Aye, then. My head hurts, pardon the wall of text, p sure I'm gonna ramble.
A week or two ago I unearthed some buried series of fics on the web.
They started out pretty good. Made sense, at least. Tried to fill in a little bit more of the character development, the series was started during Season 1 i think. One thing I noticed about it was that the villains were made to be just a little bit... darker. Just a little bit edgier. I mean, they were going for realism, and it worked... at first.
So I kept reading. Eventually the differences in the author's character development and the official character development proved impossible to reconcile, and at some point during S3 he just gave up and said "screw canon".
The story had already taken one dive into MUCH "darker and edgier" territory with some undying tormented souls trapped forever in the everfree forest or some stuff. It started going downhill faster though. It was like a car crash in slow motion, watching the author's sanity fly through the windshield. The story started out really compatible with just about everything else but the divergence and slowly worsening condition of the fic-verse just fried my brain for like four days. The curse of having a nearly all-inclusive headcanon, I guess.
Anyway stuff got even weirder when he went and did a history segment with it. A lot of the characters acted... really ridiculous. But there were still snippets that were plausible.
Finally it all just went "ded" when he had a bunch of characters suddenly start acting REALLY out of character with no real explanation, Discord being apparently the epitome of every evil ever, being able to corrupt folks even while in statue form by using telepathy and stuff...
Long story short it was disturbing to watch the author's sanity slippage and I could tell at a glance that the final section was going to be full of insane, confusing stuff.
TL;DR, I read a fanfic and it was obvious the author was slowly losing his mind/optimism/faith-in-that-which-is-good as he wrote it, and it was really really weird and honestly pretty disturbing in a lot of places.
Other than that, I just dug up a few more pony character concepts and advanced my mental-fanfic storyline by about a week or two. The rest of the time was spent busy on some other sites doing other stuff. Mostly hanging out on a freeform Pokemon RP site (both multi-person and solo writings) and writing stuff for that, working on those characters, etcetra. Though I sort of started a crossover with three other entirely unrelated storylines as foreshadowing to a final confrontation in which worlds collide (technically coexist in the same space at the same time and interact with each other in a limited area), so at the rate I'm going, those stories might have ponies in them by the time I'm done.
TL;DR, I wrote some weird stuff.
Finally, since I haven't seen the slightest bit of S4, I have no idea what's going on in canon. Technically I read a bit about the first part of the premiere but everything since then is a complete unknown to me. Fortunately, my fic chars don't interact with canon characters much (if at all) which gives me flexibility in maintaining writing that makes sense given newer context.
Not that anyone cares about that stuff. I guess I just felt like I needed to yammer or something. Focus my thoughts by typing them out.
I'm in college now, Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. It's been keeping me busy, to say the least.
I still wear that fluttershy-cutie-mark button that ShadowsfeaR sent me, every single day. That one from the raffle where he couldn't get just two alone so he got the six pack and gave the other four away to people in the thread. It got water damage at some point, so about a quarter of it is kinda blurred out, but taking it apart to restore it is essentially impossible (I did the research on the construction). Most people don't mention it, which is fine by me. People who ask what it's about usually get a dodgy non-answer about it being "a gift from a friend" (because unsurprisingly people are still richards here in college even though they should have stopped caring long ago), only one person has known what it was off the bat and I don't see much of him.
During the first week of college, I made one really good friend. We hung out a lot, talked a lot. Eventually she invited me over to her dorm, we spent six hours watching funny stuff on youtube. There was a connection, it felt like, something I hadn't felt in a while. Then, the very next day, something went wrong with her FAFSA loan, she got kicked out, and I never heard from her again. Sometimes it feels like life conspires to keep me friendless. Other times I feel it's my own damn fault.
What else was new with me...
I've gotten really, really depressed. I guess that wasn't so much "new" as it was "oh, hey, looking back over this past year and really my life, I'm seeing a definite pattern here". I guess it was just something I got used to. It started getting noticeably worse starting january last year, and so I've slowly been drifting down to where I am now: complaining about stuff nobody cares about on an anonoymous forum where nobody can really help me, because none of the therapists or shrinks or whatever-the-forget-they-are haven't helped stuff and I can't afford to get an official diagnosis or any more meds than I'm already on.
It sort of shows in my writing down on the Pokemon site, "In Licentia". My solos are my better work, since I can edit and restructure the story as need be (and because I don't feel obligated to post even when my writing quality is feeling stuff), and most of them have some sort of gimmickry that forces a second read-through to get the full effect, an attempt to more engage the readers and make it more enjoyable (and ironically one of the admins completely misses the point and complains that it's a hassle to approve). But yeah, I guess in a way the writing serves to showcase my own downhill slide. It doesn't help that the only things I can figure out how to write are the really really weird parts at the moment. Weirdness has easier standards.
The sort of stuff I used to enjoy just doesn't cut it anymore. I mean, sure, I can distract myself for a few hours at a time by playing the latest video game, but in the end, it all ends right back where it starts, and I'm just... bleh, again. I can't remember the last time I had a "good day"; the best my days get is mediocre. I even lost interest in my artwork (I've been meaning to do an art project for the bare-walled stairwell in this residence hall), and for a while I didn't even write or create or much of anything. Nothing really seems to matter much anymore.
TL;DR, I'm depressed and confused. That said, I know I don't have the guts to off myself. Besides, too many people have put too much time and money and effort into this life. Cutting it off here would just make me an even bigger disappointment than I already am.
Total TL;DR, I did stuff and learned stuff and made stuff and sorta stopped making stuff and I hate my life so I'm rambling about it here because I'm an idiot.
