What’s next for my MLP episode reviews?

It’s been almost a month since I released my review of the season 5 finale, and for once in this post series’ history, my hiatus between seasons has actually lasted without being artificially extended by delaying posts’ releases. While my reviews of the season 3, 4, and 5 premieres had all been written several weeks before their releases, I still haven’t started writing my review of the season 6 premiere, and I’ll release it on the first Friday after it’s finished because delaying posts under the illusion of a hiatus is silly.

It’ll be a while before I get bored enough to resume my episode reviews, or probably work on any significant creative projects at all. This is because I got an offer for a new house accepted a few days ago, and I’ve spent the past few days and will spend much of the next month preparing to move in. This is going to sound dorky, but writing my review of Castle Sweet Castle early in season 5 has genuinely helped me prepare for this inevitable future event. Once I’ve moved and settled in, presumably around mid-January, then I can think about starting the next leg of my journey through MLP:FiM.


OK, I’ll admit it: everything after this point is just a bunch of random rambling. 2022 was in many ways a difficult year for me: my parents got separated, I went through many periods of frustration with a job that I want to quit but am not sure how, I caught COVID-19 for the first time, and I felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. The two main good things that happened took months of stagnation to even become possible: I got my own car and, after a miraculous stroke of luck, I got a new house to move into. Aside from this, ponies were the main thing that helped me get through this year, and for that I am very grateful.

One inevitable annoyance of working on a long-term project is looking back on the earliest installments and going “ugh, this sucks”. The further I progress through my reviews of the show, the more I will need to restrain myself from rewriting my early reviews. Whenever I look back on my review of a season 1 episode, I keep thinking about how I barely glossed over most of it and could have gone in a lot more detail and said more intelligent things. But the rational part of me knows to accept imperfections in my old work, as begrudging as it may be. It’s like I said in a Homestuck post from 2016: “I’ll probably look back on THESE posts and think they could’ve been a lot better, but for now, as far as I’m concerned they are supreme masterpieces that I am totally in love with.” 2016 me was wrong about many things, but that wasn’t one of them.

Aside from episode reviews and a few chiptune covers of songs from the show (like this), there’s one more MLP project I made this year that I never thought I would make. Two weeks ago, I finished my first ever MLP fanfic, one that’s on a topic I had never expected myself to write a fic about: Rarity being transgender (specifically, male-to-female). It was a difficult fic to write, but I also had a lot of fun with it, and people have told me it’s both accurate to the experience of being transgender and accurate to the show’s presentation and style, which is good because that’s exactly what I wanted this fic to be. I used to scoff at transgender headcanons, but now I think it’s really cool when people have them, and they’re fun ways to connect to or give further insight into a character. This likely won’t be the last fanfic I write, because that’s the sort of person I’ve chosen to become.

While my thoughts on transgender topics have long been complicated and mixed, I’m now at a point where I pretty much get what it means and have fully accepted a difficult truth: Transgender people are real. I know it’s hard for many people to accept, but they are real, and they’ve always been real. Anyone who denies they’re real either doesn’t know any better or actively suppresses things that they know deep down are true, and I’m proud to say I’m now at a point where I could rant about how mind-numbingly stupid it is when people try to deny that transgender people are real.

Wow, this post got way off topic. But I guess it’s in my nature to write unfocused walls of text at any opportunity.

Update on my MLP posts + life stuff in general

The past week has been a weird week for me.

While my real-life job has been on stagnation, I spent much of the past week blitzing through the Homestuck reread I mentioned in this post, especially in the last few days leading up to 4/13 (the last day of the reread). That, and blasting my way through five MLP episode reviews,* until I cleared the halfway point of season 4 earlier today. Writing all those reviews has been fun, but it’s now left me feeling very exhausted. As such, I want to cool off for quite a while before I review the second half of season 4.

* Pinkie Apple Pie, Rainbow Falls, Three’s a Crowd, Pinkie Pride, and Simple Ways if you’re curious.

I don’t want to get too personal in this blog, but I’ll just say my mental health has been a mess through this whole year so far, largely due to work frustration. I want my personal projects to be fun side things I do as my life goes smoothly, not something I turn to to avoid confronting problems in life. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a show that I hold a deep attachment to, one it took me a long time to finally own up to. But I know that obsessing with a work of media can be dangerous, and I don’t want my relationship with that show to collapse or be soured like it was in 2014. Nor do I want myself to get so burnt out with this episode review project that I pause it for a year or more. So for the next month or so, I’d like to confront some of these life problems and either make big changes to my job or find a new one that isn’t as frustrating, because I know I’m at an age where motivation to move forward in life has to come from myself. Not to mention that I want to be in a good mood when I go on a family trip to Spain in a month, so that I don’t feel bummed out when I arrive back home a week later.

As for personal projects outside of work over the next month, nothing in life gives me the same burst of joy as working on music. I’ll try to focus on that a bit more while I cool off and try to sort things out in life. Another thing I’d like to get started on soon is updating the content on my dinosaur of a large number site called Pointless Large Number Stuff to move to the new Google Sites, since I kind of have no choice now.

See you soon!

Progress update for my MLP posts

A week ago, I started working on my first MLP season 4 post: the review of Princess Twilight Sparkle, parts 1 and 2. Currently I’m a little over halfway through part 1. And I have the following update to make: until mid-April, my season 4 posting schedule will probably be a little slow. I still plan on releasing the first season 4 post on March 11, but after that, it’s likely I will skip weeks and perhaps even go on an every two weeks schedule instead of every week. What’s the reason why, you may ask?

Well, um…

*scratches my hand behind my head like a flustered anime boy*

… I’ve kind of been rereading Homestuck again. Let’s be real, what did you think I meant by mid-April? As long as I’m alive, I’ll probably view 4/13 as a holiday on par with Thanksgiving and Christmas, because my brain is fucked up.

The Unofficial Homestuck Discord is hosting another community reread like it did in early 2019 when leading up to 4/13, except this time I want to really commit to it. I’m on Act 4, and I’ve been constantly holding back the temptation to update or rewrite my Homestuck posts all over again, because I’ve been making tons and tons of new observations that I had never noticed before! Alas, now that I’ve finished my Homestuck post series, I think it’s best to leave the posts as is and not do any rewrites anymore. Especially because I have some amount of real life things to worry about.

Another project that will slow down my MLP posts is the last four covers for my upcoming album, The SRB2 8-Bit Cover Collection: Volume 2. Watch this video for more information. I said I planned to release the album in March, and I don’t want to forget that promise. I want to prioritize making the last leg of the album over my MLP posts until I get that done, because getting projects done feels so much better than endlessly putting them off.

Homestuck post series update (for the last time)

I’ve finished writing my final Homestuck post!!! It’s all on track to release on September 20, the sixth anniversary of the first post.

Over the next few days, I’ll reread my Homestuck post series in order and go along the way fixing mistakes one last time, and perhaps trimming down on the retroactive edits as I’ve already said. I’ll be busy with an upcoming full-time job, but if I have some time to spare, rereading those posts sounds like a nice thing to do as I take a week-long break from Internet presence.

Did I mention I’ll take a week-long break from Internet presence? It’s because of my upcoming job, which I feel it’s only right to prioritize. The break won’t start today; it will be from September 13 to 19. And then on the 20th, my final Homestuck post will be released, and all will be well. I’ll see you then!!!

(Holy shit, I’m really excited to be done with my Homestuck posts.)

My MLP episode review posts will be going on hiatus…

… until I finish my Homestuck posts. I only have 11 Homestuck posts left, and I should be able to finish them well within the end of this year. Once I finish those posts, a huge weight will be lifted off my back, and I can move on to other insanely ambitious projects that no normal person would ever think of doing!

That’s all, bye.

Change of plans regarding my rewritten Homestuck posts

My classic Homestuck blog post series, the one I’ve been writing on and off since 2015, is on the verge of completion. I have only 14 posts left (start of A6A6I5 to the Snapchat credits), which is maybe more like the verge of the verge of completion, but it still truly feels like the final stretch! I’m greatly looking forward to the day I finish my Homestuck post series and the triumphant feeling of completion that it will surely bring… but what does that mean for my rewritten posts?

I had originally planned to end my rewritten Homestuck posts with the end of Act 5 Act 1 (the trolls’ arc), but I decided a few days ago that it would be better to finish those with the end of Act 4 instead. I’ve chosen this earlier cutoff point because I’m not motivated enough to finish my rewritten posts all the way up to Act 5 Act 1, but I still want to finish those at a natural cutoff point. I’ve been sitting on my next rewritten post (Act 4, part 2 of 6) since early March, and I’d love to finish rewriting my Act 4 posts before I’m finished with my Homestuck post series as a whole. Four and a half rewritten posts doesn’t seem like a tall order alongside the fourteen classic posts I’ve yet to write (after I write my Psycholonials review post, I have only one chapter before I’ve finished playing/reading it).

I had long wanted my rewritten posts to effectively supersede my original Homestuck posts, but now I think that if someone were to subject themselves to reading my Homestuck posts in comic order, it would be most interesting to start with the original posts and see my writing style and opinions on Homestuck evolve over time. As such, I’m not as fond of the idea of rewriting my Homestuck posts as I used to be, but I still want to give them a proper cutoff point rather than abruptly ending partway through Act 4.

For real, though, I want to finish my Homestuck post series as soon as I can so that I never have to think about Homestuck again! Even though I know deep down that I’ll never truly be free from Homestuck, it will be very liberating when I’m done with this ambitious project that I’ve willfully subjected myself to and could cancel at any time but have merely chosen not to. I can finish my Homestuck posts, and I will finish my Homestuck posts, much unlike what I thought during my nearly two years of hiatus through most of 2017 and 2018.

Random blog update

  • WordPress is still dreadfully buggy and annoying to use
  • This semester is still an insane workload and I’ve dedicated my remaining creative energy to music stuff
  • Homestuck^2 so far is absolute garbage and I hate even acknowledging that it exists
  • Sonic Robo Blast 2 v2.2 is the actual best thing ever and if you haven’t played it yet you’re really missing out

Also, I’ve been sitting on my next mainline Homestuck post (part 103) which has been unfinished for over a month now. I doubt I’ll get this post series back into the swing of things until May at the very earliest, unfortunately. Know that despite this current burnout, I probably always will love Homestuck to death.

In the mean time, I’ll go ahead and post an underappreciated track (click the link) made for the SiIvaGunner: King for Another Day Tournament, a giant musical project that was arguably the most fun I had doing anything ever.

Update on slow posting schedule

Trust me, I won’t let my promise of having a faster Homestuck post schedule in 2020 go unfulfilled. I really should have mentioned sooner on this blog that my laptop hasn’t been in good condition since last September, which is a big part of why my posts were released so slowly in the last few months of the year. Now I’ve finally gotten around to ordering a new laptop, which should arrive a few days from now. My posts will most definitely be faster, for real, and I mean it this time, when the new computer happens.

Homestuck post 101 coming in the next few days!

I’m on a trip to California right now until the 31st (immediately followed by MAGFest 2020 as I’ve mentioned before), and though I don’t normally write blog posts while on vacation, I was already over halfway through my 101st Homestuck post so I’ve decided I will finish that post during vacation. Right now I only have a few pages left to cover so you should expect that post to come at most a few days from now! It’ll probably be my last Homestuck post of 2019.