Oh, how time flies...

Four years ago, to the day, was the day that I stumbled across a particular channel on YouTube by the name of 'Wubcake'.

I can still remember the day. It was a Friday, and I had just gotten home from school. Season 9 wouldn't start until April, and Season 8 had ended the previous October, so I was a bit starved for MLP content.

The newest video on Wubcake's channel was titled, 'Long Road To Friendship - Chapter 5 Slice of Life' and had only been up for maybe an hour or two.

Obviously not wanting to start five chapters in, I went back to Chapter 1 and listened to it. By the end I was captured by the brilliant storytelling of Albi and voicework of Wubcake. So, I started on Chapter 2. And then 3, 4, and eventually ended on 5.

I think it was only around seven o'clock when I had finished it, so I went to go and play some Forza Horizon 4, which had only been out for five months at the time! It was closer to ten o'clock when I was like, "...You know what? Let's read some more." and so I logged off of Forza and switched over to my relatively new at the time Galaxy A9.

Seriously, that quad-camera setup was the coolest thing to me. And the blue-green colour. Anyway, I was reading until gone two in the morning, and I finished somewhere around Chapter 12.

Saturday morning, I picked it straight back up, I didn't leave my room that weekend. By Sunday midday I had finished the story for the first time. All 213k words of it, done in under 48 hours.

I will freely admit that Long Road to Friendship is the only piece of writing to ever make me tear up and cry. Not bawling, but I did cry a little. That ending is just heartwarming in all the right ways.

I knew at that moment that this story was something truly special. And when I found out there was a sequel, Spectacular Seven... Sweet Celestia is the only phrase to describe it!

So I started on that too! And I remember blasting through that the next week.

As far as I'm aware, it wasn't nearly as fast. I devised my own two-week system for repeat reading of Long Road, and Spectacular Seven. In fact, I'll copy paste it here!

Saturday: LRtF
Sunday: LRtF
Monday: 4
Tuesday: 4
Wednesday: 5
Thursday: 4
Friday: 4

Saturday: 5
Sunday: 5
Monday: 4
Tuesday: 4
Wednesday: 4
Thursday: 4
Friday: Sunlight

This went as far as Volume III: Chapter Four. The story didn't get an update until July that year, so I had lots of time to read up until the same point without messing with the schedule. I also chucked in Sunlight, another brilliant story that was narrated by Wubcake as a nice Friday treat before I'd delve back into Long Road over the weekend.

Five total hours of videos, that was! I can vividly remember blazing through Sunlight while playing Forza at three in the morning. Finished at five. Messed up my sleep schedule but damm it was worth it.

This followed all the way into summer, and I've read through Long Road to Friendship a total of TEN total times so far. Spectacular Seven is sitting at nine, including the first eight in 2019 and my current readthrough with the latest chapters.

I remember 2019 summer. I took frequent walks with my dog, Bentley, around our local forest. I had the text-to-speech function reading the fics to me through my earbuds. It wasn't perfect, but it worked!

So... Yeah. A lot has happened in the last four years. The Horizon Adventures happened. I fell in love with Diaries of a Madman in Feb 2020, the longest fic on the site at the time. I've read through THAT three times, now.

Long Road, Spectacular Seven, and all of my Sunlight binges combined total maybe five / six million words.

All the Diaries readthroughs stretch ten million, easy.

I've read a looooot of words on this site, and I don't think it'll stop anytime soon. This site is why I'm still into MLP, because its been my main source of content since the show ended.

So, thank you Albi, Wubcake, Knighty. For introducing me to a brilliant story series, narrating a brilliant story series, and creating this site itself!

This has been a huge nostalgia dump and I'm just happy to relive those memories. You guys are all legends