• Member Since 28th Aug, 2011
  • offline last seen 2 hours ago

Cold in Gardez


Stories about ponies are stories about people.

More Blog Posts187

  • Monday
    Science Fiction Contest 3!!! (May 14, 2024)

    Hey folks,

    It's contest time! Wooooo!

    Read More

    3 comments · 234 views
  • 2 weeks
    A town for the fearful dead

    What is that Gardez up to? Still toiling away at his tabletop world. Presented, for those with interest, the town of Cnoc an Fhomhair.

    Cnoc an Fhomhair (Town)

    Population: Varies – between two and five thousand.
    Industry: Trade.
    Fae Presence: None.

    Read More

    5 comments · 241 views
  • 14 weeks
    The Dragon Game

    You know the one.


    A sheaf of papers, prefaced with a short letter, all written in a sturdy, simple hand.

    Abbot Stillwater,

    Read More

    7 comments · 544 views
  • 32 weeks
    EFN Book Nook!

    Hey folks! I should've done this days ago, apparently, but the awesome Twilight's Book Nook at Everfree Northwest has copies of Completely Safe Stories!

    Read More

    9 comments · 570 views
  • 36 weeks
    A new project, and an explanation!

    Hey folks,

    Alternate title for this blog post: I'm Doing a Thing (and I'm looking for help)

    I don't think anyone is surprised that my pony writing has been on a bit of a hiatus for a while, and my presence on this site is mostly to lurk-and-read rather than finish my long-delayed stories. What you might not know, though, is what I've been doing instead of pony writing.

    Read More

    26 comments · 998 views
Jun
30th
2018

Starlight Continues Her Education · 1:50pm Jun 30th, 2018

“Knock knock!” Twilight Sparkle said at the threshold of Starlight Glimmer’s room. She didn’t actually knock, of course -- the door was already open and she could see Starlight sitting at her desk, leafing through some journal or other from the library’s periodical collection.

“Hey Twilight!” Starlight flipped the journal closed. “What’s up? Need help with something?”

“No, just thought I’d stop by, see how you’re doing.” Twilight stepped into the room and looked around. “Actually, there was one little thing I was hoping you could help with.”

“Of course!” Starlight leapt to her hooves. Her horn lit, and her saddlebags floated from their peg on the wall to her withers. “Where are we going?”

“No, no, not a mission. Just a question.” Twilight pulled a few documents out of her own saddlebags and shuffled them before her. “It’s just, I was going through the castle’s invoices this morning, for the budget meeting next week, and I found something that I thought was a little odd.”

“Oh.” Starlight floated her saddlebags back to the wall. “What’s that?”

“Well, uh.” More shuffling of papers. “This will sound weird and it’s probably nothing and I’ll feel stupid about it like that time I thought you were hitting on my brother but it turned out he just had some lint on his belly and we all had a good laugh about it and it was funny even though it kinda felt like you were all laughing at me but anyway I thought it was important enough to check so here goes—” here she took a breath, “did you by any chance order a premium subscription to www.live-pig-dissections.com?”

“Oh. Oh!” Starlight let out a little half-laugh. “That! Oh, yeah, I could see how that would startle you if you just saw it on an invoice. I’m sorry, Twilight, I should’ve given you some kind of heads-up – it’s not what it sounds like.”

“Heh. Whew! I figured.” Twilight grinned. A weight lifted from her shoulders. Just a little misunderstanding! Foals and their website names these days, all crazy and startling and misleading. “I mean, wouldn’t that be crazy? A website that actually sold videos of live pigs being dissected?”

“Hah! What a nutty idea!” Starlight smiled along with her. “No, it’s nothing like that, Twilight. The videos are live. All the pigs are already dead.”

“The videos…” Twilight stopped and reconsidered her words. “You… you’re serious?”

“Absolutely. All the videos start with a veterinarian certifying that the pig in question shows no signs of life, or its brain and spinal cord have been destroyed. No brain, no pain!”

“No, I mean…” Twilight closed her eyes. “You… you watch videos of pigs being dissected? Ponies make videos of pigs being dissected?”

“Of course. How else are you supposed to learn about anatomy?”

“Books! From books! You don’t need to, to cut a pig open!”

“How do you think those books got written?” Starlight asked. She sat on her haunches and held up a hoof to forestall Twilight’s response. “Look, you know I love books. But books can’t show you how intercostal muscles expand your ribcage and make you inhale, or the weight of the heart, or how the liver balances the body’s humours.”

Twilight scowled. The shock and disgust bubbling in her gut gave way to something else – indignation, and a little anger besides. “I can’t believe this! Those were living beings! And you just cut them up for your own edification?”

“Well, no, I don’t cut them up. The doctors in the videos do. But you’re correct about the important thing, Twilight: they were living beings. And now they’re dead, and they don’t care what happens to them. Why shouldn’t we at least put their bodies to some good use?”

“Because they’re—” Twilight tried to keep speaking, but had no breath. Hyperventilating, that was it. She closed her eyes and lowered her head below her shoulders, focusing on her breathing. In, out. In, out. In, hold, out. Dimly she was aware of Starlight rubbing her back with a hoof.

“Easy, easy,” Starlight said. “I’m sorry, Twilight. I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about this. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier.”

Twilight took as deep a breath as she could, and let it out a second later. “How can you not feel strongly about it?”

“Hm.” Starlight gaze around the room for a moment before fixing her eyes on the desk. Her horn glowed, and a feathered writing quill lifted from beside her ink pot to float over to them. It hovered in the air, flying again. “You see this quill?”

Twilight nodded. “Uh huh.”

“Did I ever tell you about it?”

Twilight shook her head.

Starlight spun the quill idly as she spoke. Her eyes seemed to look beyond it. “This feather’s name is Ink Scratch. My mom gave her to me years ago, after I won top prize in an essay contest at school. See those little blue dots on the barb? They’re probably just marks from the quill-cutter, but when I was a filly I thought maybe the whole bird this feather came from had those blue spots, and she was a special bird, something beautiful like a peacock, and this feather came to me all the way from some distant land just so I could take notes. And everytime the nib cracked I’ve had her re-cut. Everytime I’ve moved, she’s been the first thing I pack. I saved almost nothing from Our Town, but I have Ink Scratch because I never let her out of my sight. Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

Twilight nodded. The residual anger in her heart had softened as Starlight spoke. “Yeah. You know, I have an ink pot that—”

Starlight snapped the quill in half.

Twilight gasped. “Starlight! What are you—”

“It’s a feather with a nib on it, Twilight,” she said. “I bought it last week from Davenport for three bits. I made all the rest of that up. All I did was break a quill, like you do every week, but because I told you a story about it, you felt bad.”

The broken quill bits floated over to the trashcan and fell, vanishing among crumpled papers and scraps of kite-making materials. Starlight continued: “There’s nothing wrong with dissecting dead animals, Twilight. It’s necessary for us to understand the world. It only feels wrong if you tell yourself a story that makes you feel it’s wrong. So tell a different story.”

Twilight stared at the trashcan. “How… how can you do that? Just… change what you want to believe?”

“Sentimentality is an indulgence, Twilight. Only the comfortable can afford it. Now, come on.” She nuzzled Twilight’s shoulder and helped her stand. “Wanna see how a pig’s lungs work?”

“No!” Of course she didn’t. Why would she want to see that? To see how they adhered to the pleural walls, how the negative pressure of inhalation inflated them, how the diaphragm compressed to expel them. That was… crazy. “Maybe. Okay, yes.”

“Great. Let’s start with this one here…”


Written with assistance from GaPJaxie, that man for all seasons.

Why does Applejack have all those pigs, anyway?

Comments ( 31 )

... Yeah, I have to side with Starlight on this one. People don't make anatomy books through pure logical induction after all. Though I do have to question how anyone's supposed to see how a liver works by watching someone dissect a dead, lobotomized pig.

And griffins and carnivorous pets have to eat something.

4892284
The nice thing about recording knowledge, on the other hand, is that you don't have to repeat your experiments every time you want to teach something. It's good to do so from time to time, of course, just to make sure the laws of the universe haven't changed in the since the last time you checked, but often enough to run a live subscription-based web service, the primary purpose of which seems not to be actual education but voyeuristic pleasure?

I'm just saying, there's a reason scientists phased out the practice of wowing crowds by suffocating birds in vacuum chambers.

“Ms. Faust, why do the Apples keep pigs?”

“Uh . . . ponies like truffles! Yeah. Yeah, that’s it!”

(The dialog’s made up, but the question and answer aren’t.)

Always a pleasure to see more of our favorite sociopath!

4892287

the practice of wowing crowds by suffocating birds in vacuum chambers.

i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/665/543/e40.png

4892287
Good point. I should've known better than to think that there would be a simple answer to one of these blogs.

Good snippet. Of course, if this was a Twilight who was comfortable eating bacon and hamburgers when visiting the EQG universe, she might instead be asking, "Fascinating videos and all, but someone ate the leftovers, right? They didn't waste all that food?"
Could even be an omake. I'd love to see Glimmy's reaction.

To ensure a strong, bountiful harvest, duh. How can you have a strong, bountiful harvest without a sacrifice of pigs?









They go through the orchard and clean up weeds and apples that fell before they rot and attract pests. They’re sacrificing their time because that’s what employees do. What did you think I meant?

“Look, you know I love books. But books can’t show you how intercostal muscles expand your ribcage and make you inhale, or the weight of the heart, or how the liver balances the body’s humours.”

I love the juxtaposition between clinical anatomical detail that could be straight from any modern-day medical textbook, and the part about body's humours. In a magical land like Equestria, the correct ratio of black and yellow bile may be vitally important to your physical and mental well-being!

4892284
And never forget, FIM ponies are carnivores too. Or at least, they eat seafood.

Hmm, honestly she does have a point but at the same time to me it seems like she misses the point entirely when she puts something like discovering the inner working of anatomy and a 24h/day pig disection website on the same levels of importance.

They have magic and probably countless ways to simulate it now using said abilities, probably even something like store it in objects to be used (sombras cursed door giving you a life like illusion comes to mind).

The idea that ponies are important is just a story, Starlight. And dead ponies are just as dead as dead pigs.

I don't see you checking out live (dead) pony dissections.

The stories matter, and which ones we keep and which ones we "just change" is what makes or breaks a civilization.

Proceed with caution.

4892354
You can find human dissection on YouTube.

Well, autopsy. Same thing.

4892366
Personally I don't care about the details here, it's just a matter of the cavalier premise of the argument.

It's easy to tell people to change a story you don't care about without knowing what else that story is holding up.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

"Uh... Starlight, why are you sitting that way?"

"You don't touch yourself while watching the research?"

>4892294
Them pigs pay rent, dang it! :ajbemused:

Do they show the collection of pig blood they use to drop on Spike? (“When I say the ‘A word’, the blood drops.” “The ‘A’ is for ‘Apples.” “Oh no, it’s in my eyes!”)

4892312

Who's running Never the Last Word these days?

4892284
You'd think so, but on screen we've only seen griffins eat chocolate mousse and scones. I think there was a cooking contest in the comics, and they had eclairs or something? Maybe in their world they're obligate dessertivores.

At her picnic Fluttershy served berries, cookies, jello, and tea to her animal friends; the bear and ferret had what appeared to be toast and jam. I do remember her feeding them fish at one point, but as the song goes, "it's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings."

Maybe in Equestria - living under Harmony's influence, that is - animals' basic biology is rewritten so lions really can lay down with lambs. Though this doesn't seem to apply to monster-types: the hydra, chimera, cragadile, etc. all seemed very ready to eat ponies.

4892489
Sorry. Not familiar with what you're referring to.

4892284

Though I do have to question how anyone's supposed to see how a liver works by watching someone dissect a dead, lobotomized pig.

Necromancy, obviously.

4892284
In the "Sass Squatch" comic issue, Applejack says 'Pork chops and applesauce!'.

Why does Applejack have all those pigs, anyway?

Because ponies are objectively carnivorous. Just one look at their facial structure should tell you that. They're built for depth perception.

4892489
4892725
Not sure if story snippets that aren't based on other fanwork qualify for it, though I would love a "Starlight the Living Philosophical Dilemma" collection.

4892724
Admittedly the comics...say a lot of things.

However, as of "Surf and/or Turf" fish consumption at least by the hippogrifs appears to be hard canon, unless some of their comestibles have really clever names.

Ink Scratch, no!

I love these shorts but I am also waiting with bated breath on the next parts to The World is Filled With Monsters...

Mixed feelings!!!

4892727

Scratchpad had proposed to write a fic based on this blog entry (blog entries have been used as the basis for NtFW entries before).

4892842
Ah. Yes, if 4892606 does write something inspired by this, then I'll be happy to add it to NtFW2.

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