Story Notes: Onto the Pony Planet Chapter 31 · 10:57am May 14th, 2018
Many thanks to my pre-readers:
MSPiper,metallusionsismagic,AShadowOfCygnus, and MrZJunior.
We're gonna start this off with a recipe!
One of the nice things about casseroles is that you can prepare them ahead of time, and keep them warm for a while and they're just as good. This is really useful if you're Starlight and your job has unexpectedly shifted to cooking three meals a day for Dale, Kate, Lyra, Diamond Mint, and the guards, you're suddenly serving food whenever to them as well as some of the nurses, Raven, and whoever else happens to be at the embassy at that particular time.
Plus, you can refrigerate them and then serve them again as leftovers later.
I should also mention for readers who are new here, Starlight is not Starlight Glimmer. She's this pony:
From the Ant-Sized Wiki
Who Hasbro has since re-named Lucky Star.
There are two ways of deciding the oldest tree: clonal and non-clonal. Non-clonal trees are what we'd think of when we think of a single living organism: they sprout from a seed, grow for some period of time, and then die. In the case of non-clonal trees, the oldest known tree is a bristlecone pine in California appropriately enough named Methuselah. It's thought to be over 5,000 years old (it's not like you can ask a tree how old it is, and the former oldest known bristlecone pine was accidentally cut down by a scientist who wanted to know how old it was).
The oldest single clonal tree known is Old Tjikko.
It might not look like much, but it's about 9,500 years old. Basically, as soon as the glaciers left Sweden, that tree thought here's a good place to live, and so it did.
The thing about clonal trees that you might not have known (I didn't!) is that they basically can grow new everything over time as needed. New trunks or a new root system, whatever they might happen to need.
So take a deep breath here, because while Old Tjikko is the oldest single clonal tree, it's nowhere close to setting the record for the oldest clonal tree. That honor goes to Pando, a 107 acre aspen forest.
Nobody knows how old it is. A conservative estimate places it at 80,000 years old.
The Equestrian Railroad Telegraph Service appears to have this uniform:
The proper way to spell Fleur's name is Fleur De Lis. However, uncultured barbarians who try to render it in English sometimes wind up with Fleur Dis Lee.
From the ant-sized Wiki
Depending on the nature of the alterations, it might indeed be quicker to make new clothes from scratch, rather than to modify existing clothes. [I'm not a seamster, so take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt.] If you have to make something smaller, taking it apart at the seams, cutting the panels smaller, and re-sewing it is likely reasonably straightforward. Likewise, making things like pants shorter often just entails shortening the cuffs, and then re-sewing them.
If you have to make them bigger, though, things get more complicated. You have to figure out where to add fabric to make the panels wider or longer; depending on what you're modifying, that might be fairly easy, or it might be a huge challenge. First, you've obviously got to match the fabric, and even if you do, you're going to wind up with seams where there aren't supposed to be any. Something like a pleated skirt might be somewhat easy to modify; you could probably hide the seams in the base of the pleats. A knitted sweater would probably be nearly or completely impossible to make larger without just starting over.
I did check with an experienced seamstress to find out how long it would take to make simple sleeping clothes (I said scrubs, since those are basically the same as pajamas). She said it would take minutes.
My Equestria isn't as technologically advanced as Earth; however, Rarity has sewing machines and can get fabric by the bolt, so worst case, Rarity could probably make functional sleeping clothes at an hour a set.
While we don't know if ponies classify animals the same way that we humans do (this actually came up in the notes on a different story where I opined that ponies might potentially classify bats as birds), it'd be pretty obvious to any reasonable pony that humans aren't reptiles.
That does beg the question, though, is Spike cold-blooded?
The first mammal that came to mind which takes dust baths was the chinchilla. In fact, they're famous for it, and one of the things that you need if you're going to keep chinchillas as a pet is an appropriate dust bath for them.
Then I did a little bit more research on other animals that take dust baths and it turned out that horses were on the list, too.
We haven't really seen any ponies doing that, as far as I can recall, but I could see it being a thing that some ponies would do, especially in places where water was scarce.
Dr. Clay is named for my college Stagecraft professor. He was brand-new when I started at college (they'd hired him for that year) and he didn't last too long. He was really out of his depth in many ways, and I'm actually not sure why he got the job. He'd worked as a welder for years and then apparently gotten an appropriate education, but he didn't really have the depth of experience that you'd expect for a college professor.
Having said that, he also brought new things to the table that a college professor might not have. I think that sometimes professors get set in their ways and view everything through the lens of academia—he certainly didn't. And I'm not saying he was a bad professor, because he wasn't. He was also quite willing to learn on the job, and he certainly left the college a more-rounded man than when he arrived.
Dr. Cresida is named for Jaylen Cresida in The Lost Fleet.
We know from the show that Screwy starts off as an inmate of the Ponyville hospital, and later on is living in a house which Nurse Snowheart checks on.
Most of y'all who follow me know that I work as a mechanic during the week; I also work at group homes for developmentally disabled adults part-time on the weekend. The goal of the agency I work for is to let them have as normal a life as possible while providing the supports they need. I work with high-functioning adults, and all the homes I work in are basically normal houses located in normal neighborhoods. There aren't bars on the windows or guards at the doors or any of those things that you might imagine when you think of a 'mental institution' (this is especially true if the first thing that comes to mind is what Hollywood often depicts). In fact, my first day on the job I went to the house I was training at and there were a bunch of guys sitting around watching a basketball game on TV and I legit couldn't tell who were the clients and who were the staff.
One thing that we can't provide is high security, and we've had to send a few clients to other facilities for that reason—clients who turned out to be more dangerous to themselves or others than we were capable of dealing with.
We also have varying levels of supervision, depending on the client. Some are line-of-sight, which means that in general there has to be one staff person watching them at all times; others live unsupervised in apartments and only have staff check in occasionally to help them with things that they can't do themselves.
I'm really grossly oversimplifying here, since this isn't meant to be a blog post about how group homes operate, but from what I've seen in the show, I believe that the ponies use this model.
One of the common shipping lanes in Lake Michigan runs close to the west side of the Fox Islands. The water gets deep not very far to the west of the islands, and since ships have to turn to go through the Straits of Mackinaw, they want to run fairly close to the islands.
When I was younger, we camped one time on the east end of the northern peninsula, right by the channel where downbound freighters ran (the Great Lakes flow into the Atlantic eventually; if you're headed against that current, you're upbound; if you're going with it, you're downbound). We had a sixteen foot sailboat and took it out into the channel, and we were watching as a freighter loomed over a small island. While intellectually I knew that it would stop if it hit the island, it looked like it could just run it over and keep on going if it had wanted to.
In narrower passageways like that, the water level would change as they went by, since they displace so much. You could feel the throbbing of the engines in the ground.
The ship in question is the Edwin H Gott, and it's not the biggest freighter on the Great Lakes. I won't bore you with statistics; instead, just watch this video and maybe think about how from the bridge they're looking down at the entrance lights to the harbor.
'Sunstones' are a sort of generic reference to any sort of stone or glass which is designed to let some light into an inside space. There were various types of light prisms used historically to shine light through sidewalks into basements in cities, or belowdecks on ships before the advent of electrical lights.
There are also sunstones that were used for navigation back in the Viking days. A certain type of rock (cordierite or Iceland spar) might have been used to navigate back in Viking times. The way that they transmitted light allowed a navigator to determine the azumith of the sun even when it was cloudy or the sun was partially below the horizon.
I'd say it's kinda hard for anything that breathes fire and bathes in lava to be cold blooded. But then again, magic.
Picture don't work.
Picture don't work.
:)
Lé gasp! at the title!
It's been so long, I completely missed it.
4860339
Well, that would make it the ultimate cold blooded creature though: no need to get heat from the sun, just use your own inner flame to do so.
Blog post #500.. I suppose some kind of congratulations are in order...
I don't think Spike or other dragons would be cold-blooded. Anything that could chill in a lava bath (or breathe fire, for that matter) would have to have some manner of internal temperature regulation, magical or otherwise.
In destitute areas, Sunstones have been rediscovered and loudly proclaimed as the new fantastic invention, as in being a cola bottle filled with water shoved through a hole in the tin roof.
New name means licensing, means profit in some way even if non monetary.
Ah. A medium ship then.
yeah, some images linked into this post use webp ('new' image compression standard) and mozilla/firefox apparently have trouble supporting them: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490 . Still, you can download those and view separately
i.imgur.com/6EYxb1u.png
According to Hasbro, her name is in fact spelled "Fleur Dis Lee." The reason for this is because "fleur de lis" is a common term and can't be trademarked. (Same reason why "Bon Bon" got renamed "Sweetie Drops" for merchandising purposes; she was originally named after a G1 pony by the same name, but Hasbro discovered after the fact that they'd inadvertently let the trademark lapse on the name and couldn't reacquire it.)
All the MLP wikia images you used are WebP images that only display in Chrome.
(edit: nvm, I see this was mentioned already)
actually, patched seamonkey (2.49.3) can view those webp files too.. but guess they recompressed on the fly somewhere between server and browser, because in theory they all have extension .png! (but apparently patch author was smart enough and added some hack for guessing real content of image.. MIME types? I just applied those patches with hammer, not really looked heavily at them)
4860339
Maybe his normal body temperature is really hot. Maybe that's why he didn't want to go out for Winter Wrap-Up.
Or maybe he's just lazy.
Actually, can you imagine a Victorian-era scientist trying to classify the flora and fauna in Equestria?
4860365
Grr, they work on Chrome and Chrome mobile. Never bothered to check them with any other browser.
The one of Lucky Star is like the only image of her that exists on the internet. Or at least as far as I've been able to find. She's about as obscure as background ponies get. Even Incidental Background Mare #9 is on Derpibooru.
4860400
I know, right? I'm not dead yet!
4860420
"Ponies 'burn' hay to keep warm."
"I'm literally on fire inside."
It's the perfect thing to use my 500th blog post for, too.
FWIW, blog post #2 was for CSI . . . not sure which the first one for OPP was; I don't know if there's a way to find out without counting manually.
4860445
By conventional biology, yes, but maybe by magical biology they wouldn't. They could just get really hot and be okay.
4860472
The thing about old inventions is that they worked (well, usually; I'd be skeptical about any old-timey medical cure). Poke a hole, fill it with something transparent or translucent to let the light in but keep the rain out, and there you go. What's old is new again.
4860494
About as big as lake freighters get. It's not the biggest, but it's reasonably close.
4860535
Woo-hoo! Now I know why they don't work in everything!
Maybe I should not be lazy and just put 'from the wiki' under them, and instead put full links for people who are using less-mainstream browsers.
4860584
That was who I was specifically referring to when I said 'uncultured barbarians' (them, and Gameloft).
Seems like a trademark could still be gettable; after all, there's a famous tech company named "Apple," and a terrible pizza chain named "Dominos" and both of those would, I think, qualify as common terms, even when those businesses got their trademarks. Maybe it would have been more work, and that's why they didn't bother, or maybe they've just got someone lazy in the legal department (or someone who can't spell).
Regardless, I'm still going to make fun of them for it, and insist that her name is actually Fleur De Lis.
4860648
I didn't know that until today.
I just knew that people were complaining that sometimes Wiki images didn't work on their browser, and so I've tried not to use them when I can avoid it.
I've thought about that a lot too. A possibility, for sure, but ultimately I don't think so. He likes sleeping on cold floors and he seems to be able to frolick in the snow completely naked. I'd lean to the opposite extreme, actually. There is some dragon lore that suggests they have very high metabolisms, so maybe that's the case and because of it, Spike actually runs hot more often than not.
Besides, he'd need an electric rock to sit on lol.
I buy sausage?
4860864
Typical when you think about it, 30 years ago a computer philosophy came out that used plug ins. The file load module looks inside the file to read what its encoding is, then calls teh appropiate decode module, or sequence of modules, if available.
Its 30 years old, I notice a couple days ago on the 20 plus year old central respository that there was a WebP update. Really must get round to analyzing and updating neuralnet.library one of these decades to make use of the millionfold increase in system power.
Hmm... Sore subject. I'll go Luddite in the corner.
4860870
I just don't know you anymore.
Being a chain store I understand that quality varies from place to place but I really like Dominos pizza, especially their "Brooklyn style" pizzas. Thoses are really good and one of them feeds me for a few days.
4860846
Sorry, I'm using Firefox. ;)
4860852
Well, that IS convinient for Twillight: think of the economy in heating she is making by keeping Spike around!
I thought that name looked familiar, but couldn't place it. Initially thought it was some-pony introduced some chapters ago that I had forgotten about since I read it.
I just picked up that series around the tail end of last year, already blitzed through The Lost Fleet and Beyond the Frontier also picked up Vanguard not too long ago.
4861131
So maybe the reason that he still sleeps in a basket next to Twilight's bed is because he keeps the room warm.
I could buy that, actually.
He'd be useful at bathtime, too: plunk him in the water to get it warm. . . .
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/d/da/Spike_sitting_on_Rarity_and_Twilight%27s_rock_costume_S6E5.png
4861231
That Lucky Star added a new level of challenge to finding images of her (if any).
4861266
Thirty years ago I was using a TRS-80 and I think it only had one file system. It got to choose if it wanted to load from a disk or from a cassette, though, so that was something.
Man, things have gotten a lot better since then. Our computer would give you a mild electric shock when you touched the disk drive case. It probably wasn't supposed to do that.
4861325
I've never actually tried a Brooklyn style. Didn't know that was a thing.
Back in my day, Dominos was so bad that when you ate one you always wondered if you'd accidentally eaten the cardboard box that it came in. Of all the major pizza chains, they were the absolute worst.
And I should give them credit; they changed their menu and now their pizzas are about as good as any that you're gonna get from a national chain.
But dammit, I've been making fun of them for bad pizza for 20+ years (as has everyone my age, I'm sure). I can't stop now.
Also, I might be a bit spoiled, because in and around my little town of 2,000 we have three pizza stores that sell home-made pizza. Any franchise pizza isn't going to be able to match that quality.
4861410
There was one point where I was checking blogs across multiple browsers (I've got IE, Edge, and Chrome, and it wouldn't be that difficult to install Firefox if I wanted to), but either way I run into a problem when there just isn't any other image of Starlight/Lucky Star to be found anywhere.
You can search Lucky Star off this list. As for the other image, it was a Gameloft image of Fleur with the title card spelling it Fleur Dis Lee.
4861533
People always said it wasn't safe to keep a dragon in a library inside a tree, but now that we've all brought this up, I can't help but wonder if maybe that was safer than having a traditional fireplace? Aside from a few accidents, Spike tends to keep his fire inside.
4861730
Well, there's always the possibility of it having been a long-forgotten character (there are more than a few of them, honestly).
I haven't watched it at all; is it good?
4861752
I'm a bit confused by you saying you haven't "watched it at all", considering it's a book series... and one comic, but, while I bought Corsair, I haven't read it yet.
But, the Beyond the Frontier books were pretty good, continuing Geary's "adventure" after ending a century long war; and Vanguard is alright so far, focusing on the start of a certain colony and one of Geary's ancestors.
4861848
For some reason, I thought that it was a TV series. I'm not sure why I thought that.
Maybe I'll have to get some of the books and start reading them. In my ample free time.
i see alot of good things that are being talk about.
but what i dont see is................................................
I LOVE IT PLEASE MAKE MORE!!!!
thank you and that is all.
4870525
You're welcome!
4872564
(SPIKE THE BEST!!!)
i'm a little late,but your welcome!