Twilight knocked on Pinkie's bedroom door as she entered. "Pinkie Pie, are you here?"
A rustle came from the closet, moments before Pinkie sprung out of it doing cartwheels. She came to a stop at the last moment, ending up nose-to-nose with Twilight.
"Hi, Twilight, what's up?"
Twilight blinked before pointing up at the title. "I was wondering if you knew anything about that?"
"Oh!" Pinkie gasped "Is the story really gonna explode?"
"Okay. You just noticed it." Twilight sighed. "Great."
"I bet I could touch it if I jump high enough!"
"Pinkie, this is serious. We need to figure out what's going on."
Pinkie wasn't listening. She was already jumping to try and touch the title.
"Pinkie!"
After another moment of jumping from various angles, Pinkie gave up. She noticed Twilight was still there and said, "Twilight? What are you still doing here?"
"Getting you." She turned towards the door and motioned for Pinkie to follow her. "Come on, we need to go and figure this out."
"Okay," Pinkie said before diving back into her closet. "Just let me grab my exploding story confetti and I'll be ready!"
That stopped Twilight in her tracks. "Why do you have exploding story confetti?"
Pinkie tossed a heavy box onto the floor, marked on the side in military stencil: Exploding Story Confetti. "Never ask why, young Twilight," she said sagely. "Ask: why not?"
"Okay, so, you're ready?"
"Yeah! An exploding story sounds fun! I can't wait to see what happens."
"It's not- Ugh, okay, whatever, let's go."
Twilight marched out the door, and Pinkie followed behind, bouncing bubbly with a smile.
As one might expect, a very quintessentially "Pinkie" response to the dilemma.
Also, the title's timer actually counting down with each passing minute has no right to be as cool as it is. Impressive stuff!
For future reference (if possible, depending on the nature of the actual explosion), said timer was at 21:56 at the time of typing.
Love this. Really fun idea!!
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Only just noticed that myself (timer's now at 21:53). I'm trying to figure it out how they're doing it--surely not by manually updating the story's title every minute themselves, right? That seems like it'd get awfully tedious fast.
11865307
21:45 for me, and I think it has to do with code of some kind
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Inclined to doubt it's manual; PseudoBob was listed as offline for a couple minutes, at least on my end (also assuming I didn't miss a check-in while I was in-between refreshes), and the title's been updating regardless. In that case, I'd wager it's a site-side script of some sort.
(Currently at 21:42!)
EDIT: Seems I missed this before, but the description mentions that Silk Rose wrote all the code. Hats off to them!
The only proper response of course. There is no why. Only why not.
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We're talking about an author who wielded the barely-used opacity tag last year and made a largely-invisible crackfic. Personally, I've stopped asking and resorted to the answer of "I don't know, but it's some sort of genius technological mastery at work."
Too bad Pinkie wasn't as helpful as she hoped. At least there's confetti!
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The site has an API, which I know Silk Rose uses (they use their bio to promote other authors' stories on a rotating schedule), so that can be used to update the story's title via coding. And if you're already using the API, setting up the code to run every minute is trivial.