I'll wear my fez, unless it's really cold outside.

Eh.. I might go there. Depends if Swebow (our producer/manager thingie) will be against me pitching Equestria Online. I wouldn't really have any other reason to bother to go into the rain. (Yeah, rain predicted for the whole weekend.)

edited 5th Oct '11 9:43:00 AM by gingerale

Wait, Ginger, you do work for Equestria Online?

Just as a programmer. And I'm so busy that I barely have time to do the scripts currently. But yeah, I was invited into the team some time back.

edited 5th Oct '11 10:09:26 AM by gingerale

If it isn't raining too hard, I'll be wearing my fez. Say hi to me if you're there, Ginger.

Got to love hats.

I'm recognizable from my bowler hat myself. And being a 25 year old programmer. (Translates to "long hair" and "a little bit odd." :B (Though now that I think of it. I guess I'm pretty normal compared to most "a little bit odd" people. o/))

edited 5th Oct '11 11:11:23 AM by gingerale

I was thinking about parallels between the pony pantheon and classical Pagan deities*

^{I hope this does not offend anyone: it's just for fun, I would make a parallel with Christianity instead if it were appropriate.}

I'm going with the Roman pantheon, which is the one I know best.

Luna is easy — she's already the moon goddess, and the sister of the sun god.

Discord is Discordia, just as easily — he changes gender, but Discord would probably roll with it with no trouble .

Celestia, however... there are a few possibilities here. One is associating her to Sol/Sol Indiges/Sol Invictus*

^{There is an ongoing debate on whether these last two deities were the same...}

, the aforementioned sun god: that would make sense, as he was considered the protector of the late Roman Empire — it fits quite nicely with Celestia being the ruler of Equestria.

Or she could be Caelus/Caelum, the sky god — the name fits better, after all. But the myth differs: I cannot really imagine Celestia castrating her own father and throwing his testicles in the sea, though I imagine that it would make an interesting piece of fanfiction .

Or again, Celestia could be Aurora, yet another sister of Luna and the herald of dawn: that's kind of Celestia's thing anyway, and in this way she does not have to change gender. Plus, Aurora has a tiara, precisely as Celestia does.

That would imply, however, that Celestia, differently from Luna, does not control the sun directly — rather, Celestia and Luna's brother Sol moves the sun, and Celestia only chooses whether to allow it to rise. Again, this could be an interesting interpretation.

Thoughts?

EDIT: has anyone, to your knowledge, already tried to rewrite Hesiod's Theogony as a creation myth for Equestria? If not, I might just do that, for the hell of it. It would require adding a lot of non-canonical alicorns, for the other deities, and the style would be kept as is — that is, a little on the heavy side — but I am easily amused.

Also, there would be a lot of incest, of course. But I get the feeling that the MLP shippers have done worse already, so eh

edited 5th Oct '11 11:28:36 AM by Carciofus

Caelus was the primal sky god who got castrated, not Saturn the castrater.

I'd stick with Sol, the moon goddess' far more important sibling.

Mod saddle on, etc., kind of important:

Is it true that Ponibooru hosts pornography of underage characters?

If so, it may not be appropriate to link to that site from here.

(Not sure of the exact rules regarding non-pornographic links on sites that host porn, e.g. Danbooru, so this may be a false alarm, but it may well not be.)

Edit: According to the thread in WA, the answer is yes. Oh dear.

edited 5th Oct '11 4:39:44 PM by BobbyG

@ Bobby: Not exactly, you have to disable the filters to get explicit images, if you click a link to an explicit image and don't have the filters disabled you get redirected to the main page.

It's a precaution for younger fans online.

edited 5th Oct '11 4:44:54 PM by inane242

Repost from other thread: how about direct links to images? They contain nothing more than the image, and if you're gonna argue "the URL has poniboorus adress" then just a heads up: ponibooru is the first thing to pop up on google when you typ as much as "ponib" on the search bar.

No ruling has been decided yet. I'll let y'all know if there is one.

So, out of curiosity: is it against site regulations to link to danbooru (for example), then?

edited 5th Oct '11 5:59:21 PM by Hsere

There is no blanket ban on Danbooru links as such, though pornographic links are not allowed, period.

There won't be any official ruling on Ponibooru, btw. Eddie doesn't care and is not going to ban a site based on hearsay regarding members-only content. (I think he's a lot more laidback about this stuff than I am.)

So basically, the de facto rule we had before. Cool.

How do we define "underage" when they're equines?

Eugh. Pony porn shouldn't even exist, so this doesn't come up. :-|

Rule34, Rott, Rule34. No matter how much we wish it wasn't true, it is.

I think the concern is mainly pornography of humanized versions of certain characters, or porn of the mane cast that depict them as human children. This is still kind of a weird area legally, as there can be a discussion of whether drawings of naked children count as actual child pornography, but I think we'd all just rather avoid getting to a point at which we have to have that conversation at anything other than a purely intellectual level.

I thought that the nsfw images on ponibooru get ceneserd as "qustionable" unless you have turn the filters off or if you click them on them.

If you try to link to a NSFW image on Ponibooru, you will just be directed to the main page unless you have the filters turn off.

In other words, you will only be able to find porn there if you are explicitly looking for it.

Okay. I thought it was something like that. That means you don't have to worry about accidently finding that sick shit, right?

^^^ That's the Questionable images. There are a lot of images tagged as Explicit which aren't visible in the default setting. Edit: And yeah, you won't find anything like that unless you purposefully look for it.

I'm sorry we got onto this subject. Can we talk about something else?

Like the distressing lack of any recent art by Moe, who is awesome.

edited 5th Oct '11 7:47:31 PM by BobbyG

Indeed. You will only find it if you are a sick and twisted individual.

So Ponibooru is safe. Links to FIMChan itself are potential risks, though.

Thanks. I don't think I'll be seeing those horrible images anytime soon.

Now, onto something else. Here's a qusition for the shippers. Is there a pairing out there that you don't think gets enough love?

Oh, I think they make enough love on their own...

I personally like John Joseco's series of Morning Ponies.

Caramac is nice. Unfortunately, not many people like reading M/M Shipping, sooo....