And now for something completely different: 1000-follower AMA! · 2:03am Nov 10th, 2016
The political season was long and painful enough; I'm not gonna extend that by decompressing here. Not here, in our little sanctuary of ponies and camaraderie. Instead, let's follow up the changing of masks with a little bit of mask removal!
I've also got a little bit of belated celebrating to do, in honor of having passed 1,000 followers while I was distracted by my jam-packed October schedule. (A shout-out to Reneigh Haycart for being #1000!)
So: Ask me anything! Informational, awkward, salacious, or whatever. For the rest of the evening, I'll answer truthfully and openly, with two caveats: 1) I'm not gonna dox myself, and 2) FIMFiction has weird policies on M-rated blogs, so if you're determined to work blue, let's keep questions and answers toeing the T line. (T plus a Sex or Gore tag still covers an awful lot.)
I never know what to say in these things...
How many licks does it take before you start biting a Tootsie Roll Pop?
Gee, horizon, what's daily life like at the offices of the Royal Canterlot Library? :V
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I'm not a licker, I'm a sucker. And I tend to suck just about long enough to start uncovering the center, when most of it still has a hard crunchy candy shell.
Sooo... what are you wearing?
Also:
Best and worst redemption in MLP?
Favorite pony fanfic? Do you have a favorite non-pony fanfic?
Well, I won't bother with the swallow, your name is written on you, and your favorite color is not that interesting, so...
...What is your quest?
Completely serious.
When are you going to post The Case of the Cowled Changelings?
Hint hint, nudge nudge.
Also, what is your favorite story of mine?
When are you going to get back to Hard Reset 2? I need my timeline fuckery!
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Also, which RCL co-curator is the worst? Like, just, the worst?
can you record yourself making a taco?
and if you're able to, would you and upload it to youtube?
Are you, in fact, a Changeling?
Is no one going to ask it?
No one?
Okay. Okay, I'll ask it.
Are you secretly a changeling?
Did you ever catch up on all the episodes?
What other shows and books do you like?
When was the last time you:
a) Got a hug?
b) Saw a dinosaur?
c) Were a dinosaur?
d) Had some chocolate?
e) Reported back to your hive?
Do you have any clutch-siblings, and how are they doing?
Do you currently have a pet?
--Sweetie Belle
So, uhhhhh... *cough*
What's with those changeling rumors?
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Long periods of apathy, punctuated by bouts of weeping and "occasional" panic.
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Benman, for leaving the fandom. This is true and inarguable.
come back ben
I'm going to use this AMA as a proxy for Google:
When did you first begin identifying as a dragon?
If strange was yellow and malfeasance was twisted two lengths away from the piercing needles of ascension, how many emergent wrigglers would you place upon the Chattering Stone? And how many if the flanges were well concealed by organic geared fibers?
And how many changelings down are you?
1. Would Rainbow Dash consider you awesome?
2. What's your sexuality?
3. Do you love Scootaloo?
4. How much ice cream have you eaten from now since your first scoop as a kid?
5. Have you ever killed an ant for fun?
6. Do you like walls?
7. Fruits or veggies? Or fats?
8. Tu comprend le francais?
9. Do you love homocidal/ suicidal porcupines?
10. Who is best peanut? (I don't mean best pony, I mean best peanut.)
11. What's the best shoe?
12. Why do dogs lick their bums?
13. How do you cross your eyes?
14. Do you have anything against Mexicans?
15. Trump or Clinton or neither?
16. Peanut Gallery or Public Speaker?
17. Instigator or Mitigator?
18. Do you like the number 1000 or the number 2000 more?
19. How many licks does it take to kill a lollipop that has joined the dark side?
20. What are your views on Raccoon Warfare in South Africa?
BONUS: 21. We're these questions random enough?
I don't feel like asking anything terribly embarrassing since most of that stuff is not terribly interesting to me, so I'll ask something personal to me and something silly.
1) What fic of mine is your favorite?
2) Who had the most punchable face at Quills and Sofas this year?
This may exceed the T rating, but I have to ask it after browsing your stories: Who would you f**k to save Equestria?
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Black jeans, black work shirt, black underwear, and black socks. There's kind of a theme there (which gets into politics, which I'm going to avoid unless directly asked).
Sunset Shimmer is best ex-villain, which is why Baconhair is a waifu. Her onscreen struggle with acceptance after her redemption is powerful and her character arc is fantastic.
Worst is Starlight Glimmer, because they redid the same thing but missed all the beats which made the arc compelling. Uuuugggghhh.
There's a damn lot of good ones out there and it's hard to pick just one, but I nominated Riverdream at Sunset: A Manuscript for a Hugo award last year, so that's a good default answer. As for non-pony fanfic, gonna have to go with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I managed to enjoy greatly as a deconstruction despite never having read the original work.
Why are you awesome?
~Skeeter The Lurker
WOOOOO congrats on 1000!!
How do you determine the difference between good and evil?
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Completely seriously:
To live a full human lifetime, with its range of weird and beautiful and occasionally terrible experiences. I want to accomplish here what I can -- probably ultimately involving writing, even if that's not my current day job -- but I believe just enough in some form of reincarnation (and/or lately, have been toying with the idea of the simulation hypothesis, which epistemologically reduces to the same thing) that I consider this whole thing research. (And my belief in life-after-death is tempered enough by pragmatism that I also want to leave a legacy here to whatever extent I can; I think letting my beliefs push me into passivity is bad whether they're true or not.)
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Oh look, it's me, directly asking!
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It's about third or fourth on my to-do list, though if you catch me in the right mood via instant message you might get me to work on it sooner. (Not until after Time Enough For Love, though.) I need to put on my big-boy editor pants and merge the edited and original versions because the edited version is overedited, so I'll probably want your help specifically on that.
And re your stories: glancing through the ones I've saved to my Notable Stories bookshelf, at the moment I'm going to go with The Fated Hour, which might sound like an odd choice but it just hit a sweet spot for me. I don't think it's necessarily objectively your best but it's the one Horizon enjoyed most.
(This is a lot of questions, and some of them are absurdly personal/complicated to answer. Feel free to shrug
a fewall of them off)What are some of your favorite fandoms (besides MLP)?
What fandoms are you the most interested in joining, but haven't yet?
What is your favorite "traditional" mythological creature? (Anything "imagined" before 1900: Phoenix, Dragon, Griffon etc.)
What is your favorite "modern" mythological creature? (Anything after 1900: Pikachu, Agumon, Ents etc.)
If you had to switch careers again, which fields would you be interested in investigating?
Which writing goals do you feel are most effective: wordcount goals? Or "time spent writing" goals? Or maybe some other method?
Any plans on doing a retrospective on how that writer's wordcount spreadsheet project turned out and what made it ineffective/effective? (I should probably do this too >___> )
What do you listen to while writing? (White noise? music? Nothing?)
What are some general characteristics of a person that makes you want to be friends with them?
Which book do you think has had the biggest impact on your life?
How do you feel about the concept of Superintelligent artificial intelligence and it's impact on humanity?
Do you wish to be immortal?
Hypothetically speaking, you die and you get to choose exactly what happens to you afterwards. Which general path would you choose for your own existence design? Reincarnation, immortality, or non-existence?
If humanity as a whole had a "happy ending," what do you think that would look like?
What's something that you do everyday just because it makes you happier?
Are you ever going to properly respond to that pm I sent you like a month ago?
Is Quiet Boy and Moon Horse secretly a self insert?
Why is Luna best pony?
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I am an American liberal.
This is the second time in my life I've felt the election was important enough to volunteer (if only briefly) for political phone banking. The first was 2004, and the local state senate candidate I was calling for lost by about 250 votes, in the midst of an awful year for liberals generally. I feel worse now than I did in 2004.
In the words of some anonymous wag who scribbled on a whiteboard in my local Staples, "11/9 is the new 9/11." That is almost certainly hyperbole, but My Team has got some dark years ahead.
And that's all I have to say about that.
(Let's please not start a political discussion in comments.)
Fuck, marry, kill; mane 6 edition.
Go.
Bonus points for categorising all 6 (2 per category)
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It is currently either second or third on my ponefic priority list, after works that are complete but need editing (were written for Writeoffs). HR2 requires actual new writing effort, which means I need a larger block of writing time set aside to make progress on it. But I do have half a new chapter cached, and know where the next few are going, and have an outline for the entire thing.
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It is probably possible for me to do so, yes. I do not have taco materials at hand, though, and my Internet is shit DSL, so the uploading process would take days. This is unlikely to make it onto my near-future priority list, I am sorry to say.
Is there a reason for you to not capitalize "horizon"?
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Do you want me to be?
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If so, it's not a very good secret, is it?
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*rolls eyes, affects an exaggeratedly sarcastic voice* Well, OBVIOUSLY, I'm ACTUALLY a dragon shapeshifted into pony form, using the changeling thing as an INTENTIONALLY HORRIBLE COVER STORY so that nobody questions my REAL PLANS. DUUUUUUUUHHHHHH.
But seriously though, you wouldn't believe how effective an intentionally bad disguise is. Everyone pretends to buy it just because they feel sorry for me. You wouldn't believe how much free pity I harvest.
... Which I put in jars in my pantry, because I'm a perfectly normal pony, and perfectly normal ponies don't eat emotions.
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I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don't wanna be up all night answering these. Would you rather have one-word answers to everything, or would you rather have me choose one question from the list that I can answer interestingly, or would you rather winnow your list to the 2-3 you're most interested in?
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Definitely that.
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How about the ones you're the most interested in answering?
--Sweetie Belle
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January 22, 1994, after either supernatural contact or a moment of positive, affirming psychotic break (depending on your perspective) jolted me out of a nervous breakdown.
I had toyed with the idea for several years beforehand, as early as my early teens, but that was the first time I felt comfortable accepting it as a solid framework for identity.
Is it true that you new-type love-overclocked changelings are actually made of rainbow sherbet?
How do you feel about the concept of Superintelligent artificial intelligence and it's impact on humanity?
What are some of your favorite fandoms (besides MLP)?
What fandoms are you the most interested in joining, but haven't yet?
What's something that you do everyday just because it makes you happier?
Credit to these question go to Chinchillax, but I am really interested to your answer on any of these particular questions.
-Techy
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Oh, hi, Discord! Good to see you around again. Don't be a stranger, y'hear?
And I believe the answer you're looking for is -- *pulls out a blank book and flips through for a moment* -- "the thirty-fourth cheese."
Twelve, plus some number between 0 and 36,133,891 from that cross-temporal lynch mob in the timeslip thread of the "Miss Harshwhinny Is Best Pony" forums, depending on how many of the casualties were actually paradoxical non-entities killed after they were already removed from earlier in their timeline.
I am so going to hate the bookkeeping on that when it starts next month.
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Hi! I owe you a PM, by the way. Sorry - it arrived before the con last weekend and I've been sitting on it. I haven't forgotten, I'm just bad about that.
1) Honestly, I need to read more of your stuff! Of the few I've read, "Rogues Anonymous" is on my Notable Stories list, so let's go with that. What are you proudest of? I'll put it on my immediate to-read list.
2) Most punchable face was probably GaPJaxie -- NOT, I should specify, because he was in any way uncool or punchworthy, but because his face reminded me the most of a stereotypical frat boy's.
4294403 Awww.
That's no fun.
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Naw, that's straight-up T + Sex territory, long as I don't go into any details on the act.
And it's funny you should put it that way, because I've written an M-rated story titled "Social Lubricant" that ... ah, I see, you're pulling that from the description.
My answer isn't going to make sense unless you read the story (plug!), but I am 100% in agreement with Pinkie Pie on the inherent failure of the question and on there being only one logical response: "Everyone!"
Though if you bend it slightly to "Who's the first pony you would f**k to save Equestria?" it would be Luna in a heartbeat.
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Because I try to live my life as if I were already awesome, instead of doing what I think people will find me awesome for.
And thanks
4294429 Ummm, alright. Totally not a changeling, then. Just another pony. Nothing special at all, other than the standard one special thing allocated to every otherwise totally normal pony. Gotcha, loud and clear.
what's the most interesting thing(s) you've learned from this fandom?
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I'm definitely willing to help.
It's allowed! I certainly enjoyed the story, and any story that involves a pony refusing to come out of the closet is my kind of shameless.
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Thank you!
The answer that I can give you within a reasonable amount of AMA question-answering time is probably closest to some hodgepodge of utilitarianism and vestigial Libertarian dogma with a light seasoning of Unitarian youth church (the one that stuck as my parents toured through a succession of different churches): evil's what deliberately inflicts pain, especially on innocents. Good's what helps and unifies and heals. I have no authoritative source for this, but that's de facto what modern human civilizations all agree on; and I have not run across a situation in practice which requires grounding that further in an appeal to authority. If we ever, for example, run across an alien race which defines good and evil differently because they just work differently than we do, I will probably have some formalization and/or rethinking to do, but it's a good-enough answer in the meantime.
Read you 1994 link. Eerily similar parallels to my own experiences. However you seem to basically have had your shit together and done something with yourself. You are also very good at expressing yourself in an understandable way. Your perception of the other side is also much clearer then my own. I must say I find your experiences quite interesting.
As for a question. What do think of the current state of the therian community? And when you first started out learning magecraft, where did you start, outgrow and work within currently? I seem to recall you being somewhere within the ceremonial camp?
I believe there are some deeper questions lurking in my head, alas I cant seem to articulate them.
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Damn, I was setting you up to reply with "Your's, of course," and then I was going to add "Voted Most Punchable Face of Bronycon 2016 by Horizon" on my profile.
I guess GaPJaxie will just have to take that honor. Oh well.
Hmmm. God, there are many stories with different reasons to be proud of them, and it's hard to pick which pride is the "best" here. I guess the one I think was the "best" in terms of just literary meat was The Sun Shines High, and Alone. Making An Old Lady Cry is probably my most well rated story, and probably one of the most unrelentingly funny things I've written. That said, despite how rough it is (and apologies TD, I really do intend to edit it one day for TRG), Forever and Again is one I hold in a very special place in my heart because of what I wanted to say in it.
God, I can never pick these things when people ask.