So I just hit 500 subscribers the other day. I've gotta say, the idea that 500 people said to themselves, "Hey, I think this guy has some neat writing. I think I'll follow him." is just awesome. So, to all of you, I want to say you all are the most awesome people on this planet, and I love every single one of you.

Seriously. I love all of you. Crack open the wine.

And as a thank you to all of you, I've got a little something for ya. You see, a year or so ago wasn't the first time I wrote fanfiction. And for those who've checked out my fanfiction.net page, I'm not talking about that BioShock story either. I'd like to take you back to a time when I was but a wee RatherHomely, eight years old and full of hopes and dreams. It was at this time, in the height of my love for a game called Paper Mario, I wrote a story about it. This was before I even knew what fanfiction was.

And I still have it.

So, for your viewing pleasure, I've uploaded the story onto the internet to let people witness my writing at it's finest. With great pleasure and pride, I present you with; The Mystery of the Ruins of Alpho.

God help us all.

As an additional note, for my MPPT3K people, I've added a little closure for MPPT3K in Fallen Prime's Fifteenth Riff Massacre. While I'd strongly suggest reading the full thing, the bit of closure is at the very end if you want to skip to it. I wasn't planning to do anything further originally with MPPT3K, so this is a nice little send off to the series.

Greetings, person. Do you like to read funny things?

Me neither.

That's why I, with my fellow riffing companions, have worked (Okay, so Fallen Prime and RJ Bachelor did most of the work) towards creating a central hub for all your MLP MST needs. You can find links to all my riffs (which will eventually be made into GoogleDocs sometime in the next 5 years so you won't need to spend 5 seconds entering a password), Fan/fic/ Theatre 3000's main page, RJ Bachler's riffs, and... Hmm, what am I forgetting...

Oh yeah, most of the guest submissions I had to take down. I guess that's sorta neat.

If YOU want to have your riff shared with the rest of the world, send me a link and I'll link your riff to the page. Or you can bug Fallen Prime and RJ Bachler about it. I'm sure they won't mind.

Salutations, fair readers, RatherHomely here. Unfortunately, I received a message from the mod team concerning MPPT3K;

It has been brought to the attention of the administration/moderation team that you have continued to publish your anthology "Mystery Pinkie Pie Theatre 3000" due to it being "grandfathered" in.

While that is okay (in part, and I will come back to it in a moment) by necessity and cordiality, you should ask the authors of the stories you are 'riffing' for their approval prior to actually doing so and posting it. As such, we ask that you willingly revoke the story until you have gathered proof of permission by the authors involved to use their work in this way.

Given the nature of authors here, it is unlikely that getting their go-ahead will pose an actual problem, but it is required and has been pretty much so for a while now. (This is basically the same rule as posting a story that is not your own under your name).

Now, the "Guest" mstings have to go. The "grandfathered" rule applies only to your own work, and only that. Those guest mstings are not your work, and as amusing as they might be to the readers, it's still trying to circumvent the limitations of the rules, and also happens to be blatant abuse of your rights as owning that "grandfathered" story/anthology.

Futhermore, the moderation team has come to the consensus that you will unfortunately need to desist your series. As it stands, the rules will be enforced on your story because it does not represent the continuation of a work that would normally be protected under a grandfathering rule. The MST3K-style is episodic in nature and can be reproduced infinitely since it can be contained to your post under previous enforcement, whereas policy dictates that no new MST3K should be made.

While I understand this might be a pain to do, I ask you to comply for the benefit of all involved.

~WD

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty cool with this.

No, seriously.

Believe it or not, I was already thinking of discontinuing the series after Riffuary. Running MPPT3K was fun, but very time consuming. And as much as I enjoy a good riff, I enjoy a good story more, and MPPT3K was keeping me from doing any other writing. So this isn't so much a "HOLY SHIT THIS SUCKS" message so much as a "This is a sign it's time I moved onto a different project". Loved you, MPPT3K, but it's about time I put you down.

So, I'm going to cooperate with the mods to the fullest. I'm revoking MPPT3K (it's still visible on the site and my profile, so you can still read it whenever you want) and I'm deleting the guest submissions (An additional note; If none of you can post MST's on this site, then I shouldn't have any right to either.).

So that's that. Thanks for reading!

Oh, and if any of you start bitching at the mods about this, I will personally come over to your house and slap you on the head. The mod team does a great job, and I agree with them that MPPT3K was stretching the rules more than it should have.

Edit: Also, as an additional note, you can check out the unpublished stories/riffs that were going to be published for the remainder of Riffuary, but obviously can't be now. The password to access the unpublished chapters is "password". Link is here.

Ah, 2013. A glorious start to a new year, so full of potential, possibilities, a different word for potential, and fiscal cliffs.

Is gonna be good.

And what also may or may not be good (depending on your opinion) is that I'm returning from my hiatus to start off the new year strong. As I recall, MPPT3K is roughly a year old. To celebrate its anniversary, clean out my riffing requests, and to make up for lost time, I'm doing something special. Today marks the start of Riffuary (isn't that name delightfully awful?), a month long goal/event where each day a new riff is posted, making for a grand total of 31 riffs (unless I'm lazy... then it'll be, like, 29)!

Also, I am now excepting riff requests and guest submissions again! You all now have permission to pester me (not really)!

Guest submissions should be written on a Google drive doc , publicly accessible, and the link be sent to me. If you have a better way to send it to me, contact me via PM.

Riffing requests should be sent to me via PM. I'm not going to accept requests that originate from the comments on the blog or comments on the story as, from past experience, that proved difficult to keep organized. Requests may be of any genre or quality (I believe anything can be riffed), but I will not accept requests for stories lasting more than 15,000 words long. If the story has multiple chapters, you may request specific chapters in order to meet this requirement. You may also request specific ponies to riff the story, but this is entirely optional.

For those who sent me a request during my hiatus, if you could resend the request I'd be really grateful.

With that, let the month long riffing commence!

... Oh, and those other stories. I should probably work on those.

And for those concerned about my sanity in the midst of all this riffing, I did a good chunk of the work in December, so I'm not going write myself to death. Not yet anyway. :)

Edit: Also, on an off note, love the changes Knighty's made to the site since I left. Rearranging chapters? SO USEFUL FOR MPPT3K.

Hello.

...

Yes, hello.

I'm going on a hiatus for an unknown period of time.

Unfortunately, I just learned that my mother (who's been fighting cancer for the past four months) has about four to six weeks left before she passes on. Personally, I'd rather not waste time writing and instead spend these last few weeks with her.

Thank you for understanding.

Edit: Thank you all so much for your kind words. This is a very emotional time for me and the rest of my family, and it's great to know I have such awesome readers who've got my back.

Double Edit: I suppose I should offer an update on what's going on. Unfortunately, my mother just recently passed away. Yes, I knew it was coming. No, it doesn't make it any easier. Yes, I would like some time away from FiM. Yes that means I'm continuing my hiatus. I just really need some time off, and I think anyone who's lost someone close knows what I mean. My apologies to everyone who's waiting for the next MPPT3K with baited breath (all five of you). I probably won't be posting anything until December, maybe November if I'm an emotionless robot. Once again, thank you all for understanding.

Triple Edit: Make that January. Between this, Hurricane Sandy, and college finals, I've just been swamped as of late.

For all those interested, I've cleaned up my request list for MPPT3K. Stories I can't find anymore have been weeded out (sorry to those requesters ['requestors' is not actually a word]) and I've moved the ridiculous long stories that I'll never get to because I don't have enough time to riff into a separate category on my user page (and also sorry to those requestors). If anybody feels like making a guest submission but don't 1. know what to riff and 2. feel like doing a ridiculously long story, that's the list to go to.

Also, on another note, for those of you that enjoyed You in Equestria: Let's Save a Kingdom, a couple of bronies made a video read through of the story. The person who's read it before serves as the narrator, while a compatriot of his is going in blind.

It amuses me.

The full, not quite so edited version is here (about an hour and a half, so grab some popcorn), while the more polished version is currently in the works here.

I know as of late I've been a bit slow on updates. At least, I think I've been. It's certainly slower than the three riffs a week I used to do when first starting out (How did I even do that?). Life's been a bit... "draining" as of late. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say problems seem to compound and create a big weight that seems to be constantly resting atop one's shoulders. One of these things is that my mother, who's been fighting cancer for the past three months, has just told me the doctor's found spots on her lungs. I just... don't really feel funny right now.

I'm not going to stop writing. I could never just 'stop' writing. I'm just going to be writing less. The last thing I want to do is force myself to write unfunny riffs just so I can meet a self-imposed quota. That's not fair to all my readers. I'd rather write one good riff every two weeks than an awful one every other day.

On a separate note, I've been looking over my list of requests. As some readers have pointed out to me, some of these stories are particularly long and would take a million years to finish. "Hm," I said to myself. "My output rate is equivalent to shit as of right now. Perhaps I should get rid of some of these stories?" But that wouldn't be fair to the people who made those requests. So, I've decided to do something; I'm going to create a separate list on my page for the stories I consider to long for me to tackle. If you feel like submitting some guest riffs, but don't know what to do, these are totally up for grabs. I'll probably take care of this within the next week or so.

You know what's probably going to happen? At the start of summer, I say, "Oh, it's summer, I'm going to get a ton of writing done!" I don't. Now I'm saying, "Oh, I'm just going to take it easy... Not write much..." I guess that means I'm going to write like crazy. XD

Hey guys, RatherHomely here.

Just for kicks, I wrote a fun little collab story with Mister Fluttershy.

The story is being published under the name RatherShy, and has just been submitted for approval recently.

So, if you're interested, keep your eyes peeled for our magnum opus, "Rock".

Edit: It's out!

It's interesting.

I am so happy right now.

No, seriously, I'm in a good mood.

As you all have probably noticed, I've just released a teensy tiny story known as "You in Equestria: Let's Save a Kingdom". I have had that beast on the back of my mind for a month and a half, and the amount of pressure that's been taken off me feels absolutely AMAZING! It didn't help that, a couple of weeks ago, Poultron casually commented to me that he and Knighty were thinking of banning Choose Your Own Adventure stories, so I was really happy that the story was published in the first place!

The fact that the story is actually doing well is icing on the cake. I'm sorry if this sounds like bragging, but it feels great to have a story you've been working on for so long actually rocket to the top of the most popular chart and hit number 1 in the featured box. When I checked it last night, it was just sitting with around 300 views or so. I was actually expecting it to fade into obscurity. There are times that I'm happy I'm wrong.

Now, I know perfectly well that a story that gets a lot of views doesn't mean it's "the best story in the world", or even that it's a good story. I completely understand that. But if a story gets a lot of views, then that means a lot of people are reading it. And if a lot of people are reading it, then that means there's a good chance I'm making a lot of people laugh. And as anyone who knows me personally can tell you, I love to make people laugh.

Also, I've hit 300 watchers. I guess that makes me a C-List fimfiction celebrity or something. Hooray! (I suppose, out of fimfiction, that makes me a... Z-List celebrity?)

I won't go lauding my achievements any longer. I WILL tell you where I'm going from here.

My main plan is to work on some collab/proof-reading projects I should really do. Afterwards, I want to focus on a particular multi-chapter story I've been ignoring for the longest time... My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic the Gathering. I'll still be publishing riffs, but that story is going to be my primary focus. I know at least a few people have been asking me to continue it, and now that "You in Equestria" is done, I'll be happy to oblige.

RatherHomely, out!