Hypothesis #1: The Cake is a Pie · 10:09am Mar 24th, 2016
An idea just came to me: The Cake is a Pie.
No, literally, this is, like, the entire thing. It explains a lot, though.
I have no canonical means to substantiate that, but the idea is that Carrot Cake is related to Igneous Rock Pie. More likely than not, they are cousins. At the furthest, second cousins. Why? Let me count the whys:
1. See “MMMystery on the Friendship Express”, “Baby Cakes”, “A Bird in the Hoof”… Just about every time he shows up, really.
Pinkie, being a live-in worker of undetermined relationship to Carrot and Cup Cake, is permitted tremendous freedom within Sugarcube Corner, more likely than not, far more than she’s worth economically – from the secret party planning cave, to neverending, incessant trouble, and sometimes, destruction. Mister Cake is shown to be a nervous, jittery stallion,1 who would need a reason to tolerate Pinkie for long enough to get used to her.
2. Cheese Sandwich’s flashback by the end, to be precise.
Pinkie is very obviously not suited to live on the rock farm, so it’s no wonder she is no longer there. However, according to “Pinkie Pride,”2 she was living in Ponyville from a young age, presumably, showing up soon after the Sonic Rainboom. Can you imagine a stern, conservative and traditionalist stallion like Igneous Rock Pie, letting Pinkie strike out on her own with just a cutie mark to her name? Feels unthinkable. But realizing that her future doesn’t lie in rubble, and shipping her off to live with a less traditionalist relative who agrees to teach her a viable trade suited to her talents and employ her? That, I can imagine.
3. Apples have themed names going – they are primarily named after apple-based dishes or after apple cultivars – but even then, the latest crop of Apples is an exception to the rule, with “Apple Bloom” being pretty literal, and “Applejack” being an alcoholic apple-based drink. “Big Macintosh” is a mutated reference to “Red McIntosh”.
4. And despite “Hearthbreakers,” it is pretty clear ponies at large wouldn’t find them edible either.
5. Which is also the only example of a husband and wife couple with a matching name component, suggesting that either one of them changed the name upon marriage – there is precious little evidence to support the idea that ponies ever change names – or that they had matching names before marriage. I wonder, how would Igneous Rock Pie treat a second cousin who married a second cousin, and what did the pairing stone have to say about that, if anything?…Both families belong to the short subset of pony families that pass on name components directly, which even Apples don’t do,3 which suggests they are culturally related. Pies actually go so far as to produce non-meaningful compounds – Igneous Rock Pie, Maud Pie, Marble Pie, Limestone Pie… None of these sound very edible.4 Cakes have more meaningful names, but they all have a distinct component – Carrot Cake, Cup Cake,5 Pound Cake, Pumpkin Cake…
So, opinions, counterarguments?
EDIT (2016-03-26): A while after writing this, I have discovered I’m not the only one who made the same conclusion – in particular, Estee’s Pinkie Pie vs. The Soufflé also appears to presume the same explanation for Pinkie’s presence in Sugarcube Corner, down to postulating Pinkie having common grandparents with the Cake Twins.
Well, it is kind of obvious, isn’t it?
The same reason as for everything he does: his wife told him to.
Wait a minute. How'd you get a superscript?
Somehow I hadn't noticed how weird that is. Maybe in some future episode we'll discover they've all interpreted their cutie marks wrong, and are supposed to be bakers.
3824279
Yes, there is that option that the relative of Pies is the other Cake. I find it a bit less likely, though, because in every scene where the actual business occurs in and regarding Sugarcube, Carrot Cake appears center stage -- telling his wife to hurry up, fainting as the cake tips, etc, etc, so it is a bit more likely he would be the one making the decision than his wife. But it can work either way.
Pandoc, custom formatter for fimfiction bbcode dialect, and a lot of cheating with unicode symbols:
function faux_superscript(input_string) return tostring(input_string):tr_spaced( "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B D E G H I J K L M N O P R T U V W a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w x y z", "⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ᴬ ᴮ ᴰ ᴱ ᴳ ᴴ ᴵ ᴶ ᴷ ᴸ ᴹ ᴺ ᴼ ᴾ ᴿ ᵀ ᵁ ⱽ ᵂ ᵃ ᵇ ᶜ ᵈ ᵉ ᶠ ᵍ ʰ ⁱ ʲ ᵏ ˡ ᵐ ⁿ ᵒ ᵖ ʳ ˢ ᵗ ᵘ ᵛ ʷ ˣ ʸ ᶻ" ) end function faux_subscript(input_string) return tostring(input_string):tr_spaced( "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a e h i j k l m n o p r s t u v x", "₀ ₁ ₂ ₃ ₄ ₅ ₆ ₇ ₈ ₉ ₐ ₑ ₕ ᵢ ⱼ ₖ ₗ ₘ ₙ ₒ ₚ ᵣ ₛ ₜ ᵤ ᵥ ₓ" ) endThat would be amusingly evil. :)
3824305 But then how'd you embed a function definition, and a function call, in your comment? Can you link to somewhere that shows an example of how all that works together?
3824486
Fimfiction has a completely undocumented [code][/code] tag which I found by trying every bbcode tag I ever heard about. I’m not executing any code in the browser if that’s what you’re asking.
Not really, but here:
I edit everything, including comments of any substantial length, in Atom which is currently my editor of choice, using Markdown to format it – any pure text editor will do, of course, and you can use any other markup language pandoc understands.
Then I feed the result through pandoc invoking it appropriately to use this custom formatter¹ – they permit pandoc to produce more or less any reasonable text-based format. The problem is figuring out how to express what you want to see in Fimfiction’s bbcode, which took some experimenting, but this formatter takes care of all the clever tricks.
That gets me a text file containing bbcode which is not really human readable and which I just copy and paste.
There’s also a makefile by now to invoke that stack, because I use it to edit all my stories and notes, but I started with a shell script.
The comment on the git repo for Aporia says “An overengineered piece of MLP fanfiction” for a reason. :)
3824548 ... you use git to version-control your stories?
You've out-nerded me yet again.
3824634
It kind of felt natural when my editor had more time for me, he could clearly see what exactly did I change since the last time and when.
Now it just keeps the whole thing safe and backed up a few times, mostly. Also, it helps with editing on mobile devices. (PocketGit + DroidEdit + foldable keyboard + build webhook on my server...)
3824653 Tangential rant: Both git and subversion have caused me much more trouble than they have ever prevented. They've destroyed my source code, wiped out revision histories (Subversion used to do this if you renamed or moved the file; I think git still does when you merge branches), wiped out my entire repository (Subversion often does this in team environments during an upgrade if you have different users using different clients), caused screw-ups because changes got propagated into branches before the changes they depended on did, or just bogged things down generally due to the continual need to read man pages, each of which assumed you'd already memorized all of the other man pages.
I kept track of all the major production outages at one workplace for half a year. Most of them were caused by bugs introduced by the version control process. Nearly all of the rest were introduced by other tools and processes we had created to reduce bugs.
I think that a lot of places would be better off just using revision control to save backup points, and not doing dev-test-prod branching at all.
3824694
Mmmm... You might be interested in fossil, then. It has a very different approach to keeping things safe and to branching from either subversion or git, and might serve your purposes better than either.
That said, you do need everyone to know how to use the version control for it to work properly, which is, of course, not normal. :) But then again, there's Gitkraken...
My last production outage was caused by datacenter's raid failure. Then a tech came around, replaced the drive, and mirrored the clean drive onto the healthy one. I inherited that horror from a contractor who utterly mismanaged a ~1 million lines project in such a way that a clean reinstall in the specified manner was impossible, and all we had was a database backup. We've been hoping to abandon it in favour of a fresh fork once I've sorted out the kinks... and then boom.
That was a fun week.
3824723 I think git is awful, but the main problem I see isn't with the tool. It's with dev / test / prod branching and code reviews.
- Code reviews are useful, but there has to be a way to keep them from becoming style wars, feature creep, sources of resentment, and an obstacle to commits that keeps everybody's code always out of sync. Not all commits need to be reviewed.
- dev / test / prod branching, I've come to believe, is more trouble than it's worth for many teams. "I'll patch the code and the DB in prod, then write a different patch in test, then write a different patch in dev, then remember to undo the prod and test patches when I push from dev later on" doesn't work. If your production code regularly has more severe bugs than your development code, and you don't have legal liability issues, it's better to commit straight to production.
- Additional branches for different versions should nearly always instead be controlled by flags within the software.
I think devs in general are oblivious to the huge overhead of all their cool tools, frameworks, and processes. On the last dev job I had, which by today's standards was an outstanding team with a fully-implemented, rigorous, state-of-the-art develop / document / test process, I would usually spend maybe half an hour a day writing code, and the rest of the day either dealing with processes (git, Jira, testing, code reviews, meetings), trying to figure out the rules for a process, or trying to penetrate the mysteries of some massively complex middleware that was supposed to save development time.
3824779
...wait, wait, "patch in prod"? People actually do that?... I thought the prod branch was there to avoid doing anything to it. :)
Most of it is from the fact that actually cooperating on a large project is a hard problem. People don't stack. Without all those things, they stack even worse.
But my dev experience is exceedingly unorthodox, just like my job, so I my opinion on the subject is essentially in vacuum. I keep insisting that I'm a sociologist, not a programmer. I started coding because I couldn't make anyone else do it for me. For some bizarre reason, nobody believes me anymore. :)
3824823
If that were true, you wouldn't need a branch, would you?
3824909
It leaves less room for error than deploying commits by hash.
3824915 Production branches existed long before insane version-control systems that identified branches by hex codes instead of by tags. Because pushing from test to prod typically requires a lot of testing, most places do such a push once a month or less. So the prod code, and database, and server environment, falls behind. Somebody upgrades the database, or the interpreter, or some third-party software pushes its own upgrade, and prod stops working. Dev typically keeps on working, because it's up-to-date. But you don't have time to do a full test, so instead of pushing dev to test to prod, people patch prod.
The more "cautious" people are about it, the further behind dev prod is, and the more new bugs are introduced by changes to hardware or software dependencies, by later pushes from test interfering with earlier patches to prod, and by patches to prod getting overwritten by pushes from test (bcoz test wasn't patched).
3825206
Somehow, I almost never encounter this style of problem. Only once in the past year, I think.
You just described the poster use case for Docker, though. :)
I strongly hold with this theory. The only alternative explanation that I've really seen is that Pinkie is actually related to to Mayor, who does look like a combination of Pinkie and the rest of the Pies family (Pink Mane, beige coat) and would be able to find a good place for her niece in Ponyville. It would explain how Pinkie is able to get away with so many shenanigans though, is she was a Ponyville equivalent of a Kennedy.