Interlude 4

"Chokkolat Bunny, what do oo tink dis is? I can't figgoo it out."

"Oh! I know whatdidis! I not dat dum...."

"...it where da ponees plush dere monee down da drain when dey not gibbing us j'monee!"

And The Winner Is....

Well, this has been an awesome little project. It's been a blast to see everyone's entries and, to be honest, I've really been looking forward to giving away some goodies. I don't know about you, but getting a package in the mail is one of those simple thrills in life that you never get tired of. Especially if there's ponies involved! And new ones that are a pain in the hindquarters to find. I want to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for participating in the contest and encourage you to start gearing up for the Valentine's Day photo competition in February! I appreciate all the positive feedback coming my way about PTT, as well...this blog is my baby because it's the ultimate indulgence for my inner child. The compliments mean a lot, believe me. I hope PTT helps you remember what childhood imagination was like, too.

Without further ado, the winner of the New Year's Resolution Photo Contest is...

Eternia's "Avoid Dessert" resolution!

I gotta tell you, Eternia, the minute I opened up this entry I cracked up. We're all right there with you on needing to avoid dessert, believe me! What a creative way to portray that resolution, too. Click on it to enlarge and take in all the carefully done details. Look how lush the scenery is; you really get the feeling you're in the ponies' world. And look at all the desserts! The agony of all the ponies enjoying sweets...just imagine how the place might smell...and all the while trying to avoid eating dessert?! It's like a battlefield covered in edible landmines. Don't step the wrong way, the strawberry tart might blow your hoof off. Good gravy, that's a tough resolution to keep for pony and human alike. For the fantastic entry, and as a little extra good luck on keeping that resolution, Eternia's going to have a brand new shiny G4 Applejack in the mailbox soon! Eternia, I will be contacting you soon for your shipping information. :) Congratulations!

I have to tell you though, we enjoyed all of the entries....we really did. It's always tough to make a call on contests like this. We here at PTT appreciate all of your work, dear entrants, and we'd like to show it off for everyone else to see as well. You can enjoy all of the awesome entries by following this link!

Closing In On A Winner

Just an update...50% of the votes are in for PTT's New Year's Resolution contest! There is a clear winner so far, but anything can happen still. As soon as I know the last votes and make a final call on it, I'll be posting the winner here on PTT and on My Little Pony Arena. Thanks so much again, everyone, for your entries and interest in PTT. I love having a place to let my imagination run wild and share some fun with like-minded folks; it's my pleasure to give a little back to readers!

Did you miss this contest? It's okay...coming in February just in time for Valentine's Day is yet another chance to win in the

My Little Love Story Photo Contest!

Who's your favorite pony couple? Is it an obvious match-up or proof that opposites attract? Have you created a back story on how the lovebirds met? I want to see your pony couples and hear what tale your imagination has created about the happy couple. To the winner will go a beautiful G1 Twice As Fancy Milky Way MLP! More details to come in February, but start dreaming up your entries now!

Coming soon is the next installment of My Little Trony and, of course, yet another episode of our ongoing bunnies vs. Fakies vs. real ponies showdown. The Fakies will learn that to defeat their foes and find themselves on equal hoofing in life, a long journey to discovery is in order. What mystical beings will help them uncover the path to victory? And in My Little Trony, Pigskynn will face the terrible truth that he's in a world he just can't comprehend, doomed to do battle for something he doesn't even want. Who is behind this place and why was it created? And will he ever get out? The answers might surprise you....

Win a G4 Applejack...Deadline Approaching!

Heads up, ladies and gentleponies! The contest deadline is January 16th and entries are starting to roll in. If you have sent an entry in via Gmail, please post that you did in the Comments section to make sure I have received your entry. I don't want anyone to miss out!

And for a little more inspiration (you do have three more days to enter!) here's another example from a Friend Of PTT. Just in time for a regime-like change to this Friend's health insurance requirements when it comes to weight loss is his own resolution to continue losing the flub. Fortunately, the resolution from last year got him to the point that the new Draconian BMI regulations on his policy don't even apply to him because he's lost so much weight...congratulations! (And just so you know, I give a hearty round of Good Luck to all of you out there tackling your own resolutions and wish you the best. I resolved to have a contest so YEY resolution completed! Low standards FTW!)

27 . . . 28 . . . Dude! You think maybe it's all the pizza we're eating? . . . 29 . . .

MY LITTLE TRONY: Into The Paddock

SORRY GUYS! MLT is on hold until I figure out a way to do Part 3 because my original plans got shot down. Thankfully I know a lot of people good with Photoshop!

Pigskynn was no ordinary jock. Once a National Football Herd star, he was hiding a secret side of himself. Under that rough exterior lived a genius....a computer genius. Although he found incredible success as a quarterback, he retired early with no word on why to the press, his team, or his fans. The truth was he wanted to get back to what he was even better at than football: hacking.

He was never one for luxury. He spent his cash on upgrading his laptop to insane proportions. To keep his alter ego hidden, he chose a modest stable, didn't care much for making the place anything fitting of a multimillionaire stallion, and kept a lot of outdated electronics around. Even his laptop was in disguise; instead of a shiny, futuristic looking machine, he used old, beat-up, and ugly laptop shells and then pumped them full of so much power that if they were cars, they're be heading down the strip at 320 MPH. Nobody thought twice about the pea green laptop kicking around under his old school CRT television. After all, the guy still had a record player for pony's sake! "Geeze, Piggy, you still use floppies in that hunk of junk?"

A VCR? A tape player boom box? A Sega Genesis?! Pigskynn came across as more of a die-hard Luddite than anyone who had the computer know-how to hack into every pony bank in the world. Ever heard of the Day of the Backwards Pony Debit Card? The day where all ponies had $100 bucks deposited into their bank account randomly, followed by emails that said it was courtesy of the bank and that they signed away any right to ask for the money back? Guess who was behind that. On Christmas day, he loves to slice through credit card account security and randomly delete all information from a couple ponies' accounts. Merry Christmas! You have no more debt and there's no way the credit card companies can even find your account! Needless to say, Fight Club (on video tape, of course) is a favorite movie of his. The Matrix is almost a comedy to him. Someone controls us? Ha! "Hackers control the world, and I'm the top stallion of them all, baby. I control the controllers."

His fiery girlfriend, Mingo, knew nothing of this side of her other pony half. Together for years, she was often frustrated by how behind the times Pigskynn seemed. No smart phones. No LCD TVs. The guy didn't even have a microwave; something about not trusting "modern weird stuff" like that. How did she manage to land the only NFH star who refused to live a "Stallz" lifestyle? He was generous to her, but after watching other pony sports stars flaunt their 5-story stables, pony pools, and fleets of Horsley-Bridleson motorcycles, she couldn't help but feel like she got the short end of the hay. Mingo loved to shop, and thankfully for her, Pigskynn indulged her often. There was just one thing he couldn't stand: Mingo's addiction to stable shopping channels.

"Watching that barf again?!"

"Piggy, you just leave me alone! The Daily Blowout is a hoof polish set you can't even get anywhere else!"

"Baby, I love you, but I can't stand no more of that trash. Lonely old mares calling in to buy jumps. They ain't jumped in years and if they did they'd fall on their faces! And those high-pitched twits selling it to them like it ain't no problem."

"Listen here! I've had it with you living your Amish lifestyle and living in this...this...SHACK. Don't you have any pride? And you have the gall to criticize me for buying stuff off PSN?! At least I'm living in 2011 instead of 1989 like you! I'm surprised I can even order from here, because I'd expect you to have a rotary dial phone! I'm embarrassed to tell my fillies where you live. They wouldn't believe me first and then they'd have a heart attack when I told them it was true!"

"You have no idea. No idea. NO IDEA AT ALL OF WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT! You know, I haven't told you this, but I got another side, Min. I don't think you'd muffin all over me if

you...."

"You can take your...whatever your "other side" is...and shove it. I'm going home, where my television wasn't made when Ronald Reingan was still president!"

"Fine! Go! PSN is more important to you than me!"

Pigskynn was furious. He knew Mingo was high-strung and, well, a bit materialistic, but this was too much. So PSN was that important? For a minute, he thought he'd be crossing a line if he did something to Mingo's beloved shopping channel. And then he thought of what she said to him, not to mention how much money PSN would lose if he scrambled their broadcast so badly it would take weeks to fix and toasted any hope of their ordering systems functioning normally.

Time to fry some servers.

"You're the only critter that understands me, old boy. At least I got you. I don't think the cat likes me much either 'cuz she sleeps all the time and ignores me when I'm awake. We're gonna show 'em now, buddy."

 

"Lessee here...okay, into their ordering system. Oops! Lookit that! How they gonna handle ten thousand automated orders clogging their system every minute? So just call on the phones? Gee, too bad they put 'em through their 'net lines. Some big, bad hackers might come to get them someday!"

Pigskynn was a formidable foe if he decided to take you down. Within just minutes, he knew he had put PSN on full stop. He kept picturing the sales ponies galloping around trying to stop all the automated orders while the tech ponies bucked holes into the walls out of frustration and rage. Oh darn, now some nice elderly pony couldn't waste half her life savings on their plastic crap!

"We're experiencing some technical difficulties, shoppers, so things might take, ah, a little longer than usual to order. But please bear with us as we...."

"Oh you ain't seen nuthin' yet, you piles of soaked, stinky hay. I'm gonna take you down now."

He turned to his computer and hit the Enter key. And with that, PSN fell down a deep electronic hole they wouldn't come out of anytime soon. His final keystroke obliterated their satellite feed and jammed their system so badly they had no hope of recovering unless someone as skilled as he was with computers could step in to help. Good luck with that!

"Well, well, lookie that. The signal goes flushy McFlusherson like the horse pie it is. Gonna have to cancel those trips to the Ponibbean now, won'tcha?"

But Pigskynn didn't notice the buzzing sound coming from near him. He was too busy enjoying the glorious sound of static and scramble that was coming over PSN airwaves now.

 The sleeping kitty was suddenly awash with light. Her eyes turned a neon shade of shocking pink and began to glow. This cat-turned-supernova tilted her head slightly to aim directly at Pigskynn's head....

The noise now too high-pitched to be hidden by the TV's static, Pigskynn turned towards the din and was shocked to see two beams of light blast out of the cat's eyes. He started to rear up in effort to escape the beams but there was no hope; it all happened too fast. As the beams struck him, the world went 8-bit. He heard a robotic voice in the ether as life pixilated into nothingness....

"YOU HAVE ENTERED THE PADDOCK"

To Be Continued.....

Thank You to Aaron Wade for the SFX!

It's CONTEST TIME!

Calling all you creative types! It's time for the first (of many) PTT contests!

Here's the deal! This contest is themed towards the time of the year. You know what's on everyone's mind right now....NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS DUN DUN DUN! Cookies are deposited in the trash. Cartons of cigarettes fly off of bridges. Ex-boyfriends' phone numbers are finally deleted. The bag of Snickers Fun Size left over from Halloween is run over by a car multiple times. I'm sure the different types of NYRs are as varied as the rows of meal replacement bars filling end caps at your local grocery store. Now I want to know what your NYR is. But since this is PTT, you can't just tell me...you have to show me.

I want to see your New Year's Resolution played out with ponies (and yes, other childhood toys too)!

And to the lucky winner goes this brand-spanking-new MIB G4 Applejack!

Ignore the bunnies. Nothing impresses them. To get your creative gears cranking, here's an example of a contest entry by Friend Of PTT, Kelly Wade. Her resolution is the ever-popular "remove weight from body" NYR, of which I'm sure many of you are already toiling under...

 It's time to take a look at the contest rules and factoids. The bunnies love this part because someone can screw these up with their entry and give them something to make fun of. If you really like the bunnies for some odd reason, you can always send them a really bad entry to guffaw at.

1) Yes, this contest is open to international readers! :) With how slow the mail has been, you might have already blown your NYR by the time it gets to some areas of the world, but hey, I'm not watching you to see if you called your ex or downed a row of Oreos with a Diet Coke! 

2) Although My Little Ponies need to show up in your entry, you're also allowed to use other childhood toys to supplement your storytelling. Note the emphasis on childhood toys...I do ask that the toys you use be ones from your childhood era, as opposed to using, say, Monster High dolls too. I suppose this is ageist against infants.

3) Just one photo, please and thank you! However, in that one photo you're allowed to do whatever you want. The theme of the picture doesn't have to be something humorous (I guess a dour, macabre entry wouldn't match too well with a humor blog, though, huh?), it just has to be creative. Think of your NYR and then think of the most entertaining way you can portray it. Do let me know what your NYR is exactly if it doesn't say it somewhere on the photo!

4) The entries will be judged by myself and the Friends Of PTT. We're a varied group of tastes when it comes to stuff like this, so we're not biased towards any particular thing. We can appreciate something super funny, super artistic, super thoughtful...whatever. It'll just come down to whatever entry sticks out in all of our minds the most.

5) Please keep in mind that I'll need an address to send Applejack to if your entry is chosen. If giving out your address on the Intarwebz gives you the heebie-jeebies (or you think it might cause issues with someone in your household), it's probably not a great idea to enter.

If you're already formulating plans for your entry, here's the rest of the info you'll need to know! Send your entries to aceercpATgmail.com (or, if you're an Arena member, you're welcome to contact me there). You're welcome to upload your entry to, say, Photobucket and just send me the link to the photo. The deadline for contest entries is January 16th with the winner announced by January 19th. I'll post the winning entry on PTT and contact the winner for details on where to send Applejack! I will also post the winning entry on My Little Pony Arena. Just think, you can add "achieved internet stardom" to your list of accomplishments for the year!

Good luck! May your creative energy not be sapped by your AbCoaster or piles of unfinished projects. I can't wait to see your entries!