Reflection – Pinkie's Paradise

Pinkie’s 500th Post: Reflections and Ideas

Hurray! Dear Reader welcome to my 500th post! While I missed the mark of 500 posts on Paradise , I was in time to do something about me reaching 500 posts. So today we will do the obligatory Reflections as well as discussing content for the future, you know the road to 1000. So what was it like making 500 posts?! Take a look with me! During these 500 posts! I laughed, I cried, I learned and I adapted and this is a little journal on how!

What Have I Learned

Cute Kawaii Face Pink PS4 Controller Skin

Let’s first take a look at the growth I made! As a writer, I do not personally feel I have grown all that much! I still make silly mistakes, I still am long winded but I am also still me! Throughout almost two years of blogging now I do think I for the most part always kept track of me.. all posts feel like me! I can recognise myself in my earliest writing , the middle and the end. Even though I changed content a lot in these 500 posts, there is a certain level of me in all of them that makes me feel at least a little accomplished. I also learned that maybe that very almost indescribable thing that is the “me” that is in that post is what keeps people around. I can change up my content a lot but people will still be there. Except for gaming posts around older games, those really usually bomb! I might need to delve deeper into Gaming WordPress to grow further.

I tried many approaches to things , but I also learned that blogging in a way can be a bit addicting. I wanted to put a post out every day, I wanted to do two every day even.. but I realised with how long my average post is.. that is not something I can maintain. I spend so much effort to get posts done.. just to break even at the end of a day. One post goes in, one post goes out! I need to be blogging every day, need to be edditing every day and need to be able to consume content every day as well! I discovered I struggle with episodic reviews, they are easy enough to produce but they hardly give me any gratification. An episode summary feels redundant because people who read these things often seen the same anime, yet you can also not got without the summary so half my post already feels redundant. It will also kinda force you to find negatives about an episode and it made me feel whiney and unhappy! So after a massive burnout.. I decided to end them. I needed to be happy!

My current schedule of blogging every other day already works a lot better for me! I am creating a post every day still, sometimes more, but this time around I actually plus on blogs. I write two.. one goes out, one is still in cue. This is much more managable with my health. If I have a bad day.. I can now accept I have a bad day and just don’t produce. I can go spend a day with my friends or family without feeling obligated to blog, I feel a lot more free. I could also write shorter posts and write several a day… but that’s not me! I need to think more and correct myself more!

That’s not my style.. while I may repeat myself a lot now and talk about random stuff in the middle.. what I write comes from the heart.. it feels to me more as if I am talking to you.. and I rather have that than styling out a post! I read a lot of how to blog guides, and a lot of tips to be regular and consistent to be neutral and all of that, but to me that may work to get you an audience.. but that might not work for you as a blogger. I love you all, but I learned that audience is secondary to yourself having fun. You can’t write if you hate doing it! Sometimes that means letting your audience down…or not growing as fast as you could. So be it! I am sorry, but as a hobby blogger your first responsibility is to you and your hobby!

My Highlights

Now I love all my posts and never will favourite any of them, as the others may cry so I won’t be going over my favourite posts! Yet while creating this blog and while doing things I have come to experience a few highlights. The first one is minor but I just had so much fun! It was while I was creating my post for OWLS-Minicon , my post about all the convention plushie dealers around the world. While that post tanked hard and not many people cared about my passion for plushies it was a great experience to get to learn some new people. To get that feeling that I can do at least a very little something back for those people who provide us with these amazing dealers rooms!

Even if we don’t buy their plushies,their games or whatever, think how your dealer room would look without them. Empty.. not fun, even if you don’t buy their goods you still like browsing the stall! Some of the interactions I had with those people were fun and super grateful! Not a people may have read the post or they disliked it just.. but to me I felt closer to the geek community then I had in a long while! I may have not been able to bestow people that convention feel.. but I sure got it!

I Love My Staff This Much Mug Friend Colleague Office Employee Secret Santa Birthday Gift Christmas Novelty Humour Funny: Amazon.co.uk: Kitchen & Home

Another Highlight was my decision to look for Blog STAFF! It has offered me a nice platform of great people to interact with, with the coming of Periwinkle the STAFF chat has really livened up! I love geeking out over things, and even some of the random discussions we have! I am so happy to have these people in my life! As well as the awesome blogger crowd visiting me of course.. but with the STAFF it is just something special you know! A long time ago I worked on a blog with friends and I loved that feeling, and that feeling is beginning to return a bit now! Paradise is growing and I really love it.

Yet another highlight I had , and this may sound silly is being included in K’s ,Which Blogger are You test. It wasn’t exactly that I was included that made me happy, it was the fat that I answered my questions very genuinely and it spit me out! I have a lot of fun making my images, dong the whole paradise thing and trying to have this “brand” as it were. I wasn’t sure if it worked. I hide a lot of fun details in a lot of my images, or go to some weird effort to make an egg reflect in the water.. just because I want to give it a try… I never really get reactions to this.. but the test showed, it got noticed. I try provide content that is off the beaten path.. and oftenly those post perform badly in terms of likes,,but this test showed me it was noticed

As the scatterbained loon that I am I often interacting less with people than I would like, I read your blog on my phone, then go to grab a cupcake, I like your post as I enjoy my cupcake.. but then I see on my pc on twitter that another person also made a new post! I go read it and forget the like button! I oftenly type comments to people and as I search for a strong joke to end on I end up petting my Pikachu in Pokémon Camp and it shows me an apple and I forget to enter my comment or sometimes I get to anxious to reply. I feel like a horrible person a lot of the itme because of it.. increasing that anxiety… yet by being included in the test.. I got a feeling, okay so perhaps I am not as much as an outsider as my mind makes me out to be.. perhaps i do belong here! I may be weird and distant..but I am approachable.. and that really made me smile! Irina’s attempt to explain me trough anime characters was another one of those things.. and it even gave me an idea for my next restyle. When she called me the sports team mom, with a hint of ojou-sama

My Lows

Watamote–Anime Early Impressions – FunBlog

Today we will celebrate so we will not stand still with my lows a lot, but I made a few discoveries about blogging and content creation in general that made me feel a bit…disappointed. A big thing was a realisation I made. While I really do love anime I don’t enjoy it in the frequencies that most others here do. I watch anime once or twice a week and I am content with that. Not always that long either. I am not sure if that is enough, I don’t feel alien to the world of anime but I can not really shake that “fifth” wheel feeling. I am not being subjected to active gatekeeping, but when I walk into a discussion I do feel I am in over my head. I do not feel I have much to contribute. I always end up freezing up and just letting others have their fun discussion without bothering them with more basic shows!

It is a feeling I have come to learn to accept , the eternal Kohai but it is a feeling I did not expect when I began. Anime is great and the anime community is fantastic but I never expected it to be this “overwhelming”. It’s all about the anime. In a way I’d say the community is a bit more nerdy than geeky. With which I mean: At a convention you talk to strangers and they ask you , how is your bubble tea, where did you get that figurine or if you vaguely know them, how are you. I will always have an answer.

The Online-Anime-Community is more “ Have you seen Astra yet?” “Someone did a Gatekeeper Tweet” , “Miss Kobayashi 2 trailer looks shit”. These discussions can be fun, but I always wonder.. does my voice in this really matter?! Meanwhile, compare that to the question “How is your Bubbletea?” I know my answer is going to be relevant. This is not a flaw about the anime community, just a misconception I had. I have had a rough time coming to terms with that. I have since made friends I talk personal with like Summer and Mallow, but also many others, but with that voice that tells me I am not good enough, or watch to basic anime it has been a bit of a struggle. The demon on my shoulder never fully goes away and keeps telling me, people will abandon me because I don’t watch anime daily!

Another lowpoint I have had with blogging is WordPress itself, it has given me more trouble recently! Just when I get into a rhythm they change it up and put something that was never an effort before, behind an extra set of clicks or scrolls. I had my favourite types of blocks with one click away and now I constantly have to search the block I am looking for. Recolouring things can be a hassle because with a new update I can’t drag and drop because now you just have to click! I learned so many hex codes just to avoid this problem! WordPress still is a great tool, but at times it feels so clunky! As if I am dragging through mud! It’s worth it.. but I don’t have that much energy to give. So if I need to give extra energy things grow skewed quite fast. It’s a shame that I have to design my blog keeping things in mind such as “It’s not worth it to recolour that thing, cause that glitches out half the time” or “better not add in that type of images as I will have to rescale it twice to make it fit”. The fact that I have to click a random button before I can activate my WordPress Bell is another thing. I often find myself thinking.. I’ll do it later than, I can’t be bothered with the hassle right now!

Self-esteem Archives | Documentation Wizard, LLC

WordPress Reader is another thing I have come to dislike! It is an easy way to check out other blogs fast, but it has also become an issue. To my knowledge it doesn’t show YouTube feeds. I recently tried to do YouTube but paused it because my health got in the way! I will now come back to it with an easier to handle model and a bit more flavour. Regardless, Reader doesn’t show my posts as pretty as I want them to be, my videos don’t show up, my images can look a bit more yankee, and the themes I work so hard on are not displayed. It’s as if people see you trough a broken mirror. Sure it’s you but a lot of effort you made to put on make-up is kinda lost. They just “recognise” you. It also results in a lot of ghost liking, which once again feeds that stupid demon.

My Future

Despite the whole Reader thing, I am planning to do a new Restyle really soon! This current style has been here for almost a year now! Minus a month or so, some minor changes took place, but this will be a big one! New theme new icons, new Pinkie! Manager Pinkie will soon be upgraded by a ruler of Paradise with a new flavour. The VTuber theme will still be going but the moth will be replaced by something new! Something a bit quirkier and something that is a HECK of a lot easier to build a VTuber model around.

Something more unique as well. MothTubers are almost all lewdTubers , there is a group of them.. but all of them are pretty non seiso! Which made me feel alien AGAIN! Besides that it was such a hassle to deal with those wings! It always looked fabricated to me as well. So when I went to have her commissioned instead.. I had change of heart and went for a theme that is much more in line with me rather than be a metaphor! I can flavour it a bit more as well. The restyle will arrive later this week.

I stopped doing episodic content because with my health that has been the hardest to keep up! That requires a schedule and I do not want that anymore. It gives me stress and on a mental level forces me to do content and currently I can not work under those circumstances. So no more episodic reviews, and less reviews in general. Rather than reviews, I’ll do rants or raves! Me being super positive, absolutely loving something, or me just having fun burning things down to the ground! (Think AVGN style) It won’t be subtle.. but it will be a lot more fun to do. I am also trying to the same with something that utterly confuses or baffles me.

Now I know something isn’t 100% good or 100% bad or 100% weird and that’s also not what I am trying to achieve with these newer formats. I really hope there is someone that loves what I hate, and I am pretty sure there is someone who hates what I love and that to a certain extent they will have a point. However I feel we have become a bit too afraid to give our unbridled opinions. It’s time to either praise something, or burn it to the ground! The latter usually in a so bad that it’s good spirit though.. or at least so bad that it’s interesting. It will be a bit wacky.. but it will be fun!

Speaking of wacky , that will be much more a theme going forward. While as a Moth Pinkie , before my second major burnout in a while I tried a more journalling type of approach to things, that doesn’t work for me. I do a journal with my Blogging Bestie, Summer now! Gaming in step by step content didn’t work for me though! I felt I either had to slow down my gaming, rush it or struggled with screenshots. It also made me serialise everything and I can’t do that.. my health is to fickle!

Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubeman (Family Guy) | Reaction GIFs

So instead you’ll see me tackle wacky games, anime or movies while also doing wackier things myself with my content in the form of stranger lists, more odd tags and of course more random content. I already did another Never Have I ever, with random prompts, post (for the near future) I also made a weird new tag, which probably not a lot of people will be interested in joining..but that’s not what it is about.. it is about me doing quirky things in familiar settings. A lot of it will be “fan stuff. Things like “If I made a Super Mario Movie” or how will this Anime couple look 20 years later. Stuff like if Kamina and LeLouche played a game of YuGiOh.. which one would win. I will also just watch weird stuff and tell you how I feel.. Movies like Swiss Army Man, or me Playing a Cho Aniki game!

The STAFF will of course continue to do their down thing, but by growing bolder and bolder in my content I hope to inspire them step out of the box as well! The box is an illusion.. inside the box you can be both dead or alive.. and while we don’t know if you are alive or dead inside your box.. you are both.. therefore you are dead in the box per definition!.. I guess not if it’s a translucent box or an oxygenated box but either way… don’t be shrödingers cat! Step outside your box! There you can be alive for sure! And that will be a theme clear on Paradise. Also I plan to use a bit more pink after the restyle! Just so you know! Yay! Onto 500 more pink posts! Then I will treat everyone to Pink cake!

<spoiler alert> the cake is a lie <end of spoiler>

Happy 500th to me! And thank you guys for coming along in the journey!

Conversation with my plushies: Pinkie talks about her beliefs

Hello my dear Island Guests and welcome to another geeky lifestyle post. In the first blog tag I ever created “The Super Happy Love Blog Award” I already told you that I love about myself that I am not afraid to cling onto the child inside me, talking to my plushies. However I also told you this stemmed from a bit of a deeper , perhaps naive belief in “magic” if you will. So with this blog I wanted to talk to you a bit more about what I belief in. This also fuels my idea to make this category a bit more about myself giving me more direction in my topics, like we discussed in the Episode 0 of A Bit of History. So Yay me for multitasking!

There is no knowledge there is ignorance.

I am not a woman of god, while I do not believe in god I do think god is real. While that sounds conflicting it still is very true. You see while I am not a woman of faith I do believe that the world is bigger than us. There is plenty of things we can not comprehend. Miracles happen fairly regularly, like a mother gaining strength to rescue her baby or a man surviving a wound or sickness he would not have survived just because he wanted to see his significant other. Do I think it is god? No there is bound to be some logic behind it, but it is knowledge we can not comprehend yet. Maybe one day. I still believe these things are forces of nature but of a nature we can not explain yet. I do feel our emotions however play a critical part in it. Somehow these emotions empower us or alter the environment around us to create a certain effect.

(***Peach had the power of emotion once…and a talking umbrella!)***

The closest thing I have seen to an explanation I have seen is the (pseudo) science of Noetics. In the book The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown this science is given the spotlight. It claims that ice crystals have frozen up more ugly in times of a russian crisis while in that same area during a time of welfare the ice formed much more beautifully. It focusses on trying to measure how consciousness can influence the outside world. While the science claims to have results on several occasions these discoveries have usually been declared invalid. Mostly because all proof is either subjective or those who saw the scientists results where connected with them and thusly deemed biassed. So while nothing is really “proven” we all play music to our baby, send it positive thoughts to be big and strong, talk to our plants to make it grow we even play music to our plants at times. On a subconscious level we can all feel it.. there is more to the world than we know. We are still very ignorant. We once KNEW you could sail of the edge of the earth. We once KNEW the atom was the smallest part. We once knew that pluto was a planet. Yet all that knowledge turned out to be nothing more than ignorance in disguise and just because it was labeled knowledge we followed it like sheep.

There is only Passion

Knowledge is subjective and often temporary. We seek to proof that what we we think we know is real but oftenly turns out differently. Eating a lot of eggs made you strong in the age Gaston from Beauty and the Beast lived in… eggs killed you just a few years ago and even more recently we discovered that eggs might not be as bad as we thought. The actual force to make something real .. is the drive to proof that it is real. One has a theory they believe in very hard, they find other people who share your views and fight to prove alongside each other. Thusly they end up in an area with plenty of people who share a form of consciousness and passion about something. Just like that woman trying to lift a car to save her baby, who is able to because there doesn’t exist a doubt in her consciousness only thinking about her child, the same in reverse applies to those who tried to break down the atom.. trying to prove it’s the smallest part. They deeply believed it could not be done.. thus it could not be done. It really was the smallest part.

(A surprisingly on brand scientist)

Do not get me wrong, I do not believe you can run a marathon by simply believing in it. I am just not sure if that is because your body is incapable of doing it or because there is always one of your friends around thinking… they did not train they are never gonna make it. If every single person in the world would all deeply belief in you with passion.. no disruptions.. you just might make it. Stopping would never occur in your brain, no one on the side would demotivate you and put that thought in your head. Like that first guy that ran a marathon… no one believed he could not do it! Sure he dropped dead afterwards but he did make it. That can not be done without faith or without passion!

(***You can do it! You got the power! Elimnate doubt…don’t run a marathon!***)

There is Emotion there is no peace.

A second element I wish to discuss is talking about what is considered real and what is not. The tv show South Park, of all things, once asked some very interesting questions which I now will use for myself. Reality’s definition is “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them” Existing is being described as being “objectively real”. So how can we proof that something is real if we need it to exist..but for us to proof that it exists it needs to be objectively real? South Park stated that Luke Skywalker inspired many young man to be like him, which is more an ideal and could still count as not real. But he inspired the in the real word existing belief of Jedi-ism, that’s pretty real. I heard about people beating depression based on ideals of fictional characters so that is pretty real as well. For me Kamina from Tengen Toppa made me believe I can defeat being sick or at least not be taken down by it.. I care about my friends to much to be done in by a stupid thing like being sick. So I fight! I will do the impossible and hey I am still around so Kamina is pretty friggin real to me.

***(Kamina really is my hero.. so thats why you see so much of him)***

This finally brings me to the god thing. I belief he is real because people believe he is real. To them he IS real. Because real doesn’t mean what we think it does. Real is a subjective term rather than an objective therm. Sure there is objective realism as well, I mean I can’t deny that stone stairs Rocky ran on is there..but what is it really? For some it is FACTUALLY a symbol of perseverance for some it’s a big hassle to climb and yet for others it is just a that stair. Does it mean that is not really a symbol? No! Because that guy REALLY got inspired. We focus on objective reality to much because if is easy, it offers us a peace of mind as it does not require us to think about it. Yet it is also fairly useless.

**(Ugh I get tired just looking at these stairs)**

Let’s change the stairs to a meatball sub for example. Factually it is a meatball sub…but if you are eating it no one thinks.. this is a meatball sub. You either think “Hmm this is a delicious sub” or “Eeew so many carbs” or maybe “This is so gross”. To YOU a meatball sub is never just a meatball sub. What truly matters is your perception of it. Same goes for those stairs in a way. Walking up those steps either inspires you and makes you feel good, or they tire you out. Perhaps you fear breaking your neck on them, or sigh in annoyance as you are already slightly late and this is just another delay. Objective reality means jack diddly squat. I have a pink pillow…(surprise) but to me it’s not a pillow, it’s something that makes my house look more comfy and makes me feel more at home. No one thinks just pillow.
So yes god is as real as people make him, people take inspirations from him, people love him and people feel good about it. They don’t think .. ah just god it impacts them.. and that is what makes things real to me! So yes I do not believe in him.. but he does exist.

***(South Park God..kinda looks like a Pokémon!)***

My Chains are broken

Now I hope I made at least a bit of sense before right now because I am about to throw it all away. Ever since I was little my mother has made me eat food by making it talk, telling me it would be so sad if it would not be eaten. She gave voices to objects I just tossed aside and when I played and talked to my plushies when I was a kid I had the courage to tell them stuff no one else knew. I did feel bad for the food that I left, so I ate it… it did inspire me to eat.. so in a way this is real. I did feel bad for my toys I did not love as much as others and just tossed aside. I apologised to them and cleaned them up.

(***Sorry for not cleaning you up Mr Duck.. not my actually toy but would have loved it)***

That voice inspired me and yes that voice factually and in objective reality belonged to mom.. but it still made me care for the toy. So in subjective reality it was not my mother’s voice. I was in the store the other day and wanted to replace what I had selected for lunch with something else and when I was putting it back I heard the food cry in my head. They did not want to be returned. Last time I bought the same mini rolls the food had been utterly destroyed by some youth who just tosses the packages around or just break it for fun so the store has to toss them out! I did not want that to happen to them so I bought them and had them as lunch for the next few days. I heard them cheer in my basket as I gave up on my alternative idea. I actually felt really good and it made my food taste a lot nicer because I knew my food was happy!

My plushies are the same, I treat them all with respect, because when I get one I do not just see a plushie. I see Yuni, the pink somewhat posh unicorn. When i first held it I just imagined a personality of it. When I won a green unicorn in a theme park I did not see a cotton stuffed horse toy, I saw Cohn the derpy green pony that loved to cosplay but always looked ridiculous. When Lita, Hawnd and Horsey where bestowed upon me I saw a triplet of singing unicorns. (Yes I have a fair few unicorn plushies) Who where to tiny to fend for themselves so they had to be protected by Yuni and Cohn. What made me come up with these personalities. Was it just my brain? Maybe something ineffable force made me feel this was correct. Even if it was just my brain… what of noetic sciences are right? What if thought and consciousness do have mass? That would make Yuni, Cohn, Lita, Hawned , Horsey and Fay Bell (my tiny pink unicorn that speaks with a french accent and has a taste for fine pastries) real to an extend as well. Mono is there as well she is Tsundere.

***(I told you Cohn liked weird costumes.. he loves his pink leopard tie)***

So I better treat them nicely. I may not be fully able to understand it yet but one thing I know for sure. It is not others who define our reality. My plushies are “soon to be cash money” for some, a cute decoration for others, for one friend it’s a slap in the face because I blew him off to go to the pub as I wanted to spend my money more on Ai the Sylveon at a con. To may they all are something that make me smile, cheer me up and are always there for me when others can not be there. They sometimes sing, sometimes they are insulted, and other times they just look pretty. Emotions and passion create our real reality so think of me what you will but never think. Pinkie is a blogger…or those are just plushies. Because nothing ever is just that word we use to define it with.

Do you have your own beliefs? Do you like following a certain faith? Do you think I am crazy? Let me know in the comments.