How hard can writing novels be, anyway?
It's okay. I'm here. I can remember what happened.
I'm still here.
Written for the Thousand Word Contest III, categories Horror (Pewter Medal!) and Experimental.
Thanks to Silk Rose, Scriblits Talo, ThePeer, and MorganaTheNotCat for pre-reading and feedback.
Now featuring an excellent dramatic reading by Ross and Wizzy!
I recommend reading this in a web browser.
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oh my god pseudobob strikes again with another uniquely formatted story
PLEASE you had me looking for a repeat of the invisible story 😭😭gl in the competition!
I love this story well done friend
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A dislike!? Unacceptable
Oh, my.
I've got the chills, now. That was very effective.
Good show! Best of luck in the judging!
Twi, you done fucked up 😐
i'm honored to have pre-read this fine piece of words
Loved this story, so sad!
Glad I could help out.
You sure have done it again with the interesting formatting, Bob.
Very nice.
I really enjoyed your
what was it?
oh
your story.
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Begone bot!
Saw the title in the featured box, immediately knew whose this was xD
I saw the title and I immediately thought "Yup, it’s PsuedoBob Delightus".
You really nail unique formatting!
Well, that was certainly an interesting read.
Great way of displaying someone fading from existence in writing format.
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Thanks for the help!
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Glad you enjoyed it - thanks for the feedback!
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Oh no... the mortifying ordeal of being known...
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That's for certain, assbutt2. There but for the grace of Celestia go I.
I would not know to say that this is the first story of yours that I have read, since I do not notice the authors, but this story I loved, not if it is by the format that it has or by how the small story was structured, but it was enchantingly scary and completely fun
Usually in these kinds of stories, I guess Discord ends up saving the day at the end, but only when he’s "good," and I think at the time of the story, it would be before that
Loved how spaced out and fragmented the thoughts were here. The simple stuff was what really drove it home, stuff like the
bit(s)
This is terrifying in a completely different way than any other story I have read. Deeply unsettling.
So this story is basically if your conscience had a mind of it's own. Great job.
Howdy, hi~! Its DaOtterGuy
Glad to see you practicing that opacity setting that you had talked about before :p. Past that, really liked how unsettling this was. It was so interesting, representing the fading opacity as losing train of thought or, in the context of this story, thought itself. It's a weirdly almost in-universe meta story and told from such an interesting perspective that I can't even be sure if my interpretation is even correct. Definitely rambling, but the point is that this was a super banger read. Thanks~!
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I
I like it.
I have no idea how you did that thing with the words, where they were fading, but that was cool.
And... Dark.
Didn't feel really scary, but... It was deep.
I don't really have words to describe what I just read other than it was unique, and I like it.
The tone of the music may not be quite as accurate as I would have hoped, but nonetheless, this song is perfect for this fic.
"i" by Aphex Twin, from his 1992 album Selected Ambient Works 85–92.
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[opacity=(pick a number between 0.00 and 1)]text here[/opacity]So
[opacity=0.5]Carrot Top is best pony.[/opacity]renders as Carrot Top is best pony.11967857
Thank you!
—Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger (ch. 11)
Love it. I have a soft spot for abstract stories like these, very interesting stuff!
I would like to think this story is simply Twilight zoning out, but the "Sad" tag suggests something darker, I dunno, just my observation
Abstract stories can have infinite interpretations lol
dang trying to do phenomenology while suffering from this mind blanking is just so tragically ironic
hehe that is indeed what the three of them would say respectively
and ooh this does seem to be trying to capture something about consciousness. i am fond of the idea that at its core, consciousness is our mind trying to simulate other beings in a social context, and our own sense of self is just one of those simulations that thinks it is the entire brain. so when the threads begin to be pulled apart, confusing a self-monologue for a dialogue is a natural mistake
she is describing her own hindlegs and tail? and ya that is brain problems level of disassociation! everything is more fun when ponies are doing it
and ooh another way the brain can fall apart! matching words to their right definition by context is nontrivial and very apparent when it goes wrong
ah classic Twilight pushing the limits of magic farther than they were meant to go thus producing existentially terrifying results, that happens so often!
oof, really can’t hold more than one thing in her mind at once now!
and love this artifact of the English language that makes this the intermediate between “i am still here” and “i am”, there is something just so poetic about that.
fantastic job in communicating the feeling of Twilight’s mind coming apart in such a directly felt way! it’s something that is so very easy to slip into maudlin in a less skilled writer’s hands but you strike a great balance. thank you for writing!
Remember, folks, when exploring uncharted realms, always layer on far more safeguards than you may think you need. Time-based automatic retrieval is all well and good until you venture into a realm that lacks the concept of time as we understand it. Alternatively, don’t go. Not until you send a probe of some kind in there, and more importantly either have a remote feed or means of retrieving it.
In all, a haunting and well-presented tragedy of poor testing procedures (and, you know, all the same horror of watching a loved one succumb to neurodegenerative illness on a much faster timescale.) Well done, and thank you for it.
Yay! Comment avalanche!
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Not something I approached in a systematic way, but on review it seems a lot of my stories are about consciousness. And this story could be considered an opposite of What am I?, in which an unthinking object thinks itself awake. Funny how that works!
Not specifically what I was going for, but the idea was she's trying to describe herself without any intuition about her own body plan, so you got the idea.
Yeah, it was really neat that all the stages from "i am still here" to "i" are valid statements.
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Twilight doesn't know the meaning of "measure twice, cut once". I mean, she doesn't know anything anymore, but she didn't know that before either.
We love writing about horrific things, don't we folks.
Thank you for the nice comments! I'm glad you liked the story.
It is interesting and a little funny how everyone seems to have their own interpretation of what happens to Twilight. Did she escape reality, or destroy it? Or just destroy her mind some way or another? I did have something specific in mind while writing it, but what good is my opinion? The author is dead, or outside of reality, or something. You get the idea.
Hello! I reviewed this a bit ago, so here's your overdue courtesy note. I liked that I thought of more than one possibility about what's happening to Twilight, part of which was because it was in Equestria, not on Earth. Even though I'm often not a huge fan of experimental formatting, I think it did a decent job here. Upvoted!