that's not the oldest one I've got if I were to really go digging . . . could hit the early 90s or late 80s if I re-locate some old notebooks.
In one of my blogposts, there's a picture of some of my work from (at a guess) 1994, maybe 1993. And that is certainly older than some of my readers.
Cute Lyra is cute.
Must get checked for diabetes now.
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A plotter is not obsolete tech. If you put what is effectively a Poundland hot melt glue gun on one, you have a 3D printer that can only make one layer. What use is that I likely hear you say. Well, the plotter only needs a stepper lift to move the bed away and you have a 2.5D printer which is what a 3D printer actually is, and that CNC tech is 8 bit era.
I used to code a CNC simulator in the 90s that ran on an Acorn Master system, 8 bit 6502 CPU and 64 kilobytes of Ram. Which is more than the worst modern 3D printer I saw.
The organ cellular printers use a variation on the continous flow inkjet printers?
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the Lyra collection, they're all so cute ;u;
Congrats on 10 years of OPP , and thank you for sticking with us!
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She is totally adorable
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She is totally adorable