Braingeyser · 5:33pm Jul 7th, 2016
I would very much like to go to Bronycon next year, but it clearly wasn't in the cards for me this time around. Might as well do something to entertain myself while all the cool kids head off to Baltimore. Oliver did one of these "random musing" blogs last month, prompting me to say I should probably take the chance to clear out some of the bits and bobs cluttering up my head. Thus, the following. Some pony thoughts, some non-pony thoughts, and a few snippets I'm not likely to use elsewhere to cap it off:
Some story needs to describe Adagio Dazzle as "a large mass of hair with a girl coming out of the bottom."
Is "pet peeve" considered as vulgar as "shit list" in Equestria?
To this day, whenever I hear about the Kardashians, my first thought is of Star Trek lizard people.
I want to see a post-apocalyptic fortune teller solemnly intone the ancient words invoked by seers before the end: "For entertainment purposes only."
I tell stories compulsively, and it's not always a good thing. Combined with my anxiety, I can picture my own unlikely yet gruesome demise by wandering serial killer within seconds of hearing the doorbell.
There's a property to stories I've never seen others mention, a nebulous concept I like to think of as a story's smoothness. It's a blend of style, skill, and immersion that can make twenty thousand words pass by in the amount of time it might take me to read two thousand in a coarser voice, and after those twenty thousand, I'll usually still want more.
"My birth certificate says Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia, but everypony calls me Brain Freeze."
"Like Granny Pie always said, 'Before enlightenment, laugh, party, and make ponies smile. After enlightenment, laugh, party, and make ponies smile.'"
"Weren't both of your grandmothers rock farmers?"
"Nah, Dad ran away from the circus."
"This explains so much, and yet so little."
Finally, something that was probably meant to be part of an early draft of A Darker Shade of Pink. Like the above excerpy, it's what I call a dialogue skeleton, a transcript of the exchange as I say to myself out loud. (And yes, I do the voices. How else am I supposed to know how to apply phonetic accents?) And now, according to the name of the file on my hard drive, "Yelling Orange Horse":
“You don’t really think this is all there is t’ earth pony magic, do ya?”
“Um…”
“Sweet Celestia, y’ really do. Twi, if you weren’t one o’ mah best friends, I’d be beatin’ th’ stupid outta you right now.”
“Applejack!?”
“Look around ya, Twilight! How th’ hay d’ you live in this town and think growing plants is all earth ponies c’n do? How d’ you know Pinkie Pie fer more’n eight seconds and still think that?”
“I… I guess that’s fair. But what else is there?”
“What else… Land’s sakes, Twilight. How’d you think an apple pie could stop a chargin’, full-grown buffalo in his tracks?”
“Earth pony magic?”
“Earth pony magic. An’ I bet you think Sugarcube Corner just looks like a gingerbread house.”
“…Doesn’t it?”
“Heck no! That there’s construction-grade gingerbread. That stuff ain’t easy t’ bake, lemme tell ya. I ain’t got th’ knack for it.”
The last one reminds me about "Earth Ponies Are Overpowered", which has things like extradimensional spaces inside manes and drastically extended lifespans, and draining plants of vitality
I probably laughed more than necessary at, "Nah, Dad ran away from the circus."
Me too.
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Me three. They had character. I'm not sure what their namesake is supposed to have.
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Yeah, Maran and I both have a lot of fun with the concept.
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Hey, all those songs and stories had to come from somewhere.
I agree; "For entertainment purposes only" has been the death knell of many civilizations. It's right up there with the sign that says "do not press" right next to the giant red button.
The Earth Ponies do seem to have the ability to make highly
inconceivablephysics breaking materials... Well, they just defy physics in general really, don't they? Like kicking a tree hard enough to make ALL the apples fall off without sending the shattered truck hurtling through the air... Or Maud and her... Earth Shattering performances.Two things
First, a cute picture.
i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/144/069/1dc.png
And second, is it wrong that I want to see Jace in full-on caffeine addiction mode and in Equestria? Just, poor Derpy having to deal with the mind mage suffering from withdrawal.
Construction-grade gingerbread made me think of this book that described trying to make a chocolate bar that wouldn't melt in tropical heat. It said something like "They designed a chocolate bar with considerably less cocoa butter than normal, giving it the keeping properties of wax. Also, the taste."
Ah, don't we all, don't we all?
By the way, Spitfire and that one Wonderbolt "Blaze" - who's apparently been around since season 1 - look suspiciously similar. Yet, they don't seem to be related. Plus, the wiki doesn't list her cutiemark, so we probably haven't seen it either... And she actually got a brief speaking role that one time in "Rarity Investigates", so she can't simply be disregarded as a random recolored background character...
I call "mirror-pool clone in the Wonderbolts".
Yeah, I actually don't know who the "Kardashians" are (not the Star Trek race, of course I know who those are), at least not outside of some vague "celebrity in the US", and "apparently many people don't like them".
I'm guessing some "Big Brother"-kind of thing, or a pop-music thing.
Bleh, better off not knowing probably.
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That should be the chapter title. Or the title of the second / last chapter if there's more than one.
It is at this exact moment that all my neat little ideas that weren't worth writing down have all fled my brain. I can't think of anything.
I tried to solemnly intone "For entertainment purposes only." It took a good five minutes of deep breathing, and even then I burst into giggles right after
"Who's entertainment?"
"Mine"
I laughed to hard at this.
Igneous Rock Pie ran away from the circus...
Bon soir, Malvolio Bent.
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Yeah, "Yelling Orange Horse" is, in some ways, directed towards those who think that a lack of anatomical accessories means a lack of magic. Sure, some of it is cartoon physics, but that can't explain away everything.
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Well, there's always tea, and Donut Joe's probably named for more than just toroidal pastries. Though honestly, with what Jace has been going through lately, he could probably use something a lot stronger than coffee.
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And now I'm imagining Pinkie using one of those bars as sealing wax. Or Bonbon, who may have made it specifically for that purpose.
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Nah, clones have higher fidelity than that. Blaze lacks Spitfire's highlights. Unless clones degrade over time, but that has some disturbing connotations for the Pinkie clone who escaped to Manehattan...
Or Blaze could just dye her mane. Either or.
As far as I can tell, the Kardashians are one of those pop cultural logic knots who are famous for being famous.
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Then I've done my job.
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Rocks: Almost as reliable as numbers.
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Introduce the Living Guildpact to energy drinks.
images.memes.com/meme/3015.jpg
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Well, according to the wiki, Blaze has apparently already been around since season 1, missing streak and all. So mane-dye seems likely.
Either that or she got cloned a long time ago for any "degradation" to have already taken place.
..."Filly Spitfire falls into the mirror pool and gets a sister" has a cute ring to it.
Even if she has a different cutiemark, it could be explained as "she was cloned before Spitfire got hers".
...Though I'm still gonna go with "mane dye".
Okay, I'm gonna take a guess that they used earth pony magic to keep away the ants and such.
Although now I can't help the mental image of a group of changelings methodically disassembling Sugar Cube Corner into chunks twice their body-size and flying off to supply the hive.
Applejack is so bad at telling convincing lies because her language of discourse is the Speech, in which lying convincingly is outright impossible. (The Speech is the universal/fundamental language in Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" and "Feline Wizardry" series. It has the additional useful property of universal translation: knowing the Speech makes it significantly easier to understand every other language in the same way that knowing Latin makes it easier to understand modern Romance languages, only more so; if someone who doesn't know the Speech hears it, they perceive it as their own native language.)