Фоллаут Эквестрия: Двадцать минут · 2:20pm May 31st, 2014
Yesterday Equestria Daily unexpectedly published "20 Minutes", which they rejected about 2 years ago under the "No Fallout: Equestria fics" rule, which they repealed yesterday. I looked at the story's stats page to see how many people read it thru EQD, and saw I was getting referrals from a Russian site, which hosts a translation of it into Russian.
So of course I read Google's automatic translation of it back into English:
Amadi walked slowly down the hall right through Staley long red and gold carpet, reserving tables with croupiers located behind them, foldout maps for playing baccarat and blackjack zebras. Place looked expensive, though, and did not lose time shabby kind - made in bright colors, but dimly lighted, it was full of light and smoke cigars muffled hum of conversations, not intended for foreign ears.
The war, which began Amadi seemed so distant memory, but in fact hardly unleashed a little over a year ago, this town has touched much less than others. Visitors and traders gave way to government contractors and mobilized soldiery, located in the local garrison. Located in the border town, away from the capital, they have proved so useful that the Legion de facto cleaned hotel-casino to their hooves. Loss of money littering high cones on both sides of the border meant that they could go a little further beyond the rule of law, rather than the previous owners. And they could not because they are here and there is a law.
It cost him almost everything that they have accumulated over the past year, twenty minutes to book with pegasus. His wife would have killed him if it found out. - Demand creates supply, - said the cashier. Amadi already withdrew his "condition" and turned away, but the cashier said it eerily daily, as if talking about cabbage that made Amadi turn around and put money back, instead of what would come home and complain to my wife again, that someone should do something.
He had to decide on it now, as he stood at the end of the corridor, and the cashier pointed to the double door, secured in a zebra dress uniform with sergeant stripes. And it was the stern soldiers, with whom he was to speak.
(Auto-translating back into Russian and then again into English made almost no further changes.)
Looking back at that story now, I can't imagine writing it today. I don't like the idea of even reading it. Though now that I think about it, I've always found it easier to write horrible stories than to read them.
Gotta love top-notch translations!
And yeah, I can't stand to read my old writings, whether they be stories or school papers. It's just too, I don't know, difficult. Embarrassing.
It reminded me of the time I watched Taps for the first time. Very emotional.
*Came because of the Russian title*
Ow, machine translatons.
Personally, I'd like to get some pactice by manually putting some of my writings into German and Russian, but everypony.ru isn't allowing more people to join now, and I don't know where the german site it.
My bad. I was clearing out old tags in the pre-reader inbox and your story was listed as posted, which was why I made sure it went up.
This is a bit of a special case, obviously, but I'm curious as to what kind of EqD boost the story gets/got.
Why is that?
2161527
Khe.
http://ficbook.net/fanfiction/cartoons/my_little_pony (in place of everypony.ru)
2161522 2161874 I'm not embarrassed by it--I don't think I'd have the guts to write something that disturbing right now.
2161641 Just go to the story page and hit the "stats" button and see.
2161614 Awesome! Thank you for your happy mistake!
Actually, we sort of repealed it earlier this year and just didn't tell anyone. :B CAT'S OUTTA THE BAG NOW
2162920 It's true! They didn't even tell other pre-readers!
The Internet is not only stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose.
How have you changed during this time?
Why not?
Probably unrelated: I have translated The Conversion Bureau: Ten Minutes into Russian. Still didn't proofread it.
Inspired by a guy who read his fanfic aloud at a local brony meetup in St.-Petersburg, Russia (we've bult a brony club of our own. Kind of.) and the fact that I could use a mic and projector at the club, I decided to translate Ten Minutes and do a live reading of it with an audiovisual component. I've put instrumental covers of Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits during the main part, and the main, black-and-white loop of a video. It was probably horribly executed due to my inexperience and fear of public speaking, but an interesting experience for me. I still think it was a good idea, though not sure if anyone appreciated it. Here's my collage of videos I used as a backdrop, to show a gist what my perfomance could look like (or rather, I hoped could look like?)
cs7004.vk.me/c322424/v322424563/6812/DaTviTRp_cI.jpg
I would do more of the same, but I got involved with organizing a writing prompt inspired by Thirty Minute Ponies and it took off more immediately, though demanded all of my effort during the initial stages; and then real life intervened so I didn't return to live reading or translation.
I considered choosing your Twenty Minutes to translating and reading, and it was one of a few stories of appropriate size. I considered many, even short stories, to be too long to translate for me - I am very slow translator - and, maybe too long to read aloud as a first try. So yours was one of the few that wasn't big and was of a mood I wanted to try to read - but in the end, I decided that I might not handle reading it. So there. It's a compliment.
As a tangent of a tangent, you know I've read a review for Kana: Little Sister where the reviewer said she would like to get to another ending of the game, but she cannot bring herself to play it again. Not right now. I consider it a true compliment to a game's worth (and my hypothesis is that games have potential to be accepted as forms of art as powerful and more relevant to the current century than prose and cinema are, though the potential woefully under-explored). Perhaps this is at least somewhat refreshing, if not superior, way to think about a game's worth in a day and age where "replay value" is considered a merit? I still hope to explore the potential of interactive (pony) writing, and your stories, as well as some Japanese visual novels, are kinda the tonality I am looking for, for my first try.