Or well I did... shit.

Anyways, Solace updated today and for some inexplicable reason hung in the update featured box for 6 hours. I still have no idea why my stories hang in there for so long, but the next update will probably be a little while because the editing of From Scratch 14 is going places. It should hopefully be out soon™.

The reason the estimated release date is set to "Soon" is because I'm terrible at guessing them, and after I put in a whole fifteen minutes of effort, (oh my god my hands almost fell off) a number of people had the gall to complain that the estimates were never right. Anyways, not getting into that right now. I have a bunch of stuff upcoming in the next few weekends so the chapter after this for From Scratch might come a little slower. I like to at least warn my followers when this is happening... So, consider yourselves warned. We're not talking three months again, maybe a month and a half max.

Since I have you here have a random pony song.

I've been mostly posting under-appreciated songs so far on my blogs. This one has a decent number of views, but not nearly enough. Pony trance is pretty rare, most of the time it's just house mislabeled to trance, and good pony trance is even rarer. This is a really solid long track and comes in a club mix version if you don't like all them namby pamby instrumentals at the beginning. Personally, I think the original mix is far superior, but make your own decisions.

I'm still sitting at around ~180 songs in the top 200, but Rainbow n Rooted is out soon and I have a lot more songs to chug through. So I'm looking good to hit my goal of 240 songs before I start cutting. That's about everything I can think of to give updates on.

<Insert witty tagline here>

-Kal

This has nothing to do with fanfiction.

I've been talking about how I'm kind of annoyed with EQD's music posting system among a few different circles recently and I figured I'd actually elaborate instead of just sounding like an angry old man. The new EQD Music website is honestly currently in a pretty bad state, and yet another website that relies on popularity contest systems (upvoting and ratings) to feature songs isn't really what Pony music needs right now.

Now, before I go too hard on EQD's Music they have been doing a better job of spotlighting unknown musicians more recently. Hopefully this trend will continue and they will start to make a concerted effort to feature songs regardless of how popular the musician is. The problem lies in their habit of spotlighting ANYTHING that a super popular musician makes.

The Aviators: (Numbers gained by comparing to youtube channel and soundcloud to EQD posts)

Edit: Aviators makes a decent amount of non-pony music, these songs were ignored for the sake of stat keeping.

37 Songs on EQD Spotlight Music posts.

5 Solo posts (EQD Music posts including just an Aviators song)

4 Remixes unposted to EQD

0 Songs posted in a Music of the Day post.

Last original song not posted to EQD was from early January 2012

Aviators started their music channels in December 2011

This is the major problem I have with the EQD music system right now. The huge musicians: Aviators, Glaze, Tombstone, Silva Hound, Sim Gretina and a few others get pretty much auto spotlighted when they make music. There's kind of a B tier of musicians who will more often than not get spotlighted. This includes: Mandopony, Radiarc, Evening Star, Jeff Burgess, Joaftheloaf, Forest Rain, Dashdub, and other such musicians on that general level of popularity.

There is a system of pre-listeners in place for EQD and they should be the exception. The other pony websites that promote music pretty much do it based solely on popularity. EQD should be the place that is posting based on quality, that's why they have pre-listeners. It kind of goes against the entire point of content filtering when there's a list of musicians who automatically get the equivalent of being featured every time they make any piece of pony music.

Secondary point:

Mandopony.

Every song on his youtube that is directly pony related is either spotlighted or not posted. I could not find a mandopony song within the last year that was put into music of the day.

Now, I realize that they're popular, but musicians are not on all of the time. Both of these fellows have made a significant amount of music, and I know it might be shocking news to their fans, but not all of their songs are high quality. Popular musicians are capable of writing mediocre or even bad songs, in fact, it happens all the time. With the way that the entire system of promoting musicians is set up right now, popularity has to snowball in order for a musician to get more than just a trickle of followers and fans.  All of this means it's just more difficult for new musicians to break out and already established musicians get several helping hands rolling their snowball up the hill.

[/rant]

-Kal

I'm still kind of freaked out from this morning, but I'm just going to post a song and try to get on with normal life and stuff.

Here, have a song.

The original song has some lyrics that I really like, and fit quite well with the picture of Canterlot that I've been trying to paint in From Scratch.

The issue with the original is the highly tuned vocals. The vocals in this remix haven't been touched by PonyFireStone, instead he decided to redo the instrumentation and synth lines to make a song that fits the voices better. In this, he's done a good job because I didn't really like the original a whole lot. This version, while a bit long and repetitive is quite good. That and I'm biased towards more gritty depictions of Canterlot, anyway.

Lyrics since they can be hard to understand at points.

The city of the broken dreams and hopes

shattered around

If you are the bravest pony around

take the chance

Where the rich ponies go

the city of gold

where ponies are beautiful

The art is so bold

no fashion unsold

only the strong will survive

Where the rich ponies go

the city of gold

where ponies are beautiful

Where dreams come alive

there is no revive

you're going to lose control

Diamonds bits and fame

and all things divine

Diamonds bits and fame

and all things divine

Golden dreams of reality

where you could be somepony else

Fading bits of mentality

Should I be somepony else

P.S. This is my 100th blog and I'm still sitting at 4 published stories... That's quite the ratio.

I'm posting this because I'm a little freaked out and sharing helps me calm down.

Was about to go to sleep a little early for my usual nocturnal self (5am) when any thoughts of that were interrupted by the sounds of many police sirens and gunfire. The guns were extremely close by and a quick glance showed that the police were all in a huge line of cars barely one house down the street. My mother wandered downstairs looking tired and asking what was going on before I could go up and fetch her and we wound up waiting out the gunfight in the basement.

I lost count of how many shots were fired, a safe estimate would be fifty but it was probably much more than that. It started out pretty slow but turned into rapid high power gunshots that echoed off of every available surface and made it difficult to say which direction they were coming from at the time. It sounded a bit like a war-zone and the shots went on for a good five minutes before silencing. We stayed down there until the sirens were off and waited a bit longer just to be sure. By the scale of things and the way it suddenly ended, I wasn't surprised when the news was reporting at least one suspect dead.

That was three and a half hours ago and the entire area is still heavily taped off. If we wanted to drive somewhere, we wouldn't be able to actually get our car out of the driveway because of all of the police tape. Our driveway is actually completely blocked by tape, and the exit of our street onto the main road is blocked off as well. The location of the actual shooting was a little more than a house down, and I could easily chuck a rock from my back door to hit car that the police shot up with the suspects in it. Obviously not planning on doing so, but that's just to give you a scale of how close by it was. A nearby coffee shop has two windows shot out, but besides that I can't see any damage done to our house or anything else within sight. Not that I can really freely explore at the moment, but I walked around what property I can reach without crossing any police lines.

There is a second line of police tape that I've never seen before; dark red "Police Line Do Not Cross" strung around the area where the shooting occurred within the larger area of yellow tape. The police officers themselves don't even seem to be allowed inside and not that long ago an investigator or detective of some kind pulled up in front of our house and waltzed into the red area. I'm glad I didn't have any plans to go anywhere today because by the looks of it, I might have had to cancel them.

There's two policemen in the hospital, one who is reported to be stable after getting hit in the leg, and I haven't heard an update on the second. I hope he's okay.

The news helicopters have finally ceased their infernal hovering, and several reporters have stopped by to ask us questions so I'm going to try and sleep now. I'm unsure of how successful I will be. This sort of thing has never happened in our neighborhood, shootings don't happen around here at all and the police won't say a word as to why this occurred.

Still kinda freaked out,

-Kal

I feel like sharing some music. So I'm going to post a couple good songs that you might see in the upcoming top 200. The catch? These are songs that are relatively unknown on the popularity scale. Expect a lot of good but unknown songs when I finally get around to posting the list. That won't happen until after Rainbow n Rooted at the very soonest, though.

154 views? What the hell? Pretty chill, relaxing background track while still being upbeat. The song is pretty fitting to the idea the artist posted about in the description. Not the best song around by any stretch of the phrase, but still very solidly composed and the instruments work well together. Definitely deserves a lot more attention.

It's a clear and sunny day outside. You should go out, you might catch a glimpse of Equestria's greatest flyer out dong what she does best.

249 views. The third version of the song at first titled =(Magic)=, each iteration of the song has been a marked improvement in all aspects of the song. The instrumentation and mixing is better in each version, and the final VIP version sounds great.

1189 views. I'll be honest, I never really liked the original version of this song. There's been a lot of remixes of it and most of them didn't really appeal to me either. This version takes it and puts a different spin on it that makes it much more appealing. It has the feel of a video game boss track to it and the extra instruments thrown into the mix just make me want to dance to it.

1865 views. I still don't know how this song hasn't garnered more attention. Amazingly soothing and appropriate to the name. A very pleasant acoustic track.

2601 views. ImTheMoon's second most popular track, losing out the top spot by a mere 300 views. How this man doesn't have more subs I don't know. He creates great piano tracks and this extension of Celestia's Ballad sounds great even with the few derps in the playing.

Oh, about that not telling anyone thing? I lied, these songs and many others that will be coming along deserve way more attention.

-Kal

Crossover and AU tags are stories that take tons of effort and I generally shy away from them. The skype chat got talking about bad/trollfic ideas that are common but could be interesting if written well the other day when the subject of Hitler came up.

Hey, don't leave yet. Seriously, Hitler was a frighteningly intelligent man, much of what he achieved was through knowledge of human nature and outsmarting other people. Before his rise to power, though, there was a pretty significant time where he was just a disillusioned war veteran wandering around Germany with a sour taste in his mouth and a general seething anger towards the world.

The concept is pretty straight forward, magical events because of reasons to be worked out pull him from our universe and into Equestria before the chain reaction of events that sent him on his quest to fix Germany and the world. You suddenly have a frighteningly intelligent man who is extremely upset tossed into the world of ponies, but the kicker is none of them react the way he expects them to.

Ponies seem to follow a completely different moral code, in that they actually practice what they preach. This means that he's not able to manipulate them in the ways that he's used to, he can just ask for things and generally get them. What happens to a man who has all of the building blocks to become a monster, but is suddenly thrust into a world where everything that caused him to become so upset and angry with the world doesn't exist in his new surroundings.

A human in Equestria story that deals with the very human nature and how it contrasts with the world of pony by using a ridiculously divisive and probably offensive analogy: Hitler in Equestria.

It could be super interesting, it could be amazingly philosophical, but it's still Hitler in Equestria and therefore would never be taken seriously.

-Kal

I have gotten into the habit of using FIMFiction's built in line break code for creating lines and separating scenes in my stories. The problem is that along the way of the site redesigns this turned from a nicely visible and neatly coded tool into a sometimes not very visible line that fades into the background and creates inconsistent spacing.

^ That thing. After playing around with the site design settings, I've have realized that it's actually downright barely visible on some settings. I'd gotten used to using it and never really considered other options, but I'm torn on if I should go back and change them in my stories to something else or not.

With the way that the site can scale to almost any width trying any sort of:

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

line doesn't work. Depending on the viewer's layout it's almost guaranteed to not be a full page width.

There are alternatives such as

and other such variations of simple designs using centered text, but these bring into the equation of looking less attractive depending on the font being used by the reader.

In short, what do? Do you guys prefer the regular breaks or when authors make their own and center them?

-Kal

I give up.

I wanted to completely rewrite a major portion of the plot, but in the end this is a story that has silly roots. I can't really rewrite it into srs bsns very well since the entire concept is just silly and cute. I don't really like the way the plot is, but trying to change it isn't really working so I'm just going to plod forward with the silly plot.

It's not that great, but it was never intended to be an amazing piece of literature. I started this project as a writing exercise, and the whole shipping angle just got tacked on because it was an amusing concept. I extended the story because it was adorable but in recognizing that its purpose is to be silly and cute, I don't really mind as much if the plot is silly, as well. It will probably bother me still, but it would bother me more if I never wound up finishing it because I was too busy nitpicking the plot.

Basically, going to stop dawdling and just write the damned chapters again.

-Kal

Ahem.

I'm posting From Scratch Chapter 13 when I wake up. (I happen to be nocturnal so probably 5-6pm eastern.) I'm feeling nice so I'm warning you in advance. I also have a revised version of the first chapter (finally) available for release. I've been meaning to get that available for a while as I've hated the current version for a long time. The new version is considerably better, there's nothing radically different content wise, just better executed. Hopefully it will be a better introduction to the story for new readers.

In other news, my collection of good pony songs after listening to now over 8000 songs has broken the 180 song mark and is well beyond 12 hours in length. I'm aiming for breaking 240/250 by the time I finish going through massive amounts of songs I have backlogged. I'll then attempt to cut it down to 200 and have the top 200 ready for release. I'll probably be posting the top 200 here on my blog since I don't have anywhere better to put it.

Basically don't be surprised when random music posts start appearing in my blog. It's a project I've been working on for quite a while and will be ranked based on my opinions and quality. That means we won't have a popularity contest in which the entire published works of Living Tombstone appear in the top 100. (I'm looking at you EverFree Networks.)

Blah blah blah, new chapter tomorrow(later today), with bonus chapter 1 rewrite.

-Kal

I've been thinking about doing one of these for a while and shamelessly stealing the title from Present Perfect. So, here we go.

Currently, From Scratch Chapter 13 is very close to being published. My editor has been quite busy finishing the paper he needs to write in order to graduate. (Not quite a dissertation in terms of scale, but same general idea.) This has been the major source of delays recently, but given my absurd adventures in trying to find an editor... I'm pretty much just willing to wait this out. It should be out in a few days, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

The delays in Solace in Silence have been due to the fact that I'm just not really happy with it right now. I tried to rewrite some minor things and while I like the result better, I'm still not satisfied. I'm going to just suck it up and finish the damned thing. Even if I'm not happy with it, I feel that it's better to finish it than to leave it alone. It won't take a large amount of writing to wrap the story up, and once that's done it's just up to finishing From Scratch.

I am honestly not certain what I'm going to do once From Scratch finishes. There are a few story ideas in my head, a few that I've even outlined but I'm not entirely certain if I want to dedicate this huge stretch of time to writing, editing, and posting again. It's not exactly a pressing matter as we have an indeterminate amount of time left in From Scratch, but it's not exactly short. One of them is a long adventure, been toying around with a sadder style story, and there are a few other shorter silly ideas that I'll probably write regardless.

I'm certainly going to have less time to dedicate to writing as things progress anyway, so then we're looking at no real increase in production speed with possible decreases. I'm not sure if I want to get into another huge project while that is the case. Soon I'm going to have the last words on the couple of job applications I have in the works, and then I'll be spending my time either with those or hunting down newer prospects.

I might go back and rewrite the first story I had on this website, as it was a good concept that I feel could get some more attention, but it would barely be recognizable and would basically wind up being a different story. So again, that would be a large time sink and I'm not certain if it's something I want to do. (Sorry bookworm)

Basically there's a lot of uncertainty in my life right now, things can go in a number of different directions. So, because of that once I start finishing up the projects I have on the table right now I'm going to have to stop and clearly think about it before I start any new ones that are anything beyond short oneshots/2-3 chapter silliness.