Hacker Cinema
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
2010 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 9 seasons
Created by Lauren Faust
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasyKids
Journey to the enchanted land of Equestria, where unicorn Twilight Sparkle and her pals have adventures and learn valuable lessons about friendship.
2 positive1 negative4 neutralfrom 7 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
7 comments on Hacker News
As someone with a young child this thread feels really odd. I can't imagine the time to ponder such things in between a full time job and parenting (no, 'friends' are not necessary to start a family).
What are you all expecting? That you meet a bunch of compatible people and your everyday lives become like the episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? Or is it a desire for more of an emotional co-dependency with someone of the same gender?
If you want to do an activity, join a club. If you want to share information, find people on Twitter or something.
Fun fact: An animated TV series that ran from 2010 to 2019 developed by Lauren Faust, was animated in Adobe Flash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_Magic
For myself the amount of TV and movies I can watch is pretty limited compared to what I could obtain.
Lately I've been into the silents (Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino) but also Howard Hawkes movies not to mention things like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Jackson_(1988_film)
feel free to laugh but my son got the family (including my wife who teaches people to ride horses) to watch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_Magic
... and then there are all the Gundam anime since Gundam 79, all the rest of Sliders, at least 200+ hours of video "in the queue".
I think how a few years back I would go see a movie like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_(film)
in the theater. I was talking to my son the other day how we lost interest in Marvel and Star Wars movies... We never had a moment when we said "Marvel Sucks", but they rarely make it into the queue to watch on video. And going to the theater post-COVID seems implausible to me because I don't want to deal with disgusting popcorn mess.
I'm sure there are good movies made today, even more sure there are good TV shows, but they have to fight for every minute of view time they get.
I have a 4yo daughter. We don't use youtube's recomendations to get things for her to watch, instead:
* we watch what we liked to watch when we were young (we are from Czech Republic and there is a wealth of local animation series, usually ~7 minutes/episode. If you want a sample, "Pat & Mat" is silent-duo home-improvement slapstic comedy that we kinda like :)
* we talk to other parents (i.e. you can't really escape Pepa Pig or My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic)
* we like animation, and sometimes watch even more grown-up things togehter, i.e. we liked various series from the How To Train Your Dragon universe
Three more things that I think kinda help as well:
* if she watches alone, she know she has a limit (usually 3 stories in one sitting at most?) I am really proud when she manages to close the app on her own.
* I often sit her in front of my thinkpad instead of tablet. This limits her ability to binge-watch, somewhat :P
* She has an mp3-player of sorts and a cd-player with few radio-plays. She know how to operate both of these. We don't really limit her using of the audio-only entertainment :-)
The sociopaths, now forged in the hell-fires of Something Awful and 4chan, have gotten good. Since the mops are the source of value to extract for the sociopaths, the geeks are uninteresting to them, and may be a threat because they defend their obsessions with the vigor and loyalty of a Revolutionary-era patriot. But you can turn that threat into and advantage -- by turning the mops against the geeks. And the best way (so far) to do this is to use some sort of political posturing that appeals to the mops' innate sense of goodness. For example, by writing or videoing a long-form critique that makes the case that, say, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic carries a hidden intrinsic subtext of racism and misogyny. This will anger the geeks, but a substantial fraction of mops will believe you. And in their anger the geeks will play straight into your hands by writing you angry emails, which you can then post on Twitter to prove your point that Something Must Be Done to fix My Little Pony and its fandom (which something must invariably include systematically excluding and ostracizing the original fan base), because look at these awful people. My Little Pony is why Trump happened. That will get you con appearances, and maybe even phone calls from Hasbro to offer you a job as a consultant/script doctor to make sure that future MLP episodes are not so offensive.
And if anybody calls you on it, you can simply declare them part of the problem, and turn the entire righteous outrage of the now mostly mop fandom against them. When it comes to harassment, the only standard necessary to establish guilt is that the victim feel harassed. So all you need to do is tell Twitter or Tumblr about how Joe Geek's point-by-point takedown critique of your critique of My Little Pony makes you feel threatened or triggered. Or how he is "stalking" you by reading all your public twitter posts. With the right tone of righteous indignation and enough mop followers willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, hell, maybe even Twitter will step in and ban Joe Geek from their platform for life as part of their newfound commitment to stop trolling and harassment. Depending on the jurisdiction, you could get him jailed for hate speech.
So sure, by all means, call out these people. And enjoy becoming the star of your own #metoo story -- as the perpetrator, not the victim.
Time and time again, western media corporations prove they have no fucking idea how to market their productions to fans.
Problem:
Western corporations treat the consumer as some sheep to whom you show some advertising and then they are supposed to react accordingly and purchase their stuff. You show the advertisement for the movie and then consumers are supposed to pay you to watch the movie. You show them the movie and then they are supposed to go buy the toys you make available on store shelves. They treat the consumers as a simple black box with an input for advertising and an output where money comes out. And time and again people prove they are not this simple revenue generating mechanism. And whenever they prove this, western companies are baffled, unprepared, and ultimately blame it on the consumers by starting anti-piracy crusades and trademark protection crusades. Many pages could be linked here to prove the utter stupidity of these companies, but maybe in a grandchild post. The market and these companies are not efficient. They just barely manage to make a humongous profit. This is typical of any monopoly. The market is inefficient, the market actors are inefficient and the monopolizing actor makes a profit (most often not as much as an actor could possibly make if the market was healthy) to the detriment of all other actors.
Solution:
They are even more pitiable when compared to the state of affairs in places like Japan. The media industry for anime, manga and all related things understands there needs to be a symbiosis between the source (usually or eventually a company) of original content and the fans. Once a company releases something it becomes part of an ecosystem around that content. They are no longer the sole provider in that ecosystem. And this serves to keep the ecosystem healthy. Fan content keeps the community active and buzzing during the periods between releases by the original source.
Let's take one company acting in such ecosystems for example. More precisely one range of products(Nendoroids) for one year(2015) from one company (Good Smile Company). For those unfamiliar, Nendoroids are high quality posable figurines (with a few articulations and interchangeable parts) of super-deformed(chibi) versions of characters. For the particular issue of gender representation of characters a rough count leads to around ~125 female figurines and ~50 male figurines released in 2015 which results in a ratio of about 5/2. Note that the target audience also isn't segregated into male or female. The target customer is simply Japanese.
To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let's take a much more narrow example. The Mikudayo figurine. This is a figurine with a lot of fan history behind it. It starts with Hatsune Miku who started as the box art mascot for a voicebank for the vocal music synthesis software Vocaloid. Fans in turn created an entire character around this one picture sparking an entire phenomenon that spread through the entire world (I may write a tangent explaining a bit the Miku phenomenon). Good Smile Company crated a Nendoroid figurine for Miku in the specific style of the line. Eventually, a fan based an entire costume on the Nendoroid version of the character and wore the costume at a convention. The result was rather grotesque, but the sheer discrepancy between the cuteness of the Nendoroid figurine and the eeriness of the life size costume version sparked a phenomenon around this new version of the character that turned into a new character of its own called Mikudayo. Subsequently Good Smile Company released a figurine of exactly this new character.
Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west.
- The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the murkiness of the trademark issues.
- The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character.
- The Hatsune Miku phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks by creating fan content that mislead people into thinking Miku was anything else than a piece of software (People new to the phenomenon usually mistakenly associate Miku and Vocaloid in general with the hologram not the voicebank and the software. Trademarks were designed to prevent exactly this.).
- The Vocaloid software would never have been made or would never have succeed, because the very idea of making your voice available for everyone on the planet to create songs with is baffling and outrageous to artists in the west.
And yet the ecosystem around this phenomenon (Miku) is healthily spreading and growing and all actors are making a profit even if there is rampant copyright and trademark infringement.
The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren't really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren't cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it's a good thing they are not targeting their fanbase because their biases around what the demographic of the fanbase would want would make them change the content and abandon the very strengths that made people fans in the first place) Hasbro has on their hands a completely unexpected phenomenon of an unprecedented growth and scale. This phenomenon is called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the volume and demographics of the fanbase is something Hasbro could never have anticipated.
Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post of it's own. But it's not like I said anything new. Maybe I should end this by saying that we should make these companies that treat consumers as a money spewing black box fail. Alas, it may actually have no effect since there actually are a lot of sheep that will just buy what is given to them, and any of our efforts ignored with the decrease in sales blamed on piracy.
now more individual frames than there are XKCD comics.
That's kinda a silly claim. Most of the Time frames are part of an ongoing scene, so each new frame is just an addition on top of the old frame. Your Time viewer has a differential view against the next/previous frame so you can see it in action.
Saying it's "more frames than all the other comics" is like saying one episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has more frames than X. Yeah, numbers can be bigger than other numbers, but they aren't the sameness of comparison.