March 18-19
I discovered that what I'd thought was Madison was actually Columbus, and Madison was a bit further south. I'd thought the town looked a little small to have a university, but hadn't wanted to insult Gusty's choice of towns.
Aquamarine asked her about the clothes, and she said that she'd started to feel uncomfortable being naked when everyone else was wearing clothes, so she'd started wearing them occasionally, and now she was just kind of used to it. She thought it was important to respect local culture.
I didn't think I was being unrespectful by not wearing clothes. Humans in Equestria weren't expected to go around naked, but it really didn't seem like something to argue about. If Gusty liked wearing clothes, there was nothing wrong with that. Plus she had her coat trimmed really short, and I thought maybe she was cold.
We took turns talking about what we'd been studying. I was the only one who was done with my classes right now; the rest of them were all mid-course. That was one thing that still needed work, I guess; the class schedules between all the different universities didn't line up with ours.
I told them about poetry class and climate science, which I had to dumb down a bit. Some of the really technical stuff went over their heads.
Aquamarine was studying plants, mostly—I thought she would like to meet Brianna if there ever was a chance for that to happen. Most of her work was indoors right now because of the snow, but when spring came she'd be out in the fields. There was a lot of stuff she thought she could learn from human farmers and botanists, and there was stuff she could teach them, too. She was working on a plant-growing experiment with one of her professors (she kind of lost me in some of the details about how the experiment worked).
Cayenne was studying physics, which was a little different on Earth. She'd had a lot of trouble in the beginning because all the symbols were foreign, and the equations were set up differently. I felt her pain: I'd had the same problem helping Peggy with calculus.
There was a lot of measuring equipment that they had on Earth which had proved some of our conjectures, so that was interesting, but humans didn't account for thaumic force in anything, apparently. She thought it was because they couldn't really apply it, and had started her own little lecture group to explain it, which she said as many professors attended as students.
Gusty was studying theatre, and I was pretty proud that I knew a few things about it from Aric. She said that as far as anyone knew, she was going to be the first pony playing Puck in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and recited some of her lines for us.
We probably would have talked through dinner if Mister Barrow hadn't come down to get us.
The tables were only made for four humans at each, and since we didn't want to crowd too much, we sat across the aisle from Mister Barrow and Miss Parker. I kept getting distracted from my menu by the scenery rushing by outside: there was a river running alongside the tracks and the land had gotten a bit hillier in the distance. I knew that when you went west in America you came to the mountains, but I thought they were further away. I was certain that we were still in Wisconsin.
There weren't as many choices as I was used to for dinner, but I finally settled on their black bean vegetable enchiladas. Both the unicorns wanted the pasta (it was tempting, but I didn't want a sauce-covered muzzle), and Aquamarine chose the Pad Thai. Then we had to decide on what to drink, and Cayenne was a big help there. She spent a lot of time out and about when she wasn't in class and had tried a lot of different human drinks, so she knew what all the various kinds of wine were.
Our dinner came while we were stopped in a little town called Wisconsin Dells, and the waiter had just finished setting down our plates when the train pulled out of the station. It was a smoother start this time. Maybe the engineer was getting better.
It was funny that the thing that people most seemed in awe of was Gusty and Cayenne eating their meals with aura-held forks and knives. I guess unicorn magic is pretty neat to watch if you're not used to it.
We each had a piece of cheesecake for dessert, and then we went back to our room. There was a lot of scenery to see, and we figured out pretty quick the best way to sit on the chairs so that we could carry on a good conversation but keep an eye on what was passing outside.
I'd learned that most of the people in America lived on the coasts and southern borders, and a lot of the middle of the country was pretty empty, and it seemed like that when we were on the train. The towns that we passed through were smaller and smaller, and there was a lot of wilderness or big open fields. A lot of the fields were so big that we couldn't even see the houses and barns that must have been there, somewhere.
And the roads had changed a lot, too; many of them were simple dirt trails rather than paved roads with marking stripes.
Aquamarine had brought a deck of cards with her, and Cayenne had some beer, so we started playing euchre with one unicorn per team, since neither of them knew how to play it.
Aquamarine was really good. A lot of earth ponies are smart and cunning. She only got better as we had some drinks, or else I got worse. I do get impulsive sometimes, and that's not the best way to be in a card game, so me and Gusty wound up losing.
Cayenne had a folding computer with her and she set it up and used her field to tap the keys—she was really good at it. She said that she had to do a lot of computer work in her physics class, so she'd had to learn how.
She also had one of the flat telephones that humans like—it was called an iPhone and had a helper called Siri—and she showed us how there was a moving map that showed us where we were. That was really neat; I didn't have to try to read the signs on the towns that we passed by.
There were silver sheds along the track that also had signs with names on them, but they weren't always the same as the town name, or at least I didn't think they were. People had nicknames for things that didn't show up on maps, though, so maybe Yard Limit was what they called one town and it had a different name on her map.
I was yawning and ready for bed when we got to Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Even though the clock on Cayenne's iPhone said it was only ten, it felt later than that to me. Aquamarine felt the same way.
All four of us decided that we'd get out of the train and stretch our legs a little bit. It had to sit at the station for a while; Aquamarine thought that probably the locomotives had to be serviced since they'd been running for so long already. I think she was right; there was a lot of activity on the platform.
Since the station was covered, I thought it would be okay to fly and exercise my wings as well. No airplanes were going to be down here, after all. So I flew the length of the platform a couple of times, and then landed back with the rest of the group and we went back to our room.
The train had left the station and we'd just settled in—me looking out the window at all the city lights—when an attendant came in and offered to set up the beds for us, which was really nice of him.
There were two upper beds and two lower beds, arranged into an L-shape. We decided that we didn't really have much use for the top beds, so we told the attendant to keep them put away.
I was pretty yawny by the time he left, so I excused myself to the bathroom and then crawled into the bed that ran side-to-side.
Our unicorn companions stayed up, but they were kind enough to keep quiet and let us sleep.
March 19
It's strange to sleep on a train. When you wake up, you don't know where you are.
Aquamarine woke up just after me—I'd rolled onto my belly and lifted my head up so that I could see out the window, but there wasn't too much to see because it was still dark out. The lights of the train windows hardly lit up anything at all, and there were only distant pinpoints of light to see, or the occasional car or truck waiting at a railroad crossing.
I could see out the other window that we were next to a road, going a bit faster than the cars alongside. There weren't too many, though. It was still dark out, but it felt to me like it ought to be light already. I guess Daylight Saving Time had messed me up more than I thought.
The sun was just coming up as we passed by a train with orange locomotives waiting on a side track. Just past it, there was a collection of big silver cylinders that Aquamarine said was a grain elevator, which is where grain is sorted and kept until it is ready to be shipped off.
Aquamarine and I decided it was time to get out of bed and get ready for the morning. The train is very self-contained, with bathrooms and showers for the riders which were just down a short hallway from our room.
There weren't any windows in the shower room, which was a pity. It would have been nice to see outside, but I guess since humans are embarrassed when they don't have clothes on it made sense. Just the same, it felt kind of confining to me, but I could mostly ignore it. Aquamarine didn't look all that bothered by it.
We put our shower supplies back in the room and checked on the unicorns, but they were both still asleep, so we decided to get some exercise by walking up and down the length of the train.
The passages between cars are kind of scary, because the two cars are moving relative to each other, so if you're ground-bound you have to judge carefully. There are little doors with pressure plates that you have to push before you can cross into them, so you can't accidentally wander into a between-car passage.
All the way in the back, the door didn't open, but we could stand up on our hind hooves and watch the ground zip by behind us. It was kind of dizzying, seeing all the crossties blur away. But it was a really nice view, not limited to one side or the other like our room was.
It really would have been something to be sitting in the locomotive, but I didn't think we'd be allowed to do that.
We passed by a train on a side-track—it was going the same direction we were, but not as fast. I waved out my window when I saw the locomotive, and to my surprise the man inside waved back at me.
The two of us might have stayed there all day but Miss Parker finally found us, and invited us to breakfast, and we followed her forward to the dining car.
We'd finished our meal and gone back to Miss Parker and Mister Barrow's room when the train stopped for a while in Minot. That was another long stop, so we all got out and walked the platform until the conductor said it was time to get back on the train.
On both sides of the train was farmland. Gusty thought it was boring, but Aquamarine liked it because she likes farms, and I liked how big and open it was. I don't know what Cayenne thought of it; she was using her computer to look at Facebook.
We'd had a couple of hours to ourselves when Mister Barrow and Miss Parker came down and asked if they could sit with us for a little bit. Mister Barrow said that he was going to tell us a bit about the train, which would be interesting.
He told us that the train used to be run by the Great Northern Railroad but then the railroads had started to lose money on the passenger trains because people were taking trips by car or by airplane, and then all the passenger trains wound up being run by Amtrak, and it had been that way for over forty years.
I asked him if the Great Northern Railroad still had any trains, and he shook his head and said that they had become part of the Burlington Northern, which had then become part of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, or BNSF, and those were the trains we would see now.
He told us that tomorrow, we'd want to get up to the Viewliner car early so that we could get a good view as we went through the Cascades, which were a mountain range. During the summer, we would have gotten a really good look at Glacier National Park, but we'd be passing it at night—and we'd pass over the Rocky Mountains at night as well.
Gusty thought it was odd that more people didn't like trains. It was a lot roomier than an airplane, and a lot nicer inside, too. She'd noticed that people were really jammed into their seats, and some people even had to crouch to walk through the aisles in the airplane, but the train was taller. She said that she didn't like cars all that much, either.
Aquamarine didn't mind cars (and I didn't, either). I thought that they were comfy inside, and it was a fun way to get where you were going. I asked Gusty if she had ever been on a road trip, and she shook her head.
Cayenne said that in Chicago, there were lots of trains to take you where you wanted to go. It was called “Metra,” and she said that was how she'd gotten to the train station to get on the Empire Builder. She thought they were better, because in a taxi or Uber-car, you were limited in how many of your friends you could fit in, but there was no practical limit on the trains. Plus, she said that a lot of the train terminals had musicians performing.
The land outside the train had gotten hilly and there were a lot of small ponds and lakes scattered as far as the eye could see. They were all covered in ice, but you could tell that they were there, because there were flat spots in the rolling land.
In Williston, there was a steam locomotive and a caboose that both said Great Northern on them. I suppose they had been left over after the Great Northern became the Burlington Northern. But then Cayenne said that humans kept old machines in museums and sometimes if they were big outside where people could look at them and admire them.
Just before lunch, we passed into Montana. There weren't any signs announcing it, like there were on the highway, and we wouldn't have known if Mister Barrow hadn't said something about it. The land had gotten really hilly around us, and we'd go long stretches without seeing any human civilization besides roads, and then we'd come upon a little town, and then we were back in near-wilderness.
The train made another service stop in Havre, and we all got out. It was colder than it had been in Michigan, and even with her clothes, Gusty decided that she needed another layer and went back inside. I was a bit chilly, too, and kinda regretting that I'd had my coat groomed.
After a while, Montana started to look the same, and we spent a little less time looking out the windows and a little more time talking about our experiences on Earth. Cayenne told us about the museums she visited on the weekends and the different clubs she went to at night. Gusty had a bunch of funny stories to tell about theatre people, most of which were about things going wrong on stage and people forgetting their cues. Aquamarine told us about all the different fields and barns and stuff that Michigan State has, and also about the basketball games she'd been to, and I told them about flying around Kalamazoo.
After dinner—which was pretty much the same as it had been last night—we all sat around Cayenne's folding computer and we took turns showing pictures of friends that were on Facebook. I didn't think I'd find that many of me, but Cayenne told me that if the pictures were tagged with my name, the computer could find them, and sure enough it did. I kind of blushed when I found a video of me rolling around in the snow, but the video of me giving a ponyback ride at Val Day made up for it.
Then when Aquamarine was taking her turn, Cayenne found a picture of her at the horse stables standing next to an unsheathed stallion. Cayenne's jaw dropped at the size of him, and Gusty got really embarrassed and turned away.
It wasn't too long after that we started talking about our sex lives on campus, and we decided that we needed to have some drinks for that. Well, Gusty thought so, and I wasn't going to turn down the bottle of wine she offered, so we passed it around and talked about doing it with humans.
Cayenne had the most to tell; she'd been to lots of parties and had figured out how to get boys interested in her. Gusty had met a girl she really, really liked and she wouldn't say any more than that. I told them about Aric, and Aquamarine said that she'd managed to score with one boy after a party but that had been it, and it hadn't been all that satisfying because he was drunk and didn't last very long.
We played another round of euchre after that, and then everyone got ready for bed so that we could get to the Viewliner car early. When Gusty got undressed, I noticed that she was wearing underwear, too, and that struck me as really odd. I thought about saying something, but that wouldn't have been polite.
Empire Builder kinda sound like the title of a video game when you don't know what it is.
Eating and sleeping on a train, always a fun experience I must say!
Amtrak is a really amazing way to travel. I did it once from Temple Texas to LaCrosse Wisconsin. It was mostly flat until we hit the Mississippi river valley. Me and my brother were awestruck.
Got a sister that works for BNSF. She's a yard master now.
7216305 Maybe less a part of the language and more a part of the "other verbal communication", sigh, laughter, humming... These would be more expression of an emotion then a verbalised concept.
disrespectful, and you're either missing a period or capitalized humans.
Northern
The rest of Gusty's body, though, was very very attentive.
7216255 Empire Builder is a board game, a "crayon" train game (you build track between cities by drawing on the board with crayon). I don't think a computer version was released, but there was a computer version of a similar game called Iron Dragon.
7216351 Well, the name was too good to pass on I guess!
7216351 There's also Kingdom Builder, a board game by the Dominion dude.
Gusty sounds like my kind of pony.
Do they know about time zones? Equestria might not have them depending on how fast and long they can travel in an east-west direction, either by train or really fast pegasus, and how their different sun would affect things.
Well, that's enough pony for today.
I suppose the author couldn't talk about what happened in a physics lab with a unicorn. I would imagine lots of measurements of the auric field while levitating objects because Equestrian Magic is completely outside of known human science except maybe the theorised Dark Energy.
If the Humans could duplicate Auric Levitation the airplanes would be quieter and they wouldn't need runways to takeoff and land.
7216490 I don't know what Admiral Biscuit thinks, but the fact that the sun is raised by magic in Equestria, quickly and abruptly (not a constant movement across the sky) , makes me think Equestria is located on a flat, geocentric world. The show sure made it seem like Nightmare Moon's eternal night was worldwide (no other side of the planet to have an eternal day.) if so, in Equestria, there would be no difference between the time of day between any two locations.
7216441 ok. I'm guessing that they're going to head south through washington, oregon and california then cut across the southwest and head back up north?
7216255
It is. And it's been way too long since I've done either.
7216300
The best part of Amtrak I've ever been on is their route through the Cascades.
Does that give you the opportunity to ride in locomotives?
7216316
That's logical. Could also be a way to set the tone of something, maybe? Like if you finish a sentence with a nicker it has a different meaning than if it ends with a snort.
7216461
A theatre pony who always dresses in style?
I'm on quarter and this can be pretty annoying. My friends have finals next week and I still have a month left. Then I start about month after them.
7216339
unrespectful was intentional; the missing period wasn't.
Oops--correction made
7216490
I would think that they have them. Nobody told Silver Glow that they crossed into a new one, though. IIRC, we had to invent them not long after we invented trains, and I'd think that the ponies had the same idea. Unless they live on a flat planet, of course, in which case they wouldn't need them at all.
7216566
az801229.vo.msecnd.net/wetpaint/2016/04/Yakkos-Goodnight-Everybody-Tagline-.png
7216581
I couldn't even talk about what happens in a physics lab without a unicorn.
7216278 Sorry, meant Captain America Civil War. If her friends invite her to that it'll be a bit confusing without explaining the back stories of every character in it. Just thought that would be a task as she's already seeing so many other movies.
7216490 I believe before railroads standardized the time each town had its own local time zone. Or each major town, at least.
7216374
The first time I heard it, I lived ten miles from the New Jersey Turnpike.
Are they taking the Empire Builder to Seattle or Portland? If it's the latter, the trip through the Columbia Gorge would be amazing. It'd have been interesting for them to see rail, road, and maritime shipping, except the river was closed at that time.
7216726
Every town had it's own "time zone" (the concept didn't exist) They set their clocks to local noon. Therefore, every single town operated on a different time. Since they didn't communicate with each other except on a scale of hours to days, it didn't matter.
Mister Barrow's a nerrrrd
I just figured out the perfect music to listen to while reading this fic: smooth jazz. Not the experimental stuff you have to really love our you hate it, but more like the "Peanuts" backtrack music. I happened to be listening to some on spotify while I read this chapter, and it just gave the experience such an immersive atmosphere.
7216587
Better? Sure. Decent? Ergh, I would disagree, honestly. Shell quoting rules, while extant, kind of blow. I've learned this lesson... more than I care to admit.
Really, once you get a shell script that starts to have any kind of non-straightforward logic or anything a little complex, you're better off sucking it up and switching to perl or something which doesn't require hideous and alien IFS hacks and escaping to work with filenames with spaces and punctuation (and a regex implementation that doesn't suck and is, in fact, quite good).
Generating most any markup with a shell script... sounds awful, honestly, but at least you're not trying to build a parser out of regex! That would be silly.
7216598
Yes. Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough For Love are two of his more controversial novels, and for exactly the opposite reasons Starship Troopers was controversial. Troopers was written in the late 50s and was considered by the Left to be a glorification of militarism and facism, while Stranger and TEFL can be seen by some as harbingers of the 'Free Love' and Libertarian movements of the late 60s and early 1970s. Oddly enough, he wrote one of the best hard sci-fi novels of all time, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, in between the two works that seems to strike a balance between Heinlein's earlier and later novels of the period.
After the mid 1970s, he tried to recapture the genius of Harsh Mistress with The Number Of The Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and then got weird with his 'World As Myth' concept where he tried to stitch together all of his novels into one shared metaphysical setting in the mid 80s, culminating in his last novel, To Sail Beyond The Sunset.
In case you can't tell, Robert Heinlein is one of my favorite sci-fi authors.
It's interesting to see how the various ponies have adapted to life on earth and the extent to which they have 'gone native' it must be difficult to get a whole load of pony fitting clothing. It's good that none of them seem to have had any really bad experiences or at least they don't talk about them and none are very homesick. Either ponies are naturally adventurous or the selection process for the exchange scheme works well.
So far Silvers anti unicorn bigotry hasn't reared its head although she might just be to polite to say anything out loud, she seems to also have some, more favourable, fixed opinions about earth ponies. I wonder what the others think of pegasus?
7216324
You know what they say - those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. The "almost exactly a year later" part is optional, but definitely earns bonus points.
7212861
Ooh, you're from Eau Claire too? Neat!
...Ok, given my family moved away when I was a baby that "too" might be a bit of a stretch, but at least we've visited again a couple times? For all I know, I might even have run across you without realizing it.
7216621
Yeah, theater people are usually pretty cool.
Why do I keep reading Gutsy instead of Gusty ?
7216606 Flat or not, the sun would still not have the same ligth depending on where you stand in the world, thus a traveler would suffer the same kind of effect we get when we change time zone.
7217027 Computer aren't just made for leasure you know!
They are very advanced calculator, typewritter, make creating a layout easier, are an advanced way of communication all in one and we are just talking about some of the basic functions here. Made pony-friendly (or rather hoof-friendly), computer would be useful enough to be used in big quantity.
7216621 Once as a kid me and my brother rode in a switcher engine. Our sister had become an engineer but wasn't qualified for runs between Chicago and LaCrosse.
Whoo! Lived there for a couple years. Good times (sort of).
I need to take a train trip some day. I rode from Detroit to Chicago once as a kid on a train. I was even able to meet the engineer. That was really cool.
I bet they belong to the girl that Gusty really, really likes O_o
7217414 It's true that parallax would cause observable difference in the apparent position of a very near sun from differing spots in a flat, geocentric world. However, the world would have to be truly extraordinarily large -- far larger than our own Earth -- for the difference to amount to enough to differ by enough to justify time zones. The differences are probably measured in mere arcminutes. (This is, of course, also dependent on the size and distance of the sun; variables which are unknown to us.) I doubt that ponies would bother noting the difference between apparent times if the difference between the eastern and western edges is, say, two hours.
We've seen Celestia and Twilight raise and lower the sun, and Luna the moon. It's worth noting that when they did so the sun and moon rise very quickly; the movement isn't a continuous, unnoticeable speed like we have. Therefore, sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset would differ by only a few seconds at most, regardless of the size of the habitable surface.
This all assumes that Celestia keeps an extremely precise schedule and moves the sun across the sky at a smooth and steady speed. For all we know, she might be a little sloppy with her times and positions; or she might move the sun once an hour, or leave it in a single position all day. (Woe be to the sundial users.) I seem to recall the sun ticking across the sky like a clock's second hand in Lesson Zero; maybe Celestia regularly plays with it?
7219006 The mathematic to calculate how much different the time would be use to many unknown variable. However, the difference can be quite huge, it is very observable on earth with just a few hundred of kilometers, and would throw off your biological clock.
I see Silver is discovering the magic of time zones.
7216598 Actually I was wrong, all 3 books have been turned into short movies you can get on DVD now. Even Wikipedia didn't know about a 3rd movie and for good reason, it's not as good as the first 2 and the animation is lower quality. You have to admit, that cat in the 2nd movie is still scary.
7217280 If you're ever in the US, you should try the regular corn syrup Coke-Cola and the imported Mexican Coke that's made with real cane sugar. They come in glass bottles in the Mexican food area of the stores here. It's almost night and day in how they taste and the sweetness they have. Had my parents try it and they said it tastes exactly how they remembered Coke before they switched the formula after New Coke in '85 failed. Mexican Coke is more expensive, but worth it. Corn sugar is used way too much in products here as a cheap sweetener.
7219078 The only unknown variables are the distance to Celestia's sun and the distance between the observers.
Parallax is diminished with distance to an observed object. It also increases with distance between observers, but they are usually much closer to eachother than to the observed object. An object at the other end of a table has more parallax than the mountain a few kilometers away. The moon, farther away still, has a maximum parallax of just over one degre (61 arcminutes) and our sun a fraction of that. The parallax of even nearby starsis so tiny -- fractions of an arsecond -- that its existance was debated until the 19th century. The apparent absense of stellar parallax was once considered strong evidence against heliocentricism because of the seemingly absurd distances that implied.
Man, I would have left a few good comments on the last several chapters, but I usually read this on my lunch break at work with my phone, and I hate () typing out anything on my phone. (I spent the last 29 years without a texting plan, so I suck at that.) By the time I get home I just don't have it in my head anymore. Sorry I've hurt your comments/views ratio! However, mostly I'm wondering about how this trip with 2 unicorns and an earth pony will go with Silver Tribalist along for the ride.
Oh, and I guess Gusty has gone native then?
7219449 I can't stand "High Fructose Corn Syrup". It literally makes me ill and is in just about every food imaginable in America. Bread, meat, drinks, cereal, any thing sweet, heck, even vegetables if you count things like pickles! I gave up soda all together because of it, aside from the occasional root beer float, made with cane sugar mind you. That corn s*** is toxic I tell ya.
7216763
The first time I heard it, I lived ten miles from the New Jersey Turnpike.
I don't know if living in New Jersey is awesome, but it's cool that you were that close to the NJ Turnpike.
My one experience in NJ was that you got to go to New Jersey from Philly for free, but you had to pay if you wanted to get back into Pennsylvania.
7216954
Seattle, and while they don't get to see the Columbia Gorge, they do run along the Skykomish River, and that's pretty impressive scenery, too. That's the route we took when we went out to Seattle in the 80s.
7217014
Yes he is. THere's a reason he volunteered to go on this train trip.
7217032
Links? I've been listening to soundtrack music when I write it, but that doesn't always work out right thematically.
I guess Gusty has become a furry, pony on the outside and human on the inside.
7217079
I read Starship Troopers (totally different from the movie), some of Stranger in a Strange Land, and that's it in terms of novels. At least as far as I can remember. Pretty sure I've read a bunch of short stories by him, too.
7217089
Everypony has a different experience!
It hasn't come up in the story yet where she's getting it.Gusty knows a costume designer/seamstress; that's where she's getting all of it.
Nothing terribly traumatic for any of them, yet.
In a strange land, she's more comfortable with pony companions than strange humans.
Pegasi are impulsive. They prefer to rush in without thinking.
7217208
My groundhog days are a full year.
7217229
And sometimes very, very weird. But usually in a cool way.
7217075
I suspect you're overestimating what I actually do with shell scripts. The example I used was mostly just embedding all of the image files in a directory into an html file and recursively doing the same for all subdirectories. Half the time I spent on it was looking up 'ls' switches I rarely use and designing the html. Using perl would have been overkill, especially because it would have meant learning perl.
That said, I've always found the bash quoting rules to be straightforward and logical.
7217373
Why does gDocs keep trying to correct Mister Barrow to 'Minister Barrow?'
Some things we'll never have an answer for.
7217471
I got a chance once in Wisconsin, 'cause a friend's uncle worked for the UP. Plus back when they allowed it, I got to ride mostly in the cab of an Amtrak train--that was when they had the Amfleet control cars (before they started using retired F-40s as control cars).
7217536
I did that once, too (the met the engineer part)--but now they use a different type of car on the head end, so it's not as much fun. Still nice, though. I'm having an urge to take Amtrak somewhere now.
No, but that's a reasonable guess. They're customized, with a tail-hole.
7219238
Yup. Her internal clock hates them, especially coming so quick after Daylight Saving Time.
7219503
Yup. She got convinced that running around naked was weird.
7219449 There's a conspiracy theory that the whole reason for New Coke was to disguise the change from sugar to corn syrup in the original formula.
I wonder if Silver Glow would like Mexican Coke more than the Coke from the fountain?
This particular arc makes me keep thinking of a certain song:
This has been great fun so far. I'm a bit surprised to hear that the other ponies have also had human relationships; I kind of imagined that Silver Glow and Aric were the odd ones out. Not that it's a bad thing - I was worried Silver would get weird looks or something like that from the others when they found out about Aric, but that is clearly not the case.
This also makes me think more about traveling by train. I did it a lot in Japan, but aside from occasional weekend trips between my hometown of Springfield, IL and Illinois State University, I haven't been on a train in America in years. I might consider such a trip this summer.
7219600
Well that was a hilarious moment. I wonder how long it will take them to find human and/or FiM pony porn. Unless, one or more of them has already discovered it.
Gee, I wonder if she borrowed that underwear from someone...
Still, it seems that everyone has gotten into sensual business at one point or another. Especially Silver and Cayenne.
7219600
Eventually, I believe this is going to bite Silver in the rear. Hmm... What are the stereotypes for the other pony species? And for that matter, will we see or hear about pony species other than the classic trio of Earth Pony, Pegasus, and Unicorn?