Chapter 29 story notes · 11:20pm Aug 7th, 2017
Chapter notes are back! Yay!
A special thanks to my pre-readers!
metallusionsismagic, AShadowOfCygnus,
and Forderz
As well as creative consultants:
Humanist, AnormalUnicornPony, bitbrony, MSPiper, MrZJunior, , Woonsocket Wrench, and my parents.
One other important note, and I'm going to put this right up at the top, because there's been some confusion.
The Starlight who works at the embassy is not Starlight glimmer. She's this pony:
From the Wiki
Felloes are the curved part of a wagon wheel that's just inside the tire.
Source
In the above picture, you can see how one has partially rotted, and you can see the seams around the wheel where the felloes join. Normally, they were pegged together, and then once the tire was put over them, the joints couldn't come apart.
My grandfather started his career on the assembly line at the Baltimore GM plant. He managed to work his way up through the ranks to a while collar job sometime in the fifties, IIRC. Besides being smart and a hard worker, one of the ways he did it was by learning how to do every job on the assembly line . . . except one. He couldn't do pinstripes.
Nowadays, they're generally either stickers, or applied by some kind of a machine that makes a nice, perfect line every time. But back in the day, they were done with a special kind of paintbrush (one type is amusingly called the squirrel hair dagger) and a very steady hand.
Even at that, there was a fair bit of thickness variation in the stripes, because no matter how good you are, the brush starts off with a lot of paint in it, and then you have progressively less until it's time to add more paint. Even if the stripe looked perfectly even when it was new, after years it probably won't any more.
While Dale might not be overly familiar with wagons, he would be familiar with hand-painted pinstripes. GM was still doing it that way into the late 70s--my first car, in fact, had hand-painted pinstripes on it.
We all know that tic-tac-toe is canon, and that Pinkie Pie is almost certainly Ponyville's champion player. Or else Rarity is very bad at the game, which is also possible.
If both players know the proper tic-tac-toe strategy, a traditional three by three grid is unwinnable for either player every time.
Dots and boxes is another pen and pencil game. You make a grid of dots, and players take turns putting a single line between two dots (only horizontal or vertical). If a player makes the last line to close off a box, he gets to take an extra turn.
There is a strategy to win dots and boxes, and if you know the strategy, you're going to win every time unless your opponent gets lucky and accidentally blocks you.
I'd mess up the explanation, I'm sure. Luckily, the crew from Numberphile explains it in this video:
Lavender Sunrise's sole appearance thus far has been in Stranger than Fan Fiction
From the Wiki
Tindal is an OC. His name is an obscure Indian name for an attendant, technically one who serves in the military.
I honestly can't say for sure where I came across the name "Silver Book" as a list of nobles. I'm fairly confident it was in an actual published book, and the most likely source is one of Tamora Pierce's fantasy novels. My guess is that she based it off the Domesday Book, which was a survey of England and parts of Wales undertaken in 1086. Interestingly, it was nearly 800 years before they did another survey as comprehensive.
Many families keep some sort of genealogical record, either handwritten or actually published into a volume. I'd tend to expect that on average, the more noble your family is (or thinks it is), the more detailed the records are going to be. Not only because nobles often care more about that kind of stuff, but also because before literacy was widespread, they'd be the only ones likely to have the knowledge to assemble such a book.
Bon Bon is in fact related to the Apples:
Episode Screenshot
She's not the only pony you wouldn't expect to be related, but that's how it goes in a small town.
I could have found a picture that didn't have the red circles, but since one of them was around Bon Bon, I figured it was good enough.
Poppycock is a background unicorn pony. He's so deep in the background, this was the best image I could find of him:
Ant-sized Wikipedia link
Fun fact: Poppycock comes from the Dutch words 'soft' and 'dung' (pappekak).
The USS Pueblo was infamously captured by North Korea in 1968. They alleged that the ship was in their waters, while the Navy says that it was in international waters. Either way, the North Koreans kept the crew of the ship for eleven months. During that captivity, they were photographed for propaganda purposes, and as a sign of protest, many of them gave the finger in the photographs.
The ship stayed in North Korea, and it is still there. It is also still a commissioned ship, making it the second-oldest commissioned ship in the Navy (after the USS Constitution).
Ink is, and has been, made of many different things. One thing that was common was mixing tannin (from oak galls) and iron. This was called iron gall ink. When it was liquid, it would soak into the paper, and as a result it was very difficult to erase. However, it was fairly acidic, and could damage the paper; on top of that, since it had iron in it, it could rust. It was not suitable for use in fountain pens, but it worked in dip pens.
It also had a long life; it was commonly used into the 20th century.
We all should know what a long-distance communications device is.
Source
There's a tired old meme that NASA spent millions developing a space pen, while the Soviets used a pencil. And there's some truth to that, but only a little. Fischer actually was the one who spent all the money developing the pen. I wasn't able to find how much it cost to develop, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't millions.
What the meme fails to take into account is that pencils leave behind wood shavings, eraser bits, and most importantly graphite dust. All of those are a potential fire hazard aboard a spacecraft (since they'll just float around anywhere), and graphite is conductive and could short out equipment.
The space pen solved all those problems, and it turned out that it was much cheaper than the specialty pencils that NASA was using at the time ($128.89 per pencil; $6.00 per pen).
They were so good, in fact, that the Soviets also bought Fischer space pens for use on the Soyuz.
...You're a strange person, Admiral.
You have broken image links in your blog.
4627173
That's hardly surprising; it seems to happen every time. Which ones?
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The Starlight who works at the embassy is not Starlight glimmer. She's this pony:
camo.derpicdn.net/f8d1f49a29565665d9d26829846c9dd995443365?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvignette3.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fmlp%2Fimages%2Fd%2Fd3%2FLucky_Star_ID_S1E13.png
From the Wiki
Lavender Sunrise's sole appearance thus far has been in Stranger than Fan Fiction
camo.derpicdn.net/9963ac9bf5117a7e0402cffb9281291e2e3a75a6?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvignette4.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fmlp%2Fimages%2F9%2F91%2FLavender_Sunrise_ID_S6E13.png
From the Wiki
Poppycock is a background unicorn pony. He's so deep in the background, this was the best image I could find of him:
camo.derpicdn.net/e875890ce2ffbacb4b11d6c9c93355e542c8bc89?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvignette3.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fmlp%2Fimages%2Fd%2Fdd%2FPoppycock_ID_S2E26.png
Ant-sized Wikipedia link
That's all of them for me.
4627193
Hmm, so all the wiki pictures. Interesting.
Let's see what I can do.
4627193
Alright, should be fixed now.
Well isn't 'poppycock' kind of an upper-crust word for 'bullshit' anyway?
Fischer gave them a bulk discount, to boot. Oh yeah, not to mention the fact that floating graphite and eraser dust, and wood shavings don't sound like fun stuff to be breathing in.
Is the Silver Book related to Silver Glow or is just one big old coincidence?
As a child, I remember a short on TV (it may have been Sesame Street, or some other child's show). It started off with a painter putting on traditional pinstripes. Something interrupts him, and he walks off. The camera cuts to a close shot of the two blobs of paint at the end of the stripes. Suddenly there are engine noises and the two blobs start racing all over the car. After a couple of minutes of close up paint blob racing (with matching engine and squealing tyre sounds that may have been just a guy doing "brum-brum" noises), the camera pulls back to show the car totally covered in crazy '70s psychedelic stripes. As a child, I may have even asked my father if he could get that done on the family sedan. (No, the family car remained boring '70s brown...)
*EDIT* A quick YouTube search reveals that the above was a segment from Disney's "Dad, can I borrow the car."
*EDIT 2* I was born in the '70s. Watching that reminds me that the past is a completely different world. Far out, man. Far out...
One of my relatives on the Norwegian side of my family made a book tracing our families history back to a Norse king called Harold the Hard and his brother Olaf (as in Saint Olaf). The book is called The Timber Hewers and it's about 4 and a half inches thick. It is the only book (other than a phone book-they are still a thing right?) that I am mentioned in, and I have more lines my brother!
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Yep, fixed. Also, super awesome chapter! So, will it be 10 or 11 months till the next one?
My parents had cars with pinstripes, a lot more recent than the 1970s. They were hand-painted, and signed; if you looked over the pinstripes, at one point you'd see "Sid did it" between the stripes.
Haha, we were thinking of the numberphille video as well.
I think teaching ponies Hex/Nash wouldn't be too complicated to convey with his imperfect language, unlike Go, and not so simple as to be boring and unstimulating like TicTacToe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)
(The Beautiful Mind movie is melodramatic crap. Check out the biography it's based on. The Imitation Game is tolerable, but only because Cumberbatch is a zillion times better an actor than Crowe).
edit. Or maybe Dale can teach them Reversi, which is NOT "Othello."
I never liked that name, mainly because I first played it as Reversi on Windows 3.x.
edit. edit. Also, we really need a Thrilling Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace movie.
I would cast:
Benedict Cumberbatch as Charles Babbage.
Danica McKellar as Ada Lovelace.
NOT Robert Downey as Isambard Brunel (too obvious, and his plate is full). Maybe Rory Kinnear instead.
Cary Elwes as Charles Dodgson
John Oliver and Stephen Colbert as Gilbert and Sullivan
Jon Stewart as Martin van Buren
John Cleese as George Boole
Alastair Fothergill as Charles Darwin
Linda Hunt as Mary Somerville
Patton Oswalt as Augustus De Morgan
Cate Blanchett as Queen Victoria
Ian McDiarmid as Michael Faraday
Jürgen Prochnow as George Airy
Daniel Radcliffe and Evanna Lynch as Lord Byron and Anne Milbanke in flashbacks. (To screw with Harry/Luna shippers)
Andre Rieu as the sinister Organ Grinder
Andrew Scott as Charles Wheatstone
David Suchet as Lambert Quetelet
Simon Russell Beale as the Duke of Wellington.
Allison Janney as Mary Shelley
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That's very true. I won't deny it.
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Probably. High class people get all the fun words.
Even if they hadn't, I bet retail on the space pens wasn't $128. Yeah, besides the problems with equipment, it can't have been great to be breathing in pencil shavings. Of course, this was back in the 60s, so it might have been cleaner than California air. . . .
4627317
That's a big old coincidence. Nothing to do with Silver Glow.
4627332
Man, you can find anything on YouTube these days.
I was also born in the 70s. Rather late in the 70s, so I don't remember too much of them, which is just as well.
GM kept boring '70s brown until at least the 80s on some models.
pre12.deviantart.net/9ab4/th/pre/f/2014/001/d/3/suburban_by_admiral_biscuit-d70fiwl.jpg
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We've got one, too, called the Shipleys of Maryland. As I recall, I'm in it but my little brother isn't, because he was born too late.
Anybody who's going to Bronycon and wants to make a side trip to the Baltimore Public Library could probably find a copy there if they looked hard enough.
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Hopefully not. I've got about half of chapter 30 already written.
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I assume that wasn't the factory paint, though. There are paint guys that still do pinstriping, but the factory doesn't apply them by hand any more, at least not on mass-marketed cars. I suppose if you're buying a luxury car like a Rolls, you can get hand-painted pinstripes if you want.
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It's a great video! And I've learned lost of math from Numberphile.
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I'll have to look up the rules. I've never heard of it myself.
I've heard of that one, but never played it. Although I think it's fairly well-known. The only possible difficulty for Dale would be remembering the number of squares on an Othello board. Probably if he played it a lot he'd know.
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Great!
The Space Pen bit is adorable!
4652612
Space pens are the shit, yo.
I've seen our family's book; it's pretty thick, but I haven't gone through more than the last couple pages.
Interestingly, it doesn't just list the names of existing family members; it also lists the names to be used for future members, and has an appendix showing the mathematical formula to be used to construct newer names. Every twenty years or so we find an astrologer to update the book.
Supposedly the formula was itself constructed to bring good fortune to the family, based on rules I'm not too familiar with.
5419702
Huh, my family wasn’t that fore-thinking when it came to naming kids. My brother and I are both named for former family members; my brother’s daughter is named at random as far as I know. Interestingly, my brother’s wedding date was set by a Hindu priest, who chose an ‘auspicious day’; coincidentally, it’s the same day that our parents were married, and next year’s their fiftieth wedding anniversary.