Hearth’s Warming is a time for tradition, for decorating the Hearth’s Warming Tree and drinking hot chocolate and most importantly not telling Discord what you’re up to because of course he’ll want to show up to ‘help’ and before too long the hot chocolate has collapsed into a singularity and everypony’s yelling at each other and then the tree explodes.
Fun concept, and a charming gift for Discord. A bit too meta for me, but I'll live. Much fun was had.
Finally, someone uses the term "baited breath" correctly. (Although I would have figured Discord for eating chum.)
9396973 Are you referring to the cat who ate a slice of cheese and then waited outside the mousehole with baited breath?
Trees actually can explode in the winter. If they have enough water in them followed by a rapid and severe temperature drop the water will become ice and the outer bark can literally burst off the tree.
I see what you did there.
Well that was an interesting thing.
Now, why did it explode?
9397237
Because the nitro cherries grew in. And then someone breathed.
CHAOS CHAOS!!!
A CAN DO ANYTHING!!!
playning: THE WORLD REVOLVING
The great thing about Trees being atomic level nanotech replicators working on deterministic Turing principles, is that if you crack the coding, programming and assembly procedures, you can get the Tree to make ANYTHING. Organic, Inorganic, Metallic, any combination, blend, hybridisation.
Just look at Changelings.
My favourite article recently are the guys who found out how to slightly modify existing well known paper production mathods to turn cheap pine into something that better than most titanium alloys, for a similar price to steel.
Anyone for a Trabant F1 suborbital family car?
Huh. If I'd known you'd be my Jinglemas author, I'd have requested an obscure previous-gen pony who only ever showed up in merchandise. Still, while this wasn't at all what I expected, it was a bunch of wack and zany fun, which I probably should've expected from a Discord fic. And meeting the requisite Derpy and card game quotas was much appreciated. Thanks again for a wacky and wonderful story.
Who knew he'd go mad fixing up a tree
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It’s the kind of tree he’d really like. And let’s face it, Discord needs a pet.
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I’m kinda surprised nobody’s done it before.
And you’re right, he probably is a chum sort of guy, but who knows how ponies would respond to that. We know they’re not above eating worms.
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That’s somewhat alarming, to be honest. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen to any of my trees. It hasn’t yet, for what that’s worth.
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9397237
Thank you!
Pinkie Pie was involved in making it, as was Derpy. Also, Discord handled it. So that’s why it exploded.
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Well, that’s a possibility, too.
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Ooh, I don’t know why, but the song “The Day the Earth Caught Fire” suddenly came to mind.
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I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t more research devoted into that topic. Although I do know that they can be used (and are used) to suck up pollution. If they’re pulling up heavy metals, it’s probably possible to get them to put them in a fruit or something.
Changelings don’t grow on trees, silly.
There has been a resurgence of late in using wood to construct things that are normally constructed from steel. I just read an article about someone who figured out how to make wooden wind turbine towers that ship better and are cheaper than steel towers. I’ve also seen articles on wooden skyscrapers, and I’ve also watched a YouTube video about a company building cardboard houses.
There’s a lot that can be done with trees.
I’d like to see that. Elon Musk could probably make it happen.
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It’s an omnifruit tree, so it’s understandable.
Also, why are you a penguin with a gun? This concerns me.
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Honestly, that would have been an easier for me to write.
I’ll be honest, I was going to try and come up with something sweet and serious (and having a lot of trouble brainstorming what it would be), but figured that since it was Discord, and since I gave you a serious story with Dinky and Derpy a couple of years back, I might as well flex my crackfic muscles and obscure bits of knowledge for this one.
You’re welcome!
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It’s a rare phenomenon. A lot of factors including size and type of tree are required so it’s the kind of thing park rangers or forestry service might come across.
I was actually expecting: "And
horniworkhornwork"Or as a replacement wagon wheel, fruitcake is very versatile.
It's like you carefully nurtured hundreds of little injokes, ideas and thoughts, raised them through childhood and watched happily as they grew into adulthood. Then shoved them all in an industrial strength blender, baked for 3 hours and left to cool in the fridge overnight.
Very enjoyable :)
I would ordinarily say this should be "bated breath", but it's Discord, so it's just as likely he meant exactly what you knew.
Wow, that was just... it was something else. The something else I didn't know I needed.
This was kind of crazy in a good and fun way. You might want to reorganize the dialogue though. I had a hard time figuring out who was saying what.
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Yeah, I’d have to imagine that it’s infrequent. I do wonder if there are some trees that are more susceptible to it than others--there probably are.
EDIT: Just did a bit more looking ‘cause I was curious, and apparently some Native American dialects called the first moon of the new year “The Moon of the Cold-Exploding Trees” (at least, according to Wikipedia).
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Ooh, I could have done that.
This is assuming that you make it in a wheel shape to begin with, or have strong enough tools to carve it into a wheel shape.
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That was more or less the idea. When I decided that I was going to go for random comedy, it was time to toss in all the little bits of weirdness and stir them up and see what came out.
Thank you!
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I didn’t actually know that, or if I did, I forgot that I knew that.
Nevertheless, he tossed a handful of worms into his mouth, so ‘baited’ is appropriate in this context.
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Thank you!
9401651
Thank you!
There’s a couple spots where I probably could have, but I’ll be honest, I’ve found that in crowd scenes sometimes it doesn’t matter who says what (with the exception of a few core characters). IMHO--and your opinion may vary--dialogue tags often get in the way, and I try to minimize them whenever I can.
You might be interested in a blog post I wrote about the subject: Writing Mechanics: Saidisms. If nothing else, it’s kinda entertaining.
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Always been a fan of the odd history lessons you can come across. Personal favorite so far is that their was a war declared between England and either Spain or Portugal over a smugglers ear getting cut off.
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Yesterday I learned about the time the US sent in, among other things, B52 bombers . . . for the purpose of cutting down a tree.
The best part is the Wikipedia article lists in the little summary box the casualties of the conflict, and on the North Korean side it just says “One Poplar Tree.”
Great idea for the present at the end
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The best part is that you can actually buy such a tree.
I wanted to quote something bit there are too many good things to quote...
This is pure gold. XD
this.... this is too good
GIVE ME MORE PUNS!!!
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Thank you!