My Name is Twilight Sparkle
Jan 8: Hello, my name is Twilight Sparkle, and... This is so neat! A journal in an alternate universe! What fun! All I had to figure out was how to get "e-mail address" (e for Earth?) and find an Earth journal that works well with my magic. This Dream Width looks good and oh! Comments and replies! Maybe I can make some friends here! For science!
Dream Width. Is there an Earth version of Princess Luna running this? Somehow many of you speak Equuish, at least in written form.
Selecting "Post Entry", now.
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Success!
Jan 9: That worked! Hoofston*, we have a new journal, in another universe! Whee!
So how did I get here? Well, my new Ponyville castle, the Friendship Tree-Castle that sprang from the box of locks after we got all six keys (and fixed the mess made by Tirek), has a lot of bare rock walls and not many windows. I was upstairs the other day and I decided to cast my graphical display grid spell to show Pinkie that zebras are black with white stripes, not white with black stripes. It reacted with the rock wall and I got a window into another universe! ...It, your universe, looks like a letter-writing universe. Or a giant atheneum. A book universe! Now, for a bookworm, that's irresistible.
The bridge is not perfect, there is some stuff that's coming through garbled. Probably illustrations.
* Hoofston is the home of earth pony aviation, where they make dirigibles, balloons and pony-powered whirlygigs. And they're big on exploration.
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Rock Solid Safety
Jan 10: Exploring the thoughts and literary works of a new universe from the safety of a rock-solid castle in Ponyville! This is so exciting! See? *taps display* Rock wall! Words on a rock wall! Nothing gets through except ideas. What could possibly go wrong? This calls for a pot of lavender tea and a timothy/clover hay sandwich! Party time!
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Introductions Are In Order
Jan 10: Well, since this Earth-Journal seems to be holding together and not evaporating in a puff of smoke, despite it not being written on anything corporeal that I can see, I should introduce myself... in case anyone is reading this besides me.
Hi, my name is Twilight Sparkle... well, Princess Twilight Sparkle now. Princess of Friendship. I don't rule over anyplace, but I do have a castle! A brand new castle for me and my best friends... and this is getting dull. OK, let's try bullet points.
That's it.
* or if you prefer, a bright lilac
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Snowflakes
Jan 11: It was a cold day today in Ponyville. I was still up when Princess Luna set the moon and ushered the constellations away from their playground in the sky. As Princess Celestia nudged the sun into the heavens, I stepped out on a small balcony and watched the weather ponies push big grey clouds into the pink sky. They gave us a snow storm and the snow flakes were beautiful! Around mid-day they returned to clear the sky and the ground sparkled like diamonds in the sunshine. Most of the snow was made of stellar dendrites, principally fern-like stellar dendrites, and the sparkle came from the sunlight reflecting off of stellar plate snowflakes. I found some examples of scrolls on stellar plates! That made my day. No needles or hollow columns that I could find this time around. A few weeks ago there was a snowfall that was almost all needles and hollow columns. I had never seen so many hollow columns at once. That probably cleared out Cloudsdale's inventory.
The sun has gone down now but it isn't dark. The white snow sparkles in the moonlight in harmony with the twinkling of the stars above. Walking through the quiet streets, it's like Ponyville has taken leave of the ground and floated off to join the constellations of Princess Luna's night.
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Golden Oaks
Jan 12: This rock castle is a bit cold and sterile. I miss the Golden Oak Library.
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Chaotic Mail
Jan 13: I have Earth Mail! Actually, several E-Mail letters. But I think they all got the wrong address. I don't want more hair, I'm not interested in "low interest", I don't know what I'd do with a "check" for "5M dollars", and my password to my credit card can't be lost if I don't have a "credit card". I think Discord has an Earth Mail account. I should ask Fluttershy. Or maybe I should just ignore the E-Mail. Discord will get bored and go bother somepony else.
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Cold Snap
Jan 14: Cold snap! It's so cold that I've been donning my boots, scarf and that nice blanket Rarity made for me when I step out. It's a beautiful red with a gold trim and it has a hood for extra warmth. Rarity says the exact color is "folly"... not crimson or even electric crimson. Folly. Folly it may be, but I love it. It's so warm and bright!
The snow squeaks underhoof and throwing a bucket of water into the air causes it to evaporate and condense into a miniature cloud in the blink of an eye. It's fascinating! Spike* is running in and out of the castle and giggling. He's been clearing the snow and ice from the walk with dragon fire, raising big clouds of steam. He finds that very funny. The steam has been condensing as frost on every surface it touches. The trees, the bushes, the castle walls... it's all fuzzy white now and ponies have been stopping by to stare in admiration. It's very pretty and stark under the midday sun.
*Spike is a baby dragon whom I hatched from an egg as part of my entrance exam into Princess Celestia's School For Gifted Unicorns. He's now my Number One Assistant.
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Dragon Pride
Jan 15: I received another shipment of books today from the Crystal Empire Library. Big McIntosh was kind enough to cart them up from the train station. Spike and I spent the morning sorting and shelving them. It was hard work on the poor fellow, he's taking a nap. But he wouldn't stop until every last book was shelved. Dragon pride.
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Carerfilly Castle
Jan 16: Rarity, Spike, Pinkie and I went on a day trip to the Carerfilly Castle ruins, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna's old home deep in what is now the Everfree Forest. I wanted to borrow a few books on transdimensional compatibility theory, Rarity is fascinated by the tapestries, and Pinkie... well Pinkie wanted to gallop through the halls and try all the traps and slides, over and over again. I think she's going to build an amusement complex in Ponyville, as part of the fairgrounds. I'd better ask Applejack to help with the engineering... if she's planning another rock slide, it would be better that this time it's the ponies that slide on the rocks, and not the other way around.
By evening I'd found two promising books, Pinkie had donned a mustache and a cape (she's plotting for sure) and Rarity had Spike lugging four rolled-up tapestries that she plans on mending. Pinkie dashed back to Ponyville ahead of us as we strolled through the gloom of the Everfree Forest, Rarity practically dancing with excitement at how she was going to spruce up our Friendship Castle in Ponyville, Spike hanging on to her every word.
It feels wonderful to be back on my cushion by the fire. A perfect day -- an excursion with some of my best friends to a place we all love, great plans for the future, and two new books to study. Life is good.
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Twilight Time
Jan 17: It was "Twilight Time" again for the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Scootaloo found and rebuilt the crank-action scarf loom I'd conveniently broken after getting my tail caught in it one time too many. A gift from my brother. I'll have to find a darker corner in the basement to "store" it. Apple Bloom's latest growth potion carpeted the halls with grass... that promptly died. And then caught fire. Sweetie Belle then caused a water bucket brigade to spring to life and douse the flames. By the time I found a counter-spell for this potion-based magic fire the hallways were filled with black sludge and we were all coughing and hacking. If only the fire had spread to the scarf loom. The three foals were mostly sad that they didn't get fire-fighting cutie marks.
Now to crack open that tome again to the chapter on Euclydean fixed distance lithography of static illusions. I was just at the part on adjusting for the quantum wobble in pony photographic prints. This could be very useful!
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Stretchy Changy Scroll
Jan 18: This Dream Width scroll has a weird quirk. While the text reads from left to right, top to bottom, each journal entry is like on its own patch and stacked on top of all the previous patches with the last, latest one on top. So, it's like a stack of patches all in one scroll. A patchwork scroll that stretches every time you add a patch. Or it's like reading a staircase where the bottom step is the beginning and the top stair is the most recent past. At least it's organized. I put a "tag" on the beginning entry at the bottom so I won't have to dig to find that first step in this staircase.
The journal gets "news" delivered to it on another page called "reading". News was delivered today and it's about changes to how this system works, mostly things I don't use or haven't used yet. The little arrows that appeared next to that "beginning" tag are new. So very odd that these things can change, but I am writing on someone* else's paper, or paper shared by many "people". It's like living in a TreeCastle, you make do with what you're given. I almost left a query as to whether Equestria could be included in the list of countries. Then I thought better of it. There's no point being on a list of countries if you're the only pony from there who is on Dream Width. I did put Ponyville, Equestria in my profile sheet, but in "region" and "city", not "country". As such, it didn't light up, but it's there, if you look!
* This appears to be the Dream Width equivalent for 'somepony'. I'm tempted to use 'somecreature' or 'somentity', but 'someone' works.
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Illuminating the Manuscripts
Jan 19: Fixed the illustrations problem... somewhat. The illustrations coming back to me via Dream Width look kind of grainy and melted. And I think they're imported from another wing of this Earth atheneum thing. Except for some really tiny illustrations (or decorations?) that are housed in the Dream Width... paragraph ornamentation, I think. Sometimes they reflect what is written, sometimes they seem to be like a signature or personal seal. The ponies... people here look mostly like the anthropoid beings where Sunset Shimmer is studying. Only with small eyes, hardly any color variety and not quite so spindly. OK, so this journal I'm writing in is part of something like a community writer's workshop with a paper supply, a quill supply, an illustration archive... that you have to organize to work together. The illustration archive is the missing piece from my journal scroll. I can fix that! I'll need to cobble together a magi-tech image transfer spell that I can integrate into my Earth/Equestria interface matrix. Hmmm, from what I was reading, Star Swirl was working on "Euclydean"-compatible interpretation and organization of visual data as rows of colored dots... To the Canterlot Archives for more research! Huzzah!
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Starving For Knowledge
Jan 20: I got lost in the Star Swirl the Bearded Wing of the Canterlot Archives. Not literally lost, I just lost track of the time... for the entire day and late into the evening. So much knowledge! So many unfinished projects! I think I forgot to eat. I can hear the hay in the pantry calling me.
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Short Introduction to the Non-Euclydean Equestrian Universe
Jan 21: Lecturing is something I do best!
Equestria appears flat but that's an illusion. Equestria is more like a bag with the edges connected. If Ponyville was all there was of Equestria, you could walk past a building on the edge of town and end up passing a house at the opposite end of town and find yourself heading for the town center. So Fluttershy's cottage could end up next to Rarity's Boutique even if they are at the opposite ends of town. Ergo, there is no sky and the frozen north and the frozen south are one and the same. Straight lines are mostly curves with variable lengths. This introduces uncertainty into getting from here to there. It all depends on which path you take, and there are an infinite number of paths. This could make travel across Equestria a gamble, as the time it will take changes, even if you take the train. The slightest shake will change your path. But this is all second nature to us ponies. We're born with a sense as to where to go and how long it will take. It would be very strange if the distance from your house to the bakery was always the same. If that were to happen to me I'd know I was dreaming.
The appearance of the sky over Equestria is dependent on velocity. Einstallion worked out the relation between velocity, mass and energy, but understanding the math behind his theories is a bit of a hard slog. It goes like this: because ponies move quite a bit slower than the speed of light, we don't see the curve of the land, we see a gap, and that gap is the sky. Plus the moon, which is a dollop of Equestria that somehow got pinched off. Pony philosophers are still working on that. It might just be a shiny pebble that got tossed into the air at just the right time and place, thousands of years ago. So anyway, we see a gap, a gap that doesn't exist if you move at the speed of light. A gap peppered with stars and stuff.
It gets weirder.
The sun and the stars are borrowed light, extracted here and there, visible to us as stars only because we aren't traveling at the speed of light. The light can be borrowed because at the speed of light, there is no distance and it takes no time to go nowhere -- it's borrowed and paid back in the same instant. The sun is just a really big loan from the nothingness of space that Princess Celestia pushes up from the edge each morning. She's really good at easing it into a track that crosses the sky. Since the sky is an illusion and the "edge" is a single point, it looks like she is pushing the sun up from the same place each day. Anyway, it's a good thing that the entire sky doesn't belch light -- Equestria would burn to a crisp! Some philosophers speculate that that is happening to Luna's moon, which is why it glows, right through the rock! It's like a failed Equestria, floating right above our heads. *shudder*
But what magic makes the stars in the first place? Many ponies believe that after they die, their magic lives on as a star... or part of the sun. They believe that they don't really die completely. And so it goes for the stars that came together to form the constellations, constellations that are very much alive and that step down from the sky to rest and play. Astronomy is such a fascinating field of study! I must get more books on the subject.
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Space Travel
Jan 22: Space exploration is a thing in Earth, as in traveling in a direction perpendicular to the ground and beyond the constellations? That is not possible in Equestria, at least not in a Euclydean sense. What we can do is move orthogonal to the Equestrian _universe_ and cross over into a parallel universe. That's what the Breezies do, by way of tunneling through the fabric of our perceived reality. But just flying straight up here does not get you out of Equestria. Should you try to fly much higher than the constellations, you will find the edge of Equestria rushing up to meet you. As such, to step down to the ground, the constellations need just step up.
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Safest Way to Travel
Jan 23: Viewing Earth through a projection is the safest way to visit, really. Who knows what the subtle differences in the laws of physics would do to a pony if we were to cross universes.
I think I might have to drop the Science Daily "feed" from my Dream Width reading material, he or she posts entries so often that it drowns out any other journals that may be posting too.
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Testing Picture Transfer
Jan 24: OK, I cobbled together an illumination transfer protocol spell from Star Swirl's theory. Tricky, but so far it looks like it's working! I used it to send a vision of a picture of Spike to a "gallery" and I selected a "HTML" print spell from the gallery and I glued that into my Dream Width scroll here.
...
It worked! What fun!
Meet Spike, my most valuable assistant. We've been together since he first hatched. See, he's not a pony, he's a dragon (ponies have hooves, not claws). Spike has a mauve body with a grass green crest and eyes. He's also quite the ham, it's hard to catch him not striking a pose when he sees a camera pointed at him, but Pinkie got a good snapshot of him here. Pinkie's pretty clever with that camera of hers.
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Log Entry "Icons"
Jan 25: I should make at least one log entry image for my Dream Width journal scroll. A picture of the Golden Oak Library, how it used to look, would do nicely.
I can store 16 different "icon" images in the Dream Width... 16 kinds of journal entries, or 16 different subject matters. I should make a list. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Food, leisure, work, rest. Canterlot, Crystal Empire. Friendship.
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Picnic at Carerfilly Castle
Jan 26: The air has warmed up from the cold snap, not enough to melt the snow, but enough for a nice walk with friends. Since Rarity has finished repairing and washing the tapestries she'd borrowed and I have two books to return, we decided to all go for a picnic at the Carerfilly Castle. "We" is me, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy and Spike. We decided against using Applejack's cart and instead lugged the tapestries and supplies on our backs. It's best to be light on your feet in the Everfree Forest and to be set to flee in any direction at a moment's notice. Applejack brought a fresh batch of apple chips and pies to go with the lunch Spike packed for us. We planned to have the picnic in the throne room where most of the tapestries fixed by Rarity hang.
The walk through the Everfree was beautiful. It snows there too and this time the snow was particularly sticky, adhering to every twig and bough. The usually grey and dreary forest turned soft, white and fluffy, almost cheery with a carpet of pure white at our hooves and the smell of fresh snow in the air. The air was still and quiet, disturbed only by the crunching of wet snow under our hooves and the occasional creak and groan of the boughs shifting under their heavy white burdens. Pinkie had brought her camera. Rarity had asked her to take a few pictures of the tapestries once they had been returned to their proper places. While we were walking through a more open stretch of the path, Dash borrowed Pinkie's camera and flew a few paces ahead to snap a candid picture of our procession through the white woods.
On the way we met the river serpent, preening in the mist rising off the water. He was very happy to see us again, showing off his gleaming scales and his moustache. It has mostly grown back, I was surprised to see that some strands of Rarity's tail remain mixed in the serpent's whiskers. She really is skilled in these things.
At the castle ruins, Spike and I went to the library to return the books, Rarity had Dash and Fluttershy's help to lift and hook the tapestries, and Applejack and Pinkie prepared lunch. The books shelved and the tapestries hung, the highlight of our day was the picnic. Sprawled out on a big bright blanket in the snowy hall, open to the sky, we were surrounded by good food and gorgeous tapestries so bright and colorful they practically glowed. Our laughter filled the grand hall with cheer and echoed down the corridors. I could almost see the Princesses, young and proud, gazing down at us from their twin thrones. One day the castle will be rebuilt and ponies will return to the Everfree.
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Requiem For an Old Friend
Jan 27: Walking back from the train station today I stopped by the Golden Oak Library, or what's left of it. I could smell hints of home hiding in the strong musk of charred wood. The falling snow has settled like a shroud, transforming the shattered and fallen timbers into gentle mounds. My warm, beautiful library now has white flowing drifts covering the stairs and piling up in the empty gaping shelves. We've already scavenged what we could from the wreck and now a demolition crew will finish Tirek's work. The library was a living thing. Failsafe spells can't bring back the dead.
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Multiverse Possibility
Jan 28: If there's an infinite multiverse, which there may well be, I've visited two, it is possible that there are alternate universe Twilight Sparkles writing in journals in this labyrinthian tangle of webs.
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Casting Spells
Jan 29: Like in the mirror-verse created by Star Swirl, the one Sunset Shimmer is studying, it looks like there isn't much use of magic in Earth. At least not in a casual, pony way. Maybe the physics aren't right in Earth? If there was magic in Earth, it wouldn't just lie dormant, some body would practice it, just like we do. Casting a spell is like learning to put on a winter scarf. Grab, throw, grab, throw, pull through and there you go! Nice and snug, just like your mother taught you. Like putting on the scarf, spell casting when we were little was tough and you had to take it slow the first few times, but once you got the hang of it, the combo becomes automatic. With a spell, since the combo is in your head, you can cast that spell faster and faster as you get better and better at it. Like Cadence's sneeze guard spell. She's faster than a sneeze!
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Ponies in the Machine
Jan 30: Unlike what appears to be the case in the Earth realm, we can't do without magic or let magic lapse, forgotten and unused. Almost everything in Equestria depends on pony magic to function properly. Right at the top of the list is keeping the day and night cycle on time. Then there's the seasons, the weather, managing the fauna and getting the plants to grow. All of it requires magical intervention from ponies. Mostly from specialists, but all ponies are magical and all ponies help in some way. Sure the animals are bright enough to share ideas and feelings with ponies (or at least with Fluttershy, I don't speak 'squirrel') but they require a helping hoof to plan far enough ahead to build their own nests, migrate or find food in the spring. It has always been thus, it's how things work in Equestria. Except in the Everfree Forest, where it is always gloomy and nothing is run by ponies.
It's odd that the ancient Tree of Harmony exists in the middle of the Everfree. Such a strange and powerful tree, made of rock and gems, leafless, existing in a grotto and somehow responsive to our needs. Perhaps it is shaping the Everfree and its inhabitants. It is so powerful, it may even shape or have shaped all of Equestria. Which came first, ponies or the Tree? Perhaps the tree is the manifestation of the combined will and magic of the ponies of Equestria? No that wouldn't fit, Tirek had consumed the entire sum of the magic of all the ponies and we easily defeated him with magic afforded us by the Tree.
We find it spooky when things happen on their own, like there are ghosts in the machine. It's very reassuring to know that clouds stay where you put them and that if they move, it's because a pony pushed them. There would be so much chaos if everything just did as it pleased! There would be floods and droughts! Bunnies would eat everything! Like when Discord broke free that first time and took over Equestria. I think Discord would feel right at home on Earth. How do Earth denizens remain sane? I think I'm beginning to see why this E-Athenaeum is such a jumble. It's Discorded!
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Hay Loft Accounting
Jan 31: I'm still mystified by the Tree of Harmony.
The Hay Board meeting is tomorrow at Town Hall. We don't want to ship out too much of our stores; what we have has to last us at least to first cut or ponies will be grazing through our first harvest before it's reaped. That could easily snowball into an all-out famine. Everything has to be planned out just so.
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My Thoughts:
There is confusion.
Perhaps our universe is the same way, it's just very large. We would probably never know.
I don't really understand this. The speed of light isn't infinite. And what is a "really big loan from the nothingness of space?" If it means what I think it means, where do the oppositely charged particles go? (I don't know what I'm talking about for this next sentence) And also, the moon would have to stay in the exact same place where the effects of gravity are equal on all sides, so moving the moon might cause gravity to pull on it slightly more towards one side.
Wait, wind doesn't exist? Everything here doesn't just "do as it pleases" there is order, well, to some extent, there are certain repeating wind patterns and water currents that maintain the climate of some areas. (Example: The gulf stream carries warm water towards western Europe, which prevents it from getting as cold as other places of the same latitude)
(Joke) What if once upon a time in Europe some humans did practice magic, but then they all got burned alive for doing it because it's considered heresy by the populace. (/Joke) Why would you waste energy to prevent sneezing. And also, yes the physics probably aren't right on Earth. I once considered how little sense transfiguration makes according to conservation of mass.
(Hopefully this time my reply will appear in the correct month.)
Open universe or closed universe, there is the question! ^_^ Will all die a cold death of infinite entropy or is time traveling both forward and backward simultaneously as the universe expands and contracts from Bang to crunch and back again. I do not know. I clean animal pens for a living.
Light travels in a vacuum at C = 299792458 metres per second. The value of C is constant, but a person traveling at a speed that approaches C experiences both time dilation and length dilation. The closer they travel to the speed of light, the less time they experience. See the Twins Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox . At the speed of light, this dilation is infinite: there is no distance and there is no time Ergo, to a photon, the universe is a single point and it takes no time to get there. Furthermore, the energy borrowed to create the photon gets paid back instantly. Physics is weird.
Equestria's moon exists in a non-euclidean universe, where the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. As such, size and distance can be different from how they appear. The moon is on a trajectory dictated by Luna, and since it is very high in the sky, it is also very near the ground somewhere, and as I said, it may also be very small and relatively easy to levitate.
Ponies control the breezes as well, although once started, a pony breeze tends to follow the path the pony gave it, just like moon. So clouds stay where ponies put them. That makes them convenient structural material for cloud-walking pegasi. Equestria depends on ponies to power everything.
Cadence was not preventing a sneeze, she was casting a defense shield that kept the sneezed germs from reaching her.
To conserve mass, you have to pull or redistribute material depending on the mass difference between what was and what you turned it into. It's a variation on teleportation, not an easy spell to master.
Oh my, I absolutely love this story! I wonder if we will ever get to ask Twi or Spike questions?
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I believe FiMFiction has a 'no role playing' policy and in the digest format in which this story is presented, real-time replies in articulation with Twilight's daily blog posts (from over 6 years ago!), from Twilight or Spike, would not make sense. Sorry.
I'm happy you are enjoying the story! If you get the urge to retell anything I write here and flesh it out, feel free! First person narrative in blog format has its limitations, as do I. I'm not that good at fleshing things out, I tend to be spare, to the point.
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While 'no role-playing' is a rule, a couple of stories do get away with it, chief among them being 'The Influence'. So that's pretty much up to you.
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I'll have to look up The Influence to see how they handled that. In it's original form, Twilight's Blog _did_ have Twilight answering questions from her few Dream Width quill pals, as it is with usual blogs. That could be hair raising at times, coming up with recipes and such the like at the drop of a hat! I started preparing answers in advance, just in case... That was with just a few hundred words a day. Now, at this accelerated rate of a month or two every week, answering 'quill pals', researching new recipes, quoting more pony literature, and hardest of all, trying to weave a coherent narrative tying in seasons 7 through 9... oy vez! That's a mountain I doubt I would be able to climb. I have my hands full editing, proof reading, embellishing and formatting the narrative for easier reading in one month chunks. But I'm happy to answer questions, just not as Twilight in real time. ^_^
P.S.: Found The Influence, here: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/369593/the-influence The premise reminds me of Moonstuck and Sketchbook Twilight. ^_^
This was a fun introduction for Twilight to Earth's tech! It was actually kinda nice to see that she didn't haveta respond to a buncha comments or replies from others. There are some great fics that depict that, but I like the diary-style format that this fic entails, and that might be less effective if she had to constantly deal with Earth drama.
Technically, she should already have a passing knowledge of technology from Sunset's world, but then again, her time there was limited, and it wasn't like we ever saw her on a cell phone or computer either, so having knowledge of a technology's existence, and actually being able to use that technology are two different things, I suppose. Still, she could ask Sunset for help, if nothing else.
Your explanation for Equestria's spatial "displacement" is very intriguing, and, ironically, would explain the "cartoonish" cut-scenes we sometimes see where things are in different locations and it takes different times to reach the same location, or less time to reach locations further distance than those close by (in other words, you tried to come up with a legitimate explanation for the show's cartoonish gimmicks ). However, it should be noted that globes are shown several times in the show, so that would indicate that they view the world as a sphere.
Look forward to reading the next chapter!
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Believe it or not, Twilight's Blog was exactly that! The high water mark for quillpals leaving comments was six! Most of the comments was from a person with Scootaloo-tier enthusiasm. Since daily comments of "Wow" "Oh cool!" "That's awesome!" and "I hope it does well!" doesn't add to the narrative and including the comments would make it look like I'd written them, I left them out except in rare instances where Twilight refers to a comment in her blog. But feedback in the comments did influence content. In March one person asked: "Oh, those pancakes sound lovely! Could you be persuaded to share the recipe?". That took some research to come up with a horse compliant but theoretically viable recipe! Yowsers!
One criticism I've received is that Twilight is not shown to be responding to comments (or similarly, not devoting the blog to an exploration of Earth). As I said to one person on FimFiction, while it might not be strictly enforced, role playing is verboten on FiMFiction, so I can't operate as a true blog here. I wouldn't be able to keep up anyway! Imagine 60 people asking me to quote poetry, share recipes, recite jokes and such the like in real time! Six people were keeping me on my toes enough as it was. Twilight's blog is a means to an end: to make sense of Equestria, to fill in the details of what probably goes on between episodes and to round out the personalities of the mane six as best as I can in a first person narrative written in an open, interactive journal. The only interactive journals I know of are blogs, and I couldn't see anypony explaining the mechanics of Equestria to somepony else in Equestria. That would be like if I was to send you daily pen-pal letters describing gravity, rain and how potholes form on dirt roads. A magical connection to the World Wide Web is much more believable. 8^D
In the first Equestria Girls movie we do see Twilight seated in front of Pinkie's laptop, watching the video Sunset Shimmer made of her in the school library where she is typing with her fists on a computer keyboard. So yes, it isn't clear what she thought of the Canterlot High audiovisual tech or if she managed to use it, but she at least saw it in action.
Yes, the globe in S2E10 Secret of My Excess is the sand in the Vaseline, even when you discount the quip from Pinkie's Puddinghead in the Hearth's Warming Eve pageant. But otherwise Equestria is only depicted as a flat map and a globe model does not mesh with all the bouncy gymnastics going on in the sky. I come back to the subject of Equestria's topography and it's not flat, really. More like a cross between a cone slice and the inside of a sphere. I wish my handle on math theory was better. So, my take is that Twilight's globe is a fancy alternative to a wall map or an atlas, there for easy quick reference but not physical accuracy. I don't remember any other globes. I also can't think of any other grand unifying mechanism for Equestrian physics, except just hand waving and saying "Magic! How does it work?" and leaving it at that. Since Twilight has devoted her life to studying magic, a deeper understanding is a must. ^_^
Ooo, I like this. The little snapshot segments into Twilight's life are quite enjoyable to read through.
Slice of life is something I enjoy quite a bit, so these little digestible entries will make for good reading when time is limited but I'd still like to relax and with some pony content.
Thank you for writing it
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You're welcome. ^_^ Filling out and making sense of Equestria and day to day pony life was something I wanted to see, so I wrote this over a period of two and a half years.
Religion in pony world? Meh. It's only human trash
... okay. Hmm. So, let's see if I'm understanding this all correctly:
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The light as borrowed energy is the easy part. ^_^ Photos travel at the speed of light. I forget the equations, but perhaps you remember the twins paradox? One twin takes a round trip at the speed of light to, say, Alpha Centari, and the other twin stays on Earth. Alpha Centari is 4.2 light years away. So, with instant acceleration and deceleration and traveling at the speed of light (all of which is both impossible and would take infinite energy) the Earth twin would have aged 8.4 years while the Alpha Centari twin would not have aged at all. For the Alpha Centari twin, no time would have passed at all. It is thus for light. Traveling at the speed of light, no time passes and distance is undefined. For light, the entire universe is a dimensionless point, at least for the four usual dimensions. At the speed of light, there is no time and there is no distance. I remember being told in physics class that light is borrowed energy that is payed back instantly, at least from the light's frame of reference. Ergo, the "sun" of Equestria, and anomaly in the sky, a sky that shrinks the higher you go and that contains an anomaly close enough to cast Rarity's shadow over an entire stadium and to fry her wings when she got too close.
My understanding of Equestria's universe is that it is conical. It expands as you go down. Tartarus is infinite. To further complicate things, the non-euclydean geometry not only turns a one hour stroll into an over-night train ride, but it can be a very long walk to 'the edge', like where the frozen north and south are one and the same, especially if you've never been there before and can't feel out the best route. It's wild. Fortunately, there is "quantum entanglement" keeping everything together and within a fuzzy range of probabilities. Like with orbital probabilities in electron valence shells. (Faust, it's been ages since quantum mechanics and valence shells!) I touch on these themes in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th months (aka chapters). All this stuff becomes consequential later on. Twilight doesn't just lecture, things happen.
If I knew how to express non-euclydean math perhaps I could get a better handle on this.
So yes, the sky is an illusion. The air is there, there are celestial objects, but there is distortion. Like with gravity. Gravity is a distortion in the space-time continuum. The Earth bends the space-time continuum and we spiral in on that distortion. It looks great on paper and gravity waves can be detected, but to the casual observer, it sure looks like there is some sort of weird attraction that's keeping me from falling away from the Earth and flying off into space.