Fluttershy, Big Mac, and Mike Stahly · 4:06am Jun 4th, 2014
I just published the new final chapter of "Fluttershy's Night Out." It owes something to a karate instructor I had many years ago named Mike Stahly.
Mike was the head instructor at my karate studio, and a third-degree black belt. That doesn't mean much on its own; black belts are almost common in some karate associations. In mine, a black belt was a big deal. You were expected to take several months off to prepare full-time for your first-degree black belt exam. A second degree black belt was a bigger deal, and third degree indicated the highest recognized level of technical proficiency. Degrees beyond the third would be awarded for contributions to the sport rather than technical prowess; but none had ever been awarded.
After each evening class, after the masses of yellow, green, and purple belts left, the upper belts would stay for another hour of more intense practice. After that, we would all change into street clothes and head to a late-night cafeteria for a meal.
One night, we were the only people there when we walked in. We spread out around the cafeteria, choosing our sandwiches, soup, and so on.
Then two scruffy guys walked in, wearing flannel shirts and baseball caps. They looked around the cafeteria, then walked over to Mike, and stood to either side of him and slightly behind, and started talking with him.
I thought at first that they were friends of his, but, listening in, I realized that these two guys had never met him. They were just looking for someone to harass. Mike, skinny and exuding sweetness, looked like an easy mark.
Everybody else in the cafeteria realize this at about the same time. These two guys didn't even notice that everyone else in the room, about a dozen young men, were all slowly converging on them. They were trying to goad him into a fight, laughing and enjoying themselves.
I was looking forward to kicking their asses. (Literally. I favor kicks over punches. It's a bad habit.) But I thought maybe it would be disrespectful to Mike to kick their asses, instead of letting him kick them himself.
So we all just stood there, waiting for some signal from Mike to tell us what to do.
He never gave the signal. He paid for his food and went and sat down, and we all sat down around him. The other two guys sat far away, ate very quickly, and left. We asked Mike why he hadn't done anything, and he just shrugged and smiled.
Mike died a few years later from cancer, in his thirties. He was a wonderful karate instructor, but I think that episode in the cafeteria was his most remarkable lesson.
What, not massively escalating a confrontation is somehow extraordinary where you're from?
Remind me never to move there.
I do think the new chapter added a lot to the fic, though.
Reminds me of One Piece, actually.
I get and agree with your point about the nobility of self-restraint. I also notice that you're providing evidence of the stupidity of petty criminals, as well.
Or maybe not ... it sounds like at the end they noticed that a whole hostile group was forming around them.
Reactions to the new chapter so far: No new upvotes, one new downvote, plus one former upvote changed to a downvote.
Fimfiction wants blood.
At 10,000 views and 400 upvotes, it's one of the least-liked stories on fimfiction. And that makes Fluttershy sad.
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A whole ton of new views, though. It made one of the Featurebox's update slots.
You're right, though, that is an absolutely bizarre views/votes ratio. The more so since people aren't hating it, they're just not voting. Your two new critics aside.
Maybe they're like me and you made them think hard (so hard they forgot about the arrows)?
2173240 Well what did you expect - you made Fluttershy cry!
Also, regarding Mike: That's a heck of a legacy.
2173240 Generally that can mean a great number of non-FimFic members reading the story, since only members can up/down thumb it. (checks stats) 4,500 EqD referrals.
We had a Jujitsu/Ninjitsu teacher in the 1980's named Stan who was a Vietnam war vet. He originally got into the sport as a control on his anger, and it worked, to a degree. He was a shorter individual with a broken nose and a somewhat flat face, and I learned a whole lot from him, primarily that Jujitsu only belonged in a defense strategy somewhere below running away, screaming for help, throwing your wallet at your opponent, and begging for mercy. Carrying concealed is a much better strategy.
(He also taught a number of 'hard' styles, which are much more effective than Jujitsu in close combat, and don't require a permit. One thing I still remember is his promise that if any of his students got into a fight that they started or if they pursued some mouthy idiot who was leaving after a fight, he would kick them out of class in a very literal fashion.)
- Ben Parker
It seems Mike had understood it quite clearly.
Though, I was always under an assumption that 'never actively seek confrontation' is taught on any of those karate/jujitsu/krav maga/etc. classes. Perhaps I was wrong?
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Sense is never common?
Especially amongst many people who take martial arts, many of whom are itching to use them. Kind of like the people who own concealed firearms and are very eager to use them in "self defense".
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A lot of them don't, or gloss over it. That's why Marc MacYoung is so pissy about them.
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That was actually my first thought as well...
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Could be worse. Rainbow Dash Gets An Abortion has 3,377 views, 153 upvotes, and 197 downvotes. Though I suppose you specified "least liked", not "most hated" (though I suspect there are stories more hated than that one).
And well, your story did commit the cardinal sin of making Fluttershy cry, and having a sad ending. I suspect that people who feel bad after they read a story are less likely to vote than people who feel good after a story. An upvote has positive connotations, which doesn't match with their feelings of negativity. And if someone cares enough to really like this story before, maybe they don't like the final chapter.
Also, to be fair, the first chapter has twice as many views as the subsequent chapters, I suspect because a lot of people noped out of there when they realized what was going to happen to Fluttershy. While losing 50% of your readership by the end of your story isn't terribly uncommon, you lose 50% before chapter two. Though, I'm not sure if you posted the whole thing at the same time or not (originally, that is).
You know, Bad, when you released Experiences, I was going to come down to your house over in Washington, DC[1] and protest your little goodie two shoes story[2] by chaining myself to your fridge. I'd protest you like a hippy does to loggers by denying you access to good food and you'd have to eat out and you'd grow unhealthy eventually. Yeah. That would show you good.
My plan was pretty legit. I was going to do it, but decided not to for whatever reason. Intuition. Sure. It's a good thing I didn't. From this blog entry, I can tell that Ghost[3] was right. You Americans are impulsive. It may be a few years since that cafeteria incident, but I bet you would not hesitate to kick my head in or shoot my mouth off :( [4]
Yeah, I have to rethink my plan. I have to avoid you at all costs. Maybe I'll have to settle for touching all of the things in your bedroom and leave without you knowing, setting them slightly ajar. Ooo, I wonder what sense of creepiness you'll get from that. Or maybe I should turn on all the taps and clog your drains a la Wet Bandits. Not only will your water bill reach astronomical levels, but your house will be its own water amusement park and a seal will be the only pet to appreciate it. Yeah, you'd be forced to buy a seal as a pet. Suck it.
But neither of those plans would suffice to the one I have going on right now. Cause right now, I am actually at your house. Fortunately for you, I found sugar to be too mean and settled with candied bacon. You know how you really love your Jaguar? I put sugary bacon into its gas tank :) I think it thought it was delish, BTW.
See? This is what happens when you upset your biggest, craziest fan. You get candied bacon in your Jaguar. I hope you've learned your lesson.[5]
[1]Seriously, you're so open on the net that I can track you down so easy in RL, [en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CM_Punk]Bad Horse. Fo real, yo.
[2]You have betrayed your pacts with evil, and that is unforgivable.
[3]Dammit. Why isn't Ghost as open? All I know about him is that he's not actually British. I want to find his house so I can rearrange his bookshelves so his books are upside down in reverse order.
[4]I like my mouth. A lot. I can do things like eat with it. Oh, and I can [censored] with it :]
[5]For the record, I'm just screwing with you. I'm a merry goth catboi jester. Please take the barrel of the gun out of my mouth. It kind of hurts my molars. Hmm... I'd prefer a different kind of barrel, actually.
I used to hate these kind of people when I was a few years younger, when I was far more hot headed. I mean, it seems like they actually impede in getting shit done, eh? Obviously, beating the fuck out of a bunch of bullies and learning them how not to pick on people is progressive... eh? Hmm...
I've had a few wonderful people like Mike in my life since then and I feel they've humbled me and taught me to be a bit more level headed.
Not that barging head first into something still isn't an effective way of getting shit done, though. To fuck with the consequences.
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Sanji, with his preference of kicking? I am missing something. I haven't read any One Piece manga for a long time. Does Panda Man still make cameos?
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Maybe they're dumbfounded? There have been some of BH's stories that
I've taken awhile to upvote, and even longer to make a comment. I dunno. I always feel a bit discouraged to do so with the amount of gravity in the subject matter or the comment wars happening. It's rather intimidating, the people BH attracts.
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It's a rarity and it's always a blessing.
"Only fools go where heroes dare not tread."
"Safety before convenience."
Those two hoodlums should have left and found a new eatery rather than stick around to stave off their specific craving of sammiches and soup. Who knows? From their POV, who's to say BH's karate group wouldn't have arbitrarily decided they deserved their asses broke after all and laid the beats on them in the middle of their meal? There's no telling that they're karate practitioners, either, since they're in street clothes. They might be gang members or something and have guns or knives. There's plenty of reasons that those two shouldn't have stayed.
Common sense ain't that common because people don't pay attention to their surroundings, not bothering to see the worse circumstance conclusions. If I see a bunch of punks in the train station, I head for the other side of the platform, even if it inconveniences me because the punk end of the platform on the station I want to get off on has the side I wanted to exit off on. It's just a few more seconds of walking. If there's a vehicle nearby and you see a driver inside, give them a wide berth if you can. Same thing with objects that have a high possibility of falling over. People will plop their asses next to said object because it gives them shade.
That said, there's plenty of reasons to avoid such common sense. I can't think of any right now, but I'd say some examples are job related, where you're paid to put your life in a bit of danger to get shit done. Oh, and recreational things like skydiving! That kinda goes against common sense cuz so many things can go wrong but it's fun so therefore fuck it.
I should stop. I'm jinxing myself. Watch me get killed by a falling pallet of chips tomorrow.
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Lel
I'll take it you don't follow the parasprite? Fair enough if you don't. She's bad. She's actually drew attention to certain stories, causing F5 shitstorms of hatred that have (what I believe) caused Obsolescence to post those recent blog posts on reader and author etiquette. But yeah, those downvote bombs on those stories ain't "natural", per se, whereas your RD abortion story example looks kinda like it is. BTW, I'm adding that to my Read Later cause it seems fascinating, Keepers didn't end up giving me a massive mind fuck like All the Pretty Pony Princesses (#1 BH story ever) did, and the author seems to do a bit of horror.
I would recommend following para for a deeper understanding of evil. Where BH is educated, elegant, reasonable, and displays an (arguably existing) conscience, para is grittier, simpler, hedonistic, unreasonable, without morals, and quite possibly insane. Although, she can be nice. I've had a few words with her, and I found her strange, in a pleasant way I haven't experienced since high school. Oh, and the whole Nazi obsession of hers... no comment? Yeah?
Definitely worth following her to see another side of evil. parasprite is like Nine Inch Nails and Bad Horse is like... I dunno. Apocalyptica. Sure.
Keep your head on, though. I think a bit of her has rubbed off on me and I'm a bit more of a jerk because of it.
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Oh mother fuck you BH! You set me up! YOU FUCKING SET ME UP!!!
It took me like an hour to realize who I was talking to. Shit. Shit. Shitting shit shit. Shit. Shit shit shit shit. Shit!
Not happening. Do not want. No gusta.
I'm going to slowly step off the soapbox now. Umm... hello, mister metal internet dragon who's very nice and big. Nice weather, eh? No shitstorms, eh? Well, not site wide ones, anyways. I think.
...
...
...
Would it be a bad time to mention that your name reminds me of furries more than dragons? I dunno. It seems like it's be the name of a furry band that made music to yiff to.
Please don't hurt me! I'm a cowardly fool! I already have Shub-Niggorath, God of Mounting Goats following me; I don't wanna put up with more crap! Waaaah!
*runs*
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I'm actually aware of Parasprite, and have spoken to them several times. I never knew they were female. I do find them interesting. And the whole mythequestria thing was hilarious; Freud would have loved that guy.
What is really interesting to me about Parasprite is how erudite they can be when they actually bother, which makes me wonder how much of their ridiculous posting is pretense. I'm pretty terrible at pretending to be someone else; I've had people recognize my posts without even reading who posted them before, on multiple different websites about multiple different subjects. I wonder if Parasprite really does normally type that way, and has to actually try to be erudite, or if her Parasprite voice is an affection to mess with people.
Glad to know my reputation precedes me.
Possibly? It is an incredibly nerdy nickname; I came up with it when I was eight years old because, well, there were gold dragons and silver dragons and bronze dragons and all that stuff, but gold is a pretty soft metal. Why not a titanium dragon? Clearly, titanium is the most awesome of all metals, so it only makes sense that it would make the most awesome of all dragons.
A few years later I adopted it as my internet monicker (the other one I used way back in the day was Mishra@home, a reference to Magic:The Gathering; ironically, I never actually had an @home email address) and I've been using it pretty heavily since... 2001? 2002? Somewhere in that range. I've had the name longer than that - I know I used it in Counterstrike in 1999, and I may have used it before then, but I'm not entirely certain.
Though let's face it, I am a terrible furry. I kind of fell in on the deep end - Googling for my (now long defunct) digitalrice website, I stumbled across an otherkin's webpage, and then followed some links to find a place called the Gryphon's Guild, where I hung out for many years amongst the sort of people who think that joining an internet community about really loving gryphons - and I don't mean carnally, I just mean thinking gryphons are really awesome. Which probably forever flavored my view of furries, really. And transgendered individuals, as I met otherkin before I met anyone who was transgendered, and thus to me, forevermore are transgendered people "otherkin, except with gender instead of species", rather than the other way around.
Which, let me tell you, does not make transgendered people happy, even when I say I'm totally cool with otherkin. Or maybe it is especially because I am totally cool with people who think they're dragons?
Not sure.
I never have been one, of course (though I have been mistaken for one on multiple occaisions), but I've always sort of enjoyed their existence for some reason. I guess it makes sense that I would.
Anyway, yeah. And now I am a huge pony fan because, let's face it, I write stories about ponies. And am proud of writing said stories. I know a lot of bronies don't really identify themselves as furries, but, well, when you are an enormous fan of technicolored semi-anthropomorphized horses, it is kind of hard to say that you're not.
As a wise man once said, "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."
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In one of Luffy's flashbacks, we see Red-haired Shanks and his pirates having a big ol' party at the pub, and some bandits walk in. They then proceed to harass and mock the Red-hair pirates, and Shanks just takes it. Luffy think's he's being a chump for not opening a can of whoop-ass, but Shanks tells him that fighting just to salvage one's ego is just pointless.
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More than once, actually. A few thousand pages later, and halfway across the world, the same thing happens with Luffy being the harassed one.
That second time I find it more interesting because Luffy is with two crew members; one, a very strong fighter, understands what is happening with just a glance from Luffy and does not interfere. The other, who is not much of a fighter and had problems with... let's call it bullying, it's close enough... does not readily understand what is happening and is moved to tears.
It was, IMHO, masterfully done both times, and the first time it happened it actually helped shape the main character's personality.
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I've actually had a very short but intense bout of correspondence with them after helping them proofread a chapter of Splinterwood, in which I tried to give 'em and show as much objective evidence that the world is, in fact becoming a better place.
It was..interesting, to say the least, given I had a strong impression of emotional detachment from them even as he used emotional arguments to disregard my own; at one point saying something along the lines "I can't believe you're actually trying to change my mind, this is hilarious" which, as an aspiring-rationalist-non serious cultist of bayes made me stop in bafflement.
There is a fantastic word in italian, "supercazzolare" which roughly translates to "Chewbacca defense", and I got the feeling he uses that, all the time, at the borders of his usual thoughts.
I dunno...I definitely don't understand them, but they are fascinating
Cool narrative, bro.
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"Parasprite" has been used as a synonym for "troll" in the fandom as one of those made up fandom words, which is why I never take them too seriously if they say something ridiculous... because, well, they do troll. Frequently. And their name basically means "The Troll".
So... yeah. I just assume whenever they say something really ridiculous that they're messing with people.
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Well, I already upvoted it, faved it, and I liked the new chapter, and I think others did as well. What could I do, upvote it twice?
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The closest thing I've seen to what you are saying here was the little kid who punched me in the solar plexus at a Taekwondo meetup when I was 14 and then somehow got me in trouble for it even though I didn't retaliate or anything.
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Kids who take martial arts are usually doing so at the direction of their parents; it is a very different environment from adults who sign up for martial arts.
When you deal with kids, they're usually emphasizing that it is healthy, teaches them self-discipline, ect.
When you deal with adults, you see a lot more stuff about how martial arts make you a badass, how they let you kick ass, how they let you protect yourself and your family.
There are definitely martial arts for adults which are about health and all that other stuff, but, well, I see ads for "self defense" martial arts all the time on the internet which basically say "Don't click here if you're too much of a coward to defend your family" and stuff like that. And I believe that quote is almost word for word an ad I've seen several times.
I don't really see that sort of stuff directed at kids so much, probably because parents don't want their kids piledriving kids on the playground.
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That way of advertising martial arts seems very American.
Yeah... that wasn't learned off of any classes. Little Zangief is the best
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See, my original point stands, then. Thank you for delineating the thing I wanted to avoid. That's something I would like to stay away from entirely if at all possible. It's not the default in my little bubble, and I was surprised to learn that Bad Horse ever considered it to be the default in his.
2176801 These were two guys who came up to a skinny guy who seemed to be alone in a cafeteria around midnight, and tried to start a fight. It looked like they were going to start a fight regardless.
If you can watch people being cruel to your friend for fun, and not want to hurt them, you're too civilized, IMHO.
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Wanting is fine.
I can't describe what I want to do since that could blow my cover on my supervillainry should it ever come to fruition.
Three rules from your sensei:
One--outsource your feelings
Two--limit your training to be task-specific
Three--assign regret to those accountable.
2173240 Try 4,700 views and 146 upvotes, 15 downvotes
2173876
Your name is so metal.
2173876
Your name is so metal.