Starlight Serenade

Sick. Woke up with a bad pain in my stomach and can’t seem to keep anything down. I took some meds and tried to rest the past 4 hours and feel a bit better now. Going to have some homemade soup in a bit.

I don't really have other social media and went off the analytic data that I saw a year ago, G5 seems more popular elsewhere than here. I see a lot of G5 vids as well. Though I have been recommended some of the "G5 hate" vids and ignore those. Too many people just ranting for the sake of ranting instead of being respectful and giving valid criticisms(which I have a few for G5 but that's another issue). That's why I based my OC, Starlight Serenade off of G5 with the idea of Skyros in mind. I had my own little idea that the alicorns were similar to Greek Gods, but something happened and they all spread out. Yeah it's a bit sad to see. This and the threads idea of keeping conversations fresh instead of reusing threads from inactive accounts as well. Oh on the topic of threads, what about if there was something similar to freeze pane in Microsoft Excel/the quote system here for the OP's questions/posts? This way you can see what the original poster put in regards to a question/post without scrolling to the top or to the beginning at times. I see some people go off based recent comments at times and then the threads become derivative from the original topic. There are a lot of little quality of life updates that I think could be tweaked a bit. I saw that there was an minor exodus of fans around the ending of the first 3 seasons and the start of season 4. I assumed the peak years went all the way up to around 2014 or so since Lauren Faust's involvement early around S2/S3 and the writing started to decline. There were a lot of fun little moments in the later seasons, but there was definitely a decline with recycled story lines and ideas for later episodes.

Okay, I will make one more post on the forums and then I got to finish these accounting calculations!

Yes I am assuming that since social media is more popular than ever, using the forums as a means of communication isn't as prevalent as it used to be. It doesn't help that the fandom hasn't been as popular as it's early years in G4. I think G4 was lighting in a bottle as it was around the early years of when social media was beginning to rise which helped boost it's popularity. Just to clarify, I used Reddit as it's the most similar to a forum in comparison to the other big social media sites. Discord is good for gaming/groups(some ideas from it could be used on apps), but is limited in some aspects. Adapting some ideas from different sites would be good for the app.

Mmmm the forums is still somewhat active as I recall from when I came back a little while ago. However, some of the people I used to know are not here anymore while the other regulars are still out and about. There are periods where it seems dead as a lot of people that I met here are fellow adults who most likely have jobs, families, school, other hobbies, etc. So on one hand, it's totally understandable that some people can't sit down for too long on the forums with other things going on IRL. However since I look at the business side of things due to school- my only concern is that if G5 had several hundred million to a billion social interactions across all social media platforms just a year ago, why wasn't there that much of an uptick in people joining here? Here are just some other thoughts: - The forums seems more G4 centric than the current generation. This could make some new fans coming in feel not included/out of the loop as a majority of things on the forums are more G4 than anything. It's understandably so with how popular it was in comparison to the other generations. The forums have recently done more events that are G5 centric, but I recall there weren't that many before when I joined last year. I love G4 as it's what got me into the series a few years back, but it would be nice if G5 was embraced more and that it got some more attention at the forefront. With the news that licensing and TYT possibly being finished up in early 2025, G5 could almost be over in a year and not much has been done here. Maybe there could be more events, banners, backgrounds, rps, etc. (I love the current banner though). -No accompanying app. It would be great to have an app for the forums similar to what Reddit has, but I understand that is a complex situation with a lot of overhead and can understand why the owner(s) of the site would not maybe want that. Maybe even copyright issues as well, idk? With an app on the apple store/google play store, I would imagine thousands of people joining here. -A lot of inactive accounts. One thing I noticed is that accounts shown here for birthdays and such show inactive accounts from a few years ago to over a decade ago. Honestly there were some days recently where it showed a wall of people who haven't logged in for years and people telling them happy birthday. That could come across several different ways to new people. There should be a new way to program or set it up so that it captures more recent/active accounts. One idea that I think should be included is that older threads should be retired and maybe use AI to generate new topics that are used for 6 months to a year then retired completely. I had a few more thoughts, but I need to get studying for school XD

A few times thanks to the different music groups that I was in. The first time that I recall was when our school got tickets to be in the audience for a living recording for a show called "The Voice", they had a really "bad act" come in doing some questionable stuff that caused the crowd to boo them loudly. The second time was for a concert for Gym Class Heroes that my high school's marching band performed in as part of a half time commercial thing. It was interesting and fun. The third time is more like a music video for John Mayer, again with my high school marching band. The fourth time was for a college jazz band where we played with a very well known Latin drummer at the annual college festival. We had this giant stage and I got interviewed by the news!

If you can find it physically/digitally and be able to afford it, do it. It's always great to be able to support the series in any way, but I understand if you have to sail the high seas with the other seaponies.

The last game I recall playing was Palworld when it came out, I think? Unfortunately, I have not played games in a little while as I had some things come up a while back.

I'm making some gradual progress on this course work, but this specific family member is really going out of their way to ruin my day. Okay, so that's how today is going to be.

So the same person I know that bet against Cody winning at mania last year for $1,000 is now betting $5,000 that the story continues. They told me that the story can get even bigger and that Roman's historic title reign can break more records. I really don't know how it could possibly get bigger than it already is nor do I want to know. I say that the story finishes next week weekend. Cody's story line is definitely one of the best ones that we have seen in years and the build up has been insane the past few months, but I want to see what happens post mania. The roster felt like it has been in limbo for a while and after mania, we will see a lot of pieces moving across the board and a lot of exciting new match ups that were teased back around the rumble.

"Put the lime in the coconut and burn the building up"

Tired. Still up late reviewing some accounting coursework as I got tied up with some things in the middle of the day. Thank goodness I still have time to turn in my assignments.

Likewise, I just found out about the discord server and joined there to find out about the announcement. What if people don't have a discord and/or other social media as well?

Tired. Did some weight lifting and 4 miles today for cardio. I am slowly getting more distance in. Now I'm dreading all the work I have to do for my accounting class.

I'm glad that the forums are back. It felt like forever since I was online but I know that our techs/staff is working hard behind the scenes and I'm thankful.

Tired. Long day of running around and there is still more work that needs to be done.

All these AI music videos that are popping up in my feed have been really good. From Frank Sinatra singing Creep by Radiohead, to Freddie Mercury singing an emotional rendition of Let It Go from the movie Frozen, to now the Rainbooms singing famous pop songs that would fit the G4 EG show. I am impressed with what it can do so far and it's only going to get better it seems.

"WE'VE JUST ARRIVED AND WE'RE THE MOST ELITE WARRIORS IN THE UNIVERSEEEEE"

So I was recently reminded that I had like 18 years on Youtube for my oldest channel (I started young around early 2006) and it's been through so many changes. It's been the one streaming platform that I have always gone on for the longest despite so many criticism. I agree with a majority of what people have written here. There are too many ads all over every segment of videos on mobile that it made me go into podcasting apps over the past decade (thank goodness for ad blockers on desktop btw). Though one of my pet peeves are these sponsor segments with really terrible segways. The moment I see them, I skip through the video and down vote the video. These "creators" have gotten too greedy and sold themselves out. It's already enough that I see some of my favorite older creators "retire" but then comeback with a writing team/higher budget and production, but it's never the same again. I have seen that happen way too much in the past 5 years alone. I recall when I was given a year of Youtube Red/Premium for free years ago (it was a raffle prize), it said that I had around 27 HOURS of ad free videos at the end of the year. They are literally robbing time away from your lives with this ad nonsense. They don't care about your time. Second, searches are getting darn near impossible to find the video you want. I get random video recommendations which is like playing heads or tails to see if they are good. Usually the music recommendations are decent, but other times I watch a clip of one of my favorite shows then get a random political video or "mature" type videos out of nowhere. What do those have to do with MLP and my other cartoon shows? If this is what they are showing adults, I wonder what the heck they are showing kids as there are many ways to bypass the weak and basic Youtube filters. I am starting to think that they purposely make videos hard to find so that you spend even MORE time on the platform and get distracted by the recommendations they put. On that note, I really dislike it when I see the "made for kids" feature is on MLP videos or cartoons in general for that matter. It perpetuates the notion that only kids watch cartoons. Adults like to watch cartoons too, anybody can watch and enjoy! They disable the comment section which I usually like to check out since they took away the dislike button. The Dislike button that was taken away was very pivotal as it help users discern what videos were good or not. In the age of AI, I think it's very important to have that feature. Also, don't kids have the kids version of the Youtube app? What's the point of the made for kids feature if they are supposed to be on the kids app? Every video that is automatically set to "made for kids" literally links you to the kids app to download automatically yet a kid could watch "mature" type videos without issue. It's a flawed system, well in general if we are being honest. Next, copyright strikes. These can remove media that is rare to find and ruin people's lives in other cases. There should be a better system in place now. They had YEARS to fix this, but they won't do it. Youtube Shorts is also very annoying and time consuming. It feels like a distraction tool as they randomly open when you open YouTube and once you see one or two of them, several minutes have gone by and you have forgotten what you are doing at times. It's similar to TikTok as in how they keep you attached to the platform. Another personal issue I have is playlists. I had playlists with 5K+ videos that don't even load past the first hundred videos anymore. They just crash especially on mobile. I had to delete some playlists which had so many incredible vids that I may never find again due to them being unlisted and the search bar being a mess now. I had a few more things to list, but I am just making myself feel negative thinking about it. Youtube was born of great potential and many fantastic ideas, but it has going downhill nowadays. I have to use different extensions to get a good experience.

Woah just saw this, but I like your art style! It's very fun!

I usually watch highlights of AEW, but after the suggestion of a few people- I decided to watch Dynamite for the debut of Mercedes Mone. I think she has not changed one bit, well other than her spray paint hair/wig thing? Idk what to even call it. It reminds me of those Monarch butterflies or maybe I am misremembering it. I haven't seen her since probably her WWE days, but heard she was doing other things at other promotions. Anyway, I saw her promo on Dynamite and it felt like the same style of promos that she did before. I actually bet that she was going to mention Eddie Guerrero as she used to do and I was right! It took me a while to figure out why they kept chanting "CEO" and was scared thinking that Tony Khan promoted her or something already I'm hoping that maybe she'll change the AEW women's division for the better, but I really don't know after seeing how the rest of the division is being booked.