The World's Most Obvious Story Title (and other things too minor for their own blog post). · 9:26pm Jun 1st, 2015
So. In the first short piece for The Elements Of Elements, I mentioned, as a casual joke, that some Ponyville residents will deliberately misshelve books in the name of winning a bet on how long it'll take for Twilight to throw them out. (Which kind of explains a little about the constant need to re-sort the entire tree.) And you'd kind of figure she'd almost have to find out about this eventually, if only because a rather stupid pony, or one who was desperate to win -- aw, why can't it be both -- outright told her.
Let's say that happens. Exactly that. Very early in S1. Call it about two moons post-arrival, before the slumber party.
She throws the stallion out. Or rather, upon seeing her reaction starting to build, he flees -- with her field-flinging something at his retreating tail just as the front door is closing.
Our bettor escapes. The door isn't quite so lucky, and takes the full impact of whatever Twilight tossed. A very large crack develops, at speed.
(Yes, at this point, I did think about having somepony wander in, stare at the crack in vague confusion, and then out-of-nowhere inquire as to whether the library could host a pun contest. And that pony's name may be Stonebender.)
Twilight freaks. She has damaged city property. The library is her responsibility. Not only did she just come close to assaulting a not-quite-patron, but she has proven herself incapable of handling her duties. Sacred ground has been defiled. Therefore, sacred ground had better be reconsecrated before anypony catches on. However, she doesn't know any spells for wood repair. (Rarity knows the wood sculpture spell, but that's too easy a potential solution, so Twilight isn't aware of that yet -- and thus the placement on the timeline.) This means she has to get physical. Carpentry. And it turns out there's a substance which can fill gaps and hardens instantly on contact with a unicorn field. Which, when Twilight tries to levitate it into place, turns out to mean "it hardens instantly." Inside her field. Got to apply it by hoof.
(Another fine F&F product! Local distributorships still available.)
Gluing ensues. Just for starters. If she had wings at this point, one would be hauling books with the other possibly tip-attached to a leg. As-is, hooves may wind up in near-permanent union. Twilight's trying to follow the instructions, but the door must be restored to perfection and everything she does only seems to call attention to another defect. (Not exactly having the original state memorized doesn't help.) Things keep getting worse: she's just no good at hoof and mouth labor, especially for what she's convinced is fine detail work. At some point, just to cut off the approaching nervous breakdown, we'll need to have a friend rescue her. AJ or Fluttershy, I think: they would both do a lot of maintenance work on their own residences. Eventually, all is well, or as close as it's going to get. And Twilight just has to accept that sometimes, a minor defect in a piece can add character, at least until she saves enough to secretly order a replacement under the mayor's snout.
The title...
...look, you kind of had to see this coming...
...Twilight Spackle.
That's got to be good for twenty automatic downvotes all by itself.
(How has no one used this before? Is it the twenty automatic downvotes thing?)
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I was browsing through a flea market this past weekend and went by a yard sale table: just like putting stuff on your grass, but you pay a daily rental fee for the honor. It's a resort for those who don't have grass, or a driveway, or live in a big city and the municipality already has a special fine just for the occasion. And this table was hosting a complete set of Star Trek: the original series.
On tape.
Betamax format.
Still in the original shrinkwrap.
I stared at the collection for a while. They were housed in a clear plastic tub, so it was easy to regard the entire group. One episode per tape, no more.
Research is easy when you're willing to burn the data. Once upon a time, back in the days when sellers were starting to realize that yes, this particular audience would in fact buy pretty much anything, they began looking for things to sell them. The idea of actually owning a TV series (at least for personal at-will viewing) was also starting to slowly dawn on the studios, and better they get money from that than allow those people to create their own collections, right? So... special clubs. One episode a month, or maybe two. First one... fifteen dollars? All subsequent tapes twenty bucks. Maybe twenty-five. Cancel any time. And then after a few years of effort, you would be the proud owner of your very own Star Trek set (with no need to call it "original" yet), with the ability to watch an official version at any time you chose, something no one had ever thought possible before. Or, for the true collector... those people could buy two sets: one to watch and one to display and treasure.
If you showed me a disc-based complete set on a flea market table... I would consider it. No Trekker I, but I have some appreciation for the work. I can watch any episode of the original series any time I like, as part of my Amazon Prime membership -- but there's something to be said for true ownership.
About $109.00 new from Amazon, for a Blu-Ray set. A variable less from eBay. But Betamax died, VHS faded, and even the discs will fade in time...
Seventy-nine episodes.
Plus shipping and handling.
Back in the day, that would added up to a couple of thousand dollars, right?
No price inquiry. I walked away. I wanted to find a private place to feel horribly sad in.
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The first manga I ever read was Parasyte. (This may explain a lot.) The anime, which apparently had something around a two-decade time delay, finished airing in March for Japan, which means Hulu's got it now and the cheap Malaysian sets are on eBay. I'm told it's an incredibly faithful adaptation, with some of it almost coming panel-for-panel from the original -- and since the manga is complete, no one had to invent a let's wrap-the-series-before-the-comic ending. Strong voice acting. Some quality animation. Much loved, possibly in no small part because some people have been waiting a couple of decades for it. For my own part, it's at least a noticeable span of time, and...
I'm not sure about getting a Malaysian set: they're inexpensive, but they cram a lot onto a disk: you can get 24 episodes on two reflective circles, and I've never been sure as to whether they stuff too much or the U.S. wastes a lot of space. Plus Malaysia tends to censor. A lot. (And you will occasionally run into the misfortune of some hilariously bad subtitling.) The Japan release is on Amazon, but at a price where flying to Japan for a pickup starts to look like an option. No idea when the States offering is coming out.
...sometimes, the hardest thing to do is waiting a little while longer.
And yes, in the wake of the section above, I'm aware the whole desire is a little ironic.
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One really-final-this-time note on the Hero Run game: they're closed. Users got an update two days ago which announced in-app sales were shutting down on May 31st, with technical support and releases ending on June 30th. Downloaded copies will still work, but no more official versions will be available.
What happened? I think they priced themselves out of the market. We talked about how many in-app purchases it would take to unlock the most expensive characters, and it feels like other people did that math and worked out that One Fully Unlocked Character * That Much Money = I'll Stop Playing Now. Less downloads as they told their friends not to bother, in-app purchases dried up... the game wasn't taking in enough cash for the company to keep supporting it, and so they stopped. But hey, at least you can still play it.
Sort of. One friend still has this, and that's where I got this news. Today, that party earned enough in-game currency to purchase another random rare character card. The coins were deducted. The card came up Joker.
And then, because there was no longer a game server to inform of her purchase, the card was not added to her collection. It simply evaporated into the electrons from whence it came. But those in-game coins stayed deducted.
So you can keep the game on your tablet forever. You might eventually save up enough gems to unlock every character there is, and they added one more just before shutting down. And when you buy them? The gems will vanish. The characters won't be added to the file. But on the bright side, you will have finally finished completely wasting your time...
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As American animation goes, Steven Universe is currently leading the field in retroactive "Megacrap" reactions.
What I've come to love about the series is the rewatch value. Rebecca Sugar is very slowly unfolding the backstory of this little corner, taking her time and using the full canvas which Cartoon Network's huge episode order has granted. There's no need to rush. And so she's been throwing little details into artwork and dialogue which don't mean much at the time. Two shoes are flung into the air and the second only comes down eleven episodes after the first. Once the series began to find its footing, it began a steady transition towards stunning. But when you see some of what was revealed later on in the run, then go through the early episodes again with that information in mind... words gain weight. Simple expressions develop extra layers of meaning. Character posture is revealed as a clue planted in a time when you didn't even know there was a mystery. As a sequence of episodes, it can be rather loose with a lot of slice-of-life thrown in -- but as a series, this may be the most tightly-plotted animation work currently on American television, and the recent reviews seem to indicate people are starting to realize that. On the first viewing, it's a quiet moment, or a small joke, or a throwaway you didn't even notice going past. And on the second... oh, megacrap: it was right there the whole time...
Not too late to get in before the fandom starts to peak.
(And yet Cartoon Network still won't release a real Season #1 set.)
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If anyone knows a way to completely and forever scrub Abode Flash off a computer -- which is not their own uninstaller or the unofficial really-it's-gone-this-time -- please tell me. I'm pretty sure one program should not be draining up to forty percent of system resources. It's gotten to the point where I have to deliberately crash it in order to advance in any other function at all. But the instant I load a new page, it's back again... and deleting/reinstalling hasn't done a thing.
The only true solution may be a new computer. I'm currently about 50% of the way there (and we may talk about SurveyQuest in another blog). The remaining 50% is not going to come along next week. But until then, I need a stopgap -- and I am willing to live without Flash if i have to. I just can't seem to actually get rid of it. It's crabgrass, Kudzu. Girl scout cookie sales stations. It's rapidly descending to the level of That One Party Guest Who Will, If Allowed, Sleep In The Punchbowl. And it's making the desktop just about impossible to use for hours at a time -- which is wrecking quite a bit else, writing capacity included.
Put it this way: I am about two weeks away from "Is there any chance 'format hard drive' would work?"
And counting.
...and the reason Twilight doesn't simply get a pony to fix her door...?
...Right, neurotic Unicorn who goes off the deep end if anyone so much as looks at a book wrong - or, Celestia forbid - breathes on a page...
Forget I said anything
I'm quite amused no one's run you out of town with your puns yet
Whatever you're using to bribe them with seems to be working
That pun was absolutely horrible, and I love you forever for it.
(and in regards to Flash... I guess you could try uninstalling it through the Programs and Features menu in the control panel?)
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Both seeing it as her personal responsibility and being afraid that the more ponies she brings in on it, the higher the chances of the story spreading.
(ETA: One of the things the group has in common, especially in the early days, is that they all have a lot of trouble asking for help.)
Having her trying to buy the repair items while in disguise might be going slightly too far, but I can see S1 Twilight getting flustered by the supply shop owner's questions and leaving without half the things she needs.
3116002 And at the end of it, she'll still probably be the (behind closed doors) laughingstock of Ponyville
...again
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/728/775/4b0.gif
My body is ready
If you're using Firefox, try installing the "Flash Control" or "Flash Block" plugin. It won't remove the actual Flash player, but it should keep it from being loaded by the web pages in question.
Depending on your Firefox version, you may also be able to go into Tools --> Add-Ons --> Plugins, and switch Shockwave Flash to "Never Activate."
I'm not entirely sure where you're getting that idea from... Star Trek was very definitely still in syndicated reruns at the time, and if you had a Betamax at all, it was very definitely capable of recording those syndicated reruns off the air, so it was entirely possible for "those people" to "create their own collections" through off-air recordings if they wanted to. What, precisely, do you think the studios were preventing "those people" from doing?
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The greatest sin any studio can conceive of: getting their content free, at least in the sense that the studio didn't get any of the money. Simply can't be allowed.
Besides, think of the slipcovers! They have artwork on them! Official artwork! (Okay, official screenshots. But they're official!) No need to worry about the picture quality of the antenna broadcast, and the show may not be available in your area anyway. And the commercials have been edited out for you! It's such a time-saver...
(Taken far enough, every marketing pitch starts to sound like Flim & Flam wrote it.)
As for "those people" -- I don't think many studios really understood their fanbases back then. I'm also not sure that's changed much.
Steve Jobs hated Adobe Flash with a passion.
Okay, the guy did everything with a passion. But still, he was right about Flash.
3116118
And yet, as I have already established, there were many fans who did exactly that; built their own collections by recording the episodes off the air, either because they didn't have the money to spend on the official tape sets, or just didn't wish to spend the money on them. So I'm really not sure what point, if any, you think you're making here.
Is it your contention that Paramount should have given away the official tapes for free? Or is this just one of those "stop liking things I don't like" things, where since you don't see the value in something, no one else should either?
If you're taking issue with the price-per-tape, specifically, then all I can say is that such pricing wasn't at all uncommon back then, and it had a lot to do with the state of the technology at the time. Mass duplication of helical-scan videotape was a complex, time-and-labor-intensive process until the mid-80s — and when that particular set of tapes started hitting the market in the latter half of the 80s, Betamax was on its way out, so while the cost of duplicating the tapes had dropped, making things available on Beta at all was catering to a niche market, and a Beta release of the entire Star Trek series was catering to a niche of a niche...
3116163
*sigh*
Sometimes I think if I found myself with healing abilities and went around curing the sick, I'd be stoned to death by a mob of angry pharmaceutical CEOs.
The sadness was about obsolescence. Think about the effort required to assemble that collection, including the financial. It could be argued as a labor of love, certainly not something that just anyone could or would do. To make the commitment towards getting the entire series, to keep paying out over that much time -- and then, once it was complete, keeping every last tape perfect and untouched. A monument to adoration and the difference that piece of media made in the owner's life.
And here you have the end product of all that effort in front of you. In a clear plastic bin. On a flea market table. Make an offer.
Once upon a time, that set took dedication, commitment and yes, you could easily say love. Now? Order everything in a single shot for the cost of perhaps five tapes, have it within two days -- or watch the digital, remastered versions at your leisure as an incidental benefit of having paid for something else entirely.
Does the love become more casual because the effort is so much less? Does it fade? Has it simply kept up with the times and every new means of availability will be equally adored? It's possible the owner had just fully moved on to streaming and had more need for the space.
But still... all that work...
3116193 It's possible that the tapes were purchased by someone else as a labor of love. Someone with whom the current owner may no longer be on speaking terms with, and made the mistake of leaving with said current owner.
Reminds of this one joke:
A man in California saw an ad in the paper for an "almost new" Porsche, in excellent condition - price $50. He was certain the printers had made a typographical error, but even at $5,000 it would have been a bargain, so he hurried to the address to look at the car.
A nice-looking woman appeared at the front door. Yes, she had placed the ad. The price was indeed $50. "The car," she said, "is in the garage. Come and look at it."
The fellow was overwhelmed. It was a beautiful Porsche and, as the ad promised, "nearly new." He asked if he could drive the car around the block. The woman said, "Of course," and went with him. The Porsche drove like a dream. The young man peeled off $50 and handed it over, somewhat sheepishly. The woman gave him the necessary papers, and the car was his.
Finally, the new owner couldn't stand it any longer. He had to know why the woman would sell the Porsche at such a ridiculously low price. Her reply was simple: With a half-smile on her face, she said, "My husband ran off with his secretary a few days ago and left a note instructing me to sell the car and the house, and send him the money."
(from Snopes.com)
For Chrome and Firefox, try chrome:plugins and about:addons in the URL field and disable the Flash plugins. For other browsers, I'm sure it's about as simple. Once deactivated, they should STAY deactivated.
My first thought on the story idea was "Twilight Cracks Up." Hey, it's both literal and figurative...
Honestly though, I like the idea of Twilight never finding out about the bet. Completely clueless. Thrilled that the town has such dedicated library patrons. Eye twitches and other ticks at every miss-shelved book. (Spike saying, "It's your own fault, Twilight. You completely change the organisation of this place twice a week. Ponies are just putting things back where they remember them being last time.)
Also, the odds... No doubt her friends would get more leeway, and thus longer odds. Somepony messing up the magical section would get tossed faster than say cloud architecture. Would a unicorn unsorting by field get tossed sooner or later than an earth pony carrying books in their mouth? (Bonus points for visible teeth marks?) Would high shelves being messed up by pegasi be noticed sooner or later?
No doubt that Flutershy, Rarity, and Applejack would think it cruel. Funny, but cruel. Rainbow would consistently bet against herself, and lose more often than not. Pinkie is probably running the book...
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Okay, now I see what point you were actually going for. I can agree with that to a certain extent, especially since I've personally lived through that entire transition from when the videocassette recorder went from being a multi-thousand-dollar appliance that was bulky, heavy, complicated to use, and which few households could afford and even fewer could think of any practical use for; to a common household appliance, then eventually to its obsolescence. (Of course, for me it's a bit sad to see these things fade into obsolescence because I grew up during that time period; I can remember a time when things like VCRs, personal computers, CDs, cell phones, and hand-held video games didn't even exist, so a lot of childhood and teenage memories are bound up with them as they went from being the stuff of science-fiction to something you could actually own and use.)
The point, alas, got a bit muddled and lost amidst the snark about Paramount charging money for the tapes instead of letting people make their own collections, or whatever — especially when you doubled down on that snark in your previous reply. You rather made it sound as if you thought the manufacturer was committing some kind of war crime against humanity because they had the gall to sell a product to some group of customers who wanted to buy it, leaving the impression that you didn't think Paramount should have even offered them for sale in the first place.
(Now, as to why someone would have spent that kind of money on a complete set, and then never actually opened or watched any of them? Who can say... maybe they were one of those "collectors-for-profit" types who erroneously assumed that a complete, still-sealed set would automatically become valuable some day? I've run into more than a few of those types over the years; they're the same people who are currently out there snarfing up every possible cover variant of the IDW My Little Pony comics on the dubious premise that they'll become valuable "some day", never quite grasping the fact that the reason the original 1963 Spider-Man #1 is worth $36,000 in mint condition today is precisely because there were not tens of thousands of "collectors" back then who bought up dozens of copies and immediately entombed them in archival mylar bags stored at 0 degrees Kelvin in a neutrino-free environment.
)
Twilight Sparkle and the Library Glue War
The Escalation of Chaos can be even simpler.
Look at the crack in the little window at the top of the door. A new pane of glass and some glazing will fix that right up. Let me get the book.
Oops, I dripped some glazing on the door and when I scraped it off, the finish came with it. I'll just sand it down and refinish it. Let me get the book.
Now there are drips on the floor that have stuck the tarp to the wood. I'll have to refinish the floor. Let me get the book.
There are some pits in the floor that need to be filled before I varnish. Let me get this F&F Filler, guaranteed to stick... Now it's stuck on one hoof, I'll just pull... Now my hoof is stuck to the bookshelf. If I wiggle... Now I've got books stuck to books stuck to the bookshelf stuck to the floor stuck to the door stuck to the librarian
There's a reason why I won't let my wife get me started refinishing the carpet in the kitchen...
3116604 Reminds me of that episode from King of the Hill when Bobby and Luanne were left in charge of the house for a day. Bobby forgetting to use a coaster soon escalates into an attempt to completely renovate the house.
3116604 Why do you have carpet in the kitchen? If there's any room that needs carpet less, it would be a bathroom... which I've seen happen.
3116716 Because it was here when we moved in. It took *two* passes by a Rug Doctor before we realized it had a pattern. Yeah, it's a fun house. Rarity would have passed out on the spot when we moved in. Still, I'm a little afraid to do any major projects like replacing the carpet for fear that it would roll into cabinets... and a sink... and a dishwasher... and windows... and... Well, a new house.
If I remember correctly, Calahan ran Punday night contests on Tuesday. Could it be that Twilight, already in a panic over the door, blindly agreed to Stonebender's request? And with all the calamities, major and minor, falling on a Tuesday the Library has either been closed, or Twilight herself has been absent...
What kind of shock to her system would finding out about Punday night be? Would she prefer to host an evening of alliteration?
Twilight Spackle sounds hilarious. Twilight has harmed a library! Her hooves are stained with sap!
Also, I will gladly take a look at Steven Universe, but I'm positively glacial when it comes to TV archive binges. I'm still catching up on Adventure Time.
from the mare who brought us "Twilight's Escort Service", i'd expect nothing less.
Steven Universe is pretty awesome; it's up there with Gravity Falls in my list of "shows I am enthusiastic about watching."
Still, I'd think the twenty automatic downvotes are worth the eighty automatic upvotes and at least lower half of the Feature Box.
I've thought of the pun -- big surprise there -- but admittedly, not even tried to come up with context for it.