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2) Nocturnian Revolution


Night Shine

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Part 2: The Nocturnian Revolution (Summer 2012)

 

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Resistance is futile.

 

AS SOON as I returned from summer camp on July 22, 2012, I dove right into the brony phenomenon. I used GeneralZoi's Pony Creator to re-create the pony I had seen in my head at summer camp, and I have kept the result as my profile picture ever since. I started binge-watching MLP episodes every night, starting with The Return of Harmony and then going back to watch all of the episodes in Seasons 1 and 2 in order. I found and joined MLPForums on July 24, two days after becoming a brony. Because I knew how ridiculously powerful my interest in MLP was--it had overpowered me after I decided not to become a brony--I thought to take advantage of that interest. I used the raw willpower given to me by my newfound MLP interest to radically shift my interests, thoughts, and mindset. Here's where things get interesting.

 

 

ASSIMILATE OR DESTROY

 

This was my mindset regarding anything in my life that was not pony-related. It would either be assimilated, or it would be destroyed.

1) Minecraft: Destroyed

After diving headfirst into bronydom, I never played Minecraft again. I considered it once or twice when I heard about pony Minecraft servers, but I never really overcame the extreme paranoia I held towards Minecraft from how it had sucked away all of my creativity and made me extremely depressed. The last thing that I did in the game of Minecraft was take an airship that I created with the Zeppelin mod and bomb Summerside City, destroying what may have been my greatest Minecraft creation that I created over several months.

2) Youtube: Assimilated

Before MLP, I liked Youtube simply for its own value. I enjoyed watching Youtube Poops about all kinds of subjects, I was a dedicated watcher of Equals Three, I loved watching funny cat videos, and overall I liked Internet humor simply for it being Internet humor. During my Minecraft interest, this became slightly more focused as most of what I watched were Minecraft parodies, Minecraft instructional videos, et cetera. However, once I was into MLP, I was not only extremely paranoid of anything related to anything related to Minecraft, but also was in love with the concept of Ponification. I saw Ponification as a form of Purification, where something as corrupt as the humans could be turned into something as pure as the ponies (I will expand on this purist ideology later). So, with the combined forces of Paranoia and Ponification, I purged my Youtube habits of anything that was not pony-related. I unsubscribed from every non-brony Youtube channel that I had previously subscribed to. I replaced music with pony music, Youtube Poops with MLP Youtube Poops, and Minecraft parodies with MLP parodies. Everything non-pony had to go. To this day, I will still think twice before watching a non-pony-related video on Youtube, and am generally wary of them.

3) Furdom: Destroyed

(This one is kind of disgusting, so I will put it in a spoiler if you want to skip over it).

 

Though I was never proud of this interest, over time I had become brainwashed into an attraction to anthropomorphic animals (which I will refer to henceforth as "furries," non-capitalized). I have never considered myself a part of the Furry fandom, because I have always sincerely hated my attraction to furries. However, before becoming a brony, I never had enough willpower to overcome this attraction and prevent it from getting the best of me. I could not for the life of me overcome my addiction to furry porn, despite that I felt no connection to the Furry fandom and knew that my attraction was Wrong and Gross. I was what most members of the Furry fandom would probably hate: someone who held no respect for the fandom or sense of community, but still held it as the kind of sexual fetish that makes the Furries look bad.

 

 

You see, the time that I looked up furry porn was always in the middle of the night, when I was staying up later than my parents wanted to look at funny stuff on the Internet like Youtube Poops and Minecraft parodies. However, once MLP assimilated this time, I found myself in complete and total control of my activities. Did I suddenly feel the urge to go look up R34 of Krystal from Star Fox or Renamon from Digimon? Sucks, go watch ponies or listen to pony music or post something on the pony forums. After years of praying to God for the willpower to overcome my addiction to furry porn, I finally found myself with twice the requisite willpower to purify my Internet actions. I couldn't have been more thankful.

 

4) Christianity: Assimilated

This was one of the crucial components to my MLP obsession, believe it or not.

You see, most of the first videos that I watched about the Brony fandom were the propaganda/history videos that I've taken to calling

videos (the most notable and/or well known of these is Saberspark's "Ballad of the Brony"). After watching enough of these videos, I was completely brainwashed into believing that the Brony 'family' was the purest group of people on the planet. Why?

 

 

Why, Love and Tolerance, of course!

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Being exposed only to this beautiful propaganda, I saw the Bronies in their most idealized, purest form: a group of friends dedicated to the high ideals of Love and Tolerance, refusing to descend to the impurity of Hatred. As an INFP, this was a dream come true. Except for one slight problem that this article about Bronies points out very well...

 

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The slight problem was that, according to my perceptions, the Bronies had surpassed the Christians in terms of moral purity. That seriously screwed with my mindset. Why was it that this group of Bronies was following the Christian values of love and tolerance better than the Christians themselves? Of course, this was based only on my perceptions--the media and the world was feeding me propaganda about how bad the Christians are, and Youtube was feeding me propaganda about how good the Bronies are.

I was very afraid that this cognitive dissonance would cause me to lose my faith in God, which would be the worst possible thing I could imagine. So, in order to preserve my Christian faith, I decided to take my two purest interests and combine them. My faith in God and my faith in the Brony movement became one and the same. This soothed my fears that I would become an atheist, because as long as my interest in MLP survived, so too would my faith in God. All I had to do was never give up my combined Faith.

 

I came to view this as a mutually beneficial agreement. All of my incredible experiences with the Brony fandom could now be attributed to God-given heavenly joy, which ensured that the Nocturnian Revolution would not dethrone my Christian faith, and in exchange, MLP received something that I later christened,

 

 

"THE DIVINE RIGHT TO PRIORITY"

 

I'm guessing that this sounds familiar to you because of a very similar term called, "The Divine Right to Rule [of monarchs]". The Divine Right to Priority was actually almost the same exact concept. It stated that, because my MLP interest encompassed my faith in God, it had the divine right to priority over everything. "Everything" in this case refers to:

-Sleep

-School

-Health and Safety

-Truth and Honesty

-Anything else that may have threatened my combined Christianity and MLP interest

 

But, there was one more interest that was essential to this prioritized passion.

 

Everyone, yeah, everyone, we feel so empty...

When I look at the stars, I feel like myself.

 

There's a reason that my superior internet-personality (aka my OC pony) is named Night Shine. As I stated in the post that I referenced above, I believed that I "sh[o]ne when it [wa]s night." My favorite pony was, and still is, Princess Luna, not only because she had the same personality type that I have now, INFJ (which I found out recently) but primarily because she is the Princess of the Night:

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--I am obsessed with how beautiful the stars and moon are.

--In [the] day, I'm always super busy with school, homework, and activities my parents force me into, but at night I can just relax and enjoy the company of my friends on the ponynet.

--I really like to be alone, and nighttime is my only chance to do so.

 

 

 

During the Nocturnian Era, I legitimately tried to split myself (psychologically, not physically) into diurnal and nocturnal selves. The former was the person who is me currently, who was focused on schoolwork and his public life. The latter was Night Shine, who was focused on his friends online and private life, as well as his relationship with God. This nocturn-diurn split primarily came from my competing priorities. On the one hand, I had a pretty busy 'public' life, including not only schoolwork (I was, and still am, an A student), but sports like tennis and skiing, Boy Scouts, the school band, and my church youth group. On the other hand, ponies.

 

...actually, my decreasingly imaginary psycho-separation was not quite as dualistic as nocturnal vs. diurnal, although it was never very defined--I also constructed several other alternate personalities which embodied parts of myself I disliked. While I hesitate to digress too much, the multiple-personality aspect of my Nocturnian mindset is too important to be mentioned later in the post. Here are the definite alternate personalities which embodied concepts or emotions that I separated in order to keep them organized and respectively unmitigated:

 

 

 

1) Night Shine.

First of all, I should clear up something about the whole personality-type thing. If anyone is reading this who is well-versed with Myers-Briggs personality types, they could instantly identify all of the actions i have referenced previously as those of a J- rather than a P- type, and thus would feel dubious about my use of the INFP explanations and metaphors (and if you're not and have become confused and/or frustrated by my continual usage of its jargon, read this). I will clarify that I am, in fact, currently an INFJ. I have always been an INFJ...except for many instances during the mid-Nocturnian Era, in which I deprived myself of sleep to the point of legitimately altering my personality type (which is possible, by the way):

Among socionists, the prevailing view is that sociotypes [personality types] are inborn and genetically determined...although...some socionists believe that sociotypes may temporarily change while in altered states of consciousness or under great stress.

 

Given that sleep deprivation is an altered state of consciousness, it does not seem like a huge leap to state that my personality was very flexible during the Nocturnian Era, especially given that I took an MBTI test in January and December of 2013, with these surprisingly divergent results:

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Basically, the difference between Night Shine and all of my other personalities--the former was nocturnal and the latter were diurnal, or at least were thought of as such--can be defined as a difference between an INFP and an INFJ. All of the systems that I have so far mentioned were created by my INFJ personalities in order to benefit my one superior INFP personality, Night Shine.

 

So...who or what the heck was Night Shine?! Well...many things. On the one hand, he was my pony OC. He was me, if I lived in Equestria, which according to my belief system meant that he was everything I should be, without the pesky-but-necessary corruptions of human nature. On another hand, he was the personification of my extremely happy moods, who could be brought into being through watching MLP episodes and (given that I had a very wide mood range) acted very differently and believed very different things than the personification of my extremely depressed moods. On yet another hand, he was my personification of my Nocturnian Dream, simultaneously encompassing my faith in Bronies, in the Night, and in God.

 

2) The Black Sun.

Of all of the characters I created to embody certain moods and aspects of my personality, this one fascinates me the most. He had several names--first The Hooded One, and then The Diurn Shadow, and finally The Black Sun. Here is the way I felt about him at the time, taken from a Skype conversation:

"I don't usually let...him...on the Internet...but sometimes I just slip...[and] for the record, I don't have multiple personality disorder. It's just easier to act as if I do."

 

The Black Sun was specifically designed to be Night Shine's enemy, in every way. I actually have used him as a character in several of my MLP fanfictions, given that I found his (my?) character so interesting. Those characters, by the way, are The Shadow from The Shadowed Nightmare and The Elements of Disharmony: Necessary Corruption, and more recently Lord Duskfall from Garden of Shadows. That last story was actually written as an attempt to put the Nocturnian mindset on display in a way people could understand...but I recently decided that the fic does a poor job of explaining every facet of the Nocturnian mindset, hence, this blog post.

 

Anyway, back on topic. The Black Sun was Night Shine's opposite in every way. He never had a distinct form like that of Night Shine, but he did have a symbol. While Night Shine stood for love and tolerance, Black Sun stood for purity and nothing less than purity. Night Shine remained an optimist no matter what, and Black Sun was always wanting to shoot him down.

 

But that is speaking of them in terms of characters. I should be speaking of them in terms of moods.

 

Night Shine was joy, satisfaction, and the love of living. He could not stand conflict. Black Sun was his opposite: hate that hated everything, including but not limited to his own existence. Still, the primary objects of his hate were the corruptions of humanity, the "necessary corruptions" like sexuality and anger. These manifested as hatred for those who took things I considered "pure," like ponies, and associated them with things that I considered "impure," like sexuality. In case you don't know what I'm not-so-subtly hinting at, I have always suppressed a deep hatred for cloppers...which is ironic, because I've always know that, due to my unfortunate attraction to anthropomorphic animals, I am susceptible to become attracted to ponies. I find 'clop' attractive, but that does not mean that i have not always hated it. I have always hated it primarily because I have always found it attractive.

 

Anyway, the Black Sun hated furries, and cloppers, and anyone who was either corrupted or pretended not to be. For me, the Black Sun was a ball of hate and fiery bitterness derived from depression that I tried to internalize, but once it took control of me, it became its own separate personality with the mindset of a self-loathing purist.

 

3) The Wolf.

This character embodied my view of sexuality as something innately corrupted, and thus to be suppressed at all cost. I viewed my sexual aggression as a raging beast, a wolf that was driven only by primal urges. This one was actually more of a character than a personality--I never truly felt like I could "become" the Wolf. Still, it represented the emotions of sexual aggression which, while they could not control me, certainly could try. My views on this primal beast are perfectly captured by the poem "Lament of the Wolf," which I will show below. A warning, though: this poem is extremely disgusting, if you figure out what it means, moreso than probably anything else I will mention in this blog post.

 

 

 

Lament of the Wolf

 

White blood seeps

from my cut deep;

I wish that it were red.

 

For if it were,

I would be sure

This impure Self was dead.

 

 

My Father's gifts,

save that dark rift,

Are all holy and pure.

 

And yet this rift's

a mark, a kiss,

That makes me very sure:

 

 

Their words so blue,

and yet so true,

"We could ne'er be perfect"

 

Are realized,

and take the guise

Of my one fatal defect.

 

 

A wolf within,

a bane of Self,

Is what I have become.

 

A far more deadly

enemy

Than the impure Black Sun.

 

 

4) The Person who is Currently Me.

Hello, by the way. My name is Greg. Back in the Nocturnian Era I felt that this name was "[k]inda bland, not very unique, [and it] tells absolutely nothing about my character. I'd hope you understand that I prefer if everypony here [on the Internet and MLPForums] called me Night Shine." Still, it's a somewhat normal human American name that isn't embarrassing. I couldn't ask for anything more, could I...? Or could I? Do I have the right to ask for something beyond human reach? That seems to be the big question of the Nocturnian Era, to which the answer was eventually shoved down my throat: NO.

 

Let me tell you a little about myself. For my entire life, I have lived in a well-off American suburb, with a moderately rich family. My family is the image of a "good American family," although we live close to a very unconventional city. We are conservative in an extremely liberal state, we are Christians in the most atheistic state in the United States, et cetera. My family, while surprisingly accepting of other viewpoints, is rather traditional. My mother, an ESFJ, works as a part-time fitness instructor, and thus is very insistent on getting enough exercise, which my other siblings are perfectly happy to follow. I have always been stubborn on this point, unfortunately, but we have worked it out. My father, an ISTP, works as a full-time businessman as a higher-up in a convenience store chain, which gives him a tendency to respectfully disagree with most of the liberal political views I have ever encountered among my friends and my community. The only time that I ever really disagreed with my parents enough to be considered rebellious was during this Nocturnian Era, when I insisted on my radical decision to become a nocturnal spiritual brony with no regard to the consequences.

 

Prior to that decision and even after it to some degree, though, I have always been a goody-two-shoes in most respects. I have gotten all As in school all of my life, I joined the Boy Scouts program early on and would later become an Eagle Scout, I did a couple sports teams even if I did grumble about it, and I have always been active in my church's youth group.

 

There is very little else that is interesting about me outside of the Nocturnian Era. I am simply a generic good-student American. Without Night Shine, really...there is not that much to me.

 

I don't really have anything of true value, without that peculiar personification of purity and faith.

 

I soon developed a way of keeping track of all of these personalities, though: by graphing them through a dichotomy-based self-analysis chart. It was the first of many, and extremely basic, as it threw together basic concepts under the assumption that mood changes, morality changes, and self-identity changes were one and the same. Still, it eventually led me to two results: 1) a fully accurate chart of my entire mood range, including patterns through which my mood cycles over time and the relations between all of my relevant emotions, and 2) Myers-Briggs psychology.

 

 

 

To compromise between the desires of Night Shine and of the Person that is Me, I decided to pursue my public interests during the day, and my private interests at night. Nighttime was my chance to unwind and relieve the pain of depression that I had experienced during the day. I used my nighttime ponies and star-gazing as a way to fight my depression (I'd seen the memes, and you probably have as well, that present MLP as an anti-depressant--and I took them seriously).

And believe it or not, I recently found psychological proof of my method's effectiveness in an article about the effects of a bad sleep schedule on depression which you can find at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Another aspect of the association [between sleep schedule and depression] is the remarkable, if paradoxical, temporary improvement in mood seen after total sleep deprivation in a high proportion of depressed patients...

 

[A] well-known feature seen in many patients with severe depression [is] that mood is worse in the mornings and gradually improves during the day, to the point that it can be in the normal range just before bed - only to revert back to depression during sleep. However, keeping patients awake all night is difficult to perform, and once they are allowed uninterrupted sleep all the beneficial effects of sleep deprivation disappear...N[e]uroimaging studies provide some evidence that in depressed patients, the...depression is corrected by sleep deprivation.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the real antidepressant wasn't MLP:FiM or even stargazing. It was the accidental nightly sleep deprivation that resulted from my personal desire to be nocturnal clashing with my public need to be diurnal. Whaddya know.

 

Speaking of the influence of pony memes, one link between my attempt at nocturnality and my love of ponies was the huge encouragement provided by brony culture of my form of nocturnality (which most likely resulted from the fact that most bronies are teenagers or college students, the sleep schedule of whom has been scientifically shown to be much later than that of society). Again, I took the memes one hundred percent seriously:

 

 

 

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This combined interest of MLP, Christianity, and Nocturnality, I later deemed "Nocturnianism." It was a Triumvirate of passions that together carried enough weight to overpower any other interest or belief I may have held at the time, and was specifically designed to ensure that it was the most important thing in my life, and would remain so for as long as it could.

 

The quintessence of Nocturnianism as an ideal for me was my passionate faith in Love, Tolerance, and Moral Purism. But wait, you say, isn't that a contradiction? How could that possibly make sense?! Well, I'll explain it; it's a major aspect of the INFP worldview.

INFPs live primarily in a rich inner world of introverted Feeling. Being inward-turning, the natural attraction is away from world and toward essence and ideal. This introversion of dominant Feeling, receiving its data from extraverted intuition, must be the source of the quixotic nature of these usually gentle beings. Feeling is caught in the approach- avoidance bind between concern both for people and for All Creatures Great and Small, and a psycho-magnetic repulsion from the same. The "object," be it homo sapiens or a mere representation of an organism, is valued only to the degree that the object contains some measure of the inner Essence or greater Good. Doing a good deed, for example, may provide intrinsic satisfaction which is only secondary to the greater good of striking a blow against Man's Inhumanity to Mankind.

 

Basically, I saw it like this. Hate is bad. Love is good. Purity is defined as the absence of any of the following corruptions that I saw as innate to human nature: anger/hatred/aggressiveness, sexuality/lust, and cynicism/pessimism. Living with this mindset, the ideal of Love, Tolerance, and Moral Purism made sense on a conceptual level. If everyone loved each other and was tolerant of each other, then the result would be purity. Injecting hatred, cynicism, sexuality or cold logic into a situation would thereby corrupt that situation.

 

However, while this may have worked (albeit flimsily) on a conceptual level, you can imagine that it caused some serious cognitive dissonance when I attempted to practically apply it (which was always). The biggest problem was certainly my purist view of sexuality as innately corrupted. For example, I still dislike what i call the Clop Dilemma, which is to say, is it ethical to Tolerate cloppers as an NP would argue or to Purify the fandom by rebuking them as an SJ would argue? And if the best answer is a balance between these views, where do you draw the line? I still struggle with this issue.

 

Interestingly enough, in order to 'properly establish' my ideal and make sure that I followed its spirit, I drafted a 'Constitution' of sorts about how my behaviors must reflect my new ideals:

 

The Nocturnian Constitution for Pure and Joyful Living

 

1. Do not play Minecraft ever again, and stay away from all associated content that is not first and foremost MLP fan content before it is Minecraft fan content.

 

2. Never again look at furry (or any other) pornography, soft-core or hard-core, on the Internet, in books, or anywhere else.1

--2a. Do not ever descend to the level of a 'Clopper'. This means no reading of 'clopfics' and no viewing of 'clop art'. Shipping and 'non-clop' romantic material are not directly prohibited, but viewing of them is highly discouraged.

 

3. Masturbation, perverted thoughts, and any other necessary corruptions2 are tolerable only because they are scientifically and psychologically necessary to existence as a human. To any other extent they are strictly prohibited.

 

4. Always love and tolerate those who hate on any of your personal beliefs or causes you support. If you release any hatred out of uncontrollable rage, always apologize.

 

5. Never deny the existence of God. He has brought you to this stage where you can be with Him and fully appreciate God's Greatest Gift3.

1I would later change my definition of 'pornography' to "any media that you would observe for the specific purpose of sexual pleasure," which I consider to be the most accurate definition of the concept of porn. Maybe that's why it's so hard to define what's 'inappropriate' or not--it's not an inherent property of the thing which is being used for sexual pleasure, but a subjective property.

2Fun fact--my fanfic "The Elements of Disharmony: Necessary Corruption" which I started in August 2012, took its title from this concept. In all honesty, there isn't much relation between the literary themes of that fic and my concept of sexuality as the Necessary Corruption of Human Nature, but it just sounded cool.

3I never defined exactly what this term meant, although I did have a pretty good idea at the time. I'm pretty sure it refers to his gift of giving me the Nocturnian Triumvirate as a means through which to change my life...but it probably refers more to the gift of extreme spiritual joy that He supposedly gave me nightly as a way to alleviate my depression.

 

 

 

This was the basic groundwork of how I applied Nocturnianism to my own life, although there were other aspects--many other aspects, some so ridiculously trivial that looking back it is kind of hilarious (for example, I only wore certain clothes going to stargaze, only held my phone in a certain position while using it as a flashlight, only visited certain websites at specific times and in specific orders, et cetera). Actions became routines, which became habits, which quickly became sacred traditions. My Nocturnian system was primarily built around a routine that became arguably the most important tradition, how I spent my nightly free time:

 

1) After "going to bed," I would catch up on all of the new content that my subscriptions had released on Youtube. This included Youtube Poops, brony music, brony fan animations, et cetera.

 

2) Next, I would watch exactly two episodes of MLP:FiM on my iPhone. These would hypothetically bring me out of a depressed state and into my purer Night Shine mentality.

 

3) Immediately after finishing the MLP episodes, I would sneak out into my backyard (making extra careful not to awaken my parents) and begin stargazing. Whilst stargazing, I usually listened to specific pieces of music, although I did listen to others occasionally, and I would listen to these at specific times in my stargazing experience. First, as I walked out of my back door and saw the beauty of the night sky for the first time, I would watch (but mostly listen to)

dedicated to Woona and Celestia of a song entitled "Going Home." Next, while stargazing, I would listen to several songs, the first of which would always be what is still one of my favorite songs, CommandSpry's "
." Finally, before returning to my room, I would listen to my own personal favorite composition, "
." However, that's not to say that all I did under the stars was listen to music. I developed an odd tradition of watching videos of MLP con panels in between listening to music while stargazing, which to be honest I kind of miss...but then again, I miss pretty much everything mentioned in this post, so that's irrelevant or redundant or both.

 

4) Once I returned from stargazing, I would go online to my pony websites. First, I would go to MLPForums and send Happy Birthday messages to everypony whose birthday fell on that day and who had logged on in at least the past month.* Then I would go adventuring around and ponying around on the Internet, which later involved messaging friends on Skype but at the time mostly involved watching more Youtube videos.

One interesting and kind of awesome aspect of the way I would spend my nights on the Internet is the way I listened to music. I created one brony music playlist for each approximately month-long period of time in the Nocturnian Era, dividing it further into sub-Eras, if you will. Each playlist had exactly 32 songs, and these songs were arranged to provide an emotional experiences, transitioning from Fun songs to Epic songs to Dark songs to Sad-Feelsy songs to Relaxing songs to Happy-Feelsy songs (not necessarily in that order). I would listen to the playlist for each sub-Era every night that I could during that sub-Era, so I came to associate that music with that period of my life. This provided 2 benefits: 1) it formed a way of storing emotional memories, as I can go back and listen to any given playlist to remember the time period that the playlist refers to, and 2) it was an effective way to consume the huge amount of music produced by all of the brony musicians that I liked.

Please note that, even though I used the past tense in the previous paragraph to keep it consistent with the past-tense nature of this post, I still use this tactic of organizing brony music for its aforementioned benefits.

 

*Clarification relating to INFP vs INFJ in my behavior below:

 

I would like to clarify this as a way of describing the struggle between my two MBTI types--my Natural type, INFJ, and my 'Purified' type, INFP. If you don't know how MBTI functions work, read this and then this (or just keep scrolling). My Natural type was how I automatically acted and thought, based on my INFJ's Fe function which didn't mind consistent social niceties, but my Purified INFP's Fi function disliked how "fake" such niceties are, and demanded that I be friendly on a personal level. So, I developed a system to compromise between Night Shine and Greg: I would send Happy Birthday messages to everyone who had logged in once in the past month whose birthday was that day. If the person had no About Me, I'd use my normal message. If the person had an About Me, I would explore their profile and find something to add as a personal note. One interesting sidenote that further notes my Fi function's determination to be sincere was that I always typed the messages out instead of copy-pasting them, and I always tried to vary how I phrased my short messages, using subtly different emoticons, cutesy-slang, et cetera to make sure my messages to every person were not "insincere cultural / traditional niceties."

 

 

5) Once done on MLPForums, which involved replying to topics and such as well as sending Happy Birthday messages to everyone, and Youtube, which involved listening to my music playlist and/or watching random videos, I would end my night by going on Equestria Daily. EqD always had to be the last thing. Firstly, I would check out the Drawfriend Stuff post from earlier in the day, and download any of the art which I particularly liked. This led to the creation of an Art folder in my general pony folder on my computer, divided into the following genres of art: Funny, Feelsy, D'aww, Beautiful, Crossover, Dark, Holiday&Celebration, Physical (or IRL), Miscellaneous, and Awesome. If I didn't really know where to put any given piece of artwork, I would either put it in Miscellaneous if I kinda-sorta liked it or Awesome if I really, really liked it.

After checking out the Drawfriend Stuff post, I would read through EqD's Nightly Roundup, and once I did that it was off to sleep. The song I would listen to while falling asleep, which has always been one of the last of the 32 songs in the playlist, was extremely important to me, usually falling into the ranks of my favorite brony songs. Here are the first eight of my ending-playlist-songs (the Nocturnian Era was technically only eight sub-Eras long, although I'm still not sure if sub-Era 9 counts as part of the Nocturnian Era or not, for reasons that I will explain much later):

 

 

1 Golden Age (7/22/12--10/10/12): BlackGryphon's "

"

2 Octoberan Era (10/11/12--11/9/12): AcousticBrony's "

"

3 Purest Era (11/10/12--12/21/12): NightBreeze's "

"

4 Second Summer1 (12/22/12--1/20/13): Evening Star's "

"

5 Heart of Winter2 (1/21/13--2/10/13): NightBreeze's "

"

6 Road into Dawn (2/11/13--3/5/13): Delta Brony's "

"

7 Ultimatum (3/6/13--4/3/13): MandoPony's "So Much Left to Know (Twilight's Song)"

8 Synthesian Era3(4/4/13--5/31/13): NightBreeze's "

"

1Please note that here, "Summer" does not refer to the actual season but the freedom of time and the feeling of harmony that I equate with the summer season. The reason I called this "Second Summer" was that it was the first time since the First Summer (aka the Golden Age or the Nocturnian Revolution) that I truly felt free.

2In my terminology, the "Heart" of a season is the time after the excitement about the season has died down, and you move on to the core of everyday life in that season, but you have not yet entered the period transitioning into the next season. For example, the Heart of Summer would probably be July and early August, the Heart of Winter would probably be January and early February, et cetera.

3"Synthesian" is the polar opposite of "Nocturnian," which is to say a mindset based around the ESTJ personality type or around the Extraverted Thinking cognitive function. It also meant, for me, the public life instead of the private life. Whereas Nocturnianism in general carries the theme of stubborn hope, Synthesianism in general carries the theme of realistic fatalism. In my view, society seemed to be built around the concepts of Synthesianism. I still struggle to see the world as something other than a constant binary struggle between these two perspectives.

 

 

 

Before The Fall (which will be explained in the next section), I had another tradition which was not quite as harmless or tolerable in the Synthesian eyes of the law. A few minutes' walk away from my house is a statue of Jesus out in the middle of a large field which also happens to have a cemetery in it. During many of my spiritual highs that resulted from a combination of sleep deprivation, ponies, and stargazing, I would walk out to the statue of Jesus and sit out under it so that I could see the stars better and also be physically closer to my Father, in a sense, even though I've always seen His essence as of the stars so there was really no "point" in such walks. Why I brought this point up was first of all so that I could show the following poem I wrote on the subject at the time which captures my mindset brilliantly, and second of all because it transitions well into the next section: The Fall, or The Octoberan Era, when the Golden Age ended.

 

Here is the poem, "Surreality" (or "Night"):

 

 

The sun goes down,

My heart wakes up,

To Surreality.

The brilliant moon,

The shining stars,

It all belongs to me.

 

And yet I wonder

How they all

Ignore her Purity.

Then I remember

They're the ones

Who'd take her 'way from me.

 

As I stroll down

This endless road

My life's fulfilled, in means.

The shadows there

Cause me no fear

(He no longer owns me.)

 

I stare into

The loving eyes

Of her, Lunar Beauty.

The stars in them

Are twinkling

For me, they are for me.

 

No other soul

Nor flawed person

Does try to follow me.

As I walk down

The endless road

To Surreality.

 

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