Weekend Update - 20th of November · 12:38am Nov 21st, 2021
TL;DR
Up to 30k words on DoH3, on track to NaNoWhatever. I miss just winging it and posting whatever the heck I feel like, but I guess if the quality of the end product is good then it's worth more than all the time I could have spent getting instant gratification cashing in on gen 5 memes.
Also I'm gonna do something I haven't done in a while (lower in the blog) and get some cynical self-deprecating humor and ranting done. I used to be quite good at it, either that or people love watching a train wreck.
Next Dash of Humanity 3 preview
If you want to see another excerpt of the new story as a preview, comment one of the following so I can figure out which one to share:
- Dawn eats an entire MMMM Cake because he's curious how Pinkie does it and doesn't die.
- Dawn saves a pony's life that's injured in a construction accident
- Dawn fights off a zombie horde from a bell tower
The editor I found is awesome, and at the end of the month I'll immediately start making the suggested revisions and posting. I hope to post the whole ~20 chapters over a couple months. So bright side, if I'd done one chapter a week like I used to, it'd have taken 5 months to post it all! Imagine waiting five f***ing months to find out what happens. No thanks. This is the Netflix I want it now! era and that's just unacceptable. 
Bored/Distractions
Are you ever bored but distracted at the same time? Like you're on an endless hamster wheel seeking out some form of entertainment, or way to kill the time... and no matter how many tabs you have open, regardless of sneaking in some reddit or fim fic at work, or having an entire evening free and a literal sea of entertainment options begging for attention you just... can't even?
Anyway, I've been very bored this week. I've been too distracted to write as much as I want. Luckily, I have a Thanksgiving Vacation so I'll probably cut back on the electronics and detox. I do plan to write throughout the vacation on my laptop, but I'll be able to do some of those healthy "normal person" things I keep hearing about... Visit family, friends, eat food that wasn't frozen until you microwaved it, touch grass, see the sun... it should be fun!
Straight Up Ranting
I haven't done a good rant in a while and I used to find them therapeutic. So I decided that I'd grab a pizza because I wanted hot food now, and didn't want to cook it. No problem, so I go to Domino's website except they're really jacked up the prices lately. $20 for a single damn pizza? $6 delivery fee, 10% tax, and that's not including the tip for the poor schmuk being paid $8/hour to deliver it to me. Seriously it's like $35 bucks for the same thing I could get in the freezer section at the store for about $4.
Anyway, no problem, there are coupons! So I try to click on some of the coupons (there are only 2, there used to be like 10-15, but they had to cut back on giving people cheap pizza because I guess the poor multi-billion dollar corporation had to tighten it's belt).
Anyway, the absolutely infuriating and unforgivable part is being pizza-blocked by javascript errors. Seriously, it's Twenty fucking twenty-one and I can't have a coupon pop-up, or add an item to the coupon, because you outsourced your website to some "recruiting" agency in silicon valley, who outsourced it to their resources in India, who outsourced it to the lowest bidder.
And before someone asks, I tried Chrome, Firefox, and Incognito with all plugins disabled. The site's straight broke. According to the console, "fuck dominos" which is apparently lacking an error code, but I'll contact Al Gore to get that one added.
So I go over to Pizza hut, because the fact I can't have a pizza makes me want it more. I'm insatiable, and Celstia-damn it, I'm getting my pizza! So I grab a pizza and some bread sticks and low and behold, I can't create an account to save my information. "The email fields do not match." I do a double take. There's only one fucking email field! I mean, how in the hell are you going to deny my account creation attempt because the emails don't match? You didn't even remember to add the damn 'repeat email field!'
Whatever I'll check out as a guest, and add Pizza hut to my shit list. Unfortunately, it still requires an email, and it was convinced that the email field was blank... and about that time I just said screw this and went to look for a Papa John's or Little Ceaser's or something. It's like Homer's Odyssey and all I wanted was a circular piece of bread with unhealthy tasty shit pasted to it. I had to brave Tartarus, beat Cerberus at Chess, wrestle Medusa, and sleep with Hercules just to get the roof of my mouth scalded by molten tomato sauce.
I am convinced by websites like this made by multi-billion dollar corporations are why I've never met a programmer with a full head of hair. Somewhere out there is someone who either doesn't care, or isn't paid enough, for the ridiculous 80 hour weeks they're pulling to try and keep their job from being outsourced. And I can't blame them, with shit websites like this, do we really want to outsource it so we can get even lower quality? For fuck sake, I'd hate to see the mobile sites for Dominos or Pizza hut... and that's assuming you've got a kick-ass ad blocker on your mobile browser, because the internet is straight up unusable on a phone unless you jump through a few hoops to get a good browser with good plugin support.
Anyway so that's where I am now. A pizza is en route, a story waiting to be written, and an Amazon package 2 days overdue because they decided to let the USPS handle last-mile delivery. (Don't get me started on Amazon or the USPS, we'll be here all night. I just wanted to play Shin Megami Tensei 5, and I'm already halfway through the weekend and I haven't hit on a single sexually deviant demon to get them to join my party. FML.)
End of Rant
Anyway, thanks all for dropping by. I'm hoping to get Dash of Humanity 3 100% complete ASAP. It's not got much farther to go, really, and I have vacation time and a laptop. I can't wait to start sharing it, and I appreciate the few words of encouragement I get each time someone posts on a blog of whatever saying they're looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun, and I've already got a new "soarin's revenge" and "gen 5 crossover" in mind for Dawn. Plus I've got to bring back other arcs from the old 3 (pregnancy, Fluttershy, etc...) That's right, your reward for braving that wall of text is a sneak-peek into stories 4 and 5, though to be honest I'm looking forward to gen 5 more than revisiting the soarin arc... but what can you do? I could just leave it as a trilogy, apply myself, and write a good new IP for a change... but that sounds like a lot more work.
Dash of Humanity is one of my favorite series on here and I'm glad to see you doing a rewrite.
I'm torn between 1 and 2 for the preview.
Also way back when I first read DoH, I couldn't understand why Don, a cis man, didn't enjoy being turned into a mare. After all, what man doesn't dream about turning into a woman? Around five years later I finally realized that, no, cis men actually like being men.
Thanks for keeping the story alive.
I mean, if you must share a preview, I guess I'd want to see if the cake is a lie.
When it comes to pizza, I'm poor, so I almost always get a $5 pizza from Little Caesars. In all of my many years of buying $5 pizzas from Little Caesars, probably since their inception twenty or so years ago, it's never been unreliable to order them over the phone and picking them up on the way home from somewhere.