November 7
I woke up at the usual time, because while my portable telephone might have known that it was supposed to change times, my body didn't, and it was very confusing.
I guess humans adapt to it much easier than ponies, because Aric and Meghan were still both fast asleep, and so I snuggled back down with them but I couldn't go to sleep, so I just listened to them breathing and the birds outside—who probably also didn't know anything about Daylight Saving Time—chirping as they had their breakfast.
And I was kind of starting to doze off again when Meghan woke up enough to start scratching my back, and I pushed my head against her and gave off a happy sigh.
She leaned up on one elbow and looked over at Aric and asked if we should wake him up, and I thought that would be kind of rude, so we let him sleep until Meghan's alarm started going off, and even that didn't wake him up. She was kind of quick to turn it off, so maybe that was why.
I thought that her alarm had gone off at the wrong time and I had to look at it and make sure that it was correct, 'cause it didn't feel right to me. She said that in a few days things would go to normal and I hoped that was true. I didn't think I'd been this confused when Daylight Saving Time had started, but maybe that was because I had to get up earlier, and so it hadn't seemed so strange.
Us moving around in bed was what finally woke him up, and he was pretty out of it, and I thought that maybe he was having trouble with the time change, too, but Meghan said it was probably because he'd stayed up all Saturday night working on his paper, and it turned out that was why.
Even though it was his own fault for not getting it done sooner—I wouldn't have been mad if he'd done it on Saturday instead of going to Fort Custer with me—I felt kinda bad for him.
So after we'd kissed him goodbye, Meghan got dressed, and the two of us walked back to school, and I went right up to my room and woke up Peggy so that she could have a morning trot with me. She was a little bit more cheerful because of the time change, and she got dressed while I was in the bathroom filling up my camelback.
We went around Academy Street to Grove and even though we'd left kinda late because I'd been at Aric's, we got close enough to wave to Caleb and Lindy and Trinity before they got on their bus.
And then we went around the rest of the neighborhood the usual way, and it was really strange for it to be so light out when we'd finished our morning exercise. And I kept thinking that I was missing my class, even though I wasn't.
After Kat got out of the shower, I took a really quick shower and then let Peggy take hers, and I went back to the room and groomed myself and preened my wings. The summer brush I used was starting to tangle in my coat now, 'cause I was starting to grow in a winter coat, so it was about time to put it away and get out my winter brush. Pretty soon I was gonna be fluffy instead of sleek, and I hoped that the weather got cold pretty soon, 'cause if it stayed warm like it had been, I was gonna be too hot.
Peggy got dressed and I packed up my things for thermodynamics, and I hoped that Lisa was at the class, or else I was going to have to go to her room and get the lab notes and figure out how to put them in the computer myself, 'cause she might have had an excuse for not getting them done but I didn't.
I guess the extra hour in the morning had given the kitchen more time to get ready, because there were omelets and waffles and lots of other good food, and so I got both an omelet and then I shared a waffle with Peggy, 'cause neither of us wanted a whole one. And everyone was a little bit cheerier and more awake at the breakfast table, and when I got there Christine and Sean were telling Meghan how much fun we'd had at the second Rocky Horror.
Sean got up and went off looking for more food, and when he came back he had a whole plate full of chocolate eclairs, and he said that they'd just put them out and he'd gotten enough for everyone, and he passed them around. I didn't want one, 'cause I was full, so he had one extra, and he gave that to Christine, and she kissed him even though she had chocolate frosting all over her lips.
Everyone got done eating a little bit early, so we didn't have to rush off, and we just sat and talked for a little bit, and then I got up so that I could get to class on time and I nuzzled Meghan before I took my tray back to the conveyor.
I flew across the quad, and landed in front of Dow and I got there early enough that the last class hadn't left yet, and Lisa was there although she still looked kind of sick and maybe should have stayed in bed.
Professor Brown taught us more about mixes and the Lever rule, because it was so important how it worked because most things were solutions of one kind or another, and after he'd reviewed what we'd learned before he started to talk about alchemical potential, and he gave us equations for all the different parts of the pressure diagram, and some of them got so long that they were crowded on the markerboard and so I was careful not to scrunch them up in my notes.
He also told us that the achemical potential of a mixture was always lower than the alchemical potential of a pure liquid, and then we moved on to non-ideal liquids, and he gave us a formula for that, and then how there might be positive or negative deviations from it, if the two liquids really liked each other or didn't get along at all.
He drew out a phase diagram for acetone and carbon disulphide, and I didn't know what either of those were. Carbon was on the periodic table, but acetone and disulphide wasn't, and he said that when you mixed them together they tried to become a gas. But if you took away the carbon disulphide and replaced it with chloroform (which also wasn't on the table) than they liked each other and would stay a liquid that was lower than it should have been on the ideal phase diagram.
After class was over, me and Lisa went to the lounge and she got out our lab work and we both looked over it for mistakes, and we didn't find any, which was good. She said that she was going to go back to her room and get some more sleep, and I went back to my room.
I sat at my desk and did my homework, then when I was done I picked up the Bible without really thinking about it and then I remembered that I had finished it. And I ought to have started the World War One book—I was going to start over, 'cause I couldn't remember what I'd read—but the window was open and it was a really nice day again and people were playing out on the quad, and I thought it would be more fun to join them. I could start on the book in the afternoon.
So I went out and galloped down the quad, then when I got to the bottom I flew up almost against the wall of Hoben and then flew to the top and landed and did it again, and that was a lot of fun. And then I laid on the hill and rolled on my back in the grass, which cooled me down a little bit, and when I got back up again, I had lots of grass clippings stuck in my coat, 'cause they'd trimmed the lawn while I'd been in class, and so I shook them off and that made me think of a tree shedding its leaves.
And there were trees that hadn't shed their leaves yet, maybe because it was still pretty warm, but they were mostly turned, so I started to gallop around one and I didn't think that I was accomplishing anything at first, but then I started to feel the pull from the tree, and pretty soon I had leaves raining down around me.
I was only one pony, and I wasn't very good with trees at all, so by the time I'd started to get dizzy, the tree still had a lot of leaves on it, but there was a pretty respectable pile of leaves around it, too. And there were also a few people who'd watched me, and also got to watch me stagger around a little bit while my body tried to figure out straight again.
I had to go back to my room to get my things for math, and when I got there Peggy asked me what I'd been doing on the quad, because someone had texted her and said that I was running in circles, and I said that I'd explain at lunch, because I thought maybe other people would want to know, too.
So after we'd gotten our food, I explained how we ran to help the leaves come off the trees so that they would be ready for winter, and Sean said that on Earth the leaves just fell off on their own and nobody needed to help them. And I thought that maybe they would in Equestria, too, but it was also a sign to everyone that winter was coming, and it was time to get ready to hibernate or to fly south if they were birds, plus it was just a fun thing that everypony could do, even pegasuses and unicorns.
Christine said that in America the sign of fall was pumpkin spice, and when animals smelled it in the air that was how they knew it was time to leave. Anna asked her what the animals had done before Starbucks, and she said that there was no civilization before Starbucks, just people living in caves trying to invent pumpkin spice lattes.
So I wanted to go to Starbucks and try one since they were apparently so good.
When we were done eating, me and Sean went to math class together, and I was still feeling pretty frisky, so instead of walking I cantered across the quad, and he just kept walking, so I cantered all the way back to the dining hall and then back, and I might have been able to do it a third time but instead I just stayed by the door until Sean arrived.
Professor Pampena taught us about flux, which was another line integral. And it was kind of similar to work, but not the same. And it was really useful because it could be used to figure out how fluids moved.
He showed us how to calculate it on a circle first, and it was kind of easy because a lot of things got to cancel out, and then he showed us on another vector field how it was just zero, and then when he was sure we understood that, he said that instead of solving it geometrically it was easier to use coordinates when things got complicated, and showed us how to do it that way. And at first it seemed like it was going to be more difficult, but then he reminded us how to rotate vectors, and then it was a lot easier.
He wrote an equation for it on the markerboard and told us that we had to remember it, so I underlined it in my notes, and then told us that there was a Green's theorem for flux, too, and put that on the markerboard, too.
We went to Sean's room to do our math homework together, and he had the window open and there was a little bit of a breeze blowing through it and it got better when he cracked his door open some to give the wind a place to go. And I stretched out my wings and let it ruffle my feathers a little bit before I started to focus on my math homework. At least this time I'd be doing it without my insides trying to get out.
He finished up while I was still double-checking all my answers, and he asked if I minded if he changed the music to another beautiful song, and I said that he could. And the woman who was singing had a really beautiful voice, and I kind of lost track of checking my work, 'cause I was focused on what she was singing. And I didn't know any of the words, and he said that they were Bulgarian, and that the song was called Zaidi Zaidi. And he didn't know what the words meant, but I didn't think it mattered too much.
I wish that I could sing like that.
The two of us went over our problems together, and then we wrote out one of them in Equestrian, and I was glad I'd thought to write down what symbols I'd been using for the math letters, because I'd forgotten one of them, and I didn't want to confuse Professor Pampena by changing math letters from one problem to the next.
And he played the song for me one more time before we watched a Numberphile movie. It was about a math problem that had been on a math Olympics test, and it had been so difficult that the mathematicians who had picked the questions for the test couldn't solve it, and I thought that that was kind of unfair, but they'd thought that maybe some of the contestants could figure it out. And it was actually two movies, because the first one explained the question and then the second one gave the answer.
At the very end, he also revealed that one of the other people who had solved it correctly and gotten all seven points was Zvezdelina Stankova, who had been in one of the other movies I'd seen. So she was really really smart. And she was Bulgarian and so was the song that I liked that Sean had just played for me which was also an interesting coincidence.
I went back to my room and got out my World War One book and started reading it, just to familiarize myself again with how it had started, and then it said how all the different European nations declared war with each other just because Archduke Ferdinand got assassinated and Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for it.
And the Germans went through Belgium and started massacring people on their way to France, and then Germany pushed through and into France and hundreds of thousands of people got killed.
And in the sea, the British sank German ships and blockaded them to force surrender, and that only worked until the Germans started sinking their ships with submarines.
The Russians attacked in Prussia and the Germans defeated them, but Austria-Hungary didn't do so well, until the Germans helped them, and they fought all winter and nobody won.
Turkey decided to fight Russia, too, and their warships bombed ports. And in Africa, all the European nations started to fight against enemy colonies there, too.
Japan declared war on Germany, and Australia defeated a German colony that was nearby, and they started to fight around South America, too.
And the book kept telling me how many people died in each battle and the numbers were impossible to imagine. It seemed like everybody was fighting everybody else and nobody was getting anything from it. I guess it was important for friends to stand by each other, but I thought that everyone should have already figured out that the fighting wasn't working and nobody was winning and maybe they should just stop.
I wasn't enjoying the book very much, so I was pretty happy when I got to put it down and go to dinner. And I ate a pretty light dinner, even though I was hungry, 'cause I had to practice cheerleading tonight and I didn't want to do it with a full stomach.
Which was too bad, because they had a pretty good dinner, and I had a couple of fish fillets, and also some salad, and then I told Reese and Anna that I wasn't going to be able to come to Durak tonight because of cheerleading practice, and I thought that I should probably tell Aric, too, so he didn't worry.
I got there a little bit early, and so I had to wait around the entrance, and Sandra wound up arriving a little bit late, so everyone was already there and even though she hadn't been there to coach them, they started to do their stretches. I'd worked with weatherponies who weren't that motivated.
While they were doing their normal routines, Sandra took me into another room so that I could get measured for the uniform, and she had a woman named Elaine take the measurements, because she had been the same one who made the costumes for the play. And she kind of fussed about a bit and had me hold out my wings and flap them and flex them, and then move around my tail. My legs weren't too much of a problem, because the vest didn't have sleeves and the skirt at the back let my hind legs move freely.
And I thought it would be like with my lab coat where I would get it back in a couple of days to see how it fit, but she'd brought a whole sewing kit with her in a toolbox, and she got to work right away.
So I got interrupted a couple of times while I was practicing, just so that I could try it on and try to move in it and then she'd make a couple of marks and take my clothes back off and I could practice some more, and then I had to be fitted again.
But it was worth it, because by the end of practice she'd made me a cheerleading uniform that fit me, although I had to be careful because some of the seams were still held together with pins that would poke me if I moved too much. And she'd even made underwear with a tail-hole which I didn't like very much but Sandra had decided that I would have to wear it, even though I didn't really want to.
While the girls went off to the locker room to change, I went back into the other room and Elaine helped me take off my uniform, and then she also measured around my fore fetlocks so that she could make straps for pom-poms for me.
She said that she should have it all ready for tomorrow, and I could practice with it on, since it would be my first time wearing it.
I was happy to have it off, 'cause it was hot wearing clothes. I didn't know how Gusty managed. She was probably gonna have to clip her coat really short, especially if the weather stayed like this.
I walked back up the quad to my dorm, and I was glad that the temperature had dropped. I guess that was one nice thing about it being later sooner—the temperature got a little bit cooler. And I was getting kind of tired, 'cause my body still hadn't figured out the new time, and thought that it was bedtime.
I probably should have taken a shower to rinse out my coat, but I didn't really feel like it, and I'd be taking one in the morning anyway. And so I went and started to pack up my flight gear so that I could go to Aric's, and then I went to get Meghan, and the two of us walked over to his house together, and I told her about my cheerleading outfit.
We were a little early and he hadn't got back from Durak yet, and I was kind of tired, so I just got in bed and I scooted over up against the wall, and I was mostly asleep by the time that Meghan was undressed and in bed with me. And she was kind of worried that maybe I was getting sick, but I told her that it was just the time change messing with me, because my body was telling me that it was time to sleep.
I felt kind of bad disappointing her, but she rubbed my ears and told me that it was okay, it was better to let my body get accustomed to the new time, and then she put her arm around my belly and snuggled up to my back.
The Legend of Question 6:
I'm not putting the link to the second video in there, to give you time to solve it on your own if you want to
Acetone is nail polish remover (among other things)
WWI the casualties were 80% military/ 20% civilian (IMO, largely because for several years the Western Front moved slowly enough that civilians could flee). WWII, casualties were about 50/50 (IMO because of bombing cities to try & disrupt production). These days, casualties are 80% civilian. Also, in WWI artillery caused about 90% of the (non disease) casualties (counting airplanes in w artillery) & machine guns caused 90% of the remainder. It was the 1st major war that more people were killed than died of disease.
Looking forward to Silver Glow's comments on the election tomorrow... and mildly surprised she didn't hear anything about it the day before.
To be fair, calling WWI and WWII separate wars is of course technically accurate but in lots of ways they were the same core conflict.
Honestly if it weren't for nuclear weapons making it so that no one could meaningfully win it probably would have gone on forever, just with more pauses. Industrial society is ravenous.
So Silver Glow gets her winter coat based on the calendar, not the outside temperature? She'll have a warm November, then, but she'll be glad she has her winter coat come December.
7856120 also on the list, saving private ryan. He somehow got permission to show that in it's entirety.
i love seeing how silver is reacting to ww1. Will we see how she reacts to the election?
7856294 Haha no kidding, there are only two other fics in my Faves list that surpass this one in length.
And you're only 300k words from taking 2nd place! :D :D :D
I always see tail holes for anthros wearing underwear, but one has to ask why they don't just cut a simple v-notch in the area to fit the tail.
7856302
Would the elastic waistband work right with a v-notch?
7856215
Yeah, she's gonna have a rough day of it.
At least she knows she can fly over any stupid wall.
it was kind
the words
needs a period
7856226
Ye old George Orwell idea? I disagree. Patton, maybe. Montgomery? Potentially. But Churchill? Eisenhower? Hell, Truman coming into the end of it ... one must have more faith in humanity than that.
Some look at the World Wars as some golden age of science - but those same scientist could have cured cancer. Some look at it for the martial glory - but there is no glory in blood and death. Some look to it for national honor but that poison started the whole mess. I love the World Wars because they showed humanity that the center could not hold. The old ways were dead at the barrel of a machine gun, at the burst of a bomb, in the fire of nuclear reaction. And we have had problems adapting, true. But we are adapting. And even if that poison spreads again and we end up in the tornado of world war once more, it took almost a hundred years to start again despite how falsely simple such 'solutions' must seem. And those generations that lived in the time when peace - peace, beauteous peace - was on every tongue if not in every heart surely would have been worse if not for the sacrifice of those who died not for glory or nation but to perhaps prove that the old ways were dead. Forever or at least for a good, long while.
At least, that is my hope.
MY favorite is still WW1 as a bar fight.
images1.tickld.com/live/articles/a_1013_20150917155149.jpg
Click to zoom
I like it mostly for the description of Russia's revolution.
Although I have a book about it from the Canadian perspective that's absolutely fascinating (actually it's about Canada's military from the Boar War until Korea. "Marching as to War" if anyone is interested.)
Fun Fact:
Canada's first naval ship? HMCS Rainbow
I'm not entirely sure how the title links to this one, I was sort of expecting Silver to play the card game Flux at some point. I guess its to do with the general change of the clocks and seasons.
Silver certainly seems to be extra frisky for much of the day, apart from the evening when her usual friskiness seems to have departed to Meghan's disappointment.
It's interesting that Silver doesn't seem to grasp the difference between elements and compounds (Although that probably not the correct terminology. Atoms and molecules maybe? Although elements still form molecules. Chemistry was a long time ago now).
Franz Ferdinand getting his head blown off isn't all that interesting in itself.
The real cause of WWI was the deterioration of relations between world powers that eventually became vocal hostility and saber-rattling, or rather, the reason for that: They each wanted control of land colonized by the others. Hell, the only thing that stopped the scramble for Africa was deceleration of WWI itself.
As world powers do, each side in the conflict got together and decided who would get what territories if they won. When the Russian Monarchy was overthrown, the Allied plans ended up leaked to the press.
Of course, in WWII they didn't bother keeping it a secret; we all know about the Yalta conference.
And yet, amidst all the horror, WWI gave us one of my favorite episodes in the history of human-kind.
The Christmas Truce, when fighting simply stopped. It didn't repeat and it didn't change the course of the war, but it was, IMHO, a shining moment of hope.
What would people in 90 years say about the situation Today? There are conflicts all over the place. It just happend that the places we care about are less effected by them than the places we don't care about.
Silver should read some of Wilfred Owens WW1 poetry
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46560
Dulce et Decorum Est
Equestrian Elements, not including Harmony, seem to be Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Penut Butter and Baked Bads.
Silvers getting enough Tiddly Pom Pom to make a British Marching Band.
When I think of flux I think of solder.
When I think of solder I think of tin and lead.
The alloy of tin and lead has a lower melting temperature than
either pure tin or pure lead.
Probably due to the principle of flux.
Someone really needs to explain how molecules work to the poor pony.
7856318
You might need to sew something stiff into the v to give the elastic anchorage, although I'm somewhat skeptical that panties for ponies would operate in the same sort of way that human panties do.
But really, I'm not sure a tailhole is really a work around for having a tail: even if she had hands, we're still talking about literally threading the whole tail out of the hole if she ever had to go the washroom, or threading it back through after. It's a crazy hassle.
7856213
Really? I thought it's only practical use was in potato cannons.
7856798
In 1914, many enlisted men did not see the point in killing men with whom they had no quarrel. This lead to an attitude of "Live-And-Let-Live", if you do not try to kill us, we shall not try to kill you. The unofficial Christmas-Truce was the ultimate manifestation. In a better alternate world, the leaders came to their senses and figured that since the soldiers do not want to kill each other, they might as well call off the whole damned war. Ours is not that world:
Officers would punish, up to executing, soldiers refuse to kill the enemy. Then we had the raids:
Raids were both on the tactical and strategic levels, of little military use, but got the soldiers killing each other. ¿What is a raid? Every now and then, when an attitude of "Live-And-Let-Live" starts to manifest, the officers would order the soldiers to attack the enemy trenches in an infantry-charge, kill as many of the enemy as possible, and steal whatever they could from the enemy, before retreating to friendly lines.
7856546 Not to say that people don't matter, but people change quickly, and the factors pushing societies towards war or peace are much more stable. FDR didn't even survive the war, and Churchill got voted out right after. And then we had 50 years of Cold War and accompanying regional conflicts. Given actual history got close to a wider war even with that deterrent, I don't think there's much reason to think we'd have avoided it without it. And more to the point, it's still the case today that people feel they need more resources to drive their industrialized societies than are easily obtained in their own lands. We've just come to a system where for the most part it seems like we'd rather go in for economic conflict than military.
7857394
I'm well aware that it didn't last, but it still is, IMHO, a very important statement about human nature. Specifically, the lengths you have to go to reach the horror that was WWI.
That pretty much covers every major war in history.
Just wait until you find out how many horses and other animals died...
If Aric like Meghans clothes I bet he'll have some fun with his new cheerleader...
War exists for two reasons only: Because people can always believe it's easier to take what somebody else has instead of working for it, and because the alternative to defense (slavery and genocide under a single tyrannical government) is even worse than war.
And while I'm blathering about the topic...
7857044
I talked to a seamstress tonight, and she said that the v-notch wouldn't work; even if it was stiffened, like with a steel plate or something, the elastic wouldn't hold them on.
There is underwear which exists with a large hole in the back, although I'm not sure if I can post a picture of it. Basically, there's a cutout at the back that you could put a tail through, or you know, whatever. And you could make it large enough that the tail wouldn't have too much trouble fitting through, although that would defeat the purpose of it hiding much (or anything at all).
Another option might be a flap, like a union suit has:
imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/58/5832/UFDSG00Z/posters/comic-cartoon-man-s-longjohns-and-woman-s-panties-hangin-out-together-on-laundry-line.jpg
A notch could be cut in that for the tail, and it could be buttoned up after, and of course that would allow the wearer to use the bathroom; however, buttons would be no advantage for earth ponies or pegasi, unless they were so high up on the back that they could reach and manipulate them by mouth.
Likewise, you could have some sort of a split in the back which could be opened when needed, and closed most of the time to preserve modesty, and I can think of ways that that might work with hooves (especially since ponies are extra-bendy), although if you made it loose enough to be easily opened when needed, you might accidentally flash other people.
Maybe that's why underwear really isn't a thing for most ponies.
7858668
I'm not sure I really understand why it wouldn't work. As far as I can tell, the elastic of the underwear is, presumably, exerting an inward force around the waist of a person because it's slightly smaller than the waist that's wearing it, which stretches it and creates tension. So long as the elastic is smaller, it shouldn't matter that both ends of the elastic aren't together. After all, the only thing making the ends of the elastic meet together is thread that sews the two ends together.
7856646 flux is a mathematical concept that silver learned in this chapter. It's essentially the amount of something (electricity, water, heat, whatever) that flows through an area.
I'm surprised Silver hasn't learned the differnce between elements and compounds as well. Although I guess that's what she gets for skipping pre reqs
Yes.
7857430
The leaders just could not allow soldiers not to kill each other. In retrospect, the enlisted men would have been better off if they would have shot the officers rather than let the officers force them to shoot the enemy:
Politician # 0:
"We have to call off the war because the soldiers still refuse to shoot each other."
Politician # 1:
"The officers were supposed to force the enlisted men to kill."
Politician # 0:
"Enemy snipers killed all of the officers."
Politician # 1:
"⸘They did‽"
Politician # 0:
"Yes. The funny thing is that all of snipers shot the all of the officers, without exception, in the back; and despite being hundreds of yards away, the officers have powder burns on their backs from the snipers."
7858860
See, I thought the same thing, but according to the seamstress, when you start moving, the underwear will move out of place because an elastic band that's been cut like that won't work like it ought to, and the underwear will work its way down.
I'm strongly considering experimenting with an old pair of underwear and a v-shaped piece of something that I can attach to the waistband to find out. After all, the best way to find out is by experimentation, isn't it?
7861230
Well, I mean, the tail would surely brace it.
I'm not really sure how, unless the seamstress is thinking you need to rely on the elastic being, well, "not slippery" in order to hold the underwear in place, and having a discontinuity in it would mean it would grip less there, but that could be easily solved by adding some sort of additional fabric over the V--which I'd strongly suggest anyway unless you want a piece of metal literally shoved up your undertail.
I do think experimenting would be a good idea, because I honestly have no idea why it wouldn't work.
Any artists here want to draw a Fluffle Puff-y Silver Glow?
7856213
Which in and of itself is a sad state of affairs. I mean, it's to be expected, but still . . . .
7856215
For a large number of people, it seemed like the election was just a formality. Turned out that wasn't the case at all.
7856226
Yeah, and in some ways they maybe should really be treated as the same war. My World War Two class in college started with how things were in Europe after the end of WWI, because that of course was the foundation of why there was a second war.
7856258
Well, like with her estrus cycle, it's based on the length of day as much as anything else. Because of course it doesn't all grow in overnight.
And yes, the unseasonably warm November is going to be a bit annoying to her.
7856264
Huh. You said high school?
7856282
Yes indeed. It's kind of unavoidable.
7856300
Well, I'm not going to make it that far, for better or worse. Not unless chapters start getting a lot longer.
7856341
That's very true. Ponies probably figured out a long, long time ago that walls aren't a good way to keep pegasi out. Or ponies with shovels or ladders.
7856546
Well said!
Yeah, that's one thing that's always bothered me. Sure, science advanced; it had to, if we were going to win against those godless _________. But there's no reason that jet engines or ammonium nitrate fertilizer or better limbs for amputees or any of the other things that have come out from war couldn't have been invented in peacetime. It's not like rocket technology only works when there's a war on.
7856588
It's a fairly accurate way to describe how it went.
As I recall, y'all have a badass commando unit that went over to Iraq and started punching
NazisAl Qaeda, and almost nobody in America even knows that they exist. I imagine that they apologize after every one of their victories.I'm honestly surprised they didn't call it the Maple Syrup.
7856646
Well, and she learned about flux in math class.
A pony can only be frisky for so long before she gets tired.
Probably everything on Earth has a different chemical name, and the way that we name compounds isn't the same as what ponies do. Plus, she wasn't expecting thermodynamics class to have alchemy in it, so she hadn't studied up on that beforehand.
7856770
And there was a fair bit of fighting down there, and on the Arabian peninsula as well, which is probably part of the reason why we still had problems in the Middle East
Yeah, that was something that could have gone a lot better, especially after World War I.
7856798
The one Christmas story I know about in WWII was when the Germans put up a Christmas tree, so the Russians shelled it with mortars. Not really such a heartwarming story, though.
It's a pity that all the soldiers didn't decided that it was better to stop fighting then.
7856811
I think that I've heard that overall there are fewer conflicts going on now than there have been in recent history, although of course to the people in those conflict zones it's small consolation. And I don't know what history would make of the way things are going now--I thought that perhaps the Arab spring would usher in a wave of democracy to the Middle East, although that doesn't seem to be the case.
7856812
Ooh, that looks good. Thanks!
7856821
And cake, to make the sun go 'round.
7856822
Not the kind of flux that Professor Pampena was talking about, but it is interesting how compounds sometimes seem to have very different properties than the elements which make them up. Probably a chemist could explain it all, but I sure can't.
7856976
Oh, man, that would take a while. Silver Glow doesn't know much about chemistry at all.
7857222
I've also used it to make models, although it's been so many years I can't remember if I just used it a paint thinner or if there was some other purpose.
7857422
I think it's in one part because the economy is so intertied, and when you have interests all over the world, you're a bit reluctant to go bomb them, or do anything which might cut into your profits. As well illustrated by the recent Executive Order regarding travel from certain countries.
7857951
It does, doesn't it?
7858128
Luckily for her that wasn't in the book, but I bet it was a horrifyingly huge number.
Of course he will. Who doesn't like a cheerleader?
7858293
Yeah, weird isn't it? And I'm not sure if they actually did anything significant, other than declare war.
7858879
She's aware of basic chemistry (or as she calls it, alchemy), but not as much as she should have been for this class.
Who knew that there would be chemistry in a thermodynamics class? I sure didn't.
7859015
Fluffy pone is best pone.
7886966
She's not going to be that fluffy.
7907374 oh yes Japan at that time was on the side of Great Britain they attacked and overran several German colonies and possessions in the pacific and as a reward they got to keep them after the war ended. Then thier government got hijacked by military extremists and invaded China in the 1930's and committed a bunch of war crimes there, then they entered in an alliance with nazi Germany and the rest is history.
7907415
Huh, I don't remember that little bit of history. I did know about China in the 30s, but not what they did in WWI. So basically, they didn't contribute anything to the war effort in WWI, at least in terms of troops in Europe, but they used it more or less as a pretext to get more territory?
The french nicknamed it "La der des der"; the very last one.
7907343
Remember that unlike WWI, WWII was an ideological war. Plus, both German and Russian soldier were under litteral death treath if they did as much as hesitating in figth. At some point, Stalin even had gunner with order to shoot any russian soldier that stopped moving forward.