Shameless self-promotion department, belated

I meant to post this a few days ago, but because I'm me I forgot. Anyway, my minific "The Villain Contest", which was originally published in the UK PonyCon 2016 con book, got a Highly Recommended from Present Perfect the other day! A nice surprise, and one that pleased me both because it was nice to have something in actual print, and because I still rather like the piece all these years on. :)

Ponyfic Roundup 463

Read it Later story count: 95 (+1)

Words read this week: 8,616

This week, in "Logan is not American, you know", a reminder that what I mean by "brackets" are these things: ( ). These – [ ] – are specifically "square brackets" to me. While we do use the term "parentheses", doing that in colloquial British English sounds overly formal and a little bit affected. And now on to more interesting matters. Three fics today, all of them pretty short as I'm not yet up to longer reads:

Heartstrings by evelili (review requested by author)
Amber Hearts by Blondlionezel
Sweetie Ban by Casketbase77

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

Looking back at Sunset's Sales Snag

This is an idea I nabbed from hawthornbunny. Well, I don't exactly expect Hawthorn is the only person to do this, but still. Pick a fic I wrote and write a little bit about it. I couldn't decide which story to choose, so I let the RNG take the strain. And the first on the block is... drumroll, maestro, please... Sunset's Sales Snag. Whew, an interesting one to start with!

SSS is one of my most poorly received fics, with a thumbscore of +18/-7 as I type this and a total of 446 views – not a high total for a story published more than seven years ago. Do I think it's that bad? Well, no. I wouldn't call it one of my finest achievements, but that's another matter. I'm fairly sure I know the biggest reason for all those downvotes, and I'll get back to that.

The fic was written, as it says in the longdesc, as a "bit of silly fluff for Sunset Shimmer Day". On those terms, I think it does all right. Sunset (the normal EqG version) is now 21 and in a dead-end sales job for a cake firm. This is just a convenient setup for some silly – and, by my standards, slightly innuendo-laden – dialogue between her and the slightly creepy man who answers the door.

It's a comedy of misunderstanding. The man believes that a young woman with a name like Sunset Shimmer must surely be involved in a rather... particular branch of the entertainment industry. When she reluctantly reveals she works for the Lyra Heartstrings Company the man feels vindicated. Sunset, meanwhile, is constantly having to bite back sarcastic responses.

What is bad about this fic is that it has a very, very weak ending. It's a one-line gag, and not even a particularly funny one-line gag. I've written feghoots with much better finishes. (As an early Fimfiction comment suggests, it wasn't even my first published version of said last line.) If that had been the reason for those downvotes, I could have had few complaints.

Sadly, the reason is duller: the [Sex] tag. These warning tags were new at the time, and I wasn't sure whether a fic with no actual sex but with significant innuendo needed one. I played it cautious and put one on the fic. Then, of course, a bunch of readers who'd loaded up SSS expecting hot Sunset clop action got annoyed when there wasn't any. I removed the tag, but too late. Oh well.

The humour in this story reminds me a bit of my earlier Kicking Back, which is probably a slightly better fic and is also probably the one to pick if you just want to read one of my stories in this mould. Still, reading the story again now, I still get a few smiles out of it. Even from the utterly shameless "Cakes. Why did it have to be cakes?" line I gave to Sunset

Meta post regarding Ponyfic Roundup

I'm finally recovering from Covid now, but I don't want to rush things. As such, I'll be splitting the next Roundup in two. I had planned to review five stories this week, as you can see at the end of the last PR, but that won't now happen. Instead I'll cover three, with another three next week. How does that work? Well, I have a story whose author requested a review,¹ and I'll cover that one this time with a couple of the original list. Then the rest of the list the week after.
¹ Heartstrings by evelili

This does mean I'm not going to manage the Nightmare Night themed Roundup I'd been vaguely thinking about, but such is life I'm afraid. I do still plan to get to the Thousand Words winners, though. Eventually...

Sethisto's EQD editorial on AI art

This turned out to be a very interesting read, which is why I'm writing about it here, albeit saddled with a ridiculously long headline, to wit: The Huge Struggle of Pony Posting in an Era of AI Art, Policing Fake "Artists", and Dealing With the POWER of DALL-E 3. Aaaand breathe. What's particularly interesting about the article is that it recognises just how much AI art has changed in the last year, showing some really quite startling examples. If you remember the Twilight Pokéball stuff from 2022, that's totally old hat now.

As Seth says, it's no longer possible just to assume that AI-created pieces will all have an instantly recognisable style or sheen to them. That was true in 2022: it isn't (at least, isn't necessarily) true any more. Many of the kinds of silly little mistakes it still produces are a) often skimmed over by viewers, and b) also quite often produced by human artists. Plus, as he also says, dishonesty exists in this fandom too: he says there's an AI-created piece posing as a human-created one in his inbox as he types.

The comments section on the EQD post is better than I'd expected too, with many posters coming to the conclusion that the time when you could realistically say, "AI must be kept out of art, full stop" might well already be over. As one person points out, Adobe is powering ahead with AI-enabling Photoshop, and it's not going to be the only graphics software package to do that. I assume, then, that soon just about everyone making computer art will be using AI somewhere along the way unless they put considerable effort into not doing so.

I'm too unwell still to add much of my own, but I did want to flag up the EQD piece as being something worth your time to read.

Thank you, Covid, thank you so very much

Apologies for this, but I'm afraid there's likely to be another delay in updates here for a while. I've acquired Covid, and while I don't feel impossibly ill I really am not currently in a fit state to do updates much longer than this one. I think the most likely thing is for me to delay everything by a week – so no Ponyfic Roundup this coming Wednesday, then the week after that I'll do the one I was hoping to do this time. It all depends on my state of health, of course. Really rather annoying that I get to stay at home but can't cope with using all that time to read!

Record charity total from UK PonyCon!

Per the UK PonyCon Discord, last-minute donations have increased the total raised for the RDA to...

£12,124

This is slightly more than last year, and in fact the highest one-year total ever raised by UKPC. Huzzah! :D