If there’s two things I love, it’s being a huge nerd, and having way too many concurrent projects. And on that note to I have some useless information for you! See, the thing about having like 200 blogs is that a few of them fall into inactivity after a while. I’ve also been periodically recording follower counts for all my blogs since January 2015. This is obviously back of the envelope math, but it gives me a good stab at answering a really trivial mystery:
Where are those unfollows coming from?
I’ll save you a click and just tell you straight up: on average, under normal circumstances, a dead blog loses about 0.2-0.4% of its followers per month. This is in effect the Tumblr entropy rate - people closing their accounts, people getting banned, people purging their follow lists. My dataset is imperfect and the chosen blogs aren’t huge, but it’s a useful approximation nonetheless. Well. For certain measures of useful. For the super dorky among you, the math for how I got here is below the cut.
I won’t name the blogs I’ve used for this calculation to avoid disrupting their later use for these studies, but neither of them have posted anything since about 2015. These blogs are dead af. In August 2015 they had 896 and 345 followers, and at the time of posting (February 2019) they have 787 and 290 followers. This gives an overall loss of 109 and 55, which over 42 months is about 0.28% to 0.37% loss per month. Simple enough, right? Exceeeept... We had that thing last December where Tumblr decided that banning adult content was a good idea, and a huge number of people left the site. This creates a statistical freak for us. Fortunately the granularity of my data allows me to go one better. (It turns out not to matter, but indulge my nerdery for a moment.)
My formula here is something like this:
Where f_n is the follower count at data point n, f_n-1 is the follower count on the previous data point, and t is the number of months between the two data points. Running that for all of my data for these two blogs gives me this handy dandy chart:
So now we have our background rate over time! That spike on the right of the chart is December 2018. Obviously this is a fairly small sample and I’m not sure what’s going on with June 2017, but interestingly, these two blogs’ follower loss rates track together pretty well. They’re not completely independent - they’re both blogs i’m involved with after all - but in the absence of any bump for literally years - that’s a pretty good correlation.
Anyway that’s about it! Just a random bit of useless trivia.
So, I was doing some research for a podcast I’m gonna be on later this week. I was re-reading Fallout Equestria for it, and the thought occurred to me, because it’s explicitly stated in the story that Tenpony Tower lives off of scavenged food. Could it really? This seems to be an assumption that Fallout 3 runs off of too, and I wanted to put it to the test. So below is a sprawling epic of back-of-the-envelope maths. You have been warned.
Let's abstract a pony to be roughly equivalent to a human. A human needs around 2,000 calories a day. They can survive on less but can't really do any work, such as general survival stuff like travelling and hunting and scavenging. 100g of Cap'n Crunch, which we'll use as a shorthand for Sugar Bombs, contains 400 calories. That's pretty calorific and calorific is good when you're trying to survive. Also breakfast cereals tend to be fortified with vitamins which is good for dietary balance. Cap'n Crunch doesn't have every vitamin in it, but other cereals do have wider spreads of it, so let's assume that you're not going to die of scurvy by subsisting on Sugar Bombs.
A 20oz box of Cap'n Crunch is 560 grams, so each box contains 2240 calories. That's a little bit of excess that is good for doing work. So this means that doing regular wasteland survival, you will need to eat a whole box of cereal every day. That's 365.25 boxes per year, per person. A conservative estimate of the population of Tenpony tower would be... 1,000? It's a gated community but it's also not a video game and they don't have to convey the impression of an entire settlement using like 12 people, and it’s described as a pretty large tower, so I think 1,000 is low-balling it. So that's 356,250 boxes of cereal every year. You can see where this is going, right?
If we assume that Tenpony tower has been inhabited for the last 100 years, that's 35,625,000 boxes of cereal that you need to find in the Manehattan ruins. That's with a population of 1,000 - every additional person in the stable population raises that number by another 35,625. Figures for how much cereal there is in for example, the New York metro area, is not something most sources keep track of, but we can make some educated guesses. There would be in the area enough groceries to feed a population of 20 million, BUT only for the shelf life of the produce in question. Let's say that 40% of the produce is perishables, and another 15% is contaminated by the blast and spoiled by exposure, and let's say all of the rest is Sugar Bombs.
Cap’n Crunch has a shelf life of about 2-3 months in a dry room. Let's say that because this is the future, the preservatives make it live forever, and 3 months is just how long stores will hold on to it before throwing it out. 93 days, optimistically, to make up 45% of the diet of 20 million people. The average American, according to National Geographic in 2011, eats 3,641 calories a day. That works out to 1,360,500,000 boxes of cereal.
Great you say! That's enough Cap’n Crunch to feed Tenpony Tower for 3,800 years, right? Except Tenpony Tower is hardly going to be the only settlement scavenging from the Manehattan ruins. Just from the story, we know the Manehattan area contains Gutterville, Bucklyn Cross and Friendship City, and there are raiders on top of that. To account for this, we can deduce that there is enough cereal in the Manehattan area to feed one pony for 380,000 years. There are 380,000 pony-cereal-years in Manehattan. That is a sentence that I just typed.
When you rearrange it, the maximum population you can sustain for 100 years on that amount of cereal is 38,000. This ignores population growth, and doesn't count the 100 years previous to that, which we'll just say was too dangerous for regular settlement to take place, but still might have had some small-scale scavenging. So ultimately it comes down to how big you think the population of the Manehattan ruins is. For a little perspective, 38,000 is slightly more than the number of people employed by JFK Airport. I don't think it's too hard to see that many ponies in the Manehattan metro area.
Next we have to consider the estimates for the food ratios. I pulled the 40% and 15% numbers out of my ass. The proportion of perishables is probably higher, and the proportion of food that's otherwise unusable is probably going to rise over time as more of it gets destroyed from fighting, rendered inaccessible by crumbling buildings, eaten by animals, or just plain rots on its own.
Also, not all of it is going to be breakfast cereal. (I don’t know any city where 45% of the food is breakfast cereal.) This isn’t too important, since 2000 calories of beans is as good as 2000 calories of breakfast cereal, and there should be roughly as much of it around based on how I worked out how much cereal there was, but it does bring up that there will be inefficiencies. Some days you’re just going to eat more than you need and burn through food faster than you should be to make it last. Particularly when it comes to drinks like cola and alcohol - that’s a lot of extra calories that if they were rationed could really extend survival time, but people tend not to ration drinks on their calorie content. Nor do they ration food on calorie content, really - people eat when they’re hungry. There will be other inefficiencies in terms of finding food that may counteract these, and some settlements will have other sources of food, but given the pains the story goes to to tell us how hard it is to farm, ultimately I think they balance out, though the proportions of perishables and contaminated and lost food are going to be the strongest levers on how much food there is left.
In conclusion, I think having Tenpony Tower subsisting entirely on scavenged food is vaguely plausible. To have it as portrayed in the story, as a comfortable place where the food is expensive but plentiful, is a stretch. Based on these numbers, I would say that Tenpony Tower should be in the middle of a food crisis as the stocks of remaining food run out, and they have to buy from scavengers further and further afield. After all, you can only plunder the Super Duper Mart once, and those Sugar Bombs are gone.
PAST SINS in a nutshell - Part 1: Everfree Discovery
After a bit of unexpected delay I got around to the second first chapter of the story! Let's not hang about.
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So we pick up the next day, Twilight's fine, all her friends are checking in on her, so far, so show-like. People keep talking about Twilight's ponynapping and the word just drives me up the wall. This may be personal preference but I feel like this is taking pony puns way too far - their use in the show was as a way to bring familiar places and characters into the setting by way of parody, with a few insertions into regular language to make the show's vernacular stand out. Of course the fandom gets its hands on this and takes it to its logical extreme without any regard for taste, and...
Eugh. I'm getting distracted. Let's just toss that brown M&M away.
So everyone's pretty in character so far. There's a few moments where season 2 lore like Discord and Shining Armor have been shoehorned in as afterthoughts, and a laundry list of random incidents are mentioned like Twilight's cockatrice encounter (CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW TWILIGHT VERY NEARLY DIED IN A SUPREMELY ANTICLIMACTIC WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIRST SEASON)... Actually, this brings up another issue, which I might as well talk about because not much is happening in the plot at the moment.
There is this habit that fan fiction writers have with their first long story in something like the FiM universe, and that's to mention EVERYTHING, regardless of plot relevance, or else bend the plot over backwards to mention everything. I did it with my first horse story, and I noticed it in Fallout Equestria too. It's a bit more justified in FoE than most other cases because at times it's more of a world tour than a story, and it mixes it with a lot of wartime flashbacks, but there are still times when the show reference feels excessive.
It's a bit like the use of coincidence. If you use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, that's great. If you use it to get them out of trouble, that's cheating. Similarly, if you use source reference to set up the plot of your fan fiction, that's fine - your story has a solid anchor in the source material. If you're using source reference as a solution to problems in your plot, you haven't really set up a plot of your own, and it feels cheap. Even if you're littering reference around as set dressing, it still feels cheap, because you're importing events rather than inventing them. It comes across as not understanding the characters enough to think of things they might do off screen. Pinkie's party cannon is old the second time the show uses it, so it's going to be old by the time you use it in your story.
Okay, that was a lot of ranting and not-the-plot. I need to save some of the ranting for later, otherwise this nutshell is going to be very front-heavy.
So it turns out that Twilight was carrying some books with her when she was kidnapped, including some important and irreplaceable books that she had on loan from Canterlot. She's understandably uneasy about going back into the forest after a pretty harrowing experience yesterday, but she decides to anyway, because books. She has this locator spell that's kind of like a metal detector, beeping and flashing as you get closer to the target, but it just made me think of the Coolometer from Futurama.
She gets there, she gets the books, and there's something rustling in the grass. Twilight gets jumpscared by some lightning, hears someone crying, and when she eventually checks it out, she finds a foal caught in the thorn bushes. This foal has an uncanny resemblance to Nightmare Moon, particularly the snake eyes, and Twilight joins the dots pretty quickly, so she's hesitant to help her out in case it's a trick. Eventually she decides that if it was a trap, Nightmare Moon would have sprung it by now, and takes the kid back to Ponyville.
If this story is going to be pounding the trust-your-heart-over-your-head line the whole time I'm going to be so mad.
The ritual sucked all the magic out of the air so Twilight has to walk back with the kid on her back, which leads me to another thing, but I won't talk about that unless it recurs (and also so I have things to talk about later.) However, I have my suspicions, and the reason for this decision becomes clearer in hindsight.
Twilight gets back, hiding Babby Moon (Nightmare Woon?) on her back, Spike makes some dinner, Twilight gets the kid to the bathroom and they clean up, put on some first aid, Twilight asks for some extra food claiming it was a long hike while Nightmare Woon digs into hers. Then she goes downstairs and fills Spike in on the situation. They argue a bit, with Spike wanting to inform Celestia right away, and Twilight going "noooooo", Spike eventually relents, and Twilight goes back upstairs. She asks the kid some questions about what she remembers, and then bursts into tears upon being asked her name, because she doesn't remember anything. She cries herself out, then asks if she has to leave because Twilight looked angry when she first saw her, Twilight lets her stay, and hell, even sleep in her bed.
And here, we have a lesson in how the way you tell a story is as important as the events themselves.
Everything from Twilight rescuing Babby Moon from the bush to eating is described blow-by-blow, while Twilight's conversation with Spike is glossed over. Twilight's questions to the kid are also summarised, but we drop out of fast forward in time for her to ask if she can stay and sleep in Twilight's bed. The change of narrative pace is fine: if everything is real time the story will crawl, and if everything is summarised it'll fly by too quickly. You need to change gears every now and then to keep your story moving along while still providing detail where it matters. However, where you slow down and what you mention decides what you think is important to the story.
What the decision above says to me is that Pen Stroke has decided that Twilight mommying Babby Moon is the most important thing that happened in this chapter. More important than the conversation with Spike which could have been a really interesting argument about this development, and more important than detailing the kid's fragility about not even knowing her name. What the author has decided pretty firmly so far is that "aww wook at dem don't you just want to give dem a hug" is what he wants to write about, as opposed to like, giving us insight into the conflict Twilight now feels by giving voice to her rational mind through Spike, or illustrating why her compassion is being pulled on against common sense.
I don't know yet if the rest of the story is like this, but we're in chapter one, and it's supposed to be setting the tone for the whole thing. Sometimes openings are misrepresentative (cough Skyrim), but so far I am not filled with hope that after 20 minutes of play we'll finally be let loose into the Falkreath countryside.
PAST SINS in a nutshell - Part 0: Prelude: Resurrection
So this is the first part in a rambly blog series in which I read Past Sins and see what the fuss is all about. A lot of people seem to really like this thing but everyone whose opinion I value either reviles at the mention of it (or its principal character, Nyx), or asks "wtf is Past Sins", so I really don't know what to expect. Stuff below the page break!
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So first let's look at the cover art, because this is gonna be most peoples' first impression of a story. This is the kind of cover you can only get away with in fan fiction. There's a lot going on here and some of it looks kind of spoilery. There's Nightmare Moon, Twilight about to be hanged, and some black foal being the centre of attention. Along with the tagline - "What else can you be when the world can only see a monster?" - the impression I'm getting from this is that this story is some kind of magical horse version of Afterschool Charisma (which if you're unaware is basically Clone High* played for drama rather than laughs). This has some the potential to be an interesting study on the ethics of cloning and the existential question of fate - like, if you cloned Hitler, would the clone go on to do the same things as the original?
However, we must remember that this is fan fiction, and everything that can go wrong probably will, no matter how many stars Equestria Daily gives it. So, on with the show.
*Clone High is a show with clones of historical figures in high school
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The first chapter is a prelude, which, if we're going to be pedantic it should really be a prologue, because a prelude refers to a musical form, but if music is going to be a motif then it could be kind of neat, and it's not a big deal anyway. Possible brown M&M (I'll explain that metaphor later on) but we'll move on.
It's early spring (early enough that there's still snow around) and this unicorn slathered in black grease paint is praying to the moon as he dons his Nightmare Moon cosplay. Apparently there are a bunch of cultists who want to use magic to resurrect Nightmare Moon for... shits and giggles, I guess? There's no reason given yet except "cult". Also in order to do it they abducted Twilight Sparkle and gashed her leg for blood for the ritual.
They start the ritual and magic happens all over the place. The blood drips off the dagger into the remains of Nightmare Moon (which are for some reason pieces of paper), and then the dagger gets thrown out hard enough to get stuck in a tree (that part I don't think is especially important, I just thought it was amusingly hazardous). Then SHOCK HORROR, they're raided! Celestia shows up and swipes away the cloud they're hiding under, guards turn up, everything turns into a battle and the ritual gets stopped halfway through. A bunch of the cultists get away through what looks like a teleportation spell but is later explained to be an invisibility spell, and everyone goes home. Apparently Zecora was responsible for the anonymous tip, and then a little black ball of magic from the ritual earlier just kinda pops out when nobody's looking and pulses and starts beating like a heart.
The content here isn't bad for a prologue. We have a setup for the plot and the pacing is alright. It does a pretty good job of setting up some atmosphere for some dark magic. It's not fantastically inspired, but it serves the purpose. However, what I have to take issue with, and this may just be a personal bias of mine from being spoiled by fine wordsmiths like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is the prose. The prose is so far is just... inefficient. This is a problem I had with Fallout Equestria too - it has little patterns of circular wording and unnecessarily flowery description that make me start to skim read. Like, when we have:
“She couldn’t try anything even if she wanted to. She’s got an anti-magic brace on her neck.”
... and then a couple of lines later, this:
However, not only had she been physically bound, but the metal brace secured around her neck kept her from making use of her magic.
I don't feel like my reading is making any progress. I don't need to be told things twice. When I'm told something twice I skip forward because I think I've spaced out and that I'm rereading a section. I had to use the audiobook to fix this with Fallout Equestria (also because of its length), but I'm not giving myself that option here because I need to be able to quote things.
Now, this story has no less than twenty one editors. I'm not sure what this says about the editing, whether it was too many cooks, the writer not listening, or that twenty one people just plain didn't see this issue (through ignorance or me being a prose pedant), but all of this may well be - to explain an earlier metaphor - what I call a brown M&M.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story that Van Halen used to include a clause in their rider (the contract between the band and the event organisers) that there be a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed in their changing room. While this is easily dismissed as rock stars being divas, it also serves as a test of the event organisers' attention to detail. If the band go backstage and find brown M&Ms in that bowl (or worse still no M&Ms at all), it means that the organisers missed that detail, didn't care enough to implement it, didn't take enough care when implementing it, or intentionally flouted that detail to spite the crazy rock stars. Now, the brown M&M itself is harmless - nobody in Van Halen is allergic to brown M&Ms. But its presence signals that the organiser may not have paid due attention to the rider (a large document indeed), which contains details on things like the weight of the rigging, and the pyrotechnics, and sound equipment, and stuff that if it goes wrong could stop the show or be a safety hazard, so it's important that they get everything right to the letter.
So when I talk about brown M&Ms in the story - things like calling the prologue a "Prelude" without any further sign of musical motifs, or the redundancy in the prose, or the 21 not very effective editors - I'm talking about the possibility that at some point further down the line, some characters are going to go quiet because a fuse is blown, a theme becomes dangerously detached and sprays fire everywhere, and the plot comes crashing down, killing several audience members.
Who knows. Maybe we won't find anymore of these things.
