My Friends ❤
These are all the new friends I've made after only two weeks!
Peggy, who's my roommate and from Colorado. She's not a morning person at all. She's sort of taking the lead in teaching me stuff about Earth college: the stuff I don't learn in class. That's important, because if we just wanted book learning, there'd be no point in the exchanges at all; we could just send books back and forth.
Christine, who is the first person I met at the dining hall (besides the nice old lady who watches the entrance). Christine has long orange-red hair and big canine teeth and likes Star Wars.
Joe, who is friends with Christine. He has a goatee and blonde hair and when he graduates he's going to teach school in Asia. He's usually pretty quiet—of all my friends who eat together, he's the quietest.
Sean, who has short blonde hair and a round face, and wears jeans and t-shirts. He likes Star Trek as much as Christine likes Star Wars. He's going to college for computers. He told me once that if I have a problem with mine, he can fix it.
Aric, who's tall and likes to wear plain white t-shirts. He's pretty talkative, and sometimes he eats with us and other times he eats with someone else. He lives in Michigan all the time, not just for college.
Ruth, who lives down the hall and dyes her hair different colors. Ruth has a weird obsession with pants. She made a daisy chain of pants out of construction paper and hung it around her room.
Rebekka, who's very quiet and wears long loose skirts that go all the way to the floor. She is an artist and always has a dreamy look in her eyes. Peggy told me that sometimes people on drugs have that kind of look, but Rebekka is just like that all the time.
Kat, who's Rebekka's roommate. She's quiet and wears glasses but she's really nice.
Brianna lives down the hall from us too. She's very tall and skinny. I thought she was a boy when I first saw her, just because she was so tall. I didn't know girls could get that tall, too. She's studying biology, and last year was in the rainforest in Brazil.
Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, the two people who rode with me from the airplane station to college and helped me get my ornithopter license and will take me places when Peggy isn't available or when I need to go somewhere she doesn't want to go.
Aquamarine, of course. Although technically I made friends with her before I got to Earth.
There are a bunch of other people that sit with us sometimes, like Kennith and Seth (Seth has a tattoo on his left bicep, which is sort of like a cutie mark but it doesn’t appear on its own), and James and Elizabeth who are so in love that they’re going to get married. Andy, who is very strange, and Nancy who has a lisp. I really want to get to know some of them better, but they mostly like to sit in the darkest, most confined room in the dining hall, and I’m just not comfortable eating there.
I’m gonna leave a couple of blank pages after this one, so I can add in more friends when I make them!
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Cute on this.
Okay, so not yet, but eventually she'll realize she's visiting an unsustainable genocide machine where 25,000 children die every day due to poverty. Maybe she can take a history course about the Holocaust, eh?
7027769
Actually, given what you've established about Unicorn culture's obsession with bloodlines, they'd clearly prefer Jeb! Bush
7027756 Come on! It is not like keeping a small cloud in your room for the nigth would be that bad. They use those as furniture.
7025491 And that's where you fail.
You assume Marxism can ever exist. It never will unless you have a society of emotionless machines. Like most notions of 'paradise on Earth' created through government means, it tends to ignore the basic tenets of human nature; the most relevant of these is that those who seek power also tend to abuse it.
7027797
Funny you say that, have you read A Brief History of Equestria?
It's not only the best pre-Equestria history fic I know of, bar non and by far, but I'm pretty sure Caunciller Puddinghead was inspired by Emperor Norton.
Sadly it remains incomplete, but if you haven't read it it's still totally worth it and the author did cover all of the canon events we know of until the founding of Equestria (Kind of surprising that such an old fic is still current, shows how little the pre-Equestrian history has developed).
I just really love these chapters! Sweet and often times funny, or at least amusing, and ending on a nice positive note. I'm really enjoying each chapter as it comes out, and I always look forward to reading more! <3
7028145
hehe
Less so that and more that Children are Us. Duh, right? But I mean, children are adults without the polish. They feel and act intensely. "They don't know better" sounds trite but in some ways it is true. I found that when I worked at the daycare that children legitimately have a hard time sometimes understanding that their actions have genuine effects on others. When they do understand this, they are beyond remorseful. Their malice is a thoughtless malice. Is that better or worse?
I'm still haunted to this day by the look in my first grader's eyes--he had been in an argument with another kid, and he was this big twin who was used to roughousing with his brother and so he was stronger. Right? So he's waving his arms around to illustrate how upset he is over some stupid baseball game, and he smacks this poor kid right in the face with his plastic bat. I was already running over there before it connected. But he just stood there, dumbfounded, horrified, looking at this kid. And as I take the bat away he just looks at it. The look in his eyes as he understood he had actually REALLY hurt somebody, not just a little bit during some playing around but really hurt someone--he panicked. The look in his eyes man.
Kids are people too. I think they're what we are with all of the polish off.
To add my two bits (lawls) in to the ongoing economic discussion going on-- Ponies might find a lot in common with Distrubists. This was the philosophy of men of the Chesterton variety. The dsitributists, such as they were, favored agrarianism and tradition, which I think ponies would probably get behind. On the other hand, in a lot of ways, these guys saw the answer to economic disparity in spreading the means of production across a wider area, not holding them in common in the way that Marx envisioned so much, but definitely with some sympathy for the motivations of Marx. It's a neat little article.
loving this a long.
7027540
Neat! Thanks!
I wouldn't really say the G3 version creeps me out, but I find it hard to get much from it concerning her hair style considering those are, to my memory, all essentially the same in G3. I like the G4 one though! The armor seems somewhat out of character, but that can be fixed, and she's really cool regardless.
Regarding "pegasuses": fair enough. That's sensible. Just so you know, though, I'm going to change it to "pegasi" in my head every time I read it.
7028483
Alrighty then. Yep, that'd be the sensible thing to do in the latter case, or required in the former. Let the Record State That it is Agreed.
Is that really Rebekka's name or is Silver misspelling Rebecca? I suppose it could be correct but I've never seen that particular spelling before.
7027944 Well, here is an exemple of succesfully applied communism with some hint of anarchism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinaleda
7027944 A liberal and a libertarian fighting over Marxism. It's so adorable to see both sides of a debate be equally wrong.
I mean, straight up. On one side you've got a guy who uses the word "Marxism" as if it's a social structure.
It isn't, it's a branch of political-economic study which applies a materially grounded form of dialectics to the historical-anthropological record, leading to an analysis of class relations through the different economic stages of human history.
On the other, you've got a guy who claims that countries were or weren't "Marxist", presumably based on the same mistake as the first guy. It's a bit like seeing someone deride the US government as not "mathematical".
You're both very guilty of having strong opinions on a subject you can't even actually define.
7028785 It's a tiny farming cooperative of like-minded people who all think pretty much the same. It's population is smaller than the population of Country Lakes, a single housing development in the town of Browns Mills where I live.
Again, it cannot be applied to a national level, nor an urban center.
Problems arise once the governmental structure becomes large enough that full-time positions are required. Then corruption naturally follows.
7 billion people all cannot operate small farms. It's the same as saying hunter-gatherer lifestyles are a model system because a few thousand people in Africa can live that way.
7029222 The only thing that matters is Marxism applied in any form has been a universal failure on the national level. It's a heavily flawed analysis that leads to conclusions which don't bear out.
Marx' ideas were heavily influenced by his own dislike of capitalism and his own interpretations of what he saw.
And besides which, Marxism specifically predicts progression from socialism to communism, which Marx believed would be "a classless, stateless, humane society erected on common ownership and the principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"."
This has not been the case. The theory suffers from an internal bias that communism is the final, perfect state of society and that the overwhelming majority of humans will simply abandon the desire for possessions and individuality... which flies in the face of the entirety of human history. It works only if you ignore everything about human nature.
Indeed, what we've seen is that socialist and communist-style governments lead to even GREATER disparity, where a tiny handful of the leaders control everything while the masses barely have enough to keep going. And this disparity and suffering is proportionally greater for an increasing population size, supporting the notion that the larger such systems become increasingly vulnerable to abuses as there are no internal checks to government power in those systems over individual liberties, since those systems abandon the very idea of individual liberty in favor of collectivism.
7029632
Let's have a look at this statement in particular:
"Problems arise once the governmental structure becomes large enough that full-time positions are required. Then corruption naturally follows."
What you have accidentally done is damn all states equally. But you no doubt give the capitalist ones a free pass because reasons.
Then let us look at the next statement:
"7 billion people all cannot operate small farms. It's the same as saying hunter-gatherer lifestyles are a model system because a few thousand people in Africa can live that way."
What we find is that 7 billion people cannot be successful capitalist entrepreneurs, or even labour aristocracy which settles for a comfortable living wage. Indeed, the capitalist system requires exploitation and poverty to function, it literally could not continue to exist without a large pool of labour desperate enough to do terrible work for sustenance level pay.
One of the big mistakes you make is in the assumption that socialism, particularly the socialism of marxists, requires or expects people to be identical and interchangeable. Such a view is alien to marxism, so your attempt at critique by claiming one model of a socialist commune couldn't be universally applied is irrelevant. I will go so far as to say that even within the commune in question the production and consumption patterns of each individual will differ wildly, so your conception of what is going on there doesn't even fit small scale societies.
7029648 "The only thing that matters is Marxism applied in any form has been a universal failure on the national level. It's a heavily flawed analysis that leads to conclusions which don't bear out. "
You've never actually substantiated this claim. Not once, ever. You use the usual tactic of stating things you believe and then expecting people to just automatically agree with you.
"And besides which, Marxism specifically predicts progression from socialism to communism, which Marx believed would be "a classless, stateless, humane society erected on common ownership and the principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"."
This has not been the case."
Substantiate this claim, please, I'm dying to know your method of definitively truth testing a stage of human economic development (which take hundreds of years) before it has actually happened.
"The theory suffers from an internal bias that communism is the final, perfect state of society and that the overwhelming majority of humans will simply abandon the desire for possessions and individuality..."
You've done it again, your weird misconception that marxists want or expect everyone to be interchangeable and identical. Substantiate this if you dare.
"which flies in the face of the entirety of human history. It works only if you ignore everything about human nature."
Ah, the good old "human nature makes us capitalist" argument, I remember when they used to call it Original Sin.
You've just sat on your own balls with this one, because basic anthropology (not to mention awareness of other currently existing cultures) teaches us that "human nature" as a set of predefined human social behaviours and motivations are defined by the environment that human is raised and lives in. It must massively fuck up your program to consider that a cooperative human society must have existed for us to have developed a common language and system of trade (leading to money and the first beginnings of capitalism and class society) in the first place.
"Indeed, what we've seen is that socialist and communist-style governments lead to even GREATER disparity, where a tiny handful of the leaders control everything while the masses barely have enough to keep going. And this disparity and suffering is proportionally greater for an increasing population size, supporting the notion that the larger such systems become increasingly vulnerable to abuses as there are no internal checks to government power in those systems over individual liberties, since those systems abandon the very idea of individual liberty in favor of collectivism."
You see I'd dare you to substantiate this but I know you actually can't, because it isn't true in the slightest. You can check this out by picking a socialist country and then comparing the wage disparities from low to high, the amount of resources assigned to public services vs private consumption, etc. If you look to the USSR you find society where the richest most powerful men had such impressive wealth upon retirement as... brace yourself... A three bedroom house and a Chaika car. Meanwhile, they tripled the literacy rate in the same thirty year period as a civil war and World War II, at the same time they also increased life expectancy from 45 to 70 years.
What you have to say on the subject has stopped being misinformation and actively became disinformation.
7029632 The economic system work and it just one exemple of cooperative economy. It can be applied easily to bigger structures.
As for the political part, the solution is very simple: deleguate.
7029454
Yup! I'm a licensed private pilot.
7029732
7029648
Kids, kids! No political arguments underneath the admittedly realistic story about an adorable sapient horse!
And KB_BOY, you'd better quit being confrontational before I come over there and start playing yakety sax on eternal loop. With a kazoo.
7029649 You're the one who brought up the little commune in the first place.
The fact is, it doesn't work in large systems. History itself is my evidence, in that every attempted highly socialist or communist system has either collapsed or had to implement free market reforms to survive.
What you define as 'capitalism' that isn't working is, in fact, 'crony capitalism' in which governments are bailing out and propping up failing companies... moving trillions of taxpayer dollars to people who ran their businesses poorly.
A pure capitalist system would have let them die, and those banks and companies which ran their business well would pick up the slack. Instead, the more honest companies were indirectly punished for doing a good job.
7029732 Then I might require you to substantiate your claim of Marxist-based systems remaining intact for even 100 years.
Please name 1.
I can name a LOOOOOOONG list of failed socialist/communist experiments: The first French republic (the earliest attempt at a socialist-type system which dissolved in 10 years and became an empire under Napoleon), the USSR, Maoist China, Myanmar, North Korea, Argentina, Greece, Cuba, Venezuela... and it looks like Brazil is about to join the list as their recent jog into heavily socialized systems has just about destroyed them.
Really, the only system with a worse record is fascism.
The USA has lasted, since the adoption of the Constitution, for 227 years... and that despite being infiltrated at every level by communists and socialists who hate it beginning around 1920... and openly declare this hatred, especially in the universities where protests and political correctness are clearly now more important than education.
7030283 heheh no, I really enjoy the tiny hints of local flavor
7030360 Fun and probably a little frustrating too!
7029967
"You're the one who brought up the little commune in the first place."
No, actually, I'm not.
"The fact is, it doesn't work in large systems. History itself is my evidence, in that every attempted highly socialist or communist system has either collapsed or had to implement free market reforms to survive. "
No, that is not true. History itself shows all of them working for decades. The USSR, again, achieved the still standing world record of 50% economic growth year upon year for an entire decade. They successfully transitioned from an agricultural, peasant society with a shockingly low life expectancy (Under 45 years) and a sub-30% literacy rate into an industrialized superpower with a highly educated, long lived population and a rapidly expanding commodity market. They did all this in thirty years. The first man in space was born in a dirt floored log cabin to parents who could not read!
Further there has never been any collapse of a socialist country due to socialism "not working", in fact when you study planned economics as practices in eastern bloc countries you find that the biggest economic drains, in order are: 1) Cold war arms race, and 2) the economy actually outgrowing the capacity to plan in the pre-computer era, in other words: they grew themselves to death.
Then there's the claim that currently existing socialist countries have had to adopt "free market" economies to survive - this is some incredible nonsense not least because they don't even fit your own definition of a "free market" - if you screw around and ignore regulations then these market socialist countries will put you out of business and into jail very quickly.
And, of course, there's still two socialist countries that haven't implemented a market economy at all.
"What you define as 'capitalism' that isn't working is, in fact, 'crony capitalism' in which governments are bailing out and propping up failing companies... moving trillions of taxpayer dollars to people who ran their businesses poorly.
A pure capitalist system would have let them die, and those banks and companies which ran their business well would pick up the slack. Instead, the more honest companies were indirectly punished for doing a good job."
I'm going to let you in on a little secret:
The word capitalism was invented to describe the current economic system of western countries. People observed the real, actually existing property relations, class relations and market practices of the economy, and they wrote what they saw down, and they named it capitalism.
So you don't get to defend "real capitalism" by coming up with a daydream of what you wish capitalism was like and pretending that's what the word means. Capitalism is the word for what exists, not what you would like to exist. If you cannot defend it without retreating into hypothetical fantasy situations then just admit it.
7030349
Okay yeah, that's almost definitely inside its airspace then, and even if it isn't, it's close enough.
Alright, that's sensible. I probably wouldn't call it "getting clearance" so much as "announcing her intentions" (like at uncontrolled airports where you simply announce that you're taxiing or taking off or what have you), but that's definitely sensible.
Well all altimeters base their measurements on barometric pressure -- a skydiver's altimeter works exactly the same as an aircraft's. Both have to be adjustable to account for weather, as you so deftly narrated before, but this also means you can simply adjust it so it reads an altitude of zero when you're standing on the ground, instead of setting it to the barometric pressure at ground level like you would for an airplane. So the same device, usually used to measure altitude MSL in aircraft, can also be used to measure altitude AGL for skydivers (and they pretty much always have it do so). The only problem with this is that it can't detect changes in ground elevation beneath you as you move through the air -- it only knows the reference point for ground level that you set before taking off. Since Silver Glow will often need to move much more laterally than a skydiver would, AGL altitude measurements will quickly become wildly inaccurate unless the ground along her flight route is very flat.
Haha, I wouldn't worry too much about that. A pegasus shouldn't have to be restricted to certain altitudes the way mechanical aircraft are. That would take away way too much of the freedom of the sky that I'm certain a pegasus has a psychological need for. And in any case a pegasus would be much, much more capable at detecting nearby aircraft than regular aircraft are. For one, a pegasus has no blind spots; they can look in any direction at will, unlike a pilot who has huge swaths of their view obscured by their machine. For two, airplanes make a lot of noise, but pegasi don't; a pilot can't generally hear nearby aircraft because their own vehicle's engine drowns the sound out, but a pegasus -- especially with their significantly better hearing than ours -- would hear an airplane from miles away.
In short, altitude separation is just completely unnecessary for the comparatively all-seeing, all-hearing pegasus. Controlled airspace is one thing, but I see no reason pegasi shouldn't be allowed to fly at whatever the hell altitude they want.
I shall imagine Andy to look like this
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/rvb/images/d/d4/Andy_S4_Bio.png/revision/latest?cb=20121117131741
This chapter provided me with the required dosage of the warm fuzzies!
7027663
Thanks!
7027791
That exclamation mark is the selling point.
7027887
Silver Glow gets drunk and brings a cloud home. The next morning, Peggy wakes up and runs into it.
7028125
Not yet, but I'll add it to my RiL.
7028237
Thanks!
7028493
I think it pretty much was. Not 100% sure; the only G3 I ever watched was A Very Minty Christmas.
I could probably dig through a BG pony list and come up with a good manestyle, but I think I'll just mostly leave that open to interpretation. I'd imagine that a majority of my readers think Silver Glow is an OC.
She's too obscure to have much fanart. Minty has more.
That's fine. Whenever I listen to the radio, I substitute 'person' with 'pony.' It makes the news a lot less depressing.
7028683
It really is. It's an odd spelling, to be sure, but I did know one Rebekka who spelled her name that way.
7030450
They say 'write what you know.' Well, I know Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo College. Might as well make that diploma pay off, am I right?
7031391
That's fair. Reasonably close. Although he has reddish-blonde hair.
7034810
Possibly bad idea for ya! Have you considered, or are working on, the human counterpart? How the human would react to life in an Equestraian college or university? And I say possibly bad because I think everything I do is bad or wrong. Dunno why, just do.
I'm really enjoying the show in the comments.
3 / 10
Ruth is secretly Lyra Heartstrings!
A human student attending an Equestrian collage. Ths is a great idea!
I wonder if she's get along well with
best ponyLyra.I've been totally waiting for some mentions about tattoos from this. Imagine if she met a biker and was like: "Woah, he must be really talented. ... Or really sick. (HaVe no idea if humans can get Cutie pocks, but I'd better stay away from him to be sure) "
If Silver Glow knows Tree Hugger, I'd get her and Rebekkah together, just to observe the waves of mellow and zen flowing out in all directions.
7277659
7651412
That hasn't come up yet, has it? I think that they would know what tattoos are, and that humans can't get cutie marks, but it would be weird for her to see.
7893297
Oh, the two of them would make a great pair. Mellow as fk.
7907487
If it hasn't, then you should definitely find somewhere to put it in. I'd love to see her actual reaction. (maybe next time she's travelling)
7907859
Rachel in anthropology class has a peace sign tattoo on the back of her left hand, but I don't remember if there was any more than idle curiosity about it from Silver Glow. She knows that they're not the same as cutie marks and people have to put them on themselves.
Ahh, nice, a summation of characters so far
Okay
A wise plan!
7989443
And for the longer, more up-to-date version, Dramaturge.
I tried to make it not spoilery, and there are some characters who are missing from it, because I did it way late and forgot about some of them.
At a liberal arts college, some people are really weird. Mostly in fun ways.
Although she never did wind up writing a 'friends part 2' chapter.
7998542
You made a blog post out of it, though. It was the reminder I needed to finally start reading this
7999209
Something I shoulda done months and months ago. There are probably twenty or thirty characters missing from the dramaturge. You'd think I'd have been smart enough to keep track of that. . . .