skbl17

I'm not famous at all, especially considering the fact that I keep taking multi-month breaks and largely keep my posting to the Beyond Equestria subforum.

Not counting college transit options, it's been two years since my last trip on public transit. Prior to mid-2016, I lived in an area that was pretty close to a train station, so instead of having to drive 35 miles each way to get to and from class, I would just drive 5-10 minutes to the closest rail station and take the train in. I will say that I never had any issues with either my train or bus commutes, and I actually kind of miss it. Now I live too far away for public transit to make any kind of commuting sense, even with the rush hour traffic jams.

Typical summer weather here in Atlanta. Hot, humid, scattered "garden variety" thunderstorms in the afternoon and early evening.

Here I am posting this reply minutes to 4 in the morning... I consider midnight to be too early, and during long vacations it's not uncommon for me to stay up until sunrise.

The list is very, very long: wheat, gluten, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, eggs, bananas (I kid you not,)...let's just say that I never got to enjoy pizza or ice cream as a child.

For many, many years I thought my eye color was black. They're actually brown.

Not really; I care more about the content of your posts than the profile picture and signature. On mobile, the profile pictures are practically pinpricks anyway.

I don't use "brony lingo", not even with the people I know to be bronies. That said, I've never been a huge fan of "20% cooler"; I don't know, it's just that whenever I hear that term, I always think, "Why 20%? Why not make it twice as cooler?"

Snow in the South is rare. Snow in the South on Christmas Day is extremely rare. That's what made 2010 so magical; it's too bad I didn't take pictures. It all seems like just a distant memory, a far cry from the 72 degrees I saw today. What White Christmas?

414,188. 585,812 left to go!

MLP. I've been a closet brony since 2011, and while my interest in the show has waned, I still read the occasional fanfic, participate in some MLP-related communities (this one and the MLP parts of Reddit,) write excessively long bits of lore, and make vectors for my OCs, so I've been going on five years now. By contrast, I was in the Sonic fandom for only about three years (2008-2011), and I'm not anything close to being a "member" of other fanbases.

Looking back, the only difference between my internet self in 2009 and my internet self now is that when I write roleplay-related lore, at least the MLP ones make more sense than my old Sonic the Hedgehog ones. The verbosity is still there, though; I still have endless-block-of-text writing down pat.

I love it when I don't have to drive in it. Thankfully, the last time my area had anything resembling a good snow event, I didn't have a driver's license. Of course, as a bit of a weather nerd, it kind of sucks to live in an area just far enough north to spend the winter pulling my hair out model-watching, but just far enough south that snow doesn't come every year.

A little over a week ago; I honestly would have preferred even a regular cold to whatever I had. I didn't have much of an appetite, the head pain was horrible, the stomach pain was intense, I had a fever lasted a full day, I had to go to the bathroom every half hour....needless to say, I didn't have the energy to do much of anything. At least I'm all better now!

I'd say that it's pretty good. That said, there are some words that I occasionally mess up, such as "occurred".

The Olympics started today (no, really), and I don't approve of how my host broadcaster covers the Games, so much of my day could be summed up with this title: Peacockproofing, or How I Learned to Stop Complaining And Use VPNs.

There is a built-in fan in my room, but it moves so fast that I fear it will fall off, so I don't use it much (at least until the speed issue is fixed). I use a portable fan whenever the AC doesn't work.

A few years ago, I signed up to join another forum, but naive ol' me didn't actually read the rules. Five off-topic posts and one ridiculous thread later, I was permanently banned. It wasn't an IP ban though, so after a few days, I signed up again under a new username, actually read the rules, and now I'm a seasoned user (even though I don't post that much nowadays).

I live in (metro) Atlanta, and my old college dorm is in sight of Coca-Cola's jail annex-looking headquarters. Admittedly, I do like my Coke products and rarely drink anything by PepsiCo, but that could just be a function of where I live. That said, my favorite soda is not made by Coca-Cola or PepsiCo, but by a Jamaican company (link is Walmart but I never buy this at Walmart).

Wikia. Back when I was part of the Sonic fandom, I would make thousands of edits on its associated wikis, was behind one of the wiki's big CSS refreshes, and was even made a bureaucrat on the same wiki. From time to time, I'd pop in to other wikis and make edits there. After Wikia's controversial 2010 redesign, I dropped out of being an active Wikia user. I occasionally visit the MLP wiki to look through some of the pages, but I don't edit anymore and my Wikia page visits have probably dropped by at least 80%. Honorable mentions include: - Facebook (I don't have as much history with it as I do with Wikia) - Equestria Daily - FIMFiction

405,967. It takes a lot longer to count to a million than I expected.

July 2016 update: All of this stuff is still valid. I will write a fanfic one of these days, and my companion site should be up before I return to college on August 22...assuming I don't keep breaking flash drives and having to redo all of my OC vectors. The original post follows. ----- Writing fanfics is hard. Writing college papers is hard. Coding projects are hard. Exams are hard, and I'm still not done with them. Websites take time to build. Man, I wish days had more than 24 hours. After taking another unexpected "vacation" from this site, I've realized two things have fallen by the wayside in my absence: Port Impala and Equestria Forward. First, a flashback: after my last "vacation", I made a blog post describing what my plans were for my properties on this site, specifically my (at the time one) roleplay Equestria Forward, which had been going on on an intermittent basis since last December. If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that both my signature and the "About Me" section of my user profile had "Equestria Forward" scratched out. There's a reason for that: it's done. Cancelled. I hate to have to retire a roleplay with so much effort put into the setting behind it, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time now. I said it would have come back in November, but that's obviously not happening, and I also noted that it would come back on the to-be-launched roleplay website PonyRoleplay. I don't know if and when that's going to launch, but you won't find an Equestria Forward roleplay created by me there. So what about the extensive lore behind the Equestria Forward world? Luckily, that's not going away. I also mentioned that I planned to build a companion website that would serve as a database for everything related to that world, as well as info on my original characters and fanfics. That's right, I have decided to bite the lead-filled bullet and try my hand at writing an elsewhere fic that takes place in the Equestria Forward universe. There's no longer a set deadline for either the fanfic or the companion site, but I want to try and get both of those done sometime in the next couple of months once things die down on the college end. Once that site launches, I'm giving carte blanche for anyone who wants to use the universe as a setting or backdrop for a roleplay or fanfic of their own. Just because the roleplay centered around Equestria Forward is cancelled doesn't mean the universe itself has to be. Next order of business, Life in the Big City...State. Yeah, this is cancelled too. Again, I hate to have to retire a roleplay with so much effort put behind it, but the roleplay itself has fallen into inactivity. Port Impala, its history, its institutions, its government, its culture, and its climate will be absorbed into the Equestria Forward universe, and as such will also have a place on my new companion site. I don't have plans to write fanfics that take place there, at least not at the moment, but again, if you want to write something that takes place there, the door will be open to you once I finish the companion site. By the way, the existing Port Impala map is outdated. I'm currently working on a new one during this so-called "Thanksgiving break"...whenever I'm not spending time with family or working on college papers. Look for the updated map on the companion site when it launches. Well, that's all I have. This could be interpreted as a shift, in a way. To be honest, I was always worried about getting involved in the roleplay business again, fearful that college and real life would rear their ugly heads in ways that would inevitably keep me from keeping them moving on a regular basis. Sadly, that has come to pass. So to those who participated in both roleplays throughout the past year, I apologize. You all were great roleplayers, and I'm glad that you all took the time to partake in these escapades. I wish you all well in whatever endeavors you wish to pursue, from fanfics to custom music to art to other roleplays. P.S.: Regarding my OCs...all of their pictures and profiles on this site are DEPRECATED. From now on, only the descriptions on my to-be-launched companion site will be valid.

Edit: Hi Tumblr! Also, the post has been updated now that I've finished "season 1" of the dub (i.e. the point up to episode 23 of Smile!). My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is not the only "girls' show" that I watch. With the barrier down on MLP, I decided to dive into another genre of show that is also derided as "for girls", but has some hidden gems: magical girls. No, not just Sailor Moon and the dark stuff like Madoka Magica, I'm talking about the standard magical girl warrior fare. One of those franchises is Pretty Cure, a magical girl series created by Toei Animation (the same animation studio behind Sailor Moon, Digimon, and Dragon Ball). It's been going for eleven years, and continues to go strong...in Japan. The initial reason for the popularity of Pretty Cure in its home market was the twist in put on the magical girl warrior subgenre: instead of flashy attacks, the magic was withheld until the end. The actual fighting was completely physical. Sadly, that element has been toned down in recent seasons, but some of it is still there. Outside of Japan, the success of Pretty Cure has been mixed. It's pretty popular in Italy, where the public broadcaster (RAI) dubbed the first few years of the series; reception was fairly positive. In Hong Kong, TVB has broadcast dubs of most of the series into Cantonese. In the Anglosphere, Pretty Cure dubs are hard to come by; Toei themselves helped produce a 2009 dub of the first season (Futari wa Pretty Cure) for viewers in Canada and the United Kingdom. Reception was also fairly positive, but the networks airing the English dub (YTV and Pop Girl) didn't do much with it. The United States has had it even worse. 4Kids Entertainment (yes, them) licensed the franchise back in the mid 2000s, but never did anything with it, probably because of the failure to get a merchandising deal for its successful, yet butchered dub of Tokyo Mew Mew. Funimation eventually got the license, and even started to stream subs of the series. That didn't last. Oh well, it didn't seem like Pretty Cure was going to have its day in the United States. Today, the non-Japanese fanbase is tightly-knit, mostly congregating on three sites: 4chan, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. Anyway, along came a guy named Haim Saban, who in 2012 offered to take over the license for Pretty Cure in the entire Western world. Toei agreed, and since then, Saban Brands - the company behind Digimon, Samurai Pizza Cats, and Power Rangers - has been "hard" at work creating a dub of the at-the-time-airing Pretty Cure season: Smile Pretty Cure!. That dub began streaming Friday morning on Netflix, but under a new name: Glitter Force. Star Wars would have to wait. The Crappy Dubs Strike Back Glitter Force Relevant links have been provided for your convenience. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. First, some disclosure: I watched Smile Pretty Cure! back in early 2014, as part of my binge on various anime series. I thought it was fine, not my favorite Pretty Cure season, but not the worst. There wasn't much of an overarching plot, the characters were fleshed out to tolerable levels, there was a stupid event halfway through the season that irked me, and the last episode was just a rehash of one of the All Stars crossover movies. Some episodes were brilliant (episodes 13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 35, and 40-44 remain among my favorites of the entire franchise,) while some were horrible (episodes 17, 48, and the one with the kid who plays guitar). The animation was beautiful, and I still maintain that overall, Smile! has the best animation of any series in the franchise. Overall, a simple, fun series, which is what the producers were going for. So I'm coming in with the perspective of being one of the (few) people in the U.S. who has watched Pretty Cure before. Now, another word about dubs: I have nothing against dubs. Frankly, I find the "dub-sub" debate to be ridiculous. I'm all for a good Pretty Cure dub; hell, there was an English (not American) dub of the first season, Futari wa Pretty Cure!, which was pretty faithful to the original series, despite the name changes of the two main characters. With that out of the way, what about the actual series? - Title: Sure, Glitter Force sounds stupid, but considering the alternative, I'll take it. I kid you not, Saban was initially planning to call the Smile! dub "Gangnam Girls", which would have been even worse. Pretty Cure itself is kind of stupid, but I watch it anyway. I'll give the name a pass. - Names: All dubs released for kids (4Kids/Saban/DiC/Nelvana, etc.) will have name changes. I'm actually okay with name changes; even Saban did a pretty good job with the names in Digimon. However, my concern began from the moment one of the Danish voice actors leaked the name of Cure Beauty's "Sabanified" name: Glitter Breeze. Wait...huh?!?! First, it's Cure March who has the wind powers; Cure Beauty is ice. Why in the WORLD did Saban think that "Glitter Breeze" was appropriate for Cure Beauty but not Cure March?! That makes absolutely no sense. As other names were leaked, I found them to be surprisingly bearable. While "Glitter Breeze" still irks me to no end, the other names are, well... SMILE PRETTY CURE -- GLITTER FORCE Miyuki/Cure Happy -- Emily/Glitter Lucky Akane/Cure Sunny -- Kelsey/Glitter Sunny Yayoi/Cure Peace -- Lily/Glitter Peace Nao/Cure March -- April/Glitter Spring Reika/Cure Beauty -- Chloe/Glitter Breeze Candy -- (same) Pop -- (same) Wolfrun -- Ulric Akaoni -- Brute Majorina -- Brooja (sp?) Joker -- Rascal Emperor Pierrot -- Emperor Nogo Akanbe -- Buffoons Bad End Kingdom -- Shadow Realm Nanairogaoka -- Rainbow Hills Maerchenland -- Jubiland Royale Queen -- Queen Euphoria - First, I'm okay with Joker being Rascal. If Saban tried to sell merchandise of the generals and used the "Joker" name, DC Comics would be up their rears in a hurry. - The Glitter names are colors in some other languages (Spanish). - I find it ironic that Cure March's civilian name in the dub is April. Heh heh. - I have no problem with the name of the town changing. "Nanairogaoka" means "Rainbow Hills" anyway. - With Pierrot becoming "Nogo", I was hoping for the Bad End Kingdom to be called "The Nogo Zone" as part of a joke. It's not...I kid you not, it is called the SHADOW REALM. My god, the Yu-Gi-Oh nightmares are back! Overall, the names are tolerable, except for "Glitter Breeze". It doesn't fit. - Voices: When I first saw ( ) for the dub, I was incredibly concerned with the voice acting. Not only was there a lack of effort, but I couldn't tell any of the girls' voices apart. Candy sounded the same as April who sounded the same as Chloe who sounded the same as Lily. To be honest, the voice acting in the trailer was absolute crap. Thankfully, the actual voice acting is a bit better than the trailer's. I could tell the voices apart (somewhat), but that brings me to my biggest problem: they don't shut up every once in a while. I don't get why Saban thinks this is acceptable; I'm sure kids can handle short pauses in dialogue every now and then. It's completely unnecessary for the characters to talk all the time, including during transformation sequences. Well, at least some of the lines are witty and snarky...but others are painful. I found myself agreeing with some of the villains' lines on a frequent basis ("What a Glitter Farce!" Agreed, Brooja, agreed.) The protagonists' voice acting is mixed. Of the individual voices, I find Kelsey and Emily's voices to be the best, while Lily and Chloe's voices don't fit. Lily's voice is a bit too low for her personality, while Chloe's is a smidge too....forceful. Pop's voice is awful, while Candy's voice is marginally better than that of Smile!. The villains' voice acting is better. I like Ulric and Brute's voices, while Brooja's is....meh and Rascal's is terrible. Nogo's is okay...sounds like a stereotypical dub villain. So far, the voice acting is passable, but they need to shut up once in a while. No need for non-stop dialogue. - Edits: Another common characteristic of "Americanized" dubs is the edit, and Glitter Force is no exception. Some of the edits, like changing Japanese text to English text on signs and books, are okay. There's also a photoshopped American flag...okaaayy. Then, there's the town name: Rainbow Hills. It sounds cheesy, but the Japanese "Nanairogaoka" means "Rainbow Hills" in English, so it's acceptable. However, Saban also made edits to the story. Episode 1 opens with Emily having a dream about her (future) teammates....great, just what we need, a huge SPOILER in the first few minutes of the series! Surprisingly, the "Candy Turban" moment from episode 6 was kept; I thought it would be cut for religious/moral guardian reasons. Also, I was wondering what would happen to the Osaka/Kyoto trip in episodes 13 and 14...it became a "trip" to the "Asia-Pacific Expo". Really? Otherwise, of what I've seen so far, the story seems to be mostly intact, even with the edits. - Animation: Now, I thought I wouldn't have to address this. Smile!'s animation is great overall. Fortunately, the good animation carries over....except for the CGI endings. See, Pretty Cure series (since, gosh, Yes!5 I think,) have a tendency to animate their closing sequences in CGI as opposed to 2D. Some are trainwrecks, others are pretty good. Smile!'s were fine, and I thought that Saban would just dub the original Smile! endings. You would not believe my shock when I saw that Saban decided to CREATE ITS OWN CGI ENDINGS. They aren't even good; they're cheap. Awful. Subpar. The lack of effort shows. Otherwise, the animation is good. - Attacks and transformations: No magical girl warrior series is complete without the transformation sequence. Remember my complaint about the non-stop talking? That's the case with the transformation sequences; there's so much talking. That's not to mention the catchphrases at the conclusion of the transformation sequences, they vary from mediocre to BAD. What I find especially shameful is what happened to Cure Peace. First, Smile! viewers know her "Rock-Paper-Scissors" schtick: at the conclusion of the transformation sequence, Cure Peace will go "Jan-Ken-Pon" and throw up a sign (Rock, Paper, or Scissors?) It was a game, and sometimes the antagonists would whine at the result. I never won, but I tied three times. :3 She still does that in the dub, but RPS is not mentioned at all. Instead, she talks about "puppies and kittens". Why? Girls know what RPS is, no need to cut it out, but Saban did nonetheless. Stupid Saban, cutting out an in-show game that the (young) viewers can play along with. The other transformation catchphrases are okay. Attack names are fine. All the attack names were changed to "Sparkle [insert word here]", but I'm cool with that. - I could complain about the plot, but as I said, Smile! doesn't have much of a plot. There are small "arcs", but Smile! is fairly simple and episodic for the most part. You could skip around episodes and not miss all that much. - Cut episodes: Only 40 of Smile!'s 48 episodes were dubbed, so eight were cut. The first 20 episodes of the dub are on Netflix as of this writing. Among the cut episodes include one of my favorites (episode 19), which is tragic, but I see prefer to see this as "the glass half-full": maybe Saban thought that episode 19 was so fantastic that it would be tragic to tarnish it with a crappy dub job. I can only dream that was the case. - Music/SFX: Ignoring the opening, which I thought was fine, I found the music choices to be cheesy and - at least in the last two episodes of "the first season" - ill-advised. For example, compare episodes 19 and 20 of Glitter Force and episodes 22 and 23 of Smile Pretty Cure!. One of the scenes in episode 19 (GF)/episode 22 (Smile!) involves the main quintet splitting up to contemplate whether they should bail or stick around in the Bad End Kingdom/Shadow Realm to stop Pierrot/Nogo and rescue Candy. The music is a bit too upbeat in the dub to accurately convey the gravity of their decision. I also noticed that a lot of overly cartoonish sound effects were added to attacks and comedic actions (such as faceplanting on a cliff,) probably to emphasize the kiddy nature of the series. While I don't consider that a bad call, I do think it was unnecessary. Smile!'s already a fun kid-friendly series, and I don't think adding those sound effects will be anymore effective in getting kids to laugh. - One other thought: I didn't think this was possible, but they managed to increase the girliness factor in the dub. Saban added some lines that reference "girl power", the grayskull call was changed to reference makeovers....I just...did Saban ever think that maybe they're going a bit overboard in trying to appeal to the target audience? Of course not. - "RIPOFF!": Now, browsing Tumblr, I've noticed (aside from the dub hate) that a lot of users are dismissing this as a "Sailor Moon ripoff". Now, I can sort of understand where these people are coming from; Sailor Moon is the example of magical girl anime in the West. Pretty Cure and Sailor Moon are animated by the same studio, Toei Animation. In fact, Toei has created a new version of Sailor Moon (Sailor Moon Crystal, closer in story to the original manga) that is streaming on Hulu and Crunchyroll. I don't consider Pretty Cure to be a "ripoff" of Sailor Moon. Don't get me wrong, there were magical girl shows in the mid-1990s that tried to play off the various tropes introduced or solidified in Sailor Moon to various degrees of success. When the original Pretty Cure began in 2004, I found it hard to see the "ripoff" quotient: compared to Sailor Moon, there is a much heavier focus on physical fighting and (at least in the original and as TVTropes calls it) focus on "wonder twin powers" - both members of the duo could fight separately, but needed to be together to finish the job. That element has been toned down a bit as the years have passed, but not enough to the point where I'd feel comfortable calling it a "ripoff". Plus, many of the tropes from Sailor Moon weren't even unique to that series. The magical girl genre, contrary to popular belief, did not start in 1992; the genre goes all the way back to the 1960s, with a Japanese series called Sally the Witch. Majokko Meg-chan introduced the rival (or "dark") magical girl. Toei produced many magical girl series in the 1980s. Cutie Honey introduced the 'action' aspect in the 1970s. The concept of a team of color-coded heroes fighting evil monsters of the week go back to the Sentai franchise (you may know it better in the West as Power Rangers). Hence, I find it a bit dishonest to claim that everything about a magical girl series came from Sailor Moon. Sure, many of the tropes we associate with that series were mixed and solidified (to an extent) in that series, but very, very little of it was new. - Overall: I gave it 3 out of 5 stars in my Netflix review. I would have rated it 2.5 stars, but Netflix doesn't give you an option to give fractional ratings. Honestly, Glitter Force is fairly tolerable...if you're not coming from a Smile Pretty Cure! background. My opinion in this post is colored by my previous experience with the franchise, so of course I'll be pretty mad. If you watched a show that you thought was fine, then heard of an inferior dub that steps on the original work in various ways, you'd probably be miffed too. The only way I'll be happy with Glitter Force is if we end up getting a legal method of watching the original seasons subbed, maybe through Hulu or Crunchyroll, as a result. Fingers crossed. If you've never watched Smile! (or Pretty Cure in general,) the show is...fine. If you're looking for something to watch with your kids, this is okay. If you end up liking it, point them to some of the other Pretty Cure seasons; there are eleven others. Except for Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart (season 2) and Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo (season 5), which are sequels, all the seasons are self-contained and independent from each other. The only season (aside from the Smile! dub) that can be legally streamed in the U.S. is the original, which is available on Crunchyroll. All the other seasons can only be streamed through unofficial methods. P.S.: If you don't like the dub, stop blaming Netflix. Compared to Nick, Disney, and their restrictive Standards and Practices requirements, Netflix grants producers a significant amount of creative control for their programs. All the crappy decisions were made by Saban, not Netflix.

I don't hate it, but I find it boring. The intro in the Italian version is better in my opinion.

I don't usually talk about it in public. In the five years I've been a brony, I can count the number of friends that know I'm a brony on two hands.