gdp's Comments

Equestria Daily : Quick Recap of Newsy Stuff from Nuremberg Toy Fair 2015 - Including Equestria Girls 3 With Motorcycl

Mon, 9 Feb 2015 20:40:01 +0000

The joke almost writes itself: Call it "The Saddle Hackers." It can be an homage to The Side Hackers. Get it? Bad movie... and hacking is an equestrian discipline... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bip2DAKw_M

Equestria Daily : What Does Japan do With The Ponies? Have Applejack and the Beanstalk

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 19:31:07 +0000

Not entirely, no... Manga never was my bag of fermented soybean curds.

Equestria Daily : What Does Japan do With The Ponies? Have Applejack and the Beanstalk

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 19:07:15 +0000

What in the actual f**k did I just read That's three minutes I'll never get back.

Equestria Daily : Comic: MLP Eclipse Eve

Sun, 7 Dec 2014 18:02:44 +0000

What, no one else has commented yet? Ah, there's one popping up earlier. I've seen the art from this, but great to see a translation now! I'll get down to reading some of it today. And by that,I mean ALL of it.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 02:35:31 +0000

Featherprop, it's clear you don't know what you wrote. Really. That's fascinating. I mean, I typed the sentence. I constructed it. I thought about several simple instances were growth was considered detrimental and listed them. I prefaced it with "Not all growth is good," not "We must destroy what we disapprove of." And yet, you are telling me what I really was thinking was, "Let's eliminate anything to do with Equestria Girls." If you had just said, "I didn't mean I want it destroyed or shut down," instead of, "OMG, how dare you tell me I'm advocating mass killings?!" I... never mentioned mass killings. I used a silly construction, "Hitlerian word-jihad" to mean "book burning," which you had already leapt to. No, no mass killings for me. You're the one who's been focused on the burning of books and now, it seems, genocide. Frankly, I didn't think I NEEDED to say I didn't want it destroyed, not after I said I had a lot of respect for how hard the creators worked on it. I thought it was apparent I wasn't advocating destruction of their work when I said I respected their efforts. I'm sorry you didn't see it that way, but it's not because I surrounded it with exhortations to scale the walls at DHX and drag all the servers into the parking lot in preparation for burning. **NOTE: FEATHERPROP DOES NOT ADVOCATE THE DESTRUCTION OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL THAT PERTAINS TO EQUESTRIA, GIRLS, OR ANY COMBMINATION THEREOF** I'm quite self-aware. I also don't like letting things go, but I'm not the one who's gone wholesale nutjob here telling someone else that they are advocating destroying an entire body of work. Like I said before, whatever, dude. This has been an illuminating exchange, I'll say that much.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 23:25:11 +0000

For fuck's sake, no, I didn't discuss a garden or destroying writing. I talked about situations where some kinds of growth are not desired. End of discussion. The rest of it is what you're projecting into what I've written. Do I wish they'd never gotten the idea for it? Yes. That's a far cry from "I want this eradicated." God, you just can't let this go, can you? You keep on trying to tell me what I'm thinking and what I meant with the words I wrote. I'm sorry, but that just isn't how it works.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:48:48 +0000

I think you're really reaching with the Demolished Man bit, if you're talking about the removal of SS's megalomania. It's nearly identical to the end of the series pilot... much like the rest of the movie closely follows the path of the pilot episodes. Angry villain, making friends, Sailor Moon scene, rainbow blast, evil stripped away. There's no need to go looking further than that- I mean, they're not marketing to middle-aged fans of Cold War science fiction, are they? What makes more sense-- that they intended to create a parallel to FiM or to a book that's going to be virtually unknown to the target audience?

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 17:51:35 +0000

You "wouldn't recommend t." Gotcha. What will you do- reveal my inner Guy Montag to me and cause me to break down in anguish at the monster I have become? I have to say , this is one of the strangest exchanges I've had on EqD, where someone equates a simple phrase with fascist tendencies. And what is with your obsession with the book burning/"literary purge?" Why not just ASK what I meant, in which case I could explain (since you seem to ignore the "prune trees" portion of my comment) that NOT ALL GROWTH IS CONSIDERED GOOD. Period, end stop. When you have to look professional for work, beard stubble is bad, so we shave. When we get a cut, bacterial growth and infection is bad, so we treat it with peroxide. Or is that a bad thing to do? For just a moment stop and consider, just for a moment, that maybe I DON'T want to burn down entire libraries, because you sound kind of crazy. For the record, I mean that I do not see EqG as a good sort of growth for the franchise. I think it gets away from the ideals and spirit of the original show. That's it, man. That's all I meant. You could have asked, instead of going fruitcake.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 18:49:37 +0000

"Plucking weeds" means burning books. Right. I didn't go Godwin, you did. You may not want to acknowledge it, but that's your call. Whatever, dude.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:58:33 +0000

The reason the second movie exists is simple: Someone at Hasbro decided it would sell more toys, which is the same reason FiM is still being made. I'm not a fan of EqG, but we need to keep some perspective on this-- the first movie obviously created enough interest and there was enough demand for the toys to put money into a second (and whatever else comes along). Hasbro is a business, and their business is selling plastic toys to kids and to their parents. As much as we might not like elements of these movies, it's not bronies that caused them to be made; it was the fact that Hasbro saw a marketing opportunity and chose to ask DHX to produce something to drive sales. How closely Hasbro held the reins, we don't know. What they asked for exactly, we don't know. What we do know is that they see a net benefit from making these movies. If anything, they should remind us that we were lucky to get such a great show in FiM, and that we should be very supportive of the people who pushed it forward, the ones who created the content, and the ones who made the decision to give them greater control over the content than many other toy-line cartoons have gotten. I'm not going to go see this movie. If there are more of them, or even a series, I'm not going to watch them either. It doesn't appeal to me. But at the same time, I don't want to see DHX or Hasbro get slagged for making decisions that are financially prudent. They all have jobs to do, and you shouldn't knock people for doing their jobs well.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:45:14 +0000

>Do we burn books too Please. I don't know what you're even trying to say there. I express disappointment and you try to conflate that with Hitlerian word-jihad? Or is it simply an attempt to delegitimize my opinion? When I say "pseudocool" I'm not talking about any of the examples you try to serve up- I'm talking about Rainbow playing a guitar and singing about being awesome or a set of villains who project sass and snark. When I was in high school, that was what the kids at the top of the food chain did (being snarky, not singing about how awesome they are. That song ends up being self-parody). When I say "pseudocool" i mean marketing's presentation of an attitude as cool to sell a product, as opposed to something that is "cool" on it's own- the music of a good garage band, the way a friend sticks forks in the ceiling of the lunchroom, the way you "accidentally" break a teacher's concentration and get away with it. THAT stuff was cool because it was transgressive in a minor way or evinced a style of it's own rather than being designed to sell stuff. By zeroing in on Lyra and BonBon, are you trying to claim Hasbro is using implied lesbianism to sell things to teens? Because I was talking about marketing efforts, not interpretations of what characters are doing on- or off-screen. It's in a high school (check) with bitchy villains (check) and there's a contest (check). There's a nice guy who might be a boyfriend (check) and the nice girl who gets all shy and flustered around him (check) and in the end she and her friends lose the contest (check, maybe) but defeat the villains (check). So I don't care about smiling pastel girls, or saw-playing, or any hint of lesbianism, or the slumber party, because that wasn't what I was talking about. FiM was/is "cool" because it happily sidestepped some of the usual toy-selling conventions and the creator said "Cartoons for girls don't have to be second-rate or just about girly things." And then she went and made a cartoon that didn't avoid feminine elements, but wasn't beholden to them either. THAT is cool. To me, a story that revolves around the small world of a prototypical high school and caricatures of the sorts of people who might inhabit it ("The Eco-Kids") is not cool-- it's asking a studio to check boxes on a marketing plan. The fact that we're discussing this "under the image of a teenage character playing a saw in front of her entire school" is more emblematic of the confused nature of EqG- trying to hang on to the elements that have made FiM so well-liked while trying to sell products to a demographic that's moving away from FiM precisely because it's for little kids (KIDS, not girls) and therefore "not cool." Derpy isn't celebrating the coolness of playing a saw. she's in there because the animators like her and fans like her and at the same time she can be the butt of a gentle joke. I mean, really- how many saw-playing teens have enjoyed widespread popularity at their schools? You know and I know it's a "Womp womp" moment- a quick laugh, and on to the next act that's not going to end up in the finals of the contest. "Book burning." Do you not see how ridiculous that sounds? For Pete's sake, all I said was I found the setting trite and uninteresting. How does expressing disappointment equate to the deliberate destruction of knowledge? I know the staff has worked hard on this; they are rightfully proud of their efforts, but that doesn't mean I am obligated to like it, cheer for it, or promote it. I don't think it stacks up to FiM. I think they've been handed a very hard task, and likely were asked to try to achieve goals that may be mutually exclusive ("Compete with Monster High, but make it like Friendship is Magic!"), and this is their best effort to satisfy their client AND their professional pride. I respect them for that. I respect them for taking a tough assignment and trying to make it fun and interesting not just for the intended market, but for others who were never foreseen. It doesn't work for me, but that doesn't mean I'm not impressed. I fervently hope they have years and years of good work to come from Hasbro, but at the same time I deeply wish Hasbro would ask them to develop the world of FiM more, rather than transplanting the characters into the small and limited world of a high school. You want to disagree, that's fine, but please leave the insults out of it. I didn't do you the disservice of calling you a Hasdrone, because I find that sort of shit offensive. You have your opinion, and you look for ways to back it up. I have mine, and I do the same. I didn't make implications about your intellect because I don't think you're stupid or feel the need to try and delegitimize you.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:59:53 +0000

Not all growth is good; we prune trees and pluck weeds. Saving worlds can be interesting or trite. To me, putting it in the vehicle of a BOTB in a world where the creators are trying to straddle the fantasy/whimsy of FiM and the pseudocool deemed necessary to market to the teen segment isn't innovative, it's awkward. I hate feeling this way, because I adore what they achieved in FiM.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:01:18 +0000

Well, had I beein in the business of making predictions, I would have said Twilight and the villains would make it to the finals of the battle, it would be dramatic, and Twilight's side would win in the end. It wouldn't be dramatic because it's not new and exciting; the people who are enthusiastic had pie-in-the-sky ideas that it would somehow transcend what seemed like an obvious setup and blow us away with it's innovation. From the start, though, I fully expected it to follow the usual BOTB script with some minor tangents that are relevant to the franchise. There's a lot of cameos and shout-outs-- those are nearly impossible to predict the specifics of. However, since I've read through a thread that has highly likely spoilers, I can't make any claims to prescience now, of course. All I can say is that what I've learned bears out the expectations I had-- to my mind, it strays farther from the charming world of FiM that drew me into the fandom.

Equestria Daily : Warning: Loads of Rainbow Rocks Spoilers Popping Up (And Spoilers Below the Break)

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 06:37:25 +0000

Combined with the storyline seeming to hew closely to the first movie/pilot: Sudden rainbow zap of the villains saving the day, and now it's time to write letters about friendship. For all the people excited over short inserts of their pet character, I'm disappointed by the lack of unique storytelling-- we have a rather cliche setup, a pretty standard wrap-up, and what I see as a wide-open door to have interaction between EqG and FiM. Yes, I know, it's been said that it won't happen. We were also told that EqG was a standalone one-shot... and here we are, the second movie's almost out, with hints of a spinoff series.

Equestria Daily : The "Best Worst Song Ever" on It's Way in Rainbow Rocks

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 01:06:35 +0000

I'd respectfully disagree; giving the audience exactly what they want is almost a guaranteed ticket to mediocrity. That's a large part of why the first one was painful. Unlike the sly adult-oriented inclusions of the first and second seasons, the references were blatant and unartful, sometimes jarring. Easy-to-spot shout-outs may excite some but they're just annoying to people who expected that a bigger budget and longer format would lead to better storytelling. ... I had more, but what I really should be saying is, even though I'm really not a fan of the entire EqG thing, I hope you can enjoy it. I'd rather it not have come to exist, but it's good that people will appreciate the time and effort the staff put into making it, and for their sake I hope there are people out there to say "thank you."

Equestria Daily : The "Best Worst Song Ever" on It's Way in Rainbow Rocks

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:42:01 +0000

I don't think you can use that as an excuse for it. FiM is marketed towards little girls and the music is pretty dang good, much better than what is on the album that's been released. Now, you're right- they aren't going to change it just because we think it's not very good.

Equestria Daily : Full Writing Staff Hinted at By Meghan McCarthy for Season 5

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 02:56:41 +0000

Not sure if you're trying to snark, but I'll risk staying the obvious and say "Again, not ponies. :)" 'Sides, I don't want to obsess, I just want to see new pony content. EqG isn't pony for several reasons, and while Grab Falls is a great show, it's not the same. But thanks for trying.

Equestria Daily : Full Writing Staff Hinted at By Meghan McCarthy for Season 5

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 05:05:15 +0000

Yes, but we're waiting for actual pony content. With, you know, ponies.

Equestria Daily : Cleaner Versions of Equestria Girls Dolls Also Spotted in the Brazilian Magazine

Wed, 3 Sep 2014 02:30:48 +0000

I can see the limbs look even more twig-like. Are the torsos even shorter? If this keeps up, soon they'll be a head on a set of legs...

Equestria Daily : Cleaner Versions of Equestria Girls Dolls Also Spotted in the Brazilian Magazine

Wed, 3 Sep 2014 02:28:01 +0000

I agree. I feel that there's an institutional preference for human-shaped toys, as if those charged with marketing them feel more familiar with selling them.