Fic recs, April 19th: Cold™ Edition! · 8:57pm Apr 19th, 2016
If you read more patented Cold...fics, you wouldn't have this problem!
Gadzooks, they're right! TO ACTION!
But first, the news! VisualPony has done a reading of Vinyl's Heritage! ShadowOfCygnus read Dash Eats Meat! Okay, that's it. :B TO THE REVIEWS
H: 0 R: 1 C: 1 V: 1 N: 2
Maniacal by ColdGoldLazarus
Genre: Origin Story
For all that I found Power Ponies, the episode, kind of awkward and disappointing, I love everything surrounding it. Foremost among those elements is the Mane-iac, perhaps Tabitha St. Germain's greatest role in the show. And this story, as a look at the accident that created her, works quite well as an origin story. Granted, there's not a whole lot to it — she gets pushed into a vat of experimental shampoo, she transforms, she seeks out revenge — but it's a good comic booky read, and it even gives her some extra powers we wouldn't have seen in the episode, but that make sense in context. Greatest is her eventual motivation for what we saw her do in the show. :D This is good, clean fun, and more or less what I was hoping for, going into it.
Recommended
Happy Millennium, Sister! by Cold Blitz
Genre: Sister Bonding
Luna is going to make sure Celestia's thousandth birthday is one to remember.
This one's right in my wheelhouse, but I have to say, I didn't really enjoy it. The narrative is flat and telly. There are constant tense shifts, word usage problems, incorrect formatting (use of slashes to denote italics) and emoticons? Any comedy or emotional impact was eaten up by the severe lack of editing. If you're really, really forgiving — if you can handle a story whose first sentence includes the phrase "our beloved moon pony" — this might be worth a quick read, but I don't think it's going to appeal to anyone with strong writing standards.
Not Recommended
Luna's Amazing Adventure by Cold Fire
Genre: Random Comedy
Celestia is high.
I'll admit, I enjoyed this for a little while. Unfortunately, I realized the main jokes are "X was high" and lots of swearing and character destruction. And unfortunately, "X was high" just isn't funny enough to carry a whole story. The character destruction was too far beyond the pale to be fun. The final bit is maybe kinda funny, but this overall just got annoying.
Not Recommended
Filly of the Apocalypse by Cold Spike
Genre: Post-Apocalypse
Alone, Scootaloo searches for a spell that will fix everything.
Up front, this story is fast-paced and melodramatic, with some editing mistakes, but I liked it nevertheless. The strictly in medias res opening was a good way to go, and, well, I like post-apoc, which is why I picked it. The mantra of "What's the point" was a little hokey, but if nothing else, the fast pacing helps communicate how frantic Scootaloo is. Plus, the entire setup — she's more or less trapped in one section of the palace — was pretty original and held my attention all the way through. It may have been on the cheesy side, but I kind of felt like I could have kept reading a few thousand more words of it. To compare it to a story I just read, there's enough here that the errors don't overtake the writing.
Recommended If You Don't Mind Fast Pacing
Losing Myself: Pinkie & Pinkamena by Coldfire Hart
Genre: AU/Sad
I'm not sure what it says about me, but I've always kind of liked the idea of a straight-maned Pinkie, whoever she might be, being a separate character from the Pinkie Pie we know. This piece provides lots of that, but also a few questions. Where did Pinkamena come from? Who or what is she? What's the timeline here, since it seems Pinkie was hurt in Rainbow's nuking of Applejack's barn? Or was that a different barn? Why isn't there an AU tag? It doesn't help that the formatting's weird and the ending is extremely melodramatic, and needlessly sad. And given all the questions about who and what Pinkamena is, the impact really isn't there. Still, I can't say I disliked it, I'm just not sure who it will appeal to.
Vaguely Recommended
Writing a whole review blog just to troll Cold in Gardez? I must have a lot of things on my plate that I don't want to do.3881429
The fact that you reviewed almost every 'Cold' author but Cold in Gardez is the part that makes it hilarious. I can't wait to see more reactions to this.
3881442
I actually skipped quite a few, not just the ones who had incomplete stories only, but a bunch with stories that didn't look all that great. :B
3881448
Well, you did mention having a full plate, no? It would be interesting if a reviewer decided to take this up-thinking of a simple element that would occur in a username and reviewing some of their stories. It would bring a lot of attention to stories/users that this site might have forgotten about or previously went unheard of. It could also be hilarious considering how many people might have overly edgy usernames and even edgier stories.
3881429
15,840 words, according to the temporary bookshelf I made. Nice.
2.bp.blogspot.com/-4iEHydE4zb0/U8SfIOYR8uI/AAAAAAAAAI0/wqdh_3XnAmI/s1600/giphy-1.gif
OMFG, you are such a dick, sometimes!
3881461
Upon reading this I was briefly tempted to do my own review round of stories from users with "horizon" in the name. I reconsidered upon doing a search and realizing that I've literally got an order of magnitude more followers than anyone else who uses that word in their username, and that if Sturgeon's Law holds, I'd be handing out a lot of non-recommends/half-hearted recommends and it might come across as punching down from "the" horizon.
So if I were going to do this I'd pick a nameword not related to me, or probably to anyone I follow. That said, I still like the idea.
3881429
Plausibly deniable procrastination troll is best troll.3881553
Well, if you were to do so avoiding your name of 'horizon' would be good. I'd try a really common noun, like 'fire' or 'sky'. Perhaps even a more pony-centric one like 'rainbow', 'princess', or 'harmony'. I'm glad you liked my suggestion and I'm a big fan of your poetry stories.
3881519
Please don't kick me!
You reviewed, like, every 'Cold' author except Cold in Gardez? That's...
... cold, man.
YEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH
:p
Well played.
3881553
Have you become The Man?
3881553 I don't understand. People who have a lot fewer followers than you are that guaranteed to be bad writers, any more than a random sampling? Or people who have only written a couple of stories and didn't manage to draw hundreds of followers from that are so guaranteed to be worse than average?
Let me put it this way: Casca has 99 followers. Are you 9 times better a writer than he is? Aegis Shield has 4127 followers. Is he 5 times better a writer than you? Is he 43 times better a writer than Casca?
So next you're gonna review a bunch of authors with names of the form xnamex, right?
3881595
To be perfectly honest, I saw one of ColdGoldLazarus's stories (not this one) in the popular box and thought, "I should read more stuff by him." Trolling CiG came to mind next, and fun was had. :V
3881758
lolno
3881684
Let me edit my comment above for clarity — changing nothing, but shifting statements around in a more sensible order:
So the thought process is basically this:
1) I would be essentially doing a review set of authors/stories chosen at random. Present Perfect just did one of those, and 8 out of his 11 reads were NRs. This is Sturgeon's Law in action — there is absolutely no need to make any claim about follower count vs. quality, because even if we assume that there is 0.00 correlation between talent and follower count, the average posted story is bad. I believe that, on average, if I were to replicate Present Perfect's experiments, I would achieve nearly identical results, which means that it's a highly reasonable scenario to imagine that I would post a review blog finding nothing to recommend. (See also.)
2) Now let's unpack the implications of writing a review post which might contain near-uniform NRs of "other Horizons". (This is hardly a given, but it's statistically credible enough for me to make plans based on it as a worst-case scenario.) The fundamental gimmick of it is a vanity search. Comparisons are implicit, and clearly I would recommend my own work. I would be afraid of people drawing the conclusion that I was stating that I'm the only Horizon worth reading.
3) Finally, throw follower count into the mix. 800-follower Horizon just posted a blog saying that all of the less-than-80-follower *_Horizon authors are all crap. I would be very concerned that people would start to make exactly the accusation you just made:
I never said that, and hopefully you know I'm not saying that. But imagine that question coming up in the comments of a review blog where I just gave a straight slate of NRs to authors much more poorly followed than myself. Hence "punching down".
The point of running from the Horizon plan is that if I choose another review-theme keyword, I can directly avoid #2, and almost certainly dodge #3 as well, because other keywords are likely to contain a wider mix of follower counts. (PP's "Cold" reading slate had authors with as many as ~350 followers, which is at least in that "established recurring author" tier.)
3881461 The moment I saw this, I thought I'd probably end up doing that at some point. Mind you, I wouldn't be using my own name: a search for "Logan" turns up only two stories by authors with that element in their usernames. Still, I might try it with another word. It can't go any worse than relying on the RNG, which resulted in my reading right through Pinkamena Diane Pie Cupcakes with Scootaloo...
3881684 3881939
Finally, I wanted to say something about follower count vs. artistic skill. (And to put this in a post of its own, because it's an unrelated discussion.)
I do not actually believe this, and I think it's just basic statistics.
You can make statements about aggregate groups that are simply not true at an individual level. (The Casca counterexample is easy, but here's a better one: A few years ago, I only had 80 followers. Clearly I have not gotten 10x better in three years when I've been writing all my life, and when my first and latest stories are comparable in quality.) But in the abstract, on average, high follower counts do correlate with higher skill. This is not because good authors are guaranteed to get followers, or because high-follower authors are guaranteed to be good — but because of two basic facts:
1) There are a great many casual authors who cluster at low follower counts after writing one or two low-quality unpolished stories and then giving up, and they drag the low-count average down.
2) Even poor authors with high follower counts get there because they keep writing and releasing new fics regularly, and everyone improves with practice.
I think there's more beyond that — for example, the recommendation effect; finding a diamond in the rough from a low-follower-count author is often an opportunity for a signal boost or a Seattle's Angels feature, and that leads to swarms of review-sensitive readers inflating good-author counts but not poor-author counts — but the two factors listed above are more than sufficient to make a statistical difference.
3882010
Oh dear.
3882010
Am I getting you back for the RNG now? :)
3881574
3881553 personally, I'd suggest a review of every author who has the word trampoline in their name.
( i'm honestly not sure if I'm the only one and I'm too lazy to check )
3881758
3881824 Gonna be a whooooole lot of xTSGx stories.
3882970
I think you're the only one.
3882270 Yes. Curse you!