Tag Archives: announcement

Laptop story + blog update

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As you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to keep up with my plan to make two more Homestuck blog posts before I leave for vacation tomorrow. Here’s why that is.

Three days ago, during my summer camp, I lost one of the earbuds from the headphones I brought with me, and I started frantically searching for it, keeping the laptop I brought with me as I did it. Then, I left my laptop in the hall of the dorm building I was in, and when I went back there, it was gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere the next few days, and I started feeling really terrible about it because it belonged to my mom and all that. I could still get on other computers in the varioius buildings but those are of course kind of inconvenient.

Today was the last day of camp, and right after I left and got some food nearby with my family, I found out that the laptop was found again. It turned out that someone put my laptop in the dorm room next to mine and it was there the whole time, but nobody knew about it until today. This is good because I had some project files saved on there which I was afraid I lost for good, but sucked a little because I kind of wish I had it back sooner to do stuff on it.

Regardless of all that, losing my laptop prevented me from getting as much done in my Homestuck posts. The next post will be released tonight. It won’t be all that long, and it’ll cover around 40 pages (including two medium-length pesterlogs), and I’d say it’s about 80% finished. The next post after that (also will be fairly short) will be released a few days after August 6 (not the 5th as I originally thought), when I return from my next vacation. After that I’ll see what happens with this blog.

Cookie Fonster’s Vacation Stuff Part 3: Everything Else + Other Updates

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(part 2)

So I’m finally back home from vacation now. And I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t make more blog posts after the one about feeding birds. I did consider a few things to write posts about but I just didn’t bother with all that. It’s not that I didn’t do cool stuff, it’s just that I didn’t do things that I felt would make interesting blog post topics. If you want to know, here’s some stuff I did. I went to a super-relaxing warm hot spring pool, hiked around mountains that I got to with a cable car, ate a lot of food, and some other stuff.

The flight home was kind of interesting for a few reasons. The longest of the three flights started 3:30 PM and ended around 5:30 PM because it went six hours back due to time zones. Skipping ahead six hours in the middle of the night is one thing, but skipping back six hours in the afternoon is kind of weird. On the way there, I felt pretty sick after not sleeping for about 20 hours. But this time around it’s kind of different. After a long day of flying in airplanes, I decided that when I get home I would hop right into bed and get a nice well-earned sleep. But somehow I am wide awake a little after midnight writing a blog post in my twenty-fifth straight hour of being awake. I have no idea how such a thing is even possible.

During the vacation, I also thought about my blog posts. I’ve decided to continue my Homestuck posts as I did previously, with a new post every few days. I’m even more hyped than I already was about reaching Act 6 due to some random thoughts I had. But I also had the idea to write a commentary post series on Problem Sleuth, Homestuck’s predecessor. I don’t know when that commentary will start, but I imagine that starting within the next week I might work on Problem Sleuth posts alongside Homestuck posts, with Homestuck posts released more regularly. Before I start my Problem Sleuth posts I’ll write an introduction post similar to my Homestuck commentary introduction post.

I’ll get back to my regular blog posts tomorrow (technically later today), after I get a good night’s sleep.

EDIT: One more thing I forgot to mention. I plan on making a full real-life edited version of Detective Pony, something I’ll be able to feasibly do after I get a summer job and can buy supplies with my own money, stuff my parents would never buy for me.

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 6: Over But Not Quite (the comic, not the post series)

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So today was the final update of Homestuck. Except it isn’t quite the ending, since Hussie talked about making a final epilogue in the future. It still left a lot of plot points unresolved and we’ll probably have to wait still more months for the grand epilogue, but that’s besides the point. The point is, I want to say stuff about my post series now that Homestuck is semi-finished.

I originally intended to make this post series once Homestuck is over, because with that, the posts wouldn’t feel incomplete with inaccurate predictions or stuff I could say now but couldn’t have said back before the comic ended. The comic was supposed to be fully finished when I started this post series, with all plot points resolved.

Except the plot points aren’t solved. We still don’t know:

  • what happened to Lord English
  • the full story of Caliborn’s timeline and how he became Lord English
  • the deal with the cherub universe vs. the one the kids created
  • the full story of how Gamzee’s timeline went down (like what happened to him after we last saw him in [S] Collide?)
  • what events came before and after Caliborn’s Masterpiece, or where exactly (like from which timeline) the kids there came from
  • what ultimately happened to the Green Sun or the god tier version of Calliope
  • the purpose of destroying the Green Sun
  • what Vriska and company did with the magic chest
  • whether Vriska and the other trolls will too settle on Earth
  • what’s going to happen to the ghosts from Game Over
  • which ships will be canon in the end (this is kind of a joke thing, but seriously, that sort of thing is usually answered in the end of stories like this*)
  • what happened to all the sprites
  • what happened to (John)
  • what happened to everyone else who didn’t enter the victory door (Ms. Paint, Jack Noir, the Felt, whoever else)
  • the whole deal with Karkat’s supposed universe leadership role which the flash didn’t address at all
  • the ramifications of Terezi gaining pre-retcon memories
  • the thing of restoring the troll race (or the human race for that matter)
  • what all the classes and aspects mean for our resident theorists
  • probably some other stuff I forgot to list
  • to say nothing of the smaller plot points that have been hanging for a while (here’s a list someone made of unresolved plot points).
  • and to say nothing of character interactions we’ve been hoping would happen but haven’t gotten yet. When will Jade get her touching young guardian reunion? When will Jade have her dialogue reunions with everyone else for that matter? When will the alpha kids, with their absolute social trainwreck, have their grand reconciliation?

* For one thing, it was practically guaranteed at this point that John would get together with Roxy by the end. The Act 7 flash kind of implied this? But only kind of.

Continue reading →

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.

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.