Book: Empire in Black and Gold

Non-pony story today. As mentioned previously. So a bit of pony content up here in the intro bit. A guilty pleasure of mine is however much I don’t like the art, I have enjoyed several of the Equestrian Girls songs. Been watching the Battle of The Bands clip recently. Two favorite bits. The first is the villains have magic necklaces with red gems on the front. Very much the same color as the Alicorn Amulet. Would be cool if that connection turned out to be true. Second favorite bit, the three evil girls are singing this song of conflict that ensnares everyone in the cafeteria other than our heroes. Well, and you see Vinyl Scratch in the background wearing headphones and headbobbing, completely oblivious to the song number or fight breaking out. Won’t happen, but it would be awesome if a major plot point is that Vinyl is completely unaffected by their magic influence simply because she is always listening to her headphones and therefor completely immune to the music-based corruption.

Completely unrelated: I wanted to pass on the link to a friend’s Patreon page. She’s an artist that does pretty funny webcomics, Supporting her is better than buying bottled water, and that’s a hard, solid non-researched statement. Just keep in mind that you can pledge less than a dollar, so even just a quarter or so to toss in each month will add up. Which is true for anyone on Patreon you might want to support. The link here, just to help my friend out.

 

Pony Stories 190

Guardians of the Galaxy opens this weekend. Hope it’s as fun as the trailers present it. Might be the last good marvel movie for a while given what I’ve been hearing about some of the ones further out. Plus is still cracks me up that they got Vin Diesel to voice the character who can only say three words. Using big name celebrity for a role like that just hits my funny bone.

Also, I’m reading Hell of a Time again and I have to report, still hilarious. It’s just as hilarious the fourth time as it was the first. You know, however hilarious you thought it was. My favorite part is still Princess Luna ‘playing’ the blues on her harmonica. I can just see her doing it in my mind when I read it.

 

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And this is the last of the backed up pony stories from before the most dangerous game contest. Which means… I’ll either have to read more pony stories or post something entirely non-pony tomorrow. Might even have to switch from posting every day to just once or twice a week. The horror! How will the internet survive without a constant stream of my wit to give it motivation to keep trying to escape and power society’s big hamster wheel?

 

Pony Stories 188

Huh. Coming up on the 200th post of pony reviews since I started counting them. Given I’ve been averaging 3-5 stories a post, that’s a lot of pony reviews even given the quick and dirty style I’ve been using. Plus I’ve started, maintained, and then switched to a much easier form of the big master review list. I might have to actually think of something somewhat special to do for the big round number post. Now I’m thinking of meta-level entertainment. Maybe a entire post of reviews of stories that haven’t actually been written yet. That’s always been a art form that has interested me. Creating stories using a kind of negative space. Nah, too much work. Anyway, I’ve got a week and a half to think about it and many intro paragraphs I could fill with random speculation on the topic. It’s a gold mine for filler content.

 

Pony Headcanon-ish 03

I had this thought a week or so ago just thinking about pony stuff. The question was, why have winter if the seasons are manual? I mean, wouldn’t you just have spring, summer, fall, spring again? Maybe with a day or week of snow here and there for variety. So I was thinking about it and came to this thought: Winter is when the weather factory gets vacation. The snow is where the weather industry stores all the water and all the weather employees get to take time off. If we consider that, in general, the evaporate/cloud/rain cycle is more or less a manual thing. Maybe not the evaporation, but collecting it in clouds and distributing it as rain again could be. The yearly water collection from a town is obviously just making up for all the water that gets lost across the borders of the kingdom, or just plain inefficiency in the process.

So, winter wrap-up is the weather industry’s off season.