There are some thickheaded opinions here.  

Shhh.  Just be warned.  

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My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic and Pokémon.  They can both just go the fuck away now.

Not the television shows, per se, which for the most part are reasonable and wholesome entertainment pointed at a younger audience (for most people here-- for me, that would be much younger audience), and not the toys and games-- the combination of both of which, God knows, I get to hear about at least four times every goddamned hour between the time I set foot in the door of my house until the time I manage to extract myself away to the merciful buffer zone of our bedroom, which is blessedly Pony- and Pokéball- free... at least, it is, until the time around Birthdays and Christmas.

So I get onto deviantArt, and of course, what do I see scattered all over the front page?  

Like freaking clockwork, I can pretty much guess that one out of every ten to fifteen deviations will have something to do with one of the two.  It will be a Ambiguously Gay Rainbow Dash comic, or will be a backgroundless picture with an ATK level and type, or be an OC MLP that fits snugly between episodes 15 and 16, or an OC Pokémon/Trainer that fits snugly between episodes 136 and 137, or a ubiquitous "MLPs as Oversexually-Caricatured Anthromorphs/Humanmorphs" pic.  (And no, that last one will never be able to be scrubbed from the insides of my retinas without the benefit of steel wool, thanks.)  And frankly, I get it.  They're popular, and cute, and easy to draw, and JFC, fucking enough already.

I should note that I am not bashing sight unseen.  I have seen both shows enough (Christ on Acid, have I ever) to know that they're fun for kids.  I can rattle off the names of the ponies: Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie-Pie, That One That Sounds Like A Texas Truck-Stop Waitress, and Princess Whateveria.   I know there's kind of a cute nostalgia factor to MLP:FIM, the same way the old Justice League series pulled the Legion of Doom's Evil Scrubbing Bubble headquarters out of its ass.  I know the names of about thirty Pokémon types just from having them launched at me in casual conversation, like some sort of verbal  catapult barrage.  I know the Pokémon cartoon (and yes, it's a 'cartoon' now.  Once 4Kids gets a hold of you, you officially lose the right to be called an anime, and it's only a matter of time until the snobbiest otaku disavow your existence) has been on its sixth or seventh iteration and the last time I heard the voice actor playing Ash, he was totally mailing it in.  Hell, Pikachu is old enough that he's starting to sound wheezy, like he should cut back on the Marlboro Menthols.  So I've seen and endured it outside the 'net.

And please, don't give me the "But it (they) are/were well-written and have interesting stories and characters!!" response, either.  Game of Thrones, CSI, and Stargate Atlantis are/were well-written and have interesting stories and characters, and I would feel exactly the same way if every tenth deviation was a Shepherd/McKay slash comic, or pictures of Ned Stark, or animated gifs of Daenerys Targaryen's boobs.  Overkill and oversaturation is overkill and oversaturation, regardless of the genre.  Are these really the only worthwhile fanbases these days?   

Srsly, who woulda thought I'd get nostalgic for the days when crudely drawn shock-comics and grainy erotica was what littered the dA front page?

You know what?  Even if I hate both of them with the same sort of psychotic, irrational hatred that I reserve for things like Political Debates, Morality Tests and the New England Patriots, I guess I can still recognize that they keep my stepchildren from doing much worse things.  Like snorting modeling glue.  Or methamphetamines.

Or Naruto.  

But damn, even so, do they have to invade every aspect of my life?

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So, over the coming week or so, I am officially retiring the Argo model.  Not the character Argo himself, but the model, mesh and texture that I've used for Argo for a good long time now.  I'm a bit sentimental about that, as I've always been very happy with the 'look' this particular model had, the mixture of youth and smarminess that just seems to scream Argo.  (Seriously, I could do things with the expressions on this model that could turn a smirk into an evil grin).  Argo was based off a mesh called David (or D3, in the Daz parlance), who was a Daz 3rd generation mesh/model, specifically a younger man compared to Michael 3.  His size fit in well with the also-younger Stephanie 3, who was the model I based his then-paramour Shockwave off of when I was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, into the use of generation 3 models on the whole.

I've always been a bit slow to accept the newest models for my characters, because A) upgrading a character you've used for that long can be a chore in and of itself, and B) Daz 3D tends to churn out new character iterations faster than Apple churns out iPhones, except with less backward compatibility, which means plunking down more money for the base, the morphs, and all the new clothes that you wish like fuck had come out for the character generation that you are currently using.  (No joke, I once referred to Victoria 3 as "that vomitous polygon-heavy bitch", railed and railed against upgrading and finally broke down and bought her and her morphs, and within a month was treated to a preview of Victoria 4.)  It also means that designers are coming up with texture maps at something like 6000 x 6000 pixels, more than enough to give a small embolism to the $1500 software I've done all my modeling in for the past six years.  

Unfortunately, sometimes that upgrading sort of thing is a must-do.  In the current creative forays where I'm spending most of my time, the Company of the Tangled Briar (who are sort of the iconic characters for my World of Phantasie campaign setting) are all Generation 4 models... except Argo.  And since D3 was shorter than the generation 3 models, I have to upsize him in every picture he appears with another character in, which sometimes skirts the edge of comical, since without tweaking, the relatively short elves in the group-- based off the generation 4 meshes-- all tower over him.

I may get maudlin and do a farewell pic for him, but more than likely I will just start churning out new pictures with the new character look.  And for that matter, maybe now is a good time for me to look into updating his look.  But I've kinda grown attached to the blue-armored caster with the mussed up forelocks, so it's hard to say.

Those of you who don't know Poser or Daz Studio may be left a little out in the cold here, and for that, I apologize.   Think of this as geekspeek for 3Dists.  Long story short: Argo may look different soon.  The rest of the group will not notice.  

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As of this month, my lovely Trophy Wife™ *xWicked-Angelx and I will have owned a house for a year.

It has not caught fire or been otherwise reduced to rubble.  It has not hosted a frat party or a collection of serial graffiti artists.  It has not become a health violation site or had the garage taken over by flesh-eating rats.

This is what we call a small victory.

That is all.

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Alla you who made it down here, thanks for reading!

- Mark/Argo

  Somewhere in the lush greenery of Indiana