SciComm, Ponies, Puffins, and the Donald · 10:42pm Jul 11th, 2018
A few bits of random news:
My regular readers will know of my not-so-secret plot to educate pony fiction fans about science. I have another ongoing mission with the goal of educating the scholars of Oxford University about pony fan fiction. Progress has been a bit slower with this one, however I had a breakthrough last week when I had a chance to give a 7-minute talk on ‘SciComm with FanFic’ to an audience of about a hundred at an internal Public Engagement with Research conference. I went through 24 slides showing pictures of coloured unicorns doing mathematics and pegasi engineering rainbows, with carefully prepared sound bites to get across the core message in the 17.5 seconds per slide. The audience loved it. I lost count of the number of people who came up to me afterwards with enthusiastic praise.
This was recorded and I hope it will be released as an official university podcast. If they get nervous about copyright issues or veto it for some other reason, I’ll see if I can put another version on YouTube.
Shiva Shakti kindly notified me that one of my crazier stories Fluttershy Defends Scotland Against Invasion by Alien Squirrels has now been translated into Russian. Russian readers can get that here: Флаттершай защищает Шотландию от вторжения белок пришельцев.
I don’t know Russian, but I was sufficiently curious to check out how Google translated it back into English. This way I learned that the Russian for Puffin – Тупики also translates as Dead End. How interesting. Further research shows there are two species: the Pacific Dead End, and the Atlantic Impasse.
As Donald Trump is finally visiting the UK tomorrow, it seems appropriate to also remind you of the sequel to this story: Fluttershy Defends Scotland Against Invasion By Donald Trump. The moderators wouldn’t let me post that as a story so it’s a blog post. Strange to think this was written at a time when nobody believed the Donald would ever be elected president.
We may not have Fluttershy, but Britain is preparing to give him an appropriate welcome. The Trump baby balloon is set to fly over London. American Idiot has hit the UK music charts. There will be rallies in London and other places where he will visit. I would love to go along to show solidarity with American friends, but having twisted my ankle I don’t think I’ll make it to the big London rally. Hopefully manage a smaller local one.
And the England football team have sadly just been knocked out of the football world cup. I’m not a great football follower, but I did feel a certain additional warmth towards the team after seeing this photo of their training session.
Sounds like a pair of novels where the protagonist has survive while stranded at sea.
Also, I do hope that talk can get on YouTube one way or another. Sounds awesome!
Why didn’t the mods let you post that?
Seconded on 4899512's question. As long as the word count's there . . . .
And it's certainly friendlier than my Trump story.
Well, they managed to win on penalties for the first time in how many decades?
Did you use the slide of the 9001 hooves of Pinkie Pie?
How comes that the mods didn't let you post this story? It seems completely rule-conform.
All of this chaos reminds me about the Chinese Curse “¡May you live in interesting times!”. Our times certainly are interesting.
I'm not going to read comments on this beautiful post of yours since I don't want my mood ruined today, but I really, really want to see that presentation. Hope there'll be a way to watch it. Oh and good luck defending the UK. Ol' Blighty needs all the luck she can get nowadays.
4899512
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The reason given was: "This story, as it has been submitted, is not considered to be related to the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic universe." I sent a polite reply asking for clarification of how this rule is interpreted and what changes I would need to make for the story to be accepted. I just got a one line reply saying: "There is no MLP content in this submission."
4899806
I'll be honest, I don't get it. I've got less pony-related stuff myself, including things that I filed the serial number off of and threw a token pony in. Hell, Here I Am might not be about ponies at all. . . .
These days with auto publish you could probably publish it if you wanted to although trust me you'd get a, uh, lively comment section on it. Possibly some unfollows, too--that happened to me. And a shit-ton of downvotes. And possibly some angry PMs.
Incidentally--and I'm not telling you what to do here--but this particular gif has served me well:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/6/25/20549__safe_edit_edited+screencap_screencap_apple+bloom_liza+doolots_petunia_scootaloo_silver+spoon_sweetie+belle_tootsie+flute_truffle+shuffle_twist_f.gif
(if you want music, too, here's the YouTube link)
Trump's already said he's not going to London or anywhere else where there's the slightest risk of a protest.
4900176
Figures. The big orange baby is a coward, like so many bullies.
4900091
Yeah. If I write another similar story I will auto-publish it. This one was written before that was an option and I suspect if I resubmit it now, having already been rejected, that would just piss off the moderators and they might revoke my auto-publishing right. I could have argued this one as they didn't give a good reason, but I was trying to keep things friendly, and it seemed easier to just publish it as a blog post.
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We scared him off
The domain name of the first posted image makes me wonder if you have a deviant art account.
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That's no secret. That's where I host the images I need to post on fimfiction. https://www.deviantart.com/pinetapony
4900562
I bounce between a deviantart account, an imgur account (now that that's working again), and a secondary Facebook account for all my various posting needs.
Tried a couple of other image hosting sites, but they didn't work out for me. Either I couldn't figure out how to share links, or FimFiction wouldn't accept them.
4899502 if so, we can only pray that one is not a sequel.
"I know it was hard on you last year, honey. But what are the odds that our yacht winds up being destroyed by a freak wave and we wind up drifting for three months awaiting rescue again? Now put the life preserver down and get into the boat so we can start our Pacific tour."