June 6
I slept like a foal, and when I woke up I was ready for the new day. I probably could have stayed in bed until Meghan's alarm went off, but I wanted to get a little bit of exercise in because that helped wake me up, so I kissed her on the cheek then got out of bed and pulled the covers back up over her so that she wouldn't be cold.
Before I left, I stuck my muzzle against the window to see what the weather was like and it was perfectly clear—as far as I could see, anyway—and I thought about opening the curtains, but I didn't.
I had to go back to my room to get my flight gear, and then I went out to Pebble Beach and got my flight clearance and even though I wasn't supposed to, I said that I had a final exam today and the grumpy man told me good luck!
I always worry that I'll be late to important stuff like tests, so I stayed close by and just flew in a big ellipse around to the far edge of Western's campus then back again. It was a short enough flight that I didn't get very sweaty, but I still took a shower because I didn't want to change my morning routine.
Then when I went to breakfast I was too early and had to wait in the lounge until the dining hall opened, and I was the first one in there.
It was a good thing, too. Like the last time I was early, they hadn't put out all the food yet, but the waffle-maker was there and so I made a waffle and also had some fruit and then I also took one strip of bacon because protein was good for sustained energy and they didn't have any fish.
I didn't know who would be at our table, and when I got there there wasn't anybody, so after I had finished my waffle I looked in the dark room and none of my friends were there, and no one was in any of the other rooms, either, so I went back to my usual table and ate my bacon and then when I was eating my fruit Sean sat down. I asked him if Christine was coming, and he shook his head and said that she'd sent him a telephone telegram last night saying that she was going to be up all night cramming for her afternoon final.
He said that he was ready for the math test, and so was I. I finished my fruit and took my tray back, and then sat there until he was done eating. I'd noticed Keith and a few other people from our class had come into the dining hall for breakfast, too; Keith looked really tired and his tray only had two cups on it.
I guess he had been up all night, too.
We went to class together, and waited patiently until Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee came in and he waited a few minutes after class had officially started before he closed the door and then passed out our tests.
There weren't that many questions, and as I went through the test I saw that most of them were what we'd learned in the last three weeks of class. That was good; I really liked fractals, and having a test on them was a lot of fun.
Then I got to a question that asked which was a real exponent and there were choices like Leprechaun and Lenovitch and the correct answer was of course the Lyapunov exponent and I set down my pencil and looked over at Sean and when he looked at me I stuck my tongue out at him then went back to taking the test.
He must not have been as far along, because I was on the last page when I heard him say 'goddam it' under his breath which I figured meant that he had gotten to that question, and I would have looked up and stuck my tongue out at him again but I was busy writing out an equation and I really had to focus on those because even though I'd gotten a lot better at drawing math letters, it was still difficult to get them right.
Just like last time, I finished first and had lots of time to carefully go back through my test and make sure that there weren't any mistakes. Then I took it up front and set it on Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee's desk and quietly thanked him for the class and he said that it had been a pleasure having me.
I had the whole rest of the day free, which was kind of weird. I didn't know what I was going to do to fill the time, but I thought that it would be nice to wait for Sean, so I flew up to the nearest tree and landed on one of the low branches and stretched out there and watched for him to come out.
I was kinda having second thoughts when he hadn't showed up for a while—maybe he was going to go out the front doors, 'cause that was closer to Christine's dorm—but he finally came out. So I flew down and asked him how he'd done and he said that he was sure he'd passed, but there were a few questions he'd had trouble with, and I said that maybe we should have studied together a bit more, but he'd said that he knew everything when we'd finished up on Sunday.
He told me that when he takes tests, he forgets about stuff he knows, because of the stress. And then he reached into his back pocket and took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to me and said that he never would have guessed that would actually be on the test.
Sean said that he didn't have any plans for the rest of the morning, either, but he had another test in the afternoon in his computer science class which was going to be really easy for him. And he said that Christine would have her test in history which is what she had been studying for all night long.
Since there wasn't anything else to do, he said that if I wanted to, I could watch an episode of Star Trek in his room before lunch, so I followed him back to his room and watched Captain Picard fight with an alien called Q, and when it was over he told me to keep his room safe while he went to the bathroom.
I thought about the time that me and Christine had used it even though we weren't supposed to, and I thought about the big open shower they had in there and so when he got back I asked him if the shower was so big because this was the dorm for people who liked taking group showers, and he said that it was just like that because it was old and hadn't been remodeled and he was really happy that there weren't many people who wanted to use it.
Then I said that it would be fun to take a group shower, and he shook his head and said that there was no way that was going to happen, which was kind of disappointing.
But the joke was on him, because when he brought it up at lunch, Christine said that it would be a great way to unwind after a day of finals, and she eventually managed to convince him and Peggy and Joe by telling them that everyone would wear underwear or bathing suits or whatever they were comfortable in and it would kind of be like the beach. I don't think she would have thought it was a good idea except that Sean thought it was a bad idea.
I had to leave lunch a little early, 'cause Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn needed to take me out shopping for things for my new apartment, because it didn't have anything in it. Well, they thought that the most important thing was a bed, so we looked around at a lot of different choices, and I finally decided to get a futon, which was a really clever thing that could be both a couch and a bed. I also got a papasan chair just like the one in Christine's room, and also a desk for my computer and a chair that I could sit in and then there were a lot more things that Miss Cherilyn said I ought to have like curtains but I couldn't think of a use for them and Mister Salvatore said that he liked my minimalist style.
There was a really pretty painting of a tree that changed from having leaves to being bare depending on how you looked at it and I thought that was nice, so we got that, too.
Then since we were out anyways I got some groceries plus food for the party, which was mostly beer and lots of flavors of potato chips, plus a couple of big platters of vegetables.
Everything fit in the back of Sienna, and we took it over to my new apartment and they carried it upstairs and put it together and I could see that Miss Cherilyn wasn't too happy about it, but she didn't say anything.
There was a room in the very back that was supposed to be the bedroom, she told me, but I didn't like that it only had one window, so had them put the futon in the other big room, and the papasan, too, and I had him hang the tree-picture between two windows and I thought it looked pretty good.
Then she said that I needed a shower curtain, which we hadn't got, and I remembered that I would like a bookshelf, too, so we got back in Sienna and made another trip and then finally everything was set up.
They dropped me off back on campus, and gave me the key to my apartment and Miss Cherilyn reminded me to lock the door always, and then they also gave me a copy of the rules to read, which I thought I'd do tomorrow after my poetry class and before the party.
Everyone was a lot more relaxed at dinner—like I'd thought, having a final early meant that you didn't have to worry about it any more once it was over—and even though Christine complained that they didn't have anything too good for dinner, everyone was in a pretty good mood. Joe said that he was only one final away from freedom, and he said he was going to spend the rest of the week resting on his laurels before graduation. Then Peggy asked him if he'd gotten all his lecture credits, and he nodded. He said that there were some seniors who had been forced to attend every play and concert and lecture that was offered for the last quarter because they hadn't, and I remembered that Aric had been laughing about them because he automatically got them for every play he worked on.
I guess I was lucky that I didn't have to worry about them, since I was a visitor. I wonder if the student who's exchanging with me gets a break because she's in Equestria?
One thing that they did have for dinner that made everyone happy was ice cream for dessert. There was a machine that made fake ice-cream in a weird star-shape, which I'd tried once and didn't like, but they had big tubs of real ice-cream instead and lots of different toppings, and so we all had some for dessert.
Before we split up, Christine reminded us to meet in an hour at Sean's for the group shower, and he put his hand over his face like I'd seen Captain Picard do, and Christine punched him.
So Peggy and I went back to our room and we both turned on our computers and checked our Facebooks and computer letters and I had gotten one from Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee saying that I had gotten a 98% on the test and my total grade was 97%, and so I told Peggy and she thought that was really good, and reminded me not to brag about it because maybe Sean hadn't done as well. Then she got a little smile and said it was okay if he bragged first.
She put on her swimsuit and then her clothes back on top of it and then changed her mind and put on a sports bra instead and a pair of panties that wasn't as lacy as the ones she liked to wear. I asked if she was going to wear all that in the shower and she said it depended on what everyone else did. Then she reminded me to take a towel, too, and I told her that I'd never forget my towel and tossed it across my back.
When we got to Sean's room, we had to wait for Joe to arrive, and when he got there were were talking and finally Christine said that we ought to talk in the shower, which I agreed with, and even Joe said that it would be a good learning experience since they did this kind of thing in Japan although the public baths were separated by gender. Christine told him to imagine that she had a dick, and he said that didn't help.
Sean said that we ought to make a sign so nobody was surprised, and he drew one that said 'orgy in progress.' Christine told him that was all wrong, and added the word 'platonic' to the top and said it was good and then herded him out the door and we all followed.
He went in the bathroom first to make sure that no one was in there, and when he was sure it was empty he told the rest of us to come in. Christine put the sign on the door, and Sean started turning on the showers, trying not to get his pants or shirt wet. He said that the steam would help hide his shame.
Pretty soon everyone was getting undressed. They had to take turns on the bench to get their shoes off—humans have trouble taking them off if they're standing—and then once that was done, people moved aside to let the next person sit on the bench.
Christine had already taken off her shirt and bra before she sat down, and by then Joe and I were in the shower. He was wearing a swimsuit-like pair of shorts he called boxer briefs and of course I wasn't wearing anything.
At first, Joe completely avoided looking at Christine until she said that if she didn't want anyone looking at her boobs she would have left her bra on, and then when his face got really red (and he still wouldn't look at her) she told Sean that if he'd lose his underwear she'd lose hers, too.
Sean said that he didn't want to be the first one to get naked, and she said that he'd been beat by a pony, which I didn't think was fair but I kept my mouth shut, 'cause I didn't want to start an argument, and I thought that maybe people weren't having fun, which was too bad, 'cause I'd thought it was a good idea, but it had wound up with the boys at one shower and the girls at another and me kind of in the middle.
Then Christine said that she'd had more fun at a funeral, and she told Sean it wasn't like he had anything to hide anyway and went over and took his underwear off for him and before he could protest she looked him right in the eye and said that the Death Star had a better fire-suppression system than the Starship Enterprise, and he said that wasn't true at all and then they were arguing about it until I think he forgot he was naked.
She took off her panties when she was arguing, and I don't think he noticed. She slid them over her hips and then stepped over them when she was poking her finger into his chest to make a point.
Once Sean and Christine had finished their argument, everyone clustered together around one shower, and it was a lot more fun then. Peggy finally decided to take her sports bra off, throwing it on the bench, and then Joe had two girls that he wouldn't look at—I sort of felt bad for him.
We were probably in there for an hour or more. One guy came in and he looked over at all of us then shook his head and went right back out, but otherwise we weren't bothered even though we were breaking the rules. Peggy said that there were rules that mattered and rules that didn't and this was one of the ones that didn't.
Eventually, we decided that we'd had enough fun and turned off the showers and dried off. Neither Christine or Sean put their underwear back on, since it wasn't too far to his room, and Peggy decided that she could go without her bra back to our room.
On the way back, she said that it was weird of her to think that that kind of thing was normal for me, and then she said that she wondered if Joe would get used to social bathing when he was in Japan. I said I didn't know; it was the kind of thing I'd never thought about until I was on Earth, and it was still kind of weird to me how people wanted to hide certain parts of their bodies from everyone.
And I said it was also still a bit weird that men had nipples.
When we were back in our room, she changed into her lounging clothes and asked if I was going to be staying for the night, and I told her that I was going to go to Aric's house and spend the night with him.
She told me that there was a sex position called 'cowboy-style' and said I should try that because maybe it would help him with his monologue, and I thought that was a fun idea.
I gathered all my flight gear and hugged her before I left, then I flew over to Aric's house.
I went through his window—this time I made sure to not get stuck—and sat on the bed while he did his monologue twice, then when he got undressed and in bed I got on top of him and it was really weird but we both liked it.
Silver Glow is one hoopy frood that really knows where her towel is. Yay for H2G2! (Someone should give her those books.)
I see they haven't yet mastered the art of tying their shoelaces just right. I would've been out of my sneakers in seconds, no hands or bench required. :V
Silver Glow on Star Trek: "This Q character reminds me of Discord for some reason."
Silver Glow is going to be plagued by Discord Towels out of the corner of her eye for ages when she gets back.
I read somewhere (was it I Fucking Love Science?) that men are basically malformed women. For the first few weeks of pregnancy, we all look the same regardless of our chromosomes.
7463139 Ditto here. You get to learn fun stuff when trying to take a shower in camping where all the shower stall are very small and without a bench.
That bracket look like something leftover from editing.
7463228
Nipples form before the suppressing gene on the Y chromosome is expressed.
Reading P G Wodehouse stories, I got the idea that the English sometimes eat kippers (kippered (smoked) herring) for breakfast.
Old joke
Minor differences are critical. Heaven has German engineers, French cooking, & English police. Hell has German police, French engineers, and English cooking.
I had a friend who bought a Renault. He said the French had a word for "spare parts" but he didn't know why because no Frenchman had ever made a spare part for anything since the history of time began.
I'm waiting for one of the other fanfics to describe Discord as meeting the less demanding requirements for being a god.
More accurately, something more like the Trickster of the the Native American mythologies and less like Loki of the early Marvel movies.
If only someone with Mad Editing Skillz could take that STTNG scene where Q admits to (brags about?) being a deity for several planets and add "and the chaos spirit for a world of poly-chromatic quadrupeds".
Christine use nerd distraction . Its super effective !
he was busy checking out the pony !
this becomes the next big thing in equestrian sex live ! ... or a wonderbolt formation
"That's weird; how did they get Discord to voice this guy?"
I love how Sean stepped right into that.
Mysterious bracket sighting
Done
7463488
Yes indeed we do, although it's generally considered very fancy, I've only ever eaten then at hotels.
Love these two.
Is that mysterious bracket an electronic thumb?
Hah! Knew that Aric likes the horse to ride him.
Why do I get the feeling that they had to shout over the argument to tell Sean and Christine that the shower party was over?
In any case, hooray for fractals. Here's hoping the other finals go as smoothly for Silver.
7463426
I'm talking like 30,000 feet in the air kind of clouds with massive passenger plane wakes cutting through them.
"Passengers, this is your captain speaking. We're ascending to 33,417 feet because there are some nice thin clouds up there that we'd like to play in. If you look out either side in about a minute you'll see one being cut in half by our flight. Whee."
I'm aware of the cowgirl, which I was sure Silver had already done, and the reverse cowgirl, which seems like an exotic twist for a pony, but I had to look up "cowboy style." The only one I could find has her on the bottom, so I know it's not right. Plus, for that one, she'd need truly impressive range of motion in her hips.
I still don't know what they actually did.
I think that's supposed to be done. And I love how Christine was able to distract Sean from what was going on by bringing up Star Wars/Trek.
I have been in some pretty strange social situations, but I have no idea what I would do (or should do) in a shower party like the one in this chapter. I've coped with locker-room showers by ignoring everyone else. I would have no idea what kind of conversation to start, being platonically naked with the opposite sex.
Most girls don't like it if they catch their boyfriend examining other girls' bodies too closely. Sean is in a really weird situation here because his girlfriend dragged him into this. As he looks at the other girls there, is he supposed to find them sexy or not? It would be really easy to hurt people's feelings either way.
I don't know if this is how it was at your school, Admiral, but this turn about time for math grades seems really unrealistic to me.
7464016
Oh good, so it wasn't just me that was confused by this.
7463228
That's a rather poor way to put it. Humans start out as fetuses that essentially look the same, and it's only after a certain point that various final organs. The penis and clitoris both develop from something called the 'genital tubercle' for example: without testosterone, it turns into a clitoris, whereas testosterone signals it to develop in the other direction.
Silver's confirmed for being a hoopy frood.
Extra closing bracket there.
("In Soviet Russia...")
which was about
Why?
7463156 Considering Aquamarine is from Ponyville, I'm pretty sure she would be the one making this comment.
Silver really likes to stick her tongue out a lot doesn't she? Twice in a chapter is a new record!
imgflip.com/s/meme/Captain-Picard-Facepalm.jpg
One of the greatest known meme images out there!
7463228 7463262 Interesting trivia point that I hit on The Adultery of Princess Twilight Sparkle (and it appears the Admiral caught too) is that male horses don't have nipples. (Cite courtesy of Jothki) From the textbook Pathology of Domestic Animals. If you get really hyper-technical... No, I better stop there.
7464156
No, that first one is probably correct, just worded awkwardly. It's a multiple choice question that asks which of the answers is a real exponent.
7464047 If I rember well, they described it like this because testicles and ovum are formed inside the body at the same place and the testicle will drop at some point. A few other characteristic are mostly looking like the premises of a female body but change under the influence of the y chromosome.
7463122 And now we need a Ford Perfect character.
7458415 What I mean by needed to, is the use of Magic could have stifled their technology. After all, why create fancy farming equipment, if you can use magic to do the same? The fact that you have Earth Ponies with crazy high Endurance, Strength, & Farming Magic makes a lot of technology less needed and inspired. Why create a Tractor, when a few Earth Ponies can do the job just as well, or better? There's less inspiration for flying, when you have Pegasi who rule the skies, and a even a Unicorn can cast spells to reach the sky like Twilight did. Etc.
A human example would be our inability to distinguish/see the color Blue, until the Egyptians were able to mass produce the color for dyes. If you look at ancient historical texts before then, there's no mention of Blue Skies or Oceans/Water.
Not to mention with the stability that Celestia & Luna have had in their country, they haven't had the many innovations that have come from War as well.
In terms of Language, Equestria Girls universe had the same written and spoken language. Not only that, but there's been human/s who have interacted with ponies in previous Generations of MLP.
7464869
Prefect.
7464047
I don't know, with a team of five TAs we often finished grading a two-hour exam for ~100 people by evening or the day after. The best and worst ones take the least time to grade, so if he emails the results as they're done instead of all at once, I could see Silver getting hers early.
7464047 It's possible, but unlikely. However, the class may be curved. I ended up with a 99% in one of my engineering classes once.
Platonic orgy. That's an interesting term.
that was great. I don't think I could handle the whole social bathing thing though.
I'm not sure she should really be surprised. Most male mammals have nipples and I actually didn't know horses didn't until I looked it up.
The Enterprise would totally have better fire suppression systems. The empire actively gives as little of a damn as possible, starfleet pretends to care about health and safety of crew at least.
7463122
7463139
I can do sneakers, no problem; boots are a bit more challenging. But you do raise a good point; one or two of them would probably be wearing shoes that came off easily. (Back in my college days, hightops were in fashion, and they were a little bit harder to get out of quickly. I have no idea what college age kids wear now.)
7463156
(I was actually thinking of sneaking the joke in, but SIlver Glow's probably never heard Discord speaking)
7463185
I'm not even sure what a Discord Towel is and I'm not sure I want to find out.
7463228
I think that's the tadpole stage.
The ones I hate are the ones where the showerhead is at nose-level. I've run into a few of those.
Yeah, it's one I missed. For a week and a half or so, the gDoc to FimFic interface was having issues, and it was adding bold and italic tags to every single line. So the freshly-imported text looked like this:
There's no find and replace command, so I had to delete them all manually.
ETA: and then I had to go back in this comment and put in spaces because of course they all cancelled each other out.
7463262
Not in horses, though. (Well, I don't know why stallion don't have them, but they don't.)
7463488
They have some kind of fish for breakfast in Norway, too. I think it's herring.
7463489
I'd say that depending on the mythology, he could certainly qualify. Definitely as a trickster god.
In a way, I'm kind of surprised nobody has.
7477930
Tough luck.
I had trouble back when I used internet explorer to browse, for some reason it hated the BB code.
According to that text linked by Georg 7464440 , hormones are to blame for that. The text didn't specify at wich stage of devellopment it happen.
7463498
That's how you trap a nerd.
Probably both.
7463617
It would be pretty funny to have a Q meets Discord story. Maybe there is one. I'm not enough of a Trekkie to write it, unfortunately.
7463743
Corrections made; thank you!
7463866
I had the impression that the only things the English ate were kippers, marmite, crisps, and fish and chips.
7463925
I wish. It's just an editing error.
In Soviet Russia. . .
7463944
They probably did. Arguments like that can go on for a while.
7463956
I'm sure pilots do stuff like that sometimes. I know we had some fun on the radio when I drove wrecker. Like, you know the 10-codes (10-4, 10-20, etc.)? We had a bunch that we used, but a lot that we didn't. The dispatcher got a list of them from somewhere, and the radio conversation went like this:
"Dispatch to 27, do you copy?"
"10-4"
"What's your 10-13?"
"Um . . . I'm 33 on the 45way."
I would mix things up with one dispatcher and instead of using the military or police alphabets, I'd just try and pick a theme for letters. And I radioed in once that I was at periscope depth and the target was in range, so he gave me permission to fire torpedos.
I was thinking the 'cowgirl," which Silver Glow has not done. That's actually a really odd position for a pony, given how their legs bend.
So basically, I didn't have the foresight to look it up.
7464022
7464025
Basically not stare. Try to keep your eyes up.
Basically anything is acceptable, except maybe "are those real?" (Although at one nude pool, I did hear a couple of older ladies refer to a gentleman's Prince Albert as a 'pull toy.')
That's what makes such a party both challenging and liberating. Sean's kind of got a get out of jail free card, since Christine made him do it.
7464047
The more advanced the class, the fewer people there were in it. My senior seminar in Theatre had 5 people; in English, 9. In fact, thinking back, probably half of all the classes I attended at K had twelve or fewer people in them.
Silver Glow never said how many people are in this class, but it's not a lot. And he's posting grades as soon as he finishes each test.
It's cowgirl style. I ought to have looked that up.
7464115
She is.
Exactly!
7477998
"...I CALLED FOR A TOW, GODDAMNIT, NOT-!"
"Sir, please calm down, and I'll"
"I WILL NOT CALM DOWN! I HAD A FLAT! YOUR WRECKER SHOT MY CAR WITH TORPEDOS!"
This is probably my own inexperience coming through, but Silver has mentioned being on top multiple times, so how has she not already tried the cowgirl at least once? Has she never sat upright?
I'm wondering about her bedroom creativity now.
7477998
Perhaps it's different at this school, but you generally can't take 'more advanced' classes right off the bat. Usually these classes have some sort of prerequiste course(s) that you have to take in order to enter into more advanced classes, unless you get special permission from the professor in charge of the course.
I'm not sure how this would work for transfer students, but I don't think Silver's ever actually mentioned being in school prior to this, which seems to suggest she's come right out of the cloud pushing fields with whatever education she has, and is now attending this school.
Even with few people in a class, that doesn't mean you're going to get the exam back quickly, and I don't think he'd even be allowed to post grades as soon as he finished each test. For one thing, with math exams/tests, unless the professor is completely bone headed, they're going to be awarding points on proper technique and applications of concepts, not just whether you've got the right result or not. This means you have to go through and look at the work they've done, for each question, of each test, and try and follow the logic they were using to get to that stage. It's time consuming.
Finally, when you do get the results, you're going to want to analyze the whole class results per question. In this situation you're looking for problems with the questions themselves. If everyone (or almost everyone) got a question wrong, was the flaw with the wording of the question? With the teaching? Did people get it wrong because they interpreted it in such a way that led them down the wrong path? And how do you approach these issues? do you discount the question? Do you award half points because you worded it poorly when you made the exam up, and people did something wrong according to what you intended, but right according to how they interpreted it?
All these things are considerations that have to be taken into account when it comes to grading any sort of examination.
I've seen multiple choice exams (as in, everything is MC) that are graded by a computer take up to a week or more to get returned, largely because of the above issues (as well as particular problems regarding people who screwed up their bubble sheet, etc). And these weren't math classes.
7478029
I laughed uncontrollably for a full minute.
Thank for that!
7464156
Technically, the first one is correct, although it's rather awkward phrasing. "Then I got to a question which asked what was a real exponent" would probably be better.
Because FimFic's importer had problems, and so I had to delete a lot of formatting tags, for about a week. It's surprising that I only missed one (and a few days back, there was also a single line in bold italics, which was the result of another one I missed).
7464284
Now that he's reformed, I don't think that he lives in Ponyville any more . . . wasn't he visiting in the episode with the Smooze? Just the same, she's likely to have run into him as a filly, regardless.
7464333
Not as much as Christine likes to punch Sean.
And yes, facepalming Captain Picard is one of the greatest meme images out there.
7464440
And they're one of the very few mammals who don't. Male mice don't, either; on the flipside, male Dayak fruit bats have lactating mammary glands.
7465141
Well, yes, that's certainly a reason to not pursue certain avenues of technology, and one reason that I think a lot of their society is like it is. They're well-suited to walking and pulling things, which makes pony-power pretty attractive . . . and it's free. No need to pay for a tractor, when you've got a couple of ponies on the farm who can do the same thing for the cost of dinner.
I think we could see it, but there was no word for that color. Just because you don't have a specific name for something doesn't mean you can't see it . . . there are languages which have no specific word for the color pink, but I'm sure they can see what color Pinkie Pie is. Although I seem to recall an experiment was done with green and blue with a tribe that didn't have a word for blue, so maybe I'm wrong on that.
That's true, but I consider Equestria Girls as not such a good source, since the two universes are very similar, to the point where the exact same people exist in both, so I don't think that's a realistic example. Although given that example, it would be fair to say that going through a portal magically gives you fluency in the native language. As for previous generations, I think that that was in the very long-distant past, even before tribal unification, so any commonality of language could be dismissed as having faded out.
Having said that, there's so much mythology in MLP pulled from Greek, I would like to read a first-contact fic where all the ponies speak fluent Attic Greek, or perhaps a more ancient dialect.
7468062
It's a little weird but after a while you get accustomed to it.
Although let's be honest, how many different male mammals have you seen them on? Because most of them that Silver Glow would be familiar with would be covered with fur; the only species she's likely to be intimately familiar with is ponies.
7472957
Three of my friends actually had this debate once, and one of them even had a manual for the Enterprise, which he was using as a reference in the discussion. I think it did wind up being the Enterprise. Mind you, this would have been back in '92 or '93, so later films might have changed that somewhat.
"Hey this Q alien reminds me of this guy called Discord who tried to take over Equestria a few years ago!"
Oh my god, I didn't even think about if there was a human taking Silver's place in Equestria.
Classic.
im.ziffdavisinternational.com/t/pcmag_au/photo/p/picard-fac/picard-facepalm_mkuu.1280.jpg
7477953
That was the part I was kinda curious about. I mean, we've got 'em, most mammals got 'em, so why not horses?
7478029
Well, it's a rather odd position for an equine, don't you think? Like, sitting on her butt's one thing, but actually moving in the appropriate direction?
The fact that she's stuck doing it on the ground is rather limiting . . . probably the pegasus Kama Sutra has at least half the positions requiring flight.
7495699
If there isn't already, there ought to be a Discord/Q crossover story. If I was more up on Star Trek lore, I'd do it.
Yup--that was why there weren't many pegasi in the program, because cloud universities can't host a human exchange student.
7497748
Not without a good supply of balloons and lots of helium. Or that spell Twilight uses in "Sonic Rainboom." (The application would probably read "Must not be afraid of heights. At all. Seriously, you really have to be okay with this.")
7478044
Silver Glow was taking classes back at a pony university, although it's never stated which one. So she's met the prerequisites for an advanced-level math class (which was probably a subject of discussion between the two colleges). So she's not fresh out of the cloud-pushing fields.
Why not, out of curiosity? If he's not curving the results, what's the harm in posting the grade as soon as you have it?
Hmm, I hadn't considered that. That's a good point you raise there--especially on a written test (obviously, on multiple-choice, you're either right or wrong, and the scantron doesn't know what logic you used to get the answer).
That's something that some professors do very well and others do very badly, and the same thing extends to IRL tests. Michigan still has carburetor questions on their engine performance test, despite the fact that no automobiles I can think of for sale in the US have had carburetors since the mid eighties, and if anything, those questions belong on the certification test for working on antiques.
In the spring semester, they don't have a week; they've got three days tops until graduation for the seniors, so the professors have to be fast. I seem to recall that I would get results back from all my classes within a couple of days, tops. But maybe I'm misremembering.
7497771 And a lot of trust in the system, even if the unicorn casting the spell is good, it must renewed regulary. If you miss it once your going down...
7497785
There can be department policies, for example, or requiring the professors to submit the completely marked exams to the registers office, or similar things. I think it's rather poor to decide that you're not going to curve the results before you get the results, and as I suggest in the rest of the post it's usually a good idea to assess the test's performance on whole, along with comparing it to other year's exam's results and other data.
For someone like Silver, it probably doesn't matter, but adjusting the scoring can mean the difference between passing or failing for some students.
Yes and no. The scantron is going to output the results along with (I think) a class wide analysis of the performance of each individual question. I've seen multiple choice exams with poorly worded questions before, and I've seen multiple choice exams with repeated answers and repeated questions before.
I'm sure they have a deadline, but I'm not sure how that would fit relative to 'graduation'. Since they're not going into other classes, I would assume they can take longer to grade the tests.
Has this ever actually been talked about in the story? It feels like a bit of a surprise, to me. Silver Glow seems to be presented very much like someone who's never gone to university at all, rather than someone who already has some experience with it--and I'm not sure it lines up with her characterization.
It seems unlikely that that Chonamare has it's own university, especially where you've described it as being fairly small, iirc. Which means she'd probably have left her home town to go to it, and in doing so likely experienced the ups and downs of living with unicorns and ponies she's not familiar with in general.
7497748
There's a few of them.