Drew Linky
9th of July
Part of the reason I decided to begin recording this at all is because of the events of the last few days. Due to various elements of the server, there is some inherent volatility involved, a few contributing factors of which I will attempt to describe now.
#mspa-literature as a channel is difficult to describe; as plainly as I can state it's a clique group. The moderators use it far more often than the other channels of the server, and if one must speak to us it's advised that they come in and see us in #mspa-lit. A number of regular users also inhabit it on a frequent basis, and it may seem intimidating to people who aren't familiar with the layout of the server. As such, #mspa-lit has developed a reputation for being cliquey, as I stated before, and this has garnered the ire of some. While most people using the channel are content, WoC is notably an advocate for completely abolishing it.
WoC himself is an interesting character and is widely regarded as the most crass member of the mod team, with a blatant disregard for the sensibilities of other people and a gung-ho mentality about almost everything. He has injured himself in ridiculous ways and bounced back with remarkable aplomb, and it is common for people to mock him for these often idiotic mistakes.
On one particular occasion, WoC managed to cover his hand in superglue, and he wasn't sure how to remove it. Naturally, WoC decides the best way to do this would be with electricity. He then proceeded to remove the cover from an electrical socket and stick his hand into it, shocking himself violently. After he did this he came onto the server and told everybody, which led to us making fun of him for it for weeks afterwards. Truthfully, he's lucky he hasn't died yet; other acts involve drinking small amounts of kerosene by accident (not technically his fault of course), purposefully putting kerosene in his mouth so he could spit fire with it, and arranging no less than five firework mortar shells in a hole to blow up a hill that was inhabited by a prairie dog (because, in his words, “fuck those pests”).
Naturally WoC's demeanor also puts him at odds with a significant number of people in the userbase; he is often pointed to as one of the most hard-to-get-along-with members of the team, specifically because he seems to derive pleasure from purposefully messing with people on occasion. Despite all appearances, this isn't out of malice or spite, it's more just the kind of behavior WoC grew up around and is used to (he has described himself openly as a redneck). It is definitely difficult to stomach on occasion, but it's simply the sort of affectations associated with him. WoC is the pseudo-mod for the #gaming channel, and of course is very familiar with video games in general.
For future reference, the process of deliberately trying to get a rise out of whomever you're speaking to is called “baiting”, or more commonly “trolling”. This isn't always for purely antagonistic reasons, it's also weirdly enough a display of camaraderie depending on who you're speaking with. The exact nature of this practice is difficult to understand unless you've actively engaged in it and/or been on the receiving end of it. The results can be hilarious, or they can be exceedingly dramatic if the person being baited cares too much about the topic at hand, or even if they just find the technique itself to be distasteful (I've often been baited myself and I personally never enjoyed it).
Makin, the admin and owner of the server, is vaguely similar to WoC as far as reputation is concerned. He is an extremely secretive person, absolutely refusing to relinquish details about who he is in real life, and often intentionally obfuscating the matter further by providing “false leads.” I don't even know if he's actually male or not; one of the only things I can say that I probably know about him is that English is not his first language. He has a penchant for dedicating himself to “rationality”, which is paraded as an in-joke or meme on the server. Rather than being a joke, however, I think he actually takes the notion of rationality seriously. There have been innumerable discussions involving the practice and ideology of rationalism with him, although some conflicting behaviors on his part makes this tendency frustrating for various regulars of the server.
Another interest of his is fanfiction, which is not altogether unexpected given the nature of the server's existence. At any given time, #mspa-lit is used by him to discuss the fanfics he's discovered recently, or even for him to request more from anyone who happens to be familiar with them. On occasion he'll jokingly refer even to “rational fanfiction”, shortened to “ratfics”. Honestly his interests extend to most topics, including most elements of pop culture. There have been many discussions with him about all manner of art and forms of entertainment, such as video games (an incredible number of conversations about Dark Souls have popped up in the past), movies, music, etc.
Makin's exact reputation on the server is difficult to ascertain: for some people he is utterly mysterious, for others he appears to be nothing more than a wacky zany jokester. His penchant for secrecy regarding his real life and his subsequent love for unpredictability can bleed over into his position as admin of the server, and many people find his complete inscrutability frustrating, including myself sometimes. It appears that he will often try to do the thing he deems most unpredictable or interesting in various situations, an act that delights many and infuriates just as many others. I'm personally not sure what to make of his behavior sometimes. I am immensely frustrated with him at times but at others it is easier to go along with what he says and does. I'm reasonably certain that his intentions for the server are positive, otherwise I don't know why he would bother running the place as he does. Sometimes the problems that ensue involving him make maintaining that belief a challenge, however.
As I started this entry with, I wanted to begin writing this journal because of events that happened a few days ago. Makin's tendency to be unpredictable by itself is already cause for tension in the server on occasions, but he also has an unfortunate record of being difficult to understand. If it were one or two users then it would be fairly isolated and we would assume nothing of it, but this issue is rather consistent; it seems as if almost every problem involving Makin is the result of some sort of miscommunication. This problem is almost certainly exacerbated by the fact that English isn't his first language, but a lot of it is due to his unwillingness to accept anything but well argued logic as a good basis for change or what have you (perfectly in keeping with his preference for rationality). On this particular day, as has happened numerous times before, Makin made a grievous blunder when trying to express how he feels about a topic and managed to greatly offend a user.
The user in question, who I shall refer to as Alex, is sometimes problematic for us. They are a figure of some infamy in our server because they are also a prominent member of a rival server of ours, which I will describe in detail another time. Alex was never banned from the HSD, but actually took the unusual route of joining the rival first and then joining the HSD. They stick around in both places but will often leave the HSD when they get into fights with other users here, and as of this writing are actually on their last warning for repeatedly causing several-hours-long, heated discussions (usually referred to as “discourse”).
They are also a firm advocate for the rights of LGBT individuals, something we sympathize with of course. Unfortunately, they pursue their stances on this topic to the point of what can only be described as absurdity. This was more often than not the source of arguments involving them on HSD: Alex would initiate the discussion and ruthlessly fight people who may disagree with them on the topic. While well-intentioned, this practice often led to discourse and generated considerable ire for a large number of people. There is still ongoing pressure from various members of the mod team and the userbase at large to ban them because of it, especially from WoC and a couple other pseudo mods.
Alex's propensity for defending LGBT rights extends to other things as well, and they are overall a very outspoken and opinionated person. Extremely passionate, Alex will quickly become upset if you demonstrate that you don't care or dismissive of what they have to say, or how they feel. Makin acted this way a few nights ago, when the two were having a typical discussion about some of the characters from the comic. The two have been through their song and dance enough times that Makin knew it was approaching time to cut off the discussion, both because it probably wouldn't go anywhere meaningful. Instead of the intended effect, however, Makin shoved his foot in his mouth and pissed Alex off considerably.
Alex left the server, another power user named Putnam left the server in similar disgust, and thus began the multiday shitstorm of trying to figure the situation out and keep it from getting worse. After a while of this, Makin openly requested assistance in trying to improve his behavior; he had a moment of clarity and realized he was making other people upset and wanted it to stop. This sort of request from Makin is almost entirely unprecedented, so naturally I seized upon it. We moved to #serious to try and help him understand why people get so annoyed at him, most of which was just informing him and helping him realize that his communication skills are garbage, all things considered.
After some time of this it seemed we were making a little progress, but then another outspoken member of #mspa-lit, tipsy, came online and decided to speak her mind without bothering to learn anything about what was going on. She's often tried to chide Makin for some of the things he's done, and without any context she simply said, “you just don't care is your problem”. It's not an easy thing to hear, especially after you've just tried to demonstrate you do care and are trying to change your behavior to better suit the needs of your community. Makin got really upset at this and went offline almost immediately, effectively leaving the server. The severity of this is not to be understated--Makin has only left in a huff a handful of times, and I had never personally witnessed this happening.
Things have quieted since that point, but there is a more or less pervasive air of awkwardness surrounding the fact that Makin stormed out. We're not quite sure what's going to happen, if anything. It’s likely that he will simply return and nothing significant will occur, but there is always the element of his unpredictability to consider. We will see exactly what happens when the time comes.
I'm going to end this entry here, I've just realized I haven't explained anything about how or why I came to this server in the first place. I'll go ahead and explain that more in a future entry, probably the next one.
10th of July
More Makin related drama, although relatively minor. I was directly messaged by a person on the server, saying that an outspoken hater of the Discord and especially Makin posted about his disappearance on Twitter. Normally this sort of thing wouldn't be worthy of the slightest mention, but the person in question is James Roach.
James Roach is also a content producer, a musician who created various pieces that were incorporated into Homestuck itself, as well as included on its official album releases. As if this wasn't enough, James is also an active member of the team developing Hiveswap, as one of its sound designers and composers. These things gives him some considerable clout in the community, especially as one of the few people from the Homestuck team who interacts with us at all. He used to engage with us but there was a considerable falling out between him and Makin for reasons I’m not familiar with.
James is a fairly outspoken individual, to the point that it seems he will combat you if you so much as hint at disagreement on various issues--my experiences with him have been plagued by a sensitivity to criticism or questioning to a level I would consider absurd or even irrational. This attitude has led to a lot of chafing and negative relations between him and Makin, the latter naturally fomenting arguments and leading to excessive discourse on all manner of topics. Yet, it’s important to note that James on his own appears to radiate a particular aggression or hostility, towards some at the very least.
About a day after Makin left the server, James apparently tweeted about something he said just before leaving. Makin specifically stated “not to assume bad things of him” shortly before he left, and the tweet says: “I like when people say “don't assume the worst of me” or w/e and its like my guy I don't have to assume anything its right there you suck”.
I don't find these sorts of things professional. For someone of his stature in the fandom to wield his opinion like a cudgel and strike at someone who is already down is unsavory at best. There is already tension between James and the community, and he is viewed by many as somewhat of a nuisance because of his attitude. This sort of thing only serves to stoke that animosity further, and there have been clear responses from the rest of the mod team condemning his actions.
At any rate, this development has only served to sour the mood even further. Luckily, there was an alternative development that significantly improved how everyone felt. In the announcements channel, an unknown bot named Smug Trizza posted the image of the cave after Jesus's resurrection, with the caption (stay tuned). It is widely assumed that this was Makin using webhooks or similar methods to post, since he is still technically absent from the server. We assume he is feeling well and planning to return soon, in keeping with the “rise on the third day” theme. Excitement abounds. I'm going to go ahead and end the entry here though, I am exceptionally tired and I have a lot to do tomorrow.
11th of July
Makin returned at 5:23 AM CST with a post in announcements declaring the creation of a new channel, #news. #news will be serving the same purpose as the announcements channel, except that news is specifically reserved for information regarding Hiveswap. Announcements will continue functioning as it has, serving as a way to inform the community about relevant fan adventures, generally important events, etc.
Makin himself seems largely unchanged, utilizing his return to the server after three days as a meme to portray himself as the Messiah. I'm personally just glad he's back and talking, it was a very strange few days with him being solidly gone. Of course, there's no telling if any of the reforms we were trying to help him with will have gone through. My bet is on “no”, but time will tell.
There seems to be little else of note happening, so I'll go ahead and describe some more regulars of the server that I'm personally familiar with.
To stay organized I believe I'll finish describing the mod team first since I've already described Makin and WoC at length (edit as of 2/13/18: I have moved the character descriptions to coincide with the first event in this journal relevant to the person being described for pacing reasons. People who do not appear later in the journal are still described here).
Lucky Red Seven, or just LRS, is one of the most enigmatic members of the team, through a combination of not inserting his opinion and not interfering with policy at all. He frequents #gaming a lot with WoC. As far as being a moderator I don't think he's terribly active, but that's not really my call to make. He could be perfectly active and I'm just not around to see it. He's nice enough anyway, if somewhat disinterested in the more dramatic elements of the server. And who could blame him? Sometimes this place is utterly festooned with horrid, unnecessary highschool level garbage. If I had to leave it on an honest and positive note, I'd say that LRS is just an overall chill person.
Difarem is much like LRS to me except even more enigmatic. The #coding-tech pseudo, I barely see him speak elsewhere. Being one of the channels I frequent least, I end up never talking to the guy. By all accounts though, my few interactions with him have been amicable enough so I can't assume he's not a nice person. Unfortunately, I don't know what else to say about him, and rather than pretend I know anything I'll just go ahead and move along.
For the last few days in the server and elsewhere, a new internet phenomenon has been in the works called 17776. It's a curious story about the Voyager 9 probe gaining sentience and talking with other probes, such as Voyager 10, JUICE and once Hubble. These satellites spend their time floating through space watching humanity, in a post-scarcity society where people stopped aging and dying sometime in the mid 21st century for unknown reasons. After a technological development that keeps people from dying in unnatural ways as well as through their now limitless longevity, humans have moved on to passing the millenia by playing football in new and strange ways. The subject matter of 17776 is largely about these games, and what they mean for humanity's place in the universe. I'm actually a huge fan of such stories, and I eagerly await each update now. I'm curious where they intend to go with it.
The rest of the community seems to enjoy it as well. There has been a lot of talk about the ingenuity of the story using satellites as characters, among other elements of the story. This is only the latest in a long string of various stories that have been lauded by the community, and which will be discussed in some part for ages to come.
I believe I'll end this entry here and pick it back up tomorrow.
12th of July
The flow of conversation in mspa-lit is really strange and captivating to me sometimes. Topics can be discussed rabidly for hours with no change or we can flit from idea to idea rapidly, almost as if trying to settle on something but not sure what to go with. Today the latter has been happening; all day it seems we've swiftly moved from topic to topic, not quite stopping on anything for more than a few minutes.
For a while we simply talked about whatever came to mind, often enough that 17776 story. Other topics that we crossed paths with included sports in general, the InCel (short for “Involuntarily Celibate”) and Redpill communities, garage music bands, space, humanity's purpose in the universe if it exists, what we ate today, youtube meme videos, and so on. Without a focus we're perfectly content with drifting among the various possible things that can be discussed, and almost nothing is off limits. The sheer eagerness to speak with each other is palpable; we enjoy talking together, and it's immensely gratifying to me.
An interesting and unexpected development today, as well: the Official Homestuck youtube channel released a song, written in the style of a band called The Grubbles that exists in Hiveswap. This is the third such song by them, and each one has actually been pretty nice to listen to. Predictably though, this steered the course of conversation to Hiveswap’s interminable delays and mishandling by What Pumpkin.
Hiveswap is a subject of intense controversy and polarization in the community. Only a sparing few months before I got into Homestuck myself, back on September 4th of 2012, Andrew Hussie launched a Kickstarter project called the Homestuck Adventure Game. Obviously I wasn't around for this, but it caused quite a stir. The project had a fundraising goal of $700,000 and managed to raise almost $2.5 million. People talked about it for years, so that even if I wasn't around for the initial splash I was still subject to the waves and ripples. We were treated to various announcements on progress and promises of things to add based on stretch goals being reached. It was very exciting for a long while.
However, time went by and people started to notice something was wrong. The original intended release date was in 2014, a 2 year wait. This seemed daunting but more than acceptable for most people; they waited, content that the fandom going above and beyond the call of duty would secure a lovely product for them. Three years after that initial deadline, we're still waiting.
In late 2016, after I joined the HSD, we received a trailer for “Act One” of the game that advertised its release date as being January of 2017. Finally, an end to the long wait! People were ecstatic, and yet others still hesitant. We had been burned a number of times before this--promised a release date only to have it pushed back, sometimes with no specific date at all. While some celebrated the news, a lot of us were cautious and outright cynical. No one wanted to be disappointed again.
The appointed time came, and disappointment is indeed what struck. Instead of being graced with Hiveswap: Act One, we got an update post saying it would be moved back “several weeks”. People were outraged, some renouncing the game in its entirety out of disgust. Others bounced back with optimism anew: “it's only a little farther away guys, the post says 'weeks'!” Of course, six months later we're still waiting. There is very little room left for such optimism.
One of the facets of this conversation that comes up is how it's been delayed so many times. We're aware that at one point, the development company Andrew Hussie had signed on with to produce the game, The Odd Gentlemen, took a sizeable portion of the money that was meant for Hiveswap and used it on another project, setting them back considerably. This information, I believe, is not widely known outside of the HSD, and in that scenario of course we're more sympathetic. Some are still harsh, saying that Hussie should have been more careful with the legal wording of any contract they had with The Odd Gentlemen, which is a sensible and fair argument. You don't squander $2.5 million with bad legalese. After this debacle it seemed Hussie created his own game development studio from scratch using his already existing brand What Pumpkin, which immediately struck people as a bad idea.
Hussie has a tendency to overpromise on things and then burn himself out in the process. This was noticeable during the later portion of Homestuck, where in the last year or so it seemed he stopped talking to fans completely, and engaging in all of the typical behaviors we had come to associate from him. Many speculated that he was simply done with trying to fulfill Homestuck to the best of his abilities, that he had created a monster he could not control. Many people speculate that this too happened with the game, where he promised a lot to people and then ran out of stamina. In the time since What Pumpkin started developing the game, Hussie himself has had little to no extensive interaction with the Homestuck community, and this unspoken policy of horrendous public relations has extended to the development team as well.
There was some shuffling of the devs, including Hussie hiring a fellow named Cohen (who long ago actually participated on the HSD, like James) to write Hiveswap instead of himself. Cohen does not have the reputation Hussie does, and this decision was met with a significant degree of skepticism. With only a smattering of developer interviews in recent months to tide us over, all of this has combined into a very agitating slurry that has left people feeling apathetic, if not outright spiteful of the project.
This agitation has actually been the source of some intense friction between the HSD and members of What Pumpkin. James Roach left because Makin tends to relentlessly criticize Hiveswap's development process (which is completely understandable). All of this controversy serves to extend the conversation long past its apparent expiration date, a fact that some people are getting noticeably tired of. However, the rest of us are perfectly content to stew in our collective agony. It's a very peculiar brand of enjoyable, as long as you're not one of the people who still eagerly anticipates the game's release.
This all having been said, the song that was posted and the developer interviews do make it a little easier. Despite our collective complaints and tendency to argue about it, as a whole we want Hiveswap to come out, be good, and be successful. It's almost five years in the making and it's one of the last things we have to look forward to as a Homestuck-centric community. If nothing else, we cling to that idea that it may still be what we've been promised and are looking forward to.
The song aside, the scheduled developer interview has not been released today. It's currently 9 PM CST as of writing this, and if I'm not mistaken the interviews are usually released earlier in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if the interview has been moved due to the song being released, but the song taking the interview's spot is not necessarily an equal transaction for us. With as little information as we've received about the project, we take every scrap we can get and are onerous when it is taken away. The song may have been a good move, but if it is not associated with the regularly scheduled interview then it still robs What Pumpkin of some legitimacy.
Ah, and here it goes. 9:05 PM, and the discourse has officially begun. All it took was one off handed statement about a lack of substantial news in the developer interviews and now the shit is flying.
There's a lot of history and interpersonal politics tied up into these discussions. Alex, Makin and Putnam are all currently discussing Makin's history of association with members of What Pumpkin, with Alex and Putnam insisting that Makin is the biggest reason that WP doesn't communicate with the HSD. This seems unfair, but I personally am not familiar enough with the history of HSD or Makin himself to know if that's accurate or not.
The discourse is now effectively over, and WoC has finally crossed the line. Makin demodded LRS to gaming pseudo for relative inactivity and WoC is now the first ever gaming janitor. While unfortunate for both, this was not entirely unexpected. I'm kind of worried about how they'll handle this; WoC is already aware of it and seems more or less resigned to it, although I'm sure he's actually somewhat bitter even if he hides it. LRS isn't around at the moment, and there was actually a scare earlier in the day about whether he would be demodded or not, so this is going to come as a bit of a blow when he comes back.
I actually feel really bad for him. I just got done informing him and he's upset; to his credit, he's mostly upset at himself for not being more active. He feels like Makin never trusted him, or at least didn't trust in his competency for whatever reason. He listed off reasons the other moderators are viewed favorably (to my amusement, saying that my attractive quality is that I “have opinions”), and said he was always just kind of quiet. I can tell he genuinely wants to just do a good job and wasn't sure how to do anything else. Additionally, WoC has left the server. I'm sure he'll be back, but in the meantime I guess I'm disappointed that it turned out this way.
Tomorrow, assuming nothing extravagant is happening, I'll go ahead and describe some of the regular users of the server.
13th of July
There are a lot of people to describe (like I said, a varied and colorful assortment of people), I'm not even sure where to start honestly. I guess I'll pick whoever's talking in the chat currently (edit as of 2/13/18: as with the mod descriptions, these have been moved to more appropriate locations if possible).
Putnam is another figure of fame, but less so for the Homestuck community: he's an amazing programmer, and most of his time is spent in developing mods for the game Dwarf Fortress. Putnam's understanding of the game is unreal; the creator of the game, a guy named Toady I believe, is actually impressed and slightly intimidated by Putnam's comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings of Dwarf Fortress. Thus, Putnam is extremely notable within the DF community. As far as HSD is concerned, though, Putnam is just an extremely mathematics and computer science oriented person. I'm currently playing Minecraft with Putnam on a regular basis, the amount of optimization and efficiency increasing activities he delves into are kind of mind boggling in their complexity and depth. His input is extremely valuable to Makin since it's usually pretty rationally oriented, given to logic and the like. Since some recent personal events, Putnam has definitely unleashed some of the more emotional aspects of his behavior. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just unusual. I'm sure eventually this will either change or we'll get used to it, but for now it's a different element in play than what we're used to. Putnam is also extremely outspoken against the concept of people dying in general—he fears death above all else, “the only true evil to exist in this world”1. The way he presents his argument makes sense on a logical basis but I and some others think he pursues it a little too relentlessly at times. This has happened for other conversational topics with him as well, such as drinking alcohol. Overall I really appreciate Putnam; he may be strange in some ways but he's a good person at his core for sure.
Griever is a fun individual; he runs a fan adventure called Jojostuck, based on the the manga/anime Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. This fan adventure is a direct recreation of one of the parts of the show, except involving characters from Homestuck based on official Homestuck tarot card placements. It's exceptionally well crafted, and the community has adopted it as one of their staple works. Its popularity is such that asking people if they've read it the moment they join the server is a meme; we've actually started receiving complaints because of how commonly the sentiment has echoed at times. We try to keep it under wraps but we secretly delight in its spread and popularity of course. Griever himself is a very nice individual, with a calm head and more or less rational opinions on things. He has Makin's ear because of Jojostuck, although if it's been a while since the last update Makin frequently dismisses him with “go write more Jojostuck already”. Griever does have a tendency to repost his artwork long past its expiration date; he'll leak art from an upcoming update if he's satisfied with it, but then he'll keep posting it over and over again. It usually takes us some time to catch on to this, but when we do we have to scold him. He's been warned against doing this multiple times, but sometimes it slips through the cracks. Aside from the reposting, Griever is indisputably a great addition to the community.
Nights is an interesting person. If it wasn't for the fact that his points are often cogent he would be taken for a habitual shitposter, because his messages are so often fraught with typos and misspellings. This is just an effect of his keyboard structure apparently, but it often manages to obscure what he's trying to say because it's so bad. He's kind of the community doll in a lot of ways—not least of which because he’s physically small, maybe one of the shortest people in the HSD, a fact that I’m unsure of how it became public knowledge. He's got that “smol” demeanor that people like so much, where he often posts cute things and argues for the most agreeable position in lots of cases. Not interested in causing waves, he just wants people to get along. He is also very important for keeping some of HSD's side projects going, being probably the most consistent running head for Cool and New Music Team where he organizes projects and releases them officially. He often plays Overwatch with Tensei and I, although right now he's gone on vacation for a couple of weeks. In addition to frequenting mspa-lit, he's often around in social; he really likes that place. The server always feels a little quieter without him around.
Rune is a tragic person; diagnosed with a mysterious terminal illness, there is a high likelihood that they will die in the next few years. As such, they have resolved to live as much as they possibly can during the remaining time they have, and often travels to cons or to meet people. They have a particular fondness for RJ, another musician for Homestuck who doesn't frequent the HSD as much, although he does visit occasionally. They will often plug things they want to see succeed, which can be annoying to others. However, due to their illness, I think we're all a little uncomfortable with telling them to stop when this happens. If it becomes very excessive then we step in, but generally a lot of leeway is afforded to them. They are extremely fond of ocarinas, sporting an incredible knowledge of them in general and making purchase recommendations to people who even remotely express interest. They are also a huge fan of Yugioh, especially the character Atem. We've suffered to no end listening to them describe how much they like the show and especially Atem, but at the same time it's a thing we've grown fond of. We all hope that they persist and manage to make some sort of recovery (if they survive their illness they will probably become better in a few years). Until then we try to make them feel as welcomed as we can.
There are tons of people in the HSD like these: WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES, Kal-la-kal-la, Kayjeth, Olkiswerve, Gnawms, Nikki, tripheus, IAMTARA, Twonks, Mad-Juggalo, Archiewhite, Andrew, Aradia, CynicallyCritical, Red, Interrobang, Barry, akaTrickster, VDNW, Skyplayer, BitesizeBird, Hadron, Tainted Angel, cloudaria, cookiefonster, Dawooya, Tetrahedron, MrNostalgic, Dingus, hb, octacle, Proto-Man, akaTrickster, Shoktherapy, OneDragonArmy, Solarsail, fashionableSpirit, Dap, Dickle, sock, molly, Squarewave, ech, 47x5, Somerandomguy, Saeko, austinado2, and so many others. Too many for me to possibly name and list them all. If they become relevant to what's happening in the moment, I will probably choose to describe them then. I hope I get the chance to talk about all of them at some point; these people are wonderful in their collectivity, making the HSD an interesting and subsequently better place to be in. I hope they all stick around for a long time to come.
Also of minor note today, Medixum and Ifnar changed places; Medixum now moderates #social and Ifnar now moderates #serious. Nothing else to report.
14th of July
The HSD has been a little quiet for a few days. I think this has to do with it being the specific time of year—I thought summer would mean everyone is free and talking more, but of course it doesn't turn out that way. Nights is currently on vacation and Cait, I believe, is finishing a summer term of school. Whatever the reasons are, it's been a pretty slow week. Or perhaps I'm simply thinking of it as slow because I'm here all the time. There are definitely points during the day where activity spikes considerably and people come out of the woodwork to talk. Maybe I need to spend some time away from the HSD to resensitize myself or something.
It's times like these that I fear the community may be suffering a little bit for whatever reason, but the other symptoms of impending community death are not present. Channels are more or less active at all times, I guess it's just the people that I'm most familiar with and care about are not on. I suppose I'm also still upset that WoC is gone.
It was discussed whether or not WoC would regain his modship status if he came back to the server, but Makin has solidly stated no (“i don't negotiate with terrorists”, in his words). If WoC comes back he'll receive his new janitor position but a mod spot is not in the works for him, so I don't see him bothering to come back. Time will tell I'm sure.
I suppose now would be a good time to elaborate on the origin of a rival server I will call Hiveswap Discord, or HVSD. Around the time that I joined, when I was still definitively unknown, one of the mods of the subreddit was a fellow I’ll refer to as Elvish for reasons of privacy. Elvish was a younger user and becoming increasingly unstable as time went by. There were significant disagreements between them and Makin over the way the subreddit and the discord should be moderated. Eventually Elvish's discontent grew to the point that they left the subreddit, which itself led to a whole slew of greater problems. Public confrontations began; at some point Elvish threatening people with suicide, which culminated in them leaving the HSD (I forget if this was a ban or voluntary).
In their anger, Elvish apparently began utilizing HVSD as their own splinter server to express hatred of Makin and become more successful than him. This attracted a lot of people who were also banned from HSD, and it led to the official declaration of rules over there that seem fairly draconic or unnecessary to us—the nature of HVSD is thus alien to us. Members of HVSD state that their server is for people who feel uncomfortable in the HSD, and as such they maintain that they simply exist as an alternative. This does not alleviate the very real rivalry that exists between the HSD and HVSD, however.
Elvish recently in the last few months stepped down as owner of the server, turning it over to a user I will refer to as AlexIcel, again for reasons of anonymity. AlexIcel and others from HVSD will occasionally come over to HSD, either in response to Makin throwing shade on them first or just to start shit themselves. This is frustrating to no end for me personally, and many of the others in the mod team agree. Makin likes fierce debate and argumentation and doesn't know when to stop sometimes, so he doesn't view this as a problem. It's a source of friction between him and the rest of us, but admittedly in the last few weeks the problem has been rectified somewhat.
Hiveswap Discord functions somewhat as a beacon for those who can't tolerate the HSD, and today boasts a membership around 400 people or so. Makin is of course disdainful of them because of their very nature as a splinter server and their dislike of him. He views the HSD's far larger member count as a sign of definitive success over HVSD, which leads to him being boastful and causing still more problems. However, it's become a pretty predictable song and dance now, one that I even look forward to sometimes. It certainly manages to make things more interesting.
There are other circumstances surrounding the HSD that are fairly controversial such as users like Daddy, who was an intense creep and had to be banned just for making people uncomfortable. Manatee and recursiveSlacker are other insufferably toxic characters, principally exhibiting behavior that suggests professional help is needed (unless necessary, I will specifically avoid describing their malignancies to avoid inadvertently feeding them attention). However, there is one name that comes to mind that may be worse than all others--even worse than those mentioned so far is a user named Talons.
Talons is a force for destruction and chaos unlike any other in our pocket of the internet. Where those like Manatee and recursiveSlacker mostly deserve to be forgotten from collective consciousness, Talons’ various abuses of people deserve to be brought to light so that he might never hurt anyone ever again. He was banned long before I became a member of the server, and has a whole host of mental problems that culminate in an individual who is singularly obsessed and manipulative towards anyone who will even give him the time of day. He has generated hundreds if not thousands of alt accounts that he uses to spy on the server and harass its users. He used to date a user named Flare, a fact that now makes Flare incredibly uncomfortable, and who is now often the target of Talons' scheming and intentions.
Flare himself is a figure of much controversy. Usually he's fine, not malicious or anything, just excessively weird. However, he and Alex have a mutual hatred of each other, and Flare especially just takes it way out of normal boundaries. I think Flare suffers from a bit of a language barrier problem, but some of the behavior is explicitly not acceptable. Alex and another user started talking to each other and being closer, and Flare would consistently interrupt them and make it impossible for them to speak in public. It was basically targeted harassment, so naturally we had to ban Flare for a few days. He's calmed down significantly since then, but there is still that threat ever looming I suppose. Aside from this, Flare is just a generally weird and confusing guy to talk to. Again, I think he means well but it's hard for him to control his emotions occasionally. Hopefully in the future he can clean up his act.
Someone that merits description is the banned user Talons. Words lack the parameters to accurately describe how disturbing Talons' ethos is. He actively colludes with other people who were banned from HSD in an attempt to find a way to ruin things for us. Talons actually conspired with another user named Itoan in this regard: Itoan created an alt account impersonating a woman to catfish members of the NSFW server and gain nude pictures of them. After doing this, he compiled them into an album and these pictures have been used for blackmailing purposes ever since (this event, alongside another involving WoC, eventually culminated in the complete removal of the NSFW channel and the creation of the Homesmut server).
Once Talons had acquired these images from Itoan, he began using alt accounts to join the HSD and spam them relentlessly in public channels. We've reached out to the Discord Abuse Center to try and have this taken care of, but unfortunately we just don't have enough information about Talons to help them get rid of him completely. There is also talk of Talons having a sister, and many people who are aware of Talons fear for her safety. He is a wildly destructive and incredible poisonous person, and I mean it in complete sincerity when I say that I hope he is apprehended by law enforcement in some way and carted to jail. He is a menace to himself and others and the sooner he's gone the better.
This unpleasant description out of the way, I think I'm done for today unless anything else happens. There are numerous other incidents to describe, which can happen another time.
15th of July
Today was pretty tumultuous in a vaguely annoying way. It begins with old drama cropping up—a couple weeks ago we banned a regular, Frost, for engaging in a group of sexually active minors. Frost is 17, so not exactly pedo age, but it's still bad and really illegal. To keep ourselves safe we decided to ban him, hardly a controversial decision. It’s important at this point to establish that Frost is a friend of Cerulean.
Cerulean, or just Ceru, is an interesting person: he is extremely earnest, but with a significant degree of anxiety and a lack of self-esteem. For all of this, Ceru is extremely talented at programming; one of the server's main automated bot accounts, Aradiabot, is written and maintained completely by him. It boasts an incredible array of functions and in no small way keeps the server running smoothly. Ceru also has an interest in electronic music, which shacks up with my own tastes. He is very kind to people and cares about them greatly, defending his friends to great lengths if something against them arises. This has occasionally put Ceru at odds with the rest of the mod team when we need to ban someone that he is close to; however, Ceru is also thankfully reasonable and it's not hard to bring him around and help him see why it must be done. For all of this, Ceru is probably one of my favorite fellow moderators.
Unfortunately, Frost was and still is a friend of Ceruleans (picking up friends that Ceru would be better off being an uncanny talent of his). Ceru also runs a private server, where Frost remains to this day. This seemed to be fine for a while, but Twonks was invited to the server earlier today.
Twonks is a very temperamental individual; I don't say this lightly. She is given to incredible bouts of anger that do not suit the level of provocation, which has obviously caused significant problems. All of this is at least somewhat surprising—generally she tries to put out an air of being happy and nice to others, which makes this all feel vaguely more sinister in light of her intense anger management problems. She expressed to me that she feels that her tendency to anger goes way too far (obviously) and that she needs help for it, but she doesn't know how to fix it. I managed to gain a promise from her to seek therapy or a psychiatrist, which I felt relatively good about, but I've been told that this had already done before and nothing even happened. Very disappointing to be honest.
At any rate, Twonks was invited to Ceru's private server and noticed Frost was still there. This naturally led to a shitstorm of ridiculous proportions: Twonks demanded that Frost be banned from Ceru's private server; Ceru obviously declined this and told Twonks not to insult Frost again; Twonks continued to rage despite the intervention of ost, tripheus, and another individual in a different server. Yazshu and Twonks both demanded that Makin reprimand Ceru for defending Frost, an act they called “supporting pedophilia”; Makin definitely declined this; Twonks threatened to report Makin to Discord developers for “victim blaming” some of the people involved in the original situation (an incident I will explain another time); Makin bans Twonks from the HSD; Twonks rages at Makin and ost in private messages and is promptly blocked by both of them.
Twonks is now more or less calm but I don't know if they can be allowed back. While the fundamental source of their anger is more or less understandable, the actions that she took following that are clearly unacceptable. She's damaged her standing with a lot of people today and it's likely she won't be allowed to return to the HSD. I wasn't even home for this, I was out all day with family. I ended up coming back to over 30 private messages from various people asking me to handle the situation. I'm not explicitly clear why I was put in charge of handling all of the petty nonsense that happens here. But, if it helps, then I try my best anyway even if I find it distasteful or dumb (up to a point I guess).
I think the other people on the mod team and maybe even Makin are convinced that this isn't that big of a deal, but Twonks is appearing increasingly unstable as a person. We'll see how this plays out later.
16th of July
As predicted, this has gotten worse. Yazshu felt the need to DM me about this while I was out again today, when I got back I learned that Twonks had been contemplating suicide about being banned from HSD all morning. I'm afraid it'll make me seem horrible but this is more just frustrating than anything else; again, I'm not sure why the burden falls on me to deal with this. What's worse is that I've dealt with people who threaten suicide like this before. Less than being an actual suicide threat, it's more a manipulative tactic; it garners sympathy or at least makes people pay attention to them. I have no idea if that's what Twonks is doing in reality but it would shack up with the rest of what's happening and her overall behavior.
My prediction is as thus: the chances of getting Twonks back into the HSD is really low. She's burned her bridges thoroughly; it takes a lot to be blocked by two members of administration. I think it's clear to everyone involved, more or less, that Twonks will not be allowed to come back. However, if I can get her back, then it would be a one strike policy; if she fucks up even one time, she's out for good. This is what was done for Flare, who by all accounts should not have been allowed to come back to the server for his generally creepy behavior towards Alex and his vehement shipping nonsense.
The main barrier is probably the fact that she threatened to report Makin. Makin is capricious at the best of times; I don't think he'll be too excited about risking letting this sort of thing happen again. I have to at least try and appeal, in the interest of doing the right thing and representing people fairly. Guess we'll see if the effort pays off.
All of this negativity aside, I've been reminded of why I'm okay dealing with all of this. I've been discussing the incident with Red in addition to Yazshu and Twonks herself; Red is of the same opinion I am of this entire debacle, that it's pointless and extremely disturbing. However, after the conversation progressed like this for a while she told me that people really appreciate that I'm around to help out. Said something along the lines of “people think you're one of the few people who genuinely helps out around the place”.
It's immensely gratifying to hear things like that. I enjoy being able to do a good job and help people out, even if sometimes it feels like I'm not making any progress or doing very well. It makes me want to continue helping as much as I can. As long as there's still a community worth protecting and helping, then I guess I'll be found here trying my best to do my job--they deserve that much I think. I think I'm going to end it here for tonight, there doesn't seem to be much else to report as of yet. I'm going to bring Twonks up to the modchat and see what I can do, hopefully the proposal isn't shot down immediately.
17th of July
I was shot down immediately. However, after talking further with Twonks, I think that not reinviting her to the server was the wiser decision honestly. Over night and especially after telling her that it was a no, she grew increasingly despondent and had another fit of rage. She also unleashed this on her friends, which I explicitly asked her not to do.
It's honestly just a messy situation all around. I ended up spending some time today trying to calm her down and explain to her what was going on, and I spent an equal if not greater amount of time doing the same for Yazshu.
Yazshu is a temperamental guy; he's not nearly as bad as Twonks and his impulses are guided more by a desire for justice and fair treatment than anything else, but he often clashes with the mod team in what should be deemed “correct” or how to handle a given situation. He is also given to protecting his friends fiercely and loyally, which is something that I can of course sympathize with. Unfortunately this tendency also gets in the way of actually solving problems, or even creates more. Yazshu has an almost fetishistic desire for disturbing and excessively sophomoric humor, a leaning that I greatly enjoy talking to him. Sometimes too fiery, Yaz simply cares about the right things being accomplished.
Thankfully, I was able to talk Yazshu down a bit and help him understand the inherent difficulty in helping Twonks in this particular scenario, given that she shot herself in the foot so badly. I even managed to talk Twonks herself down after her anger subsided, which was nice. Sometimes I'm okay at what I do, or at least I think. I feel bad that I can't help more but sometimes it's prudent to just let go and have people figure it out for themselves.
Aside from this, Makin started some debate today about splinter servers. Splinter servers are nebulously defined, it may depend on who you're talking to—generally speaking a safe definition would be that it's a separate, external server that is made by people from a host server, usually because they are disgruntled or otherwise upset by something that happened in the host server. Sometimes the splinter isn't made from any negative reasons, it's just made as a hangout spot for people who enjoy talking to each other. There are tangible benefits to having these splinter servers in some cases, but unfortunately in a lot of other cases there are an exceptional number of problems that occur because of them as well.
Usually drama that has nothing to do with HSD at first can fester and eventually transform into something that affects a lot of people on it anyway. This is usually what happens to me in regards to splinter servers—inevitably there is some sort of dramatic nonsense that becomes a huge problem and I'm left to try and talk sense into people after the situation falls apart. To be completely fair, not all splinter servers are dysfunctional like this; it's usually the ones that are created in spite and/or run by people who are habitually trouble makers anyway that make it problematic or troubling to deal with.
Of course, outside of this narrow range of splinter server experiences, it is not uncommon to find a burgeoning or otherwise healthy community in what is otherwise a relatively unnoteworthy server. These places aren't so bad and I fully admit that I'm okay with their existence. Makin is not so forgiving and thinks that splinter servers are categorically bad, deserving to be removed completely from the system. This stance has gained him a lot of negative will today, unsurprisingly.
More tomorrow, I'm falling asleep here.
18th of July
Funnily enough, in the wake of Makin's tirade against splinter servers, it feels as if more have suddenly popped up. I'm not sure if their appearance is as a direct result of his complaints or if they're unrelated but it's amusing how this happens. Nights, while still on vacation, has started posting again recently and invited me to a personal server filled with a bunch of other people I know and a few that I don't. I was also invited to Red's new personal server, which she created at the same time as rejoining the HSD.
I've mentioned Red a few times but neglected to explain her: Red is a fairly reasonable person generally speaking but is prone to fits of irrationality when she gets upset. She's fun to talk to, being very playful and easygoing about things, but isn't afraid to tease people over small affairs. She's very interested in science and space, much like myself. Her inability to handle being upset appropriately gets in the way sometimes though. She tries not to be too open with others, which is understandable, but I personally feel as if this can get in the way of establishing or improving relationships with others. Ultimately, I guess it's not my place to speak on that.
Two months ago she was so thoroughly embarrassed and upset by something and, in conjunction with some personal blunders and being yelled at by Makin, she left the HSD completely. I started talking to her in private messages, trying to make sure she was okay and so on. Eventually she began improving considerably and it's been a bit of a struggle to follow her desire to go back to HSD.
Today she finally did rejoin, and as I've told her over the last couple of months people were definitely happy to have her back. I think the response was a boost for her, she's seemed happy since. I haven't had a chance to talk to her about it yet since she went to bed, but regardless I'm glad that it's working out in her favor.
Honestly, the HSD has been experiencing a slow few days. When this happens, I'll meander into channels I don't use so often, such as #altgen. Being the designated shitposting channel it's a gamble trying to use it; it can either be really fun or it can immediately be annoying. Since it's such an easily abused channel it's also gained a thoroughly negative reputation to all people on the server, even the ones who use it regularly.
On the few occasions that I pass through, I always make sure to mess with the people involved as much as possible. On a few occasions I've even “deleted” the channel after an hour or so of warnings. This involves hiding the channel from public view so that only moderators can see, which to all others involved appears as deletion. This predictably led to shock and outrage, and most importantly chaos as altgenners were forced to leave and go into other channels, shitposting as they went. I'll also arbitrarily ban people over the silliest or most unrelated reasons possible (temporarily of course), and my particular flavor of mod abuse involves spamming something asinine over and over again. This genuinely aggravates some people because it's against the rules, so it's a flagrant abuse of my power as a moderator.
But it's altgen, so who really gives a fuck? That having been said, I do have an honorary altgen ban from Tori, because “everytime you're there it's legendary”. I appreciate having that sort of reputation for wanton chaos when I want to be reckless and have stopped giving a shit.
Now that 17776 is over, Makin has renamed mspalit to “read-tnc”, tnc being short for The Northern Caves, which is some kind of strange fanfiction that's not actually about anything in particular from what I can tell, but is more accurately just a short story. It's about a group of people online who still talk about a set of stories from an author they all like, and they end up theorizing on one particular entry that is completely and horribly confusing and seems to have no real direction, and they go crazy because of it.
Obviously the irony is not lost on us. Personally, I found the story kind of weird and flat because of the ending, which involves someone dying for magical reasons somehow. Makes no sense and kind of ruins the otherwise realistic and oddly relatable core of the story for me. This isn't the first time Makin has shilled the story so I'm already over it, but it is nice to see what people think of it; there's a lot of people in HSD who enjoy the story, it speaks to them in a way.
Tomorrow is Wednesday, which is when Hiveswap Interviews from the dev team are supposed to come out. Last week when I wrote the entry it was clear that, while we got a new piece of music, the interview that was supposed to be released was not forthcoming. I predict that, regardless of whether the interview comes out or not and/or it is of good quality or not, there will be someone or something that stirs up drama in the HSD over it. I'm almost looking forward to it, it's become a kind of scheduled event. Wednesday rolls around, interview comes out (or doesn't) and people lose their minds over it. I'm excited. More tomorrow when we figure out what happpens.
19th of July
AS PREDICTED, the interview today brought a whole host of discourse. I'm not even upset about it either, it's quite entertaining.
Throughout the day, people were audibly wondering whether an interview would even come; it was a sore issue for both sides involved, those who unquestioningly defend What Pumpkin and those who are unendingly skeptical. Time dwindled away and each of these sides continued to grow still more agitated. As the midnight bell started its toll people began to openly argue with each other about it; passive aggressiveness turned to more open hostility and insults were flung. It seemed no peace would be had tonight.
Finally, at around 8:30 PM CST, the interview did come out, which alleviated the concern from myself personally and generally mollified the people who were upset with no interview. However, the more defensive people, including Alex, were not content with it. Alex in particular said: “finally. People can not whine about no interview.”
This annoyed me severely. I don't appreciate being condescended to, and many other people took offense to this as well. And so despite an interview actually coming out, discourse began anyway. The topic of What Pumpkin's unwillingness to associate with the server and Makin's role in that unwillingness has been the topic of discussion for the last hour now.
There are of course those of us who are pushing back on it, because we're tired of constantly dealing with this passive aggressiveness and being blamed for things going wrong. We've been arguing back and the opposition has tried to paint us as The Bad Guys, a position we basically laugh at them for holding over our heads. Their lack of cohesiveness is distasteful to me personally, it's like they argue for the sake of arguing itself. But, I shouldn't continue on in this manner. It's not about what I care about myself, I'm just trying to report what's happening.
This has continued on for some time now, and Alex described “3 main points” about the HSD that need to be changed for it to be more receptive for WP staff. The first two were explained as thus:
“Okay, so, firstly, the lack of any clear and precise definition for what constitutes a violation in terms of the server and no clear definition of what consequences are required where. (This has already been memed about in ther form of "lol who needs a rules tab!" but anyway)”; “Secondly, the fact a channel exists in which the point is "less moderation" leads to people being 'ironically' bigoted and getting to be so under that guise which just creates a further repulsing atmosphere.”; the third reason has yet to be elaborated on. Alex has specifically refrained from saying it because “it would be too much of a drama bomb”.
This behavior very quickly led to the rest of us, meaning most of the mod team, to become resentful. Why bother to bring up the problem in the first place if you're not actually going to explain it fully? The first two points themselves would be valid but we've already explained why we take a stance against them before. Repeatedly. We don't have a rules channel or defined punishments because we judge things on a case by case basis. We also maintain altgen because that content would simply be distributed to other channels. There are a whole slew of other reasons we don't agree with the propositions they've come up with but I don't feel like explaining fully at the moment.
The third point was in fact elaborated on (through Griever) as:
"Basically the idea is "Makin's authority lets him say what he wants without any thought for consequences". Specifically, it does not seem to be the fact that he cannot be challenged at all by users or anything, it's more that he feels at home saying whatever he wants and this can often lead to like...dissonance or something”
This is frustratingly vague and unhelpful.
Even with the elaboration, the drama petered out and things feel back to normal already. I guess it's good that things didn't escalate too much but I was genuinely looking forward to a rousing discussion about things. Instead it seemed to be a huge nothing burger. Oh well.
The likelihood that we'll adopt any of these changes is so low that I'm not even going to afford myself the chance to wonder about it. The possibility has been discussed before, with no actual results forthcoming.
Makin did exhibit more behavior that has been deemed hard to deal with in the past. We were trying to talk with him seriously about this feedback and what people feel about these things but he wouldn't stop joking around. I guess it was due to Putnam talking to him in direct messages, so I'm not sure if it was him willfully being obtuse or if it was just him being distracted. Not much I can do about it either way at this point.
Guess I'll end it here unless anything else extravagant happens.
20th of July
Today was a rather nice day; there was no drama, necessary or otherwise, and we had a community stream. Streams are important community events where a bunch of us gather together on a website called Cytube and stream movies or music produced by LOFAM and CaNMT.
Today the content we streamed was actually two albums: CaNMT's “Greatest Hits 2” and then a solo album by ost called “One Week Older”, which is a parody of an existing Official Homestuck album called “One Year Older”. Both albums were constructed carefully and I would consider them each successful.
Community streams typically garner between 50 to 100 people, although at times may be as great as 150 people. Often viewership will peak during the “prestream”, which is actually dedicated to content that is not the main focus of the streaming event. During the prestream we do a wide assortment of movies and youtube videos, passing the hours until it's actually time to stream the real event in question. Today we ended up streaming Life of Brian and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey—I'm not sure if there were any others or if it was only those two. In between these movies we did an assortment of youtube videos by two community figures that I had not thought to explain until now: Michael Bowman and Scott Stutzman.
Michael Bowman, like James Roach and Tensei, has made music that was used in the comic itself. This alone is enough to vaunt him to pseudo-celebrity status for many people in the server, but Bowman is also the creator of several really distinguished and long standing memes within the community as a whole, partially induced because of his musician status: in particular, a 10 minute long video about his credit score has given him meme immortality for us. I don't know quite how or when this happened, but that video in particular spawned a whole slew of related projects and memes, including a full length feature album from CaNMT called Bowmania, which was released earlier this year and watched live by the man himself. It's kind of insane to think about honestly, and I'm sure to many it appears downright creepy that we idolize this guy so much and in such a strange way. However, it is an important facet of the culture of the community, so to speak.
Stutzman is kind of only tangentially related, and expressly by dint of his relationship to Bowman. Stutzman himself is an internet funnyman and also a musician, whose videos are not related to Homestuck in any way. Instead, once Bowman stopped writing music for Homestuck, for some reason the two began to make videos together, including several skits where they pretend to be radio talk show hosts or similar. Their collaborations together are probably what put Stutzman under the frenetic gaze of the HSD community. In fact, for Bowmania, CaNMT approached Stutzman and asked if they could get some audio straight from him for the album in a narrative piece, to which he gracefully agreed. That was one of the definite all-time highlights for CaNMT in many peoples' eyes.
Aside from the community event today, I mentioned there was no drama. This was true, but I've developed an eye for this sort of thing and I see the danger of it cropping up all the time. Today the problem seemed to be with Red. She's come back recently and has been fairly successful in talking to people, including Toast, but occasionally I see the way they talk to each other and it makes me vaguely nervous that some nonsense will occur again and make someone offended enough to leave.
I mentioned in the foreword before that Toast was the one who pointed me to mspa-lit, which is probably the majority of the reason that I've stayed in the server for as long as I have. Toast is one of the server’s more historic members, joining early and developing quite a reputation for himself. Unlike many other oldies, though, Toast is still around and kicking. He, like Shitler, used to be an unmitigated shitter; people were actually quite hateful of Toast for a while, who at the time was more sinister and apparently annoying to deal with. He was briefly modded once before as a joke, which led to a few people leaving the server in outrage. He was quickly demodded because of the backlash, but the damage was done. I wasn't around for this, but I think it actually helped Toast realize that people didn't like him that much, so he started to change. Since then, and especially since I've joined, Toast has matured considerably and shown that he appreciates his position in the community as an older regular. He was also remodded as the #homestuck and #hiveswap pseudo-mod for April Fool's Day, which the rest of the mod team fully expected to be reversed by day's end. Makin's unpredictable tendencies struck once again though, and in addition to Sea Hitler becoming a full mod Toast was kept as a permanent addition to the team. He is a solid individual, interested in self-improvement and being blunt over kind, at least when necessary. I can sympathize with this; when it's important to be, he is fairly no-nonsense and isn't afraid to speak what he perceives as the truth of any given matter--it's a valuable skill we've specifically asked from him sometimes. However, when not required to be serious, Toast is fond of hassling lesser users for his own personal enjoyment. He and WoC get along well in that regard.
It's a weird dance to try and toe the line between all these people and help them understand things about each other. Toast is aloof and generally given to the “who cares” method of dealing with issues of an extensively personal nature, at least from what I've seen. On the other hand, Red does care about this, immensely. This combination is difficult to predict, and I could be wrong about the approaching doom, but I've seen similar scenarios play out multiple times—it's a pretty familiar play at this point.
I'll have to keep an eye on them. I don't want to intervene unless absolutely necessary, and I'm sure that any intervention at all will be seen as mere interference instead of an attempt to help. Toast doesn't like being coddled, appropriately, but if argued with well enough he can be persuaded to see reason and improve himself. That is his ultimate goal, after all—self improvement.
Nothing else to report today.
22nd of July
It's been a mellow couple of days in all honesty. There has been a record low amount of drama occurring in the server and I'm not one bit sad about it. A large reason this has been the case, we think, is because Alex left shortly after being banned from mspalit. We aren't going nearly so far as to flaunt this fact to people but it's strongly suspected regardless. People outside the mod team and mspalit have independently thought this must be the case as well. Whatever the real reason, it's actually been possible to talk about things in a more open and agreeable fashion for the last few days. We've had more engaging conversations and the channel has been way more active than it was previously. We've also had like 3 or 4 people older members, including ViceroyofMonteCristo and Mad Dog, come back after being missing for weeks. It's even less clear if this is the result of Alex leaving but the correlation has not gone unnoticed by me.
Honestly I'll take what I can get. The chat feels better than it has in a while and I'm enjoying it greatly. Rune contacted me a bit ago today to warn me that a problem user was preparing to go on a tantrum, possibly. This guy, Xena, is an absolute shit meister of the highest degree. He flits around the HSD and Hiveswap Discord will rant in their respective serious channels for hours. This would be fine ordinarily—many others do this in fact, it's just that they are particularly recalcitrant with literally any advice given to them. It is a futile and frustrating effort to try and convince Xena to do anything, especially if it happens to concern their improvement as a person.
I remember a number of months ago trying to talk to them in serious. They were frustrated because they hated their job and we were trying to ascertain why. Like, whether it was just a terrible manager, the particular type of job, the customers, etc. After so much of this literally the only thing that was clear was that they hated working there. That's totally understandable; working sucks sometimes, it's alright to hate your job just because it involves doing work I guess. However, we kept talking to them and trying to figure out if there was anything else they wanted to try and do, such as do art or go learn things or what have you.
After another hour, it was clear we were getting nowhere. Xena obstinately refused any advice we offered. We were largely confused about this so we kept trying to figure out what was going on, and finally it reached a point where Xena was saying that they wanted to quit their job so they could go do nothing. They literally said something along the lines of “I want to do nothing and be paid for it.” Actually, this isn't extreme enough—they were implying that, if they in fact did stop working, the universe would conspire as such to make them successful somehow. This kind of illogic was enough to drive me up a wall, it was literally impossible to convince them that it would not work out the way they wanted. So eventually I washed my hands of the conversation and moved on after calling them lazy. There's only so much I can do I suppose.
Now, months later, Xena has predictably failed to improve. They're still working the same job but are becoming so disgruntled that they're threatening property destruction and violence against customers/coworkers. This is becoming more serious as time goes by but it's still not at the level that I've got to deal with it yet, so I'm trying not to think about it that hard. Honestly it wouldn't be that big of a deal to handle anyway—a warning and a ban if they don't stop, and then it's no one's problem.
Ost's temporary demodding also ended today; they’re back on the team. Ost, short for ostrichlittledungeon, is a #general pseudo-mod. They are also a participant in a couple of Homestuck fan music servers, Cool and New Music Team (CaNMT) and Land of Fans and Music (LOFAM). They're not unlike wheals, having a wide array of commentary on many things and being overall a reliable member of the team. Additionally, they seem to have a proclivity for finding very obscure and otherwise un-noteworthy internet phenomena and managing to appreciate them deeply. There's an old, commonly known meme called “Potato Knishes” about some odd character named Ratboy Genius. Most people watch that video and leave it at that, never to think about the oddity of what they've just seen, but not ost--they deliberately went and sought out more from the person who developed that video, and managed to find their discography. They even go so far as to say it's “genius song-crafting” (other people hold this sentiment, but ost was the first person to bring this to my attention). I personally don't see what the buzz is all about but that's the sort of thing they really appreciate. Their status as an esoteric memester is pretty well established at this point.
Ost actually brought themselves back for a few minutes earlier today to say something, which is troubling. I think there's a problem with the way we've organized the roles in the server, so I'm going to take a look at it and see if there's anything that can be optimized or changed around to make things more secure. We have a “raidmod” role that is given to especially trusted pseudo-mods, who will then assist the mods during raids. They are the only people aside from moderators with the ability to fully ban users from HSD.
Since the raids stopped being so frequent or intense a long time ago, it's less clear why we've kept the raidmod role around but it's not exactly hurting us either. WoC used it to unban himself from mspalit and ost used it to give herself access to illuminati hangout, but ost's offense was way less serious because they were due to be remodded today anyway. In fact, I guess this demonstrates that they can be trusted with the mantle; unlike WoC, they haven't abused it to really accomplish any ends. This is definitely a point in their favor.
Nothing else to report for today.
24th of July
Today was yet another quiet day for the most part. Not a lot happened except for an event on the subreddit actually, which then became relevant to the HSD through historical extension.
The event that happened today was a small comic that someone posted; this in itself is not unusual, the subreddit is somewhat frequently used to post original works or mirror them from Tumblr. This comic was 4 pages long and had one of the characters launch into a diatribe about “compulsory heterosexuality”. The author apparently intended this to actually be a joke instead of a lecture, but the punchline fell flat and the joke itself wasn't constructed well at all, if indeed that wasn't just an excuse for posting the material in the first place.
Whatever the case, it was not received well. The post has a negative score and the comments range from negative to outright scathing. The reason this is relevant is because one of the comments references another, similar comic posted months ago infamously entitled “Not On My Watch”.
Not On My Watch, or NOMW for short, was something that transpired throughout 2016 as a whole. It depicts the main character going on a ridiculous shooting spree and killing all of the characters in the comic that can even remotely be said to be involved in a gay relationship. With the nature of the comic and the community being what it is, it immediately started a comprehensive dispute that can only be considered war in our pocket of the fandom.
It was updated throughout the middle of the year and finally completed around the time I joined in October. The conflict occurred between two primary groups of people: those who thought its content was blatantly homophobic and grounds for being banned from the subreddit/discord, and those who thought it was distasteful yet acceptable shock humor. I personally found the comic distasteful (obviously, I don't approve of anyone killing anyone else), but it never seemed like much more than shock humor to me. To others though, it seemed to be explicit “anti-homosexual propaganda”. I'm not inventing this phrase, it was actually one of the main points used against its existence. There were significant calls to outright censor any appearance of the comic, which is not something Makin or even the rest of the mod team is okay with doing.
This comic is actually a significant reason why Elvish left the subreddit mod team and formed HVSD: to people like them, the comic was too gross an offense to abide by. Eventually the comic caused so much disruption of conversation that Makin finally had to get rid of it. It is now considered one of the few Taboo Topics; the severity of such a status is not to be understated, Makin and the rest of us are firmly against censoring conversation so the fact that it's needed to be relegated as such is a sort of monument to just how disruptive and polarizing NOMW can be.
Despite this status the comic is still mentioned occasionally, such as during today's brief nonsense on the subreddit. It's also a really quick and effective way to stir the pot when conversation lulls, although it's generally seen as unwise to start NOMW discourse because you can easily get banned for it. Still worth a laugh every once in a while though.
Not much else happened today; Jon Bois, the writer of 17776, released a Q&A and we briefly discussed some of his responses. Of particular note was a question regarding the future of humanity; in the story, all humans mysteriously become immortal, so over the course of hundreds to thousands of years, they strike out to achieve everything they can think of. For various reasons, they stop and then withdraw, seeking ways to “perfect” life on Earth. Makin and I, including some others, have serious personal problems with this kind of idea. We're all taken with colonization of other planets in the solar system and in the galaxy as a whole, we're concerned with the future of humanity as a species. Bois' answer indicates that he is more concerned about the spiritual and interpersonal aspects of life, which of course is fine. And as far as the story goes it's still great, it's just that the exact reasoning provided for its setting isn't very sympathetic to us. It's not like the end of Homestuck, which is more or less objectively poor in quality writing-wise.
These moments of clear-headed discussion are really important to me; the community comes together sometimes to discuss content like this and it's not disruptive or dramatic. I really enjoy that this place has been home to that sort of feeling and these kinds of people. Hopefully this continues; Alex will probably return to the server sometime soon and we're all silently waiting to see what the effects of this are. It may be fine, but we'll see for sure when the time comes.
25th of July
Today was interesting; Makin had one of his server wide polls to see if anyone has input on how to improve the server. I've mentioned before that he has these periodically, and will occasionally have a channel that is temporarily dedicated to discussing the results of the poll. This time it was rather straightforward so no discussion was really necessary, but the results were still fairly humorous.
The questions of this poll included: “Are there any channels you've muted?”; “Is there any reason in particular you've muted these channels and what would it take for you to unmute them?”; and “Are there any other suggestions you might have for improving the server?”
These questions are not nearly as exhaustive as some of the other polls he's conducted in the past, so this was a rather short ordeal comparatively speaking. The results as always were filled with jokes and nonsense, which makes this a little harder to do but also more enjoyable overall. In the “general suggestions” question we received, as always, a significant number of responses saying to demod Makin. I'm sure a healthy number of these responses are more or less jokes, but I'm also sure there are those that are genuine, and that troubles me. Other responses ranged from well thought out to incoherent or completely unrelated, and we even received a few song lyrics (including the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).
Makin will take the suggestions that are serious and or memey responses, screencap them, and respond or otherwise make fun of them in the temporary channel he sets up for doing so. This is usually regarded as a Community Event and people enjoy it accordingly.
The one serious response I'm aware of that was actually taken into account was to consolidate rules. We had a system where we included spontaneous rule changes in pins instead of the channel descriptions, which is (in my opinion) still a useful tactic to employ when the rule change is temporary or extremely important. However, all long standing rules are supposed to be moved into channel descriptions instead, which is honestly more appropriate. No one is going to trawl through pins for possible rules they may have missed, better to include them in the spot where they're supposed to be in the first place.
That aside, not much else happened today. Yesterday I informed a few people I was keeping this journal and they have predictably started asking me to put things in here on their behalf, mostly as jokes (Red says “Today, LLF sucked.” and carlarc has requested that I say “carl is cool”. You're both welcome). Some people expressed that this was a neat idea, others think it's not really that important. Rune talked with me about it for a while, I think they had the idea that I'm afraid of the server dying. This may be true, but it's not the primary focus of the journal. I assured everyone who asked that this is just a bookkeeping effort, and that I hope the server of course remains active for a long time to come.
Frequently it's hard for myself and numerous other members to stop talking in the chat. It's currently 4:15 AM CST and the conversation has only just now stopped, despite most of the participants being Americans and thus way overdue for sleep. There is a common energy between all of us to continue talking for as long as possible, to which end all manner of things are brought up in an attempt to stall the inevitable end of a discussion. This often takes the form of parroting memes or “baity discussions”--the former on this occasion took the form of some Fesh Pince of Blair nonsense (look it up if you're not familiar, it's a classic) and the latter was the common and infamous case of 0.000.....1 = 0. This is a mathematical principle stating that a value infinitely small will be literally equivalent to zero (I'm probably mangling this description, again just look it up if you're not familiar).
The overall point is that such a line is usually baity enough to drag at least one person into a lengthy and more often than not heated discussion about the idea in question. In the case of 0.000....1 = 0, the discussion has occurred enough times that people have begun to recognize it and it's losing its effectiveness. It still pops up on occasion but it's not nearly as easy to start discourse using it as it used to be. Smarter individuals or those who are generally fond of japery and drama will find new ways to initiate such discussion, however—it's not exactly difficult to find a topic someone cares about and mangle it sufficiently. I've often been on the receiving end of this tactic, which is no small source of frustration at times, but ultimately I'm fine with it when it's only intended as a joke and not done through spite.
Nothing more for today.
26th of July
Today was a “good discourse day”. At one point in the afternoon, Makin and I got into a deeper discussion about the nature of truth. This came about because Makin made some broad assumptions about the motivations of people in general, and I went to great lengths to try and convey the idea that he might not actually know why all of these people do the things that they do. He has this tendency to reduce everything to its constituent parts, and I think it's hard for him to see the forest for the trees.
His overall argument was that, because the human brain is something that can be studied and understood, that all human interaction is therefore able to be studied and understood. While I agree with him in principle, I disagree with the idea that we can do this now in any sense. Some of the things he was saying about why people pursue art or put their own out there seemed to be based on his own motivations and feelings, and it bothered me that he was projecting in such a way.
I don't think I conveyed my point, and naturally the discussion got sidetracked into something else. We started to discuss the nature of science and what it does or does not seek to do. At one point the nature of his area of study, computer engineering and computer science, was brought up and I insinuated that computer science isn't actually a science. I regret this statement now, both after talking with him a bit and his linking an article explaining the nature of computer science in a more detailed fashion. I apologized for the statement, but he didn't seem bothered at all. I'm reminded that he appreciates argumentation like this, it's a kind of way to expose himself to the rigorous activity of self defense. He enjoys being forced to come up with explanations for what he likes and feels, as it helps him to cover gaps in his knowledge or rationalizations. I can definitely appreciate this mindset, although I feel as if the language barrier may interfere heavily at times.
At any rate, I feel as if the net result of the conversation was positive. It's always invigorating to have discourse that isn't motivated by feelings of antagonism or frustration. I guess at that point it isn't really discourse, it's simply a discussion. Whatever one might call it, it was nice. Other people also participated and managed to get their own viewpoints in at times as well, which is always refreshing to see.
Just a bit ago we had a problem with a user named Sora. They've had a long history on the server with experiencing debilitating depression and ranting at length in serious about how much they hate living. It's become something that we're all more or less wary of, and Sora's behavior manifests in strange ways sometimes.
For the course of about two months or so recently they championed this attitude that was positive but almost clearly not genuine. The idea of a positive attitude not being genuine struck a lot of people as a strange idea and myself and others who voiced concern were promptly shushed by people who felt that “fake it 'till you make it” was an acceptable coping mechanism. We went along with this for a while and admittedly it did seem as if it would be a consistent increase in mood for Sora; however, tonight that was proven wrong.
Sora is treated badly by their friends and family in various ways (which I will not go into detail about for privacy's sake), and tonight apparently the stress just became too much. Sora has, as they have done a few times in the past, brought up suicide as a possibility of dealing with their problems, which automatically puts most of us on High Alert mode.
For the last half hour we've been attempting to talk to Sora and bring them out of this mood, but unfortunately none of us are trained professionals. None of us are psychologists or therapists, especially not licensed to help people. We have no suicide specialists on hand to help deal with emergencies such as this. It's intensely frustrating to encounter a situation like this, it makes me feel helpless. Usually the people involved are delusional or distraught to the point of not being able to listen to reason, which makes it impossible to help them effectively. I've brought up the idea in modchat of seeking a specialist that may exist on the server already or elsewhere to deal specifically with such things, but there's no telling if that will be possible. At any rate it's clear to me that some sort of policy must be instated to help deal with such cases if they continue to increase in frequency, but otherwise I have no idea if anything will be done to help with these issues.
Nothing else to report for today.
30th of July
My access to the HSD is a bit spotty at the moment; I will be unable to personally keep track of any events happening up through the 4th or 5th of August. I will be asking another mod or a user I trust to keep an eye on the place and keep track of significant events to report to me.
In the meantime, this really has been a quiet week. Makin and Difarem are both taking care of things in real life as well. With the sudden lack of people, naturally the HSD is experiencing a shortage of discourse or problems. This has been kind of nice; the slowness is infrequent enough that it's not a serious problem. If this continues for a while, I'm not sure what might happen, but it could lead to people feeling bored and stirring trouble to alleviate the boredom.
There is a tendency among the younger users of the server to start talking about themselves in a more personal capacity. What I mean by this is that they start to flirt, basically. It's kind of an interesting display, if somewhat tempered by my own immediate annoyance. For what reason this annoys me I'm not sure—it may be my age is making me jaded or crotchety in response to such things or if I'm becoming more emotionally stunted, or perhaps I simply don't appreciate the unrestricted, public flirtiness these people display for each other. I'm not sure if this is a reasonable reaction or not; whatever the case, it's not just me who feels that way about it either.
The mod team collectively decided this behavior was disruptive a number of months ago. This is actually the reason we created #social, was because too many people were flirting and being open about themselves in mspa-lit. It's a very strange set of circumstances to me, personally, as the act itself isn't even that egregious. It's just that it tends to dominate the focus of a given conversation for a while, and Makin finds this distasteful (especially when he has something he wants to talk about instead). For that purpose #social is a containment channel, although the containment will often fail if no one is around to enforce it.
I don't usually have the heart to tell them to move, both because I'm not sure what constitutes needing to be moved and because I get complaints for actually requesting they do something. This sort of thing has been the source of problems before—people don't appreciate being told to relocate their conversations, even if it explicitly belongs in another channel. In particular, Tipsy has committed this conversational sin innumerable times already. The offending topics are usually one of two: the Dragon Ball series or Pokemon.
Tipsy is a definitive power user; her full handle, tipsyGnostalgic, is taken directly from Homestuck and she has a solid presence on the subreddit and Tumblr. As such, she's more or less a famed figure and lots of people recognize her. She’s a staunch advocate of LGBT rights and an avid gamer, complete with her own stream that she does occasionally. Like most regulars of mspa-lit, she is strongly opinionated on most things, although she is hard to convince to change her viewpoint on things sometimes. She always means well for people and wants to see the server improve, which I can sympathize with. Sometimes she can be a bit oblivious or hasty in her judgment of others though, which leads to difficulties when trying to discuss things. In fact, this tendency is what led Makin to leave the server for a few days last week.
The amount of times that Tipsy has brought up the aforementioned things in mspa-lit and dominated conversation for ages is unreal. I'm honestly kind of impressed that she manages to find so much to say about it. Unfortunately this makes it difficult for others to try and talk about what they want. If it becomes clear to us that she is disrupting conversation or keeping it from advancing into something else, we will tell her to move the conversation to #gaming or #cartoon-tv. However, once a conversation is told to move, it usually does not survive—I guess it's understandable that people complain when being told to move their conversation because it's usually a death sentence for whatever topic was being discussed.
Putnam is also guilty of this with Dwarf Fortress. Both he and Tipsy are just really enthusiastic about these things but they clutter up the channel for hours with their stuff. I'm sure this also happens with many other people and I would be surprised if I haven't personally committed the offense at least once, but they pop out at me as the worst offenders of this rule by far.
My unwillingness to enforce this rule is also a problem to be fair. I should be taking charge more often and setting aside my skittishness in regards to telling people what to do. I've been told before that my ability to lead is in question because I'm too nice. While I refuse to stop being kind to others of course, I can still do so while being more firm in my position and authority. The users of HSD tend to be more skeptical and difficult than the people from Twitch Plays Pokemon were; they need a stronger hand to deal with them than I was required to use those days. This leads me to two possible conclusions: the way I present myself as a part of the moderation team may be fine since it is ultimately a team, and my perspective fills any blind spots in situations that may require my perspective; alternately it may be time to rethink how I approach situations as a moderator here.
I guess time will tell which of these are true, or if it matters at all. Nothing else to report today.
Makin
1 what about me????
2 THIS IS THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN
OF ULTIMATE DESTINY