I am well aware that I have still not put up my post about "Frenemies". It is coming, and once more I am going to commit to a date. It will be up by the end of 11th October, a week hence. You bet I am going to get to the end of Season 9!
Also, as the subject line says, the usual UK PonyCon convention report will be up after the con. It's later than usual this year, so that won't be until November, but – as the meme says – it's happening!
...and "She's All Yak" is still on the list. I hope at some point in the future I can look back at the last few months and think to myself, "Sheesh, Logan, you had a rough patch there!" But unless I literally say "The rewatch reviews won't happen" then they will happen. In fact, I'm making a commitment now. Short of impossible conditions such as significant illness or family emergencies...
...the "She's All Yak" rewatch will be up within one week from this post.
Yes, I wrote it in bold. That means it has to happen! :P
We're having a heatwave and I can't concentrate properly for very long. "Common Ground" is coming soon, though. Sunday looks likely at the moment. And then I am going to try to speed up again!
A few days in Scotland, where I had a lovely time. I'm now back, and the My Little Repeats for "Sparkle's Seven" will be up by Sunday at the latest. :)
And not just any MLP material, either – because I'll finally be getting going with the final season of Friendship is Magic, and giving you my potted thoughts on "The Beginning of the End, part 1". It has been much too long. The ponyfic review has still not been forgotten, but that requires me to be able to concentrate properly for longer. It will arrive, though!
I'm feeling better than I was a week ago, and I expect to be posting something actually Pony related here within the next week. Thank you for your patience, everyone!
This time it was a sudden dental emergency, fortunately not with pain but with a "this needs fixing" and I'm now exhausted. The Ponyfic Roundup Spotlight will happen, but this time I'm not promising a date. In the next few days, I hope.
As for Ponyfic Roundup itself? It may go on hold for a little bit. I've been fighting against that idea for a while, but I think it's time to admit reality. I'm well aware that plenty of people say "for a little bit" about something and then it never comes back. That really, truly isn't my intention. But I can't promise.
I will at least try to post about S9 of FiM, though. Since that's not on a weekly schedule, it's easier for me. And unlike Ponyfic Roundup, it has a defined finish line. But again, no promises. The world has ground me down recently, and not only the stuff you see on TV.
I had a huge train delay earlier, and something else has come up this evening (not at all terrible, but fairly urgent and time-consuming) and so I will be again delaying Ponyfic Roundup. It will be up on Friday, since I'll be out tomorrow. Thank you for indulging my repeated failures to keep to schedule!
I'm not well at the moment, so (trusting that it's a 1-2 day bug) I'll be posting Ponyfic Roundup on Friday. What I will give away is that I liked Impossible Numbers' story.
Well, that took longer than I'd expected – or indeed hoped – but it seems that we're up and running again! So, first up: Ponyfic Roundup will be back on Friday. And barring any further messing about from the Blogger side of things, that is a firm date. I'll also be bringing you the long-delayed final part of my UK PonyCon 2025 roundup, which is simply the smallish merch haul I acquired this time. And then, if you're really lucky, you may even be getting the "Best Gift Ever" rewatch as well! Truly, the Hearth's Warming season brings good cheer. :D
Yeah, I know, again. Another example of multiple things converging. This year has been truly ridiculous for that. All you need to know is that none of them are things you really need to worry about. I'll put up the review of Discordant next Wednesday, ie 19th November. I won't promise anything at all beyond that! My UK PonyCon write-up is already drafted, so I hope to get it out to you on Sunday anyway.
My workload (not all work, but you get the idea) has been heavy and UK PonyCon is imminent, so I'm going to swap around the weeks for Ponyfic Roundup. This week won't get one, but next Wednesday will. This is the opposite order from what I originally planned, but this one I can actually do!
Honestly, if you've been here any length of time, you probably know what this is without even reading the body text! The lack of a "My Little Repeats" post on Sunday might have tipped you off, too. But yeah, I've run out of time to do stuff again thanks to life being life. Nothing especially bad, just that I've been ludicrously busy and expect to continue being so for a little while yet. (And yeah, this is also why I'm still behind with my Ponyfic Roundup courtesy notes on Fimfiction.)
So here's the deal:
I can't promise any of these (well, maybe the first one) but it's what I currently think is likely. If any big news intervenes then so be it. But one thing I can reassure you all about: I am definitely not losing interest in this fandom. Ponies still rock!
I've been much busier than I'd expected this past week, so this will be one of those times when Ponyfic Roundup needs to be slightly delayed. The current plan is to post it on Friday, then have quite a low word count next week to allow me to return to Wednesday from the 7th. This busy week is also why I'm having a short break before getting going on "Sounds of 2016" – though it's coming soon!
You may wonder why I haven't posted anything here for nearly a week. The answer, I'm afraid, is a sad one. Entei-rah, a wonderful friend who I'd known for well over 20 years, succumbed to his cancer on Saturday, and I've been knocked sideways by the news. I'd known the destination was inevitable for some while now, I just hate so much that the end came so quickly. I'm going to miss him terribly, indeed I already do, but I'll always remember him as one of the absolute Good Guys.
Although furry was the place where Ent was most active, he was also a quiet but dedicated supporter of the MLP fandom. He was a regular presence with his wife at UK PonyCon each year, and he attended quite a few Worcester ponymeets – the last of these as recently as December. By that time we knew he was seriously ill and I suspect he found travelling down from Stockport tougher than he let on, but being Ent he was more concerned with making sure we all had a fun, light-hearted meet as usual.
Entei-rah and I first met way, way back in the Watership Down fandom in the very early 2000s, in the days when Yahoo Groups were still a thing. From there he moved into the furry fandom, and in the last decade he took more of an interest in Pony as well and supported that with the same energy and enthusiasm he put into all the many things he loved. As he said in his Twitter and then Bluesky profile, "Luna is best something something..."
Farewell, my friend.
I made a post yesterday on the future of AI in the fandom, and it brought quite a few reactions. One of the first was from Aragón, who it seems to some extent got the wrong end of the stick and inferred that I approved of what I thought the near future would bring. I don't. His misinterpretation is my fault for not writing the post better, not his. A few other people have weighed in with their own thoughts, and I'm more than happy for other people to continue to do so if they wish.
I will make it clear, though, that for as long as it remains practically possible for me to do so, I will be refusing to review AI-generated ponyfic. The reviewing policy I set out a year and a half ago still stands: if I review a fic and later discover it was made by AI, its rating will be changed to zero. I support the Fimfiction requirement that stories are written by humans. (I think being written by ponies is also acceptable, fortunately.)
But although I expect to be writing about AI stuff again in the future, unless there's some big development that I really can't ignore I won't be writing about it again here for quite some time. You need have no fear that Louder Yay is going to turn into one of those sites where the owner spends his entire time banging on and on and on about the same subject, wondering why the world is not grasping the incontrovertible fact that He Is Right.
And now it's time to move on. Ponyfic Roundup and Sounds of 2015 updates are in the works for the coming week. Happy New Year, everycreature!
Nothing too awful, just a minor winter bug I think. If it follows the pattern of other similar illnesses I've had, I'd expect to be able to post Ponyfic Roundup on Friday, so not too much of a delay. :)
It's taken considerably longer than I would have liked, but I have finally returned to the land of the keyboard and mouse. For those who like to know these things, my newly acquired PC is an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF, which although hardly cutting-edge is a considerable upgrade on the last one.¹ I've now got an i5-7500 with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD. It may not (officially) be good enough to run Windows 11, but as I'm typing this on Linux Mint 21.3 Edge why should I care about that? :P Early days, but so far so good!
¹ Even when it was working. :P
The more interesting thing, though, is that this means I will be able to resume several features I'd had to neglect when all I had was a phone and a slightly crotchety Bluetooth keyboard. For a start, My Little Repeats will return soon – that means within a week of now. I'll also be able to get under way with Sounds of 2015, something I'm really looking forward to. Plus the Officially Uploaded episode list will stop languishing in a several-months-old slough of despond. Or possibly a despond of Slough. Who knows?
Thank you for bearing with me throughout all this, and I very much look forward to writing more here again – starting with Ponyfic Roundup, which will be up as expected by the end of tomorrow. :)
...but for a change, it's not because I've been unwell or stupidly busy, or because my computer has lost my notes, or even because I've entirely forgotten what day it is until it's too late.
No; this time it's an actual choice. As I'm having a Spooky Special edition, I've decided to post that on Halloween itself – which is of course Thursday. Simple as that! See you then.
