State of the Empire – 1/7/18

Hey, it’s Nyx. Resident TimeWitch and Queen Consort to his most majestic (and EVIL) King Sombra, here to bring you his regular State of the Empire address, but via the ‘web.

Oops…a slip of the future sight there. You aren’t supposed to know I become Queen Consort of the Crystal Empire yet, but then again, you are seeing this in the future and since the Empire was gone for a thousand years and now that it’s back and has new rulers, what the hell does it even matter?

Now do you see why I am mad? I constantly parse my speech across three time tenses (past, present and future) AND multiple dimensions.

So…my King wants to keep his slaves and subjects abreast of happenings in the Empire through this little website, so here I am, typing as he dictates away between meetings. Hey, I’m not just another pretty mare in his herd, you know. I have skills other than bouncing through time, chasing mice and ripping apart my sovereign’s enemies.

Anyway, on to the updates…

Stalk Me While I Write – welcome to our newest Stalker, Blue-Hart. He has some ambitious plans for his own Sombra universe that are quite promising and I in my insanity, have agreed to a trade of his photoshop skills for my natural gifts in storytelling. Hopefully through this alliance we can craft a beautiful and poignant story of a King Sombra who’s origins in turning to dark magic stem from a less kind Crystal Empire of a 1,000 years ago.

Website – launched on 12/24/17 and have already expanded to seven pages and a dozen posts. There are plans for;

• announcements on my (Hail King Sombra’s) new FIMFic stories & chapter updates
• regular columns on improving one’s writing skills no matter what level of amateur or professional you consider yourself to be
• special series of posts on what inspires and keeps us writers going as taken from personal experience and the experience of others as we hear about them
• updates on planning for conventions – MLP:FIM and other genres such as Doctor Who and general sci-fi/fantasy
• cosplay costumes in progress
• convention reviews
• us Sombraphile’s (FIMFic Sombra fans) plans for get togethers – be they at cons or not
  and of course, MLP:FIM YouTube favs, new and old…plushies, toys and t.v. episode and movie reviews
• a local forum for more personal contact with other Sombraphiles and MLP fans who also haunt the Kingdom (hailkingsombra.com)
• FAQs and frequently used terms pages so you don’t get lost in unfamiliar to the mundane populace terms such as what “clop”, “OC” and “cosplay” means

The only thing holding some of this back is some weird quirks about the WordPress template that hopefully will be rectified once the fully paid version is installed. I hope to get my hands on it tomorrow, but will be taking the next week to do a careful beta installation to make sure it doesn’t overwrite all the painstaking, custom coding I have been working feverishly on since Christmas Eve. This website is a labor of love that is the culmination of 18 years of website skills learned 90% the hard way and a 10% smattering through some Adobe Fireworks, Flash and Photoshop classes I took years ago. I am even considering taking some updated courses so I can move beyond Flash (which is being phased out as of approx. 2020) and getting a student discount on the new animation software used by Hasbro & Cartoon Network’s flagship shows, the new standard, ToonBoom.

Ambitious? Yes. Insane? Oh probably.

Is it going to happen? You better believe it!

Stay tuned and I’ll prove it to you and remember to always

Hail King Sombra!

(artwork by the incomparable Evehly)