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Progress report on next Homestuck post

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My next Homestuck post, which will be the 56th one in my post series, is taking somewhat longer than I hoped. My last post covered 63 pages, and my next post will cover 66 pages; that’s not that many more pages, but those have a lot of long dialogue that takes me a while to get through.

I’d say I’m about 60% through writing my next post. For some details, the post I’m working on covers all the options in these two selection screens. The first screen contains six options, all but one of which have long pesterlogs. I am partway through the fourth of six options in that screen since getting back to the post series three days ago, so I’m more than halfway through that one. The next selection screen has five options, only three with dialogue, and only one with particularly long dialogue. Basically this means I have about two and a half long chunks of dialogue left to cover, plus some shorter stuff. Hopefully I can get it done in the next day or two.

The next post after the one I’m working on will cover only 34 pages and hopefully won’t take too long. After that one there will be only two more posts until I finally reach Act 6!

EDIT (6/29/2016): Now my next post is about 90% done, and I should be able to release it today. It’s going to be really long.

Modification to my Homestuck posting schedule

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(Note: I’m dropping the “Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary” thing.)

As you may have noticed, I did not end up releasing a Homestuck post this morning. Turns out that my twice-a-week schedule was indeed too much for me.

Instead, my summer post schedule will be new posts every 3 to 5 days. This will depend on how long it takes me to write a post. If a post takes five days to make, then I guess that’s how long it takes. If two posts in a row only take three days to make, then that would be faster than my intended post schedule. I hope to release my next post in a few hours. EDIT: Either that, or tomorrow morning. We’ll see. I’m almost done with this post but I only have a few hours left for today.

Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 7: Summer Posting Schedule

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NOTE: This post was edited two days after release because me getting a laptop during the summer is more likely than I thought.

Months ago, I said that during summer I may speed up my posting schedule from the rate of every five days. Yesterday was the last day of school, so now I can do a faster posting schedule as I promised.

During the three months of summer break, I will return to (a slight variant of) my original post schedule: new posts every Thursday morning and Sunday evening. Or at least, I’ll see if that schedule works out. If that’s too fast of a rate for me, which I feel that it probably won’t be, then I’ll slightly slow down to maybe every four days. This new post schedule will be in effect starting tomorrow, which is when I’ll release my next post.

Now, I won’t be posting during all of summer. Among the approximately thirteen weeks I have off school, four of them will be on vacation: two weeks away in June, one in July, and one in August. I will soon turn in my school-provided laptop, so currently the best computer I’ll have on me for vacation is my incredibly outdated iPod touch, which is really hard to write posts on. However, if I’m lucky I might get my hands on a laptop of my own during the summer. I’ll tell you when I’m on vacation when it happens, and if I do get a laptop then the vacations might still have posts after all.

All this means that I’ll have anywhere between eight and thirteen weeks total of the summer posting schedule, until I get back to school and see what happens then.

For now I’ll say this. My Homestuck blog post series has become a considerably bigger project than I envisioned at first, just like my large number site. At first it was just telling what’s going on in the story and sometimes making remarks about it. But now, I’m analyzing the story in a level of depth I originally didn’t want to go into, but that I now wish I did the whole time. With my large number site, I would regularly edit my old articles to match them up with the current style, though I feel that I can’t really do the same to my blog post series given that it’s specifically meant as commenting as I go. Well, I did edit some of my earlier posts but it was mostly relatively small edits. I’ve thought about doing remastered versions of my earlier posts, and while I still am considering doing that eventually, it won’t be editing the early posts in their entirety. Maybe when this post series is finished I’ll do the remastering stuff and release it as some kind of grand online document? I don’t know. This project has still been a lot of fun for me.

Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 5: Holding Off Posts, Probably

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So Homestuck, the comic I’ve been blogging about for nearly half a year now, just resumed. And when I saw the news, I got super hyped to read it; heart beating, fingers twitching, loads of energy within my body that can only be released through running and jumping around. It sounds like a story of a guy preparing for the BIG GAME (it’s sports) rather than a random dude finding that the famed webcomic he’s overly invested in has updated after 8 months of pause, but that’s exactly what I felt like.

Lots of thoughts are running through my head about everything that went down in the new update. So many that I feel that working on my Homestuck post series during that time will interfere with those thoughts. During that time period I’ll mostly hold off posts to collect thoughts.

According to the news post the final updates are as follows:

3/28-4/2: 125 pages of updates

4/3-4/5: no updates

4/6: End of Act 6 animation(s)

4/7-4/13: 40 pages of updates, last one is the entirety of Act 7, the final act

So here’s my tentative plan. Unless I feel like making these posts again during the updates (which is entirely possible given how much I’ve failed to stick to plans with this post series), the series will progress as follows. Next post will be April 5, with the pause before the EoA6 update to write most of it. Although there’s no guarantee that’ll happen, the extra time might, and I say might, make the next post be super-length. Next post after that will be a bit after the 13th, then back to posts everfy five days. Maybe I’ll also write posts about the final stretch of updates during/after it’s all posted.

Like I said, I’m posting my reactions to the updates on my Tumblr. So if you want to keep up with my ramblings about that weird anime with those gray horoscope aliens during the final stretch of updates, go there. 

Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 4: After the Comic Resumes

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So I was browsing the various Homestuck discussion boards and stumbled upon this Reddit post, which leaked news from one of the author’s friends that the comic is already finished, it would resume very soon, and end next April 13, its seventh anniversary. Previously readers were led to believe it would resume April 13 by extrapolating from the following values: on February 1, 2016, the end of Act 6 was 30% finished, and on March 7, the end of Act 6 was 65% finished, placing the completion date and by association the time the comic resumes nicely at April 13. But seeing the news that it’ll resume probably in late March is quite a shock. I was prepared to make this post about the blog after the comic resumes a few days before the comic’s birthday, but now I guess I should make that post right now.

On April 13—previously the presumed resume date and now the designated end date of Homestuck—my post series should be around page 5500. That’s a good ways into the section of Act 5 Act 2 known as Murderstuck, and not far from the Doc Scratch intermission. I guess this means that the portion between where I am now and roughly page 5500 will be the portion I’m commenting on during the comic’s final stretch of updates. I was kind of hoping to comment on more stuff during that time, but I’m sure I’ll have interesting stuff to say during those two weeks or so.

What’s good about this whole thing is that much of my commentary posted before the comic resumed will probably be funny in hindsight, maybe with some on-the-dot accurate predictions, maybe with some predictions that were completely different from what really happens. After the point I’ll be at when Homestuck has its grand finale, my post series will go as I originally wanted it to be: done after the comic is complete and all plot threads are resolved. I was kind of hoping to be further through my post series at that point but whatever. Though it would have been cool to do this whole project after Homestuck is over, it’s fun in hindsight to see what I thought might happen after the comic resumes.

Something else: I plan on blogging my reaction to the final updates as they are posted as many readers do, most likely on my Tumblr blog. I posted my reaction online for parts of the previous stretch of updates but not the whole thing, largely out of laziness.

Also, happy Easter everyone.

Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 3: Character Selection Screens

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Unlike my previous two posts of this type, this one is pretty short; it’s just something I’ve been meaning to say about how I’ll do this post series.

Every so often, Homestuck will have character selection screens, where you can select which order to read parts of the story. To spice things up, I will try to avoid doing those in the most common order. This means that in two-option selection screens I will do them in reverse order (for example, in this selection screen I’ll first do Jake, then Jane, rather than what most readers do), and in selection screens with three or more options I will do it in random order. This is practically a moot point for the “click the panels” selection screens, but for the other ones it is relevant.

Neat-looking blog view I just got done

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NOTE: This post is basically meaningless now that this blog has been migrated to WordPress, but I’m preserving it anyway because why not.

So I just got done giving most of my blog posts title pictures that are done in such a way that blog views which show a rundown of each post will have a picture for each post. And the blog post tiles in the flipcard view look REALLY nice:

I could stare at this shit for hours.

If you’re wondering how I did that, it’s simple: for each post, the first picture that’s uploaded from your computer (not from an image URL) will be the one used to represent the post. If there’s no such pictures there won’t be such a picture for the post, which is why most of my posts previously didn’t have representing images in those blog views.

A gem of a blog I found

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http://prettyprettyponies.blogspot.com

Yes I know the link sounds like a blog about My Little Pony before it became an Internet phenomenon. But it isn’t really that, more like something I find really hilariously amazing that it exists. To explain this awesome Internet find I’ll need to explain why I think it’s cool.

If you didn’t know, I’m currently working on a video series where I read aloud this edit of the Pony Pals book Detective Pony. The edited book originated as something from Homestuck, where one character edited Detective Pony to make it funnier and gave it to another character for her birthday. The first few edited pages were shown, and someone decided to edit the whole book, and it’s glorious.

When I find out about cool things, I tend to get way into them, which is why my big projects exist: my large number site, my Homestuck blog post series, and my Detective Pony video series. Recently I used Google Books to read bits and pieces of the original unmodified Pony Pals books, just to see how incredibly dull they are with clichéd plots and stuff. I know those books are meant for little kids so of course there will be dumb stuff, but it’s still really funny to read them.

So I decided to google things about Pony Pals, specifically seeing if every damn book mentions that Anna (one of the main characters) is dyslexic, a fact the books always seem to take a moment to bring up but is pretty much never relevant to the story as far as I know. The modified version of Detective Pony even parodies this by making Anna’s dyslexia very relevant to the plot 3/4 of the way through the story. In the aforementioned Google search, I came across the blog I linked to at the top of this post.

It’s an old blog which hasn’t been updated since 2011 where some teenage girl named Lauren first dissected all the Pony Pals books, then started dissecting other kids’ books. It actually reminds me a lot of my Homestuck blog post series: she commented (pretty negatively) on all the Pony Pals books, then the commentary gradually became less angry and more sincere to the point of having favorite and least favorite moments in the end. Later she wrote something which is apparently a fanfiction of the Pony Pals six years later when they’re in high school?

I’ve gotten pretty carried away with my Homestuck blog post series, and seeing a similar post series about Pony Pals is pretty enjoyable. I’ve thought of reading the whole Pony Pals book series just to see how ridiculous it is, and it looks like someone actually did that, with blogged commentary and everything!

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As absurd as it may sound, I want to read that book series now.

Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 2: Faster Progress Needed?

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TL;DR: I want to finish my Homestuck blog post series before I lose interest in this personal project, but this may not work if I keep following through with my current posting schedule. I will see if I’m able to make a post every five days rather than every week or speed up progress even further than that, especially during school breaks.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve slowed down progress on my Homestuck blog post series quite a bit, and I wanted to make a blog post talking about that.

For the first three months of this blog post series, I made a post covering about 100 pages every 3.5 days. If Homestuck ends at page 10,000 of MSPA—which is a likely estimate given what Hussie has said in his news posts—and if I were to have followed through with my original schedule through this whole post series—then this blog series would have taken a total of nine months. But my recent trends following my grand change of plans would make this take much longer. My first post following this change was released on a Sunday, next one a week after that, next one a week and two days after that. If I were to continue my general pattern of 50 pages a week with all of the remaining pages—and that’s still assuming Homestuck ends at page 10,000—then I would have two years of posts to go. I’m not even sure if I could keep a project going for that long, and my end goal is to finish my blog post series. This presents a problem for my ending goal.

Ever since I was little, I’ve had a history of starting these big projects, and almost always abandoning them at some point. And like I said in my hiatus post, I’ve realized that I’ve gotten better at following through projects, and I said that it would be a shame for me to abandon this post series. But if I want to keep going at this project I would still need to be into Homestuck, and I’m not sure if I can be into something for that long of a time. Typically I have various interest phases last for a year or two and most often end with lingering with less strength. This will no doubt happen to my current interest in Homestuck. So if I want to finish this post series and not abandon it out of disinterest, I’ll need to speed this up somewhat.

Now I totally could make posts at a faster rate than what I’m doing. Why am I not doing that? When I realized stuff about how this post series took up too much of my time, I decided to push it way to the bottom of my priorities, below even my other projects. But I’m still not sure if I could go just as well putting this project higher in my priorities—after all, my other projects are also pretty easy distractions. If I made a post covering 50 pages twice a week instead of once a week, I would have a year of posts to go. That’s a good bit more feasible than staying into Homestuck for another two years. After all, the comic will almost certainly end within this year, and after that, its popularity will definitely decrease but stay substantial because of its sister project, the upcoming Homestuck-based video game Hiveswap.

Remember how I put a hiatus on this blog post series to focus on school work? Well, that clearly didn’t go as far as I thought it would. I constantly hear of people never having free time because of school stuff, so I’m inclined to think the same will generally happen to me during spells of homework loads. But I can never quite overcome the urge to slack off (though I have gotten somewhat better), which may be part of why in the finals weeks, I still made two posts a week; the other reason might just be because honestly, I didn’t have that much studying to do during that time.

When writing this post, a thought ran through my head that when I feel ready to, I could go back to making posts twice a week. But that would be kind of like going back to square one, because I started this post series by making posts twice a week. OK, that technically isn’t true; I originally wanted to make this post series weekly, but I quickly changed it to twice-weekly. But the point still stands. It may, and I repeat may, be feasible to do posts as I currently do them but twice a week. But I would need to speed things up somewhat to do that. Originally, it would go like this: publish a post, write up my next post the same day, spend the next few days revising it. But as time passed, I would sometimes spend a day without working on my post series, or write posts over multiple days rather than one day, slowing progress, not to mention that my posts have gotten way longer as they progressed. I could just publish a post as soon as I’m done, but I like having revising time because I always think of quite a bit of stuff to add to my commentary that I didn’t have when first writing up my post; I even sometimes add commentary to a post after publishing it.

But not all is lost. During breaks from school, I could probably speed up production from what I currently do. Maybe during regular school weeks I could publish a post about every five days, and during breaks I could do faster than that, like every three days. That might actually work pretty well. The weird thing about this big plan is, this isn’t something important to my real life, rather a fun personal project, which makes me wonder why I should care this much, and made me question this post series in the first place. But the bottom line is, I want to finish this project before I lose interest, and I’m not totally sure how to make that goal attainable.

Next post will be Sunday, then I’ll try doing a post every five days and see how that works.

Homestuck post series hiatus (a.k.a. Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 1)

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TL;DR: I’m making a post in my Homestuck post series on January 3, then I’m pausing my Homestuck blog post series for at most three months to see what it’s like without dedicating so much time to that post series, followed by perhaps a less intensive schedule, I’m not sure.

If you’ve noticed I’ve put my latest (read: only) blog post series on hiatus for the past week because of vacation. This isn’t entirely true: I realized at the last minute that I could bring my school-provided laptop there (which I did) but I still didn’t bother working on the post series, instead using that stretch of time to focus on my other projects. I’ve thought about this whole post series which has all these long wordy paragraphs and stuff, and I’ve been thinking, it’s probably a pretty awful use of my time with all my school stuff. I’m not sure how much of an effect it’s had on my grades and stuff but I know for a fact I’ve taken a good amount of energy working on this post series. I think I’ll put my post series on temporary pause to see, how will I go about different without doing this post series?

For as long as I can remember I’ve had an affinity for doing really big projects for fun. I doubt I’m the only person who came up with countless ideas for big ambitious projects as a kid but hardly finished any of them. It’s been this way for a pretty long time, but in the past year or so I’ve figured out how to actually follow through with some of these projects. For the past few months I’ve been juggling three big projects: my large number website, my Homestuck commentary post series, and a read-aloud of a ball-bustingly hilarious edit of Detective Pony. The first one I am making efforts to focus more on, the second I feel like I’ve been working on too much, and the third is an odd case since I can only work on it on my desktop computer, the one I generally use for spare time stuff; as a consequence of this, it usually doesn’t intermingle with whatever homework I have to do like the other two projects do.

Homestuck is a fairly popular topic to write about, so I’m not even sure how much of my commentary is that original and insightful. But I’ve seen a few commentaries of the webcomic—rereads, first reads, and otherwise—and they’re all really fun to read and often make you think, wow how didn’t I catch that? or whoa that’s a pretty interesting way to think of this thing. That’s why I started my post series, so I could do similar commentary and potentially realize things and stuff like that. It’s been pretty fun writing these posts—there’s no point in denying that. I like saying whatever I have to say about stuff in Homestuck, but despite how much I like writing these blog posts, I think it’s worth going on a pause for the reasons I listed in the first paragraph.

This announcement begs the question: how long will the pause last? Even though I said above that it’ll last at most 3 months I feel like the length could use some elaboration. I really honestly can’t make any promises on how long the pause will last (might only be a week or two), other than that I don’t plan on permanently shutting off the blog post series at this point. I already have plenty of ideas for stuff to say about later parts of Homestuck, especially the more recent content, and given that it would be a shame (for me at least) to shut the whole series down. I’ve decided that I won’t pause this post series for more than three months. But there’s another point I could elaborate on.

After the pause is over, will I return to my regular twice-weekly posting schedule? The answer: I don’t know. The post schedule I followed for a few months worked pretty nicely. Typically I would release a post, write the next post soon after, then spend the remaining time before my designated release time revising the post. Unless I somehow couldn’t find enough time to work on my posts, that schedule worked pretty well for me. It would make sense that I would spend less time working on the post series after I finished the pause, but that would require deviating from a satisfying schedule. Maybe I could try being less awful at time management and only work on it after finishing daily homework or something? I really don’t know, just throwing around ideas here.

I will make one more Homestuck post before starting the pause. Right now it’s winter break and I only have tiny amounts of school stuff to do. Vacation’s almost over and I don’t know how much time I’ll be spending out of the house through the rest of break (ends January 3 for me), but I’ll probably have enough time to work on another blog post which will be posted on the last day of break. It’s worth doing so because I could already try my hand at my new posting style which I talked about in my latest Homestuck post.

That’s about all I have to say. At some point after my next post, I’ll eventually make another announcement after I’ve decided more stuff about the future of this post series.