Drew Linky
6th of August
Toast didn't do a very good job of keeping notes unfortunately. However, not much happened while I was gone anyway. The most notable events were some discussion about a writer for the website/news source Polygon, and a new rule in #serious that I helped write anyway.
The writer is a man named Nick Robinson, who is undergoing some newly developed controversy. I'm not sure why this became a topic of discussion for the discord server in the first place, but it blew up a little bit because there is disagreement between a few of us as to how it should be treated/handled. The controversy itself is that Nick Robinson has consistently been a weird fellow, often tweeting things that are vaguely creepy.
Recently, however, the creepiness has been amplified by a number of people coming forward and describing personal interactions with Robinson that transcend simple creepiness and enter the territory of insidiousness. The schism is about whether or not these reports should be taken with a grain of salt; myself and a few other people think that there is at least some credence to these stories since there are many of them all coming out, but there are reservations among people like Makin who think these claims borne of jealousy (Robinson is apparently one of the more famed writers for Polygon, although I personally don't consider this status worthy of note). Cait’s position is that these stories are likely, but concedes to Makin that they cannot be verified--it’s important to note that at this point there are no available textlogs or other evidence that might firmly settle the matter, instead we are working with testimony from a number of individuals involved.
At this point it would be worth describing Cait. Also known as ndividedbyzero, Cait is like a calmer Tipsy—she has very solid, reliable opinions on most things, and is geared towards LGBT rights and equality. She is often looked to for input from Makin and myself; I'd say she's probably one of the most highly regarded regulars of the community. Last I checked she has no interest in moderation however. She gets along famously with Tipsy and Nights, among many others of the server. Naturally she didn't like how WoC handled things; this sort of clash became predictable but amusing in some ways, depending on the situation.
Lambda speaks less frequently in mspa-lit than elsewhere. She is the running head alongside Cait and a few others of LOFAM, the Land of Fans and Music server. Both LOFAM and CaNMT are dedicated to creating fan music of Homestuck, and they've gotten extremely good at doing so. LOFAM is in the process of preparing for the release of their 4th album, which will include a preposterous amount of music. I don't recall exactly but it's something along the lines of 6 hours. I could be wrong, I'll update that figure if I ever find out. Lambda herself is oriented similarly to Cait, but is less calm about it; she suffers from a tendency to get overheated discussing things, especially involving education or LGBT rights. She is also outspokenly dirty minded; I've had some conversations with her in the LOFAM server's NSFW channel, and there have been some incredibly disturbing but hilarious conversations that have come out of it. I miss talking there a lot.
Moving back to the HSD, we’ve got a new #serious rule. I mentioned before that Sora's increase in suicide discussion was coming to be viewed as problematic, and over the course of my disappearance this only seemed to worsen. In fact there have been a number of people, 3 or 4, who have also started using #serious to rant at length about their personal problems. This would be more or less fine if they also listened to people, but they aren't interested—generally they are simply looking for a vent and don't want to be told how to fix their problems. Between this and the fact that no one on the staff or in general is trained to handle suicidal people appropriately, all discussion of immediate suicidal tendencies and experiences are forbidden. I personally drafted the rule change up and passed it by the rest of the mod team to make sure it was as inoffensive and thorough as possible. All things considered I think we did a good job; there have been no complaints of censorship or that we don't care for the people who use the server, so I assume that the wording of the new rule is acceptable to everyone who cares.
With this, hopefully the problem is resolved. No more to report for today.
9th of August
It's been a tough few days. Makin is still not back and we're experiencing a heavier than usual amount of shitposting in #general. There has been some tension between mods about this problem, as well as other things. Medixum is upset at the way the Twonks situation was handled, although I think we managed to convince him of our side of things.
Actually, it may be a good opportunity to describe Medixum in some detail. Medi is the #serious pseudo, which is a tough and often thankless or aggravating job. His main objective is to let the discussion continue no matter what, save for keeping it peaceful and civil. Otherwise, all bets are off, and the results are often times annoying to the core. If two people are discussing a preferred romantic pairing between various characters (called a “ship”) and it gets heated enough to warrant being moved to serious, it doesn't matter that the subject material itself is inherently ridiculous—poor Medi must deal with it. Given to being calm, uually he's pretty elegant and takes such things in stride, but occasionally it becomes too much for him to handle and an outburst ensues. I've seen this once personally, where Medixum yells at whoevers arguing about “dumb shit in serious” and tells them to fuck off elsewhere. Aside from these outbursts, Medi is usually pretty quiet in general, only occasionally commenting on things, and can usually be found hanging out in #social, which is obviously a far less stressful environment than his native channel. Sometimes when server chaos approaches a high, Medixum will seem to take active delight in the confusion and frustration of people running amok in the server—this odd streak in him has given me pause before, but I'm not sure if he actively delights in the misery of others in these cases or if he's just basking in the glory of hazy confusion. Certainly an odd one, but by no means a bad fellow I suppose.
Putnam is also going fucking crazy for some reason. Flare was finally full banned again for a month, which we thought would mollify Putnam. Unfortunately today he does not appear sated at all; we've been in a discussion for the last hour or so now about random crap that he's dissatisfied with and it's seriously beginning to annoy some of us. I've taken the opportunity to dip out and fill in this journal a little bit.
I'm worried because I don't know how to assuage their feelings sometimes. Putnam, Cait, and a few others all have cogent points that they argue about, but those points rely on Makin being a faithful operator and caring about administering the place in a proper fashion. The problem with this is that I (and many others) do not trust him to have good faith about running the place in the way an admin should. He is prone to making hasty statements and relying on some extremely questionable conversational tactics so that he can “win” at discussions. I've made my position on this topic clear numerous times but it never feels like it'll improve sometimes. I can never be sure if Makin legitimately wants to run the place well or if he's treating it as his own personal playground.
Today I lost my patience with Putnam over it too. I tried to avoid being too detrimental to the conversation but I feel as if my temper has been really short lately. This may be due to some stuff in real life as well, but in the case of this conversation today regarding Flare/Hiveswap it was simply that I'm tired of this discussion cropping up over and over again. It seems as if any time any Hiveswap news comes out at all, or especially if none comes out when it's supposed to, this discourse is started up again involving people whining about Hiveswap and people whining about people whining about Hiveswap. It's a really pitiable and aggravating conversation to have every single Wednesday.
Not much else is happening thankfully, so that's all to report for today.
13th of August
Makin returned today, and activity has appropriately increased as a result. It has also been easier to discuss certain things with him since he's no longer restricted to mobile typing and all that. There was actually a pretty productive conversation where we came to a common understanding about Hiveswap and its development issues.
Earlier in the night, I had to go and ban a user named Elle because she's underaged, as in under the age of 13, which is against Discord's Terms of Service. She was pretty understanding about the whole debacle, which made it feel worse. We had a user named Teal a long time ago who was far worse about it.
Teal is an 11 year old who spent a long time going around and shitting up various channels and trying to gain access to the NSFW server. This went on for months, maybe over a year even, before we finally realized what a problem it was and decided to ban her. She still lurks in many splinter servers, which is bothersome but not our problem.
Due to the situation with Elle, I talked it over with the other mods and decided to put out a general reminder with the people in the main channels, namely gen, altgen, and social. I mentioned the ToS rule saying that if you're under 13 you can't be using Discord, but made it clear that I wasn't targeting anyone in particular or trying to out anyone. This is the same policy we have for the NSFW server, where we give everyone the benefit of the doubt but treat ambiguous jokes seriously. As I said to the others, “People who don't want to be banned from the NSFW server don't joke about being under 18.” It feels harsh but I'm hoping that people spreading this news via word of mouth will prevent people from speaking up about it in stupid ways.
Of course, the official policy is that we should be actively banning people under the age of 13, but that's an extraordinary amount of work and is honestly a bit too hunty for our liking. I left the reminder open ended purposefully so people have the opportunity to maintain themselves even if they're actually underaged. Kind of a weird set up but it's worked for us so far. Like I said, if someone does reveal their true age and they're not old enough we ban them, but otherwise we just don't ask unless it becomes prudent.
Since Makin came back from vacation today, it calls to mind for some people the last time he came back from a vacation, which spurred a community event called The Reckoning. I've asked Toast to comment on what this event was exactly, since he was around for it. Taken verbatim:
it was like makin came back from vacation
and wanted to do something super zany
so he unmodded everyone, locked all channels but gen and the channel for nominating mods, and deleted all roles
in about may 2016
There has been a lot of speculation as to when “The Reckoning 2.0” might occur. Makin himself frequently referenced it as a means to appear crazy and unpredictable, but also to maintain control over the more problematic elements of the server. For example, he would mention using The Reckoning to systematically get rid of large numbers of alt accounts, as per a message dated 12/29/2016: “if you don't have an alt in the server by the time of the Reckoning 2.0 then you have nothing to worry about”. Unfortunately as of today, it seems as if no real plans to enact The Reckoning 2.0 have come about, or it may still be in the works. Makin also references a Master Plan sometimes, which may or may not be related to a new Reckoning. It may also be completely fake and yet another layer to his unpredictability. No one really knows at this point.
Of course, the likelihood that anything like this will happen is completely unknown at any given point. The Reckoning could happen again tomorrow or it might never happen, it just depends on Makin's mood. It is very unlikely that we'll receive any warning for it, which makes the possibility more exciting. Part of me hopes that it does occur, if nothing but for some turbulence to shake up the server a little bit. I think I do enough of a good job that I would be reaccepted as a mod anyway, but even if I wasn't I would still have a good time with it. That might actually be a blessing in disguise anyway, it'd mean I don't have to deal with anyone's petty affairs anymore. But, I would also be unable to legitimately help in some cases, which is not what I would prefer. Guess we'll just have to see what the future holds.
Wheals wanted me to include a note about his color in the Discord server. Every person has the opportunity to adopt a color role in the server, and for the vast majority of people we have a list of colors based on characters in Homestuck. Pseudo-mods get to pick custom roles since they all get individualized roles based on the channel they moderate. Full mods ironically do not have custom roles, since we all share the same one, so typically we just have regular color roles as well. For instance, I have a generic green role called “maryam”. Up until today, Wheals had “hellajeff”, which was a piercing blue that was not very easy on the eyes. He cycled through the other blue options, being “serket” and “ghostyTrickster”, but neither of these were appealing either. Instead, he adopted the “video-pseudo” role, which actually wasn't being used, and gave that a custom color. He wanted this to be marked down so that we could see how long it would take for Makin to notice and revoke the privilege.
Wheals is a really reliable person, although I don't talk to him terribly often. As a result, my knowledge of his interests is halting at best and fairly incomplete. He seems to participate in discussions often enough; he displays meaningful commentary on all manner of things, ranging from video games to music to sports, etc. He's been a member of the mod team for a while, and I think at one point he was able to edit the emojis that the server had at its disposal (although Makin disliked having them changed so much that he eventually removed this permission). I view Wheals as a stable and personable guy, easy to get along with and definitely responsible enough for the position.
Today I was asked to share the journal with a large number of people, which I did. These people include Toast, Red, Barry, OneDragonArmy (Oda), Nights, Ivy, Putnam, Cait, Somerandomguy, Dupeb, Wheals, Ngame, Dap, minish, sea hitler, Tensei, and Makin himself. The response has been generally positive, and a few of them actually gave me some corrections regarding the historicity of certain things such as Talons/Itoan. I have since gone back and made the corrections to avoid inaccuracies. Thanks guys. It was also requested that I pass along these tidbits:
“add in that I said that ur a nerd drew” - nights
14th of August
At one point in the last couple of months, it became evident to a number of mods that we would all be relatively close to each other geographically, being myself, Ngame, Wheals, Sea Hitler, and WoC. Thus we made plans to meet up in the Washington D.C. area, an event that I was actually looking forward to. Unfortunately, as time went by and the appointed date came closer, it felt increasingly apparent that this wasn't going to work. For one, not enough communication about it was occurring, and I'm not financially capable of pulling off the trip right now. This is more or less okay, we all recognized that the chance to pull this off wasn't very likely. Besides, there will surely be better opportunities in the future. Rune often travels to Washington D.C., I'm sure that it would be easy to implement them into the plan somehow if we do it right. Maybe some time next year.
After showing all of those people this journal yesterday, I received some good feedback on things to correct, and have since been taking care of minor notes that were inaccurate or needed to be tweaked in general. Unfortunately, a side effect was that Makin decided to change the name of the private mod channel from #illuminati-not-hangout to #modchat and #spoopy_ghost_channel is now #userlog because he thinks that “it looks silly in drew's journal”. I was afraid of this sort of thing happening, it really jeopardizes the integrity of the nature of this journal. I made it clear that I don't like the change, especially in light of the fact that it's my observations that caused them, but I guess there's no helping it at this point. I hope the names are changed back, or at least get changed to something a bit more organic later.
Today, a peculiar circumstance arose where James Roach made a tweet that said simply, “big news incoming”. Makin found this and posted it to the server, which naturally caused a fierce increase in hype for Hiveswap news. There was significant excitement about this, both from myself and many others. After a few minutes though, Roach posted a picture of a cat and nothing else. This led to a lot of confusion and disappointment. This disappointment is the result of a lot of layers of miscommunication.
It's important to note that James Roach is not an official spokesperson for Hiveswap dev team despite working on the game. It even says on his twitter that he is specifically not able to speak in any official capacity for What Pumpkin. This alone should have precluded us from becoming excited, and yet after the severe lack in any significant communication from WP, it's also not surprising, even if misguided, that we would latch on to any hope of “big news” coming out. Unfortunately it wasn't just a private disappointment to ourselves: Minish and I'm sure at least one other left angry tweets in response to Roach's innocent tweet of the cat that was frankly embarrassing for us as a group. Tensions/relations between Roach and the HSD are notoriously bad, and this just made it that much worse. Overall it is a very awkward and dumb ordeal and I think we all agree we would like to put it behind us.
On an unrelated note, there was some more talk about altgen's position in the community today. There has been a lot of controversy about it in the past because it harbors some of the most repeat offenders and notorious shitposters of the entire server, which automatically gives it a negative reputation. However, sometimes an errant epithet or other manner of speech that indicates radicalization may occur. I'm personally comfortable with the conclusion that these incidents are not indicative of real efforts to cause disharmony or racism or what have you, but are instead just an extension of the “no holds barred” nature of the channel.
The exact nature of when we should interfere is unclear; as I've stated before in this document the fellow mods and I do not appreciate or advocate censorship, especially not of simple jokes. For some reason though, there has been considerable pushback at times regarding keeping altgen around. I've also explained in a little detail why we keep it around, but I guess the nature of that channel means that we will always have a problem with people wanting it to be destroyed.
Earlier in the day there were a number of people in #serious who, at the risk of sounding conceited, were woefully under informed about the topic they were discussing. I could tell Oda, Rune, and a couple of others were getting legitimately agitated at dealing with their ignorance, so I decided to take a peek and see if anything needed to be done. What I saw was kind of interesting: they were having a discussion about white privilege, which is almost always a powder keg waiting to happen. This brand of identity politics is important to a lot of people on the server since we're an inherently diverse group; although I don't necessarily care much for identity politics myself, I recognize their importance and utility in various discussions or situations.
I stepped in because the people who were causing a disturbance wanted “proof” of stuff like “white privilege”, or at the very least for Oda and others to explain themselves fully. No offense to those involved but the discussion was not progressing in an effective manner. Thankfully I was able to phrase myself in such a way that I feel like I genuinely got through to them, at least in some small way. It was gratifying to see them make realizations about the way culture and society works on a more fundamental level. I also ended up discussing subjects like the reputability of news media sources and North Korea's current presence in politics with them. Obviously I'm not an expert in any of these matters but I've gone out of my way to inform myself to at least the bare minimum, and I think I helped encourage these guys to do the same for themselves. I can only hope I did anyway—they seemed kind of recalcitrant about it up to the very end when I went to bed, but there is the possibility that they will learn from these experiences. It would make my job and so-called influence worthwhile if they do.
Nothing more to report for today.
15th of August
I want to take a little bit of time to explain a couple of the regulars that I haven't touched upon yet, namely Gnawms and Olkiswerve.
Gnawms is a moderator for the Undertale Discord Server, a position that nets him a lot of targeted jokes and sympathy. Some of the stories he has told us about his time there have been simultaneously riotous and horrifying. Recently he told us about the NSFW section of the Undertale server; in a fandom that is infamous for being obsessed with perverting its characters in obtuse and often strange or even disturbing ways, it is not unexpected that something dedicated to such content would be a source for some equally disturbing stories.
Today he mentioned that a reporter from Kotaku had come by and asked to interview some of the people on his server. It's a strange circumstance that was amusing to some of us; I believe Makin mentioned he had been asked for an interview by them at one point, although it may have been another news group. Gnawms himself has a penchant for bringing up very NSFW and intense subject material frequently, a habit I have no doubt is due at least in part to his time on the Undertale server. Or perhaps he's always been this way and was just well suited for the job as a result? In either case, he has a fondness for this and posting really shitty memes on occasion, or tossing out cheap insults to people who are behaving particularly foolishly in the chat at the time. It's usually pretty interesting whenever he comes around. All of this suggests a generally impish demeanor, which is nonetheless amusing whenever he decides to drop by.
Olkiswerve, or just Olki, is a fine fellow. I personally appreciate him a lot—he and I have some rapport due to similar musical interests. Olki himself has organized and produced music for an album on CaNMT called CANWAVE and its sequel CANWAVE 2. I'm not personally into music all that much, but these albums were both of a genre that I actually enjoy, so they're some of the few from CaNMT that I've listened to extensively. It was pretty exciting to learn that Olki was explicitly in charge of creating those albums, and when I found out it led to a pretty amicable conversation between the two of us. He even sent me a small album for my birthday, a present that I appreciate immensely. Olki can often be found in social flirting with some of the other regulars there, which has solidified his stance as a sweetheart in the community.
My journal was brought up again in conversation today, and at one point Gnawms supplied a comment that transformed it into a discussion about the eventual end of this server. The idea of this happening at some point has been brought up before, both in the community and in this journal itself. It seems obvious to most of us that the server will fade some day, although none of us could say when or how. It's always a sobering conversation when it comes up, although Olki stepped in to change the conversation to something a little more lighthearted, namely the ownership of the server.
Occasionally the topic of Makin owning the server comes up, and the possibility of it transferring to someone else is brought up as well almost every time. As time has gone by, partially as a result of the April Fool's Day Prank (which I still must explain at some point), it has become an oft-repeated joke that I am being groomed by Makin to have the server transferred over to me, or that I will otherwise inherit the server somehow. This used to distress me more because I didn't want to jeopardize my position as a mod, but I've since become used to it since Makin plays along. A common response of his consists of “drew will never get the server”, and thus the joke continues.
More recently today, there was another conversation with Putnam concerning Makin's behavior, in which Putnam desired some validation that Makin's behavior towards others (especially Putnam at times) is reprehensible and that Putnam is not overreacting by being upset over it. It took a painstaking hour or so to come to a more or less common understanding of how we feel about this. Putnam's initial displeasure at Makin's behavior is understandable and I would go so far as to say I agree, often times I don't enjoy how Makin treats others. However, in his desire to validate his feelings, the lengths to which he pursued the conversation seemed far and away an overreaction. It was honestly extremely tiresome to try and fulfill the conversation to its fullest extent.
In addition, Makin came on shortly after it seemed the conversation was winding down, and I was afraid that the conversation would never cease. Indeed, at first it seemed like Makin was going to agitate the conversation much worse than it already was, but after a short time it became clear that he was trying to reach a common understanding with Putnam as well. They both try to operate on principles of rationality, but Putnam's friendship with people who explicitly don't operate on rational principles leads to some strain. It seems as if Makin is trying to warn Putnam away from double standards, and even said as much at one point during the conversation, but the true extent of Makin's desires or motives are honestly still a mystery to most people, especially myself. The more important point here is that their conversation was able to proceed in a well mannered and constructive fashion, which is always something that I will be thankful for.
Honestly I have to wonder if there is too much dedication to Putnam and Makin's dealings with each other in this journal. I hope that they settle down soon. Nothing else to report for today.
16th of August
An amazing thing happened today. I've mentioned before that What Pumpkin? is the company that Hussie established to take care of Homestuck branding, such as shirts and other merchandise. However, there is another company called that is also licensed to sell Homestuck merchandise, called We Love Fine (there's actually even one more called Topataco, but that's not really important right now). We Love Fine brands itself as a merch company “for fans, by fans”, boasting a significant array of products that are actually designed by the members of various communities.
WLF releasing new products is always noteworthy to us, and it's usually announced pretty quickly when we become aware that they've added more products to sell. Today is such a day, with WLF announcing the release of a couple of Homestuck body pillows. Body pillows themselves are the subject of innumerable jokes already, so the announcement was doomed to derision from the start. To make matters infinitely worse, though, the people that were chosen to be on the body pillows were two of the most reviled characters in the entire comic.
It's almost impressive how bad the coordination is, which has led many of us, including myself, to speculate that WLF chose this mix of characters on purpose to maximize the potential controversy. For many hours after the original post came out, there has been an unceasing tide of negative comments aimed at WLF for “glorifying horrible characters”, without going into too much detail. Based on some choice screenshots that have been provided to us, we've come to the agreement that the reception is skewed about 60 or 70% overwhelmingly negative, with the remaining responses being split between neutral or positive.
On the other hand, there is a lot of indication from various people, including Makin that this selection of characters was unavoidable. Since WLF is based on fan content, what may have happened is that there was a length of time where designs for body pillows could be submitted, and then after the submissions close the suggestions they get are reviewed for quality and suitability. When they were done reviewing the submissions, the two we have now were the only ones appropriate for sale.
Whatever the reason for its occurrence, there is of course the clear sentiment from some in the HSD that this decision was terrible. Still others are happy about it, but I would say the vast majority of us are more or less neutral. Most of the people in mspa-lit, including myself, are enjoying the animated and almost vitriolic responses, much for the same reasons one enjoys watching a bar brawl after a football game. For us who aren't that fazed by the selection of characters, we recognize that the choice is a poor one but can't bring ourselves to care overly much because the nature of these characters is obviously fictional. We treat this with the same kind of questioning amusement as we would a Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor body pillow, for instance; it's certainly strange and arguably distasteful, but not something that anyone really deserves to be vilified over.
There was also some speculation that this is what we would be receiving instead of an interview, which managed to set off discourse almost immediately. It never fails; Wednesday brings this conversation to the table every single time. Eventually an interview did come out, but by the time it happened the damage was already done. It's progressed from being an amusing pattern to an immensely tiring one, by dint of too much repetition.
I spent a lot of recently trying to come to a common understanding with the main perpetrators of the “anti-circlejerk” argument, Cait and Putnam, regarding who is actually bashing What Pumpkin unnecessarily. After a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding, it was evident to all involved that the complaints about people whining harshly and unfairly were not even centric to the HSD itself, but rather were focused towards people in the Homestuck fandom at large, such as on Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter. This was pretty frustrating for myself for a number of reasons, particularly because if this is the case it doesn't answer the question of why What Pumpkin will not initiate communication with us, “us” being the HSD specifically.
The topic has been brought up before a couple of times, but there is some indication that the HSD may be the largest centralized repository for Homestuck fans left. Fans do exist in other pockets of the internet, but they are not organized—rather they are scattered about, with no collective power available to them. The subreddit and the HSD, since they are related, together comprise a group of about 25,000 people, give or take. While hardly representative of the total number of Homestuck fans that may exist in general that is still a very sizeable block of people, and it confuses me that What Pumpkin has not attempted to establish at least the semblance of some rapport with us. It would significantly promote brand loyalty and assure that there is, at the very least, a number of people who are guaranteed to buy Hiveswap when it is released.
To this day no communication has really occurred, for what reasons I can't really assess in their entirety. This fact has bothered me consistently, because it feels insanely obvious that having such a relationship between the HSD and WP would be mutually beneficial. Unfortunately I guess the devil is in the details for this particular scenario, and it doesn't do me much good either to worry about it. I did harangue the other mods once or twice, attempting to convince them that trying to strike up relations with WP was a good idea. Their inaction is not a sign that they disagree, I believe that they do think it's a good idea. The reality is simply that WP does not communicate well with fans about such things.
It has been said by Makin that non-disclosure agreements are what prevents the workers of WP from reaching out to fans, although Makin will not, or simply cannot, release where he got this information. We thus have no ability to verify this (I believe anyway; he may have mentioned that this information is available if you know where to look for it but none of us taken him up on that).
Nothing more to report for today.
18th of August
Today was not the greatest it could have been.
Several months ago, LLF and I decided to try and start an activity wherein we and anyone who wanted could watch movies or shows together. It was a collaborative effort, which each of us dividing the responsibilities to try and make things as easy as possible for everyone. Despite some frequent difficulties it was enjoyable, and often enough we had a sizable number of people joining us for whatever it was we decided to watch.
As things go, people stopped showing up or we ran out of ideas for what to watch, and we effectively disbanded. I confess that I lost interest myself, although I'm not sure why—by all accounts I enjoyed the activity greatly. None of us questioned it too much though, at least at the time. Months passed with no reconvening of this group, rendering the community streams the only way to enjoy a similar quality of entertainment. For a time this was fine—too much of a good thing is a bad thing as well, I suppose.
Very frequently though, the subject of movies or television crops up in the HSD, and it is often a fine time rabble rousing on each other for what our favorite movies are, perceived poor taste, and other assorted conventional things you make fun of each other for. In the course of these discussions it was discovered that Nights has never seen an incredible number of films that are thoroughly ensconced in popular culture, among them Star Wars and Harry Potter. Naturally, we wanted to rectify this horrid injustice, and it was thus that movie night was revived.
The task was often up to me to find a way to help everyone watch these things—we have a common streaming platform, but so far I have sourced all material myself and made sure that it is accessible to everyone. While exhausting, it was clearly worth it; the Star Wars stream was an immensely popular event, which I'm sure that everyone who participated remembers fondly still. In this way, Movie Night grew from just being a friendly showing to catch Nights up to speed into something that we wanted to make more inclusive and enjoyable.
After we completed Star Wars and a few other movies, we turned our attention away from movies for a while, but then rejuvenated the idea and even doubled down on it; I was personally tired of having to go through a ludicrous number of splinter servers to inform people that movies were beginning. It was thus that I conceived, ironically, another server for the purpose of making this task easier.
This may be that principle of too much of a good thing at play; it feels as if the interest that people display in movie night is inversely proportional to the amount of work put into organizing and setting up the related events. It's kind of frustrating to see it work out this way; I may be judging prematurely, but it is nothing short of agitating to go through such painstaking effort only for others to flake out in the end.
To make matters worse, I think I meddled in matters that were not strictly my business. I'm friends with both Nights and Red, and without going into overt detail the exact nature of their friendship has been strained for a rather long time. They were both fond members of movie night, however, so I wanted to see if there was some way I could help. After I created the movie server, they both were happy to help setting things up, so along with a couple others I modded them both—the hope was that they would be able to work together and eventually overcome whatever weird and disruptive nuances there might be to their friendship.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. In the midst of a longer argument about scheduling, Red started to cross a line and the nature of the conversation shifted from one of mutual understanding to one of enmity. The long and short of it is that she was removed from the team and shortly thereafter she removed herself from HSD and all of the related splinter servers I'm aware of. After so long of coaxing her back and attempting to understand her thought process, this is pretty upsetting—a member of the community, who was already driven out once, is now gone a second time due to what feels like totally unworthy circumstances. It's maddening trying to keep things harmonious at the best of times, and I'm afraid that this is one of those situations where it crossed a threshold and was officially beyond saving. What's worse, I feel as if I'm personally responsible for this debacle, seeing as how I tried to draw them closer. I should have realized that this was probably unwise, but as it is said hindsight is 20/20. Realistically I understand that I'm not actually solely to blame for this event transpiring—Red actively engaged in multiple places besides Movie Night, and I'm sure the nature of her interactions with people was turbulent in far more than just the one place. Doesn't make it any less unsatisfying though.
I have no idea where this conflict will go from here, and I can only hope that it is effectively eradicated in some way or another. I feel as if it has cast a shadow over today, and now I feel vaguely worried about all manner of things concerning the HSD. For instance, over the last week or so it has felt as if the server is more quiet than usual, which of course is fine. However, now I am exceedingly worried about it—the signs of impending community death are not present, and yet I can't stop myself from feeling that underlying tension, the idea that it may all be gone soon. I assume that everyone going back to school is negatively affecting the patterns of social involvement I'm used to as well. Whatever the reason for the slowness, combined with the events of today it has instilled a very specific feeling of dreariness. I'm going to hope that tomorrow turns better.
Nothing more to report for today.
19th of August
A new channel went up today, the ramifications of which are still not fully understood: #pins was created around noon, EST. The idea of it is based on the fact that each channel already has a pinning system, where a mod can take a comment and pin it so everyone who visits the channel can access it. This is usually reserved for funny or important comments. #pins is a system where the community itself can pin things from other channels using reactions. If a message garners ten “pin reactions”, then it will be posted by the bot in #pins. Ceru has been working on a function for Aradiabot for the express purpose of facilitating this, and it can also be extended to other servers who want to create a similar channel.
The number of pins required to make Aradiabot post something can be changed but is typically 10. Considering there are about 1,000-1,500 people active, this runs the risk of brigading. Indeed, when the channel went up it presented some interesting difficulties.
Altgen is not allowed to make additions to #pins because of their reputation and nature as a memetic hazard. This did not deter them, as they simply went to voicechat or botspam-radio to pin things instead. Also after a little time had passed and people grew more aware of the pinning system, #pins underwent an explosion with people pinning things left and right, for absolutely no reason. I was away while this happened but more than several dozen pins went up in the span of a couple hours. Coupled with some difficulties in the coding leading to things such as a message getting posted multiple times, some messages not appearing correctly, and other such shenanigans, the entire ordeal was insanely prone to abuse and of course a frenzied mess.
Since then it's calmed down a little, and the future of the channel isn't clear. It experiences activity but there's not a lot of understanding just yet as to what the “right amount of activity” should be. The number of required pins may be lowered to 5 to facilitate more frequent posting, which might in turn encourage more people to use the pin system anyway. If the threshold is too high then no one will bother since it'll be too difficult to pin anything.
We'll see what the future holds. Nothing more to report for today.
20th of August
There's a user in general now named Tainted Angel who has been the subject of a little controversy. Tainted Angel, or TA for short, is one of the most notable gen regulars through sheer force of presence alone. It feels as if she has manifested a significant following about her, which is a result of of her posting tendencies. She is very nice to other users and is the de facto leader of gen regulars. However she is quite young, which might be the contributing factor to some problems we had to confront her about today.
For the longest time she would greet people joining the server, saying “Welcome! Please read channel descriptions for rules.” or some variation thereof. At first there was nothing else that did this, so Ceru added a welcome message to Aradiabot which now greets anyone who joins the server. However, even after this was instated, TA kept telling people the same thing. To make matters worse, she also named herself “Botspam Pseudo Mod” for months, which definitely rubbed some of the mods wrongly. She was told to stop this, and after taking a break during the summer she did come back with her current handle, but she never stopped giving newcomers the welcome message.
Ost, the general-pseudo, was the one who initially told TA to stop posting these welcome messages, and to replace this TA started greeting people by telling them to read her fan adventure instead. This is definitely not appropriate—the server has strict rules about shilling your own works (Griever being the main exception). This is due to the fact that fanventures are so common that, if we were to allow anyone to advertise them with no oversight, the practice would be so frequent and annoying that it would surely displease everyone involved. There are sanctioned ways to advertise your adventure, but TA's method of delivering it to whoever joins definitely does not fall under that umbrella.
I'm personally not that upset by TA's tendency to welcome new people, but between that and the Botspam Pseudo Mod handle, I and other mods felt she was trying to assert some semblance of authority over #general, which was categorically unacceptable. When I learned that she started shilling her adventure to newcomers after being told not to give the canned welcome message, I decided it was time to intervene; for some reason no one had talked to her about this at length yet.
Thus began a somewhat lengthy exchange where I acted as a messenger between TA and the mods who were more upset at the behavior in question. Unfortunately TA was not persuaded to agree with us explicitly, but the behavior was still inappropriate and the justification for rules placed on people is not contingent on their understanding of them. I feel as if the communication aspect of this could have been handled differently, but I'm not sure if the problem would be addressed properly otherwise.
On a lighter note, some rather interesting information cropped up today regarding a nigh mystical random that we encountered at the beginning of June, a guy named kill40000. This person appeared as if from nowhere—as Tensei succinctly describes him, kill40000 was a “legendary one hit wonder user”. Without warning on the 9th of June, this enigmatic piece of shit joined and immediately began to post in #gaming. The content of their messages was barely coherent, defying any sort of attempt to objectively parse what was being said. Their first message was, and I quote: “killkillkillkill ill kill any1 here in any game no 1 can fking kill me ill kill ANY ONE who says they can fkin kill me I dare u to kill me ANY game lets go ill fking KILL u ANY Fking game I WILL kill u," and so on. They have almost 150 messages on the HSD, all consisting of this brand of pseudo-English, and all are roughly about the same thing; after some deliberating, the rest of us figured out that this guy was challenging people to face him in literally any video game.
We watched this spectacle in fascination—and at the time intense dislike—for some time. We did not fully appreciate what we had, and kill40000 was gaming banned after a few hours of threatening people wildly and other inane nonsense. We were content with leaving it at that, but then after I banned him kill40000 created another Discord server, appropriately called “The REAL homestuck discord gaming channel”, and sent out invite links to random people on the server. He even sent one to me, prefaced with the now immortalized quote:
Theres an insane bastard admin on the loose
in the gaming discord
banning INNOCENT people
im trying to free as many as u can
and then immediately asked me if I could “handle this situation” and get him unbanned from #gaming.
Unfortunately, since shilling servers and other things like that in PMs is not allowed, he had to be completely server banned. It wasn't until a couple months later that we started to really appreciate what we had lost in kill40000. While we were extremely annoyed with his nonsense at the time, he has since been elevated into a higher status; none who were there will forget the day that kill40000 graced us with his otherworldly shenanigans. Indeed, who could forget such pearls of wisdom as:
now if someone challenged me to world of Warcraft vanilla that would get pretty retarded
any1 whos that mmuch of a gay virgin
woudlnt take any time out of their raiding or ranking to fight me in the game anyway
so its a catch 22
inserted into a conversation that had nothing to do with World of Warcraft no less.
As I said, however, some new information regarding kill40000 came out today. I believe Toast was looking through the incident and discovered that he had actually posted his Steam account for people who were bat shit insane enough to take him up on his challenges. From there we were able to dive deeper into the stultiloquent rabbit hole, discovering not only a plethora of strange writings on his Steam profile but also an associated Youtube account. This guy has been posting a series of youtube videos for over five years, an impressive series that consists almost purely of World of Warcraft videos where he ganks other players and kills them mercilessly, or other such nonsense. (Edit as of August 14th 2019: This youtube account was not his; It was linked in one of his steam guides as a joke.)
Honestly, the new information we gained from looking at his Steam profile and his youtube account clarified exactly nothing. If anything, it only served to confuse us more and make the mystery deeper and more complex. We have no answers; is this person real? Is this all a complicated act? We will probably never know, and honestly it isn't even necessary to know—it was a privilege just to experience the discombobulating majesty in real time. Wherever you may be out there, stay ruthlessly disoriented and confrontational kill40000; compromise your honor and integrity for no man or beast.
Nothing more to report for today.
21st of August
It has been a very interesting day. I mentioned previously that myself, Ngame, Wheals, WoC, and Sea Hitler were all set to meet up at some point this month briefly, but that it didn't pan out. While the rest of us have been unable to participate for various reasons, Ngame and Wheals still fulfilled this idea and met up in real life. The occasion was the subject of some attention in the HSD, receiving (somewhat) mixed responses.
Ngame is in a similar vein as Wheals for me. He consistently helps out when needed and even goes above and beyond the call of duty sometimes—a number of months ago we were enduring a raid from one individual who would periodically send alt accounts into the server and spam child pornography, which of course needed to be handled in an extremely serious manner. Ngame was the only other person besides myself who was willing to collect evidence and the information of the accounts that had spammed the content and report it to the Discord Abuse Center. He takes his responsibilities seriously when he needs to, and unlike me knows how to unclench most of the time. Where I'm mostly anal retentive and unrelenting on the things I care about, Ngame is able to relax and take things in stride. He's also interested in similar things; he's going to college for a degree in chemistry, whereas I recently graduated with a degree in biology. I really enjoy talking to Ngame whenever a scientific topic comes up, or even just in general.
Sea Hitler is a funny case. A reformed shitposter, he frequents both #general and #altgen on a daily basis and actually has what I believe is the second highest post count on the server, after Makin himself. He used to do the things that shitposters usually do, was generally obnoxious, impossible to reason with, etc. As time went by, however, Shitler as we call him underwent a subtle change where the shitposting became less frequent and he actually contributed meaningful tidbits to various conversations. With the raids continuing to drag us down even after I was modded, Makin asked if I needed someone to help out with keeping an eye on #general. I was familiar with Shitler at that point and had noticed his development, and the other mods thought it would be a good idea. We floated the idea with him, he was eager to help out, and he became the #general pseudo-mod for a while. After the April Fool's Day prank, a topic to be covered another time perhaps, a few changes went through that included Shitler being made a full mod because he was consistently doing good work. It's been quite a transformation seeing him go from full time shitposter to full time moderator. I'm glad to have him around.
Makin, as oriented towards privacy as he is, has decidedly been against the idea of us meeting since he first learned it was a possibility. As far as I can tell he recognizes his relative inability to actually prevent any of us from meeting up, whether through his code of ethics pertaining to freedom of expression or because it would happen even if he punished us for it. So while he may object, I believe he treats it as more of a joke than anything else. I know less about the immediate responses that anyone else in the HSD may have had, but Ngame and Wheals posted a picture in #social at one point to commemorate the occasion, which seemed to garner some positive attention.
I am hoping that another meet up can be scheduled for some time in the future, which would ostensibly be more successful than this one was. The planning for the meet up that was scheduled to happen this month wasn't exactly carried out to its fullest extent, so perhaps with greater consideration ahead of time a more fulfilling gathering can be accomplished. I am also aware that there are other mods like Toast who want to participate but are unable to because of an incredible distance that would need to traveled, or some who do not reside in the US. While the reality of the matter is that it would be difficult bordering on impossible to include them, there might be something that can be done to facilitate this. I won't say anything else on the matter until I know more however.
Also of note was the removal of #pins from the server today. It only lasted about three days, a fact that can be attributed solely to #altgen. I have to admit, I'm impressed at how disruptive they can be. Altgen is usually more or less docile, but when they find something they deem worthy of their attention the result is often messy, damaging, and yet strangely devoid of consequences for themselves. It's like watching a particularly drunken hobo smash a store display and then somehow evade the police afterwards. Putnam had this to say about the incident:
it was quite dramatic someone from altgen came in, made an inoccuous message, minish said "GO AWAY" or some shit so i gave minish shit for that for a while then either that altgenner or some other one (i don't remember lol) just started copy+pasting the fresh prince of bel-air's opening lyrics line by line when he finished he self-reacted with pin and makin banned them and removed the #pins channel so that's the story in short: he removed #pins because disallowing altgen from pinning things meant that they went into other channels to make their altgen-tier pinbait that was makin's reasoning and after seeing what that meant i 100% agree
A strange situation, befitting of a strange channel and its even stranger tendencies. Unfortunately, after taking a cursory glance, it seems as if Makin elected not to archive #pins despite it being experimental. Rest in peace #pins, you were taken from us too soon.
Nothing more to report for today.
22nd of August
I've elected to provide some insight into the history of the server, both shortly before and during my first month or two here. There were two troublemakers that are quite infamous in the community, albeit for different reasons: Voidfire and Marsy. Most of the events that involved these individuals were outside of the scope of my observations, so my take on them is more personally oriented than objective in nature, at least to some degree.
Voidfire was a particularly inflammatory individual; it was apparently impossible to get them to capitulate in any discussion, arguing very vehemently for their position and refusing to cede to evidence provided by others. To make things worse, the opposition in any case against Voidfire was often harshly misrepresented in insidious and fairly repulsive ways; for example, Voidfire might bring up some principle of how they thought the LGBT community should be handled or treated, and if you disagreed in any fashion you were automatically labeled a homophobe and a significant danger to minorities. Not on My Watch was a particularly disruptive issue, the mere mention of which resulted in hours long discourse and baseless accusations against mods being homophobic, etc. A whole host of other platitudinous topics were covered in this way, which I don't particularly care to recall at this point in time.
These conversational tactics very quickly attracted the ire of a vast number of people on the server. Voidfire was finally banned on the 27th of December, 2016 for hurling some extremely loaded insults towards the people they were arguing against. At this point it seems as if Voidfire has disappeared from Discord, not appearing on any servers that we are generally aware of.
Marsy is a different beast, although similar in some specific ways. Voidfire managed to alienate people by being unyielding and extreme in their ideology, which is also true of Marsy. The difference is in the ideology itself—Marsy was extreme in the opposite direction, often expressing a profound hatred of groups such as “Social Justice Warriors” and Muslims. This extremism often manifested in unexpected or surreal ways, and signaled some other tendencies or ideas of his that were fairly alarming to many.
One particular incident that is reminisced over frequently involves Marsy at the mall. He was apparently in a hurry and rushing down an escalator. At one point he had to get past an old man, and knocked him over violently in his hurry to get past. When recounting this incident to us on the HSD, Marsy said (with some rather crass wording) that the old man shouldn't have gotten in his way, which promptly exploded into a meme that is still referenced on a regular basis to this day. There are multiple other scenarios of Marsy being an ultra-edgy individual; frequently Marsy has threatened death upon other users for disagreeing with or annoying him, including Tipsy and Mad Dog.
This behavior continued unabated for some time, but the final push was an incident that took place some time after I was modded, on the 31st of January. A discussion about someone with a Middle Eastern name was underway, and Marsy commented: “Fuck off with that terrorist shit.” Needless to say this very quickly began a discussion that he was fated to lose. The long and short of it was that Marsy could not be reasoned with and so has been banned for “a long time.”
There is no telling if or when Marsy will return, but ever since his departure there has been talk about how some people miss his vitriolic ways. For all of his outrageous invective he made a large number of comments that people still find entertaining. If he does return there will no doubt once again be significant effort applied in trying to make him see reason and why his views were wrong, but assuming nothing has changed it will not be very productive. Only time will tell ultimately.
As for what is happening today, there has been a minor yet very frustrating display in #serious. For some time there was a discussion concerning Trump, and political discussions in #serious are essentially powder kegs waiting to be derailed or hijacked by people who don't actually know anything about what they're discussing. It is possible to keep these conversations from spiraling out of control, but if you miss them as they're forming they become discourse that consume potentially hours of time and drain patience very quickly. Tonight's discussion was one such that was missed, and has developed into a full blown shit show. There are around six people involved, perhaps more, and all the participants have delivered statements that frankly make my skin crawl from how outrageous and unsubstantiated they are.
I was eventually forced to lock the channel for ten minutes or so in order to get them to stop, because insults were being hurled, usually evidence that the conversation is no longer able to recover (this is known as “Za Warudo-ing” a channel, a direct reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventures). I don't enjoy freezing conversations because it usually means something has gone so completely off the rails that failure at multiple levels has occurred. It is difficult to point at what exactly is most responsible for this catastrophic failure, and attempting to decipher as such is often a fruitless or even pointless endeavor; whatever the root cause of the problem, the end result is that an entire conversation effectively had to be destroyed. This feels like a form of censorship, at least to myself, and thus is not in keeping with the values that we strive to uphold in the HSD. Unfortunately the alternative is allowing a caustic and often net-negative conversation to proliferate, so it is often in everyone's best interest to shut it down and allow a chance to cool down.
Hopefully these incidents are not frequent in the future. Nothing more to report for today.
23rd of August
To add on to yesterday's entry, I will be describing two more people who are as of now longer in the HSD, but were historically important1.
Revlar was a particularly interesting fellow to speak with. He prized serious conversations immensely, displaying intense acrimony towards anyone who dared to infringe upon those conversations. There used to be (and still is to some degree) a problem with people derailing conversations, especially if it felt like they had been going on for a while. This practice infuriated Revlar, who wanted to see every conversation to its logical conclusion.
His input was usually pretty valuable, having an in depth and logically oriented explanation for most topics of conversation, although he displayed some emotional traits that were less than desirable. I mentioned that he was furious with people who derailed conversations; he was often unable to bridle this anger and it would spill over in ways that were decidedly unacceptable.
I don't remember the exact content of his responses to such intrusions, but they were fairly retaliatory and even violent. Additionally, Revlar developed this notion of “what mspa-lit is about”, which often did not shack up with other peoples' desires or perceptions of the place. Revlar wanted it to be about serious and “deep” conversation all the time, and was particularly disgruntled whenever the channel discussed something silly or lighthearted. As LLF once described it, he “forgets he's on the internet and wants a forum of intelligence and quality discussion always” This conflict grew until eventually Revlar had a melt down and left the server completely.
Since then, Revlar has been sighted once or twice in another server Makin created, although I can't speak to whether he's terribly active on it or not. Revlar wasn't banned so he's free to come back whenever, but the likelihood that this will happen is pretty low from what I can see. Whether or not he would even be sincerely welcomed back is up to debate, as his departure was fairly turbulent and he seemed fine with burning bridges on his way out. He officially left on the 5th of May.
The other person to be detailed is a pretty influential figure named Thellere. He is in charge of a Homestuck-related game called The Overseer Project, which is an attempt to replicate some of the mechanics or themes of the story. The game actually suffered from an intense legal scare, when someone claiming to be a lawyer from What Pumpkin issued a cease and desist order against Thellere and the team he had assembled to work on the game. It was at this point that he came by the HSD, in order to quell some rumors that were being spread in an attempt to usurp his position as head of the project or some similar issue.
Thankfully as time went by it was revealed that the cease and desist order was fake. Thellere began talking with various people on the HSD and became a regular for a while, at which point I was informed that this was actually the second time Thell had joined the server; the first time he was around, he was actually the #serious pseudo-mod. Apparently his reign over that channel was particularly hellish, as Thell exercised an extreme degree of authority over what topics could be discussed and the exact extent to which they would be allowed to transpire. I'm not sure if once he left, the position transferred directly to Medixum or if someone else had the position in between them.
At any rate, a similar experience to Revlar occurred with Thell; unhappy with the direction that the server was going in some respects, Thell expressed that he disliked the lack of consistency with which Makin handles mspa-lit and other channels. He also stated that his feelings toward the conversational content in various places was geared away from the express purpose of those channels—for example, he felt as if people used #serious to vent instead of actually discuss anything of substance. Whatever his many reasons, Thell left the server on the 18th of July.
Stories like these are unpleasant to me. Both Revlar and Thellere were contributing members of the community, and losing them is less a matter of removing a problematic element like with Marsy or Voidfire and more like driving someone out. Realistically speaking there was an intense amount of friction between Revlar and Thellere and various members of the community, so these outcomes are to some degree predictable, but it doesn't make them feel any less undesirable.
If we're to maintain a community that will be active for as long as possible, then it requires a diverse group of people who are willing to question how things operate and express dissatisfaction with the way things are being done. Allowing people to become completely content with the way things are done is a conversational death sentence; you must have energy flowing from somewhere in order to stimulate conversation, and since we are often lacking in news on Hiveswap then that energy often comes from controversy and the input of new ideas from all manner of individuals.
Speaking of new on Hiveswap, there was no interview today. Predictably this led to the established rabble rousing, but interestingly there was actually very little discourse about it I think. I wasn't around to see it myself but from a cursory glance through most channels that would be talking about the interview, there were only a few comments that were the traditional bitching. Even more interestingly is that What Pumpkin has stated they will “make up for it” next week, which implies something big. It could be an interview with a major figure or it could be something more substantive, there's no way to effectively tell at this point. I think that this statement has excited some people again, but most people are treating it with levity, and others still with disdain. I'm not raising my hopes but I must profess myself curious as to what WP could have meant. We'll see next week I suppose.
A minor note, but today Carlarc was reaction banned once again. He straddles the line between being a habitual shitposter and just a regular user, but the odd part is that his intentions are always genuine. I'm not sure if it's a lack of understanding of what he's doing but he never intends to shitpost necessarily, he's just bad at saying what he means without appearing that way. I think it may be an age issue; I believe he's 13 or 14 years old, and it shows sometimes. If you casually insult something he enjoys, even if joking, he'll be upset by it. As mentioned above he had posting privileges taken away in the past, which he was extremely upset by. These privileges were eventually instated and, to his credit, he had been showing that he was more responsible with them. However, today he went too far and now the ability has been taken away once more. At the moment this event seems trivial, but I'm sure that this issue will crop up again in about a month and the cycle will begin anew.
Nothing more to report for today.
26th of August
Forgot to write last night about an incident concerning Putnam. I mentioned before that he is verbally outspoken against drinking alcohol to the point of relentlessness—this finally came to a head last night, in a series of discourse that lasted for over an hour or so. The repetition of these conversations over the last several months has been personally agonizing, and I think to others as well (Tensei does not agree with Putnam at all but does not view these discussions as frustrating somehow, a fact that amuses me). Finally, Makin stepped in and has decreed that if Putnam brings up or engages in alcohol discussion like this again, he is to be mspa banned. Putnam agreed to this whole heartedly, although the details at that point are lost to me. In short, there is a decent possibility that this particular topic will not surface again, at least not in the immediate future.
More recent however, today actually had some pretty contentious events occur. First to cover is the history of a problem user named Mettaton NEO, or MNEO for short.
MNEO joined originally about a month ago and seemed to be a pretty run of the mill piece of shit: they were trying to encourage an altgen regular to commit suicide, and then shortly afterwards asked in #coding-tech how to hack into other peoples' Discord accounts, or perhaps their emails. Whatever the case, both of these actions are both clearly unacceptable offenses, and he was perma-banned from the server shortly thereafter.
For a while I thought that was the end of it, but then about a week or two ago I received some warnings from some helpful altgen regulars that MNEO was back with an alt account, and had openly admitted to being MNEO. Once we're aware of alt accounts it's usually pretty simple and straightforward to get rid of them, but it's also indicative of a much larger problem. As far as we can tell, most people don't bother to create alt accounts once they've been punished with a ban; this is because it requires both effort and because it would constitute ban evasion, which is a very serious offense and usually leads to permabanning both accounts involved. Unfortunately, if you're aware of a problem user who has decided to create one alt account, it usually means they're comfortable with making more and more alt accounts anyway. If they're smart, they do this in a way that is difficult and frankly inefficient to try and detect. This has been the modus operandi for some of the worst people to come through the HSD, like Talons.
After the first instance of an alt account from MNEO, things were quiet again for a while. Then last night there was a string of these alt accounts, all with a similar theme and behavior that thankfully made it easy to detect them. Today however, this escalated into a more troubling situation where MNEO finally abandoned all pretenses and starting joining with multiple alt accounts rapidly, which meant that at all times mods had to be watching #general for new alts. After a while MNEO presumably gave up the ghost and no overtly suspicious accounts joined, but now there is always the possibility that they will try again in the future.
There have been similar instances of this behavior in the past. One memorable scenario occurred on the 9th of March, where a user named Vsnake was trying to shill a small fan game they made. After a while of this, ost gen-banned them “for trolling, derailing conversations, and generally working people up over stupid shit”. This would have been the end of it, but Vsnake physically left the server and rejoined it in order to get rid of the gen-ban role and continue talking. Obviously constituting ban evasion, he was then permabanned from the server. Over the course of the next few hours, he then crafted a seemingly endless number of alt accounts and kept joining the server with them in an attempt to stir shit and cause more problems for us. After a while these accounts all followed a pattern that allowed Ceru to write a script for Aradiabot that would automatically detect the accounts and ban them. Even at the time, this was amusing; after the script was installed, we personally witnessed Vsnake try to join the server about a dozen times and fail to do so each time, after which they stopped. This is one of many occasions where Ceru's technical skill has been deeply appreciated.
On a completely unrelated note, there has been an unfortunate development with Minish. Young and formerly a problem user, he is now reformed. In fact, he was so reformed at one point that he actively discouraged other people from shitposting, which was mildly annoying since he would overreact to anything that could be construed as such (even deriding people for using “slurs”. That was a miserable time). Since then he's taken a more relaxed stance towards it all and is significantly more amicable to talk to.
As to the present day, it feels as if his behavior has become more sporadic, or difficult to understand. Some others have mentioned this as well, so it's not just my own perceptions at work. We're not completely sure why he's been behaving in this fashion—I'm not even sure Minish understands it, or is even aware of it to some degree. The operative point unfortunately is that it's been getting harder to communicate with him in a sincere fashion. I brought this up to him and he seemed to take offense to the idea, leaving the server completely for a few minutes. When he came back we talked more in depth about the idea, where I and one or two others expressed our concern for his well being.
I think this embarrassed him, as he left the server again at some point during the conversation. Makin does not like it when people leave and rejoin the server repeatedly; he views it as an attempt to gain attention. As such, Minish was given a temporary server ban to cool off. My earnest hope is that he'll calm down and be able to talk about this with us in a more rational fashion.
We'll see what tomorrow brings. Nothing more to report for today.
27th of August
As a follow up to yesterday, I feel it's prudent to say up front that Minish has decided to leave the server permanently. This makes me upset obviously, but there's not exactly much I can say to dissuade him. He has his heart set on this course of action, and I suppose that's all there is to it. I and I'm sure many others hope that he feels willing to come back someday, and in a better state than when he left.
On a more positive note, there was a great community event today: LOFAM released a new album, titled Ancestral. It was streamed today on Twitch, and had a solid 150-160 people in attendance during its debut. Unfortunately I don’t have any concrete details about LOFAM at this point, but I’m working to secure information from Cait on the topic, who has gracefully agreed to provide a document with several key elements of the group such as when it was made, important events, etc. I’ll be sure to highlight those here when she finishes writing it2.
In other news, Putnam and Tipsy were having a pretty interesting conversation earlier about the nature of what it means to be “a rational individual” or subscribe to rationality. It touched on a lot of issues that have been at the heart of discussion for a while now, such as how one chooses to refer to themselves when the topic of rationality comes up. Putnam explained a specific instance of this, in the forms of “I am rational” versus “I try to be rational”. For some the distinction between these phrases is small to the point that they are essentially the same thing, but it belies a certain element that indicates their sincerity and purpose.
I won't elucidate too much on this issue since it's not strictly related to the server at large, but it is important to say that the discussion was pretty revealing in the sense that it helped me to understand the nature of everyone engaged in the conversation. I personally asked Tipsy about this, expressing the idea that she is simply “trying to be a decent human being to other people”, which she agreed with. This is the nuance to that idea of “I am trying to be rational” versus “I am rational”, in that someone who says they are “trying to be rational” recognizes that there are pitfalls and blind spots in their perception of what it means to be as such—this particular phrasing indicates that the person in question is sincerely attempting to subscribe to a given idea. On the other hand, someone who says “I am rational” is trying to give the impression that they think in a superior manner to others who are “not rational”; the very notion of someone being “completely rational” is kind of precluded by the fundamental ideas of what rationality is. Of course, the longer I go on about this the closer I get to losing the focus of the conversation that was held in HSD today, so I will forego explaining in further detail. Suffice it to say that the discussion we had today greatly increased my respect for everyone involved.
Less positive was an incident today concerning someone I've talked to semi-regularly over the last few months, named Sky2o. Sky was an unapologetic shitter who was almost banned from the server around the 20th of June because she literally couldn't stop interrupting discussion in mspa-lit. I think she was banned temporarily, but then she was let back on with the stipulation that she behave herself. This distressed her immensely and she contacted me afterwards, asking what she was doing wrong. So, over the course of a couple days, I took some time out to talk to her about her posting habits and all of the things she was doing that interrupted conversation. It was pretty swiftly evident that Sky wasn't a purposeful shitposter, she just literally did not understand that it was undesirable behavior outside of altgen. Further, she expressed to me that she was afraid her reputation was beyond repair, and that she might never be accepted as a serious regular on the server.
These talks continued for a while. It took some effort, both from myself and from a few other mods (including Toast), but she was receptive to the advice and turned a new leaf on the server. As July progressed, she steadily transformed from someone who didn't know how to interact with other people meaningfully into someone who could delve into all sorts of conversations and actually communicate with the other participants in a way that was constructive. Her progress on this matter has actually been kind of incredible, and she deserves full credit for improving as much as she has.
Unfortunately, today she contacted me and it's very clear that she's not in a good way. I won't go into detail for reasons of privacy, but I'm concerned for her well being. She's not at any immediate risk to herself or else I would have taken more extensive measures, but I'm attempting to speak with her on a more in depth basis to figure out what's going on and help her sort things out.
This actually begs the question of whether I'm interfering too much. Obviously I enjoy being able to help other people in a significant fashion, but I also don't want this to be an annoying or even detrimental habit in some cases. In keeping with the remarks earlier about “I'm trying” versus “I am”, I feel the need to question myself about my tendencies in order to make sure that I'm not overextending myself or intruding where I'm not wanted when it comes to situations like this one. Is my desire to help Sky in this current predicament well founded or is it misguided? Is it prudent to try and intercede further or should I relegate myself to listening only? Should I even go that far? To this end, I am simply trying to be as helpful as possible. I may falter in this sometimes but it is always well intended if nothing else. I'll have to see how this develops and respond appropriately.
Finally, I realized some time ago that I've failed to elaborate on arguably one of the more notorious members of the HSD referred to as MrCheeze. They’re currently a moderator for the subreddit and used to be a pseudo-mod for the server—they were demodded near the end of April for inactivity. They are strongly outspoken against things they perceive as immoral—this has led to some discourse as time goes by, with MrCheeze responding vigorously to a problem they perceive to be much greater than everyone else does (a habit they share with Putnam). They can grow upset if people do not share their concern, which is usually what begins the discourse. In the past, MrCheeze has disengaged themselves from the community and gone missing for weeks, sometimes months. I'm not entirely sure why, but I believe it's so they can focus on their own projects and life.
In the past MrCheeze has expressed that the community as it is now is a shadow of what it used to be, which is objectively true. There is some distinction to be made as to which aspect of the community they’re talking about, however—the fandom at large is categorically lesser now than it used to be, and the subreddit is substantially less active than it used to be a few years ago. As for the HSD itself, I think that it's difficult to ascertain its strength over time at this point. It feels like it fluctuates in activity too much to accurately gauge such a thing, not to mention that it's still relatively young. Its user base continues to grow every day, at the time of writing being 7,457 in number. I feel as if this is a good indicator of its strength, more or less, and that its daily activity is more a reflection of the time of year. For instance, since school is beginning around this time, things will quiet down.
As time goes by, these patterns will become more evident. It is my fervent hope that the HSD will last long enough for me to study those patterns in significant detail (or as much detail as is appropriate anyway). Nothing more to report for today.
28th of August
I mentioned an event some time ago, the April Fool's Day Prank, which I've been meaning to elucidate on. As the name implies, it occurred on April 1st, and was a concerted event from the mod team to conduct the most wacky zany thing we could conceive of.
Makin came up with the bulk of the idea if memory serves: the biggest facet of the prank was that Makin would appear to leave the server and hand over ownership to someone else, an event that was and is often joked about, but will almost certainly never happen. He decided to give me “ownership” of the server for the duration of the prank, and tasked me with writing a statement to announce his stepping down and the introduction of a #rules channel. The change went into effect about 6 AM EST, and the mod team did its absolute best to keep up the illusion.
To aid with this and add another layer to the prank, a hidden channel was created called #april-fools, where if you caught on and mentioned something about April Fool's Day, you were immediately given a “global-ban” role which prevented you from speaking in any channel but #april-fools. Over the course of the day, several dozen to over a hundred people were global-banned and let in on the joke, although they were forbidden from interacting with others and ruining the joke.
Over the course of the day, after I announced my new ownership of the server, I received an incredible number of DMs from people. Most of these DMs had to do with the #rules channel, which included a list of “banned words” (an inclusion that caught us some flak later). Among the words that were banned were “autistic” and “pepe”, both clearly jokes, and yet I received dozens of DMs asking why they were banned.
The inclusion of the banned words list and even #rules in its entirety made some people believe that we were directly mocking HVSD, an accusation which only served to stir tension between us at the time. I distinctly remember being annoyed that the April Fool's Prank was considered a dig against HVSD; as far as I could tell literally none of us were engaging in the joke to do such a thing. I suppose that was just how the rivalry worked back then—it was hard to escape from the impression that you were trying to slight the other group for whatever reason.
We decided to end the prank with as big a bang as we could muster. I have no idea how many people were actually in on the joke and just hadn't said anything, but we announced that we were going to delete #altgen—for real—in order to make the server more friendly. This achieved the intended result—all of a sudden #altgen leaped into a frenzy, leaking into other channels, causing an immense disturbance in general, and especially in #altgen itself the pace of conversation accelerated. People were out of control—they started spamming the same messages over and over again, flying by at a million miles per hour. Chants formed spontaneously, the favorite becoming a banner for them to stake their upset: “Drew will not divide us!” accompanied of course by all sorts of images that only served to stoke their passion further. Finally, at the appointed time, we instead revealed the prank, punctuated with a final physical scream from myself in the altgen voice channel.
It was a complete rush, not unlike my time on Twitch Plays Pokemon. It was also my five minutes of fame being the fake admin for the day. In addition to all of this, this was the day that Toast was taken back onto the team as a pseudo-mod and LLF started being demoted, a somewhat bittersweet occasion. Looking back, the scope of the prank was impressive; I'm interested to see if we'll ever be able to pull off something greater next year. I'm looking forward to it for sure.
As for events of today, not much occurred. Minish came back to the server, which some people (like Tensei) had predicted in advance. I'm glad he's returned but he's since “abandoned” mspa-lit and adopted cartoon-tv as his new home. There is further speculation from us that he will eventually get bored of cartoon-tv since it's pretty inactive most of the time and come back to mspa-lit, at which point the circle will be complete.
Also notable was regular Saeko getting banned for joking about being underaged. I've mentioned previously that this was a problem, and I released statements in the most active channels to assert that people should not joke about it if they want to remain on the server. After today's incident I feel like I need to release a statement through announcements. Ceru was upset by Saeko being banned, as well as Saeko themselves obviously. I managed to help calm Ceru down and a few of us mods have lobbied for Makin to unban Saeko, since it's extremely well established that they're not actually underaged. However, I feel as if we're going to institute an “idiot tax” for people who do this in the future. They can be unbanned if they demonstrably prove they're overaged obviously, but it's a huge waste of our time to deal with things like this, so a week-long ban may be in order.
I'll figure out the details later. Nothing more to report for today.
29th of August
Very important news for today: Hiveswap has an official release date once again: September 14th! Makin celebrated by pinging everyone three times in #news, a fact that made me physically laugh when I saw it. In addition, he has taken out ad space on mspaintadventures.com (the website that Homestuck is hosted on, hereinafter referred to as MSPA) advertising the HSD.
Makin has advertised us before, and the increase in members has been substantial each time. We hit membership count of 7,500 people at 11:57 AM EST, and as of this writing at 4:24 PM EST we now have 7,523. The increased membership may prove to be a strain, so we'll see how the mod team has to adjust in order to account for this. There's even a possibility of taking on a new pseudo-mod, but I won't speculate further on that.
These advertisements also serve another purpose, which is to drive up the popularity of HSD in google search algorithms. The numbers of the server and the subreddit's position on google searches served as an indicator of our strength and popularity over other places, which to many I think was a source of pride. Makin especially is fond of asserting our dominance in this regard—again, I'm not certain if this principle still holds true to this day, but it has been a guiding idea in the “politics” of our groups in the past if nothing else.
Regardless, with the announcement of its imminent release, Hiveswap has caused an incredible stir in the community. This was also met with some interest from Makin, myself, and others: is this what Cohen meant last Wednesday when he said that they would make up for the lack of interview? Is it possible that there's still something to be announced tomorrow, Wednesday proper? Of course, if there is no interview this week, I don't think any of us would be able to complain; the game itself is far more than we were expecting.
This is accompanied by a few other ideas as well: there is a common element to Homestuck lore, something called “meme numbers”. One of the tendencies of the comic was to rely on the presence of certain numbers that gained significance through their ubiquity and coincidental usefulness. These numbers are primarily 413, 612, and 1025, which are all associated with a calendar date (13th of April, 12th of June, and 25th of October). There are other assorted numbers associated with characters or events but these are the main ones that carry significance for us as a community, because typically important events would occur on those days. Hussie was fond of releasing important flash animations or key story updates on the anniversary of the comic especially, and it is the day that the finale was released as well. Makin is fond of holding special community events on these days as well, especially streams.
All of this is to bring up the point that it's odd for us that WP announced the game at this point: neither the 29th of August nor the 14th of September are important days, so it's kind of unorthodox. That's not really a point to bring up against them obviously, it's just a note on the consistency of behavior, or tradition. Whatever the case, Hiveswap attaining a real release date is good news.
There is some doubt in my mind and I'm sure others as to whether or not this will pan out. We were given a release date before, and 8 months later here we are once again. The specificity of the date itself lends more credence to the idea that it will actually come out this time, but there is still that niggling doubt. If WP were to delay it once more at this point, I have no idea what would happen. The results of such a fiasco would be nothing short of catastrophic. I am firmly hoping it does not come to this however.
More news about Hiveswap later, I'm sure. As for the rest of today's events, our lobby for unbanning Saeko was successful and he's now back. I've crafted the message to announce to people regarding not joking about being underaged, but I have not secured permission to release it yet. Wheals thankfully condensed the message and put it in the #general channel description, so hopefully that will alleviate some of this problem. I'm going to ask to put it up regardless; the less of this sort of thing we have to deal with the better.
Nothing more to report for today.
30th of August
In keeping with the trend of talking about past events before modern ones, I'll describe the event that brought Tensei into our fold, but first a description of the man himself is warranted.
Tensei is another pseudo for the art-music channel, and a figure of fame in the community. Tensei, much like James, directly contributed music to Homestuck, and in some very key flash animations as well. However, unlike James, Tensei is not attached to the notions of LGBT rights. This is not to say he doesn't support it, he is just less imminently concerned about the idea. Instead, he prefers things to be relaxed between people, often enjoying Makin's tendencies to confuse and frustrate people over things Tensei considers relatively minor. Tensei, in addition to being an accomplished musician, is also a practicing artist who will sometimes draw NSFW art at his discretion, usually of a community creation of some sort. Something I can personally attest to, Tensei is a fan of playing video games as well. In fact, he will play with me and a couple regulars from the server on a fairly common basis, and we always manage to have a good time (once we decided to get drunk whilst doing so, and it's probably one of my fondest memories of the HSD). He is also the source of the most heavily used emoji in the entire server, simply and ominously referred to as “tenseiface”. The image itself is the face of a butterfly toy meant to be put in the garden or the yard; it gazes out at you, and is meant to indicate smugness or cheekiness. The image has become iconic and is heavily abused in conversations involving oneupsmanship or general japery. Tensei himself is an extremely chill person, which engenders some frustration from people who want him to take a perceived issue more seriously. Tensei won't have any of it though; it's probably not a big issue, and unless you have a good reason to be personally concerned you're probably just being silly over nothing. He's also one of the older members of the server as a whole, easily in his mid or late twenties (I forget exactly what his age is unfortunately), so he has effective seniority over most people around.
Some time in 2016 before I joined the HSD, there was apparently an Ask Me Anything set up where the Music Team for Homestuck volunteered to join the server for a night and answer questions. Predictably this didn't go very well; it started off amicably enough but as time went by the pace of the questions and discussion reached a pace that was completely out of control. I'm not privy to the exact details since it was before my time, but most of the Music Team left the server by the end of the night, all except for Tensei. Perhaps he witnessed the chaos and found it more amusing than terrifying, or he saw something else that made him feel like it was worth staying. I'll have to ask him why he remained someday. Whatever the reason that he decided to stay, I'm glad he made that choice.
Unfortunately, I feel as if this incident set a precedent. One of the overaching issues of the server, in my opinion, is a lack of communication with What Pumpkin or anyone intimately associated with Homestuck or Hiveswap's production. I'm not completely sure if it was the precipitating event, but ever since the Music Team swung through it seems as if the server has gained a reputation that precludes the chance of association with official figures in the future. Perhaps if this incident hadn't occurred, there would be better relations between us. I really hope that they can be repaired in the future if nothing else.
Speaking in the modern sense, another album was released today—this time from Cool and New Music Team, entitled “YES WE CANWC”. This was of course accompanied by a community stream, featuring a number of movies. I actually got to participate in this one as well, and it was a rousing time. Makin is strangely effective at managing these streams in a way that makes them more entertaining; there's a particular blend of meme videos, music, stream polls, custom emotes, and the general atmosphere that all compounds into a massively enjoyable event. He also has an intuitive grasp over how often to have them, which keeps us from falling to stream fatigue. I often wonder whether Makin gained this experience from previous communities or if he's just naturally good at hosting things. I'm sure I would ask him more about this if I wasn't sure it'd be seen as an invasion of his privacy.
At any rate, the stream today was, I'm sure it's safe to say, a great success as usual. I've also taken the liberty of asking for more information about CANMT, as I did with LOFAM. Once I have a significant amount of information on the topic I’ll explain it at length here.
Nothing more to report for today.
31st of August
It has become evident over the last week or so that #altgen is becoming problematic. The intense swell in fresh members coupled with Mettaton NEO potentially joining with an alt at any time has provided a bit of a headache with trying to moderate #altgen effectively. On top of this, there's been a serious uptick in shitposting in the wrong channels. Some of the regulars have expressed some dissatisfaction with this, and the mod team (especially Makin) is not pleased about it either.
Makin tasked me with writing up an announcement to address this problem. Taking all of about 45 seconds I came up with this:
This is an official reminder that #altgen is first and foremost a containment board. There have been an increasing number of problems caused by behavior that is meant to be confined in #altgen leaking to other channels. We cannot afford to let this happen because it's a great disturbance to people using them. People who enjoy using altgen regularly must begin exercising better control over themselves, otherwise we may be forced to delete the channel entirely.
This is not a joke. If you cannot keep shitposting and other #altgen related behavior localized in altgen only then we will be forced to do something drastic.
If you see other altgenners ignoring this policy, either remind them of what's at risk or tell us immediately so we can ban them. This is for your benefit as much as ours.
Shortly after we announced this altgenners naturally became pretty distraught, or at least as close to distraught as I've ever seen them get. It's been kind of a mess trying to placate them and get them to understand the actual plan we're trying to impart to them; most of them seem to think that this means they are indeed going to be deleted, which is untrue. It's difficult to get them to understand what's actually happening.
Due to the confusion and also the distinct potential to be painted as harsh or draconian, we're considering alternative methods for handling this. Outright deleting #altgen is an absolutely terrible idea in any case, so a far more diplomatic and effective solution would probably be to create a role that locks a user out of every channel except altgen if they shitpost outside of it. I'm a personal fan of this idea, and of naming that role “time-out”. Alas, Makin has not responded to the idea at all, so we can't proceed with it. We'll have to see what he says later, if ever.
Aside from this, I wanted to make a minor note of a conversation we had today. Rune's condition is worsening and they expressed serious discontent with the doctors they've gone to see, which is more than understandable. However, the discussion kind of quickened in a bad way after some disagreement regarding these doctors; a few of us were asserting that even if a doctor is rude, if they are competent and good at their job it's better than a doctor that is nice but incompetent. Tipsy did not take kindly to this, saying that even if a doctor is competent at their job, if they don't have bedside manners then they're automatically incompetent because the stress can negatively impact a patient's health. There's more nuance to this issue, but the overall point to this anecdote is that Tipsy got extremely heated about this matter, and people getting heated is usually concerning to me because it can quickly lead to fights.
It seemed heated to me at least, I could be mistaken. This sort of scenario has happened before where we'll be discussing something and Tipsy or someone else will say things that indicate they're angry, but it turns out they weren't actually angry. I don't actually know how to perceive these comments now that I think about it. I certainly hope they're not angry, but I'm pretty bad at determining which it is unless I ask.
Maybe I'm just overthinking this. No more for today.
Makin
1 :thinking:
2 insert a spongebob screen here MANY MONTHS LATER