November 20
I'd wound up on the outside of the bed again, which I didn't mind because it meant that I could push the covers back to keep from overheating. If his room hadn't been heated, it would have been a nice temperature for me, but they would have been cold. Aric had a lot of hair on his body but it wasn't enough to be a proper coat. And Meghan had hardly any at all.
Even though it was still a little early, I started teasing Aric with my wing, which woke him up, and he looked at me and said that I was insatiable, and I said that he couldn't talk, 'cause he was hard, and then I rolled over so my rump was pressing against him and it didn't take any more convincing to get what I wanted.
We tried to be quiet and not move too much so Meghan wouldn't wake up, and it worked, 'cause she didn't until Aric got out of bed to go to the bathroom.
And she was kind of mad that we hadn't woke her up, so I let her have Aric all to herself when he came back, while I went downstairs and figured out how to make the coffee machine make coffee. It was a little more complicated than the one at the hotel, but not too much more difficult to use.
While it was brewing, we took a shower together and even though it was warmer in the house than it had been yesterday, Meghan thought it was still too cold to go to Aric's room without clothes, so she dried off in the bathroom. He thought it was too crowded in there, so he went to his room, and I stayed in the bathtub to give Meghan room to dry off.
After we'd gotten groomed and they'd gotten dressed, we decided that we'd go to Nina's for breakfast. Everyone got omelets and toast, and I let Aric have all my hash browns, 'cause I didn't like them all that much, and because the omelets that they had were lots bigger than the ones that they made at the dining hall, so it filled me up.
We stopped back at his house long enough to get our things, and we decided that we all ought to sleep in our own rooms tonight so that we'd be well-rested for our finals, especially since Aric didn't have one in the morning so he planned to stay up late and finish working on one of his assignments that he really should have finished sooner.
Aric drove us back to campus in Winston, and we kissed him goodbye and then went up to our rooms. And I put all of my class books and notebooks in my saddlebags, and then went to meet with Crystal Dawn again. When I got to her room, I also sent a telephone telegram to Lisa, to tell her that she could join us if she wanted to.
We'd studied for about an hour before Lisa sent a telegram back, and since we were still studying, I said that she should come over.
So then the three of us worked together until it was lunchtime, and when we finally put our notes and cards away, I told Crystal Dawn that I was proud of how much she'd improved in the little time we'd spent studying together, and Lisa thought so, too.
I went to lunch without taking off my saddlebags, and they had leftovers from yesterday's dinner, but I didn't mind too much, 'cause the scrod was still pretty good, although not as good as it had been when it was fresher.
Me and Sean and Anna figured out when we were gonna study, and it was a little bit complicated to figure out, 'cause they both had study groups for other classes that they were supposed to go to, so we had to plan around that. But we got it figured out: I was gonna study with Anna first and then Sean before dinner.
Peggy told us that her project was done but now she was a little bit worried that the professor might not like it. Christine said that anyone sensible would like it, because it was fun to watch, and I said that she was putting glitter in it, too, and that was fun.
Anna told her that that would make a huge mess, and Peggy shrugged and said that as long as it was a visually interesting mess, that was all that mattered.
I had a little bit of time in my room before going to Anna's, so I finished writing my letter to my sister, and then I sealed it up and put it in my saddlebags so that I could mail it at the mail hut later. Then I wrote in my journal until it was time to go to Anna's room.
She lived on the bottom floor of Crissy, in a suite like Christine had.
Her bedroom had half the walls covered with art that she'd drawn herself, mostly just pen and pencil sketches. It was mostly make-believe humans like elves and dwarves and fairies, but there were also a few monsters. There was also a plastic drinking cup which was filled with paper flowers, and she said that she made them when she was bored, which is why they were made out of playbills and not colored paper.
I thought that they were really pretty, so she gave me one, and I tucked it into my saddlebags carefully because it was really fragile.
We sat down on her bed and got out our astronomy, and spend the next hour reviewing the formulas and vocabulary one more time, and then looked through the pictures in the book until we were both certain that we knew what all the objects in space looked like, and then it was time for me to go to Sean's room and study calculus.
So I went up the hill to his room and I had to wait a little bit before he got there—he said that his last study session had been a little bit longer than he'd expected, and he hadn't wanted to be rude and leave early.
I hadn't minded, 'cause while I was waiting in the hallway for him to arrive, I'd had a nice conversation with a woman named Allison, who was a freshman that said she was going to get a degree in social justice, and I wasn't sure what that was, so she explained how it was making sure that everyone got equal rights, which I agreed was important.
Of all my classes, I think that I was the most prepared for the math class, 'cause there hadn't been any tables of elements that I'd had to learn, or things above the sky that I'd never dreamed of, and a lot of the formulas were pretty self-evident if you sort of took a minute to think about what you were trying to do, but it was still good to have the review, and our textbooks had other problems in them which we had never done as homework, since the answers were printed in the back. But that was good for us, 'cause we could practice them and then see for ourselves if we'd gotten the correct answer. I could have done that on my own, but it was more fun to do it with someone else, and since it wasn't homework, we both worked through the problems together, which let us discuss how we were going to solve them if there was more than one way, and why we needed to use the solution we'd found.
And since it was tradition, once we'd finished with our math, we watched a couple of short Numberphile movies. The first one was a foolproof test for primes, called the AKS test. And James explained how mathematicians had used a Fermat test which was good, but not always right, while this one was always right but not as fast.
After that, we watched Matt Parker try to make a magic square and fail. He said that nobody had ever found a true magic square made up of square numbers, and there was a prize for the first person who did, which I thought was a pretty clever idea because it would make people interested in trying, like he had. And then he got a little mad at the end, 'cause Brady decided to call his imperfect square the Parker Square. I thought he should still be proud of it, because I couldn't make a magic square.
I went back to my room long enough to take off my saddlebags, and I put my math and physics textbooks on the desk, because after dinner I was going to try to draw the math letters one more time, just to be sure that I could get them all right, and then I was going to fly around some.
Sean had been right; they had a Thanksgiving dinner, and they'd made the dining hall all nice, too. There were cloths on the tables, and candles, too, and they'd turned down the lights. They had their omelet cook cutting off pieces of ham and turkey for people who wanted it, and then they had all sorts of other Thanksgiving food, and I decided that I'd try most of it, and even without trying any of the meat, I still managed to completely fill my plate with the different kinds of mashed potatoes and green bean salad and cheese grits and a dinner roll and a little bit of cranberry sauce, and it was all really good.
Everyone at the table had plates loaded with food, and nobody was complaining about any of it for once, except that Reese said that we were all going to eat so much food that when we got back to the dorms we'd just fall asleep and then not be able to finish studying and we'd all fail our classes and have to come back an extra year, and Christine told him that it was worth the risk.
I was pretty full by the time I'd finished my plate but everyone said that I couldn't skip dessert, especially because it turned out that the pumpkin pies and sweet potato pies had actually been properly made—Peggy said that they had never before had actual, home-made pies for dessert and it was some sort of a miracle. And they were really tasty. I had a little bit of each one, just small slices because if I ate much more I wasn't going to be able to fly at all. I'd just be stuck on the ground, flapping my wings uselessly and trying to get airborne.
After dinner, I was kind of sleepy, just 'cause I was so full, and my room was too hot and I almost fell asleep while I was practicing my math letters, and if I had I would have swallowed my clicky pen.
So after the third time my head dropped and made a mess of my math letter, I got up and went outside and rolled around in the snow a little bit which cooled me off a little bit, but also just moving around some really helped wake me up, at least enough to finish up practicing all my math letters.
Then I put on my flight gear and went outside for an evening flight. I got permission from the airplane directors, and I left from the balcony and flew north of town, towards the Nature Center. It was a beautiful night, although it was overcast so I couldn't see any stars, which was too bad. But all the lights of Kalamazoo looked really pretty, and the snow-cover on the trees and ground, too.
It was a little odd to not have my usual landmarks to navigate by—everything looked a bit different by night, and once I got out of town, there weren't so many lights to help me, and either the moon hadn't come up yet or else the clouds were covering it completely. I wasn't sure which, because the Earth moon didn't follow the same rules as the Equestrian moon.
There were tables of when it would rise, and I guess I could have observed it and predicted it using the formulas that Professor Miller had taught us, although if I was going to make my own lunar chart I ought to have started working on it a lot sooner. I couldn't even remember when I'd last seen the moon in the sky. It wasn't yesterday, 'cause it had rained or snowed or been overcast all day long, and it hadn't been Friday, 'cause there had been the storm that I'd flown in, and I couldn't remember if I'd noticed it on Thursday before I went to bed or after I woke up.
I thought that it probably comforted humans to know that it followed rules of the universe which kept it in the sky and kept it predictable, and I wondered if Luna stopped helping our moon if it would just orbit harmlessly on its own. Or what if Celestia stopped moving the sun? But those were worrisome thoughts, because when I was a filly they had stopped moving, until Princess Twilight got them moving again. And everypony had lost their cutie marks, and their magic too, and it was a really scary time until they all came back again. I didn't like to think about it, even though I'd been too young to have a cutie mark to lose.
My navigation was a little bit off, 'cause I was following lights on the wrong road, but once I got close, I saw the big snow-covered prairie patches, and I angled off to my right to fly over them.
The deer were grazing below me, even though it was dark and they should have been asleep in their beds. So I was glad that I was high enough that I wasn't scaring them off, and I went northeast along the river a little bit before dropping down and coming over the trees that way.
And I had to be careful not to fly too close to the trees, 'cause it would have been easy to accidentally get tangled in their branches in the dark. Then when I was reaching down for my landing, I realized that I couldn't see the path at all, but I could kind of guess where it was, because there weren't lumps of grass sticking up where the path went, but nobody had been around it since it had snowed, so I guess I was going to be the first.
I turned my blinking light off, and then just waited for the spots in my eyes to disappear, 'cause I hadn't been able to turn the light off without looking at it. And then I could faintly make out the path in front of me, from the lights of the city reflecting off the clouds, so I make my way around it, first at a walk, because I could take my time and make sure I was actually on it, and then the second time around I trotted, since I could follow my own hoofprints.
I didn't want to go any faster than that, although I could have—it was really easy to see the disturbed snow where I'd been. But too much exercise might actually wake me up, and then I'd have trouble falling asleep when I got back to college, plus I didn't want to go to bed all lathered up, and I didn't want to take a shower tonight, either.
So I slowed back down to a walk until I got to the top of the hill, and then I just stood there for a few minutes, listening to the distant noises of the city and the closer noise of a car driving by on Westnedge. If I focused my ears to the east, I could hear the river gurgling along the bank, and the wind making the trees creak and groan, and I also heard the distant howl of a dog or maybe a coyote.
Then I turned my blinking light back on and took off, but I didn't go back to college. I flew north and west, all the way to D Avenue and the 131 Highway, and then I followed the 131 Highway south. I saw a tow truck with its lights blinking on the side of the road, trying to pull a car out of the ditch. It must have gone in yesterday, 'cause the car was pretty well covered with snow, and it hadn't snowed at all today.
It was probably smarter to work at night anyways, 'cause there weren't so many cars on the highway, and the truck wouldn't get in anyone's way.
I went south, past Main Street, and all the way to the railroad bridge, and then I turned to follow the tracks back to campus. And even though it was a little ways off, a gust of wind brought me the smell of donuts from the Donut Mill, and for a moment I thought about going there and getting a snack for me and Peggy, except I'd eaten a really big dinner, and two pieces of pie, so I didn't need more food today, even if it did smell really good.
I kept high, just to make sure that I didn't run into any wires by mistake—the only other way I could be sure to avoid them was to go so low that I was at train-level, and that wouldn't be smart, 'cause a train could sneak up on me.
I could see the top of Stetson Chapel's bell tower by the time I got to Howard Street, so I angled away from the tracks and flew a direct path over Western's campus to get to it. And I mostly glided the last bit and then when I got over the quad I forgot that humans aren't used to looking up for ponies or other humans when someone who was pulling his sled up the hill turned around and saw me coming and dived to the ground while all his friends at the top of the hill laughed at him. But I felt bad, and I landed and gave him a hoof up.
He was drunk and laughing, too, so he wasn't mad at me. And I used my wing to help brush the snow off his jacket and pants, and we walked up the hill together.
They convinced me to join them and try sledding, so I turned off my blinking light and tried, and I stood up like I would on a snowboard which wasn't how they were doing it at all, but it worked until the sled slowed down and I didn't. But I did manage to get my wings out quick enough to get clear of it, although I hit the bow of the sled with my hooves, and when I turned around I saw that I'd flipped it upside-down.
All of them thought that I'd done it on purpose, and wanted me to do it again, so I grabbed hold of the tow-rope the sled had, and carried it back up to the top of the hill, and then I did the same thing again, only this time I went down with my wings already out, and cleared it completely. And then I said that I was going back to my room and they were kind of disappointed.
The flying and trotting and sledding had done me good, and by the time I got up to the room, my mind was clear of any distractions, and I looked at all my books and thought about studying some more, but I felt like I was as ready for the finals as I was going to get, so I took off my flight gear and stretched out on top of the covers.
Peggy set her book down on her bed and asked me if I wanted to have one drink for luck before tomorrow, and I said that I probably shouldn't, but I did anyway because she made me a white Russian. When I get back to Equestria, I'm going to have to teach Zucche how to make them.
She asked if I was ready for my finals, and I nodded, then asked her if she was ready for hers, and she said that she hoped so. And she said that she was too old for all-nighters, so she was just going to hope that when tomorrow came, she'd studied enough.
I asked her if she wanted to get up early and trot around the neighborhood, and she had to think about that for a while, until she decided that morning exercise might help her focus on her test, so she said that she would like to go trotting with me. So before she turned the lights out, she looked for clothes that she could wear for tomorrow that were clean enough—she said that she wasn't going to do any more laundry until she got back to Colorado Springs.
And once she'd found them, she took my glass and her own and rinsed them out in the little kitchen that was down the hall from our room, so they wouldn't get mold overnight, and then she turned out the lights and we went to bed.
Foolproof test for Primes
The Parker Square
Footprints fade.
Snow falls.
Silently.
A Paper Flower.
Remains.
Remembered.
I'd recommend the Peanut's Thanksgiving specials. They usually get shown a few days before. Also, go to New York & watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. If Macy's goes under, we'll lose a tiny bit of what makes us Americans
Is that a zebra bartender in her town?
I'm sure the old money unicorns in Canterlot will boast they have liquors
imported from Earth for special occasions.
The rich humans might get convenience store wine from Equestria and boast it's 'magic'.
The curse of a heavy meal! As soon as your digestive system has got past the first caloric impact, it tries to convince your brain that you're hungry again!
7890008 pff. Pffffff. Skipping doughnuts. Silver hasn't acclimated to America at all!
7889971
I've been working with computers my entire life and I never fully got the hang of QWERTY Touch Typing.
I'm no hunt-and-pecker either. I type something like how Chico Marx plays.
I've also practiced a fair amount with 1-handed Dvorak (for reasons totally unrelated to masturbation).
7888504 wow, you've been busy
when he taught on the east coast, he had his students experiment with angle symmetry by throwing snowballs at people
yeah, they've been doing it for years. Lots of practice
probably derivative and integral calc. My class had an "assorted" class that just had a bunch of random calculus topics that we had as well before multivariable
well, except that in a universe with magic, magic obeys the laws of nature. Those laws are just different.
I'm the same. I think I've gotten two Cs in college (well at least in major and minor). But since the classes are curved, the grades end up coming out. There's one professor at my school who deliberately makes the tests to hard and long to see how people prioritize.
my gut is a bit more hesitant, but I could be wrong. we don't work with atmospheric stuff and I don't have much experience with modeling.
well, maybe not at 6 year old level, but I'll try to get it as simple as I can (the important part would be understanding what a partial derivative is). I should have something tomorrow.
Maybe, but she'd have to take some linear algebra and differential equations.
Analog (both mechanical and electronic) computing is fascinating to me. It's something of a hobby of mine (at least it would be if I had the time). I don't see anything that is stopping ponies from cracking the enigma machine, math is math. I don't know if it was the enigma machine, but there was a mathematician working on breaking codes and he didn't even speak the language.
I forgot about him. Still that brings it up to three, not great for stats. Occam's razor says otherwise in regards to Sunburst's mom.
It turns out that they can't. I did figure out what I meant though. There's a few amino acids that omnivores and carnivores can't synthesize that herbivores can. So they need to find sources of these and the most common source is meat. I actually missed all the canon evidence of ponies with fish. Until I see evidence otherwise I'm going to assume it's kind of like escargot in the U.S. (especially as the only photo I found was a bunch of fillies just giving shrimp a wtf is this shit look).
I honestly don't know either. My first double integral was the area of a square. The function is 1 and it's over constants.
oh dear god that would be mean. We typically use a light pine that's dry (and some places bake it to do this), doesn't have knots, and has a wide grain. Actually the break that actually requires skill is a speed break. You can't muscle through it and it won't break unless the technique is perfect.
It's not really a case of more than one way to skin a cat. It's more of the cat is unskinable unless you're creative enough. I've found that a lot of upper level math is just ignoring people when they say you can't do something. It's unsimplyfing (for example, undoing common denominators) and teasing out interesting behavior.
I have the opposite problem in the summer. The building stays really hot (it routinely hits triple digits outside). Still it's nice to have a bit of space. Especially because my dad is a really light sleeper and goes to bed early.
Voice commands are nowhere good enough for coding. Especially as the structure of code is pretty different than a language (lots of symbols and new lines). I really like the idea of a ponies coming over to learn about computers. Computer Engineering might be a good idea as well. It's essentially halfway between computer science and electrical engineering. One thing I think would be cool to see for the PoE genre would be an extended research and education. I've only seen solo students (granted I've only seen two fics like this). It'd be cool to see a larger group (maybe 30 or so) come to a single college and spread out across different fields. Not sure how much I could actually help with that though. I do some coding and electronics, but it's targeted.
I don't even have sensitivity when casting (i can't remember the moment you mentioned with sweetie and rarity). No sense of touch what so ever. I do have sensitivity to magic fields though, and the don't touch the horn thing is kind of a holdover. You don't touch the horn with magic, so you don't touch it with hooves either.
I miss sledding.
7889902
And they just might be right.
7890098
Back when I was in high school oh so many moons ago you were not allowed to take ANY kind of computer class until you had the "Typewriter & Office Skills" class. Office Skills included how to answer and transfer calls on a PBX, how to use a Ditto machine, a more modern Xerography machine and the new fangled Facsimile machine. I'm glad I learned how to type but at the time I found it to be the most ridiculous pre-req for a programming class.
So, Silver was a blank-flank filly when Tirek came to town, eh? That's something for whoever's keeping track of the official timeline for this fic.
And then a kitty will get a meal of pudgy pegasus.
7890146
As have you. Nice wall of text.
"Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 1" Season 4 Episode 1
7890234
Indeed. Thanks for the temporal reference point Admiral.
7890230
No punchcard tabulating machine?
7890272
Sadly, no. The Ditto machine was mostly to make us do all the copies the other teachers requested for their classes. (Free labor.) But I do have the clear memory of pissing off my dad when I made him drop the stack of punch cards he needed for his college programming course. Almost smacked me silly. I think I was in the 5th or 6th grade back then.
I can't decide if this is one event or two. The cutie marks vanishing seems to be Tirek, although as he did it all in person you'd think she'd mention a giant centaur wandering around but I don't think the sun and moon stopped for much at the same time. Twilight wasn't very good at controlling them and if I remember they more pinballed around the sky rather than stopped. I wonder if the sun and moon stopped thing is Twilight's Kingdom when Luna and Corona got kidnapped by the plunder vines? Given that all 6 seasons so far seem to be about 2 years I suppose the two things could have happened close enough together for Silver to think they happened at the same time.
See what did I tell you, you can only do cool things by accident.
7889339 That's kind of the part that infuriates me. There's a lot of gaslighting on this little pegasus from her friends and handlers saying that this certain group of people are dangerous and hate her with a passion, and it's all based around this opinion that anybody supporting one guy running for political office is a part of that group of dangerous bigots. Doesn't that seem insane? Especially when you find someone who has different viewpoints, and it turns out they aren't evil or at least not all of them are? Maybe she should have been afraid when she finds out who he was, and see that there are people who don't hate her. Like, I don't like Islam or their prophet whatsoever, especially Islamist's, and I think it should be dropped, but there are a lot of liberal Muslims who enjoy freedom and democracy more than very strictly following a bronze age religion.
7890432
Which is exactly what everybody to the left of centre also experiences every time some braindead 0.02% of the participants of some protest or other use the occasion for violence. After all, everybody on the left supports that kind of behaviour, no? To be fair, they usually aren't called 'bigots'.
The SG's handlers told her that some people who don't like ponies might feel emboldened by the election outcome to express those views in a more direct way. Not that all supporters are dangerous. In fact, they told her that the vast majority of supporters are good people.
7890509 Except it's not 0.02%. It looks like anonymous far Left cliques and large groups of people that have been radicalized to the point of violence. You may not be in support of this, but this is the current Left now. Even in 2013 when retard Tea Party protestors came out against Obama, there weren't mass riots in the streets and protests weren't happening in Canada, the UK, or Australia either. Do you know what's crazy? I don't even like Trump all that much, but the Left has turned into THAT and people keep on trying to make excuses for it. "No fascist USA!" while waving around a communist flag, and "Love Trumps Hate!" before intimidating any supposed supporter and setting a car on fire. There is a serious disconnect in reality here.
I know I'm certainly emboldened to speak my mind more since the election especially against political correctness, but "in a direct way?" Are you still under the assumption that most of his supporters are violent?
7889863 that response is very........ Delayed giggity
Was wondering why this fic was featured every other day then one day I clicked on it and saw nothing out of the ordinary but then I noticed the amount of words and chapters and I was like "yep.... That explains a bit" xD
7890570
No. I'm also not assuming that they all are stupid, un-educated, homophobic, bible-thumpers or whatever label.
Are you disputing that the small fraction of haters among his supporters are emboldened by having 'their' candidate win? And I'm putting 'their' in apostrophes because that fraction believes his victory legitimises assault or discrimination, no matter if it's only their projection or not. Hate crimes in the UK went up 400% after the Brexit referendum. Not much in real numbers, but the effect is obvious. When Germany's AfD fascists win at the polls, hate crimes there go up as well. When a side wins that some extremists backed wholeheartedly, those extremists come out of the woodwork.
You're doing exactly what you're accusing me of doing.
On edit: you know what? Let's stop this pointless discussion. A good day to you. *tips hat*
7890253 yeah, probably should have split it up a bit. I didn't have power for about 12 hours yesterday so I came back to like 10 notifications or so.
Anyway, completely forgot about that scene (along with a good chunk of s4 lol). I'll have to work it into my head canon.
Considering the two orbit the planet in opposite directions, I suspect the tidal forces would eventually pull them together, causing them to lose speed and crash into the planet. Or they could collide with each other. Either one would damage the planet enough to kill everything on it and render it uninhabitable, if not destroy it completely.
Sure, there was the plunder vine incident that had them motionless in the sky together, but this event was caused by Discord's rampant magic, which could also explain why it was half day, half night instead of just day with the moon visible.
7889964
you mean befor w-leaks and p-hub get the data ?
7891602
something Aric and Meghan can get behind
also *NGE thermodynamics joke*
7890432
It's not gaslighting to tell Silver she needs to be careful from bigots who, emboldened by Trump's election, might feel justified in lashing out. You know, kind of exactly like that guy in the article I linked to, or how there was a serious uptick in hate crimes post brexit in the UK. I've said repeatedly, as has Celefin, that it may not be the case that all Trump supporters are bad people, but in Silver's experience, she's very much encountered someone who harassed her for being a pony, and supported Trump.
7890570
Here's the thing though, if you go and add up all the various groups around the states that protested, you'll find that the actual majority of people were indeed peaceful. This Disrupt J20 group that features in second video from James O'Keefe's organization, as far as I can tell, represented a small part of the over all people protesting . Let's suppose that they were to block a highway; accordingly they didn't know how many people were going to show, so they scaled everything back to just one place. You're looking at, let's say, 200 people total.
Compared to part of the total number of people protesting nationally? That's 0.0153% of the over all protest's people trying to violently disrupt the inauguration/protest. That's actually less than 0.02%.
It would be nice if you would stop trying to put words into other people's mouths, you know. I never said, nor as anybody in this conversation, suggested that most of Trump's supporters are violent. The point of my post is that Silver Glow for better or worse, has had a very negative experience with a Trump supporter (A Trump supporter, I might add, only verbally harassed her, not physically) and it seriously screwed her up for a significant chunk of this story, including a certain reluctance on her part to return to the place.
A thought just occurred to me: I wonder how shows like The Simpsons are handling this? How has Equestria been portrayed, satirized, or parodied by the media?
I say this because I can totally see there being an episode in which Homer Simpson obliviously eats Princess Celestia's cake. In fact, I'm having difficulty un-seeing it. In addition, knowing The Simpsons, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to get the princesses to voice themselves, too.
You know after reading this chapter I didn't realize how young Silver is compared to the show. If she didn't have her cutie mark when the battle with Turik happened, and she wasn't worried about it, she was probably younger than the CMC. But since she knew about the event, then she had to have been older than the Cake twins.
I guess then this story takes place 15 to 18 years in the equestrian future?
Speaking of her Cutie Mark, was there a chapter on how she got her cutie mark? Because I don't remember reading about it.
Aric
7892063
Maybe she'd be voiced by Nicole Oliver. I mean, MLP understandably doesn't seem to exist as a show in this setting, but the people who make it probably do.
7889828
7889846
That's something that I'd like to see in person some day. I've only ever seen clips on TV.
7889902
She's the daughter of the tavern cook, and she's learning the trade. She's not a zebra, just an earth pony.
Well, if you're the first to sell in Equestria you can make any claims that you like about your wine, right? I mean, 7-11 is a proper winery, for all the ponies know.
media2.popsugar-assets.com/files/ed2/192/1922195/45_2009/4e523c4a78924dd0_7elevenwine.xlarge.jpg
And it's only $4.00 a bottle!
7890008
When you're living in a food-unsure society, it probably pays to eat every meal that you can.
7890081
(If she lived like some Americans, she'd put on so much weight she wouldn't be able to fly anymore.
7890098
Huh, it's all I know. I got good enough at it in middle school that I started jamming my dad's typewriter.
I can't type one-handed at all (I mean, aside from one finger at a time), which is a shame. That would be a good skill to have.
7890201
You should come back up north.
7890213
I do imagine at first there would be a certain subset of ponies who would be desperate to get their hooves on anything human and wouldn't care too much what it was; the fact that it was human and therefore rare would be good enough for them. And I can further imagine that there would be humans who would be more than happy to fill that need and sell absurdly overpriced things to ponies.
7890230
Man, I can still remember how that ditto machine ink smelled. I learned a little bit about PBX exchanges in college, because one of my friends was a hacker and did some things with the college exchange.
I was lucky, because when I was in middle school I already had thoughts of becoming a writer, which is why I took a typing class. Otherwise I wouldn't have; it certainly wasn't required.
7890234
Yup, blank-flank when Tirek came, and she also vaguely remembers the parasprites (mostly because there was a food shortage after that).
7890243
Or any other monster that isn't above eating ponies . . . for a pegasus, being unable to fly is probably terrifying.
7890257
You're welcome!
7890285
Yeah, that was the same event. Although I had forgotten about the plunder vines.
7890580
As is this one. Turns out that I can't publish daily and be current on the comments.
7890658
Yup, daily updates. Now it's complete, and you won't be seeing it any more.
7891351
Yeah, their orbital system is so messed up that if they stopped making it work, things would fall apart really quickly.
Yes, and given how far he can bend things otherwise, it's not unreasonable to think that he could make the sun and moon hang together like that . . . or to appear to the ponies to be doing that, even if they really weren't.
7891627
Yeah, that's probably safest. Although throwing a computer like that into a volcano might anger the volcano gods and make it erupt.
7892063
Ooh, that's a good question. I think that they wouldn't want to, at first, because if it was the ponies who made first contact, the last thing that we'd want to do is piss them off. Probably after a little while, though, when it became obvious that they weren't war-like, I'm sure shows would, but they probably would have real trouble figuring it out at first. Since in this universe, people are generally in favor of the ponies, whatever they did would probably be fairly lighthearted.
And if it was as Treehouse of Horror episode, she could go full-tyrant on him. Or otherwise, he could teach her to love doughnuts.
derpicdn.net/img/2015/7/29/946529/large.jpeg
7892280
IIRC, the CMC didn't have theirs during the battle with Tirek, either. Wasn't that the season 4 finale, and they got their cutie marks in season 5? So she's about their age, maybe a little bit younger.
Nope. She mentions changing her name when she got it, but that's about all she really says about it.
7903790
That would be really funny.
8015745
"Too fat and heavy to fly and a monster chasing you" is probably a common nightmare for pegasuses.
8016375
In all seriousness, I'm sure that pegasi fear being unable to fly. That's got to be a deep-seated phobia in pretty much all of them, except maybe Fluttershy.
There was a story I read here years ago (and now I can't remember what it was called) where all the ponies lost some part of them (AJ lost her legs, Twilight her horn, etc.); when Fluttershy's wings fell off, she just said "oh well," and gave them to one of her animal friends to make a nest out of.
I imagine a popular pegasus winter activity is snow diving. Use wings and weather control to build up nice floofy snowdrifts, then buzz them from the air and do high speed flops into them. You get bonus "points" with all your friends (and it's just plain more fun) for more complicated/entertaining flops. Like a half-twist corkscrew backflop right into the side of the drift, causing a large, powdery explosion. Wouldn't that be fun to see?
It's not that Scootaloo can't fly, it's that she eats too much pie!
8034536
That sounds amazingly fun, both to do and to watch. They could slide off roofs or jump out of trees--there could be a height restriction, and no flapping. You've got to do it gliding only.
Leaf piles would also be fun. Silver Glow never did jump into a leaf pile on Earth, which is a shame.
So she's not a starving orphan at all!
7890146
That's an important thing to know, if you don't already.
It's still a pretty remarkable talent, to my mind. It's sometimes hard to draw something in 2d that represents something in 3d, and given that I really lack the experience in math to really understand those kinds of things, it was good that the graphs were something that I could understand.
A very good point. You know, pony wisdom and pony sayings are probably a lot different than ours. Like, "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it" wouldn't make any sense to the ponies.
In some ways, that's probably good preparation for real life. I know that in my current job, memorization of things like torque spec is pretty much useless, when we can easily get that information from the service manual. The stuff that you really need to know is how to come up with a diagnostic strategy on the car you're working on, and that is often a case of priorities. We've had a couple over the last week where the car had multiple problems in seemingly unrelated systems, and the correct answer on both was fixing the one system which had the actual malfunction, which in turn fixed the other problem.
Rather late on the reply here (until recently, I've had multiple windows with dozens of tabs open to try and keep track of all the comments, and some of them wound up getting lost in the cluster). I've been through the PM two or three times and I still don't quite get it. Some of the stuff seems pretty arbitrary, although I'm sure there's a good math rule for why it's so.
Related, just last night I was watching a Numberphile video where they explained how the sum of all natural numbers is -1/12, and it was the part where the narrator explained how they were adding a + b, but shifting b over one decimal place first which kind of struck me as math bullshit. Having said that, I realize that there are probably a number of things I do to cars that would strike the inexperienced as bullshit, so . . . .
.
I love old mechanical stuff, too--just the solutions that they came up with for the problem. I'm glad that we have electronics now--they're much more reliable and accurate, but there was always something nice about a machine where you could see all its workings.
A while back, I put in a blog post how a mechanical chiming mechanism works on a clock (it was for Celestia Sleeps In with a Vengeance). It's really fun to watch.
As for the Enigma, I could see them breaking the workings of it, but actually decoding a message would probably be beyond them, because of the patchboard at the bottom of the machine. That apparently took some heavy-duty math and a computer to crack.
Oh, yeah--I think cats are one of the animals that are obligate carnivores, 'casue there's something that they can only get from meat (well, these days you could probably make it as a synthetic, but . . . )
I know we've seen Magnum (Rarity's dad) fishing before, possibly more than once.
mlpforums.com/uploads/post_images/img-1652438-1-Sweetiebelle_House_Ext_S3E4.png
No idea what they do with the fish when they catch them. Maybe just give them to Fluttershy so she can feed her animal friends.
Also, semi-related:
vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/2/24/Rainbow_Dash_with_fish_S2E8.png
I love the look on RD's face.
I was really disappointed; I just watched a video of how to bend wrenches using your bare hands, and they showed the cheater method, but not how you did it if you were just really strong. I'm thinking of getting some cheap ones and trying myself, to see if I can figure it out.
I've bent good wrenches before, although that was with a cheater pipe, and bending them was not the intent.
Luckily, Michigan rarely gets that hot, and when it does, it's usually not for long.
At some point, I'm going to write a couple of PoE stories with groups of ponies, but one's gonna be a search and rescue team. I hadn't thought of a whole group all at the same college, although that would be an interesting story. Another one that would be interesting is a bunch of craftsponies all showing up at a makerspace as a group.
It just seems to me like it would be sort of a two-way street; some kind of feedback feeling when they're working with their horns. I feel like the magic would be almost unmanagable if they didn't get some kind of feedback which I guess would be best described as a 'feeling' in their horns.
Duplicate 'when', or is that meant to be a 'we'?
I've slowly gotten past the current date in SG's journal. Soon you're gonna have to start replying to my comments before they've been made! Or something like that.
8558680
It was supposed to be 'we.'
It'll be like the comments are coming from the future!
8099814
Ah the joy of stuff that just makes no sense, and yet works. A learning algorithm working on a computer came up with a way to do... something.. faster fuzzy on the details. But it's method only worked on that computer, and required a specific chip that wasn't connected to anything else to be installed, if the chip was even replaced with the same type of chip, it wouldn't work. It had found a way to use microscopic imperfections in that specific chip to get what it needed done.
And even then they only managed it because they had physical access to one of the machines to figure out how it worked first.
Two applicable Maxims.
MAXIM 25: If a manufacturer's warranty covers the damage you did, you didn't do enough damage.
MAXIM 48: If it ain't broke, it hasn't been issued to the infantry.
DO EEEET!
South Park would have a pony ep up the within the first month.
I'm sure some company would step in and take over, if only for the marketing and PR boost.
This pony seriously can't NOT find the bright side to anything. On the outside of the bed? Yay! Can slip out the covers without waking them up!
Yeah, you kind of are insatiable.
Poor guy, just getting passed around by the females....
Not all pony tastes are good... seriously hashbrowns are awesome!
Motivational study pony FTW!
Simple logic. Glitter is pretty, adding glitter makes project better.
"Most prepared for the math test."
On final obligatory NEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Riiiiight, didn't try to meat. You had a nice big hunk of ham hiding under all those veggies.
I doubt the pies were fully 'homemade'. If not pre-made frozen ones, at most I"m betting canned pie filling dumped into a pre-made crust.
But. but, the image to food heavy pony on the ground, flapping crazily is just so cute!
Risk of swallowing your pen if you doze off while taking notes. #ponyproblems
Also I love how she calls them 'clicky pens'
More notes, get Luna to make this moon make sense.
Well,what happens with them stopping really depends on just how things work.
See, I have a hard time buying that Tirak got to EVERY single pony in Equestria. Seemed more like he hit up a few major population centers, went for the quickest source of the most magic, then when he had enough went right to deal with the Princesses. Oddly enough,after the last season finale, there actually was an event that caused ALL ponies to lose their magic for a few days.
Silly humans, She's not Best Mailmare, no need to duck and cover for her.
But... but.. Pega-sledding is so adorable! Keep going!
So how long till White Russian's become the latest fad in Equestria?
7892063
I'm sure some observational comedian has made a joke along the lines of "do pegasus have dreams about being unable to fly?"...
8016375
...and had a pony write in to say "yes, they're called nightmares"
11496537
Funnily enough, I was working on a story just yesterday where a pegasus does have dreams of falling.