This piece of art has a story behind it. Two of them actually. One of which I'll be publishing soon. The other story is how much stupid went into making this cuddly piece...

Some time ago I discovered that my Amazon copies of the MLP series have screenshot protection. In other words: if you play an episode streamed from Amazon, pause the video, then use ANY software that can screenshot what's displayed on your monitor, the picture will come out... completely black. I don't know how they do it, but it's annoying when you're trying to get reference images. So I bought the 1st season on DVD and a player (because who has a pc with a built-in CD drive these days). Honestly I wasn't confident it would work. I know from experience many years ago, as a kid, that DVDs at least have copy protection. You can't just copy a DVD. But do they also have screenshot protection? Turns out... nope! Hoorah, I had my reference material.

However, I accidently scratched one of my new DVDs while I was messing around. Hmm, could I figure out a way around the copy protections to save them to a hard drive? Thus began an adventure to do just that, but I'll cut it short for you. DVD copy protections these days are a complete joke. It's actually more work looking up how to do it than to just do it. Literally, all you have to do is open the DVD like you would any other folder and click "copy". Yet it still took me like 3 hours to figure that out. I wasted so much time trying to use weird programs, guides, and "conversion" processes that didn't do anything. Let me tell you, it is incredibly frustrating waiting 20 minutes on a loading screen only to have absolutely no result. And I still don't understand why that didn't work. But I guess it didn't matter in the end.

Anyway! The point is I can now save my DVDs and grab whatever screenshots I might need for reference images. Which is how I made this joy. It turned out much more... wholesome than I intended. But I like it. Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.