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Night Sky

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  1. Night Sky
    I may have learned a little bit about playing stealth games, over the years. Sorry to use this thread as an opportunity for a shameless plug of my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEyeOfStone
  2. Night Sky
    Nope. Not gonna happen. I have no parental responsibilities anymore, I used to. It would never have happened back then. Now that's one battle the other side would have lost if they'd have had any interest in doing so. No human microchips.
  3. Night Sky
    Weapons, water and food, in that order. Then establish a defensible position and try to hold it and stockpile. Then try to detect and ally with any other survivors. Maybe fight our way to an area the zombies avoid. If it's gonna happen, I wish it would happen now, rather than later when I'm in my 70's. I could do it now, but doing it as an old man, is not the retirement home I have in mind, thank you very much.
  4. Night Sky
    Today, as with the entire week before it has been spent in meticulous and careful preparations. I am starting a new job tomorrow on Monday. If there's anything I can do with my living environment to help me hit the ground running, that's what I've been working on.
  5. Night Sky
    The last thing I ate was bad brand X licorice from my local grocery store, I am not gonna bother taking a pic of it.
  6. Night Sky
    I have a new favorite track, I discovered this while playing the RARIDOOM Mod for GZDOOM. At first, I thought it was just a random techno track, but it was SO GOOD, I took the mellow dramatic step of putting the mod's PK3 file into SLADE. Fortunately the file was well described by the mod's author. Imagine my delight when I realized I'd just fallen in love with a track by one of the first Brony super-composers, NotACleverPony. I went as far as legally purchasing the track on Bandcamp, and I also found a mediafire link to a dope extended mix. This track is used to score a level in the mod which the Changelings have turned into a lab where they are perfecting Trixie clones. When you're hearing this while you're battling a Cybernetic Trixie Battle Mech, yeah...it's dope. It's a nice thought to know that mods for classic DOOM can be a way to rediscover OG Brony tracks.
  7. Night Sky
    Catharsis: the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. Prior to this episode, there was only one pony in all of FIM that I had truly come to hate, Chancellor Neighsay. At first I struggled to identify clearly what it is about him that struck my nerve so badly. Then I realized; he reminds me so much of a human being, at our worst. He's a demagogue, an autocrat, and a xenophobe Before the events of this episode he was entirely self-satisfied. The one redeeming quality I could identify was the same one that Cozy Glow mentions, he is very moral, he believes what he says, even if his beliefs are ignorant and small-hearted. No other pony ever rubbed my fur quite as far in the wrong direction as Chancellor Neighsay. Then this episode happened. Including the scene from which the screenshot below was taken, including the very instant that the screenshot below captures. Somehow, seeing him get utterly pawned by Cozy Glow made me feel sorry for him, for the first time ever. I think it's got something to do with the fact that she turned a crowd he'd been pontificating to against him. He does prove that he's capable of learning something and admitting he was wrong. And he does go on to make an honest effort to help out. No other pony in the series ever succeeded in convincing Princess Celestia to march out of Canterlot at the head of an EUP army. How much different and better would things have gone for Equestria over the course of the series if Celestia had done that more often? So one of the many things I take away from this episode is that I am more able to look at Chancellor Neighsay like a pony, like Twilight Sparkle, and less like a human. It's better to be a pony, when dealing with cases like Chancellor Neighsay.
  8. Night Sky
    All's well that ends well. Spike and our heroines were bamboozled by a washed up has-been of a con artist. Happens to the best of us. We've all been had once. I'm just glad Spike and Twilight were able to patch things up sooner and easier than otherwise.
  9. Night Sky
    They speak Ponish, so they are at least partially equine. The horn, if it more like deer or antelope? There's no rhinoceros in play is there? It might explain the volatile tempers. And what about those pelts on their backs, are those feathers? What about the hardened noses? The tails seem almost primate, I'm reminded of lemurs. Such interesting creatures.
  10. Night Sky
    It's one of those things that'll I could never prove in a court of law, and so I am not going to make this a huge long thing, but; This episode really, really reminds me of a episode of classic Star Trek: The Original Series. You have this crystalline, non-human [pony] intelligence that communicates in a disorienting manner. You have a puzzle, and there's a time limit and failure is not an option. The characters have to face their fears and work together. The old series, at its best, also had some of the whimsy that FIM does. There are a bunch of OG Trek episodes I could compare this episode to. This was an endearing outing. I'm sure they all passed the test. Silverstream's delight in discovering the enigma that is plumbing was a hoot to behold.
  11. Night Sky
    It is interesting to watch this romp through Southern Equestria, which seems to be culturally very different from Central Equestria, and perhaps not so closely aligned with it as the Crystal Empire is. World building episodes in this series are always a fun jaunt of a good trip.
  12. Night Sky
    Interesting episode. One the one hoof, who would have thought that we'd ever see this much humility from Rainbow Dash in a single episode. On the other hoof, the whole episode is based upon a progression of fan clubs. Maybe a better lesson for little kids is that fan clubs are irrelevant. No one is so worthy of being looked up to than the person you are capable of becoming. Period.
  13. Night Sky
    Rockhoof is a living treasure of Equestria, and Storyteller is the perfect role for him. He's a one-horse Heilung concert. What a poverty it would be if he hadn't found a new calling. Rockhoof is the only one of the Old Pillars of Equestria who isn't somehow disappointing. There's something about all the others that I can never put my own hoof on, but that I just don't like. None of them, except Rockhoof are terribly sympathetic. There's something aloof, stern, terse, impartial about the rest of them. And now that Equestria is not under threat anymore, they seem to have gone their own ways. None of them were terribly perturbed to hear of Rockhoof's problems. At this point in the series, Equestria is a stable, safe and happy place. But the Mane 6 are still together and cohesive. The Mane 6 have something the Pillars never did, imao.
  14. Night Sky
    Exactly. This. Real life audiences are even tougher than Yaks. I feel really bad for these two young ladies. There's no good reason for them to have ever made it near that stage with their level of ability. Ugh. Reality tv = public humiliation for our delight. No thanks. But often times the person up on that stage really thought, however misguidedly that they had a chance...what comes after isn't shown and there's a reason. Something like this can take years for a person to get over.
  15. Night Sky
    My issue is not with the Yovidaphone itself. We do not have an instrument quite that epic and awesome here in the human world. And while I could listen to her play it all day, all of Ponyville couldn't. For the purpose of pushing the idea of being a supportive friend, this episode goes a Bridge Too Far. Some people who have no musical talent can't realize that gracefully. Some musicians always wanted to play a given instrument but never could. But for goodness sake, if everyone agrees that a musician isn't good, don't put them in front of a crowd you know is tough. It won't end like this. I guess this episode struck a nerve. I've seen musician friends and relatives really go through some hard times. This episode is actually not one of FIM's deeper exercises in honesty and supportiveness, this was kind of a Diet Coke. And there are things about the realities of being a musician that this episode either ignores or gets wrong, imao. All this having been said, let's see if I don't play Yovidaphone music over the PA at work today.
  16. Night Sky
    By this point in the series, the Mane 6 have longstanding mature connections. Those can sustain a heated argument. Still, neither Rarity nor Rainbow Dash were taking their responsibilities as teachers very seriously in this episode. They seemed to forget that they are teachers at the school of friendship, day of fun or not. I was waiting for Starlight Glimmer to bang their heads together, but she's more sophisticated than that.
  17. Night Sky
    A world without both Flim and Flam could never be otherwise sufficiently perfidious.
  18. Night Sky
    The Changeling's take on Hearth's Warming Eve was hilarious, so were all the other creature Holidays. It kinda sucks to see Twilight Sparkle, one of the greatest heroines ever, EVER, become a so-so nothing burger administrator. There's something about her as head mare at this point that I just don't like, or that rubs my fur the wrong way, or that's just not right. However you wanna put it in words. Bad things happen, and administrators tend to just punish everyone. That's one of the many reasons our human world is the way it is. I don't like seeing that happening in Equestria.
  19. Night Sky
    Interesting to see Discord and Starlight Glimmer build upon the dynamic they established in To Where and Back Again. Also, Starlight is discovering that even though Discord is a fellow rebel, he can be supremely inconvenient, and therein lies his value. Solving his riddles requires a type of subtlety that no pony is going to cultivate absent the necessity for it having arisen.
  20. Night Sky
    This episode basically wraps it all up for Queen Chrysalis. Yes, she did go on to be a member of the legion of doom. Her story as a character in the grand drama that is MLP FIM was not yet over by the end of this episode. However, one thing was firmly and decisively established here, and it was a masterstroke. Queen Chrysalis is really just a sad, somehow noir-esque, self defeating character. She's just a criminal, perennially bested by her own flawed plans before she even takes her first steps in any undertaking. She tried to recreate the Mane 6 in her own corrupted image, and they very nearly destroyed her. Irony of ironies, the Harmony Tree saved Queen Chrysalis. We cannot help some pony who is trying to hurt us. We cannot stop some pony who has decided to hurt themselves. We'd be foolish to try in the former case, and we have to understand that sometimes things don't work out how they should or how we'd prefer, in the latter case. This episode is also really funny. It's also terrible. Thus, it is terribly funny. Life has a sense of humor, a terrible sense of humor. A friendly word of advice, learn to laugh. Queen Chrysalis doesn't really laugh. Her laughs are more like growls or howls. Her laughs emote aggression. She has very nearly no sense of humor at all, and thus she was entirely defeated by her own life. We don't know what ultimately did or did not become of that statue. Queen Chrysalis couldn't even die. Nothing about life was satisfactory to her, she had to conform all existence to her own preferred patterns, as though life were nothing more than raw flesh. Well, life is more than that. As with Cozy Glow, Queen Chrysalis and Tirek are bad news. They are handled in ways that make them not inappropriate for little kids, but the substance is there. MLP FIM is about something, it's about many things. Real things, important things. It is one of the most courageous and wise kids shows ever produced, and it has a great deal of good reminders for adults.
  21. Night Sky
    Cozy Glow is terrifying. Somehow, with extreme subtlety, she is right there advertising that she's a negligent psychopath in plain sight. If you look at how she's drawn, every individual feature is rendered the same as every other pony. But the overall effect is not the same as every other pony, and Cozy Glow is a machine who is greater than the sum of her parts. It shows the mastery of the animators, by this point in the series, they had perfected their craft. Beyond something intangible that can never be defined exactly in how she is assembled, there are subtle cues in her facial expressions, and in her choice of wordings, and of course her actions. It is all entirely textbook, but you have to consider these traits in context. Even in our world, Cozy Glow would be a monster, but in Equestria she's utterly terrifying. By this point in the series, Equestria was a halcyon multiracial, multi cultural society. Threats were there on the outside, not from within. Starlight Glimmer and Trixie had been out of line, but they'd been brought to heel and were repentant. Twilight Sparkle was growing up to be something of an administrator, focused on applying the rules fairly and getting more used to telling ponies No. Some amount of complacency was setting in. Equestria was ripe for Cozy Glow, and so the Harvester cometh. But lest you think I'm demonizing her, I think Cozy Glow is a lush, brilliant, alluring and thrilling character, wonderfully rendered. She's a work of art because she's the devil. And, be notified thou, I do not regard her as the worst of the worst. Dante said that the lowest place in Hell, being gnashed forever in Satan's three mouths, this is reserved only for traitors to benefactors, and Cozy Glow is a traitor to her benefactors. But in point of fact, I disagree with Dante. There is one thing worse, more terrifying, and more dangerous, more disgusting to me than what Cozy Glow does and how she treats ponies. What is that? It's all the ponies who defend her. It isn't even about whether or not they are or are not just like her. To me, it's immaterial why any pony would defend Cozy Glow. Sure, there is some explanation somewhere about why she is the way she is, but there is no justification, and make no mistake, it's us or her. You don't have to like it, but if you can't keep it straight, other ponies are going to get hurt. Cozy Glow is all the more interesting because the rest of us really can't psychoanalyze her. She's both interesting and opaque, like the inside of a black hole. The motivations of her would be defenders are not interesting to me at all. Some say she was just a child who needed love. Equestria would have given her that. Twilight Sparkle and Starlight Glimmer were her hostesses and the School of Friendship did not fail her. The CMC, much to their own detriment, went above and beyond for her. If you defend Cozy Glow, we can't be cool. Too bad. I'm entirely serious right now. MLP FIM did not shy away from confronting serious matters, questions and challenges that any living being is going to have to grapple with sooner or later. Whether you're a human, or a Gorilla or a Pony, I think you're going to have to navigate encountering an individual like Cozy Glow at least once before all is said and done. The problem of ponies like Cozy Glow is one of the central problems any sophisticated being is going to be faced with in life. If you defend, apologize for, or otherwise advocate for Cozy Glow, you zig where I zag. I'm not saying that any pony should necessarily care or fuss over that. Nothing rises or falls because of my estimations, not at all. I'm just throwing that out there. I don't enjoy drawing lines in the sand, but some lines need to be drawn. I know whereof I speak. Because of my profession, I've spent far more time with Cozy Glow than most other ponies ever will. End of (irrelevant) imao speech.
  22. Night Sky
    This was a funny episode. Of course we've all had acne. But Rarity was rather out of sorts, in a way that tickled me. I dunno, is it two drops once a day or one drop twice a day?
  23. Night Sky

    I just flip flopped on something, since August is the month of Trivial pursuit can you find where on this site my flip flop is hiding in plain sight?

    I had my reasons for flip flopping, this status update is just me being accountable and a half-fun easter egg hunt. 

  24. Night Sky
    Do not speak to me of Love, if you've never had a day like the one that Big Mac has in this episode. I don't have much else to say, but this episode effected me so much that I made this; I wasn't going to upload it as a permanent post here on the forum, so please consider this a flip flop. I gotta stand up for my big broof Big Mac.
  25. Night Sky
    The more things change, the more they stay the same. Still, I can't help but think that the writers made RD and AJ act dumber and like they've learned far less about themselves and each other, just for the purpose of making this a funny episode. The AJ and RD I know have come further than this by this point in the series, both as individuals and as friends. Ocellus once again shows herself to be intelligent, quick to act and clear headed and warmhearted. Even though she never bangs her chest, Ocellus is the closest thing to a Twilight Sparkle that the Young Six has.
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