Pony Stories 213

Boom. All of PresentPerfect’s contest review blogpost linked to THE MASTER LIST. Was incredibly easy, mostly because I added most of the stories thanks to InquisitorM’s posts on the same contest. So was just a matter of finding and linking. With spreadsheet sorting powers, I am triumphant. Now for more stories from my to-read list, one again trying to focus on stories that haven’t gotten much attention.

 

Pony Stories 212

Yeah, I’ve probably spent a little too much money on commissioning pony fan art last month or two. This ‘having money’ thing takes some getting used to. The one thing living just below the poverty line can’t teach you. How do deal with fanart commission addiction. A phrase I used simply because those two words rhymed. A handful of last-minute ponyfic reviews below the break.

 

Pony Stories 211

Signal Boost time! If you have any interest in movies or the theater, you should go check out the YouTube channel Cyndi On Tuesdays. The official grand opening is Labor Day, but there are a handful of videos up now. Cyndi is an actor that’s been in the business for quite a while, both stage and screen. Now she’s adding YouTube to her list of conquered venues and you should check out a video or two before she gets mainstream popular. Three pony fanfic reviews below the break. Spoiler: I didn’t like any of them, you should probably just go watch some of Cyndi’s videos instead of reading any of those fanfics.

 

Pony Stories 210

Today the intro paragraph will be about writing. A post on another blog mentioned the the show, don’t tell rule. Or sorta rule. It got my brain in a certain well-traveled train of thought. It is an excellent example of a pattern I’ve seen in a lot of how-to-write books and advice. It all comes down to the fact that most writing advice is aimed at new writers. There are several common mistakes most beginning writers make, and the advice is aimed at those. Show instead of tell is one of the big ones, because it’s one of the biggest flaws in most beginning writer’s prose. The problems comes from an annoying habit of human behavior. If you give a rule that has exceptions, everyone will assume they are the exception and ignore the rule. So advice to new writers is often delivered in fairly draconian terms. Do this. Don’t do that. Which gets misrepresented after a while, has people arguing against it, and so on and so on.

The long and short of it is that if you are trying to weasel around a writing rule because you don’t like it, you probably still need to follow it. If you understand why the rule is in place, have followed it well for several stories, and you want to try some new style that pushes the rule to the side… Then you might be ready to push it to the bottom of your writer toolbox. Might want to write a few more stories with it first, just to make sure.

 

Pony Stories 209

I got reminded of the movie Transcendence over in the comment section of InquisitorM’s latest blogpost over on fimfiction. Augh. I don’t say this about maybe things, since I think it’s a fairly powerful word that shouldn’t be overused, but I hate that movie. I consider my religion to be Transhumanism (which is a whole topic in itself) so that movie was basically a two hour badly written insult to everything I believe in. I was mad at that movie for several days after seeing it in a theater, and was ranting at it for several hours that day. Two of the ‘best’ parts? The first was that taking out all computers and technology in the world results in basically a ‘eh, we are better off without it’ situation. Instead of, you know, the global anarchy and mass death tolls the collapse of civilization would cause. But that’s okay, because the movie opens with a quaint little California town where they use old keyboards as doorstops. The second was the movie, and this is literally in the movie, the big finale is when the ‘heroes’ inject someone with a virus and then have them infect the computer AI to defeat it. Yes, the movie literally doesn’t see any different in biologic viruses and computer viruses. They are treated interchangeable. The movie is not subtle at all. AI bad, simple living good. Everyone is a caricature, not a archetype, but a parody of cliche. Basically I agree with this review over on the Escapist website, except I think he was a little too soft on the movie.

No real reason for all that. Just needed to vent. Several short pony reviews below the break.