And it's Sylvie

This is a made-up pony (I like that term better than OC, also, to me, OC has the connotation of "this is my pony-sona") that popped into my head when I was reading that huge book on Silviculture.



Her name is Sylvie Culture. (Yeah, I know. I like puns). She's an earth pony whose special talent is encouraging tree growth/tree seedlings. (Her flank insignia is a stylized pine tree).

She's yellow, as close to the color of pine pollen as I could find, with two shades of green for her hair.

One of the fun things about "made up" ponies is you don't have to worry about making them look "like" a particular show character, so I was able to have a little more leeway with face and hair.



I decided to give her freckles (perhaps she's a distant relative of the Apple family) and after I did her main hair, I realized she really needed bangs. (I tried eyebrows first but they weren't right so I didn't put them in and went with the bangs instead). I didn't braid her hair all the way, just two main braids and then some of it loose:



(This is actually not ideal for fieldwork. If you have long hair, you really want it ALL braided up so sticks and bugs and burrs don't get in it). Her tail is also braided, though I suspect being a "bangtail" would be a preferable state for a horse that worked in the forest a lot.

The little boots took some effort to make but they please me and I think they turned out fairly well. As I said, it's hard to "cobbler" for something with very short but very wide feet and have the shoes look like shoes.



And yes, all of this is a little frivolous and maybe childish, but I need this kind of thing in my life.

A related article: I read a website called "Christ and Pop Culture" (it is what it says on the tin, as they say). I ran across this article today.

And yeah: "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang, adulthood!" The Daniel meme is kind of silly and I didn't find it all that funny - but I did, and do still, find lots of the LOLcat stuff funny. Or the cute funny pictures of cats or dogs you find on the internet.

The writer comments, about these silly things: "I’m only one man, struggling (or not) against the insurmountable forces of the world’s insanity. The world is a dark, scary place, and disposable pap is comforting." And while I'm not sure I would be so quick to dismiss some of the sweet silly fun things I like as merely "disposable pap" (I do think looking at cute pictures of animals probably does something good for a person), yeah, the world can be a dark scary place and a little comfort, where we can find it, is very welcome. And I think this is why - increasingly, it seems - I turn to the little round of five or six blogs that feature Ponies of various generations (and in this particular between-seasons break, I've gotten more interested in the earlier-generation ponies. And I don't know if Hasbro still owns the trademark or not, but I join with the fans who say, "it would be awesome if we learned that Firefly was actually Rainbow Dash's mom"). I need that stuff in my life.

And it's not even the either/or mentality he seems to be suggesting: I still read news and commentary online and even watch some of it on tv. But sometimes you need a break; sometimes it is too much to keep reading about the downward spiral of my state's budget and try to think about how I would manage if the regional universities here went away for lack of funds... so I will periodically have to turn to pictures of fuzzy ponies or silly stories about people wanting to name an icecutter Boaty McBoatface.

We need fun. Fun is good. There's a shortage of fun in adulthood, I think.