Recs: Hyperportentia, The Council of the Seasons, Always Here, Aubade · 2:10am Mar 18th, 2017
Hyperportentia by MyHobby. 6161 words. Highly Recommended by Titanium Dragon and in the Royal Canterlot Library.
Acacia Tree is a seer. The world gives her prophetic omens. About, like, everything. Report card grades. Changes to a restaurant's dinner menu. What a pony is going to have for dessert. It's really annoying.
Her friend Ritz is a skeptic. Well, not a skeptic, exactly. He just doesn't believe in bowing to cutie marks or prophecy. Which is just as well, since Acacia Tree says he's about to die.
This is tagged slice-of-life, but feels like light comedy to me. There are several places where it looks like it's veering off into darkfic territory, but I think they're an accidental by-product of having too many ideas and not enough pre-readers to point out the ones that stick out too much. Its eventual plot, and I suppose its theme, is about fate. I don't believe in fate, so I choose to read it as being about the milder, modern version of fate--the sense that you can't avoid something, or that you can't change. I like the characters, and I think it sticks the ending pretty well even though I can't articulate what it means.
The Council of the Seasons by Mitch H. 3910 words; On Hiatus. Least Squares is a magical statistician--aren't they all?--who is hinted to be kind of a jerk. He does the data analysis that the Council uses to schedule magical and non-magical rituals such as Winter Wrap-Up and the Running of the Leaves to minimize interference with everyday life and, well, general havoc and destruction. Unfortunately, the cracked head mage on the council is convinced that the newly-returned Princess Luna is full of dangerous magical energy unaccounted for in Squares' graphs.
If you love bureaucracy stories--which don't have a tag as of yet, but pony bureaucracy is proving to be unexpectedly interesting--read and track this. I'm afraid the statistics are a bait-and-switch; there's much less math in the story than the first paragraphs suggested. Perhaps in later chapters. 
There's not much plot yet, but I am hopeful. Mitch H is one of those Tolkienesque people who have three pages of head-canon behind every page they write, so I imagine he has something in mind.
I feel like pony bureaucracy stories are somehow a mirror-image of pony apocalyptica. Maybe both are subversions of the Equestrian utopia. As if canon Equestria is walking the tightrope between order and chaos, balanced precariously between bureaucracy and the wasteland.
Always Here by anonpencil. 2722 words about social anxiety. Recommended by yamgoth. If you consider yourself a hikikomori, this story is for you. I feel a twinge of guilt telling hikikomori to read another pony story on the Internet, but this one might be worthwhile. If you don't have any such phobia, you may find it slow or even pointless, but it may teach you something you don't know about problems some people have. Er, I guess. I don't have agoraphobia, but it seems convincing to me. But probably the more you can learn from it, the less you'll like it. It's funny how things often are that way.
Aubade by TheJediMasterEd. I thought I recommended this already, but I don't see a blog post for it. Two middle-aged ponies discuss a potential romance between two younger ponies over a game of chess until they realize that the game and the discussion are about themselves. Then they confess their love awkwardly and pragmatically and depart. The stallion then experiences the thrill and surprise of finding himself in love again when he had thought he was old and dried up (and this part, I think, is the focus of the story). Then they get together again and make plans. That's it, plot-wise, which might not sound like a lot for 3781 words, but it is a subtle and precise exploration of being surprised by joy. An argument for hope, perhaps, in the hopeless situation of being old. If you want a crossover between Jeeves and Wooster, My Little Pony, and Remains of the Day, this is the story for you. I mean literally the only one. If you're under 30 you should just go on Pokemoning and Tindering or whatever it is kids do these days, and stay off my lawn.
I’d like to meet this hypothetical sample of people who both Pokemon and Tinder.
At the very least I’ll probably check out Council of the Seasons. I do enjoy me some pony bureaucracy.
4460760
Just off the top of my head, half the college-age population?
4460794 Huh.
I never really associated the population of people who Pokemon with the population of people who Tinder.
Shows how out of touch I am.
...but your lawn has the best Pokemon. Well, once you work around the land mines.
4460797 Hey, you've discovered my new hobby!
I just wish land mines were less expensive.
Eh, it's less a social phobia than you think. It's actually classified as its own specific type of phobia:
http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/phobias
And sincerely, thank you for taking a look at that story of mine. Probably one of the least gross ones I've written.
4460795
4460794
There are, notably, only 7 billion people on Earth, and only 2.1 billion have smartphones. Even if every one of them had Tinder installed, that would imply that the average Tinder user has five matches.
This somehow doesn't impress me about the accuracy of the system.
Though admittedly I don't even have a smartphone so I don't really even know what Tinder is.
4460968
I think you misapprehend the purpose of Tinder.
4461002
Probably. As mentioned, I don't have a smartphone. I had thought it was a dating app, though.
4461008 Tinder is a dating app the way that a vending machine is a restaurant.
(And that's okay by me.
)
4461018 I like this post
4460795
Kids these days, all into catchin' and fuckin'.
4462218 You have ruined Pokemon for me forever. Nicely done.
4462712
For me, that happened when Ash caught Pikachu using PokeGrindr.
4462712
Well thank you very much for pointing out my story, and thank you even more for pointing out those other stories to me. Now that I've had a chance to read all three of them, I must say you put mine in very good company.