Tag Archives: blog update

Progress on my next MLP post (To Where and Back Again)

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, I finished reviewing To Where and Back Again, Part 1, and now I’m about to start part 2. Once that’s done, I’ll write my recap of the season of course. I plan to release the post on May 26, keeping my pattern of releasing MLP posts on Fridays. You may ask: why has this taken so long? That’s a fair question, and the honest answer is I’m getting burnt out.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a wonderful show that means the world to me. But like any ambitious project I do, there’s ebb and flow to my motivation. I’ve learned from experience that when I think I need a break from a project, I should do it before I strain myself too hard, to prevent what happened with my Homestuck posts in late 2016 to early 2017. If you don’t know, during that period of my Homestuck posts, my motivation was crumbling but I tried desperately to keep writing them, and I succumbed to burnout so extreme that I paused the post series for almost two years. I don’t want something like that to happen again.

I’m already pushing myself a little to reach the end of season 6, because it’s so much more satisfying to reach an elegant stopping point than an awkward one. The best way for me to conquer burnout on a project is to start or resume a different project—in this case, my Eurovision blog post series. And like all my ambitious projects, the starting phase has me overwhelmingly excited to dive right in, but I always need to plan it out first. In retrospect, my Homestuck blog post series was a major learning experience for what I should and shouldn’t do with projects, especially how to deal with burnout.

I’ll see you soon! It’s possible my first few Eurovision posts will come out before my review of To Where and Back Again, but I won’t start writing them until I finish that review. That’s what I promised myself.

What’s next for my MLP episode reviews?

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

I’ve updated the homepage of this site!

Posted on by
Reply

In celebration of the new year, I’ve done something that I have considered doing for quite a while: reveal my real name to the Internet. It’s Cedric Fausey, that’s my real name. The last name is pronounced faw-zee or faw-see.

This name reveal isn’t with much fanfare; it’s not something I’m screaming to the world, instead something I’m merely adding to my homepage so that it’s easy to find for anyone looking. I’m still going to make my content under the handle “cookiefonster”; it’s just that my real name is now out in the public. This reveal comes alongside a rewrite of the homepage’s content to be more focused and present myself better. The content that was there before was cluttered with random images and asides, and I reordered it to be more cohesive.

The new year is, as always, a time of new beginnings, and I hope this update to the homepage has made my content just a bit more presentable. I’m working a job unrelated to music or my other creative content right now, but I still want to present my creative work to the world in a way that’s just the slightest bit less self-deprecatory.

As for what content I plan on publishing to this site in 2022, I’ll be honest: it’s mostly going to be blog posts reviewing episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I’ve already finished writing reviews of the first three episodes of season 3, and the first such post is going up on January 7.

Homestuck post series update (for the last time)

Posted on by
Reply

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.)

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

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Change of plans regarding my rewritten Homestuck posts

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Homestuck post series 5th anniversary post

Posted on by
Reply

I just realized that two days ago was the fifth anniversary of my Homestuck blog post series. I’m not surprised I missed the date this year, because I haven’t been thinking about Homestuck much as of late. Instead, I’ve been working hard on making SRB2 8-bit covers, binge watching through Phineas and Ferb which I forgot for something like five years how much I liked, and doing a semester of almost entirely online classes (as in, one of the classes has in-person exams but that’s it) while I go to campus for work.

As important as Homestuck is to me, I don’t really feel like doing a heartfelt speech about it today. Instead, I’ll say that my Homestuck post series will resume when that fan project I’ve mentioned before of a definitive way to read Homestuck as originally intended is released. I was just talking about that project with the person running it today, which reminded me I had missed the post series’ fifth anniversary. Technically speaking, it is the fifth anniversary of the release of the series’ first post, but I consider the post series’ anniversary to be the release of the introduction post two days before that. Although I really don’t care for Homestuck^2 or whatever other Homestuck media is being made, I am greatly looking forward to this new way to read Homestuck as originally intended.

It’s a little awkward that my post series is on hiatus right before the last post before the Gigapause, but I guess that’s just how it is. My personal Gigapause with those posts was the one from February 2017 to December 2018 anyway and it’s highly unlikely I’ll have another pause anywhere near that big before I finish my Homestuck posts.

Homestuck post series update: The Imminent Personal Gigapause

Posted on by
Reply

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?