Pony Stories 76

For some reason I wait longer to read the darker or sad fan fiction stories. Which leads to having a whole backlog of depressing and/or sad stuff to read in a row sometimes. Which doesn’t actually have anything to do with the stories below. Just looking at what I’ve got left in my ‘downloaded to read’ list on my kindle and it’s all not-so-funny stuff.

 

Pony Stories 75

Okay, we’ve got a theme, or maybe a shtick. All we need now is a flag and a ship and we can be pirates! No, wait, that’s One Piece. I decided to try the  Alternate Universe (I think?) of The Journey of Graves. I pretty much read all the stories back to back. Not immediately, they didn’t grab me like Fallout: Equestria did so I put them down and took breaks between them, but it was still more or less a continuous read. So my impressions of the nine stories below kind of blend into each other so I decided to do this as one longer post because I’m pretty sure several of these impressions/reviews bled into each other a bit. Overall, I liked it.

 

Pony Stories 74

More pony stories. Savor the taste of the random collection of stories below. Next post is (probably) going to be a theme post all about a series of fanfics that are all in a single series. If the experiment goes well, we may never return to randomness ever again! Except, you know, after that I’m planning on reading a whole bunch of completely unrelated fanfics and then probably post my post-story thoughts here as usual. So the predictability of my lack of coherency is a win for… um, both chaos and order? They are never going to let me into Recluse at this rate.

 

Pony Stories 73

I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post. That’s something that hasn’t happened in a while. So for the next week or so I’ll be posting thoughts/reviews/ramblings about stories I actually finished a while ago. Guess the new mind-altering chemicals are working. Anyway, also wanted to point at the best pony fan fiction I’ve run across outside of fimfiction. It’s not a story, but it has me laughing more often than not. Here is the link to the posts in chronological order. No, I’m not telling you what it is. Though just looking at the link address will probably clue you in.

 

Book: Starship Troopers

Wow, this is somewhat dated. Also pretty current in other ways. The dated part comes from first a business man, then a doctor dismissing politics as useless for making money. Yeah, look at all those businessmen ignoring politics. No money in being able to directly influence the government. Of course, by the end of the book the business man says it was all a lie and he always wanted to join the service and was just scared he wouldn’t be man enough to handle it. It’s a decent book. Not nearly as bad as, say, Atlas Shrugged, but not exactly a stellar example of fine narrative quality. Interesting enough, it is another example of how to tell a story instead of showing a story. The entire thing is written as someone telling the reader, there is almost no showing and you don’t get any immersion in any of the events. Most of the actual things that happen are skipped over. Once again, when you have a entire book structured this way it can work.

Interesting how the tech isn’t that dated. Since he skips over any of the usual hard scifi descriptions of how things work and uses only the most general terms, there isn’t any specific technologies to feel old. However, the addition of psychic sensitives, and the heavy reliance of hypnotism for both training and even for attack briefings reminded me of just how common mysticism was among the mainstream scifi establishment during that time.

Not a whole lot else to say about this. Did have a moment of weird surrealness while reading it, however. I read my non-pony stuff around my fanfic reading. Well, other way around really given the non-pony stuff is longer and the fanfics are usually short fictions. Anyway, so I’ve finished up my fanfic reading for the day and decide to sit down and read this science fiction classic and like the first word after where I stopped was Luna and I’m like “Help! I see ponies everywhere now!” before I realize that they are talking about the big rock orbiting earth and not the princess. Still, was a moment where the world was upside down for me.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein