Welcome! If you were around here earlier this week, you may have seen this story on the front page:

EThis Story Did Not Explode

• MLP: FiM
• Comedy
• Mystery
• Random

Phew! That was a close one.

• Twilight
• Other
• Main 6
• Sea Swirl

PseudoBob Delightus · 6.6k words  ·  288  14 · 8k views

And with... let's see... 892 comments at time of writing, chances are pretty good you read & commented on it, too.

Well, let's do a Q&A about it!

(Disclaimer: The admins at The Writers' Group very graciously allowed us to host our Q&A thread here. And it didn't take much threatening, neither! What a bargain!)

I'm pseudobob, and I did the visual design and most of the writing (and I wrote a BLOG about it!). In this thread will also be Silk Rose, who came up with the idea of a story that explodes, did all the code for those crazy real-time updates (and wrote a BLOG about it!), and wrote a couple of chapters, too. We'll be sure to answer any questions here for as long as questions are being asked.

Thanks!

Excited to be here!

Hi! Loved this story. Question: Why is Sea Swirl in the story? No hate, i love Sea Swirl.

--Fuzzee

7955330
I wanted Twilight's last hope to be some random passer-by on the street, and Sea Swirl just came to mind. Though I didn't know her name before I added her. lol.

7955331
lol

Chapter 6 was a Calvin and Hobbes reference, right? Just wanted to be sure.

7955337
Yep. Good ol' Bill Watterson. That chapter was also heavily inspired by Chinatown and the Film Noir skits in Whose Line.

7955345
Calvin and Hobbes will always be one of the best comics. Bill's avoidance in commercializing the strip means we got to miss out on some great merchandise and adaptations, but is refreshing to see in this world of BUY BUY BUY.

As soon as I saw those numbers in the title, I knew I was looking at a piece of April Fools dynamic API wizardry, and I cursed to the heavens that I had never thought of this idea myself.

Being an assistant to the Fimfarchive project, I realized a story that changes itself over a short span of time is somewhat of an anomaly to our efforts. Thus, I alerted the head archivist and threw together an auto-downloader to snapshot the story every few minutes, lest it delete itself or something. (It turned out I wasn't the only one doing this. I'm sure Fimfiction's CDN falling over was a complete coincidence).

Q1: Were you inspired by Tom Scott's video "This Video Has [X] Views?"

Q2: Did you do a test run of the countdown first?

Q3: Did you plan for things going wrong on the day?

Q4: What does it feel like to break Fimfiction?

Q5: Are you sure that story's safe? Just because it didn't go off doesn't mean it can't go off.

7955432
Hehehe. It's pretty cool that you're involved with fimfarchive. I would have liked to help with that, but I'm probably several years too late. Oh well...

Thus, I alerted the head archivist and threw together an auto-downloader to snapshot the story every few minutes, lest it delete itself or something.

Oh no! I was hoping the archivists wouldn't freak out too much. One of my goals for the story was to make sure it was fully readable after the event was over, but we intentionally didn't tell anyone, so... yeah. Obviously. However, if you started taking snapshots early and frequently enough, you may find some deleted content and/or easter eggs.

Q1: Maybe subconsciously, but I didn't make the connection until someone brought it up during the release night VC. Probably Rego?

Q2: Yes. Several.

Q3: To an extent. iirc I asked Silk for some recovery strategies in case the script broke somehow. But they can explain it better.

We definitely didn't forsee the image proxy crash! (It was the camo image proxy, not the CDN, FYI.) I was planning on playing some RDR2 but that forced me to find a way to host the chapters offsite.

Q4: Break how? I mean, there are some actual exploits on the site. I'm not going to advertise them with a gimmick story.

Q5: Yes, it's fine. In fact, why don't you go over and kick it? I'll just be uhhh over there a bit (starts running away)

7955461

I would have liked to help with that, but I'm probably several years too late. Oh well...

Not at all, the project is still going! There's a Discord server you can join if you're interested.

Q5: Yes, it's fine. In fact, why don't you go over and kick it? I'll just be uhhh over there a bit (starts running away)

Unbelievably, I've actually seen someone do this, with an unexploded WW1 munition. (That one also did not explode.)

7955461

Yes, it's fine. In fact, why don't you go over and kick it? I'll just be uhhh over there a bit (starts running away)

It's deactivated.