Simon

I'm right there with you @Cash In. I was here and on staff back from 2014-2016 and then poofed for ages and always missed MLPF and stuck my butt back into the place a few weeks back. Also wanna re-watch FiM and then get into all the G5 stuff since all I've seen is the movie. (Hopefully I'll get there before I get too spoilered on everything ^^)

Anyway good to have you here! <3 I've been having a ton of fun making your life miserable in Count Until a Mod Posts. Hopefully we get to hang out there a lot... frequently... always and forever

10 minutes ago, ZiggWheelsManning said:

Would you consider the "Ask A Pony" thread?  

You gotta scavenger hunt for my seven year old one

2 hours ago, Dark Horse said:

Sounds as though you've had a busy few years.

That is quite the understatement. Just opened my own law firm while I am still working another full time lawyer job at a nonprofit. Kid on the way. Dad passed away so I just moved my mom over down the road from us. Just a lot of stuff happening~

35 minutes ago, ZiggWheelsManning said:

Though I've never met @Simon, I want to get to know him a little more  

It can be arranged

2 minutes ago, Astral Soul said:

Hi @Simon,

I joined this forum just two years ago, but I have seen older posts from you.

Welcome back! I hope you enjoy your stay and have a lot of good memories with ponies ♥

I love your avatar by the way

Well you must have had a boring evening to dig to my five or six year old posts :3

I am not sure I even want to read posts from me from that long ago lmao

3 minutes ago, Sir Hugsalot said:

...

SIMON! 

A surprise to be sure but a welcome one! 

<3 I have missed your virtual hugs

12 minutes ago, Princess Silky said:

then you miss curfew?!?!?
 

Honestly, I just kept forgetting to come back before 10 PM every day for the past seven years so I kept having to wait until the next day so I didn't get in trouble...

When I meet Simon, I just wanna hug him.

 

That is all. c:

Oh God, people are figuring out I'm nice... my jackass persona D:

We've got a pretty interesting pretty much dead mall out here. (granted, I use the term mall loosely with this place, it was ill-conceived)  

Neonopolis ... it's right in the heart of Downtown Las Vegas opened in 2001 so it's not even that old.

It was supposed to be a huge revitalization for Downtown Las Vegas and the entire project was a flop from the beginning (an outdoor mall in the desert with no major anchor stores surrounded by strip clubs and casinos in a high crime neighborhood, what could go wrong amirite?)

Anyway today it's probably got no more than 2-3 actual stores and a couple restaurants with most of the storefronts are being leased out as offices to try and keep the mall's doors open.

The advertisements here on MLP Forums for conventions are ads for our partner conventions. We're not currently partnered with any conventions outside of North America, (we are however partnered with BronyCAN in Canada), but that's not saying we'll never be partnered with any. Ultimately, it's not that MLP Forums or Poniverse doesn't want to advertise conventions outside the United States, those just aren't conventions we're partnered with.

I don't mind ads usually, but video side bar ads with sound are the devil. I have Ad Block disabled almost all the time, but I'll toss that sucker on in 2 seconds if I start getting sounds hooting out of a banner or sidebar ad

I've even had video ads come up on dailymotion so I'll have random sound from an ad show up while watching a video in full-screen >.<

Then why does term 'friendzoned' exist anyway? If friendship is so wondeful, who there are constant complains and jokes about being friendzoned?

You're taking a term of art way too literally.  All friendzoned means is the person was not able to form the sort of relationship they wanted in that particular situation.  If there's an individual who you want to have a romantic relationship with, who doesn't feel the same way, that can feel hurtful.  It doesn't mean friendships in general are a lesser relationship than romance.  I'm sure you have lots of friends you have no interest in forming a romantic relationship with.  That doesn't mean you don't care about those people, it just means you don't have a physical attraction to them.

If a song isn't going to tell me anything new, then it better be a damn good one.

First song started off the episode, so that was obviously new information to that episode.

Second song was a musical version of the dialogue of the election... if that scene was gone it'd just cut straight to Pip winning from asking them to help, so that's new information obviously.

Third song explained DT's emotions.  We saw how her mother treated her but had no information about her emotions until the song, so again, new information.

Fourth song detailed the struggle of DT's choice on whether to change.  This is another scene that can't be cut out... getting rid of the song means that we'd have her say she was planning on screwing over Pip and then she'd instantly pop over to the school and do the opposite.  So again, new information in this song.

Fifth song was them building the playground.  Again, getting rid of this would mean the episode would go straight from DT saying her dad would pay to CMC gettinng cutie marks... it was a necessary scene to build the plot.  Again, new information.

Last song was the only one that was even remotely close to a song about what just happened, but again, just cutting off the episode after they got their cutie marks with no celebration or discussion would have made no sense.

Not liking the songs is fine, that's a personal preference.  But don't try and claim that they have no purpose and don't add to the story.

You're equating romance with love, the two are not synonymous.  Someone can be in a romantic relationship without love, and someone can love without being in a romantic relationship.

Love is at its core a simplistic concept... it means you care for someone or something deeply. You can love your parents, you can love complete strangers, you can love a romantic partner, you can love your friends, and you can even love a show about little pastel colored equines.  Love is a very broad concept. Love can also be bilateral or unilateral, meaning you can love someone that doesn't love you back.

Friendship is more specific than love... it's a relationship between two people who mutually care about one another. Again, friendship can happen in many relationships.  You can be friends with family members, people at school, people you know, and hopefully you will be friends with your romantic partner as well.  The reason that the show focuses on the concept of friendship is because it's something we all need.  You can get through life without romance and live a happy and fulfilled life, but you need to have friendship.  Also remember that this show is not aimed at us, it's aimed at 10 year old girls... the shows messages and values would be meaningless for someone at that age if they were focused on romance.

Which brings me to another major issue with your concept of using romance.  It doesn't necessarily equate to love.  There are plenty of people in romantic relationships with people they do not love. The purest example of this is cultures who throughout history have used arranged marriages.  The entire concept of an arranged marriage rests on the premise that love is not necessary to have a successful romantic relationship.  Agree or disagree with arranged marriages, it's a great example of how someone can end up in a romantic relationship that has no love or friendship involved.  And of course there are other ways too... you can fall out of love with someone.  That's why we have so many divorces.  Love is not necessarily something that's permanent, and when it goes away the romantic relationship will often continue on for some time or even permanently without it.

This is particularly true since your original argument for romance being the focus of the show relies almost completely on the physical elements of romance, not the emotions.  You can have sex and have a family with someone you have absolutely no feelings for at all. Just take a look at the amount of domestic violence that occurs in the world... sure, they're in a romantic relationship together, but that doesn't mean their relationship is positive. Romance, particularly in the sense of a physical relationship, is in no way guaranteed to be a positive relationship. 

Friendship doesn't have this issue.  Since it's a relationship that purely relies on our feelings towards another person and not actions, when the love dissipates from a friendship, the friendship vanishes with it.  That is why friendship is such an important concept that it justifies being the focus of the show... a friendship is a relationship that is unique in its requirement that we put effort into it.  it relies on a mutual love and care for the other person, so to survive it has to have effort put into it.

Ultimately, love is an emotion, not a relationship. It can lead to both friendship and romance, but the big difference is that you can't have friendship without love, but you can have romance without it. That makes friendship the overwhelmingly best choice as the focus for the show.

 

1) More telling, not showing. It's really annoying to see how much dialogue (and song lyrics!) are there to simply hammer in the narrative. That first song was essentially recapping what the CMC are as if we're idiots. The opening song of MMC was used to juxtapose the upcoming conflict, whereas this one is the equivalent of a play/game program.

 

Musicals handle showing vs telling in a completely different way.  If you're not extremely familiar with musicals it probably would feel like there's over the top telling, but it's really appropriate for a musical episode.

Thing is, take a famous musical like West Side Story.  In any normal movie if they wanted to tell you that there's two gangs who are rivals, they'd show them have a fight or kill someone or something to make you understand that.  In West Side Story you got a choreographed fight scene with them singing about their gang war in the intro.

Musicals rely heavily on telling to tell the basic plot of a story.  The showing that happens is done through the music... you get the basic plot through the lyrics and understand the emotions and motives of the characters involved through the music and style.

A great example of that sort of showing in this episode is in The Pony I Want to Be.  The song DT sings about her life and the song during the playground building at the end are actually both the same song (you can check the credits, the playground is credited as a reprise).  By changing a couple lyrics and moving it from minor to major, Ingram completely changed the emotions and meanings behind the song to tell a different part of the story, and used the similarities in the two versions of the song to demonstrate the growth DT went through.

Musicals just handle showing and telling differently... Ingram and AKR actually did a phenomenal job in their storytelling in here IMO.

 

 

In a move that would make Flim and Flam proud, Simon needled me relentlessly about going.

Hey, Flim and Flam sold useless junk nobody needed... everybody needs a pony convention  (Though I must admit... staff attendance at BABSCon is up 7x from last year and I'm proud of this xD)

 

While I was initially saddened by the absence of the two people who were responsible for me becoming a fan to begin with, this change does afford me the opportunity to get to spend more time with the people I have come to consider friends, and actually meet some of you. <3

<3

This is what I'm most excited for at the convention... the opportunity to meet the other staffers coming in person for the first time is by far the most exciting part of going.  Add on that actually getting to share a room and hang out with the three of you, and I know this convention is going to be a blast <3

I still can't believe it's only a week away

The forum quit loading for me the second I tried to open this blog.  That was a fun couple minutes wondering if DQ went insane xD

Strictly going off stats, brands and prices and not knowing what you plan on using it for.  Usually I'd recommend something with a newest generation Intel i7 processor to really get good performance, but in your price range the AMD's on these ones are probably fine for most tasks.  Although admittedly I haven't owned a laptop with an AMD processor in quite a few years, so I'm not particularly familiar with their performance first hand. 

1 - Acer:  It's close between the Acer and the non-refurbished HP, but the Acer has a better processor, and it's cheaper so unless you really have a need for the extra HD space, I'd go with the Acer.  It does have less ram and the ram is mixed (likely a 4gig card and a 2gig card) so you'll get slightly less performance on that, but it should be enough for most anything and have a good speed for a computer in that price range.   Plus ram is cheap and easy to upgrade yourself should you ever find that the speed is lacking.

2 - Non-Refurbished HP:  Just not a fan of Toshiba's or refurbished laptops.  Every Toshiba I've owned or worked with has had constant issues with the chargers and the laptop cases tend to be very poorly crafted (although granted that's a problem with most modern laptops sadly).  I'm also not a fan of the 17 inch sized laptops... there's not much extra viewing space but they're a pain in the ass to transport.  Unless you specifically need a laptop with a full size number pad on it or don't plan on moving the laptop I'd stay away from the 17 inch size. 

3 - Toshiba:  For third and fourth it was pretty much a battle of whether I hate Toshiba's or refurbished computers more and the Toshiba won.  Problem with refurbished laptops is you're only going to get a 90 day warranty, so if anything does go wrong you're basically on your own.  Plus refurbished laptops on Walmart and other big-name stores tend to be older models with slightly out of date processors, which just cause trouble since computers become obsolete so quickly.  I'd just stick with something new.

4 - Refurbished HP for all the previously discussed reasons.