UK PonyCon announces Tabitha St. Germain and Elley-Ray Hennessy

I'm several days late posting this, so apologies! But here's the official confirmation that UK PonyCon 2023 will have a Mane Six VA for the second year running, with the voice of Rarity (and a whole host of others) appearing in person after Andrea Libman's visit last year – and also a second show guest, in the shape of the legendary Elley-Ray Hennessy. You have to hoof it to UKPC: they have really done the trick here, with two extremely popular guests.

Ponyfic Roundup 439

Read it Later story count: 93 (-3)

Words read this week: 24,360

My lowest weekly word count for quite some while today, though I do still have the usual five fics. Don't read anything in particular into that low total: the stories just fell that way this Roundup. If you look down the bottom of this post, you'll be able to check for yourself (if you really find that a good use of your time :P ) that next week's word count will rise again. Anyway, on we go...

Sixty-Eight Reasons to Switch Placebos This Summer by TheMessenger
A Day for Mommy by Hivemind
Good Enough by cloudedguardian
Garland Graveyard Shift by Ninjadeadbeard
Forty-Two Troublesome Trixies by Darth Link 22

★: 0 | ★★: 3 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

My Little Repeats 142: "To Where and Back Again, part 1"

"A changeling can change. But we haven't."

S6E25: "To Where and Back Again, part 1"

6 Oct 2016 (Tiny Pop; 22 Oct on Discovery Family)

My original rating: ★★★★ (for both parts)
IMDb score: 8.4

The one with Thorax's glittery wings

Thoughts: Tiny Pop being Tiny Pop, this episode was shown before "Top Bolt". This is, as Discord says, "quite the combination of secondary characters" – but for the most part, it really works. It doesn't hurt that the best villain in the show is back, although Chrysalis only shows up a fair way in. We get another excellent double act with Starlight and Trixie, while Glimmy herself is a more appealing character for her insecurities. (Her magic is again a bit OP, though...) The Changeling!Mane Six aren't the most convincing replacements in the world: you'd think Chrysalis could have managed better! This episode was shown at UK PonyCon 2016 (on the date of the US showing, so many of us had already seen it) and I remember the general reaction being very positive. I do have a small sigh for the Princesses getting easily captured, not for the first or last time, but oh well. This is quality entertainment. Despite a few flaws, it can keep its four.

Choice quote: Luna: "I see much of myself in you, Starlight Glimmer."

New rating: ★★★★

Tiny Pop showed E25 and E26 a day apart, so for once we had a proper cliffhanger, and I adored that. You get a longer one here for free, though! Next time, it's "To Where and Back Again, part 2", and then I'll finally be done with S6.

New story by me: We Are the Everfree

I hope to post the next FiM rewatch video this weekend. Sorry it's taken so long!

For the first time since 2019 (eek) I have two ponyfics up in the same year! This time, it's two in the same month. Here's the new one:

Background: Everfree Forest Clearing by 90Sigma.

We Are the Everfree by Loganberry
OCs and Other
G4; Sad/Tragedy; 1k words; Apr 2023; Teen

In a place as strange as the Everfree Forest, is it really so surprising that its Trees should communicate? They have, after all, been there for a long, long time. Even so, that doesn't mean that nothing ever changes in the woods, or that the Trees have always been that way...

An entry for Mockingbirb's Arboreal Yearnings Contest.

Not my usual combination of genre tags, I'm aware! But this is based on an idea that I've been vaguely thinking about for half a decade or so. Of course it's evolved somewhat since my first thoughts, but after so long it's nice to get it published. The "Arboreal Yearnings Contest" is inspired by Fluttershy's "I'd like to be a tree" comment, and requires stories to have one or more creatures "wanting to be a tree, becoming a tree, pretending to be a tree, or actually being a tree". Trees of the Everfree, of course, are not like other trees...

Ponyfic Roundup 438: Spotlight on Synchronicity

Read it Later story count: 96 (-2)

Words read this week: 82,654

Here's a longer fic that I've known about for something like a decade, and even read the first few pages of from time to time – but until now I'd never read it right through. As far as I can tell, no significant reviewer has covered Synchronicity before. It's not one of the star stories on Fimfiction, being currently rated just outside the top 5,000 with 7.6k views, and it's the only one of Sev's three fics that is neither M-rated nor incomplete. Let's see where it takes us...

Synchronicity by Sev
Mane Six, OC, Celestia, Luna and Fancy Pants
G4; Adventure/Comedy; 83k words; Dec 2011–Aug 2013; Teen (Sex)

Old grudges lead to shaky alliances when the lands outside Equestria unite against a common foe

This is a sea pony story, of a sort – in that a major OC is a kelpie, who after a strange introduction is a rather appealing character. Her people have kidnapped Celestia and want serious action from Equestria or... well. Meanwhile, a threat to both peoples is growing fast, and Twilight and the Mane Six need to work out what to do. She finds a magical resonance with Rarity lets them share certain thoughts, and this gives them both more of an insight. Though the fic shares the [Adventure] and [Comedy] tags, the comedy is concentrated in the early chapters – which are sometimes rather shakily written – and later on the adventure mostly takes over. There's some sweeping world-building here, enabled by the story's earlyish date. The innuendo mentioned in the longdesc (we're talking stuff like what Twilight really keeps hidden under her bed) likewise calms down a lot after the first third. I think this improves the fic. For the first few chapters this was a two-star story, but a substantial improvement in the writing and a genuinely exciting (if rather long) climactic chapter bring it up to a three. ★★★

After this point, you should only continue reading if you're okay with major spoilers.

Okay, what's the deal with "Carl Cornejo"?

I agree with Mr. Frog

The screenshot above was taken from Equestria Daily the other day, more specifically from the comments on the "What is the Best Pony Fan Theory You've Heard?" thread. And as you can see, Carl Cornejo has commented in the way he/they/it usually does. As Mr. Frog points out, this is CC's unvarying style of reply. Each and every time, whoever the reply is to, and on a huge range of posts.

What's going on? I have no more idea than Mr. Frog does, to be honest. This has gone on for years, and it's way, way, way past the point of being even remotely interesting or amusing. Yes, you can block a poster, but this kind of stuff is frankly at least borderline spam, and most of the time spammers are zapped pretty quickly. They come back, sure, but they're not left to go on and on and on first.

If Carl Cornejo is AI-generated, then the progress of AI in the years since he started commenting makes this kind of thing seem extremely old-fashioned and boring and I wish it was stopped. If he's a real person doing this, then it's less old-fashioned but equally boring and I wish he'd stop. While it's not a massive deal, for me at least it does make the EQD comments just a little bit tedious.

End of an era: UK of Equestria is no more

UK of Equestria is not allowed to see you again

Pretty much since the start of my time in the My Little Pony fandom in spring 2012, UK of Equestria was my go-to website. A year or so later, I was taken on as a moderator there, a role which for a while was a fairly busy one. But then social media really got going, and fewer and fewer people wanted to spend their time on a traditional forum-based website with longer-form posts. I did, and indeed one of my more pointless claims to horse fame¹ is that I have the highest post count on UK of E, but increasing numbers didn't. The site became ever quieter, though it was still there for anyone who wanted it... until now.
¹ I guess that covers all claims to horse fame, really!

Technically, UK of Equestria lives on, since as the goodbye page mentions its Discord server remains active. But, in truth, that is not at all the same thing. In particular, it lacks something that especially in the early days I really liked about UK of E: it was public. Not only could anyone making a sneering "And what do you really talk about?" simply be pointed to a link, but passers-by who might be uncertain could browse quietly and have a look. Discord has plenty of points in its favour, but as it's now walled off from casual glances it's certainly not the same UK of E any more.

Indeed, I haven't even joined the UK of Equestria Discord. I'm already a member of BritBronies, the UK PonyCon server and a small server of a couple of dozen friends, and apart from the last I don't use them much except on specific occasions such as conventions. Without a specific personal link or a binding event such as UKPC, a service like Discord simply doesn't appeal to me in the way that blog/forum-style posting does. So, after more than a decade, I am finally saying goodbye to UK of Equestria for the very last time.

I feel rather as I did a few years ago when Yahoo Groups finally closed down, and the Watership Down Yahoo Group that was in fact my first ever online fan community went with it. In that case, too, I hadn't really been active there for several years, but it was still a real wrench to see it go and to lose the archive of posts that I'd made or interacted with over the years. Still, without that, leading to furry, leading to Pony, the blog you're reading right now would never have existed either.

Goodbye, UK of Equestria, and thank you. I'll miss you.

UK PonyCon ticket details announced

Last night, UK PonyCon gave us all some ticket news. Tickets are not yet available, but we now know that you will be able to buy them from 8pm BST on Saturday 29th April. The tickets page is also now active, though again you can't actually buy any for another couple of weeks.

Tickets will be available in the same tiers as last year: Standard, Bronze, Silver and Gold. The first two will only be limited by venue capacity, but there will be just 60 Silver and a mere four Gold tickets available. Last year I believe every one of them went before long, so the demand was clearly there! Now, on to the prices. I'll stick to Adult Weekend rates to make things simpler, but one-day and child/family tickets are also on offer. No booking fees on UKPC tickets, remember!

Standard: £52 (+13% on 2022¹) – this is yer basic weekend entry ticket. It gets you a badge with basic lanyard, con book, admission to the Saturday night concert and – if you book by 1st August – a nice personalised con badge.
¹ Only fair to note that ticket prices were held at 2021 levels last year.

Bronze: £81 (+25%) – this is what I had last year. You get a nicer lanyard and badge, your name in the con book, a button badge and a £5 donation to generally awesome long-time con charity the RDA.

Silver: £150 (+25%) – the big bump up to Silver also gives you a number of exclusive (to Silver/Gold sponsors) extra goodies: a Sponsor T-shirt, tote bag, art print and mug, as well as a couple of autograph/photo tokens. RDA donation is £10.

Gold: £400 (+8%) – if you're lucky enough to get the top-line ticket, you get four tokens and also everything the Silver folks get... and a Sewpoke Britannia plushie, and a hoodie, and a ticket to an as-yet-unspecified "Afternoon Tea", which I'd guess would be a "chat with VIPs" thing.¹ RDA donation is £20.
¹ We don't yet know who these might be, but you don't have autograph tokens unless there's someone... ;)

So... thoughts? Well, I can't really ignore the price rises. I don't doubt for a moment that these are the lowest figures that UKPC could realistically charge and still run the convention properly. Their costs keep rising as is often pointed out. But however justified and inevitable it is, a 25% rise for the middle two tiers is big, well above inflation – and it will make it tough for some. Bear in mind attendees' surrounding costs (hotels, eating out, travel etc) have also risen – sometimes sharply – in the last year.

Am I going to go? I honestly don't know. You only have to look back at the "uk ponycon" tag over the years to see how much affection I have for this convention, but. For reasons that are not relevant to this blog or MLP, I have some pretty chunky costs to address this year that I didn't have in 2022. I'm also thinking that next year is the 20th anniversary of UKPC. If I end up having to choose between this year and next, then to be honest it's probably going to be 2024.

I want to be completely clear here. I think UK PonyCon is very good, I think it's very well run, I think it deserves to be very successful. That applies whether I personally make it this time or not. But I'm not here to be an ad for any event, I'm here to serve my readers, so I have to be straightforward and honest. Mind you, they had Andrea Libman last year. Actual Fluttershy. I'm not sure what, for me, could possibly top that! :P

My Little Repeats 141: "Top Bolt"

All this and a well judged flashback scene too!

S6E24: "Top Bolt"

10 Oct 2016 (Tiny Pop; 15 Oct on Discovery Family)

My original rating: ★★★★
IMDb score: 8.2

The one with Stratusburg's best sneeze

Thoughts: The end of S6 had a strange release schedule thanks to Tiny Pop here in the UK showing episodes 25, 26 and 24 (in that order) before Discovery Family had shown any of them. Tiny Pop missed out E23 entirely for cider reasons,¹ so "Top Bolt" was in fact the season finale over here! As for the episode, I really liked it in 2016 and I still really like it now. Satisfying characterisation, a nice pacey plot, plenty of action, a fine score, great dialogue, amusing jokes... you name it, really. Rainbow Dash and Twilight team up well to solve the friendship problem, with Dash's Wonderbolts perspective and Twi's classroom expertise giving a nice contrast. Sky Stinger and Vapor Trail are really solid as the very different best friends, too. Angel Wings, the Make-a-Wish Foundation-arranged OC, is a cute one-off character. We even get a montage! The episode's plot is not an especially startling storyline, but Lewis and Songco wrote it very efficiently. "Top Bolt" is just an all-round really enjoyable watch, whether at the end of the season or not. Still a four-starrer for me, and with considerable ease.
¹ It amuses me greatly that this series allows me to write that!

Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "You can call us T-Sparkz and the Dashinator!"

New rating: ★★★★

Next time, it's "To Where and Back Again, part 1". The S6 finale was a fairly divisive episode, with some people absolutely hating it. I was not among those people.

New story by me: This Lonesome Cattle Call

Happy Easter! I'm not sure which other countries do the big chocolate egg thing as much as we do, but if you do (and you eat them, and indeed you do Easter at all) I hope you have an eggcellent time with them. Anyway, some news. First of all, I hope to post the rewatch for "Top Bolt" tomorrow. About time, you may say, and you would be right! Also, there's this:

This Lonesome Cattle Call by Loganberry

The Critter Concert Classic is coming up, and who better to organise it for Fluttershy than Twilight? But there's a big problem: a distinct lack of performers. Can Applejack ride to the rescue?

Gentle fluff.

So to my great relief, I have managed to get a fic out less than a year after the last one. I wouldn't go expecting any great things from this one, as it's really just a bit of fun I kind of had to bash out after a particular line got stuck in my head. But it seems to have given some people some enjoyment, and frankly there's not much more I can ask for as a writer than that. :)

Ponyfic Roundup 437

Read it Later story count: 98 (+2)

Words read this week: 34,047

A fairly relaxed week of reading for me this time around, with only one story more than 10,000 words in length. That one is a sequel to a fic I really enjoyed, and the first is one I've heard tell of from time to time. The others were all completely new to me – in one case because it's less than a month old! Here we go:

A Most Irregular Tea Party by PresentPerfect
Queen of the Everfree by Bandy
Rotting Apples by Thunder Song
Rarity's No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day by darkcyan
The Two Unicorns by Lets Do This

★: 1 | ★★: 0 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 2 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.

Fifteen Million Little Murders Words

After almost a decade of not doing it, I have finally cobbled together a spreadsheet of all the fics I've reviewed for Ponyfic Roundup. I am not going to post it publicly, for a couple of reasons. One is that if it's just for me, I can make sudden changes and nobody (except possibly me) will complain. Another is that for cross-referencing and cross-linking purposes I need to primarily list authors' usernames as they were when reviewed, and this will mean that writers who've changed names will not have all their fics grouped together.

However, I can tell you a couple of boring stats from the spreadsheet. One is that, at the time of writing, I have reviewed 1,770 fics in the nine(ish) years since I began. And, as the subject line here hints, those fics add up to just a little over 15 million words. There are plenty of people around the fandom who've read more ponyfic than that – but for me I think it's decent going! (If you're mathematically inclined, you'll already have worked out that this means the average length of a reviewed fic is about 8,400 words.)