How does anyone here ever get anything done?
I've been known to get lost in books. Ok, fine, for most of my life it'd be more accurate to say I was lost outside of them. But a book ends, and then you have to go back to get another. You can't help but leave and deal with the world. The Internet though, that's something else. It felt like by the time I got to the end of an article I'd have three others I wanted to go back and click. Then a few hours in I figured out what that middle button on the "mouse" did, and the "tabs" just kept multiplying! I don't even understand the scope of the thing, yet, I think. I'm not sure I can.
But right, this journal is supposed to help me sort out thoughts, so: numbers. RD showed me two things: Wikipedia, and Google. The first claims to contain nearly 5 million articles in English alone, which is apparently the language we're speaking. Based on my experiences with it, I'd believe it. It's a number too big for anypony to really understand, I think. I have no idea if humans have a better head for numbers, but I know my old library in Ponyville only had in the tens of thousands of volumes. Sure, they had more words in them, but big numbers are tricky that way - a hundred times as many articles, with the ones I read well over a written page: there are likely more pages of information on Wikipedia than there were in my entire library, and all you need to read it is this tiny box. (I know the information doesn't exactly live there, but I still don't know exactly how the whole thing works - there's just so much to go through, and it's only been a day!)
So then I assumed that must be it, that must be the Internet, or at least the bulk of it. RD said Google was a way to search "the rest of the Internet", so as an experiment I typed in the name of that television program about Equestria. In thirty seconds, it found 97 million links I could click.
I don't know how long alicorn princesses actually live, but I'm pretty sure it isn't long enough for 97 million links about ponies.
Of course, what I actually discovered from the Internet just made me feel all the more confused about Earth and these humans. I found so many beautiful, amazing things, but then it seemed like most every time, by the end of the story, it had somehow gone wrong. The brilliant artist died young and destitute, or in one inexplicable case cut off his own ear. The new breakthrough was immediately turned around to kill, or was intended to in the first place. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
I don't think even Celestia could annihilate a city in one terrible instant, and yet the beauty of the equation, the thought, time and space, matter and energy each as one - by the time I reached that, I was wondering so many things I couldn't keep track of all of them. I wondered if physics works so beautifully in Equestria, and if it does, if I can ever tell another soul, knowing what it means. I cried after Tirek destroyed my library, once it all was done; each of those two bombs ended more lives than I'd had books. The war itself, more than the number of ponies in Equestria.
[Here there is a substantial gap, filled with crossed out starts of paragraphs. -Ed.]
Numbers. I don't even know how to think about a world where that can happen. And that world war was the second one! Somehow having gone through it once wasn't enough! And this is just one thing, one incomprehensibly vast tragedy in a history that seems composed of them.
I've met only a few humans, but I don't understand how Rachel or Alanna could be part of something like that. Is it just that their Discords and Sombras and Tireks are humans too, that they're far more varied and strange than ponies ever were? Or are they no better at numbers than I am, and just somehow get used to it? Maybe I would be used to it too, if I grew up here. Maybe I'd stop thinking about a hundred million lives, and just see a number on a page, like the bits in Celestia's budget.
Admittedly, that's a lot of bits. Does anypony ever really think about the cost of the Grand Galloping Gala in terms of what else those bits could be? How many extra rooms it could add to the Ponyville Schoolhouse, or how many apple trees it could plant? I've never heard of ponies having a war like that, but maybe we could get used to thinking of lives like we think of bits. Maybe if we needed to fight a world war, we'd have to, or go mad.
Or maybe we'd go mad anyway, and the humans just already have.
Mostly, though, I wondered if I was powerless to stop it. I'm the Princess of Friendship, and it seems like Earth could stand to know more about being friends. Maybe starting small is enough. Or maybe I can get my magic back, and won't have to. Tomorrow I'm going to make a new list.
But I have to admit, I'm just a pony, for all I'm a princess, and after seeing all that, I needed a break. I decided I'd take a look over that Google search, see what humans were saying about me and my friends. I needed to sign up for an "email address" to get on to a few of the sites I found, so I made one through Google.
Well. It's good that so many like the message that friendship is magical, I guess. But I'm not really going to give them credit for "figuring out" about Applejack and Rainbow, since they seem willing to believe that everypony is dating everypony else, and want to read about it in graphic, and often anatomically impossible, detail. I can't really blame them for not knowing how forelegs can and can't bend, I guess, especially given the liberties the show takes with equine anatomy, but some of that stuff is just ridiculous. Who wants a hoof anywhere at all sensitive, for example? Those things are rock hard and have sharp edges. After some additional research I gather it's quite pleasant for humans to touch each other with their fingers, but you can't just substitute like that between species, that's just lazy!
Okay Twilight, breathe.
More numbers: I found an article that said I'm the most popular single "fictional" subject of adult drawings on the Internet, with numbers of works dedicated to my mare bits that, once again, are too large for me to really understand. (Err, I mean the numbers, not my privates. Get your mind out of the gutter, Imaginary Rainbow Dash.) I don't have any idea how to feel about that. It's flattering, I suppose, though it's deeply strange to know that far more hairless apes I've never meet seem interested in me than do ponies I have. Maybe it speaks to how much this world needs friendship, if my personality and message can make them so attracted to me, despite our very different bodies. I'd like to think it's that, anyway. I know some ponies marry griffins, and Spike's crush on rarity is adorable, but these people haven't even met me.
If I ever meet any human stallions men, I'm going to be acutely aware of the position of my tail. It's a pity Alanna isn't a tailor like Rarity. It always seemed strange to me that humans were embarrassed without clothes, but now I'd love something with extensive coverage. Maybe a beekeeping suit.
Yeah, that break didn't work out so well. Now I'm off to sleep, and like the human prince in the renowned play I just read, I fear what dreams may come.