I don't know how far or how often everyone here strays out of the MLP subforum, but if by chance you never saw my
post in Furtopia's "Good News" thread that I made back in February, I was fortunate enough recently to win a brand new Acer Aspire one D255E Netbook PC by ranking in the top 25 highest scoring participants in a 3-month long Information Technology trivia competition. I received the netbook a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to be somewhat adventurous with it and
installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto it to try the beta version of Microsoft's upcoming operating system out. Now that I have played around with the new OS for a little over a week I have decided to keep it on the netbook the time had come to customize the OS's appearance... with ponies.
Now I had a few MLP:FiM desktop wallpaper images saved locally on one of my desktop machines already-- 68 of them in fact. But most of those were older MLP:FiM desktop wallpapers that I found during one crazy rushed all-night session last September. Those of you who have been following my threads here on Furtopia for a while may even remember why I was searching for MLP:FiM wallpapers at that particular time-- I was pulling the crazy all-nighter trying to get a 22-year old
Sun SPARCStation 2 workstation ready to exhibit at a Vintage Computer Fair that morning, and with only a couple hours until the Vintage Computer Fair to go and a rather vanilla-looking and mundane SPARCStation 2 on my hands I came up with the last-minute idea of trying to add some sharp-looking Rainbow Dash wallpapers to its Common Desktop Environment desktop (which turned out to actually be quite an involved project). In any case, it had been a *really* long time since I had gone out and seen what new MLP:FiM wallpapers had been made by fans, and with a brand new netbook with a brand new OS just begging to be pony-ized, I decided to seek some new MLP:FiM wallpapers out.
While I don't check out the latest headlines on Equestria Daily nearly as often as I used to, I still remembered that they often had "
Wallpaper Compilation Posts" on their site, which collected some of the latest and greatest wallpapers being produced at the time of the post by the Brony fandom. So I went to the website and checked it out, and found that their most recent Wallpaper Compilation Post was "
Wallpaper Compilation Post #43." For whatever reason, I had thought that I had gotten some of my MLP:FiM wallpapers from these EQD Wallpaper Compilation Posts in the past, so I decided that now was the perfect time to catch up with them, work my way backwards and check out every single Wallpaper Compilation Post that I hadn't already hit, and slurp up any MLP:FiM wallpaper that struck me as ranging anywhere from being just O.K. to mind-blowingly awesome. At one point, several hours into this crazy endeavor I came to a massive realization-- apparently, I had
never gone through an EQD Wallpaper compilation post in the past, I had gotten all of my current MLP:FiM wallpapers from elsewhere, and that if I was going to catch up with all of these Wallpaper Compilation Posts that I was going to have to go through
every single one of them!I stuck with it though, and after going through all 43 Wallpaper Compilation Posts I ended up with:
- 825 new MLP:FiM desktop wallpaper images. (And those were only the ones that I liked!) None of these are from any kind of zipped-up archive files containing huge sets of wallpapers either. For every single one of these wallpapers I had to follow the link from EQD to the artist's DeviantArt page (or similar art-hosting site), click on "Download File," and save it to my hard drive. You can bet that after repeating these actions 825-times with my mouse that I had a vein popping out of the palm of my hand below my thumb, and that I was starting to feel a little bit carpel-tunnelly! Speaking of those zipped-up archive files containing huge collections of wallpapers...
- 40 zipped-up archive collections of MLP:FiM wallpapers, containing an additional 500.65MB of wallpaper image files. I don't know how many more MLP:FiM wallpapers that is because I am kind of wallpapered out at the moment and I haven't yet gotten a chance to unzip them and sort through them all, but I am assuming that it is a lot!
- 1 instance of malware in the form of a JavaScript exploit.
Apparently one of those hundreds of wallpaper links that EQD linked to wasn't completely kosher. However it didn't appear do succeed in harming anything as I saw no telltale signs of any kind of an infection, and after scanning my system with Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, and Prevx I found no further problems. So I appear to have dodged a bullet and am good to go!
Even more incredible is the fact even after the nearly 1000 total MLP:FiM wallpapers that I have now amassed that I still have a feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of how many fan-made MLP:FiM wallpapers might actually be available out there. I almost wouldn't be surprised if there were several times more wallpapers on the web that I haven't even seen yet!
I now also have a serious problem, and that is that now that I have so many great MLP:FiM wallpapers, which one of them should I choose? I could have a different MLP:FiM wallpaper on my netbook display each day for the next two-and-a-half years and never have one repeat! Oh well, I suppose to paraphrase Fluttershy from the episode "May the Best Pet Win," that is probably a good problem to have!
Speaking of Fluttershy, I found one Fluttershy wallpaper in my search that I thought was so funny that I literally laughed out loud when I first saw it! It's called "Fluttershy kicks a bear wallpaper," and can be found on DeviantArt here:
http://murknl.deviantart.com/art/Fluttershy-kicks-a-bear-wallpaper-275728596I hope that you all find it as funny as I did! Enjoy!
