I have quite the habit of timing my finishing of a video game – be that the main campaign, 100%’ing it, or just to the goal or stop point that I’m satisfied with: whatever I’m gunning for at the time – right as the next game that will be my big one for a while comes out. I’m sure that’s hardly unique, many folks probably do the same, especially when direct sequels of the game they’re currently playing are on the horizon. But it can take many forms, I find.

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Ghost Mike, Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #66, 12^th June 2023:

we’ve reached that point in the generation where everyone internally knows the writing is on the wall and are already refocused on the future. […] The lack of announcement of further content for G5 beyond the initial episode orders […] only further intensifies this.

Well, that aged well.

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What’s this? Halloween, you say? You know, it used to be an exciting time for me. Even as an adult, the last few years, I’d look forward to a little pumpkin carving, at the very least. But eh, lately I haven’t even done that. This year hasn’t really broken that trend. It’s not alone – most one-day holidays tend to glaze right by me these days, over in a flash. Honestly, though, it doesn’t bother me much. I certainly want to get back to carving a pumpkin every year, but otherwise, it’s fine, I

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Some minor but important housekeeping this week: I finished adding the word counts of every reviewed story to the spreadsheet Archive. Somewhat annoyingly, despite double-checking the story lengths and accounting for the two de-listed stories (I’m sure my fellow Ponyfic reviewers will baulk that only two of 250 have been removed), the word count is still off of that in the Reviewed bookshelf here… by forty-nine words.

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When I started out these Ponyfic Review Monday Musings, I didn’t have any definitive goals, beyond reaching the end of that calendar year. Which I did, evidently. And truth be told, both before achieving that and after it, I didn’t see a situation in which I didn’t make it to the one-year milestone. So even now, it doesn’t feel like that big a deal.

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As reported by Equestria Daily, Gillian Berrow recently disclosed at Ponycon Holland that one contributor to the minimal direct generational crossover in G5 is that Discovery Family still partially owns show content rights to G4. Worth remembering that Hasbro only partially owns FiM’s base tv channel – the rest formerly belonged to Discovery and now Warner Bros. Discovery after the 2022 merger.

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November means one core thing for me, least as Fimfiction is concerned – Jinglemas is open again for signups! Okay, really, it’s more of a December thing, as you don’t get your characters to write to until November 25^th. But it’s in the air, and while the random nature of what you might get to write makes it not for everyone (they do group relevant gens and characters together, though), it remains worth consideration.

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Well, that was a pleasant weekend. Picked up one of those “loss of appetite” illnesses during the week, and it peaked on Saturday. Nothing more pleasant than being perpetually hungry all day while only about to chow down small quantities of simple, plain food. 

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…Well, thanks to the first botch I’ve had from Ryanair in donkey’s years (despite their reputation, they are very reliable for short European flights), one that forced a different plane to be used three hours and twenty-five minutes later, I arrived home just late enough from UK PonyCon to miss Monday Musings going up on Monday. Least by British time – it’s still on time for the Americans in the crowd!

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In what is an actual first for this series (just before hitting three digits too!), I am not here to post this week’s blog. However, thanks to the magic of tab synchronisation and Google Docs, Fimfiction’s lack of an upload scheduler altogether and a New Blog button on the mobile layout is no issue. Huzzah for careful planning!

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I should have touched on it last week, but Make Your Mark officially ended on November 23^rd*. I could have addressed this with my usual “the show ended on exactly the whimper we all expected” sentiment. But instead, I figured, why not celebrate it, for what it’s worth? And after my love of animation, I am a gamer. So, I took the opposite direction, and played some MLP. Scratch that, it wasn’t played, it was streamed.

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In Monday Musings’ early days, if I was lacking in a suitable blurb opener, I would often reach for whatever I’d been watching or playing lately. I kind of retired that after a while, mostly because they tended to not be what my regular readers are interested in, and largely only elicited shrugs of the “I don’t care for it” variety. Well, this time, it’s too dear to me to hesitate: on Friday, I saw the musical adaption of my favourite Disney Animation film, Aladdin.

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Another weird one for the pile: with the weekend just gone being May 4th (or May the 4^th be With You ) Disney saw fit to re-release The Phantom Menace in cinemas for one week for the film’s 25^th anniversary (only two weeks off). It almost slipped my mind until today, hence Monday Musings being a few hours later (advantage of a Bank Holiday, peeps – a free day! ).

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You know, after a holiday season where I let a lot that had happened throughout the year get to me, and keep me not quite as relaxed and joyous as I could or should have been, I think I’m feeling more at ease with things. Deliberately taking a week off not just from the more high-maintenance hobbies (fic writing, etc.), but from even thinking about them, did me some good.

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End of the month, author spotlight time. We got us another new-ish* author that’s amassed a decent following in their time here with a body of work that’s been acclaimed by quite a large handful of folks as largely reliable and consistent, with a chunk of reasonable yet disposable stories, yet when there’s a knockout, there’s really a knockout. That being mushroompone. Don’t worry, they’re not the toxic variety of fungi.

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Fifteen weeks strikes me as a reasonable break between Author Spotlights. And with the end of the year upon us, let’s look at an author whose work nearly always makes me laugh and/or smile. Not that this guy needs the promotion, with nearly 2,800 followers to his name (it’d be even more were it not for that immortal enemy Real Life^™ – more on that later), but round here, what the ghost says goes. Thus, I give you Aragon.

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Yes, I have seen Make Your Mark. No, I won’t be discussing it here – I learnt my lesson from my review of A New Generation on rushing out clunky reviews that I end up largely revising and redoing later. A lesson you’d think I’d have learnt from years of animation YouTubing… Expect something on it round the week’s end, or on the weekend.

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Got some opening blurbs planned for the next while. Let’s lead off with a big one: 2023 for Monday Musings in review! A more sensible soul would probably make a separate blog for this, but I can’t always be sensible, can I? And sure, if there are souls reading this who can’t stand statistical quirks, well, there’s always scrolling until the first cover art to bypass the blurb. Which some may do already, come to think.

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One major advantage of having a hefty backlog of publishable reviews (if obviously nothing like the several months and million-odd words that PaulAsaran stockpiles), is that it gives me the bandwidth to do other Fimfiction things. Ideally writing my own stuff, though there’s no accounting for having the optimal drive all the time. More obviously, it also means I can pitch with others. The odd bout of pre-reading or editing, for sure. But also contest judging. Evidently FoME has a screw loose,

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