This is probably the most horrible thing I’ve ever done. I’m not proud of it. If you think it’s funny, then you’re a bad person and you should feel bad about yourself. You’re also in what is likely a very small set of people whose tastes span both Irvine Welsh and MLP:FiM.
Read on for full text, merch and source files for doing your own mashup.
First, the text:
Choose life. Choose a cutie mark. Choose a fucking elaborate hair style. Choose friends with crippling mental health issues. Choose a speech impediment, hyper-competitiveness, attention deficit disorder, style over substance, and social anxiety. Choose complete subservience to an all-powerful ruler answerable to no one. Choose a body in a range of fucking pastel colors. Choose inimical wildlife, unsustainable agriculture, artificial manipulation of the weather and an inchoate economic system. Choose standing in a sweet shop eating your own body weight in fucking cupcakes. Choose a thousand years of miserable solitary exile, forgotten and alone on an airless rock, nothing more than an embarassment to your insufferable sister.
If that’s a sentiment you urgently want to have adorning your body, I’ve grudgingly set up a CafePress shop to meet your needs.
If you like the general idea but want to make your own mashup, here is the original full-resolution design file broken into layers: ponyspotting.xcf.bz2 (4MB). This was created with GIMP 2.6.11, and you’ll need a similar version to open it. (You don’t need to uncompress it first.) The original Trainspotting poster is in there as a (currently-hidden) layer, as a reference for layout.
If you’re just wondering (as one does) what th’ heck is going on: Scottish author Irvine Welsh wrote a book called Trainspotting about heroin addicts in Leith, Edingburgh. A movie (with the same name) was subsequently produced. To promote the movie, Mark Blamire and Rob O’Connor created a classic poster. Gary Barnes created a parody (“Adminspotting”) about system administration, first as a Usenet post and then as a popular t-shirt; his site tells the whole saga. (My parody was certainly inspired, in part, by his.)
The tone and content of Trainspotting are about as far as you can possibly get from those of My Little Pony (a classic television drama and darling of the Internet — also apparently popular amongst adolescent girls, for some reason).
So anyway, SWMBO and I were having a conversation (AS. ONE. DOES.) about Rainbow Dash and possible substance abuse by same, and in that moment I knew what had to be done.
[Updated 26 Sep 2011 to correctly credit the creators of the original poster.]
You are weird.
I am a brony, and this whole ordeal made me laugh. I won’t like the show any less, but points out some flaws in what I think is a funny way. Very nice sir
Hans @#2: Thanks. I self-identify as a brony also. I’m not sure I would call those things “flaws” — it’s just that the Ponyverse doesn’t operate under the same rules as reality. If you try to treat it like it does, things get very silly, very quickly.
That makes a nice contrast to something like Trainspotting, which is almost hyper-realistic.