2018 - The Year in Review · 10:16pm Dec 31st, 2018
2018 Year End Review
Let’s start things off with a TL,DR version.
Holy crap am I glad this year is over.
With that out of the way, let’s get onto the full review.
2018, by far, has been one of the craziest years I’ve ever seen. I’ll try to avoid anything political just to avoid any flame wars, but let’s get straight to it.
As far as my life goes, I’ma just say this right now: 2018 would win the award of Rollercoaster joyride of the year. Much of the early months were more or less a blurred-together extension of the emotional turmoil I was going through after the beginning of Pony-Me in December 2017. Needless to say, there really wasn’t all that much happening just yet.
March marks one of the first high points. For the second year in a row, my school’s robotics team took fourth place, losing on the same match, to the same team, in the same way, as last year. Unlike last year, however, we were also scrambling to rebuild roughly half of the entire robot in between our home competition and a competition up in Boise, Idaho. We completely bombed the home game, so between the time we spent there, and our next game in Idaho, we had to replace one of the integral mechanisms of the robot, redesigning it from the ground up because the old mechanism using all-threads would lock up waaaay too often to be reliable.
In the end, we managed to at least match our performance of last year, I guess. We replaced the double all-thread lift for the robot’s arms with a pulley system using paracord. It wasn’t quite as strong as using all-threads, but holy crap was it more reliable. Faster, too.
Heading into April, the sense of comedy that I had from the previous year finally started to leak back into my stories after getting smacked down by Pony-Me’s sudden overhaul of my writing style. Yes, I’m talking about the April Fool’s chapter of that story. I was very reluctant to insert any sort of comedy into the story at first, but I nevertheless relented, and posted something funny for the first time in quite a while. From there onwards would be one of the first major extensions of Pony-Me, with the story ultimately shedding its topmost layer of “Sustenance Sectors” and such to explore the greater world around it, of which was (and still is) heavily influenced by real-life locations that I’ve grown up around.
May was more or less just pure, unfiltered confusion. With AP tests and everything with “finals” tacked onto it swirling around, there really wasn’t anything else that could mark the month better than that.
June would come and go with the end of the school year. Just like May, there really wasn’t anything major that occurred. My friends were all on vacation, and with my parents busy, there wasn’t much I could do besides stay at home and do my usual messing around with computers. Writing progress would dramatically slow over Summer Break as I took some time to unwind, but with the same mental conflict going on as the one that started Pony-Me all those months ago still swirling around, nights were often restless. A few stories were published during this time, but to this day I really haven’t given them very much attention.
August would really be when things actually started to happen again. We finally got some time to go on a family vacation, and took my little brother to Disneyland. With myself easily getting motion sickness – something I got from my mom – I avoided rollercoasters at all costs. I just kinda followed my little brother around, and spent most of my time there waiting in line for rides with him. We topped off the trip with a short walk on the beach, and built a couple sandcastles.
With September came my birthday, and a all-night-long D&D campaign with my friends. It would also see the release of a one-shot based on a chapter idea from “What If…”, something that most notably mirrors Pony-Me. Just as much of the rest of the year, I was just kinda wallowing around trying to figure out what I should do to set things straight.
October came and went, and oh boy, this month was definitely a mixed bag. Halloween brought some candy and AB/BC Calculus class started ramping up a bit, making a few people drop the class and retreat back to a lower class. And then I accidentally sent a message to the person that much of my restlessness revolved around. It seemed at first that everything was about to go horrifically downhill, but then, it went straight up again. He even was considering becoming friends again, starting over with a clean slate and such. In the end, it was settled that we would just go our separate ways, and likely never meet again.
November brought with it sweeping changes to my writing. With the weight of worry about my former friend finally gone, I really didn’t have to write the same way I was making myself write anymore. The story would suddenly begin to swing much more towards a lighthearted slice-of-life fic with little references to parts of my own life, as opposed to being a heavily emotion-pushing-oriented story meant to get what I was feeling out in the open.
December would hit another low point at first. My dad came home from exercise one day feeling weak. He’d go to the doctor the next day, only to be rushed to the emergency room to clear a 95% blocked artery. If it weren’t for the fact that we caught it, the doctors said that he would’ve suffered a potentially-fatal heart attack within the next couple weeks. Now, he’s much more reserved about what he eats, and for the first time, has to take weekly pills to maintain his health. Going on, I’m honestly not too sure about what to feel about the situation. On one hand, I’m definitely glad that my dad’s okay now, but on the other, I’m still pretty worried.
But. Literally just yesterday, we went on one final year-end vacation to Vegas. Watched a Penn & Teller magic show, got an autograph and pictures, and as of today, we’re on a 6-hour car trip back home, where I’m currently writing this review in the car on Microsoft Word to publish once I have network reception.
All in all, as far as the actual show goes, Season 8 was the first time I skipped practically an entire season. I first joined the fandom around Season 4, but got active when 5 came around. In my opinion, the show’s quality has begun to somewhat deteriorate, with characters sometimes regressing in character development, and often times with the few episodes I did watch, filler material would be used to bump up the length of episodes.
In writing on the site, I’ve largely begun to drift further and further away from MLP in many of my stories, with “What If” and “Bloons Tower Defense: Equestria” being the only two stories that actually have any solid grounding in the show. Pony-Me and its derivatives often see the case where I have to deliberately find a way to write in something to relate it more with the show, simply because at its core, the story is entirely original-fiction, with only a loose connection to MLP to supply a small amount of background to the rest of the story. “The Day the World Exploded” is more or less still an experiment for now, and I’m still trying to figure out ways to grow the story, but for now it is on an unofficial hiatus.
Moving forward into the new year of 2019, I have my clean conscience back, and I am currently trying to revisit the things I left behind in my wallowing self-pity from most of 2018. I’ve started writing the reboot to the Lab Horse series, one of my most notable works from before everything suddenly became centered on Pony-Me. Things have certainly changed since the last time I did anything with the old series, and for now, I’m focusing on reviving the old writing style that made the Lab Horse series so enjoyable for many.
At the same time, I’m still working on the OC-only special taking place in the Pony-Me universe. It still has no relation, and no way to relate, to MLP, so for now, it’s solely Original Fiction, and cannot be published on Fimfiction as its own story.
Here’s hoping that 2019 is better. I’m tired of the uncertainty and worry.
Wow. Your year was certainly more eventful than mine.
I hope you have a better year in 2019.
Best of luck with Writing
Hope your Father is healthy and that nothing like that happens again.
Well, yikes. Being the socially clueless person I am, I had no clue this year was so hectic for you. Here's hoping to a better 2019 for all of us.