Sol 378
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 384
ARES III SOL 378
[08:03] JPL: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Just a few quick bits of news that might interest you.
Holiday shoppers will have to wait a week for the Magic Cave Farm Playset from Hasbro, the top-ticket item from the first run of licensed toys featuring the six castaways of Ares III and PSA Friendship. Pre-orders of the toys have bid up as high as two hundred dollars for a fifty-dollar MSRP deluxe playset. Retailers are breathing a sigh of relief, as they feared violence during Black Friday sales if the playset had shipped on time.
A fossil skull of an ancient pygmy rhinoceros discovered recently on a Siberian island north of the Arctic Circle has been named Elasmotherium inlustris in honor of the unicorn astronaut Starlight Glimmer. Inlustris is Latin for “starlight.” There is some dispute as to whether the skull is of an actual pygmy species or merely a juvenile of the more widely recognized Elasmotherium sibercium, but the scientists proposing the name said, quote, “It was either name this after her, or else a species of beetle.”
Speaking of insects, a CNN poll shows Dragonfly as both “bravest” and “most evil” of the alien castaways currently sharing the Ares III Hab with astronaut Mark Watney. Cherry was voted "favorite" and “cutest” and tied for second behind Fireball for “coolest”. Spitfire won “sexiest”, but due diligence requires I report that over 60% of respondents refused to answer that particular question.
In the more serious portion of the poll, 82% of Americans surveyed support the effort to rescue Mark Watney and his guests, and 74% support bringing all six back to Earth.
And finally, Tonga became the one hundred and eightieth nation to officially invite the crew of Friendship to visit their nation. Thus far only four nations have announced unwillingness to host the alien crew; Afghanistan and Iran have stated their hostility to demons, New Zealand has requested the ponies comply with their quarantine and immunization protocols for imported livestock, and Nauru report they simply don’t have the space on their islands to handle the crew and the crowds they would draw.
That’s the news on this Thanksgiving Day on Earth. Here’s hoping you can spend next Thanksgiving here with us.
[08:32] WATNEY: Hey, guys, whoever’s still in the office, thanks for the news report, but how about the weather? Any storms popping up that we might have to worry about?
[09:04] JPL: No storms, Mark. No clouds anywhere on Mars for the last two days. In fact, based on photos taken of Mars since your test launch, the atmosphere is more clear now than it’s been in five Earth years. Weather satellites around Mars report higher than normal temperatures during the daylight hours and slightly cooler than normal temps on the night side. We don’t know if there’s any direct connection to your test, and we have no idea how long these conditions will continue. Enjoy it while it lasts.
[09:33] WATNEY: Roger. We shall spend Thanksgiving reveling in meteorological paranoia, wondering when the other shoe drops.
We’ll also spend it trying to ignore the sounds coming from the toilet. Five of us are celebrating by opening a couple of my meal packs and adding them to the usual hay and potatoes, but Dragonfly is cramming stale hay and taters down her gullet as fast as she can to produce the material for the expanded rover saddlebags. Memo for when we get back; we owe her a ton of green bean casserole and pumpkin pie. She doesn’t care for turkey.
[09:55] HERMES: Hey, Mark, is the bug blowing up the bathroom like you do after Jimmy Changa’s?
[10:18] WATNEY: On the advice of the pink pony commander, I decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might serve to embarrass me.
[10:41] HERMES: Lewis here- tell Cherry Berry nice try, but it’s years too late for that.
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No love from Earth for Mark?
Always nice to see the occasional view of what is going on with the general public. It helps flesh out the world. Would love to see more from the pony news as well. :)
Given how paranoid us Aussies are about protecting our ecology from foreign pests and diseases, I'm kinda surprised that Australia wasn't standing with the Kiwis about quarantining the gang before letting them in.
Oh god, Nauru. I collect coins, you see; it's one of my life's goals to have at least one official coin from every country on Earth. I'm only missing 15 of them, and Nauru is one of them.
(And yes, I know that several countries have US as their official currency; the salt is real)
At first I was skeptical about North Korea's absence from the "no invitation" list, but then I realized that they'd probably be among the first to invite aliens into their country, as an embarrassingly transparent PR move. And doesn't the Cult of Kim's doctrine include something about a unicorn being present at his birth?
Fucking beetles.
9069374
Well, except maybe for microbes, most of the aliens will be in control of their actions, and none is likely to reproduce (especially not wildly) while visiting Earth. Microbes might be a disaster or not-- they haven't killed Mark, at least.
Meteorological paranoia is right...weird weather that ISN'T the way you expected Mars to kill you means it's getting creative.
Maybe it's going to blow up a few geysers at them? Nah, too improbable. Other shoe indeed.
Do they have a Mars Paranoia team at Nasa now that they have good reason to suspect Mars is actively malevolent? The job being to work out all the edge case, extremely improbable events that could TECHNICALLY occur and then assume Mars will do them somehow? Also figuring out just how much Mars has to tweek the simulation variables to do what it does, and so estimate it's power?
I love the news from Earth. I think it's funny that it's the Magic Farm Playset just because toy naming, but they are using it to farm magic.
Aw, they're not gonna visit my homeland? Dang you, fictional Kiwis from another reality!
9069388
Practically speaking, they should be fine, given that their farm is fertilised by their own manure - if any of the crew had been carrying some kind of pest then it would have hit the cave farm long before now, and spending over a year on Mars is one hell of a quarantine period - but I was just surprised that Australia's border protection people would be willing to let them in when New Zeland's would not.
Ah, Thanksgiving. The time of food, being thankful, and relatives you'd rather not meet again.
9069374 I was under the impression that, though you Aussies are vigilant about livestock importation, the Kiwis are downright militant.
Don't know if it's coincidence or not, but I mentioned a view of earth after the previous chapter and you delivered. So, in any case, thank you.
9069386
If I hadn't already looked it up, I would swear that unicorn thing was a load of applesauce. Then I found this:
pics.me.me/kim-jong-un-says-unicorns-are-real-25194705.png
Goodnight everybody!
9069433
Congrats on the van. Hope you deductible was low...My significant other thought they'd save a bundle in premiums with a $2500 deductible and 30/60/25 insurance. It bit me in the posterior severely.ºUº
🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏🦏
"also spend it drying to ignore the sounds"
"also spend it trying to ignore the sounds"?
9069376
Personally, I found the totally unnecessary and gratuitous insult to the Afghans and Iranians to be inconsistent with the more positive and inclusive "pony" values that I like to think stories like this are trying to support.
9069494
And this countries are totally not ruled by xenophobic religious obscurantists (sarcasm).
9069368
In my original post, I specified "more".
9069487
Should have gone 100/300/50 with a 500 deductable. Tends to fit most needs. I'd know, I sell this stuff for a living.
I do wonder what a cave farm playset woudl look like lol.
and hten fandom called the Marstons is born!
9069494
Have to agree. Joking or not (and given the ridiculousness of applying livestock laws to sentient beings with hygiene it's clearly a joke) it's a bit much to single out those two countries out of the pile of xenophobic and highly religious nations.
Hell, I get the general ignorance regarding Iran but has Afghanistan not had enough shit poured on it yet?
9069376
Nauru uses the Australian Dollar.
Thanks for the update,
9069550
As if the USA is any different
9069471
9069433
9069374
Nope, we Aussies are more over the top for BIOLOGY control. New Zealand has overall stricter Customs, but for biological stuff we are far more strict now.
Mostly cause we already fucked up enough.
Of note:
The only two places in the world that refuse sterile, purified tree saplings in a testube is Australia and Hawaii (Found out when I asked someone about the giant redwood testubes the US sells to tourist that are designed to pass biological control.)
We also order Johnny Depp to immediately deport his dog after it was discovered illegally in the country, or we would raid his apartment and have it put down.
I guess Elasmotherium sibercium is another name you came up with, huh?
9069779
The USA, as a whole, is far less likely to categorically ban the pony aliens than Iran or some country like it.
Oh good. I'm not the only one putting off con prep.
Poor Dragonfly, everyone else is chowing down and she's stuck doing the opposite...
Well, at least the morale improvements should make up for it.
Keep going! ;)
While in The big easy take moment to eat some beignets okay. I promise you will love them!
9069374
Well, not like the Kiwis' want to risk an equine to ovine STD...
9069753
Yeah, I know. I was referring to some of the other countries I don't have, like the Marshall Islands
9069969
Oh, I had gotten the impression from what you said that you were still looking for Narauan currency. What currencies are you still missing, once you exclude countries that just use other currencies?
9069820 No, I got it from a news article about a "unicorn found in Siberia" (an Elasmotherium fossil).
9070038
(NOT GOING TO START A RELIGION DEBATE) But unicorns are mentioned in the Bible, so the fact they found a fossil is entirely possible
9070050 The "unicorn" in question is an extinct species of rhinoceros, massing about half again the size of modern rhinos. Before a recent find indicated that some Elasmotherium might have survived as recently as 29,000 years ago, it was generally thought they went extinct over two million years ago. While it's not entirely impossible that the writers of the Bible referred to them when they talked about the re'em, it's much more likely to have been a more modern rhino or even a wild bull. http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/on_the_front_lines_of_the_culture_wars/2011/08/are-there-really-unicorns-in-the-king-james-bible.html
9070050
Interesting story: while preparing revenge on Twilight when Starlight was debugging her time-travel spell she may have overshot a teeny-tiny bit at first attempt
This was the line that finally did it for me, after 350k words - is there any way this story would work with the same rating as MLP itself? Because Hasbro need to write this as canon, so they can genuinely sell that playset
Great chapter, this is one of the best short ones I remember!
9069494 My point was to show that humanity being united in support of the castaways is not a hundred percent thing. I chose Iran and Afghanistan because Iran is the most stable theocracy larger than a shopping mall in the world, and I expect the Taliban or something like it to be running Afghanistan within a year after the US eventually withdraws its forces. In most other Muslim nations the religious establishment is subordinate to the government, regardless of whether or not the government is monarchy, dictatorship, or republic. And although there are some Christian denominations who doubtless would regard the ponies as demons (they're a large portion of the 20+% in that American poll who want to keep the ponies off Earth), the only places where they'd be strong enough to sway a national government would be in places that barely have a national government (sub-Saharan African ex-colonial states). No other major Earth religion besides Christianity and Islam has factions that would regard the ponies as unclean or diabolic.
As for New Zealand and Nauru, well, I mentioned New Zealand customs. And Nauru is going under the wave due to rising sea levels. Twenty years from now they're expect to have only half the land they have now, and what they have now isn't very much.
As for other nations, I just can't see any non-theocratic dictator with an ounce of survival instinct not braying loudly about his welcome of the pony crew (though Dragonfly likely gives them nightmares). Every successful dictator retains AT LEAST a large minority- about a quarter to a third of the population is the minimum threshhold of viability- who are absolutely devoted to them. This is the base from which they recruit the enforcers that keep the rest in line. No matter what atrocities the dictator commits, if they're smart, they keep that core base group extremely happy. And if that base likes the aliens, then Generalissimo President-for-Life Dear Leader better like the aliens too. And republics, it should go without saying, rise and fall on popular opinion.
Mars weather is Globally stable, with polar reference to Launch site and planetary diametrically opposite, even as those two points transition from night side to day under teh sun, or is the day and night centroids remaining constant relative to sub sun position while the planet rotates underneath?
As in, has the atmosphere become magical site, or solar tidal locked at least for a few days, because if that video of colliding vortices is anything to go off, the orthogonal secondary vortices and fleas ad infinitum, are as likely to suddenly form in a relative equatorial ring, before spreading out and causing utter chaos. Relative to the Hab/Cave farm, how far along a geodesic arc, in angular measurement, is the escape vehicle?
9070174
Ah.
That's silly, everyone knows Dragonfly is the cutest.
Also, poor Cuddlebug.
9069065
Or that, yeah.
I bet her desk is full of emergency alcohol for dealing with her subjects and their stupidity.
oh, that made me think of a line in "live free or die" by John Ringo: the super-rich protagonist, Tyler Vernon, put his company headquarters in Tonga to avoid EPA regulators, who were trying to stop him from mining asteroids, claiming it was bad for the environment of SPACE!
New Zealand is the first to quarantine at the vaguest possible trouble? Stop the fucking presses!
9069990
Including the countries that share currencies, I'm missing the following. I'm basing it all on a list of the world's nations:
Antigua and Barbuda
Benin
Burkina Faso
Ivory Coast
Dominica
Grenada
Kosovo
Marshall Islands
Micronesia
Nauru
Palau
St. Kitts/Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent/Grenadines
Senegal
There's a few I can get, that meets my own personal requirements for "official". For example, in the 70's, the Caribbean nations had a set that included individual coins with the unique country names on them. The coins worked universally across all of the nations, but it works for me. Also, Ivory Coast definitely had its own coin in 1966.
9069779
I never claimed that perfect without prejudgment exist, but comparing USA to Iran and Afghanistan is one hell of mental gymnastics.
9070580
He didn't compare the country, but the rulers.
Xenophobic religious obscurantists objectively applies to mr. Trump. His supporters might pick different synonyms though.
#Disclaimer: Intended as factual statement, not political statement.
9070184
On an unrelated note; could we get some names for some of the equipment the ponies bring to the table?
For example: That engine they just launched, with that repulsion pylon launch system.
Early on in the story that worked, but translation should not be that much of an issue anymore right?