Tag Archives: announcement

My plans for pre-show posts on Eurovision 2025

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In case you guys didn’t know, I will be going to Basel for Eurovision 2025! I’ve already pre-registered for tickets this year, so let’s hope I’m able to get some. Since this is my third time following Eurovision live, my plan was to do something different this year and not spoil myself on any of the songs. But upon further consideration, I’ve decided I will watch a small handful of national finals this Eurovision season, and write blog posts about three of them. This will inevitably mean I will spoil myself on four entries for 2025, and leave myself unspoiled on the other 34.

The first national final I’ll review is Latvia’s Supernova 2025 (semifinal February 1, final Feb 8). The 20 songs for this selection are already out and I’ve heard so many good things them that I figured, why not watch the show live? Dons brought Latvia to the grand final for the first time since 2016, which seemed to give them a big confidence boost for next Eurovision. Their selection has seven songs in Latvian, which is pretty awesome because the last few selections only had one or two each. It’ll be a good way to get acquainted with a language I know very little about.

The second selection for me to review is the big one: Chefsache ESC 2025: Wer singt für Deutschland? Stefan Raab, the man who organized Germany’s selection in 2010 which led Lena to win Eurovision, is back from a nine-year retirement from the TV screen and is intent on giving Germany their third Eurovision victory. I’m absolutely stoked to see what he has cooked up and excited to describe what the national final was like for those who don’t speak German. The heats are on February 14 and 15, the semifinal is on Feb 22, and the final is on March 1.

And the third national final that I’ll review is Portugal’s Festival da Canção (semifinals Feb 22 and Mar 1, final Mar 8). The reason I plan to watch that one is simple: because I trust Portugal. I also plan on watching the final of Sweden’s Melodifestivalen 2025 on March 8, but I don’t plan to write a blog post about it.

I’ve started to really miss writing Eurovision reviews since I finished reviewing the 2024 contest, so these blog posts will be a nice way to continue writing music reviews. Hopefully I can make them interesting even for those who didn’t watch the selections.

Quick update on my MLP blog posts

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Happy new year 2024! 2023 was a great year for me overall, the first one in which I truly felt like a responsible adult. The two best things I accomplished that year were moving into my own house and attending GalaCon 2023, my first ever pony con.

In celebration of the new year, I’ve made a small change to my MLP episode reviews: they will no longer be exclusively posted on Friday mornings.

In the early days of this blog post series, when my episode reviews were short and quick, a weekly queue helped smooth out my workflow. But now, I haven’t released new MLP posts two weeks in a row since March 2023. This means that the rule of releasing posts on Friday mornings only serves to make me put off starting my next post for the whole rest of the week. Now that my posts are more detailed and carefully written, it’s better off to release them as soon as I’ve finished writing them.

Come to think of it, the original weekly system is similar to how my Homestuck post series began, way back in 2015, except I didn’t have a queue system then. I originally wanted the posts to be weekly, but I switched to twice a week because I was writing them so quickly. Back then, it only took me a few hours to write a Homestuck post and I’d spend the next few days obsessively rereading it and proofreading. As my posts got more detailed, I tried various ways to keep a consistent schedule but they all fell apart. That’s how it always is with projects of this type: when the posts get more detailed, the originally spacious schedule is too tight for them.

Enough off-topic rambling. My next MLP post will cover two episodes: Hard to Say Anything and Honest Apple, the latter of which I’m currently working on. It’ll be released within the next few days!

Quick little announcement about my Eurovision blog post series

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For starters: I AM SO HAPPY THAT BELGIUM QUALIFIED FOR THE FINALS!!! I was worried that my boy Gustaph wouldn’t make it, but when he did… that was the loudest “YES” I had screamed in years.

Anyway, once Eurovision this year ends, I will make a quick little blog post describing what it was like watching my very first Eurovision Song Contest. This is so that I don’t have to wait a year or more before I write a blog post about Eurovision 2023. I will write a full review of the contest, song by song, once I’ve written posts about Eurovision 1956 to 2022. By then, my thoughts are sure to be a little different from today.

(Oh god. I’m really turning into a Eurovision nerd. What the fuck is wrong with me.)

(Uh… I promise I’ll make time to write my review of the MLP season 6 finale before I get too absorbed in the Eurovision posts.)

A few updates! (two Homestuck posts left, reformatting complete)

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So… I’ve finally done it. I’ve fixed formatting on every single post from before the move from Blogger to WordPress, and it only took me just shy of two years!! Now that that’s done, I’m ready to do the last two posts in my Homestuck blog post series, and boy is it an appropriate time to wrap this project up. The next phase of my life is really shaping up now—I have a new job starting in two weeks and will spend quite some time preparing for the job (or rather, the online training it starts with), but when I’m not preparing for it, a good thing to do would definitely be to wrap up this project that I started when I was a measly little high school student.

It’s truly mind-boggling that I have only two Homestuck posts left—138 posts complete, two yet to be done, and after that I’m finished for good. Here are my plans for the last two posts.

Homestuck post number 139: This one will cover all 18 minutes of [S] Collide and the visual panels that follow. I’m going to start working on it after I publish this post, and I estimate it will take a week to get done. Expect it to come out around September 6, give or take a few days. Collide is a flash that I don’t imagine I will analyze in too much depth relative to its length, at least not compared to [S] GAME OVER. And while there’s not a lot going on in the visual panels that follow, this post will likely end up pretty long anyway.

Homestuck post number 140: This one will cover all 9 minutes of Act 7, all 6 minutes of the Snapchat credits, and end with some closing words about how Homestuck has impacted my life and how it feels to be finished with this project. I will release it on September 20, the sixth anniversary of my first Homestuck post. Hussie took seven years to complete Homestuck; I will have taken six years to complete my Homestuck post series if things go as planned. I have a lot in mind for the post series’ closing words, and I hope it comes off as heartfelt instead of just plain rambly.

One more thing unrelated to Homestuck: You may know of my work in large numbers, specifically the site Pointless Large Number Stuff. You may also know that Google Sites as we know it is going away in two days—I could simply “upgrade” to the new Google Sites, but I know a lot of formatting and images would break, and a lot of features would be unsupported. Later this year, I plan on figuring out how and where to port the content over with new revisions and updates, plus some general cleaning up. I wish I could do this updating now, but it’s difficult to dip my feet back into a field I’ve long moved past, so porting the site’s content will instead serve as a nice little side thing to do when my job is progressing and my Homestuck posts are finished. But I have some good news about the large number site: you can consume its content exactly as originally intended through the Wayback Machine! And it looks like the same will hold true for the many other sites on large numbers hosted on Google Sites, given others’ archiving efforts. I’ve made HTML backups of all the site’s pages regardless, and those will no doubt come in handy for whenever I decide to move the content somewhere new. I’ll figure all this out eventually, but for now I have a Homestuck post series to finish!!

One more thing related to Homestuck: My rewritten posts are canceled because I’m really not motivated to do them anymore. Here’s what I finished of the latest one. At least I got through some of Act 4… right?

I have only eight Homestuck posts left…

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… and as such, here are some reflections.

I’ve said many times that once I finish my Homestuck blog post series—the same one that I started in 2015, paused for almost two years, and have worked on since then very on-and-off—finishes, I will never have to think about Homestuck again. Now, this is obviously an exaggeration, but I’m still starting to view the completion of my Homestuck post series as the end of an era for me. Why might that be, you may ask?

For one thing: Homestuck means a lot to me. I first read the comic in 2014, in the summer between my first and second years of high school; I was 15 years old then. I gradually got more invested and obsessed with Homestuck in the following years, participating in online discussions and fan projects aplenty. I had a steady stream of Homestuck interest going until late 2017 (months after my Homestuck posts initially fizzled out), and then it went on and off from there, with me moving to different interests—SiIvaGunner, SRB2, and MLP:FiM to name a few—but often coming back to Homestuck regardless, and finishing my Homestuck post series bit by bit. I resumed my Homestuck posts on a day in December 2018 where I was so bored that I wanted to resurrect that old project, and later Homestuck media since then (most of all the epilogues and new book commentary) has continued to fuel my motivation to continue those posts. Now, the fuel of new Homestuck media has fizzled out, but I think I have just enough remaining Homestuck energy to finish those posts!

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Homestuck post 101 coming in the next few days!

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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.

Pausing blog posts for two weeks or so

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I’m afraid Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 100, my post series’ fabled (under a very broad definition of “fabled”) entry into the triple digits, will have to wait a bit longer than I initially thought—probably not until mid-December or so. There’s two reasons for that:

(1) Finals are approaching which is always very busy, but usually not busy enough to pause blog posts were it not for:

(2) The SiIvaGunner: King for Another Day Tournament, which I will be putting most of my creative energy into making music for over the next few weeks. Regardless of your opinion on a YouTube channel best known for putting memes into video game music, I highly recommend taking the time to check out some of the musical arrangements that are being posted to the channel as we speak!!! There’s been some incredibly killer tunes so far and there will be MANY more to come.

There will be a rather short window of time in December when I’m likely to have the energy to make blog posts: roughly from 12/10 to 12/17, where I’ll probably fine myself bored one day and crank out a lot of blog posts just like my Homestuck post series’ grand resurrection last year. I will be going on vacation from 12/18 to 12/31, then to MAGFest 2020 from 1/1 to 1/5. After that, I suppose we’ll see what happens.

Small blog update (Homestuck posts and otherwise)

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Reformatting old blog posts is harder than it sounds. So much stuff got totally messed up and it’s led to quite a bit of busywork and a bunch of clumsy going through everything and fixing dead links, image size, post date/time listed, pesterlog text formatting, fancy fonts… a whole bunch of bullshit that I’ve started to sort of fall off the wagon of. And it’s caused my third case this year of, let’s call it “blog burnout”. A burnout that causes me to just sort of keep forgetting my Homestuck post series exists. I estimate this burnout will end in November or December and I’ll resume my Homestuck posts with my fabled (by me) trickster arc post.

I’ve also been working on a non-Homestuck blog post I need to finish: a post reviewing K-ON! which is arguably the best work of media I’ve ever consumed, like seriously it’s so fucking good you need to watch it to believe it. I’ve been hyping up that post on Twitter a lot and I really need to get around to finishing it instead of being affected by blog burnout.

(yui is best girl)

Web domain migration update

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(text copied directly from Blogger)

I won’t be posting to this blog for much longer, because last week I purchased the web domain cookiefonster.com! I’d wanted to do so for years and I’m glad I finally did it. The domain is hosted via WordPress, which is much more customizable and viable as a real website than Blogger.

I’ve imported all posts from this blog to my new domain, which I haven’t launched yet. I had planned to launch the domain on October 1, but the date may be delayed as late as October 4. The reason for the delay is because when I imported the posts to WordPress, a lot of the formatting came out wrong and there’s a HUGE amount that needs to be manually fixed. As I’ve been going through the posts in chronological order to fix them up, I’ve also taken the opportunity to make some revisions to my old Homestuck posts—specifically from post 36 onwards, because everything before that is unsalvageable without being completely rewritten.

I will launch my new domain when I’m done fixing up my old posts! I’ve had a lot of fun going back through my old blog posts and I’m very excited for the launch.

Homestuck posts are on mini-hiatus

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I’ll make it brief this time.

Schoolwork has been piling up lately will likely continue to do so as my fall semester progresses. Because of this, I’ve decided to pause my Homestuck blog post series for probably about a month or two (starting from 9/10, the day I released the last post). Amusingly enough, I put these posts on hiatus right before the trickster arc, which should be a fun and/or terrifying place to get back to. October 1 is still the day I plan to move this blog to a custom web domain and my posts definitely won’t resume until after that date.

As usual, these plans are subject to change.