noise."Story Notes:Cuddles V · 5:17pm Jul 5th, 2021
I was legally obligated to write a Cuddles story that fit into Categorial Grant’s Cuddlefic Contest.
Ponies are for hugging, after all.
I’m sure that there’s a standard book of cooking greens, but I have no idea what it is. Luckily, I do know from Monty Python that there is a standard book of birds, and why wouldn’t Olsen, if he were a pony, have written one about greens, too?
...The expurgated version, the one without the cabbage.
There is something to be said about having the chef instincts to improvise things that will work together when you don’t have the proper ingredients, or when you’re just making something from scratch. I’ve worked with people like that, and it’s amazing to watch them come up with something when all I see is a mostly empty fridge and barren cupboards. Undoubtedly a learned skill; it’s certainly one I don’t have.
On the plus side, I can make cereal without starting a fire.
Source
The ‘prime columns’ Cami is referring to are on the periodic table; lead’s in column 14 and gold is in column 11.* Likewise, gold is a transition metal, lead isn’t.
In my last story, we were discussing the value of bits, their weight in gold, etc., and maybe the ponies don’t mine gold at all, maybe they do just have golden egg-laying geese for all their gold production needs.
___________________________________
*Her statement is kind of vague about how transmutation of metals works, so I leave it to the rules lawyers to see if they can find a way to get around her claim, bearing in mind that she can transmute an iron frying pan into water and then back into frying pan.
Squirrels as a thing that you might get while messing up magic was suggested by Bugsydor, and fits the obligatory Magic: The Gathering reference that shows up sometimes in my stories—he gave me a list of enough squirrel cards that I’m thinking of building a squirrel deck just for fun.
Original Source Unknown
“Longhorn Lobster” is a portmanteau of two iconic American restaurant chains, Red Lobster and Longhorn Steakhouse, and because it’s a pony food cart, it sells neither steak nor seafood. Kale is in fact not seafood, but kelp could be considered seafood (kelp is a class of seaweed, and I don’t know if seaweed is considered ‘seafood’).
I didn’t look up if kaleslaw was actually a thing until I was writing the notes, and you won’t be surprised to find out that it is. Legit the reason I thought of kale as the leafy vegetable is because of the David Meal meme: “Protip: if you stir coconut oil into your cake, it makes it easier to scrape into the trash.”
Although that is unfair to kale.
I like the idea that a pony farrier would offer a free replacement guarantee if a shoe didn’t stay on. And yes, there are various glues that can be use to stick on horseshoes if you don’t want to use nails. It seems ‘pony’ to re-use hoof filings and shed feathers for other uses, as well. Probably also trimmed hair, there are things you can do with that, too.
At least one person’s gonna twig to the Aeolic dialect, along with “Ikaria” and “Chios,” and I’d hate to spoil that.
Remember, ponies are for hugging.
Source
A friend of mine had a squirrel deck many years ago when I played. It was surprisingly effective, and extremely annoying to play against.
Dawwww!!
Considering Dr. Doom and Thanos and quite a few other armageddon-tier supervillains were laid low by hoards of squirrels, courtesy of
Tara StrongSquirrel Girl, hoards of of the little buggers summoned by unicorn magic would be fearsome indeed.Also, virtually everything, including kale, can be yummy with a kombu dashi (seaweed broth) or some nori (dried seaweed) sprinkled on. Although dashi normally involves some bonito fish, so if any seafood at all is out of the question, I guess that would be a bust. Despite horses IRL eating fish and it being a rather common headcanon that ponies, or at least pegasi, like fish.
Admiral? Would you ask Cami where can I find the proper forms for requesting an extra-dimensional pony snuggle session?
I've had kale slaw, it's meh.
How long before the Bobs show up to reorganize Cami's office structure?
And classical alchemy for the win.
5549641
Obligatory:
grammarcheck.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/horde-vs-hoard.png
;P
Hmm...
derpicdn.net/img/2018/1/26/1641239/large.jpg
(Source: https://derpibooru.org/images/1641239)
derpicdn.net/img/view/2020/4/29/2334509.jpg
(Source: https://derpibooru.org/images/2334509)
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/4/24/608961.png
(Source: https://derpibooru.org/images/608961)
^,,^
If you are willing to run a particle accelerator in your home, Significant Other pointed out that you can get a stable isotope of gold from mercury in column 12:
198Hg + γ → 197Hg + n
and then:
197Hg → 197Au + e+
Of course, given the energies involved, this is probably the sort of thing that leads to the thaumic excursion events that Cami investigates for her work.
As a side note, I wonder if dragons eat gold as well along with gems? Sort of like a spreadable, metallic version of Camembert? If so, I could see Equestrians being puzzled by humans' bizarre fascination with what amounts to dragon cheese-spread that can be readily found in troy ounce snack packs (with baked mica crackers) in vending machines.
Is that... Aloy hugging kirin-Aloy at the end there?
5549609
Pyroclasm.
(I'm sure there are much more effective spells, but it was the first that popped into my head)
5549609
That is exactly the kind of deck I’m going for. Surprisingly effective and annoying.
5549627
5549641
I didn’t know that was a thing, and now I’ll never be able to picture Twilight Sparkle without knowing that she has the ability to summon enough squirrels to solve her friendship problem.
This story still fits into my general headcanon of ponies sometimes eating fish (especially pegasi); as it happens, ponies are sometimes just terrible at naming their restaurants/food carts, especially if they’re going for human-inspired.
“Hi, welcome to McHardee’s Wendy Burger, do you want a fish?”
“Do you have hamburgers?”
“Just fish.” <cheerfully slams a fresh-caught trout on the counter.>
5549653
Oh, I have.
And I will pass that along to all y’all as soon as I get a reply. You can trust me on this.
5549655
I have not, but I have two truths that I know:
*Kale is worthy of a side-eye
*In terms of things I want to eat, coleslaw ranks below the ‘is that a chocolate chip’ roulette in a home with free-range rabbits.
They already have, and now the office has two new statutes flanking the door. One of them has an expression of horror, the other resignation. One might think that they were there to warn about overenthusiastic management and their desire to reorganize what is a functional system but that’s not it at all. The one with the expression of horror is the one who realized, too late, where he actually stood in the corporate hierarchy.
You just can’t beat classical alchemy.
Really, it’s a shame (for Cami) that the series hasn’t yet gotten into medical treatments. Cami’s no doctor, but she does know how to summon leeches, and if one leech’ll fix you, a hundred will do it faster, right?
5549701
Okay, changelings are for hugging, too.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2021/6/26/2643725.png
Source
That statement about not being able to transmute across prime columns, if true, pretty much invalidates every transmutation we've seen in the show, I think... and turning an iron frying pan into water definitely breaks that rule, since you're transmuting iron (element 26, column 8) to hydrogen (element 1, column 1) and oxygen (element 8, column 16), which involves transmuting across the prime-numbered columns 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13.
Cast iron also contains carbon and silicon, both from column 14, that would have to transmute across prime columns 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 to end up as hydrogen as well. (Transmutation to oxygen, fortunately, involves no prime columns.)
Also, for that transmutation to occur, if I'm doing the math right, 5 atoms of iron have to be converted to 13 atoms of oxygen and 26 atoms of hydrogen to make the number of protons and electrons come out even. (For simplicity of calculation, we're assuming "pure" Fe56 converted to equally pure O16 and H1, since these are the most abundant and stable isotopes, and disregarding the carbon and silicon.) However -- Fe56 also has 30 neutrons, while O16 only requires 8 and H1 doesn't require any, so this conversion results in 46 neutrons left over. Large quantities of free neutrons are generally not healthy to be around...
(You can somewhat get around that by converting most of the Fe56 to the heavier stable isotopes of H2 (deuterium) and O18, but the spell is going to have to somehow "know" to do the proper calculus to figure out what proportions of H1, H2, O16, O17, and O18 will balance the equation to zero leftover neutrons.)
Soooo... there must be some other mechanism involved besides simple rearrangement of subatomic particles from X amount of one element to Y amount of another, or there's something Cami isn't explaining properly.
5549902
Thanky!
My favorite of your bio quotes.
Your cuddles stories are a rollercoaster ride of twists, turns, and cuddles, lurching from one pun to the next. Love 'em.
If there was a standard greens, I guess it would make sense it was the brassica family, which includes kale. Brassica as a collection of species is ridiculously flexible; some wildly different vegetables which might be mistaken as distinct species are actually just cultivars of the same species. I guess their genetics are just highly tunable?
5549773
That is a risk. I think you could potentially run some concurrent spells to deal with that.
One of Asimov’s stories, he figured out the chemical basis for how the goose would lay golden eggs. I’m no physicist/chemist, but it sounds plausible, at least from a ‘what turns to what’ standpoint.
Ooh, I wonder if they do? Logically, their ‘horde’ could just be the food supplies they’ve stocked up for lean times.
And the vending machine idea . . . oh, man, that’s brilliant.
Can you imagine what you’d have to stock in a snack vending machine at the School of Friendship?
5549789
According to the tags, it’s Aloy hugging Autumn Blaze.
I don’t know what the current rules are regarding putting mana in your pool, but one of my most effective combos ever was tapping all my mana, casting Jokulhaups, and then using the leftover mana to destroy my now-defenseless opponent with a fireball or something.
c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/large/front/9/9/99d26ff7-afff-40a0-b515-7928c2428809.jpg
5549908
Cami knows when not to encourage experimentation (also that it’s hard to explain magic stuff to a human). AFAIK all your chemistry is correct, and you’re right that when you’re done with a reaction you really don’t want to have extra electrons hanging about with nothing to do--they’ll find something to do, I’m sure.
Not to mention that in Inspiration Manifestation, Rarity turned things into gold IIRC.
Sigawesome suggested rather than the periodic table we humans use, ponies might use this model, which I wish I’d known about when I wrote the story. Even if it wouldn’t have changed the science!, it feels more pony.
5549917
That was a good one, and a true one.
5549947
Thank you!
5549951
Yeah, I agree with you. I don’t know if it’s got the most different kinds of things we humans eat in it as any other family, but in terms of diverging plants where we eat different parts of the structure, it’s probably got the record. Seems to me if you pick something at random in your kitchen which is plant-based, there’s a good chance it’s a Brassica.
derpicdn.net/img/2020/10/2/2457557/large.jpg
...you know, that could be an Earth Pony family who gives the Apples a run for their money. . . .
5550558
I hear the RFNA juice boxes are quite popular after some bright spark at Sigma-Aldrich came up with the new advertising campaign aimed at adolescent dragons and their friends. Just make sure you get the "natural" variety with the minimum amount of inhibitor preservatives so as to avoid dragon obesity and scale oxidation.
As far as other snacks go, I can see Smoulder and the rest of the Young 6 nearly causing an incident while on a field trip to London when she mistakes a High Street jeweller for a take-out snack shop (dragon kebabs!)
5550559
I'm aware, actually. One of my favorite combos for sheer ridiculousness in addition to effectiveness is this:
1: tap 12 mana, 6 of which must be red.
2: play Worldgorger Dragon (all your other in-play stuff is removed from play)
3: play Jokulhaups (reset much of the table)
3b: since Worldgorger Dragon pops, you get all your stuff back
4: profit
5550558
"Pate de Foie Gras", Astounding Science-Fiction, Sept. 1956. The theorized mechanism was that something in The Goose was converting O18 from The Goose's food, air, and water into Fe56, which generated enough energy to convert the Fe56 to Au197 -- but it was clearly a nuclear reaction, not chemical, because only those specific isotopes were involved. The scientists in the story never did figure out exactly how it was being done, though -- Asimov wrote it as one of his pseudo-scientific-paper "gag" articles, from the point of view of one of the researchers who was called upon to solve the mystery when they found a real, live Goose That Laid Golden Eggs.
(I just happen to have a copy of "Analog's Lighter Side" on my bookshelf, which has the story reprinted in it.
)
5549773
I'm now imagining some enterprising human following a dragon around with a pail, shovel and a hopeful (not at all creepy) smile.
5551430
...and then said human discovers the hard way that dragon fewmets are corrosive, hypergolic, and pyrophoric (too many of those junk-food RFNA juice boxes from vending machines can play hob with a dragon's GI tract). His pail and shovel are not sufficiently passivated and now he has a metal-fluorine fire literally on his hands.
5549692
Doomstadt is surrounded by forest, but for most other villains she'd need to bring the squirrels in from elsewhere. (Seriously, her origin comic doesn't have to be canon for Victor to just let her do whatever she wants in his own house)
5550596
The biggest hurdle would be figuring out how to box it. Waxed or foil-lined cardboard wouldn’t cut it, and you’d have to figure out some kind of straw that wouldn’t dissolve when you stuck it in the juice box.
derpicdn.net/img/2019/5/27/2050553/large.png
Oh yeah, you always want to make sure you’re getting the freshest, bestest drinks with no preservatives or added sugars.
That would legit be an issue on Earth, and the only thing I can think of as a solution would be teaching them, repeatedly, that they must not eat gems on Earth. Maybe they get specialty snacking gems shipped over from Equestria.
5550638
I’m so far behind on what the cool new stuff is, it’s been years since I played with any frequency and most of my cards are even older than that. All the friends I used to play with got married and had kids and don’t have free time any more. Plus we all kind of moved away, so it’s a bit of a drive to just hang out, y’know?
5550803
Yeah, I do remember that it was a nuclear reaction (although there’s no reason some pony magic couldn’t be nuclear, as well). I also have a copy of it kicking around, maybe more than one. I think it was published in a collection called Asimov’s Mysteries as well, maybe back in the 70s?
It ended with the narrator asking the audience at large if there was a solution to get more geese, and according to Wikipedia the answer is to stop giving it oxygen 18 and it’ll eventually start laying fertile eggs (this is of course assuming you’ve got a boy goose around to help out). With modern tech, it also might be possible to sequence its DNA and clone it, but that obviously wasn’t an option when Asmiov wrote the story.
5551430
Entire fortunes have been made harvesting bird and bat guano, so it’s not like there isn’t a precedent.
5551438
That’s the hazard of being a dragon gong farmer, I suppose. You gotta have the right tools for the job.
They’re probably not the only beasties in Equestria where their leavings could be hazardous, either, for a variety of reasons. What do crystal ponies poop? How about Ursas? To say nothing of Discord. . . .
5552718
Besides the obvious answer that normally summoning spells magically get the nearest whatevers for the mage (which in and of itself can lead to problems with creative spellcasters) for a more mundane solution, how many docile squirrels could you fit under a cloak? I bet a lot.
5553533
Cool "new" stuff? I haven't collected in... 15 years? My favorite combos are all older than that!
5553588
Eh, it’s been less than 15 years since I bought cards (including a pretty sweet precon Angel deck that’s awesome when it works), but most of my stuff is that old or older as well.
Doesn’t feel like it was that long . . . .
5549907
Both are for hugging:
images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/c11af197-8673-4440-9749-b83bc922a106/dcq5j59-cf421f2b-7611-45b7-94b0-f7d97ee47f1d.jpg/v1/fill/w_1024,h_6959,q_75,strp/two_evil_by_doublewbrothers_dcq5j59-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9Njk1OSIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2MxMWFmMTk3LTg2NzMtNDQ0MC05NzQ5LWI4M2JjOTIyYTEwNlwvZGNxNWo1OS1jZjQyMWYyYi03NjExLTQ1YjctOTRiMC1mN2Q5N2VlNDdmMWQuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTEwMjQifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.PqhFdIn7G1JMjqax_s-tbsBFAw1EtnZv91WIQlFS7JI
Source.
Edit: The preview uses a downscaled version of the picture due to technical limitations.
5553531
Would Swarowski crystals count as junk food?
5550573
Solanaceae would be a good candidate too. With the introduction of pot- and tomato to Europe, they surely have surpassed brassica. Also, there are a lot of plants associated with witchcraft in that family.
5697935
Maybe junk food, or maybe even be in the same category as wax fruit--it looks edible but it isn't.
Admiral Biscuit
I'm not super up on my biology, and the only conventional consumables I could think of in that family were potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. Wikipedia also mentioned eggplants and pepper. I'm sure that the list is longer than that, but most of the Wikipedia is using the scientific names which I don't recognize at all.
5606832
Anon's gonna be murdered and have all his love drained out. It's probably not the worst way to go.
5550596
Sigma-Aldrich got that sigma grindset. And also loads of sigma bonds.I can see the School of Friendship needing flameproof locks on the chem storage, or maybe the crystal tree just grew such a storage room. What even is the chemical composition of the crystal though? What chemicals would react violently with it?
5713731
I suppose it depends on what kind of crystal it is, doesn't it? And that they have properties like Earth crystals, I guess . . . who knows what magical crystals can do?
We know that the Crystal HeartTM reacts violently with King Sombra.