A visitor from Earth would be surprised by the large number of sapient species that live here. The last census recognized sixty-seven of them, with humans making up approximately half of the population. If they were from the early 21st century, they would also be stunned by the tech level and the si...
The most devastating conflict in the history of our world was the Shard War, fought some seven hundred odd years ago between the Empire and the Deep Alliance. It lasted close to eight years and resulted in the deaths of close to eight million sophonts. (At the time, the population of the world was j...
The Empress (or Emperor) generally designates their own successor. In the past this was frequently a close relative (and in the more distant past, it was always the eldest child if one existed); this has fallen out of fashion, but is still permitted. The successor is subject to approval by the Assem...
Eternity. The Empire has survived long enough to solve (for the time being) some of the seemingly fundamental problems of life and civilization (eg conflict, disease, ecological stability, mortality) and face some of the more interesting ones, like: Can a civilization sustain itself and yet make rep...
So, in Fake It Til You Make It Fluttershy tries to overcome her lack of confidence by playing a character, but she overdoes it and the character turns out to be kind of mean. Hm.
In below median rankings (but especially those that are 99% or 100%), would it be possible to display the percentage rank from the bottom instead? Currently the top 1% is shown to within 0.1 percentage points, but this precision doesn't exist at the other end. It's possible to calculate it from the ...
I don't think it is controversial to say that it is morally wrong to say (or even hint) that someone should be raped. No exceptions. I've seen several people (whom I thought better of) do a take on this along the lines of "waaah the judge was not nice to the rapist", which is one of the mo...
Hey guys, sorry to spam this in Technical, but I know many you rely on this archive for stuff. :) I've migrated the archive over to a new host (from an aging RackSpace instance to a DigitalOcean droplet, specifically), and I'm about to switch the DNS. There should be no downtime during propagation a...
See Cyclis Mundi for a detailed explanation of Ermarianese time-keeping. To summarize: The year is divided in eight months of thirty-five days, each of which is about 12.5% longer than Earth's. The year begins on the first of Evermoon, roughly half a month after winter solstice. All four points of t...
Originally, we just have a solstice celebration that coincides with the new year on Ermarian. However, off-world traditions and rituals (mostly in secularized form) have sort of percolated into the Empire via cultural osmosis over the past century. Our winter celebrations now share some elements of ...
The Empress, though married to a man, identifies as bisexual. Her chief vizier is lesbian (and also married). Her daughter is pansexual, and also married. To a magical flying pony. I don't think I need to go on.
No world map, but some of the Empire's four continents have one. This is Pralgad: https://encyclopedia.ermarian.net/w/images/3/36/Pralgad.gif This is Valorim (that one is canon; copyright Spiderweb Software): https://encyclopedia.ermarian.net/w/images/7/75/Valorim_provinces.gif This is Vantanas: htt...
Plucked up the courage to actually go to a cinema to see the horsemovie. I was one of maybe ten people in the audience, and the only non-parent adult :unsure: . The film itself was definitely worth it, though. The art style is kind of jarringly different, but still recognisable, and the songs are pr...
You'd have to go back over three thousand years, long before the fall of the First Empire and the Age of Chaos, but human settlement on the Pralgadian continent originated on Aizo. The Aizoan Empire grew beyond the capacity of its natural resources and so colonized first Pralgad and then Vantanas to...
It is called a house, which is a sort of artificial cave-like structure that can be built out of different materials but usually mainly stone. More specifically, though, the current Imperial Palace in the City of Dawn is a relatively recent construction (three hundred years old) and used to be the p...
The Endless Empire was founded just over twenty-two centuries ago by Arcadian Sol I. , ending the simmering conflict among the Pralgadian former colonies of the First Empire beyond the sea. (This period was known as the Age of Chaos, and lasted almost five hundred years from the collapse of the Firs...
I'll confess: MLP:FiM and its fandom has filled a role that religion once played in my life--it provides moral guidance in the context of a community of shared stories, simple enough to grasp but capable of complex interpretation. (I still sometimes entertain the idea of the show becoming a sort of...
I haven't caught up in a while; currently as far as Fame and Misfortune. - This is the cutest thing that has been in an episode in a while: https://i.imgur.com/ONARMX5m.jpg I like small ponies and I like ponies holding things in their mouths and I like ponies standing on their hindlegs, so this is a...
He exists, but he never entered the world stage, since the timeline radically diverges in the 1990s due to First Contact. By now nobody on Earth remembers a failed businessman from three hundred years ago - and nobody in Ermarian ever heard of him.
Private possession is outlawed, but it'd be pretty hard to break that law anyway. Authorized firearms have trackers and palm locks, and they'd be rendered inert if stolen or sold.
