Round one has the following stories...
Feel free to discuss them in comments, it's probably better than those massive posts with everything else.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) The April Fools
Description: Needed[Normal] Celestia, Buffalos, Applejack, Author: Fon Shaolin
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) Pink'd
Description: Rainbow Dash actually does some work for a change, but is surprised when she sees Pinkie Pie in several different places and acting strangely. Just what has the pink filly have planned for this April Fools Day?[Normal] Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Author: PrinceShadari
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) Leaf-ing The Dream
Description: Fluttershy's turning into a tree??[Normal] Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Author: Twinkietail
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) A Cryptological Conundrum
Description: Twilight and Spike are given an urgent task by Princess Celestia. Can they solve the fiendish puzzle before it's too late?[Random] Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Author: Chris
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5) Jack and Pie
Description: When a ghost story is reality.[Random][Crossover][Shipping] Pinkie Pie, Author: D. Shadows
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LET THE VOTING BEGIN!
47 comments:
Leaf-ing the Dream has my vote!
ReplyDeleteThat story was just precious! ^^
BLOG OWNER. WHERE THE FUCK IS SPIKE ON THE BANNER. FOR FUCKS SAKE.
ReplyDeletehey, look. someone booted out Trixie.
ReplyDeleteIt's a close thing between Pink'd and Leafing the Dream, I went for Leafing the Dream.
ReplyDeleteA vote-off between all the second placers would be good I think :)
Gonna have to go with Pink'd for this one.
ReplyDeleteAs a side note, I like the new banner, Seth.
@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteCereal did it, as always.
I fail at photoshop.
While Cryptological Conundrum had some nice stuff in it, and Candle Jack has Candle Jack,
ReplyDeleteVOTE: LEAF-ING THE DREAM.
I started to freak out halfway through Pink'd because I thought Pinkie turned into some kind of Agent Smith and is assimilating everyone in Ponyville...
ReplyDeleteThen I realized that at least Dash, being a pegasus, will be fine if she just stays off the ground. Cue winged Pinkie...
So, there's no new funny polls for 9+ days?
ReplyDeleteGoddammit
CryptoCon is one of the best short fics I have ever read. This was an easy choice for me.
ReplyDelete@Fast and Free
ReplyDeleteI want to read a story like that now...
@Cottonmouth
ReplyDelete>Twilight's Friendship Magic, didn't include you.
>Sadspike.jpg
Also Definitly voted for "The April Fools". Gotta love the subtle genocide.
So what happened to voting on the drawings?
ReplyDeleteHow does the voting work? In here? In comments?
ReplyDeleteif yes my vote goes for the "Leaf-ing the dream"
(pretty catchy title by the way)
nevermind... now I see x)
ReplyDeleteMy vote goes for "Leaf-ing the dream".
ReplyDelete@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteI'll probably start drawings after round 2 or so. I don't really want to do both at once. polls cause a lot of slow-down on the blog.
Drawings will also roll with different categories based on media and such..which i havent decided on yet.
I guess russet was *puts on sunglasses* hung like a horse
ReplyDeleteYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH
I spend about two hours on that damn cypher, but in the end I couldn't crack it. +1 for cryptological conundrum.
ReplyDeleteMy vote goes to Leafing the Dream.
ReplyDeleteAuthor of 'Cryptological Conundrum' here, just want to wish everyone good luck! I think this is one of the strongest brackets (I'll bet every author thinks that about the bracket they're in, though), and it's nice to see all these great stories submitted for the competition. May the best story win!
ReplyDeleteLeaf-ing the Dream!
ReplyDeleteLeaf-ing the Dream!
Leaf-ing the Dream!
Leaf-ing the Dream!
Pink'd is a great prank, and Cryptology tickles my math nerd bones (all 206 of them).
ReplyDeleteUltimately, I am swayed by the hilarious depiction of Fluttershy preparing to take root.
What the hay, you Fluttershy lovers! Leafing The Dream was barely the third-best story in this bracket!
ReplyDeleteIt's a strong competition though, but in the end, Cryptological Conundrum took the crown from Pink'd because troll Celestia is just too awesome.
@Anonymous 8:13
ReplyDeleteBecause there are other troll celestia stories that are better, Pink'd and fluttertree are the best in this bracket.
Awww this is the greatest bracket... oh well, my vote went too Fools day.
ReplyDeleteI just had to vote for A Cryptological Conundrum after the line "I do so love planning executions!"
ReplyDeleteIf it weren't for that, I would've gone for Leaf-ing the Dream.
Leafing the Dream felt like the most "complete" story to me.
ReplyDeleteThe rest were more like one note gags wrapped in stories for padding. No offense to any of them. I enjoyed them all at least a little.
I liked "Leafing the Dream" the most. Pinkie's little plot twist added a depth I couldn't find in the other four stories.
ReplyDeleteLeaf-ing the Dream, by far.
ReplyDeletePink'd, April Fools, and Cryptological Conundrum were all very good, but Leaf-ing the Dream had twists and turns, and also...FLUTTERSHY. :D
I had fun failing at the Cryptological Conundrum cipher. Even the fanfiction is educational!
ReplyDeleteDid anypony find out the exact method of the cipher for #4? I mean I know he tells you the answer at the end, but never says how exactly you get there.
ReplyDeleteYes, I bad at maths.
@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteTwilight was basically right with all her conjectures, so her section outlines the method Russet used pretty well. He took 1000 numbers (0-999) and assigned them all randomly based on each letter's frequency (that number list near the start of section 2). For example, X (which was not used in the text) was represented by 999 and and 367, F could be represented by 089, 662, and 12 other numbers, and A had 80 different numbers that could be used to represent it. Hope that makes things a little clearer.
@Chris If you map letters to arbitrary code points like that, then analyzing such a short ciphertext is flat-out impossible. And Twilight, having demonstrated knowledge of cryptanalysis, should have figured that out rather quickly. I was working under the assumption that plaintext code points map to contiguous ranges of ciphertext code points, which would have made the problem solvable in principle.
ReplyDeleteFor a 61-character message, there are 26^61 possible plaintexts (about 10^86). When each character corresponds to a contiguous interval of ciphertext code points, you have (26!) possible keys (about 10^26). But when any one-to-one mapping of characters to code points is allowed, the number of possible keys is the number of permutations of a 1000-letter string modulo symmetries due to multiple occurrences of each character in the codebook (1000! / (117! * 86! * 81! * ...)) which comes to about 10^1292. The key space is much bigger than the ciphertext space. Consequently, there are many keys that turn the ciphertext into a readable string, and there's no unique plaintext.
Leaf-ing the Dream was very fun. Prankster Fluttershy was great.
ReplyDeleteCryptological Conundrum was also very good, and obviously well constructed, but I feel the prank was a little too high-concept to win out. Loved the executioner Celestia bit, though.
April Fools- Not my kinda story to be honest. I didn't find the 'ironic twist' on April Fool's day to be clever either. Just... distasteful...
ReplyDeletePink'd- Great, but seemed much too short.
Leaf-ing the Dream- Sorry my vote goes to this one. :P That seems so like all the characters, and even though it was obvious what would happen, I still enjoyed seeing it unfold. ^_^
A Cryptological Conundrum- It was good, but given I absolutely HATE math, I couldn't really get into the story. :/ Also the Celestia line at the end ruined it for me. I don't care for that Celestia at all.
Jack and Pie- Much as I like Freakazoid, this one was just what the hay. Seem kinda thrown together last minute deal.
These are of course, just my personal look at the stories, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really the best to ask about this kinda stuff.
"A Cryptological Conundrum" Reminds me a lot of Cyberchase for some reason. I very much enjoyed reading it. Though the ending was really weird, so I'm just going to assume it's one of those 4chan jokes flying over my head.
ReplyDeleteTo the author of "A Cryptological Conundrum" - I'm assuming you created the cipher yourself? If so, nice job. The in-story explanation got me confused the first time so I looked for a better one online, which yielded no results.
ReplyDeleteOne thing though - if one doesn't have access to the percentages to each letter, wouldn't one have to solve it like any other cipher?
Since, for whatever reason, I can't comment directly but only in replies, this seemed a good comment to reply to.
ReplyDelete"April Fools" - An excellently crafted story, well-written and well-structured, with a masterful plot twist at the end. I felt bad for voting against it. I just can't be comfortable with Celestia betraying someone's trust that way, though. It's the sort of thing I'd be tempted to do in that position, but I want Celestia to be better than I am. An outstanding piece of craftsmanship, regardless.
"A Cryptological Conundrum" - I enjoyed the design of the cypher (didn't solve it - it does seem like the sort of thing that's only susceptible to brute force) and the twist with the lemon juice, but again, seeing Celestia display cruelty ruined it for me.
"Leaf-ing the Dream" - This got my vote. The plot unfolded about as I'd expected it to do, but the entire thing could be a TV episode. It's a very 'canon' story, which still manages to express the theme of April Foal's.
@ Anonymous (12:22):
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's no practical way (to my knowledge) to solve the code with the information given without a computer and at least some clue as to the contents of the document; that's what the whole 'I'd have to teach you scientific notation' joke was. I knew it was a weak point to the story that Twilight didn't think to do some basic number crunching before she started guessing solutions, but I liked where it lead so much that I decided to leave it in.
Well, only a few hours to go in the voting, and it looks like I'm destined for 3rd place. I was afraid that my story's appeal was too narrow to win; c'est la vie. Honestly, I'm still very happy with the way it turned out.
Congratulations Twinkietail, your fic was truly worthy! Go forth and kick butt in the final vote.
Oh, ponyhell. I really appreciated the cipher story. And the multiple pinkie story too, but the final analysis was "what STORY was better?"
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, I went to all the trouble of actually MAKING a cipher to try to understand #4. Yes, it was really THAT important (I will share it with you if you care to know). BUT I know that #4 isn't the best STORY. I am sorry Chris. But I TOTALLY support his story for the "wild card" section, just for the amount of thought that went into it.
Do we have a wild-card section?
SETH!!! We need a wild card section!!
you guys...i'm really honored. with the quality of the other fics in this round, i can't say i expected that at all. thanks! this made a great early birthday present for me :-D
ReplyDeleteApril Showers was fairly well written... but the content didn't exactly warrant my vote. =P Maybe it's because I don't ship ponies?
ReplyDeleteTwilight's Last Gleaming has my vote. The Spike bits did it for me. Spike made the story amazing. =P
I jotted down some reviews last night, figured I might as well post them. They're pretty unvarnished and one of the stories kind of pissed me off, so... be warned?
ReplyDelete[blockquote]
OK, it's 2 hours before the voting deadline, so it's time to buckle down and actually read these.
[b]The April Fools -[/b] That's really the title of this story? Ok. At first I found the prose a little dry/technical--although very well written--but then that last sentance hit me like a ton of bricks: perfect ending. I dig your less-is-more way of describing it, and I'm sure what I imagined is worse than what you could have described. I always enjoy the fan-charecterization of Celestia ruling with an iron hoof.
[b]Pink'd -[/b] Clever title. Strange story, kinda more setup than payoff. It's cute, the kind of storyline I could see being done in a spinoff show aimed at younger kids. My problem with it is that it's essentially the same vignette repeated five times, once for each of the non-pinkie mane characters, and, while I can see why you did that, at 1700 words I can't help but think the story would be snappier if you had found a way to cut it down to the tried-and-true formula of three repetitions. Still, it's fun and innocent.
[b]Leaf-ing the Dream -[/b] A very straightforward story, it delivers exactly what you'd expect from the title, no more no less. At 2000+ words, absolutely nothing went unsaid in this story. You take pains to explain everything to the reader in a very literal fashion; have more faith in us. That said, you write the characters well and I enjoyed the mental image of Fluttershy's tree-stance.
[b]A Cryptological Conundrum -[/b] OK, I call bullshit twice on this story. That might not be entirely fair as I did not finish reading it, but the part I did read was a complete cookiecutter fic that could have been applied to any set of characters. That said, I love me a good cryptogram so I stopped at the first pause and spent probably too much time working on it. Here's where I show my work:
[i][[b]EDIT:[/b] Derp, reply too long. I'll put my nerdrant in a separate reply][/i]
[b]Pinkie And Jack -[/b] I'm sorry to say that by the time I realized how terrible the puzzle in the last story was, I only had four minutes before the poll closed. I skimmed through this story in about 90 seconds. A mashup of two internet-famous cartoons, this feels exactly like something I would write. Candy Jack is clever. I kind of wonder why there isn't a meme replacing Candlejack with Applejack, since they're names are so sim-
[/blockquote]
[b]Epilogue:[/b] I voted for The April Fools.
Oh damn. Please use Brain-HTML to mentally format that message. Anyway, here's the promised rant:
ReplyDelete- By summing their three digits (and discarding the trivial cases of 000 and 999) all cipher characters can be mapped to the numbers 1 through 26. This mapping has a varying distribution: three cipher characters (001, 010, and 100) map to #1, six (011, 101, 110, 002, 020, 200) map to #2, etc etc up to many different mappings for 13 and 14. By assigning the two most frequently used letters to 13 and 14, the next two most frequent to 12 and 15, and continuing on until assigning the two least frequent letters to 1 and 26, we define a key that is very easy to generate and--although not perfectly distributed--is fairly resistant to frequency analysis. Now, technically there are 2^13 different possible keys defined by this method, but it only took a few minutes to try out the 16 different assignment combinations for ETAOIN&QZ (I did Q&Z because "equestria" is likely in the message). Sadly, this yielded nothing. At this point I decided to read on, although not before checking the anagrams of Russet Capes for any clues (all that yeilds is "A Secret Puss", not very helpful unless Opalescence is the traitor).
Unfortunately, it was at this point that I realized the whole thing was a sham. Look at that list of character frequencies! T is 7th!? There is NO way the author could have expected someone to solve this without seeing this custom list. But it was this line that cinched it: "I suspect 089 has to represent one of the least common letters". WAT. The message is 61 characters long, so statistically the chance of that collision being random is [i]at least[/i] ~84% [p(1000,61)=1-0.999^(61*60/2)]. You're only having Twilight say that because YOU KNOW 089 IS A Q. At this point I realized the author doesn't have a clue what he's doing and stopped reading the story. I don't even want to know what the code is, I'm sure I'll just be annoyed by how they figure it out. I considered doing a crib drag for the word "equestria", since it's almost definitely in there, but then I decided that I'd wasted enough time on this.
So congratulations, you got me to spend an hour working on your homework assignment. I guess that makes me the april fool in this scenario. Yeah yeah, in during butthurt.
Reading these comments confirmed my suspicion that there never was anything behind the code. Elaborating on what @Anonymous said, the author may as well have generated 61 random numbers. Since there's no way to derive the key, Russet would need to transmit it along with his message... might as well have us try to crack a onetime pad.
ReplyDeleteI am disappoint.
78653753748776765456764567uyy6hyr67yhgfyytr6gyut6tygertyjg87efywun57r96ghrefdtvkgvdnhcxtv7856478564376597vwrnytryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy7nvf54t7rvgf98gy
ReplyDelete