Tag Archives: blog pause

Homestuck post series update: The Imminent Personal Gigapause

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It’s been over a month since my last Homestuck post, so I figured it was a good idea to post an update on those posts while I’m on a week-long trip to Vermont, a state I’m legally allowed to stay in during this bizarre as hell year. I’ll keep things simple and to the point: I will release one more Homestuck post during or shortly after this vacation (the final part of A6A6I2 before Homestuck started the year-long Gigapause), and then put my Homestuck post series on an indefinite hiatus. It’s thematically fitting to do a pause corresponding with one of Homestuck’s pauses, and I’ll be as transparent as possible about why I’ve chosen to do this hiatus.1

DISCLAIMER: I do not have any insider knowledge about Homestuck media whatsoever, unless you count some fan music. When I say “as transparent as possible”, I simply mean that I don’t normally like publicly talking about Homestuck fandom drama.

A few weeks ago (I think it was?), a series of email exchanges between Andrew Hussie, an anonymous figure who I think was one of Hussie’s friends, and two staff members of the controversial Homestuck Unofficial Discord Server (which I’ve been a longtime on-and-off member of) was publicly posted and led to a lot of discourse. Those were the email exchanges that led ownership of the Discord server and corresponding subreddit to be transferred from a controversial figure (Makin) to a less controversial one (Drew Linky), and featured heavy discussion of a controversial figure who was heavily involved in Homestuck’s recent media named Kate Mitchell.

I won’t beat around the bush here: reading what Hussie had to say in those email exchanges downright sickened me. Although I respect the end result of that discussion (Drew becoming the new owner of the Discord server and a “peace pledge” of sorts), it still was a rough experience reading the conversations that led to that result. If you want to see what he had to say, you can probably easily find it yourself, but be warned: it’s extremely draining. Shortly after reading some of those email exchanges, I left the server out of disgust with Homestuck’s current state, not because I think Hussie’s group of friends was in the right or anything (though there is no denying that other sides of the Homestuck community have also made mistakes), but just because I don’t want to hear about this drama anymore. I love Homestuck to death, but I think I’ve finally reached my breaking point regarding caring about its current franchise and I don’t want my perception of this wonderful work of media tarnished any longer—not for a long time, at least.

The only reason I’m not putting my Homestuck post series on hiatus right now instead of later is because it would be so thematically fitting for me to do a hiatus corresponding with Homestuck’s Gigapause. For now, I’ll try to keep this blog updated with posts about other topics, if those come to mind. Maybe I could post about music more often?

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.

Another two-week (EDIT: one-week) blog pause

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As I said in an earlier post, I have three vacations for this summer. The first already happened, and the next two will take up most of the next two weeks starting Sunday (July 24). Before my second vacation (actually a summer camp) started, I hoped to buy a laptop with money earned through a summer job, but I’ve had really tough luck getting a job, let alone getting a laptop. But a laptop is highly recommended for that camp because of computer activities, so my mother is letting me bring her old work laptop (along with my iPod of course, which is no good for blogging). Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d be allowed to do personal stuff like this blog on that laptop because of her work restrictions or something. EDIT: Actually, I will be able to do my blog and all that other stuff on that computer after all. I’ll be at home again on the 29th and 30th, but after that will be my third vacation, where I will only bring my iPod even if I did have my own laptop, which lasts until August 5.

Now what does that mean for my blog? It means I won’t make any posts for the next two weeks the first week of August. Here’s how things will go for the next two and a half weeks:

  • Within the next few days, I’ll release my next Homestuck post.
  • Then, I’ll work on my next Problem Sleuth post, which I will most likely release on the 29th or 30th when I’m home.
  • After my third vacation is over, I will get back to my regular posting schedule, and then see what happens when school starts some time later.
  • After post number 61, I will release two more Homestuck posts and one more Problem Sleuth post before leaving for my third vacation.

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. 

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.