speedyblupi

Some humans are pretty amazing, but the majority are not.

The majority of humans are prejudiced, selfish and ignorant.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around.

 

 

 

 

One can make it a constitutional monarchy.

 

 

 

 

Yeah, I'm not fond of democracy as a concept. A direct democracy (which is what you're suggesting) is the ideology taken to the extreme. No thanks. 

Nope, you can look it up if you want.

Yes, but we've never had a 0-party consitutional monarchy before.

I'm not fond of democracy either. It would work if we could count on people to put in the effort needed to understand what they're voting for, but they generally don't.

That's not necessarily a problem. 

 

 

Socialism is an economic ideology. You might be thinking of communism.

 

 

Doesn't have to be absolute. 

Inequality in itself is not a problem, but it can lead to poverty if it's not regulated and if there isn't enough money to go around. If there is no or too little regulation of industry it allows companies to exploit their workers (and the environment, and the government, and each other) in damaging ways.

Socialism is an economic ideology, but it also has social and political aspects, and it is what I meant. At a basic level, socialism is shared ownership of everything a society needs, while communism is state ownership of everything a society needs.

The only monarchy-based 0 party systems which have been done before have been absolute monarchies, but I guess it's at least theoretically possible for them not to be.

You could also have a democracy where everyone must stand as an independent, or one where there are no politicians and the general public simply suggest and vote on policies.

I'm neither.

I think we need huge amounts of reform (so I'm not conservative), and social liberty is important, but economic liberty leads to inequality, and neither type of liberty is as important as our welfare and happiness.

 

A 3 or 5 party system would work much better, and I honestly think that even a one-party system would be the best overall.

British Politics FTW!

We've got 2 main parties (labour and conservative), but the balance is (usually) held by the other parties (SNP, Liberal Democrat, Greens, and now UKIP too), as they can form coalitions with one of the others.

We can be pretty sure that this year's election is going to be interesting with the alternative parties all being much more popular than they were at the last election...

 

What about a 0-party system?

What would that mean?

A completely socialist state? (a nice idea for small groups, but not feasible for a nation)

Absolute monarchy? (It can work well, but generally doesn't in the 21st century)

It's not well written - the grammar is poor, and the descriptions of events are extremely bland.

It's got no storyline beyond "Pinkie tortures RD to death"

It's too short.

Cheerilee's Garden is better (or worse depending on your perspective): The writing is better, it has a storyline, and the torture is more graphic and detailed than in cupcakes.

Rainbow factory is better than cupcakes, due to having a plot beyond "one pony tortures another pony to death" but Pegasus Device is better than RF because it has much more detail, is better written and clears up all the contradictions and unexplained events from it. The final chapter was a bit rushed and pointless though - the story is better if it ends at the endpoint of the previous chapter.

If you want an MLP gore fanfic with a good story read Rainbow Factory and Pegasus Device (Pegasus Device is the better fic, but reading Rainbow Factory helps you understand it better), and if you want one with horrific and graphic torture that outdoes pretty much anything else read Cheerilee's Garden (It's more extreme, much better written, and a lot longer than cupcakes - I felt sick reading it, and I'm having a hard time finishing the first chapter).

...And if you want one with clop read "after that fateful night" by peppy greyskull. It's not particularly clop heavy, and it's very well written. The pain and fear aren't always as extreme as in Rainbow Factory or Cupcakes, but the story makes up for it and there's still enough blood and death to keep gore enthusiasts entertained. It's very long (longer than order of the phoenix), but you don't actually need to read all of it to get to the good bits - the chapters are generally divided by subject (gore, story and worldbuilding, romance, clop) and these come in different combinations in different chapters so it's not hard to avoid the ones of those that you're not interested in if you just check over the chapter to see what its subject is.

I could've last year, but now I've found a load of music I really like: Brony music!

I'm pretty sure starlight's going to come back later this season... Why else would the writers let her get off like that?

It was pretty interesting for me, considering that I'm a communist (not in the traditional marxist or stalinist sense, but I'm a "communist of sorts"). It made me think a lot about ways Starlight could have gotten around the problems she caused and about how accurate the outcome presented would be likely to be in the real world.

The politics of Equestria has interested me right from when I first became a brony, and the knowledge that communism exists in Equestria makes me even more interested...

Trying to make everyone completely equal is obviously impossible - you need some people to have some level of power over others in order to organise and coordinate them, and Starlight pretending to do this was why she failed. Even if people don't have different talents they can still have different opinions and ideologies, so I don't really see why removing the cutie marks would have helped at all - I guess by removing some of the personality of the ponies, but then it makes me wonder why this happens when we see that the CMCs and other blank flanks have their own personalities despite no cutie marks. Maybe the ponies of the town got that effect because of the brainwashing? People need to have different talents in order to get things done efficiently and at high quality, as we saw in this episode, and simply having different talents doesn't lead to conflict. Starlight probably would have also done better if she hadn't tried to get what she wanted with intimidation and brainwashing.

I was just watching Fall Weather Friends this morning, and Pinkie talks about competing in a hot dog eating contest.

It's also stated in the song "You've got to care..." that the ponies are vegetarian.

But on both occasions it's Pinkie Pie speaking, so we can't really know for sure, considering that she's completely insane and breaks the laws of logic.

Maybe. But without having experienced it... how can we know?

Well, we don't necessarily need to experience it directly. We have a good enough understanding of how the brain works and how to interpret things like fMRI scans to be able to work out that this is almost certainly what happens. We can never be sure that there isn't some way we can go on feeling, but considering that sensation requires a specific sequence of chemical messengers and electrical impulses in our nerves it's basically impossible for death to be like anything else, and without evidence indicating that anything else happens after death we can safely assume that we simply stop feeling.

I've always wondered what that would feel like. Slipping away into nonexistence.

Not that I'm eager to perform an experiment, mind you.

It would be like falling asleep, but without dreaming or waking up.

It would be like what we felt before we'd developed enough inside the uterus to be able to process information about our surroundings and recognise our own existence.

I never knew about this, nor did It comfort me to just find out. I'm actually curious how Nintendo implemented that, in a safe-for- work and "child friendly" form.

Mostly by avoiding using the words "kill" and "die" (despite their use obviously being appropriate in the situation).

This is a video of the whole cutscene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgV9wGRyvI&index=49&list=PLXrmUBhH2r1RJ17xWF4uUsVKv_GSZUAVZ

If I were part of ESRB, all Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games would be rated "T". Still fun to play, though; just beware, if you have even 0.01% of empathy. )  

Me too.

How a game where characters try to torture each other to death got a 3/E rating I have no idea...

Fun fact about PMD:

The longest pornographic novel EVER written in the English language (Brave New World) was inspired by it.

(John 3:13) "Moreover, no man has ascended into heaven, but the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man) (that being Jesus Christ, who was originally an archangel, came to earth to live as a man, die for our sins, and go back to his rule in heaven, when all was said and done)

 

(John 3:13; 14:2, 3) Did he not pray that God’s will take place “as in heaven, also upon earth”? (Matthew 6:9, 10) In reality, one of two destinies awaits the righteous. A MINORITY will rule in heaven with Christ, but the MAJORITY will live forever on earth.

—Revelation 5:10

The Bible also says that killing a pigeon in a clay pot over a river and wiping its blood on things can be used to cleanse away leprosy, and that the city of Tyre would be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and never rebuilt, even though it was: The Bible is not a reliable source.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+14

All the science indicates that our minds are manifestations of physical interactions in our brain, so when our brain dies our mind stops.

Though I do actually believe in a form of afterlife. It's pretty complicated, and it's not an afterlife in the traditional sense in that you're not conscious of it, but it's still a way of "you" carrying on after death.

In life our cells will die and be replaced, and every atom of our body will be shifted out and replaced too: it is not our physical existance which keeps us as coherent individual entities. The past has gone, and it will never exist again - what once existed is irrelevant beyond how it led to what exists in the present. What keeps us as a single entity is a combination of memories and the effect we have on others. Memories exist and are retained throughout our lives, and the lives of those around us who remember us as a person. The effects we have on others are similar to memories, the only difference being that the person affected will not always be aware of it, and that the effects go beyond changing the wiring of brains.

So considering that what keeps us as a coherent entity are the physical consequences of our actions (both within and outside the brains of others) all that is needed to continue on as this coherent entity is to have a physical consequence on others, something which all of us will have. If the effects we had on others are good, then we are perceived in a positive way, and have a good afterlife, and if we have a bad effect on others we have a negative effect, so live on as something that's hated.

This conclusion was inspired by many things, but the most important influences were Richard Dawkins remarking that the boy he once was is dead, and the philosophy of Grovyle in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. It's a strange source for inspiration about something so important, but it still worked, and gave a great explanation of why it is important to act morally, even if you're risking your life to do so.

If you're interested watch from about 17:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3LRAXZGPKk

Yeah, loads.

I like raw spaghetti.

I like McDonalds apple pie with barbecue sauce.

I eat huge blocks of cheese.

I like onion, garlic and mustard toasted sandwiches.

No you're not.

 

While this not technically be in line with the topic, I feel I must boast that I probably have all of you beat: I can taste colors.

Do you have synaesthesia?

Sweet apple massacre was more a torture porn trollfic than a genuine attempt at grimdark. It can just be summed up as "Big Mac rapes the CMCs to death".

Cupcakes was also a trollfic, and as such it had little to no storlyine or emotional impact. It can be summed up as "Pinkie tortures Rainbow Dash to death".

I've not read Cheerilee's garden, but I intend to do so, considering how popular it is.

Rainbow factory was an interesting premise, and a good storyline, a wonderfully symbolic ending, but it also had a few errors and contradictions. Its plot can't really be summed up in a single sentence, but the premise of it is effectively "Cloudsdale are Nazis, The Rainbow Factory is a death camp for pegasi who can't fly, Scootaloo goes there along with some OCs". There's a lot of horrific death. Many people complained about the ending, but it makes sense when you think about the symbolism and read the explanation/resolution in the sequel.

Glaze and H8_Seed's music about it is pretty good. It's pretty impressive seeing how Rainbow Factory went from a single song inspired by a B movie to having its own film coming out, tens of remixes and derivative songs, tens of derivative fanfictions and thousands of images. The brony fandom is so big it creates its own daughter fandoms!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5U34RCgAWg

The sequel, Pegasus Device was extremely well written, used lots of intelligent and creative language, went into a lot more of the psychology of the ponies involved, and was a genuinely engaging story. It's quite underrated in my opinion, generally because people are turned off by the problems with Rainbow Factory so don't read further. It's also quite a bit longer than Rainbow Factory, and as such there is even more horrific death. Its premise can be summed up as "Two more flightless pegasi go to the Rainbow Factory and try to escape and destroy it". SlyphStorm's song inspired by it is also very good, but to fully understand it you really need to read the fanfic.

Though I would say that the final chapter should probably have been omitted. The story works better with less of a simplistic ending, and the quality of writing plummets in the last chapter too. Aurora Dawn is great at writing psychological horror, but not so good at writing about political resolutions to problems.

There's another grimdark fanfic I like that most people probably haven't heard of: "After that fateful night" by Peppy Greyskull. It's very long (a little over half as long as Fallout: Equestria), but what I've read of it has been quite good. It's an alternate-universe fic where the elements of harmony failed to revert Nightmare Moon back to Princess Luna. NM basically takes Twilight Sparkle as a sex slave, and various things happen as a result. It's a clopfic, but it's not incredibly clop-heavy, and there are non-pornographic versions of the chapters which do have sex in them.

It's mostly about politics and interactions and relationships between different ponies, but there's a lot of extreme violence. I think It's similar to Game of Thrones in a few ways: a bit pornographic, everyone's trying to compete for rule of the kingdom, relationships between characters are important, but flexible, and many characters die horrific deaths. The full version is not available on FimFiction because Peppy got banned for making a sarcastic death threat (a lot of people complained about this decision, because it was obvious sarcasm rather than an actual threat), but you can find ATFN on google drive.

Leonard Nimoy just died of COPD

WAAAH!

Spock died!?!?!

Damn...

But chewing tobacco? Do people even do that any more?

I've been offered cigarettes (and weed ) by different people, but I wouldn't try smoking.

I once thought that I'd probably try smoking once and then stop to avoid getting addicted, but a couple of years ago it turned out I have a lung abnormality which means my lungs tend to spontaneously collapse (really, it's a thing that does happen to some people), and smoking would be a serious risk of making it worse, so I'm probably never going to.

Where exactly did the speed of light come from?

I have to assume you had recently read up on various parts of quantum mechanics and wanted to appear smart by regurgitating information which you only have a tentative grasp of and which is not even related to a "SONIC Rainboom".

 

From 2 things:

1. It emits a blast of light aswell as a sound shockwave

2. In the cutie mark chronicles the sound is always heard before the rainbow is seen

I wanted to know where you got the Mach 10 from and if you pulled it out of your arse. Turns out you didn't so that's fine.

No, he did pull it out of his arse. The thing he showed, if it's correct (and the picture isn't - it uses an incorrect value of sin(13): the value for radians rather than degrees), means that RD was going a little over mach 2 (for the 13 degrees calculation) or about mach 5 (for the 12 degrees calculation in the video), nowhere near mach 10.

In Equestria light moves a lot slower than it does in our universe - slower than sound, in fact. In sonic rainboom and the cutie mark chronicles we hear the blast before we see the rainbow. What happens in a sonic rainboom is that Dash initially breaks the light barrier (when the rainbow cone appears), then the sound barrier (when the shockwave blasts the rainbow away as a ring).

Relativity also doesn't apply in Equestria's universe, hence why it's physically possible for dash to go faster than light.

It's not illogical, it's just different phsyics to what we're used to.

she can perform sonic rainbooms which is I estimate about 5,000,000,000 times faster than the speed of light, is Rainbow Dash made of protons? Protons are what light is made out of

I think you mean photons.

And your estimate is invalid. It's not an estimate, it's a random number you made up.

They shouldn't have drawn it considering it was specifically asked NOT to... but whatever.

Well, apart from the fact that it wasn't, yeah.

Ok:

Rainbow Dash: Probably not. She has a good relationship with Twilight, but doesn't admire her (she sees intelletualism as a weakness rather than a strength) or show signs of having a particularly good relationship with Twilight relative to the other members of the mane 6 beyond helping her learn to fly. There's generally too much conflict between the two.

But interestingly, it is possible that Twilight has a crush on Rainbow! Think about how many times Twilight has tried to get RD to do stuff, and tried to help her with things like Daring Do and learning the history of the Wonderbolts and compare that to what she's done with the other members of the mane 6.

Fluttershy: Who knows? Someone that introverted is hard to read. She has a good relationship with Twilight, but her best friends of the mane 6 appear to be RD and Rarity, and she has a better relationship with Discord, too. If she's in love it's likely with one of them (or maybe she's a zoophile), but considering that she isn't really the one who drives who she interacts with it's possible she fancies someone else but is scared of interacting with them.

Pinkie: She probably has a crush on everyone. When dealing with a pony with reality and logic warping powers to rival Discord you can never say anything either way. Things she does don't make sense by definition.

Rarity: She seems mostly disinterested in Twilight. They do very little together when the rest of the mane 6 aren't around.

Applejack: She's been helped out a lot by Twilight - whenever something goes wrong at Sweet Apple Acres, Twilight seems to take charge. Applejack seems to admire Twilight in a few ways, as seen in their conversations when these situations are resolved, and probably more than any other member of the mane 6, but nothing really significant. I'd say she's the most likely of the mane 6, but it's very unlikely that any of the mane 6 are into Twilight... Apart from Twilight of course.

I feel awkward thinking about RD's personality because I'm friends with a guy who's effectively an introverted and less fast version of her, down to the level of some very unlikely coincidences, like both of them completely overusing the word "awesome".

But with deconstructing personalities one of the best ways to do it is with socionics.

RD is an ESTP (Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving. my friend, predictably, is an ISTP: Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving)

CoD fanboys.

It's not even good compared to most FPSs.