Story notes: A Week of Madness · 12:59am Apr 22nd, 2018
Well, we've reached the end of the week, and so here's the promised ginormous blog post that covers ALL THE THINGS.
Episode screencap
It's probably going to be super-long, 'cause six stories. Also I can't tag them all, so I guess I'll just have to tag one.
Also, before the break, I'll list the six stories . . . with links, if I remember.
Filly Anon Catches a Pokemon
I Hate Bats
No Time for Caution
Applejack Rents a Bobcat
Twilight Burns Down Starbuckers
The Circle of Life
Bonus! Centorea Shinaes in Equestria
Filly Anon Catches a Pokemon
This one just sort of came about randomly at work.
Well, let me go back a little bit, 'cause y'all are probably wondering about why the sudden spate of Filly Anon stories.
One of the things I had planned was another 'Not Another' story, and it was originally just going to be traditional Anon stories where bad things happened to him. And then I was looking up images for my upcoming blog post series on harnesses and I happened to find one of a rather disgruntled Filly Anon wearing tack.
Source Unknown
So then I got to thinking that I could combine the two, and I'd even picked out coverart for the story and all those things. Plus written a couple of them. I just hadn't posted it yet.
Then I got to thinking that maybe it would be confusing for readers to have Filly Anon stories and regular Anon stories all mixed up into one like that.
I could do two serieses, one with Filly Anon and one with regular anon, but that wasn't really grabbing my fancy, and since Filly Anon Takes the Tide Pod Challenge was not only long enough, but I also found appropriate cover art, it made sense to publish it by itself and then one thing led to another, and here we are!
(This backstory is also sort of significant to Filly Anon Clogs the Toilet.)
This one just sort of came about randomly at work. I was doing something mundane and browsing Facebook while waiting for further instructions, and I noticed that one of my friends had proudly posted a picture of the Pokemon he'd just caught.
Well, then I thought 'what if someone who doesn't really understand the game thought that they were trying to catch real animals' and things sort of went from there. My buddy—the one who'd posted the picture of the Charizard or whatever that he'd just caught—suggested the Mighteyena when I asked him if there were any Pokemon that looked like real, destructive animals, such as a badger.
And let's be honest, if Filly Anon is from Equestria (I'm not actually sure what her backstory is), the idea of there being random monsters wandering about that need to be caught is hardly a stretch.
It's also true that IRL horses only have dichromatic vision.
I Hate Bats
Because of site rules, I can't say that this is written due to a running debate between myself and one other Fimfic personality. Nope, it's just something that I came up that has no additional context to it whatsoever; any resemblance to anything else is purely coincidental.
At first I thought that batponies were overused in stories, especially ones that want to be 'edgy,' back when being 'edgy' generally meant being bad. These days, though, the fandom has moved on, and there are many, many other ways to write bad stories.
There's also lots of adorable art of batponies, it turns out.
And it doesn't take too long before you find yourself thinking that they're pretty cute after all and you just want to hug one or two or all of them. Especially if their wings are as velvety soft as a pony nose.
I didn't want our protagonist to change his views at the end, because I thought that that would be kind of insulting, and not really in the spirit of our long-running debate. Also because if our unnamed protagonist were a real person, he's already punched me once at Trotcon for writing the shortest breakup fic ever (this is true).
But really, it's logical that batponies would love a cave that can't be accessed by ground-bound ponies or whatever. Helps keep them from being disturbed.
Helps keep their mangoes safe.
And of course the inside of a cave is pitch black.
I should point out a couple of things for the record: IRL bats aren't blind; that's just the expression. One of my readers commented that some of them have really good eyesight. I don't know enough about bats to know if that's true or not, but there's no reason why it wouldn't be.
Even if they didn't, since a lot of bats fly by echolocation, they'd be perfectly capable of navigating even if they were blind.
Also, I have legitimately no idea where the idea of batponies loving mangoes came from. I don't know where mangoes grow, and from my own experience, there are a lot of fruits I'd rather eat than a mango.
Maybe there's some kind of nutrient in mangos that can't be got other places. Or maybe ponies hate mangoes but some ponies get mango cutie marks anyways and so there's sort of a symbiotic relationship between mango farmers and batponies.
I might explore this in a future story, but I've got to do some research first.
Also, for those of you who missed it in the comments, here's how I did the edgenote (because several people asked):*
*Obviously, the parentheses should be brackets in order for this to work in BBCode, but if I put brackets in the text, you wouldn't see the tags.
Unless I also used the command to not execute code, but that would have been even more work.
It should also be noted that this doesn't appear correctly on mobile; it just appears inline wherever the text is inserted.
(figure=right)(quote)(size=0.75em) Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum. Praesent mauris. Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. Mauris massa. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla.
Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Curabitur sodales ligula in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc. Curabitur tortor. Pellentesque nibh. Aenean quam. In scelerisque sem at dolor. Maecenas mattis. Sed convallis tristique sem. Proin ut ligula vel nunc egestas porttitor. Morbi lectus risus, iaculis vel, suscipit quis, luctus non, massa. Fusce ac turpis quis ligula lacinia aliquet. (/size)(/quote)(/figure)
I posted on National Bat Appreciation Day, which I could pretend was intentional, but it wasn't. Total coincidence.
No Time for Caution
I would be remiss to not include this version.
As the brief notes at the end of the story said, I was watching clips of LoTR and The Hobbit on YouTube. In both movies, there's a scene where a dwarf plays a giant horn which is quickly followed by a charge that turns the course of battle.
I also listen to soundtrack music when I write, for what that's worth. It's a bit ironic, really, that the bulk of my content is SoL where nothing happens, and I write it while listening to Two Steps from Hell and Juno Reactor and John Williams and Audiomachine and so forth.
Anyway, songs from Interstellar wound up on my playlist somehow and I listened to No Time For Caution a few times.
That lead me down a path (as these things often do), and I found out some more about the soundtrack through interviews. Apparently, the decision to use a pipe organ was because it has to breathe.
For those of you who don't know, the pipe organ works like basically every wind instrument—you blow into one end, and music comes out the other. Obviously, most wind instruments are lung-powered, and limited by how the user can breathe.
With a pipe organ, there had to be some kind of bellows arrangement to push the air through the pipes. I would imagine—but don't know for a fact—that back in the early days, it was a bellows much like might be used at a forge or even for a kitchen stove in Ponyville. As the organs got bigger, it might have gotten more mechanically complex. These days, they're probably run electrically with fans or something.
The pipes are in various groupings, arranged by the sound that they make, and organs have stops which turn banks on or off. Traditionally, they were wooden push/pull switches.
I wound up following quite a few links on organs, and finally came across a comedy link about a 128' pipe on an organ. No actual organ that I could find really has a pipe that long. I'm not sure that the note that came out of such a pipe could actually be heard by human ears. Maybe not even by pony ears.
But it could be felt. Felt in the air and felt in the ground; it would have an effect even if it couldn't be heard. And this is something I've experienced with church organs.
Such a pipe would obviously take a massive amount of air.
As I mentioned in the notes, all these ideas came together and I thought 'wouldn't it be cool if ponies had a war organ?' And I kind of dismissed it, because why would they?
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought why wouldn't they?
Marenberg was named after Marienburg. I went through a list of famous sieges and that one came up as the most easy to ponify.
Commander Jade Thorn was named by a long and convoluted process. I did some digging on the various people who were fighting in the siege of Marienburg, and found a name that seemed likely, dug through name origins and eventually came up with Silver Thorn, then changed it to Jade to avoid overuse of ponies with the first name Silver [The notes on my rough draft say “Peace of Thorn/Green Forest/Pine Hill” (I can't be more specific as to what those things mean, since this story's been in process for something like six months, and I honestly forgot)].
Subaltern Starbuck is named after Starbuck of Moby Dick fame. Having not read the novel, or seen the movie in over 20 years, there isn't really any related charactarization.
A Cantor is an official who sings liturgical music and leads prayer in a synagogue (according to Google). I thought that was a cool sounding title.
As for his second name—that's from Léon Boëllmann. While I missed the obvious opportunity to do a Trost/Trots pun (which I wouldn't have come up with, honestly), I had to pick him just because of his epic mustache. Any guy with a mustache like that playing an organ is a force to be reckoned with.
From the ant-sized Wiki
Applejack Rents a Bobcat
This one was purely inspired by one of the developmentally disabled adults I work with on the weekend. I was taking him on an outing, and we went by a Bobcat dealership.
He said that he wanted to buy a Bobcat. I asked him why, and he said for pushing snow.
There are lots of reasons why he shouldn't have a Bobcat, of course. But that got the gears in my head turning and I started to think about a pony renting a Bobcat.
The obvious choice would be Applejack, and while I had considered it being a comedy, AJ's a sensible pony and would do the sensible thing if she had a Bobcat.
Louis Keller is named after one of the founders of Bobcat. I don't know where I got Roger from, but Gwinner (ND) is the former headquarters of Bobcat, and there's still a manufacturing plant there.
Cliff is named after Cliff Parisi, who's most famously known (apparently) for playing 'Minty' Peterson on EastEnders, where he played a mechanic.
Manlifts are any of various types of machines designed to lift one or several people. There are small hand-pushed models, and larger self-powered ones.
A Skyjacker Skylift is a brand of telescopic forklift that has a boom that can go up and out. [I have corrected the story; Skyjacker is a company that makes lift kits for off-road trucks. I think that Skylifts are sometimes called Skyjackers, but I could be confusing the two.]
Melroe ND doesn't actually exist (the story takes place in Gwinner, and I'm not sure why I didn't just leave it like that). It's named for the Melroe Manufacturing Company, which produced the first Bobcats.
KOVC is a real country radio station, based in Valley City, ND.
Pomme De Terre Lake (in Minnesota) is reasonably close to Gwinner, and would be a good place to go fishing. Pomme De Terre is the French word for 'potato,' and it literally means 'apple of the Earth.' It's rare that I can sneak in a bilingual pun, since I basically only speak English and bad English.
Cat-Tails is a real bar in Gwinner.
Applejack sound like Reba McIntyre . . . she doesn't, really, if you listen closely, but if you just catch it sort of sideways. . . . I was at work and they played one of the Reba McIntyre KFC commercials and I the first thing I thought was why Applejack was doing KFC commercials.
Having Big Mac driving a Mack dump truck just seemed perfect.
Twilight Burns Down Starbuckers
This legit doesn't have anything to do with the current PR nighmare that Starbucks is facing, I swear! It was instead about a bunch of little annoying things culminating in . . . well, Twilight burning down Starbuckers.
I had a little bit of help from my co-conspirator who doesn't know exactly what I do when I write but is always willing to offer suggestions when I give him a rough outline of what I need.
In this case, it was little annoyances, and over the course of a workday, we came up with quite a few.
Now, I didn't put them all in the story. But, for the sake of completeness, here's the list:
- Wakes up in pain—sore limb or hornarche
- Book returned with vomit on it (50 Shades of Hay)
- Out of TP—Spike has a cold [for some reason, my manager is against buying TP]
- Pen breaks
- Saddlebags girth strap breaks/buckle fails
- Steps on a Lego
- Someone else's hair on manebrush
- Newspaper is in wrong place
- Light Bulb/Crystal Lamp/Lantern out, no spares
- Out of coffee/tea
I hadn't really settled on the idea of it being a Starbucks until later in the process.
Schoolhouse of Secrets is an actual MLP chapter book.
I thought it would be funny if I bracketed the story with Twilight's friends commiserating with her predicament, and mentioning that they'd been in legal trouble before as well. Of the rest of the ponies, Rainbow probably causes the most widespread destruction, and I think it's logical that she's on the weather team because she's serving community service hours.
Rainbow might not be good at math, but if she's working 8 hours a day and if pony years are the same length as ours, it'll take her 24 years to work off her debt to society. That's assuming she doesn't get vacation time in her community service hours.
I almost didn't put in the part about Rarity getting out of legal trouble by sleeping with the judge, until I realized that it would work if some other pony brought it up.
We all know what Starlight's done. Applejack is a good pony and probably wouldn't break the law. Ditto for Fluttershy.
The part about her being a bird lawyer is from Blueshift's Twilight Gets Divorced, which you should totally read. It's most excellent.
The Circle of Life
It should have been obvious that something like this was going to come eventually.
Those of you who know me reasonably well—at least as an author—know that I don't tend to do research for no purpose, and those of you who've been around for a while surely noticed my Science II blog post where I attempted to answer the question how much do ponies poop?
There's no need to go back into all that detail again (after all, I did probably remember to put a link to that blog post just above, so if you really need all the details all you've got to do is click on the link).
I guess what I'm saying is that the numbers in the story are reasonable, and based on at least decent research.
I should also mention that some of the guys I work with at the group homes have various gastrointestional issues, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is some of the psychotropic medicine they get. There are also some of them who like to use TP by the roll, or who attempt to flush anything that they can put in the toilet.
As a result of this, some of the group homes have specialty toilets that will flush practically anything.
Anon isn't so lucky.
While I normally don't like making references to Faust as some kind of a pony goddess, I think that it's reasonable in a comedy . . . especially since Faust had a thing or two to say about where ponies poop.
Filly Anon also isn't wrong about the fertilization cycle and the relationship between grazers and plants. While there are obviously dangers about transmitting various diseases by using the 'traditional' method of s
ting in a field, composting toilets can solve this problem. And in Western society, we really should rethink the toilet—flush toilets use an enormous amount of water that's typically been treated to make it drinkable, and then gets treated again at the other end of the process.
If you'd like to know more, I recommend this video:
Bonus content!
A while ago, Estee posted a blog post about Centorea in Equestria and whether or not the ponies would automatically mistrust her because she was a centaur and they had PTSD from Tirek. It was quite a well thought-out blog post, all things considered, and would make a rather nice topic for a story.
Well, unless I got my grubby little mitts on it.
It's surely a topic I could do seriously, if I'd wanted to, but my focus somehow got stuck on Centorea's huge tracts of land and I wondered how she'd gallop without knocking herself out.
I also came up with the line “What happened next was the tragic yet inevitable result of physics and physiology.“ while I was at work, test-driving a car, and I snickered for a good five minutes after that.
So I put something together and respectfully sent Estee a link. I said I wouldn't publish without approval. After all, it wasn't my idea to begin with.
Several months later, I got approval of sorts. “So I just looked at it, and...
...the repeated references to her build are bringing out thoughts of fire and/or baseball bats, yes.“ [Which means that if I suddenly get assaulted by someone wielding a baseball bat, it mightbe because of this; if so, I had fair warning.] By then, I'd sort of lost interest in finishing it, and there it remained in my unpublished stories list. Perpetually unfinished, a reminder of what was once going to be but now would never see the light of day.
Wanderer D said that I should publish it one night when we were hanging out at the bar . . . this was a few months back. And it was kind of at the back of my mind that I ought to finish it, but I'd have to do a lot more research to do it well, such as maybe watch the anime to get a proper sense of her character, more than just reading a wikipedia article.
And if I was going to do a serious story, I'd probably base it off some other work that I was more familiar with. All I know about Centora is that she's sensitive about her weight, and she likes carrots.
But hey! That's why I have Half-Baked biscuits. Y'all get to see some of the stuff that I never managed to make into a proper story.
Also worth mentioning, when I ran the coverart for The Circle of Life by a moderator, he said it was okay. I said that I'd blame him if i got banned, and he said he could ban me preemptively.
Who says that the mods aren't there for us?
Ah, I see we both have impeccable taste in music.
I recommend looking up the NieR: Automata soundtrack, if you haven't already.
As for No Time For Caution, I recommend this video because its just so well edited.
So I was reasonably sure, but looked it up just in case, that a longer pipe makes a lower note. Human hearing starts at 20Hz, horses start at 14Hz. Then I looked it up and according to this dump:
I can't find any explicit information on the tallest pipe in a pipe organ in the world, but assuming there's only 2 organs in the world that have 64' ranks, it's a safe bet that it's roughly 64 feet.
But 8 Hz. Damn. Talk about bass.
Wait, I don't remember this. Guess you need more punches! :D
Come now, this from the gentleman who basically invented an entire subgenre of absurd-fic on the notion of peaches?
Well, what an informative way to close the week!
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I haven't, and now I am.
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That was also on my short list of videos to include. I've seen that one enough times that I sometimes say 'birds' at the right point in the music.
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Fun fact, I mentioned that in a blog post years and years ago. Maybe back in 2013? I'd really have to go hunting to find it again.
I've got to figure that there's some sort of mathematical equation when it comes to pipe length (that is, a 65' pipe wouldn't be useful for anything) and since it seems to be binary, the next one up would be 128'. If it's a linear progression (which it probably isn't), that sucker would be a 4Hz note, and maybe buildings falling over wouldn't actually be out of the question for that.
You know it's good bass when you can't hear it, but you can feel it vibrating the marrow in your bones.
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It was right after I published my epic 0 word breakup fic.
That's probably true.
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I can't really take the credit for inventing it--that was all Obs. I was just the one that took the ball and ran with it.
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As I've said before, say what you will about the quality of my stories, but you're gonna come away having learned something. Even when I'm (literally) s
tposting.
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Semantics, and you know it. ;P It only really exploded after you breathed life into it in that trademark way of yours.
See this interview with Ashleigh Ball at 17:15
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Okay, not strictly relevant, but my chain of YouTube links from that last video led me to this, which is Ashleigh doing the "Lemons" bit from Portal 2 as Applejack.
Best organs have horizontal trumpets, even if some tones sound like thundering farts.
But really, as an old brass section geek and baroque fanboy, organ accompanying brass is the best of all possible worlds.
derpicdn.net/img/2016/5/29/1165711/full.png
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Throwing together something really dumb while everyone on Fimfic was in the right mood to receive it?
Actually, tangentially related, apparently Bad Horse didn't know that I wrote anything other than trollfics and crackfics. He only found out when he read The Fixer.
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Huh.
That was a lucky guess, then.
I can see Applejack saying exactly this.
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Trumpets in general sound like thundering farts. That's why they're awesome.
To go more modern, Blood, Sweat, and Tears has the best brass section of any band I know. We played three of their songs for marching band one year (Lucretia MacEvil, Hi-De-Ho, and Go Down Gambling) and it was EPIC. We had the whole trumpet line pointed at the press box for the high notes in Hi-Di-Ho (and our lead trumpet was right on the 50 yard line).
I want to see Applejack borrow a modern snowcat for winter wrap-up now. If she can handle a skidder, a snowcat is doable (well, a wheel cat - control sticks might be too much. And Earth Pony Magic has to explain the joystick buttons just like the bobcat.)
A modern PistenBully 600 has to be more productive than those horse-powered plows Twilight crashed during Winter Wrap-up.
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Applejack Rents a SnowCat? I could see it. And you're right, that thing would make short work of all the snow in town.
The only two problems I see is that it would leave snowpiles behind (I assume; I suppose you could have it fling the snow into a trailer or something like they have to do in cities) and maybe there's something in their process that's important in making the farmland productive again. Like, maybe it isn't just removing the snow, it's having hooves on the ground (maybe that's why they won't use unicorn magic).
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We dump our snow off the work roads and festival grounds into ponds, ditches, and the woods. We still have snow piles off some trails in eastern PA from this, but not where we have to work. Where does Applejack put the snow with the pony-powered plows?
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I'm not actually sure. It's not something that they dealt with in the episode, that's for sure. If they were smart, they'd move it somewhere so that they could keep it for refrigeration.
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I hadn't thought about an ice house deal. I'm sure with some Earth Pony ingenuity they could provide ice cold cider year-round.
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To me, it makes a lot of sense. I don't think that they have electricity, and so they've got to have some way of keeping their things cool. We humans used to do that either with springs if those were available, or ice if they weren't. Snow's not as good, since it's mostly air and will melt much more quickly than actual ice, but if it's compacted down it's a little bit better, and if they've got the ponypower to get a lot of it (like in Winter Wrap-Up) they might as well use it for something.
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Have you ever gone swimming in a mountain stream? My family always joked 'they just added the ice cubes upstream this morning' and maybe the ponies use some to keep streams nice and cold during the warmer months.
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I haven't, but I can imagine what it's like. Some of those probably aren't much above freezing (and I think that historically, mountain streams were sometimes used to keep things cold).
I don't know who introduced the idea, but in real life asian fruit bats just love mangoes. Think apples and Applejack.