Tag Archives: post schedule

Another Homestuck and Problem Sleuth post update

Posted on by
Reply

First I’ll talk about my next Homestuck post, then my plans for the Problem Sleuth post series.

My next Homestuck post will be released Saturday, September 3. I’m choosing this date because that’ll put me right back on track for releasing a post on the anniversary of this post series, assuming I’ll keep posting every five days. Sorry the date’s so late, but as I’ve mentioned before, that’s because it’s kind of long. It’s also sort of because I’ve been busy with some stuff, mostly keeping track of everything and getting used to stuff as I’m starting my last year of high school.

Now what’s up with my next post exactly? The bottom line is, dividing Act 6 Act 2 into posts ended up a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Originally I wanted to do something like this:

  • One post for pages preceding the Dirk/Roxy selection screen
  • One post for Dirk’s half of the selection screen
  • One post for Roxy’s half
  • Two posts for the pages following the selection screen

As I soon discovered, the problem with that idea is, the first post here would cover about 80 pages, which is just way too much to write about in five days. So I ended up covering a little over half of those pages, and I’ve decided to revise the plan as follows:

  • Part of the pages preceding the selection screen
  • The rest of those pages + most of Dirk’s half
  • The last part of Dirk’s half + Roxy’s half
  • Two posts for the pages following the selection screen

I think that’s a fairly even way to divide up all these posts. I’ll let you know when I’m close to finished with the one I’m working on by updating this post.

As for my Problem Sleuth post series, I’m really not sure what to do with that. The commentary thing worked well with the first few chapters of the comic, but now, not so much. I do want to keep on re-reading the comic, but I think I might do the following: instead of writing up commentary the way I do with my Homestuck posts, I might start just writing down more general thoughts on the comic. Maybe there will be some parts I feel are really worth commenting on; I don’t know. I think I should see for myself how that’ll go.

Progress report on next Problem Sleuth post

Posted on by
Reply

My next Problem Sleuth post covers about 120 pages, and I have 30 left to cover. I’ve kind of been working on it on and off, but now I’ve figured out a good way to make Problem Sleuth posts and Homestuck posts at once without sticking to one or the other for too long.

Sometimes in both post series, I reach a part where I’m not sure what to say about it. This happened about a week ago with my Problem Sleuth post series, where I reached a point where I thought, “man I don’t have anything to say about these next ten pages” and pretty much hit a roadblock. But just earlier today, I went back to those pages and thought up commentary easily, something I probably could’ve done a day or two after hitting the roadblock. And now I’ve also hit a similar point where I’m not sure what to say about the next bunch of pages. So I’ve decided to start doing the following: when I hit a roadblock on my next Problem Sleuth post I’ll work on my next Homestuck post, and vice versa. My next Problem Sleuth post should ideally be released tomorrow, two days before my next Homestuck post. EDIT (8/23): Actually, it’s more feasible to release both of those posts on August 24, leading to a 2x BLOG POST COMBO.

Another blog update

Posted on by
Reply

I’m back from vacation, meaning I can once again make posts for this blog. And I’ve decided on what my schedule for my Homestuck and Problem Sleuth posts will look like as summer comes to a close.

For my Homestuck posts, I will return to an older posting schedule: new posts every five days. Until further notice, I’ll continue making those posts at this steady rate, even when school starts again. My next Homestuck post will be released August 9 August 10, next after that August 14, and then my every five days schedule will be put in action once more. I’m choosing this date because if I publish a Homestuck post every five days from that date onwards, that would mean I’ll release a post on the one-year anniversary of that post series (September 18, the day I released the series’ introductory post).

As for my Problem Sleuth posts, the pattern has generally been one Problem Sleuth post for every two Homestuck posts, so I might as well follow through with that and release a Problem Sleuth post every ten days or so. Those posts don’t actually take as long to make as my Homestuck posts; they’re just a lesser priority and thus I don’t work on those as often. Next Problem Sleuth post will be released August 12 or so.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Modification to my Homestuck posting schedule

Posted on by
Reply

(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

Posted on by
Reply

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 2: Faster Progress Needed?

Posted on by
Reply

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.