Pony Planet Side Stories: Chapters 1 and 2 · 2:00am Jan 11th, 2014
Blog entry for the first two side stories, yay!
Making Repairs
Denim is named from a region in France (it was originally called serge de Nîmes). It would have been accurate to describe the fabric as a ‘blue serge,’ or even be more specific—you see, denim is unique in that only the warp threads are dyed, whereas the weft threads remain plain white. That’s why the inside of your jeans are white, and why they fade to a whitish color in high-wear areas. However, for readability, I just went with denim.
I picked Shropshire because it sounded ponyish. I think that there were garment mills there during the industrial revolution, but I can’t remember. There was a fair bit of jumping from link to link on Wikipedia to find a suitable name, and I might have gone off-course.
Socks are machine-knit on the coolest knitting machine ever. I was unable to find a YouTube link on short notice, but I have seen the machine in action on some TV show (How It’s Made, probably). Someone with enough patience could hand-knit a copy of a commercially-available socks, but they’d probably have to have pretty small knitting needles.
The ‘geometric pattern’ on the sock is the word Hanes, which is just below the toe on their white socks. The men’s socks have it in red, while the women’s lettering is pink.
Hazel Harvest is the pony who looks like Golden Harvest that is wearing a hazmat suit in The Cutie Pox.
The entire scene is largely taken from life. I work as an auto mechanic, and deal with people all the time who want an oil change right now because they’re about to go out of town. We accommodate them when we can, but many of them take it personally when I tell them that we just can’t get them in right away—it’s a small garage, with two employees. We don’t have a guy standing by to change oil. Sorry.
Since our small shop is out in the country, we do a lot of work on farm trucks. There are a lot of dairy farms around town. I try to tell myself that the dried brown muck all over the dairy farm trucks is just mud, but the smell tells me otherwise.
Both of these things are presumably something that Rarity has to deal with, too.
One of the challenges to using a telekenetic field to lift something has to be ‘marking’ the object you want to lift. Imagine you’re looking at a plate of marbles. You want to lift all the marbles, but not the plate, so you have to somehow separate the ‘marbleness’ from the ‘plateness.’ An experienced unicorn makes it look easy, but I bet it isn’t. (Of course, Pumpkin Cake can do it . . . magic surges in a foal? I dunno.)
Nobles’ Council
Ivory is a crystal pony. As the Crystal Empire only recently re-emerged when this story takes place, anypony representing the Crystal Empire would be the most junior member.
The croupiere is the part of a horse’s barding which covers and protects the hindquarters. The medal would presumably look much like this:
Cobalt, an earth pony who’s been seen at various fancy shindigs.
Graphite
Sky Dream
The ‘motion and second’ procedure is what we use for the theater group I’m now a board member of (lucky me). Our first formal vote was for our own officers, and we all said, “I don’t want to be president.” We debated whether the bylaws allowed the office of president to be determined by a drinking contest (they do, apparently), and someone finally—grudgingly—accepted the post. I was smart, and nominated myself as secretary so I didn’t inadvertently wind up with a higher office.
As for the inking of the hooves—it makes sense, IMHO, especially in a society which is not as technologically advanced as our own. Sure, if there are multiple votes in one day in Council, it would be harder to tell who had voted and who had not, but since there’s only a hundred of them, it wouldn’t be that unreasonabe to count the ballots if there were accusations of chicanery. For rural elections (say, mayor of Ponyville), the system would work very well, especially if they used an ink which did not easily wash off (and was resistant to unicorn magic). This is the method used in several countries around the world.
Lyra believes in the "vote early, vote often" method.
Cute Lyra filly is always right, nuff said :3
I don't see any side stories posted, is it incoming?
It's always so confusing when the notes show up before the chapter.
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Yes, it's waiting in the approval queue. That's the downside of publishing a concurrent blog post with a new story.
Here is a video of one which looks like a Victorian torture device:
My uncle calls the caked on oil, mud, manure, etc. which accumulates on the undercarriage of vehicles uckumpucky.
There must be some major horn envy surrounding Sky Dream.
Point of information! Motions and seconding is a very barebones version of Robert's Rules of Order, used by British Parliament and people with lots of time on their hands. There's many rules about when, what and how one can speak in the full version, which occupies a rather thick book.
chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/blogPost/profhacker/2009/11/robertsrules.jpg
BananaStormtrooper included for reference.1704143
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And the story's now live!
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That sounds like the kind of thing I would read never.
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Ooh, I'll have to watch that as soon as I'm done flooding FimFiction
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meh still want to see more "Onto the pony planet".
Communication problems between human and pony are quite entertaining
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Tonight or tomorrow. Depends on how far I get editing.
I can confirm that you went too far South with Shropshire, the cotton industry was primarily based up here in Lancashire. It was the iron industry that was in Shropshire.
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Oops. I started with American mill towns (like the ones on the Androscoggin River) but most of them were Native American names or just "New" English names (New Bedford, New Lancaster, etc.) So I moved to England....
How did I not think of a "Flankshire" pun? Maybe I'll change that.
It's funny that for a seemingly matriarchal society that such a large portion of the nobles council seems to be made up of males.
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I'm glad you noticed that -- nobody else did (at least, they didn't comment on it).
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Something funny is going on here. Perhaps it is because the nobles don't value serving on the governing council, so they send the less valuable stallions to do it. Or perhaps there is the same (at least traditional) connection between the military and politics.
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I feel like he might be referencing the early days of American politics... Or, hell, even now, when rarely do our elected officials actually bother to show up to do their jobs (take a look at the senate floor on an average, non-politically-heated day).
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You completely missed the point of my observation. I was not commenting on the lack of attendance, but rather who was attending. Equestria as depicted in this story is a matriarchy, that is a society dominated by women. I thought it was odd that the legislature should be exclusively composed of males in such a situation.
As to modern day lawmakers their job consists of much more than attending congress. They are supposed to visit their constituency often so that they are aware of their constituents thoughts and concerns, the better to represent them.
To put it simply, yes.
It's an idea expressed elsewhere also, like in Wizards of Waverly Place. Magic is like the force in that it exists whether you like it to or not, and your challenge is to harness and manipulate it. More mature casters probably do so subconsciously, or there is a sort of safety mechanism for magic that develops after the magic comes in.
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Also, some of the pictures in this blog are missing.
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This is the picture of the award:
issaquahtrophy.com/images/productimages/Horse-Butt-Loser-Medal.jpg
Not sure about Graphite. I'll have to dig through the wiki. What I should do is upload all the photos to an flickr account, or my DA account, and then source them from there, but that's a lot of work, and my internet connection is crap.
Agreed. We know from canon it can be studied, and spells can be cast which produce known results, etc. The specific mechanics of how it works, though, are a bit more fuzzy, but that just gives me and other authors room to play.