Fhaolan

Okay, before I get into the actual topic, I feel the need to address something: Cider and Alcohol Applejack in and of itself is an alcoholic drink. It’s made by taking already alcoholic cider and ‘freeze distilling’ it. Barely freezing it and fishing out the ice. Since alcohol freezes at a much lower temperature than water, you’re effectively pulling the water out of the cider, and leaving the alcohol behind. This is called ‘jacking’ and takes a lot less effort than normal boiling distillation. This was very common up to the 18th century or so and is still done today though it is less common. Calling non-alcoholic apple juice ‘cider’ is a very modern thing and is generally limited to the United States. Everywhere else cider is alcoholic. It isn’t necessarily very strong alcohol, mind you. Root beer and ginger ale were originally alcoholic as well, just very lightly alcoholic. You see, back in olden times drinking water wasn’t very common as you could get really sick from it. Most water sources had animals (and in some cases people), living in them, and if you drank that water, you’re also drinking their feces and whatnot. But alcohol kills the bad bacteria, so people got into the habit of creating lightly alcoholic beverages to drink. Small beer, watered wine, and the like. And everyone drank them, children included. It was only later (19th century onward) when the temperance movement kicked in that ‘soft’ non-alcoholic versions of drinks were marketed against the ‘hard’ alcoholic ones. Cider is usually made from very specific cider apples, as general eating and baking apples have a different sugar profile. And due to the high sugar content, it’s easy and quick to ferment cider. You can create cider from normal apple juice in a couple of days. Just leave a jug of apple juice out in the sun in the summer for two days, and you’ll have hard cider. I did this by accident once. I went camping, and accidentally left a 2-liter bottle of apple juice in the bed of the truck over the weekend. You could’ve driven nails with the stuff, it was so hard. And finally, apple juice doesn’t hold a head of foam. Cider, on the other hand, does. So, what the Apple family was serving to all those people? Alcohol. Probably not very strong alcohol (0.5-1.5% or so), but still. The time frame they were putting on creating cider from apples in the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 episode was a bit compressed, but not really by that much and Pony magic might have made up the difference there. Oh, and here’s something interesting: If pony digestion is anything like real-life equine digestion, it wouldn’t matter if it was alcoholic or not before they drank it. It was alcoholic when it hit their system. In order to pull nutrients out of grass and other stuff that humans can’t digest, equines have a fermentation-based digestion system. That’s why they go crazy over sugar-cubes and the like. Sugar gets almost instantaneously turned into alcohol in their system, and fruit is *full* of sugar. So if the ponies eat apples as a primary food source, they’ve probably slightly drunk all the time. Okay, on the real reason I wanted to write up this essay. This is something I originally meant to work into a fanfiction (Doctor Whooves and the Spaniel Mane), but I got stuck in the plot itself and never finished it. I’m tired of looking at it, so I’m putting it here instead. There is always an Applejack in MLP. Due to the way Hasbro kept track of its trademark toy names, when FiM premiered, most of the pony names were pulled from G3 instead of G1. Lauren Faust had wanted G1 names and appearances, but Hasbro had temporarily lost most of those trademarks (it has since reclaimed a lot of them). There were only two that they hadn’t lost: Spike, and Applejack. Mainly because they had also used them in G3 and had gone through the effort to maintain the trademarks on them. Unlike the rest of the Mane 6, G4 Applejack’s color palette doesn’t match the G3 incarnation. Instead she has mostly G1’s colors. Big Mac actually looks more like G3 Applejack, coloration-wise. G1.5 is my own classification for the ‘My Little Pony Tales’ cartoon, so it doesn’t count as officially that was still G1. G3.5 was just G3 with a different art-style and a much, much smaller cast of characters, so it would be easy enough to just update the artstyle on the G3 Applejack and call it good. G2 is the hardest. There was a G2 pony that resembles Applejack in coloration, Bright Bramley (Bramley is an English cooking apple), but she is technically a different character. G2 was odd as I don’t think it had any characters in common with the other generations, but I might be mistaken. In which case, Bright Bramley might very well be G2’s Applejack, just under a different name. With the ‘leaked’ G5 material, it seems like Applejack will be in that generation as well. So, with some stretch, it’s possible to say there is always an Applejack in My Little Pony. The various Applejacks are wildly different in characterization, but there they are. So from a worldbuilding perspective, why? Why Applejack, of all ponies? It’s somewhat of an unusual name for a pony in children’s media (see the first half of the essay as to what Applejack means), so she stands out, even when she’s just in the background. Something wants there to be an Applejack. Which, in my fanfiction story, was the premise. The Doctor traveled back a century or two, and found himself on the deck of Captain Applejack, fierce pirate queen of the Spaniel Mane. Who was being investigated by Jack Russell, a diamond dog time agent from the far future (yes, Captain Jack Harkness as a dog, sue me. I’m nothing if not derivative. That plus the joke 'Jack Russell, Terrier of the Seven Seas' just had to get into it somewhere. ), masquerading as her second mate. And the two must join forces to find out why Applejack is a fixed point across all time, and why this incarnation of Applejack may break that chain and endanger time itself. Which is were I got stuck, of course, because none of the ideas I had as to *why* there was always an Applejack were very compelling for a narrative. There was something that each Applejack had to do in their own time-zones, that they had to independently arrive at, that lined up across time (sorta a morally good version of the City of Death serial from the 1979 run of Doctor Who). At precisely the same ‘time’ in each generation, every Applejack would do this thing, and time itself would be kept stable. But that could be anything, really. There was no narrative push for any one action that I could figure out, and even then, it wouldn’t make sense without seeing all the *other* Applejacks in their own timelines doing the same thing. And the story just bogged down into minutiae. The real answer was the people in Hasbro responsible for tracking toy names just like the name ‘Applejack’ and likely has no idea what the word really means, the same way that Kellogg’s renamed ‘Apple O’s’ to ‘Apple Jacks’ in 1971. It has no relevance to anything, they just wanted a name that had something to do with apples, and probably thought it was connected with the old knucklebones game that is often called jacks in North America.

Heh. The internet didn't exist when I was a kid. I guess there were BBS's starting when I was 16 or so, but they were more annoying than useful. The long-distance charges to get to anything worthwhile was painful enough. So no, my parents didn't have the option to lock down my 'internet' access.

Hrmmmm. In my opinion, I think what this needs is a couple of inkscape-drawn paper-cut-out-style trees in the background to break up the flat ground (on the right, maybe, for balance?), and possibly some faint pinprick stars in the sky. As much as I would normally try to add the moon in as well, I have a feeling that would change the mood of the picture too much so I recommend against that. Other than that, cool.

Uhm... Only counting cars I've actually owned... (pull in my family, and things get weird) 1. My first car was a 1986 Suzuki Samurai. Totaled when a guy in a Oldsmobile ran into the back of it when it was parked, and took it several blocks balanced on his hood. Tore the rear axle right off. 2. 1989 Honda Accord. Threw a rod on the highway one day. 3. 1995 Honda CRV. Moved across country to Victoria B.C., where I didn't really need a car of my own. Driving anywhere meant taking the ferry anyway, so why bother? I just rented on the other side of the ferry the few times I went to the mainland. 4. 1997 Honda CRV. - Might no count. This was a lease, once I moved out of Victoria B.C. to Washington State. Proved to me that a leased car wasn't really a good idea for my situation. Might work for other people, just not me. The leasing company threw a fit at me because I crossed the border in 'their' car too often, so I cancelled the lease. 5. 1999 Honda Insight. - Got to the point the battery pack needed to be replaced. Would have cost more than replacing the car entirely, so we did that. 7. 2003 Dodge Ram 3500 - Farm truck, still running. 6. 2009 Nissan Rogue - Main vehicle, still running. Mostly Hondas because once you've got a Honda because like most car makes, you usually get the best trade-in value when replacing it with the same make. Especially since I'm usually replacing my car when I *have* to for one reason or another.

Oh, and just so I don't forget: There were some special 'ranks' that I think might be better suited to badges, such as 'Guest of Honor' and the like. Again, lower priority stuff, but it might be worth a mini-project to sort that out.

When I was admin here, that idea was on my list of things to investigate to see if it was at least *possible*, as the award system was brand new for us. Unfortunately, I never did get around to it before I retired. @Jeric's probably got it on his list now.

90's? The 90's weren't that great. Mind you, I'm a 70's kid, so that colors my perceptions. Most people in Western cultures think the decade they were a child were the best, except for some notable exceptions (say, the 40's or so), because that's the time they weren't aware of the really awful stuff that the adults were dealing with. For me, the 90's were something of a dark time. The first Gulf War, the Superstorm, the Concordia University massacre, the Oklahoma bombing, Columbine, Cretien, the Quebec referendum, so on and so forth.

The first Star Trek fanzine was published in September, 1967. The term 'Trekkie' was coined about that same time. However, the fandom didn't really get visible to the mainstream until after the original show was cancelled. So basically, the fandom existed almost instantly (1966), but it really didn't get momentum going until about 1970 or so. Remember that the fandom developed entirely by snail-mail, and these fanzines were created using typewriters and mimeograph printing machines; instant communication via the Internet and publishing software didn't exist then, and even photocopiers were still rare, so it's pretty darn impressive.

Depends on how far back you go, really, and what you count as 'ethnicity'. I'm about as Northern European as you can get. My Mum is from London, England, and my Dad is from Barrow-in-Furness, also England (but Northern). But go steps further back and you get Irish Traveller, Frankish German, Pictish Scot, Icelandic Norse, and so on. My family has always been in motion, really.

Oh yes, all the time. Most of my friends and family are allergic, so I get sent in to deal with things. Usually without being told what the heck I'm going in for as I don't speak 'AAAAAAAAAAAA!' very well. It could be a mouse, a spider, or a four foot around wasp nest for all I know.

Gather round young fillies and colts, while I tell you a story. A true story, or at least it is true that it is a story... My maternal grandfather was a turbine engineer by profession. In England during World War II, he had worked in a factory training and supervising women to assemble detonators for bombs and the like. This is where he met my grandmother, who had taken a liking to him and pelted him with springs from said detonators until he asked her out, and eventually married her. Knowing my grandmother she was still throwing springs at him right up until the ceremony. And possibly years later. After the war ended, he, his wife, and their young daughter (my mother) immigrated to Canada where he worked on the giant generators on Niagara Falls, as well as other projects of that ilk. One day a friend of his, a British merchant marine he had met during the war, came to him with a problem. The ship he was serving on as a mechanic was without power, stuck in one of the Welland Canal Locks near St. Catharines. Something had gone wrong with the engines, and they would not turn. My grandfather came to the rescue, and solved the problem. The massive ship was moving once more, and the grateful captain gave my grandfather the ship's wheel as a trophy for his deeds. Not entirely sure what to do with it, my grandfather mounted it on the wall in the family room behind his chair and effectively forgot about it. Until one day he noticed the wheel had turned slightly. The king spoke of the wheel had a brass cap on it, so a helmsman could tell at which point in the wheel's rotation the rudder was straight, and my grandfather had mounted the wheel with the king spoke straight up. But now, it was turned one spoke to the right. It was still fastened tightly to the wall, and took fair bit of strength to turn, but turn it had and on it's own. Several days later he found out that his friend, the mechanic, had passed away. Years past, and he would occasionally discover the wheel turned yet another notch. And each time, a few days later, he would be notified of another funeral for a friend he had known during the war. My grandfather himself passed away forty years ago, and my grandmother moved from that house some twenty years ago. When she did, she sent the wheel to me for reasons I cannot explain. She never told me the full story, only that the wheel had been a gift from a grateful captain, but it did puzzle me as I lived on the other side of the continent at that point, in Victoria, British Columbia, and the shipping cost must have been exorbitant. It was my mother who filled me in, after she saw it mounted on the wall of my own living room some years later. I thought it was a funny story, as my grandmother was an odd duck who was full of many weird tales. But it was just a story. I moved again, and remounted the wheel with the king spoke straight up as it had slipped at some point and was pointing off to one side. This time I tightened down the hub nut until I couldn't turn the wheel without putting my entire weight behind it. That would be the end of that. My grandmother passed away last year, and I found the wheel had turned a notch. My wife and I didn't find it quite so funny of a story anymore, and we've been watching it ever since. Three days ago the wheel turned. [EDIT, and some explanation for those who are curious: Yes, this story is true, up to a point. I do indeed have this wooden ship's wheel, which had been given to my grandfather as he had done *something* to fix the engines of a vessel stuck in the Welland Canal. Dunno exactly what, as he passed away before I was old enough to be curious about it. There's no plaque or anything written on it to indicate what ship or the year, which I find unfortunate, but I have no reason to doubt that part of the story. The deviation is that the last time I moved, I didn't put the wheel up. It's in a store room with a pile of other things I just haven't quite figured out what to do with. But the story about the wheel turning when someone died? That's something my Nanna (my grandmother) did tell people. She was fun that way.)

Oh wow. I had thought those were all just image swaps of the same half-dozen reactions. I didn't realize they are being tracked as independent reactions. All those different teacups... The things you learn.

Heh, I always change my avatar for Nightmare Night. Someday I'll mock up a big version of this character in costume.... Heck, someday I might even give this character a name...

Yeah, totally on board with Dragonlands here. I mean, the tsundere Ember *and* the unpredictable Buffy? Can't beat that. @Jeric is going to hurt me though, for going against Rarity. Ah well, them's the breaks.

Huh, I guess Sin City really should have gone with Tom on that draft...

Yup. Honestly, though, I think she prefers track & field events with regards to sports. Marathons to test endurance, pulling in harness for strength, that kind of thing...

Yeah, this is something that I was aware of when I was an admin here. Sometimes a tech pone has to jiggle something in the back end to get an email address change to go through. he process used to be to send an email to support@mlpforums.com, or go through the Support ticket menu above, and explain there what's going on. It'll get to one of the tech pones and they'll take it from there.