AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 254
ARES III SOL 251
TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit DF for response, over.
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: SG – I don’t recall any atmospheric test of magic thrusters producing weather. Did I miss anything, over?
ESA: Confirmed no unusual weather effects from magic thruster tests. Why do you ask? Over.
AMICITAS: Mark’s bosses report the abnormal storm we just survived might have come from engine tests using main thrusters. Circumstantial evidence also raises possibility that Amicitas atmospheric entry amplified storm that resulted in Mark being marooned, over.
ESA: Repeat no unusual weather effects from tests on Equestria. Effects where you are totally unpredictable owing to inability to accurately measure and determine laws of magic (if any) in your current universe, over.
AMICITAS: Please double-check. In the meantime will not use engines until/unless necessary for Mars escape, over.
ESA: Good plan. We’ll go over the equations here. Baltimare out.
MISSION LOG – SOL 251
What I Did on my Summer Vacation, by Mark Watney, age 8.
Wait, sorry, wrong beginning.
What I Did Right After Surviving a Freaky Martian Storm, by Mark Watney, age 41.
Seriously, the last few days have been spent (while waiting for Pathfinder to revive, or not) either undoing what the storm did, or undoing what we did preparing for the storm. There were two big headaches: getting all the scrap and other junk we crammed into Friendship’s engineering compartment back out of it so we can proceed with cutting it off, and getting as much sand and dust as possible out of Potato Shed #2.
But, even with taking four hours out of every sol for a visit back to the cave, we got it done, those things and all the other stuff too. We are ready to truncate (isn’t truncate a fun word? Starlight found it in the thesaurus. I’d forgotten it existed) the pony ship, and we’ll probably do that tomorrow.
Anyway, on today’s trip to the cave, Starlight Glimmer and Fireball went prospecting. According to Starlight, they found the materials in the Hallway for the fifteen extra-large batteries Bruce Ng asked for. That is, big quartz crystals that can be sliced up into shafts thirty centimeters wide and a meter and a half long. Unfortunately there were too many flaws in the shafts that tangle up the cave in that section to get fifteen three-meter lengths. Which is probably for the best, since I don’t think a three meter quartz crystal is going to be all that happy under the vibration of a rocket launch.
“They say that breaking up is hard to do, now I know they’ve never pulled three G’s in a rocket…” Yeah, so I’m not Weird Al. Who is? Besides about a thousand people on the Internet with three fans each, that is.
Anywho, Starlight also says she found a perfect amethyst crystal, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost a meter tall, to make a new Sparkle Drive core.
She takes it for granted, but the biggest amethyst crystals I’ve ever seen were in a geode twelve feet tall and just barely big enough for a person to stand inside, and those weren’t even quite as big as baseballs. I’ve never really been able to make the ponies understand just how unusual this cave is by Earth standards, with its giant quartz crystals and shafts and all. It makes me wonder just how big crystals get in their world.
Memo: if I ever get there, I must ask to see one of these “rock farms” they keep talking about. I bet they grow some smashing pumpkins along their black-eyed peas and red hot chili peppers. (And I know, somewhere, a music historian is groaning that this entry is a bunch of korn.)
Anyway, once we got back Fireball and I worked on trimming hooves and claws. It’s been well over forty sols since Dragonfly’s last round of suit maintenance. We don’t know how much longer she’s going to spend in her cocoon, so we need to be pro-active as possible about preventing excess wear and tear on the irreplaceable suits.
Amazingly, my current suit is holding up very well. It’s my original surface suit (my patched flight suit getting burned up in the perchlorate blowout on Sol 40) with Martinez’s helmet (my surface helmet shattering when the Hab sent Airlock 1 flying on Sol 88). I have put double-digit kilometers, maybe triple-digit, of travel on this suit, especially the boot soles, but they show very few signs of wear despite the environment. For all their bungles with the CO2 filters and the safety-glass visors, I have to admit the contractors built the rest of this suit to take an unholy beating. Unfortunately the pony suits, being more of an Apollo-level construction, aren’t as durable, which is why Dragonfly was patching and re-soleing things not long before her audition for a John Carpenter film.
Speaking of Dragonfly, as I said, she’s still in that cocoon. It doesn’t make a black hole anymore when we turn on the magic field, but it still glows black, kind of. It’s sort of like shining anti-light. It’s the same temperature as everything else in the cave. I tried holding a stethoscope up to it, but I didn’t hear any heartbeat, any breathing, or any voices whispering hastur hastur hastur or anything like that. But the outside is tough, if a bit pliable, and it doesn’t feel like we’re doing any harm when we hug it going and coming.
In one last bit of news, Bilbo and the dwarves have just entered Mirkwood. Gandalf’s stock has gone down considerably with the ponies, who think any responsible wizard would see things through to the end, and if he had business elsewhere he shouldn’t have been meddling with innocent people’s lives in the first place. The temptation to spoil things is great, but I can resist.
Resisting is made easier by Starlight and Cherry reading this over my shoulder and glaring daggers at me. So I think I’ll go to bed before things escalate to homicide, or worse, wedgies.
Just make sure the rock farm you visit is on flat ground, Mark. The ones on hillsides are a terrible health risk because of all the rolling stones.
Maybe cherrie can set up a small rock farm in the cave. She is an earth pony after all.
Those food jokes were great! I'm always up for a good pun.
Status update: I made major progress on the next section of the song. It's really coming along! If anyone would like to help me on this, either to sing or something else, or you just like to watch my progress, please send me a private message.
i.imgur.com/4Nv2ES1.jpg
8953601 It's Cherry. 🍒
I wonder if any research has been done back in Equestria regarding planetary-scale sentience?
8953609
that and he was a bit busy dealing with a necromancer that was an attempt of Sauron to come back to life
8953489 In his defense, it would be an amazing sight.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never read Tolkien; all of my knowledge comes from the Hobbit and LotR films. Still, that being said, I had a few thoughts:
Being a sapient dragon (as opposed to the non-sapient dragons in the Harry Potter books), Smaug will likely be of great interest to Fireball; more than likely, he'd be incredibly impressed by Smaug's hoard within Erebor, while probably wondering what an Arkenstone might taste like...
I imagine Starlight in particular will be interested in the way the hidden door into the Mountain works; she could probably devise a spell to produce a similar effect. And although I don't think it's in the books, I imagine her getting a small ego boost at the concept of Mereth Nuin Giliath.
8953605 Mars = Ego
8953592
one rock roll and he's visiting nirvana.
Seriously, Mark needs to introduce these ponies to some Pratchett.
I think the ponies would enjoy Douglas Adams.
8953655
I feel like Pratchett wouldn't work very well with ponies. He does a lot of playing with storytelling tropes, but who's to say human tropes and pony tropes are equivalent? I feel like a lot of his humor would fall flat, at the very least.
No mention of Elvis, The King of Rock (& Roll).
Oh hey, if they ever get to Lord of the Rings and Mark gets asked the inevitable question of "why not use the eagles???" Film Theory did a pretty interesting video on that:
Oh gods this was horrible and you should feel bad for it
You know, I can't help but wonder if Dragonfly is changing in there. Not into a queen, mind you, but a changeling variant better adapted to extreme-low magic environments. Maybe not as able to do amazing magic feats any longer, but much less likely to keel over.
8953625
Smaug is the dragon of them all. He's the archetype.
8953826
One dragon to rule them all?
You talked about korn and rock farms, but we all know that they hug dragonfly and sing softly:
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
when they say rock farm, they don't mean farm that grows plants on rocks, they mean a farm that grows rocks.
8953625
"MORE TAPIOCA PUDDING! WHAT A ING RIPOFF!"
8953605
Probably not. Civilization on their universe has a tendency of going "eh it's probably nothing..... Oh shit a supervillain!"
Did it never cross the ESA's minds that the weather might not be due to the different magic physics but rather simply due to the lack of manual magic weather management to correct any magical unpredictability caused by the engines?
8953864
And you Rick rolled (insert gender)
Not the rough stuff!
Always wondered how ponies managed to type. I mean I know the cartoon logic and all but they’re pretty bulky.
8953625
You know... for MLP standards the Arknestone would be iffy... it's not that big... Ok it may be that it's peculiar material, but the main thing for it was that it was HUGE for human standard and flawless... but still it was approximately the size of a human fist... Spike has thing that size commonly for breakfast and thing comparable in size are used as a [admittedly big] tip for a porter at an hotel... It may quite be that Fireball will be perplexed by the huge fuss about what ends up as something "nice but nothing exceptional" for his standards ^^
The funny thing is, it's probably the last synonym I'd forget because I write Linux programs and
truncate
is the name of the system call that's used to adjust a file's size without altering what's actually been written to the disk.(eg. If you
truncate
to a larger size, you create what's called a "sparse file". BitTorrent clients use this so they can create a file at the target size and then slot in the downloaded chunks in non-sequential order usingfseek
to modify where the nextfwrite
will go.)...but then programmers seems to like interesting words, like deprecate.
(Probably because you're going to have to be typing your type names (nouns) and function names (verbs) over and over again while, at the same time, familiarizing yourself with new APIs, so there's encouragement to build a habit around using your vocabulary to keep things both concise and clear.)
8953625
Yeah. Here's a site which agrees that it's not in the books.
http://askmiddlearth.tumblr.com/post/71841462905/mereth-nuin-giliath-the-feast-of-starlight
8953986 They have 'two-key' typewriters. They're shown several times in the series. I always imagined the keys to be some sort of gamepad-like tilting and twisting plate that print a different character depending on position.
Two keys of 12 tilt directions and twisting 15 degrees left and right as well as rest position gives 72 characters. The underlying mechanical linkages would probably be no more complicated than human typewriters.
8953635
Immediately followed up by a Motley Crue bearing Guns n Roses, eh?
8953746
This is my headcanon
i.pinimg.com/originals/80/c8/71/80c871f2376db1aa269a49a35a08048e.jpg
8953864
I'm jokingly voting down on you. Because you should feel ashamed. So very ashamed.
So.. one of my favorite writers, Arad, decided to start writing again.
Wouldn't it be funny if the next ANGEL probe ended up on the Stardust/Mente Materia universe?
8954135
There's a thin line between ashamed and proud. I am ashamed to have posted those three lines, but I am proud that the author of Arrow 18 downvoted replied to me because of that.
8953998
You should think somethings seriously wrong when your function lables take up more bytes than the function code.
What happened to reuseable reentrant romable libraries? Physically there no different between Stack, Heap, and Ram Swap, so why the code mess? theres 16 different combinations of Malloc and Free, so why do you get to select which they are? And other such 40 year old questions that confuse me.
If you want secure systems, why is noons complaining to Intel, TSMC etc to build nteh ECC Crypto etc at the Logic and Gate Support circuitry level? Ive seen half a dozen offerings over the decades and they only add 15% to the area cost. But would reduce first run cost because fault tolerance means partial faulted CPUs can be sold as seconds while still working fully.?
I knew I forgot something. Wheres Discord in all of this?
Assembling Marks Cave Farm Faberge Egg in a bottle.
The weather in Equestria is highly magical, even when not manipulated by Pegasi and stuff. Maybe the reason the engines are affecting Martian weather is because they are introducing magic in the atmosphere and as such making the weather magically charged.
8954318
Umm... OK. That's a bit of a tangent.
Mind clarifying those?
Same reason classic MacOS on 680x0 chips and the Win16 API used in Windows 2.x through 3.11 explicitly cover things like "pinned", "movable", "discardable", and the various other instructions you can give to the Windows memory manager: Efficient use of resources when under pressure.
You can't put everything on the stack because its speed and its limitations are inherently tied to each other.
Languages which run on a VM struggle to get away from "put everything on the heap" because the CPU cache's optimizations are only viable if certain assumptions can be made about the typical orders in which memory locations are accessed... which the stack does a lot to automate.
RAM Swap is an answer to "What do we do if we don't have enough RAM to do everything we wish we could". (Including allowing using the RAM as a disk cache to have higher priority than stuff that a program forces into RAM and then never uses, such as code for menu items you never select.)
I think I'd remember if there were that many.
You only want to spend the CPU cycles to zero out RAM if it's necessary, and it's a bug if you get "brand new allocation" and "grow existing allocation" mixed up.
Beyond that, you've got C++'s new and delete operators, which call class constructors and destructors.
Sure, new[] and delete[] also exist, but only because C++'s decision to stay compatible with C meant that it kept C's primitive view of arrays. A language without that albatross around its neck can make do with far less.
They are hurrying to add features... but, at the same time, it's not a magic bullet.
For example, one feature in the direction you want is Intel's Memory Protection Extensions (MPX).
It was ill-conceived and turned out inferior to LLVM's AddressSanitizer and too slow to be used for anything but debugging, so support for it is currently proposed for removal from Linux and GCC because nobody is willing to maintain the associated code.
... When did this comment section turn to a programming forum?
I bet poking the cocoon would help!
... Ponies do NOT get to complain about wizards making bad decisions.
8954026 and tagging 8953986
144, but your main point stands. It's even been done, albeit with 8*8=64 positions and no twisting: https://www.orbitouch.com/
8954448
Yes but they are using human keyboards in this story. Pretty bulky hooves so basically two fingers and packing at the keyboard. Imagine the ponies typing speed is very fast, unless they use magic but that’s only for your records
8954026
At the risk of blowing my own horn - I 'explained' equestrian typewriters in my own story. Here's the relevant excerpt.
Mars occassionaly giveth amid all the taking away. Though I feel like this is giving them just enough amethyst to hang themselves with.
8953655
I'm not sure if we want to expose Starlight to narrativium theory. That could lead to some truly bizarre outcomes. At the very least, trying to figure out how to get the chances of getting off Mars to precisely one in a million.
8953986 8954026 8954546 8954577 I prefer the Doyleist explanation: that two-key typewriters are easier to draw, and something more complex should be presumed for the reality behind the cartoon.
8954609
Don't go down that street.
You have magic that can make actively functional probability engines. And you even for one moment expose starlight to THHGTTG? She'll invent the IIPD.
COMPUTER VIDEO:
STARLIGHT: *Ever widening eyes.*
8954665 (CSP-Chrysalis materializes out of nowhere holding a spray bottle) "NO! BAD UNICORN!" (spritz spritz) "We do NOT tamper in Discord's domain! Even I'm not THAT desperate!" (spritz spritz)
8954700
Starlight: But... Perfect FTL! Instant travel!
*Sunset Shimmer is angry at everything Sunny appears...*
Alicorn Sunset: NO! *Newspaper thwack!* BAD Alternate Universe Starlight! *Double Thwack!* BAD!
8954412
They get to complain when they get to the mines of moria. If they even read that book that is.
8954665
She doesn't need to invent anything new: original Starswirl's spell was Novikov self-consistent time travel with range of week. It's enough to be able to communicate a single bit of information between past and future in self-consistent environment to actively make miracles happen: receive bit x from the future, evaluate predicate p on state of the world, pass (x xor p) to the past --- the only state which is self-consistent is where p is false. Although actually using such device could be bloody dangerous.
8954609
My favorite headcanon is that the Magic of Suspension of Disbelief is a real force, and pony society is built almost entirely around it. Anything that requires fine dexterity is instead done by the pony just waving their hooves around while no one is watching closely and the end result magically appearing. More complex actions require the use of ritual tools or the possession of an appropriate cutie mark talent to increase their apparent plausibility.
8954951
So in other words ponies are wharhammer 40k orks?