Stuff you should read, notes I took, and magic numbers · 2:59pm Jun 23rd, 2014

I need to blog more. What I need to do is get back in the habit of writing, preferably daily, and hopefully this will inspire me. First things first!

1. Read This. If you haven't already, you should be reading Fuzzyfervert's latest masterpiece "Twilight's Monster", and I mean now. It earns its Dark and Alternare Universe tags, certainly, but if you're a TwiLuna fan, this should be at the top of your Read Later list. Get on it. Also (possibly at my urging) Fuzzy just moved it from a Mature tag to Teen, so if your filters were on, look again. There's implied sex and violence, all offscreen, and some salty language. There's also desperate and agonizing TwiLuna, and a really well-thought-out Alternate Universe that forks from canon starting a looooong time back. Go forth and read!

2. Magical Round Number Milestone Time! What is it about lots of zeroes that fascinates us? Why is 300 better than 302 or 297? Whatever the reason, within the last month...
- Luna's Librarian hit 12000 views and 1500 likes
- Pursuit hit 5000 views and 700 likes
- Concerto hit 300 likes, and it's just shy of 3000 views
- Flight Suit hit 300 likes, and it's just shy of 3000 views
- And for reasons entirely unknown to me, I'm closing in on 600 foolowers. Or is that followers? I can never tell.

3. In the Queue. My head is empty at the moment, though my to-do list isn't. In no particular order,
- Publish a bonus chapter of Egghead & Featherbrain. I have it uploaded but unpublished; it's an old TMP relic, not my finest, but it's there. Can't decide whether I really want to add it, since I marked E&F "Complete", but I may do so eventually.
- Do something for my 2-year anniversary on FiMFiction. I joined in July 2012 and I thought this would be a good time to do... something. Not sure what, exactly.
- Revise and edit Pursuit. I want to play up earlier in the story that Twilight's refusals of Celestia's repeated and relentless advances are mostly for show, done out of nervousness about accepting rather than rooted in genuine objections. That way her eventual about-face won't seem so sudden. It won't take much, I think - just a sentence here or there, really.
- Crank out more Twilestia and TwiLuna prompts for the collabs. I enjoy them too much, and I don't do nearly enough. I also need to expand and rewrite my last TwiLuna prompt for Dark Paradise and move it to Luna's Librarian. Also, I need to get in on the TwiDance collab too. It's delicious.
- Bug RazedRainbow to finish Reconstruction Site (RariDash with tragic amputation, and for once it isn't Rainbow's wings. I proofread / pre-read / edited for it but he hasn't updated in almost a year now. It's too good to leave abandoned.

4. Headcanon moment of the week. I sit in traffic and think of these things. I'd say "I need a hobby" but it appears I have one. This week's thought: Alicorn Magic Levels. Magical "power" is of course a combination of many things: personal reserves of power (mana), maximum output level, endurance, natural talent and learned skill, specialization and cutie mark influence, and more. Assume we can aggregate it all, and picture unicorn magical power as rated 1-10, with 1 being negligible magic skill (de-powered or exhausted unicorn, or foals), and 10 being a supremely skilled and gifted (normal) unicorn. Unicorn Twilight might be an 11 in this scale. Celestia and Luna would rate around a 15, with vast reserves of power and massive output potential, plus centuries of learning how best to use them. They could overpower the strongest unicorn mages with their inbuilt magic alone. Note that that's for their normal unicorn magic: their planetary / stellar powers would rate around 100. They're manipulating stellar bodies in a pocket universe, at will, and doing so in ways in which even bouncing the moon across the sky like a ball won't negatively affect tides or shake apart Equestria's crust. Problem is that there's nothing in between that 100-rated stellar magic and their 15-rated unicorn magic. TL;DR version: It's as if they have powers A, B, C, and Z, and none of the intervening ones. Celestia could easily have defeated Chrysalis at the royal wedding by calling on her connection to the sun, incinerating all of Canterlot in the process. Chrysalis knew this and counted on it: she was taking the sure bet that Celestia wouldn't sacrifice a city's worth of her own citizens to defeat her and her changeling army. This is why Celestia and Luna rely on Twilight to be their troubleshooter: Twilight's alicorn-level powers, combined with her natural talent for magic, gives her access to those mid-level skills that the others lack. She can work wonders without leveling continents. She's not there yet; give her a few centuries. Cadance will be 4th in power among the alicorns, unless she taps into the Crystal Heart, in which case she could rival the others temporarily. Speaking of temporary boosts, the Alicorn Amulet boosted Trixie's power to that same 15-ish level. She couldn't have moved the sun but she could have held her own against Alicorn Twilight, albeit briefly. What the Amulet didn't do was give Trixie any more experience or knowledge; it was a raw power boost. She could have fought Day 1 (MMC) Alicorn Twilight to a standstill, maybe; she couldn't have held on nearly as long vs. Season 4 Episode 25-ish (just prior to Tirek) Twilight, when experience and Twilight's intuitive understanding of magic would have turned the tide. Sunset Shimmer with the Alicorn Amulet (as a former student of Celestia) would have been far more dangerous, and very likely Alicorn Twilight would have needed backup.

Here, have some ticked-off Luna. Maybe someone called Twilight "pudgy"? They should know better. Only Luna gets to say that.