“Whenever there’s a big order, I really have my hooves full - the time just flies! It takes me a whole day just picking fresh herbs around the forest, and by the time I start making the potions, salves, or whatever concoctions there are, it’s already evening…”
“Why not just wait until the morning?”
“It’s better when the ingredients are fresh, you know? At least that’s what I think. I… I don’t think the customers could really tell the difference, to be honest. But I would know! You know?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“It’s the right thing to do! So, yes, I end up working through the night, and sometimes, I only get an hour of shuteye before the cart comes. I always tell them to come for the stuff in the morning, and they know I’m good for it. Then, of course, I have to take care of the loading…”
“Wait, doesn’t the driver do that?”
“Oh, they do the heavy lifting, but I like to make sure nothing gets misplaced or broken. And I have to make them tea, too! Coming all the way to my hut is quite the trip, especially early in the morning. And once everything is taken care off, I see the driver off, and can finally get some rest.”
“It sounds pretty demanding.”
“It can get a bit crazy, but… you know how it is, right? I don’t want to keep ponies waiting. In the end, siting down in the evening, listening to the bugs and bubbling cauldrons, even when you have to grind and cut and stir… it’s pretty relaxing. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

A commission for rem-ains, featuring Felicity Mossrock. Version with sound: Youtube video

Technical
Still image created with inkscape.
The animations were made and exported with aniGen.

Story time!
Talk about technical issues. AniGen handled fine enough (usual bug swatting while I worked, because hey, software development), but exporting was just a nightmare. Since the image has a few blurs in it, I knew it’d take a while. But I also know I can export twenty seconds at a time, so I set it up and went for a walk. I came back an hour later to a nice little message about Chrome running out of memory. After groaning a lot, I started exporting again, and watched the progress. It died in the first ten minutes. So I checked memory usage, and Chrome decided to eat six gigs of my RAM (!) before just giving up and crashing. So I went hunting for memory leaks, found nothing significant, started reading bunch of articles… six hours later, the best thing I could come up with was “Chrome is a literal idiot with idiotic memory management and I hate its face”.
So I went to Derpfox. I mean Firefox.
Oh boy.
Did I mention aniGen wasn’t really tested on Firefox?
I do try to keep things compatible, but it’s mostly theoretic, since I just don’t have time to switch browsers in the middle of work just to see what screws up.
So I had to fix it first. So I did (day of work). Then I started exporting. But Firefox memory management is great! And even for rendering, it’s not really that bad. Until it came to large blurred semitransparent objects with dynamic scaling (the tulip flying by) and the rendering just tanked. Minute per frame? Sure.
SIX HOURS LATER the render was done.
And it was wrong.
Because SVGRender was never tested for Firefox.
A-ny-way, another day of development later, and the issues are mostly fixed. I hope.
So I rendered it again (six hours), ran out of hard drive space while GIFing it, had a complete system crash, lost all of my music playlists, found out some of the frames are still wrong, spend another five hours fixing it, and now it’s done.
And so am I.

And I haven’t even touched on the amount of work on the head turning animation, which I’m actually kinda proud of. And it has sound now! Because youtube!

I need to go lie down.