AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 339
ARES III SOL 334
So, yesterday we talked about Rainbow Dash. Who should we tell stories about today? Twilight Sparkle?
Mark’s heard plenty about Twilight Sparkle. Let’s pick someone else.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right… what about Fluttershy? We haven’t talked about her much.
No, you haven’t. You hardly even mention her.
Well, that’s because Fluttershy has the least to do with our space program. You see, Twilight Sparkle got all her closest friends to help when the pony space program began.
But she thought that only pegasuses could be good pilots, so she made Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy her pilot candidates. She wouldn’t even consider me, which is why I ended up working with the changelings.
Worked out fine for us!
Anyway, Rainbow Dash is a born flier. Fluttershy isn’t. In fact, she’s one of the weakest and most timid fliers ever. They ended up using her entirely for ground and equipment tests. And when Flight Five almost crashed, she bowed out completely for a couple of years. She finally went up once for a day-trip to the space station to make sure some lab rats were doing well, but that was less than a year before we left, and she came right back down next day.
She almost was on our flight. Princess Twilight wanted unicorn, pegasus, earth pony on flight. But Fluttershy… how to say…
Fluttershy takes care of a lot of animals. They really depend on her. She can talk with them. She hates to be away for very long. It would have been tragic if she’d been with us.
Yeah. So I here and not her. Fluttershy rotten flier, but much better medic.
Wait a minute. Why was it important to have one each of all kinds of pony? Is there some sort of prejudice involved?
Prejudice? Hm… well, in a way, yes. The tribes intermarried after pony land was founded, and I know of an earth pony couple whose children are a pegasus and a unicorn, so it’s not like they’re at war. But there’s still a major cultural gap. A lot of towns are predominantly one tribe or another. And nobody likes it when ponies like them are left out of something really big. So it’s always important to remind ponies that we’re united, working together, all as equals.
Starlight, can we get this back to Fluttershy?
Oh, right! Anyway, that’s why you haven’t heard much about Fluttershy. Scared of heights, hates to fly, can’t talk to strangers, but she absolutely loves animals.
And she most beautiful pegasus anyone knows. Makes me feel like goose chick beside her, and I’m hot.
Oh yeah! There was this time Fluttershy had to ask ponies to help look after her animals because she’d got dragged into a… a job, I guess the word is? Wearing clothes and having pictures and, um, stuff for sell thing…
Advertising? Commercials? Wait, you mean she was a model?
From what I hear, for a couple of months she was the model.
Yeah! She offered to help Rarity by wearing clothes she made for our best picture-taker-
Photographer.
- and the what-you-said ignored the clothes and dragged Fluttershy off to, um, Manehattan?
Hat Hair City. I think.
Anyway, she was on everything- magazines, posters, newspapers, even banners pegasuses towed! Everybody wanted to see her, to meet her, to get her to help sell their stuff!
And a painfully shy pony did all this?
Oh yes! And she HATED it. Totally hated every second of it.
You see, Fluttershy thought Rarity would be sad if she didn’t use the chance to become rich and famous. And Rarity was jealous as a cat about it, because she wanted to be where Fluttershy was, but she didn’t say anything because she wanted Fluttershy to be happy. She thought Fluttershy was lucky, but Fluttershy was miserable and wanted out, and it took forever before they actually talked to each other about it.
Of course, once Fluttershy found out that Rarity only wanted her to be a model because she thought she’d love being a model, she quit right on the spot! And ever since, the only times she lets her picture be taken is when she’s modeling Rarity’s clothes. But she was the first of Twilight’s friends to get really famous.
Who cares about pony famous? Why don’t you tell about the important stuff? This is Fluttershy. She so scary she makes dragons cry!
What? I’m sorry, but what?
I hear this from cousin. This dragon, not going to say name, you can’t pronounce it, he moved his hoard and all into a cave in pony lands. Way up on top of a mountain, so he thought, no pony going to bug me here. And he settled in for a nap, might last a year or three, he thought, no trouble to nobody.
But that dragon spread smoke all over middle of Pony-land!
Yeah, he snored. But he didn’t know that. Nobody tell you these things, you know? Anyway, next thing he knows, one pony after another keeps waking him up. One of them tried to steal some of his hoard, and another kicked him right in the snout. Well, you get tired of that real quick. So there he was, about to kick them all off the mountain-
Wait a minute. This was Twilight Sparkle and her friends, right? Princess Twilight Sparkle?
Guess so. Story I heard didn’t name anyone but Fluttershy.
It was. But Twilight was only a unicorn then, not a princess. A pretty strong unicorn, but not an alicorn.
Yeah, anyway, alla sudden there’s this little yellow thing in front of his face, and then all he see are these two angry eyes. And by the time the pony was done talking he was crying in shame. Dragon almost as big as the Hab, crying and bawling like a hatchling, all because of one pony.
So he pack up and moved back where he came from, and he told other dragons. Word got around. Don't mess with yellow pegasus with pink hair.
And I tell you that story so I could tell this one.
Uh-oh.
One of those, huh?
Shut up. After Rainbow Dash first walk in space, Twilight Sparkle ask all astronauts come to her space center to train for space walk. I was only astronaut for dragon space program, so my boss order me to go. About twenty astronauts there, all different species, ponies and changelings and griffon and I don’t know names. And me.
Train for EVA is hard, you know that. I had trouble. Kept get turned around. Train building takes away, um, things you look at to tell you where you are and where you going.
Reference points.
Huh?
Reference points. A point you can refer to that tells you where you are.
Thought reference was when boss calls your friend, says, What kind of worker is he? It a thing Jim Rockford don't have.
It has a lot of meanings.
Dumb language. Anyway, real easy to get mixed up. I’m fail test after test. And I’m thinking, “Don’t wanna be here anyway, just give up, maybe boss will let me quit this time.” But don’t wanna be quitter or failer either.
Then this pony I don’t know talks to me. Real quiet voice, almost whisper. Asks me what’s wrong. I say get lost, but she asks again. So I say, I’m no good at spacewalk. And she looks me in the eyes and says, “I know it’s hard, but I believe a smart dragon like you can do anything he sets his mind to.”
That sounds like Fluttershy, all right. And a very good translation, Fireball.
No way! I was there too, and I never saw her!
I didn’t see her there either.
It was the first time she came back to the space center since Flight Five. She was really pushing herself. We found her on her side, rigid, right outside the EVA training building. We took her to the infirmary until she woke up, and then we had a couple of pegasi fly her home. She wasn't there half a day. The next time she set hoof on a space center grounds after that was when she visited you lot for the joint development of… of the first successful space probe.
Yeah yeah yeah, listen. Anyone else, especially any pony else, I blow it off. But when she said it, it felt like she was right. I knew she was right. When she look you in the eyes, it's like... well... no pony, no dragon. Just soul and soul. Sounds mushy, but that's how it is. She told me a couple hints to do better- one helped, other two didn’t- and then wished me luck, walked away.
Well, that explains the unconscious part. She must have had a bad reaction from meeting you.
Not fair to insult me, boss pony.
No, it’s not an insult. Didn’t you know? Fluttershy is scared to death of dragons.
That’s right. Phobic, except for Spike. Twilight and her friends dragged Fluttershy up every inch of that mountain to face your dragon friend-of-a-friend. Add to that her normal social anxiety and her night terrors about Flight Five… you say she spoke to you first? You didn’t say hello to her or anything?
I didn’t even see until she spoke, and then- whoa! Right there in front of me. And you say she afraid of dragons?
Like some ponies are afraid of heights, or shadows, or the number five. Absolutely involuntary. Though come to think of it, Fluttershy is also afraid of heights… and shadows… don’t know about the number five, though.
That really weird, even by pony standard.
I know- Fluttershy’s got all these fears, but she loves even the biggest, wildest animals. I mean, she even made friends with Chaos!
Aren’t you Chaos’s friend too?
In a way, I guess. But Fluttershy was his first and closest friend.
I heard she even stared down a, a, I forgot the word, chicken-snake-thing! Like a basilisk, only not! Instead of turning to stone, she made it release her friends that it had turned to stone!
What? Are you saying she stared down a cockatrice?
That’s the word! And that’s what I heard from Kevin!
Who’s Kevin?
Oops! I wasn’t supposed to say that. Forget that name. There is no such changeling as Kevin.
You can’t give us that! Tell!
No, seriously, everybody, let it go. The maddest I ever saw Chrysalis was when I asked her who Kevin was. Let’s not get Dragonfly in trouble.
Changeling Chrysalis hates that much? I wanna meet.
Guys, please, who is this Fatass you’re talking about?
Oh, Mark…
Ugh, no. Please, Glob, no.
Actually, I'm invoking Grod too here. The purple is impossible to read, and the rest makes my eyes bleed.
Poor eyesight + dark mode makes most of this unreadable. Not to mention how it would be for someone actually using accessibility features to read (screen readers, etc).
I'm going to have to say your experiment is a resounding failure. While an inspired choice as to who was saying what, it takes too long to tell whose who, other than Mark, and all the different colors make this not only a chore to read, but painful to read as well.
Interesting concept for a chapter. Please don't do it again.
Way too many shifts of color/characters to follow and still enjoy reading it, since you need to devote a small amount of time every time a different character speaks to determine who is saying what based on color alone.
That said, I think this format could work, just not with all six of them at once; 4 feels like a good number to me. If they ever come up with a way to simultaneously comunicate between Mars, NASA, ESA, and Hermes, I think this could be a decent format to use
Edit: Oh God, you removed the color without changing the text. You're a monster.
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...or, for that matter, if I want to use the download functionality to read it on my monochrome eReader. (I have a Sony PRS-505. My brother has a much newer but still monochrome Kobo device.)
...or my quotes bin. It normalizes formatting on submitted chunks of text and discards "semantically-irrelevant presentational markup" (anything which can only be represented via style or class attributes or the old font tag, such as changing colors or font sizes) and markup which shouldn't show up in a quote box anyway for structural or security reasons.
(So, basically, the same sort of things BBcode allows, except the sanitizer strips markup for headings, colors, custom fonts, media embeds, spoilering, and possibly links... it's been a while since I touched that code and my memory's a little hazy.)
I second Damaged on this one... You crashed and burned like Flight Five on this experiment. I use dark mode+changeling setting (aka the green-on-black) and where as it brightens almost all the text colors, Dragonfly's is still painful.
I use the dark theme, and the blue text is impossible to read.
9031692 Indeed. Text-To-Speech is bad enough on fimfic (no changes in tone for dialogue/stress changes), but this is going to make anyone trying to use that have even less chance of following along.
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Ha HA! The next stage in our ongoing war to crush the Darksiders begins! HUZZAH!
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Personally, I'm most annoyed that you can't control the talking speed of text-to-speech here, or at least, no method that I've discovered.
9031677
Got to agree here... the dark purple is next to impossible to read when in night mode... though the rest isn't too bad except... It took me basically most of the chapter to figure who was talking!!!!! Bad.
I hate stories that do this... Its lazy, lazy, lazy. Its okay to do this with songs so as to not break up the flow of the lyrics when(for example) switching to different singers mid song but not in normal conversation.
I get that you're trying to avoid both talking heads and "'so-and-so said', all the time", but my take is that the latter is preferable to this. It is a clever idea that worked to disencumber the song(s), but for standard storytelling it doesn't fit so well.
I'll pitch in and say this would be unreadable on an E-reader too. All the colored text would be roughly the same grey. It's one reason I'm not fond of colored text in stories, and makes it difficult to preserve my favorites.
Not intolerable. I don't hate font colors changing as long as they aren't too bright or too dark.
But normal formatting is preferred.
Another no vote here!
It's hard enough to read with dark mode, let alone the added difficulty for those who're colorblind.
Okay, I'll fix it, but it'll have to be tomorrow, and it means the next story subject will have to be Applejack... because only Starlight and Cherry will have much to say about her, so it'll be short.
"about to kick them all of the mountain"
"about to kick them all off the mountain"?
(I decided not to go so far as to try and duplicate the color in the quote, sorry.)
if i remember, "Kevin" is the unofficial fan-given name for that Changeling that briefly appeared in "slice of life". Chrysalis considers him a traitor.
Going to agree I didn’t like the colors.
On the content of the chapter though, definitely fun to hear Fluttershy’s reputation among the dragons and just hear the crew talking.
Not sure how much it'll help, but the book (I think) is still freely, non-illegally downloadable from... I can't seem to find it anymore, I know I got a copy of it at one point, think it was after buying the physical book to boot.
9031759 No, not The Martian... the next book the crew is going to read together, so I can re-read it and have it handy for specific places where the plot or characters will resonate with one or more of our castaways.
Color tags are now stripped out, or should be. That's the easy bit. Adding quotes, attribution, and minor activity is a lot more work.
9031764 You missed a red tag somewhere.
Kevin? Are you talking about Sketchy the Changeling's cousin?
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Ah... considering how much I like reading, I needed to do so better.
So Spitfire thinks she's hot? Took a couple of seconds to figure out.
I'm n the fence as to the colored text.
that last park was gold!
Ponies have pentaphobia?
New headcanon accepted.
9030318
What is this, reverse psychology shipping?
Marks attempts to speak Equestrian are always amusing.
9031069
Darn. I wanted to be smart.
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Wait, what!? I totally missed that on my first reading... stupid colored text... I'm really curious as to the reason for five? Is it some left over thing from before the unification of the tribes?( a slight against the unicorn mayhaps?) Or is this similar to the IRL problem of the number 4 in Asia?
I'm reading it, no colored text, and it seems fine. Confession: I did a chapter of Traveling Tutor with colored text, messed with it for over a week and wound up pulling the color tags. Found it it worked better un-colorized. It does make you focus on characterization in words, though.
Dang. You're in KC. I'm 2.5 hours away, and can't find an excuse to go up just to say "Hi, glad to see you, bye now." Darnit.
Hmm, colors aside ( by the time I saw it most of those were gone), I don't think this needs all that added. Sure, you wouldn't want to tell the whole story in this stream of consciousness sort of approach, but I think for these types of 'characters telling stories' chapters, it sort of works.
You can pretty much tell who's talking anyway, especially with the varying skill levels of their English. It's an interesting chance of pace for these sorts of 'filler' chapters. I say keep as is... sans the colors anyway. Don't even need 'em.
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I read this chapter without the color. I agree the color would have been painful to look at. It worked for the song but an entire chapter not so much.
I will, however, disagree with the majority and say that I rather enjoyed the dialog-only writing. I wouldn't want to read everything that way, but requiring me to pay attention to follow who was saying what was refreshing.
My vote is to leave it as uncolored and dialog-only.
On the subject of "said."
Only when you draw attention to said do most readers notice said.
Replacing said with other words such as spoke, uttered, delcared, stated, wheedled, pontificated, whined, etc... interrupts the flow of dialogue and narration. It is much better to describe the speaker's physical posture, expression, gestures, and actions in detail, but stick to simply said when you follow these with spoken word.
The only time you ought to use a word other than said to indicate dialogue is when the word is itself a modified way of speaking, such as shout, yell, mutter, mumble, whisper... and others like that.
The humble said, when placed properly, is content to point you to the speaker and slip quietly into the shadows until such time as it is needed again. It needs no introduction or bombastic flair, no pomp or red carpet.
Said simply does its job, perfectly, every time, when it is asked to do so. As does a period, or quotation mark, or question mark... in fact, said performs much the same function as punctuation.
I read it without colors and it felt fine. So i dunno about failure.
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Bump you up the comment section
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I thought it was Steve?
I also read this without the colors and liked it. I've seen this style used before and I think it works pretty well when the focus is solely on the dialogue. The varying levels of English mastery really helps to distinguish the characters and makes it work here.
Experiment, huh? Thought you were just too rushed to write it proper, and this was a early draft.
Well, good thing you try new things. And it was readable. But yeah, there is a reason why we need to be told who says what.
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Saidism is a bit of a polarizing subject in the literary world. A lot of people swear by the word said whereas others insist that it is a stifling limit and seeing it repeated over and over again irks them. There are alternatives to said for a reason, and I tend to agree with the latter group.
Of course, when it comes to writing, I try to strike a balance of varied sentence structures, character poses and actions in-between dialogue, as well as the use of said and the many forms of saidism.
Really, the one and only time that you are obligated to stick with said is in journalism. I know that a lot of authors insist on sticking to the word, but they're really asking novice writers to avoid using saidisms in simple, non-varied dialogue. As it is with many things in life, it's all about finding the right balance.
Missed the coloured text thing, but given thre are only so many, very few, high contrasting luminance and colour shades available, theres usually very few variations you can try at once.
Worst I saw was someone using Full White/Bright against a normal White background.
Ah darn, I missed the colored text. That would have been cool to see. I don't suppose anyone saved a copy? I like instantly knowing who's speaking, instead of having to think and guess based on their phrasing and words.
Another vote here for leaving this chapter as it is - I read it without the coloured text, and was surprised to see your edit branding it a failure (then read the comments and found it was the colouring you were referring to). So I think it's good as dialogue-only, and it was obvious who was talking any time it really mattered.
Wouldn't want many others like this, but I think this is fine.
I know you're stuck for filler, but I do slightly question the idea of the cast discussing FIM episodes, as it's stuff we've already seen, so it's not as novel as them just talking about other things.
Didn't see the colours, seems fine as it is.
Hmm, maybe Kevin knocked someone up and then ran away, that's why she's so angry. :B
The image of a completely rigid from fear Fluttershy being carried around always cracks me up.
Even without the colors it's pretty easy to tell who's talking tbh.
This story needs Kevin now. And now the important part. Who is Kevin? On a more serious note, we really need more Changeling Space Program.
I read it without the colours and it seemed fine.
9031925 Why five? Because not thirteen. I considered four for the reasons mentioned, but decided against it because ponies being afraid of four, though not impossible, would be similar to a human fearing the numbers 10 or 20.
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here ya go...
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mylittleponyccg/images/3/3e/HighMagic_084.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151113151354
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If you haven't already, you might consider labeling the chapters as transcripts of Hab audio logs; that way you could just put the names in front, like the telegraph or text communications.