Rainbow Dash mines out a basement, to begin her awesome base! …ment. get it? Hehehehe
Bargain Basement Dashie
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Author Archives: Applejinx
I Dig, A Pony
Rainbow Dash digs a big hole! Ooo drama ;)
Dash Stronghold Assault #5
Between the last episode and this one, SuperGigaSamuri slew the dragon all by himself ;) though Dash helped by knocking out a bunch of towers! We proceed to place the egg, only to find the machine’s derped.
NEXT time we have some changes.
Enderman are not confined to caves. They spawn around that quartz circle near the cave. They have a special sideways sign (because they’re Enderman) saying the mine belongs to Endermen, piss off. They’re gonna be more of an issue for sure.
The Cockroach spawner won’t destroy itself so easily. Floor of the portal room is now obsidian, as is the lava pit, so they won’t obliterate themselves before wrecking you. Coming down from above is still the best approach but may not be enough.
Any fool can place the egg now, so the win condition is guaranteed to work. BUT, the machine physically flings guilty players away from it. I don’t know if it’s possible to fight this in singleplayer but I do know only the Fluttershy may approach. That should work as the final machine tweak.
We will begin another session at a preannounced time, and I’ll probably be announcing when that is, on FIMfiction and the private Blue Vanilla mailinglist. This will be more of a speed run approach: go directly for the stronghold and the Ender Dragon ASAP, if you can get the egg do it, if you leave it back at spawn leave a sign so you can be credited. The Fluttershy will place it and we’ll finally have a endgame that works dramatically :)
Yeah, it’s Applejack left holding the bag on this one: the skin server’s being updated and AJ turned up for some reason.
Dash Stronghold Assault #4
In this intense climax, Dash and Turner (Fluttershy-for-a-day) make it to the stronghold and explore it (a great example of the AJ Lightin’ lightmaps in action), defeat the Cockroach spawner, brave near death, and then Dash trips over her own hooves and falls into the End, where she blows up a bunch of stuff before getting snuffed by the dragon!
The last episode before the derpy wrap-up. Next round, we have fixed the machine so it flings guilty ponies away from it rather than let them place the dragon egg, and made the Enderman situation trickier by basing them more out in the open! But that is a story for another day…
Dash Stronghold Assault #3
While trying to find the stronghold, Dash suffers another horrific and gruesome death! Galloping back, she discovers Fluttershy has slain all the monsters pacifistically and gathered up all her dropped stuff. Dash looks nervously at Fluttershy, thinking ‘damn’…
AJ Lightin’ For Minecraft
If you’re playing Minecraft using Optifine, or anything that can run lightmaps in resource packs, you might like AJLightin’!
Download this resource pack and put it in your resource packs folder. If those simple two images of caves aren’t enough to convince you, get a load of this Imgur folder full of examples—this lightmap pack alters everything from the overworld to the Nether to the End!
The overworld picks up warmer torch lighting, somewhat deeper shadows without interfering with visibility, and has a special vibe for dawn, dusk, rain…
Nether is a bit darker, warmer without being all lurid magenta and pitch-black.
The End is rather special! If it’s not well lit, it is dark and cold like the surface of the Moon! Torchlight really stands out.
If you love this, watch how I use it on my Youtube channel! There’s lots of stuff in the works, this is just a little tool I’m using to make it all better.
Thank you! :)
Dash Stronghold Assault #2
Enough preparing! Dash and Turner set off into the uncharted, dark, spooky wilderness to find and conquer the stronghold. They’ll go anywhere—even right out into the middle of the air!
Derpy Lives!
So, Derpy Hooves appeared in My Little Pony again—and not glancingly, or as a background cameo.
Nope! She walked into the doorway and derped at the camera, because she was going to be the new contestant in the relay race tryouts—and we saw her right alongside the other ponies, derping away as if she’d never left, with the big difference that she had made a decision. She wasn’t just an onlooker: she was stepping up to help Ponyville, and that decision is not unlike the decision to include her again, after she’d been exiled for her looks and clumsiness. She’s back! She didn’t let those things stop her. There she was, center stage, because the team only had Bulk Biceps and Fluttershy left, and they needed her.
The great thing is, it totally defuses the objections to having her there, without changing her in the least.
Derpy’s possibly mentally retarded and certainly has strabismus, but is beloved and has a good heart and is utterly adorable. We don’t demand she has to be clever or look sharp and never did, and it’s not really her derps that won our hearts, that’s just what distinguishes her.
Until they could both show her good nature AND have a punching bag set up to be a bigger fool, they couldn’t feature her ‘cos they sort of had to be beyond reproach thanks to a certain irritating complainer.
Now, ‘Bulk Biceps’ (hate the name but it DOES lampshade his new role, doesn’t it?) is the punching bag. He is a vain blowhard who can barely fly and panicks at harmless things and is clumsier (or at least does more damage) than Derpy. Next to him, Derpy is just lovely to look at, and otherwise totally unchanged.
When she appears, it’s a GAG and brony-food, because nobody expects she is going to win it for the team. It’s basically, ‘wow, the derpy pony is going to try! That’s brave even though she’s probably going to break the other half of the course that Bulk Biceps didn’t already break’. It’s definitely not a ‘yay, now a win is assured!’ moment and they aren’t positioning her to be a strong capable example of winninghood.
(hmph. I wrote a teasing shout-out to Winningverse before the canon show did. So there!)
I don’t like that they didn’t trust us with Derpy without having to make an Old Spice Pony douchebag jerkface (who could only be male, because you can’t mock a less powerful thing so brutally and get away with it), but they did make a better punching bag and so now we can have Derpy because she’s not the biggest target anymore. I should be grateful to Bulk including his obnoxious name for making that possible.
Dash Stronghold Assault #1
A second playtest of Nightmare Moon has bogged down… until now!. Rainbow Dash, with her trusty and alarmingly badass Fluttershy, sets off to get things moving in this glimpse into a Nightmare Moon play-through! The first episode is showing you where the stuff-grinding resources are (it’s a second playthrough of the map, not the one in the first series but what is actually there right now.
As of now we haven’t slain the dragon, but this little LP arc is me and Zobrux going through the mountains to find one of the strongholds, beating the ‘Cockroach’ spawner (Dash is like ‘get back!’ but then gets in dreadful trouble and her life is saved literally at the last moment by Fluttershy) and then going to the End by mistake and beginning the destroying of dragon crystals. So as of now, the server is open to anyone, the path to the End is open, and beating the game is anybody’s game. We have to get the dragon egg, and use our Fluttershy to place it (be nearest the machine when it is placed)
And Fluttershy is Zobrux this time, so Zobrux (who shows terrifying efficiency getting to the stronghold and is basically tougher than Dash) cannot just log on and slay the dragon. One of US has to do it. Who will be the one? The path to the End is open, and the end game is in play!
“Show, Don’t Tell”
I’m posting this because it came up in a discussion on FIMfiction. The subject was the notorious “Show, don’t tell” advice, which can usually be trusted to confuse and mislead writers, because it sucks. It’s bad advice.
“Show don’t tell” sucks for a reason: it’s usually not the correct criticism for the problem.
What ‘show don’t tell’ means in practice is, ‘you’re taking me out of the story by giving me shortcuts that prevent me experiencing what’s happening’. “Twilight was sad but then she felt better” vs. twelve paragraphs of hopefully evocative purple prose. Really, evocative is the main word to use in understanding this complaint: ‘show don’t tell’ ALWAYS means ‘you’re not being evocative enough’.
You don’t always want to sit around being evocative. Some details and perspectives are not relevant to the point of the story or indeed the point of the experience.
Neither the word ‘show’ nor the word ‘tell’ are particularly illuminating of this dilemma, which is why folks get dragged into endless rumination about ‘showy’ and ‘telly’ with examples that could be either.
If you’re not being evocative enough, you’re not engaging the reader: you’re giving them a set of facts to file away. If you’re being TOO evocative, your reader is floating around dazedly in a cloud of vague impressions with no clue as to what’s relevant.
If you get evocative over the stuff you want experienced, and summarize the stuff that the reader needn’t ‘walk through’ personally, you’ll strike the balance just fine. All you need is an intended path for the reader’s experience, and to let them vicariously experience the RIGHT details.
Fully Operational Jinxie Station
Welp, it’s done! I’ve got all five Trixieverse books uploaded and tagged and cross-referenced, plus every single Trixieverse Builds A City episode, and the beginnings of the Place The Key maps (Nightmare Moon) and even all the pony-related music. It’s all set to continue to update when book six starts up, with minimal hassle. New videos will turn up here as drafts thanks to the ‘If This Then That’ website and I can post ’em, and I’ve got the site ready to work with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) which is an exciting thing to me: I’ve done line-art for some time, and I worked out how to make Cocoapotrace deliver optimal results from scanned line art (oddly, you don’t scan stuff at particularly high res) and I’m still exploring what that will mean.
‘Cos the future does still hold more cartooning and drawing from me, it’s just a very slow process of sorting out how to art. But the tech details are well and truly falling into place. In fact I might be able to make Flash puppets that way, which would be mighty interesting.
Even invented a new guitar pickup configuration and built it: there can be more music, though some of it will go to a secret project that I’m intentionally not promoting or letting anybody see :)
I’m exhausted. Goodnight. <3
Spread Your Wings
Scootaloo found her on the hill outside Ponyville. Continue reading
Folded Wings
“But it isn’t my birthday, silly filly!” said Pinkie Pie. “Where are we going? I know the last time you blindfolded me it was amazing but we’re not going to our bedroom. You’re taking me outside! What’s going on, Fluttershy?” Continue reading
The Prom
Two little ponies danced. Continue reading
Over The Brink
Fluttershy peered down, scuffing the grass with her forehoof, biting her lip. Continue reading
Broken Tiara
The farm ponies looked at each other, embarrassed. Continue reading