My Rise and Fall: How I succumbed to MAGICAL FRIENDSHIP

[Roland]

And in other news, I remember some of you guys being a bit miffed about images linked from ponibooru showing up in this topic.

=/ Unfortunately, a recent change in the way ponibooru handles suggestive/explicit images may as well have banned it entirely. Basically, pornography is now openly allowed on the site so long as it's marked explicit. Anons viewing the site automatically have explicit content filtered out, but still.

... and it just occurred to me that the Gamefaqs/Random Insanity topic for Friendship is Magic, Sugar Cube Corner, is pretty much 85% ponibooru links. Crap.

[Fenris]

This pony blog is the best pony blog.

[Flarecobra]

So, someone used a bunch of fancy mathematics in an attempt to determine their age. You can read it here.

I was a bit disappointed in that it wasn't an attempt at exact age, as the range they got was kind of obvious if one thought about it a bit.

A: We know they're above the age of basic schooling, as evidenced by Applebloom and her friends.
B: They're old enough to have some job skills, with Rarity and Dash being prime examples.
C: They appear to be fully grown, looking at their size.
D: We can assume they're not far in the "adult" stage of life by their interactions with the other townsfolk.

...And that's about all I got. Feel free to add in more.

[synkr0nized]

Had a LAN party yesterday

The constant sight of Dash on my desktop brought in some more to the fold.

[Flarecobra]

And now.. Samurai Applejack.

[Roland]

Somebody went and made an oldschool adventure-esque MLP game and submitted it to Newgrounds.

It can be kinda creepy, though YMMV on that—it was a bit too short for me to really get into the mood and the creepiness was somewhat deflated by the necessary railroading the game does.

[Julford Hajime]

Yeah I just played through the game, and I was kinda off-put by just how short it was as well. It was doing a good job of setting the tone up till that point, but then it just ended and I was kinda left... Unimpressed, I guess. Had it been longer, it would've been great.

[Flarecobra]

Pony Rangers.

Do I need to say more?

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

You know we already have that in video form right?

[Roland]

Fanfiction!So, I've taken to reading a fanfic known as The Party Hasn't Ended. Right now I'm on Part Five, and it's pretty good so far. Though in light of a statement by Lauren Faust regarding Dash's sexualityI lost the original quote, but the gist of it was that "Whatever Dash is, she's not insecure about it at all.", it's a bit hard for me to accept the fanfic into my own personal fanon.

The shipping is very important to this fanfic, so I can't recommend it if you're against that sort of thing. It's not like Misted Stage, where you can just skip the epilogue (where the Braedash ship is really capitalized on). Trying to read this fanfic without also paying attention to the PinkieDash antics would be like trying to empty a hole-filled ship on the Atlantic with a coffee mug.

The fanfic can be found Here if anyone's interested.

EDIT: So, I stayed up all night reading. Right now I'm on part 11, but I think I'm going to have to stop for now. It's a great fanfic, really. But something about part 10 struck me in an odd way. I don't want to spoil it, but I want to spoil it at the same time, if only to give a frame of reference to how it made me feel.

When I was younger—early high school, in fact, the author I was most interested in at the time was David Gemmell. My first story written by him was Stormrider, the fourth and final novel in the Rigante series. After that I went back and read the first, then the second, and finally the third in that order. So by the time I got to the third, Ravenheart, I already knew well enough that some man by the name of Jaim Grymauch was going to die. And as that story went on, I came to like and respect this character very much.

But when the novel finally started to come to an end, I figured the event wouldn't really be all that meaningful to me outside of what it'd do to move the plot along. I was absolutely, positively wrong and to this day, Ravenheart is the only novel to leave me in tears by the time I finished reading.

So what I'm saying is, the end of Part 10 of The Party Hasn't Ended did the same thing for me, for the exact same reasons.

EDIT SQUARED: And then I finished it, because I couldn't just stop reading it. The ending was kinda eh, and I skipped over a small part of it that I had no interest whatsoever in, but overall it was very good. A few eyerolling moments, namely pretty much every non-PinkieDash shipping moment and the part I skipped over, but yeah, good story.

And in other news, Nike makes shoes. And then somebody noticed what is likely a bunch of coincidences regarding those shoes. Now if only they didn't charge an arm and two legs for those shoes...

EDIT: Also, I've been fooling around with the My Little Fortress mod. Right now I'm struggling with names and occupations for my seven starting ponies. I've got this silly stupid idea that I could make a writing project out of this.

So far, what I've got:
Freezy Dry - A unicorn who, based solely on what his randomly generated name came up as, specializes in food storage and as such is going to be the group's architect and mason.
Sweet Stuff - A unicorn who, again, based solely on her randomly generated name, has ended up becoming the group's cook and brewer.
Misty Lakes - A unicorn (again!) whose name has absolutely nothing to do with what she does. She handles engraving, pottery, and wood crafting thanks to a single personality trait saying she values tradition.
Fortune Smiles - Guess what she is. Also, the group's organizer and record keeper.
River Breeze - An earth pony (yes, they exist) who is... weird. Among other things, he likes bogeymen for their terror-inducing antics. Because of this, I made him the group's bone carver. Would likely change his nickname to something else, if only because River Breeze doesn't quite capture the strangeness I have in mind for this pony.
Evergreen - I completely forgot about her. She's another unicorn. As her name may or may not imply, she's the group's farmer. Yes, a unicorn instead of an earth pony.
Captain Scurvy - Avast, ye landlubbers! Captain Scurvy be a reformed pirate earth pony, named because Captain Scurvy has always been in poor health since the day he was born. Captain Scurvy's the group's leader, on account of Captain Scurvy being the only one with an iota of patience for his fellow ponies.

EDIT: Settling on a name for the settlment is tough. I can change any of the pony names anytime I want, but whatever I name the settlement is going to stick forever, so I need to make it a good one. I was thinking something apple-themed, with the bizarre and improbable fanon that Captain Scurvy is a distant relative of the apple family in the same branch as Aunt and Uncle Orange. But that might be too... something.

FINAL EDIT: It is 5:30 AM here. Why am I still awake? Also, for those who've checked under the swap tags, feel free to check again—I've updated my thoughts on the fanfic. And then I lied, and edited this post again at 8:00 AM. Confound these ponies, they drive me to insomnia.