Drew Linky
1st of October
A fairly relaxed day, but not without its own details worthy of note. First and foremost, by the time I had woken up this morning the Patreon had reached its stretch goal of $500, reaching yet another tier of success that I would never have considered possible. Makin has stated a few times that he has never failed in a marketing project, and I have to admit that I’m beginning to believe him. It’s not quite $5,000 but even this much money is an unparalleled success as far as I’m concerned.
With the achievement of this goal, Makin declared—perhaps jokingly—that he would begin considering server-related merchandise, and for some time today there was discussion about what we could make. Most of the suggestions were jokes, such as a shirt with a collection of out of context screenshots suitably coined a “screenshirt”. More serious suggestions included a themed calendar, with important server dates listed as holidays. I suggested that we commission someone for HSD-centric art and turn it into a poster, where the artist would receive a cut. However, I was at a loss for what the subject of the art would be—I would say the mod team, but that would appear ruthlessly self-aggrandizing. Instead I mentioned anthropomorphizing the channels themselves, but that’s also a fairly treacherous path I’m sure.
At any rate, this success is quite exciting. Makin has declared that he will start buying adspace in one week, for reasons that I’m sure include gathering of the funds in the first place. MrCheeze continues to lament this state of affairs, and unless I specify otherwise it’s to be assumed that this happens every single day. I would continue describing these occurrences but I don’t want to appear too mean about it. As it is, I will now take the time to describe the direct results of the Patreon, foremost among them the channels.
At the beginning I mentioned a couple, namely #iceland and #steel-donut-run (as of now humorously entitled #jojos-and-dogs-no-jojostuck-though), managed by medixum and LinkedGirafarig respectively. The other channels include: #oc-hell, managed by linkedsylveon and dedicated to sharing original characters, an activity originally localized in altgen (a fact that garnered the ire of many); #fanventure-fiesta-and-evangelion-memes, managed by Dickle, and whose content I’m sure is more or less self-explanitory; #mechanical, managed by deusAscendant and dedicated to discussing automotive or otherwise mechanically oriented material; #mspalit, managed by hb and used as his own personal playground where he initiates a contest called “Thunderdome” between users on a regular basis; and finally #food, which I purchased myself and have allowed Cait to run as her own channel (her jokes being the inspiration for my purchase).
Rather than simply clutter the channel list (which they admittedly do as well), these have all proven to be an interesting addition to the server, where each have experienced a significantly greater degree of activity than I would have expected. Unfortunately, this carries the additional repercussion of a draw of activity from the other, original channels. In some cases this drop in the level of activity is so minor as to not be felt, as with #oc-hell drawing some people from #altgen away. In others though, there is a distinct change in activity across channels: for instance, when #food is more active, I can physically feel mspa-lit (the real one, not hb’s channel) experiencing a drop in activity. Carlarc and I believe someone else have echoed these concerns, and they’re worried about what effect this may have on us later. For now though, I’m more or less content in the way things are running.
This description of the Patreon channels, while brief, has reminded me of something I wanted to try and resolve myself towards lately. I mentioned recently that I want to cover the events transpiring on the HSD more explicitly in order to increase fidelity with the actual history of this place, and I am still determined to do this; however, it has dawned on me that some channels I have not covered in great detail.
In accordance with my actual habits, I have covered mspa-lit by far the most out of any channel, and I am intimately aware of its politics and various cultural leanings. To a lesser degree I am familiar with altgen and have managed to describe at some length their dealings and politics, but I could stand to gather a little more experience in the channel. For others though, barring some minor experience, I am largely clueless—I could tell you about #social broadly speaking, but I’m not strictly aware of the “regulars” of the place, the people who use it the most and who are inextricably linked to its culture. I do know that Nikki is extremely active there, but not much else. In other channels this knowledge gap is even more pronounced: I know absolutely nothing about coding-tech whatsoever. I don’t enjoy not knowing the details about these places, so over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to spend a few days in each channel and perhaps write up some notes as the situation demands. It may come to pass that some channels don’t require any such notes: I mentioned coding-tech as a place where I know nothing, but on the few occasions where I’ve popped my head in I don’t see anything happening at all, with the most recent message sometimes being days old. Whatever the case, hopefully these descriptions will serve to eliminate any ambiguity surrounding the places in question.
As a follow-up to the Pep situation from yesterday, there was some minor nonsense to be dealt with: one of the regulars here and there, Jhon, mentioned that part of the discussion I had with Pep yesterday had negatively impacted one of their friends. After some discussion, they failed to convince me that I was strictly involved, although they did not relinquish the conversation. I tried my best to earnestly engage with them, but admittedly real life responsibilities have been catching up with me and I fear my responses were a bit too haranguing in nature. I’m going to reflect on this situation and see if it can be helped tomorrow.
On a vaguely similar note, Flare was permanently banned from the server today. While others like ost saw this coming, I was personally extremely disappointed to learn that Flare has simply been hiding their tendencies from us; I was given screenshots that showed Flare explicitly giving extremely vivid and disturbing death threats to Elvish. For this I yelled at him and immediately banned him, and since then there’s been a systematic effort to remove him from the community as much as possible.
I talked with Putnam about it since he was by far the most vocally outspoken person against Flare’s return to the server. While expressing ambivalence towards the situation, he did admit that my coming to him with that information offered him closure; while I was happy to provide that, I also expressed my frustration with the system, insofar as details being kept from each other for the sake of confidentiality. Obviously while I recognize that confidentiality is of paramount importance, honesty and proper communication would have put the Flare situation to rest months ago, rather than have it be dragged out as much as it was.
There is a significant difference between situations like these and the ones involving Marsy, or Daddy. While those people may have been memorable in their awfulness, there is no levity or ridiculousness that can be associated with something like actual death threats. It is not in any way fun or laughable, especially not to the degree that Flare was perpetrating it. As such, he has been relegated to the same cultural wasteland that people like Talons or Itoan now reside. Toast described it succinctly:
flare wasnt even the memorable kind of bad
he will suffer the worst fate of all
being forgotten.1
At some point today, Gnawms provided a helpful hint suggesting that a band of raiders were making rounds on various servers and spamming gore; it’s been a while since a proper raid has occurred, so I’ve felt we were approaching overdue for one. He gave us the ID associated with the ringleader, the raider providing invite links to various servers. They didn’t show up tonight, but the warning coincides with an odd phenomenon that Makin pointed out just as I was preparing for bed.
He mentioned that, in the userlog, there were an abnormal quantity of people joining the server and then leaving almost immediately. I think this worried him, as he questioned whether they may be put off by the #shilling channel. While I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a non-zero number of people who found the #shilling channel distasteful, many of these accounts joined and left in the span of less than one minute. I don’t think that’s enough time to get any sort of impression of the #shilling channel, let alone of the server in its entirety. Additionally, large quantities of people joining and then leaving immediately is a tactic similarly employed by raiders. The timing of these accounts’ behavior and Gnawms warning is far too close for me to dismiss it; it may be coincidence but I’m not exactly betting on that idea.
On a more personal note, I spent the last moments of my night on the server conferring with Makin about the nature of these accounts and what they could be. I felt as if I may have been a little terse, because at the end of the conversation he bade me good night. I’m sure this may strike whoever’s reading this as an unusual thing to point out, but in my experience Makin doesn’t typically extend farewells. Indeed, in the past he’s explicitly discouraged people from announcing arrivals/departures, as it may seem attention-grabby. As such while I was content to simply leave the conversation without much comment, his farewell caught me off guard. I’m the sort of person to overthink this kind of minor and trivial detail into pointlessness, so I will now discuss what this could mean for the next approximately 4,000 pages of this document.2
Now that some time has passed since the larger Patreon discourse, I wonder about some of the things I detailed in that particular entry. I will not go back and edit it, because whatever it is I said very accurately reflects the frustration or other emotions I was feeling at the time; it would be a disservice to try and pretend that I did not feel such things while the situation was unfolding. Likewise, I am simply trying to record how I feel now as well. These things may be at odds with each other at times. For instance, I mentioned briefly that I have to wonder if he actually cares about criticism, but the behavior that he displays on occasion makes it apparent that he does care; he mentioned PMing the people that joined and swiftly left the server to see if there was anything he could do to make it more appealing to them, which is a level of effort that I would find hard to attribute to anyone who does not earnestly care about the place they inhabit.
A significant portion of me is wary about discussing this too much, as there is a real possibility that I will overthink it more than I already am. Suffice to say, I would like to reexamine what it is Makin does and says, and why. It feels weird to admit this here when I know he’ll be reading it in the not so distant future, and it definitely feels strange in light of how much I talk about him already. However, he owns the server outright and he is our unequivocal boss, so to speak; I can only say that it’s difficult to avoid describing him in relation to things about the HSD when he is intrinsically linked to it.
I would like to believe that he means the best for the server and the people on it, and I’m sure I speak for many of the other people when I say that. I think Phantos’ comment about Makin not wanting to appear incorrect or some such may have been a more accurate assessment than I gave it credit for initially. As it is, I don’t know exactly what to think about him, and I doubt I will ever have anything resembling a full picture of Makin’s behaviors, or especially his desires and motivations. The thing that speaks to me in cases like these is that he does appear to earnestly care, and in the end I think that’s arguably the most important factor in play here.
Of course such observations don’t exonerate him by any means, but those are things to consider more fully another time. As it is, nothing more for today.
3rd of October
An unfortunate development today. Makin put out an announcement stating that he has been blacklisted from advertising the HSD on MSPA. The exact reason why is not known; it’s speculated that someone emailed What Pumpkin staff or someone else in charge of the ad spots and complained that they were “endorsing the HSD” or some such nonsense. As it is, the net effect is that we can no longer put ads up on MSPA, which was originally the entire point of the Patreon.
With this unfortunate development, what to do with the $500+ is unclear. We urged that Makin put out a survey asking the server what to do with it, and he did just that. There are a number of options available to us, such as commissioning an artist, donating it to charity, putting up ads on a different site like MSPFA, or paying the mods. I’m interested to see what the community will choose.
Unfortunately, my life has become busy and will be so for the next couple of weeks. Thankfully the server appears to be experiencing a slow period, so there aren’t really that many events to report that are happening concurrently. Instead, when I get a chance, I’ll mostly be using the days to describe my observations about each channel as I see fit.
Nothing more for now.
5th of October
It seems as if the survey is leaning towards the “donate to charity” option, a fact that I’m sure will please MrCheeze greatly. Of course, if this happens I won’t complain; I feel like it would be a great thing for the money raised to go towards some kind of benefit. It would actually be in keeping with activities conducted by members of the Homestuck fandom in the past; even though I never participated, I distinctly remember numerous occasions where fans would get together for a canned food drive or other charitable events across the United States, and even in other countries. In a way I think it would be nice to continue this idea.
Speaking more concurrently, I’ve been conducting my observations of altgen when I get a chance but I just wanted to recall an event of the past here that came to fruition tonight. Some time ago we were looking through the role permissions attached to each channel, and discovered that many of them were organized poorly. I believe Ngame, wheals, and myself all went through to fix these mistakes; of particular note was that the text-to-speech (TTS) option was enabled in a few places; ideally it’s supposed to be off, because it would take approximately one tenth of a second for people to begin abusing it as thoroughly as possible once they figure out it’s an option. Naturally we changed these settings as well, with one exception: I asked if we could leave the altgen TTS option enabled, for “shenanigans”, to which Makin agreed.
In the current day, after sharing a series of jokes that would have been immensely funnier or outright relied on TTS, I asked the fellow mods present, Ngame and Toast, why we weren’t just using altgen to actually render these jokes faithfully. It started off appropriately funny at first, with the typical phrases being employed; however, things became more sinister as time went by. The TTS jokes became longer and more esoteric, distant from its typical material. Finally, Ngame leaped off into the deep-end, and has been transcribing a 25 minute video3 by someone name Pannenkoek, discussing the mechanics of A presses for the game Super Mario 64. He’s currently on minute 10 of the video and started TTSing it 15 minutes ago.
I’m personally impressed with his dedication, but the sheer amount of this text has turned the joke into a nightmare. My brain actually feels numb from trying to take in all the information through the dull, flat speech of TTS. Altgen is complaining en masse and the fun is over. I now regret my decision to initiate the TTS jokes in full; who could have known that this monster dwelt within Ngame all along?
To be fair, this is largely the caliber of interaction I tend to see in altgen. However, I need a few more days to properly watch and see what comes out of it. Nothing more for now.
6th of October
Today was exceedingly enjoyable. In the middle of the afternoon, I was talking with Makin and others about a fear I’ve mentioned here recently, namely that activity has been witnessing a decline. This fear has almost certainly been exacerbated by real life circumstances I’m being faced with, which have been causing an enormous amount of strain.
The stress has been feeding this idea to the point that I was growing legitimately paranoid about impending server death, although I dared not speak the idea. Thankfully, as soon as I brought up this idea Makin rebutted that the server has not been inactive, but rather just devoid of drama lately. To drive home his point, he brought up the Patreon and what we should do with the money that was gathered.
I’m sure it might strike some as off-color, but I’ve never been so happy to witness such utter drama. My intense fears for the past week or so were completely wiped away in the ensuing discussion, where people seemingly came out of the woodwork to discuss the various options available to us, often enough becoming irate in the process. One of these options is the idea that we could provide a small gift to people who work on fan album art, $5 each or so.
While this struck me as a decent idea, general reception to it was overwhelmingly negative. Despite this, Makin saw fit to argue for it for some time; his argument consisted of many points, the most memorable one to me being that “giving these artists $5 is better than giving them $0.” The opposition maintained that people who work on these fan albums do it because they want to, and that instituting such an idea would be antithetical to the very idea of a fan album, if not outright disrespectful and awkward. These both strike me as cogent points; while I think it would valuable to somehow reward people for even a volunteer effort, the vast majority did not agree with the idea in practice, so it was dropped (albeit with some extended grumbling from Makin about how irrational a viewpoint it was).
The idea of donating it to charity was subsequently nixed, with Makin stating: “if I wanted to give my money to random people who can misuse it without me knowing, I'd donate to my patreon”. This is when the tone shifted from seriousness to levity for me; at this point the conversation became something else, one of those magical moments that sparks sometimes hours-long discourse without any cause for real alarm.
It was thus that we discussed the nature of this Patreon and what to do with it for the next few hours. Other suggestions were brought up and subsequently iced; in this way the conversation was blended into a veritable whirlwind. Makin consistently brought up points that were hilariously controversial, such as art being inherently meaningless except for what “the market sets its value as”4. With many self-respecting artists in the chat, this comment alone generated an enormous amount of discourse, and many other comments like it transpired as the evening went by. Putnam eventually joined in and turned the already frenetic conversation into a full out fracas at points. The entire night was well rounded: MrCheeze combatting others over various topics, Minish bemoaning S’s conversational tactics, Cait clearly and concisely voicing her opposition, Putnam obstinately against Makin, and other conventions I can’t even recall at this point. We covered so many conversational gambits that I wasn’t sure if it could ever end.
As things go it eventually did end of course, but I had already been given a lot to consider. With as close to a textual wink as possible Makin said “I did it for you drew” and then disappeared for the rest of the night, leaving me with my thoughts. To be sure, there are a lot of thoughts: most imminently, it was reassuring to know that people are still around and watching, even if not strictly participating. There was an immense degree of satisfaction in seeing people come out of the woodwork for some old-fashioned discourse, although this fact in and of itself gives me some pause. I don’t know if it’s strictly appropriate that I should revel in this kind of verbal carnage, but with the alternative being silence I’m not sure which I would prefer.
Unlike the feeling of trepidation I usually associate with such arguments, all I registered was this thorough sense of appreciation that all of these people were here and talking. I think this has been an extension of my real life difficulties, where it feels like all of the people I know are drawing away in some fashion or another. After reflecting for some time it felt that some key participants from last night had been missing for a while, such as Cait. However, afterwards I felt as if my perceptions had been warped, in no small part by the stress I’ve been under. While it may be true in some way that a few peoples’ participation has lessened, it would be more fair to attribute that to their own real life problems than to a cessation of interest in this place (at least until we know more about specific circumstances).
This entry and some even before it have been a more personal inflection into what I originally intended to be an objective analysis, but I feel as if it would be misrepresentative to not record my own thoughts as well. This night explicitly reaffirmed how much the HSD means to me; there has been an immeasurable amount of culture and expression that I’ve been exposed to here, and I feel as if my life has genuinely been bettered by my decision to come here and talk to all of these wonderful, colorful, outrageous people.
The flip side of this is that my fear this place will eventually fall apart has been magnified in its own right; the attachment I feel to the HSD is intermingled with the eventuality that it will cease to exist at some point. To this end, I’m glad I’m keeping this journal and yet again I want to redouble my efforts to document the happenings of this place, so that it might not be permanently lost someday. The inevitability of the HSD’s eventual loss is what bothers me most, in many ways.
For all my time on the internet I wasn’t part of that many communities; I participated heavily in just a few, which means that my experience in dealing with the rise and fall of such communities is fairly limited. I’m absolutely certain that there are numerous ways a community may end that I’m not privy to; the reason I bring this up is because the reasons my previous communities died don’t even seem possible here: Sydlexia died because its creator lost interest and left us to fend for ourselves, whereas Makin has explicitly shown no signs of abandoning the place no matter what may happen; Twitch Plays Pokemon fell apart because of oversaturation and the lack of a solid base, whereas Homestuck has been well established for years now, and has many thousands of people who actively appreciate and engage in the community. Further, the longevity of the HSD itself at this point suggests it may be able to continue for quite some time, with a community approaching 9000 strong and still growing after a year and a half of activity.
In short, my more immediate fears have been assuaged. There are of course still the more existential concerns, but I don’t know if anyone could help that. The only thing left to do is continue as we have, and see where the future may take us. I fear that I may say this to point of utter redundancy, but I earnestly hope that the community will last as long as it possibly can; the day that the HSD ceases to exist is a day I will be devastated beyond measure.
Nothing more for today.
7th of October
I have more or less completed my observations of altgen: while it’s by no means an exhaustive effort, I’ve made an attempt to acknowledge the history of the place and its current progression, as well as people who were and are important there.
As I’m sure anyone who’s reading this has determined at this point, the presence of altgen is controversial at best. According to tori, after The Reckoning Makin deleted the original botspam channel and turned altgen into the new one: “altgen became botspam, and people attempted to have conversation while others had full 100 percent right to just fucking do whatever… i think those times where it was just bot hell and my job was to ban anybody who thought sonic toilet was a funny meme, and nothing else, are what make people think altgen is Bad today if they dont go there much”.
If altgen was brought up externally then there was a decent chance the connotation was negative. Many people avoided the place based on legend alone, and some would say its reputation at the time was fairly deserved. Old regulars, including Dickle, Viceroyofmontecristo, definitely_not_him, Zoey (formerly VDNW), Dingus, a couple others and tori herself, banded together to make their own fanventure, appropriately entitled Altgenstuck (which tori also requested that I shill here: “Go read Altgenstuck, it’s good.” You’re welcome tori). While this occurred altgen’s reputation steadily worsened; it was known purely as a hive of decidedly inhospitable memes. The impression I get of the time was that it was, in fact, a containment channel for all of the unsavory elements that inhabited the server; politically incorrect was the rule, and whosoever went there drowned in it.
Cut to today and the opposite is true: I literally just got done handling a situation wherein the altgen regulars of now were complaining about a new user who was, admittedly, hellbent on causing as much discord as possible and being an all-around prick. As it is, the fierce dichotomy between then and now is striking to me; one user left from that fateful time, called Zoey, who was helpful in answering some of my questions.
The regulars of altgen today are of course tori herself, the janitors TS and Molly, and Zoey, but then a smattering of new people. These include $trider, tgs, Squid, Sparky, Jude, and of course many others. The community of altgen has changed substantially from its point of origin; it is now, in Zoey’s words, a “more chilled out general with shitposting allowed, its like altgens the jack of all trades, a little bit of everything”. This perception is interesting to me because others outside of the channel still hold that it is an inhospitable place, but upon closer inspection Zoey’s description is fairly accurate. The shift has been slow but inexorable, becoming more obvious the more people join the server. Its current cabal has consciously and purposefully drawn itself together, and made itself more presentable towards others. Its literal generalization has drawn interest from a number of people and it continues to grow.
This does not mean, however, that it is devoid of its bouts of energy. Altgen is also differentiated from general in the sense that it is still a powderkeg—the shitposting spirit is still very present and shrouds the place. It doesn’t take much effort for one person to set it off, and for a few minutes at least there will be an utter storm of shitposting. As time goes by, however, it feels as if these bursts grow shorter, and maybe one day they will cease happening altogether. It’ll be interesting to see how altgen progresses in that sense.
Nothing more for today.
9th of October
Today was pretty pedestrian, but I feel like what constitutes “pedestrian” for us needs to be reiterated. It’s been a while since I’ve covered a day that was more or less “normal” for us, and I think it’s worthwhile to restate exactly what that means.
For example, most of today involved us discussing a number of topics that are revisited so often that they usually don’t elicit any kind of remark. These conversations are typically about one of various things: Harry Potter, Dragon Ball, or Pokemon, among a few others.
Of the three listed, Harry Potter is by far one of the most understandable topics that ends up getting rehashed here. Its literary ubiquity is not to be underestimated; when I asked Makin about the nature of fanfics associated with Harry Potter, he mentioned that they have managed to become increasingly nested as the years have gone by—there are fanfics of fanfics of fanfics, and I’m not sure exactly how deep this hole may go. Whatever the case, it has been a topic that is revisited frequently enough to merit some note. The fanfic aspect of Harry Potter definitely promotes this, although such elements are also present in the other topics we discuss.
Indeed it feels as if the concept of fan fiction is thoroughly ensconced in our culture, which originally confused me. After some thought, however, the reason for this became blindingly obvious: fan fiction is part and parcel of the Homestuck fandom already, in the form of an incredible number of fan adventures or fan sessions that we boast. In light of this it’s not exactly surprising that one of the most-oft discussed things in our group is this aspect of writing.
Other topics we talk about frequently, including Pokemon and Dragon Ball especially, are less noteworthy in that they tend to give rise to the same patterns of discussion every time they get brought up. Harry Potter discussion is typically deeper than it is wide, but the opposite is true for these topics and others like them: there isn’t that much complexity to them comparatively, but their passing can take hours. I’ve mentioned before that Tipsy is especially egregious in her treatment of these topics, being the de facto expert in all things Pokemon related and not far behind in terms of Dragon Ball. It feels as if these topics can be poked along by her indefinitely, although not strictly in a bad way.
While I make it sound negative, it’s worth mentioning that people do enjoy these topics and there is value in the fact that they can consistently make people engage. Conversely, this can draw the ire of people who have witnessed the ensuing discussions too many times; Makin in particular is fond of redirecting these conversations to their “appropriate channels”, which invariably causes them to die; managing discussion is a delicate balance to be struck, all too often resulting in premature discussion death. Whenever this happens, it is common to witness people complaining more about the sudden redirection than the original conversation. Exceptions to this pattern are exceedingly rare, but nevertheless amusing when they happen to occur (unless your conversation is the one that has been forced to move and die, in which case it is simply frustrating).
Occasionally mspa-lit will live up to its original name and we will begin discussing literature in earnest, rather than its derivatives. Today was one such occasion, with a rather engaging conversation about stories written by Stephen King. A fairly controversial writer, King’s strength is more in the storycrafting and less in the writing itself, but his works nonetheless have attracted a great number of readers. While his general works were discussed to some length, from what I could see the main topic of attraction today was The Dark Tower series. Anyone well versed in King’s works would be hard pressed not to talk about them in terms of The Dark Tower to be honest; its power of attraction proved great, and quite a number of us spent some time talking about it.
I think the discussion was aided in part by the fact that The Dark Tower and Homestuck both feature a similar kind of story progression; the details of the universe in each are revealed gradually in a way that suggests a widening of scope, especially at specific points in the story. While fans of this series are difficult for me to encounter in real life, I suppose it’s no great surprise that I have found a number of them here. It was a refreshing change of pace from the more common conversational topics we cycle through, and I think all involved would agree that it was a fairly pleasant exchange.
Speaking of cycling through topics, a more sophomoric trend we’ve noticed is that, when Makin shuffles off to bed and disappears for the evening, there is a not-insignificant chance that the topic will turn to shit. To be clear, I’m not referring to the quality of the discussion itself—rather, the topic will literally be about shit. It’s difficult to say exactly how this happens, and the results are predictably juvenile or even disturbing, but for some reason it happens occasionally and it seems as if no one can stop it. Last time this happened I think it was due primarily to WoC’s influence, which is somehow not altogether surprising to me. Thankfully these conversations tend to end fairly quickly—a blessing from what would usually be a curse.
In the order of the simultaneously more-and-less mundane, general and social observations are being conducted now. More details may follow on this in a day or two: I feel as if the amount and type of culture in both is conducive to describing them simultaneously, although it depends on if anything happens during the day. As it is, nothing more for today.
11th of October
Today was fairly tumultuous despite otherwise slow beginnings. The event of importance today came in the form of altgen being hidden once again, although under more intense circumstances than my typical jokes.
To begin, I described Zoey previously as a regular of altgen, there almost since the channel’s inception. They have expressed a deep attachment to altgen, bordering on the level of pathological according to some; as far as I could witness Zoey simply really enjoys being there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some choice language that I’ve missed in the past. At any rate, they messaged me earlier today asking if they could be considered for altgen janitor.
These sorts of requests are not typically viewed favorably. Makin explicitly dislikes it when anyone asks to be modded or otherwise promoted, which he sees as a request for power. While the other mods may not couch it in such terms, it is still considered unflattering. It’s customary for a position to be offered to someone first, and only in the case where moderator applications are being accepted will an individual’s request to help be given due consideration.
This all having been said, I shared Zoey’s request with the rest of the mod team for reasons of transparency, although—with the exception of Makin pointing out the fatal faux pas of asking first—nothing conclusive was determined one way or another. Even if asking has effectively eliminated Zoey from consideration, altgen doesn’t need any more janitors right now; TS and Malice are both taking good care of it.
If it had been left here then I probably wouldn’t have bothered to include these proceedings at all, but then later in the day precipitated such events that served to stir the pot significantly. I don’t know if my noncommittal response to Zoey simply catalyzed latent feelings or not, but they apparently had an incredibly bad day. Shortly after I responded to them, Zoey started venting in altgen; while under ordinary circumstances an unremarkable event, this somehow escalated into suicide discussion, which is expressly forbidden in most forms on the HSD. After this happened, it was officially Time to Step In. Makin did so, and through a series of circumstances that I have no clue about eventually it was deemed necessary to hide altgen from public view.
I’ve stated a few times already that I do this as a joke on occasion, in which case I usually unhide the channel after a few minutes. Whether people are in on the joke or not, it doesn’t take more than three seconds for all of the altgenners to spill over into other channels, most commonly #general. Often enough this serves to galvanize conversation there, which is actually a desirable effect; once I reveal altgen all of the regulars go back, but general also has something to talk about for the rest of the day. This has been a pretty reliable, safe, and effective occurrence historically speaking.
By contrast, Makin decided to hide altgen for 40 minutes. I was too busy to play witness to this myself for more than a few minutes, but the results were pretty much what one would expect. Everyone directly responsible for keeping an eye on general ended up requesting more help with altgenners growing more frenzied as time went by, ultimately upsetting the ecosystem of the area to an unprecedented degree. From what I can recall Makin seemed to be cavorting around the place, reveling in his induced chaos not unlike a modern Nero. Men, women, and children alike screamed as the fire consumed them; none survived.
Then Makin decided that the fun was over and unhid the channel, and things went back to normal. Mostly, anyway—rather than galvanizing any real conversation in #general, it feels as if the channel has temporarily burnt out. I’ll provide a few more details in a bit; as for this, Zoey contacted me shortly after the ordeal had begun, expressing regret and apologizing for contributing to the state of affairs.
I honestly wasn’t sure what to say about it. I was so far removed from this particular scenario that any kind of reassurance I could have given would have felt hollow, I’m sure. On the other hand, I could tell that Zoey was bothered immensely by the idea that they were directly responsible for the proceedings of the evening. In situations like this I do my best to convey only the truth; reassurance based on falsehoods is more of a disservice than anything else. Rather than comment on the part that they played in altgen being hidden, I requested that they take a break from the HSD for an hour or two to try and relax, which I believe they did. I didn’t get a chance to follow up on this, but I genuinely hope that Zoey feels better at this point. I should go check on them and see how they’re doing.
Returning to the overall importance of this event for the HSD, I suppose it’s just another observation of the kind of nonsense that transpires here. If we were keeping score, then I believe it would be another tick against Makin, since he was technically the factor that fostered the chaos into becoming what it did. Then again, no lasting damage occurred and no one was really harmed by this incident, so who cares? I’m sure that the resultant nonsense was actually quite enjoyable for some, as a reprieve from the more typical patterns of conversation or behavior we see now. I would have to talk to some more people and see what they think about the proceedings of today, but the general impression I get was that it was karmically neutral and a net positive for enjoyment.
With that all squared away, it’s time for my comments on the culture associated with general and social, of which I will be tackling the former first. Not dedicated to any conversational topic in particular, #general has a unique position on the server as being the very first channel people see when they join. As such, it’s difficult to say that they have any sort of established culture at all; what little culture I can claim to have seen is transient in nature and tends to disappear as its perpetrators become more familiar with the other channels in the server. There are exceptions to this trend, with a notable few actually serving to anchor the place at least somewhat.
Sea Hitler, ost, and anervaria all keep watch on the channel more regularly than others, although ost is the only one to be officially designated as the general pseudo. There are also of course its regulars, the most notable in my mind being Tainted Angel. I’ve mentioned TA before as someone who has taken it upon themselves to welcome new users to the server, which led to some tension between her and the mod team. After a brief spat this behavior was no more, although TA does still talk frequently there and act as a guiding force for newcomers if given the opportunity.
Other regulars are difficult to ascertain—as I mentioned, the inherent culture of #general is fairly short-lived and will inexorably mutate as time goes by. At the time of writing the milieu consists of YanSpook, Pasta, fash, Mayyro, Erieolae, and a couple others I fail to recognize. However, when I first joined almost a year ago now the climate and demographics of the place were wholly different. It feels as if #general is fated to slowly cycle through various groups of newcomers until they all either leave the server or become regulars in other channels instead. I may be wrong in this assumption, but only time will tell.
Aside from the people, #general’s position as the first channel seen when joining the server has made it prone to some rather interesting phenomena: first and foremost of these is the raid factor. While in recent months it seems as if we hardly ever experience any serious raids, they used to be genuinely tiresome, disruptive events.
As a small aside, Homestuck tends to attract younger people around the age of 13-16, perhaps a bit older, who are generally unused to shock images—I feel as if this partially due to a shift in the topography of the internet itself, as myself and others can recall being used to seeing this sort of disturbing imagery around the same age as these people are now. As it is now though, it feels as if this kind of culture has been phased out; the chances of randomly running into a screamer or other assorted shock imagery like Goatse are unlikely at best and bordering on impossible in a lot of scenarios. In my inexpert opinion this can probably be attributed to the “urbanization” of the internet, so to speak: places like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit have become monolithic, and more importantly in an attempt to monetize themselves more effectively have phased out processes that are conducive to viewing this kind of material. As a result, people born after the 1990s are going to be far less conditioned in regards to viewing shock imagery.
The point of this aside is to indicate that, while a raid is mildly annoying for people like myself, it can engender legitimate panic in people who are unused to their occurrence. Without fail, every single raid we’ve experienced has been accompanied by what can only be interpreted as a distinct breakdown in social order: people begin to freak out and post rapidly, not only expressing their own distaste and disbelief but also asking that others confirm if they feel the same way. It’s honestly a pretty annoying behavior, but I’m not sure if it’s something that can be avoided. With the number of people who join the server, there is close to no chance that such responses can be avoided as there will always be someone who has never been in a raid before.
With this in mind, #general is typically the worst instigator of these conversational abortions due to the fact that it experiences the most raids and also has the most people who have never experienced a raid before—truly the worst of both worlds. As such, once a raid occurs there it can be a bit of an ordeal trying to get people to calm down once the threat has been taken care of. The exact extent of the panic will of course depend on the nature of the material being raided with; at its worst, we have actually had to freeze the channel momentarily to get people to stop posting. Whatever the case, it’s an interesting feature of the place even if it hasn’t been seen in some time.
With these main points being covered, we now turn our attention to #social. A far more modern channel, social was originally created when the levels of flirtiness and selfie-posting had gotten too high in other places on the server—especially mspa-lit—and Makin wanted a containment channel for it. Originally only a test, #social proved successful enough that it eventually became instituted permanently, and we recruited Ifnar as its pseudo-mod (a position he later switched with Medixum, who used to moderate #serious).
Ifnar has been a member of the community for a while and has always spoken in a very proper manner, with no shorthand in his writing and proper grammar always. Unexpectedly his commentary is usually far from appropriate or proper, usually consisting of an innuendo or otherwise suggestive phrasing. This influence of his usually brings about some interesting conversations in #social, which has come to be regarded as both a casual place for personal discussion and a containment channel for more sexually explicit conversation. If it becomes egregious it's moved to #serious for Medixum to handle, or if it becomes REALLY egregious it's moved to Homesmut entirely. Under his careful watch, no shortage of flirting and lighthearted conversation ensues.
As it is, #social is reserved for more personal discussions, such as details about your life that you simply wish to share with others, light venting, or even more mundane things such as how your day went. More positively speaking the channel is well-liked as a casual version of mspa-lit, developing its own distinct group while simultaneously being more welcoming towards new people, or amenable to all varieties of discussion.
Social is kind of a more nuanced version of #general, with which it even shares much of its native population. The number of definite regulars is substantially increased with #social, including such people currently as Ci, furrylatula, virtuNat, Dioxazine, IAMTARA, and more. Social is far enough removed from #general that it doesn’t tend to experience the same kind of user turnover, or if it does it’s at a much slower rate. As such its culture is more robust, and it generally consists of the same conversational material that it was originally created for.
Users share images of themselves, either in a casual context or more Homestuck-oriented, such as cosplay. They are also comfortable talking about a wide range of topics, which gives it a distinct overlap in conversational range with both general and mspa-lit. In this way I think it’s helpful to visualize these channels as a progression, with each one representing a more refined degree of integration in the server: general being the entry point is the least refined, social is moreso but still fairly accessible, and then mspa-lit is the most intense of the “generally oriented” channels. Many people go through general and social, and from there may specialize into mspa-lit or more often redirect towards other channels more tailored to their interests.
There is one occurrence worth mentioning: social became a lot less active over the summer once Twonks was banned from the HSD, especially after she went and formed a splinter server. She and a couple others were notoriously flirty towards others, too much so even for #social. When told to go to #social by Makin, she replied “I’m already in social”, so he responded with “go to #socialer”. Thus the splinter server “socialer” was born.
I’m not personally aware of any other major events for social in particular, but I’m not certain if this is due to a lack of participation in the area or if it’s simply less prone to more tumultuous events. To this end I’m going to take some time in the next few days to message regulars and see if there’s any distinct events I’ve missed, but for now I think these are the brunt of my observations on both channels.
At this point I think it’s worth pointing out the culture of botspam-radio, or lack thereof. This is one of the channels that has nothing of importance going on at any time—as the name implies, it is reserved specifically for bot commands and especially spam, which is considered the most egregious form of shitposting. The bot has a few commands that are conducive to games, but it would be farcical to imply that any kind of subcommunity has popped up around these functions. Its most notable feature is being used by newcomers to give themselves a color role, or as the place where you submit radio requests with Aradiabot for when you’re in the appropriate voice channel. Aside from these features, it is devoid of anything worthy of real note, so I will not cover it any further.
Nothing more for today.
13th of October
It’s been a slow couple of days. Of note, today Phantos got his own Patreon channel that he decided to entitle #spooky. This channel is dedicated to a concept that I actually personally enjoy, which is taking the inherent association of October with Halloween and amplifying it greatly with sarcasm.
It’s a relatively simple celebration of the holiday—and arguably one of the more juvenile—but it is nonetheless greatly amusing. Common ways of expressing this kind of behavior include: the use of images depicting skeletons, typically dancing or doing otherwise silly things; ironic overuse of the phrase “too spooky”, and especially application of this adjective to various concepts, including the entire month of October (a la “Spooky Month”); and assorted other activities that are mockingly child-like in nature.
I can only imagine that this sort of behavior is grating on people, and especially towards the end of the month I’m sure that it will be said to have overstayed its welcome. In the meantime though, Spooky Month is in full swing, and the videos of dancing skeletons reign supreme. Phantos’ channel is up and running, and the liberal use of shitty memes has been nothing short of successful in glorifying Halloween. I look forward to lurking the channel and seeing what comes out of it.
More broadly oriented, Discord had a major server outage today. The occurrence of this in the past has been rare enough to elicit little comment, but today it was fairly egregious; the program was completely unusable for a span of almost thirty minutes, which is unprecedented as far as I’m aware. I also don’t know how widespread this outage was; I’ve seen it where Europeans have been shut out from Discord for some reason or another while everyone else was unaffected, so I don’t know if this event was localized to the Americas or not.
Whatever the case, it’s a disconcerting reminder of how easily the stability of this place could be disrupted. As time has gone by I’ve come to regard this place as a solid habitat, but the reality of the matter is that it wouldn’t take much for everything that’s been built here to be completely destroyed. I’m not sure exactly what could remedy this fact, and indeed sometimes I think there is no effective way to help it at all. If Discord were to suddenly shut down one day, how would we all keep in contact?
Thankfully, the internet is nothing if not redundant in many aspects. While the Discord is currently the absolute go to for real time discussion, there exist alternates such as IRC. It is highly likely that a majority of people from the HSD would return to the subreddit in the case of the HSD being annihilated; most people came from there anyway. Additionally, I feel as if there would be an inevitable pull towards IRC; the subreddit is great for organizing loosely, but a real time chatform is needed for effective and engaging conversation, and thus the #homestuck IRC channel waits.
The IRC channel has been around since before the HSD was created. It has no real extant connection to the HSD, and most of the people who used it never associated with us or even professed some level of dislike for the Discord server in general. It’s kind of dismaying that this would be the case, but nonetheless my paranoid mind is grateful for the presence of a backup in case this place is ever closed. If for some reason this should occur, there is an almost 100% certainty that the community as it is now would effectively disappear. I assume more dedicated people would probably seek out the IRC channel, but we’ll have to wait and see if that’s actually what would happen. With luck, we’ll never have to actually test that hypothesis.
On a more derivative note, I’m starting to harbor some concerns about the movie night server. We’ve been trying to do it on a regular basis, once a week, but it seems as if user participation has been declining steadily each time. This could be attributable to many things unfortunately, and I’m not sure exactly where to point the finger. It might be due to a lack of organization lately, where I’ve been unable to personally oversee all aspects of the process like I used to. It might also be a matter of user fatigue, where trying to watch it once a week has been too often. Could also be a lack of movies people want to watch. Not really sure to be honest; I’ve suggested that we change up the way we decide what movies we watch; for instance, perhaps instead of doing one movie a week for sure, we wait until people decide collectively what to do, so that we have guaranteed interest. There are a number of ways we could go about helping this process, we’ll just have to see what works best as time goes by.
Nothing more for today.
14th of October
Today was a little interesting. The journal reached 200 pages a few days ago, and there has been a few ripples here and there of discussion surrounding it. This usually peters out after a few words, but tonight it eventually led to the more unconventional topic of the nature of the journal itself. MrCheeze and Tipsy in particular were involved in this conversation, and I felt as if there were some misunderstandings as to what the journal was actually for.
After probing them for a little more info, MrCheeze asserted that “the intent of the journal” made them a little uncomfortable, which was puzzling to me. I pressed them for more information but never did get a clear answer. I suppose this is in keeping with my other interactions with S—they have this tendency to assume you know what they mean, and if you don’t then they refuse or are otherwise unable to clarify. Getting a straight answer out of them is frustrating at best, although I couldn’t say why they act this way. I don’t believe it’s a matter of smugness; rather it seems as if they have a very strong notion of what is right and wrong, and it is difficult for them to understand why others may think differently. Of course this makes discussions with them rather intense when a disagreement occurs, but otherwise they’re fine to talk with.
More immediately important was that the nature of the journal seemed to bother them, although not terribly. I try to be as accommodating as possible so I tried my best to see what exactly was bugging them, but to no avail. The phrase “you can’t please everybody” rings true, but I really do want to avoid causing friction with this work. It also makes me wonder if there are many other people who feel this way towards the journal, or even more strongly about it than simple discomfort. Is there anyone who legitimately hates this document for some reason?5
While I would be lying if I said such thoughts aren’t at least vaguely upsetting to me, I’m more just curious as to what facet of the journal could be so disconcerting. Thankfully I don’t think anyone does feel that way about the journal, and if they do then I have no idea who they are or why they think that way. It doesn’t do to dwell on such things until I know for sure that they’re real and what their nature even is, so I generally don’t let these ideas bother me.
It seems MrCheeze has a generally pessimistic disposition to be honest; outside of the scope of my journal alone, they laments things far too often for me to write it off as specific distaste of particular circumstances. During our discussion today they asked where I was even three years ago in the Homestuck fandom, which was a rather strange statement to me. Their statement relied on the fact that they believes the fandom has deteriorated significantly in the last so many years, which admittedly many people and myself will agree on. As for the question of why they thought I should have been involved back then I didn’t receive a real answer, which I guess is customary at this point. Suffice to say that their outlook on the future of the community is overwhelmingly negative.
Tipsy, both in her outlook on the fandom and the journal itself, is a different story. Hers was, as far as I can ascertain, just a misunderstanding; she didn’t even know strictly why I was making the journal, saying at first that it was “just for fun” (although after some consideration I would have to agree with this idea too). Rather I explained about how I care greatly for the HSD and the people in it, which she found to be sweet. She thinks that the method of collecting information—observing things in real time even—was a bit “stalkerish”, although I’m not sure if she means legitimately stalking or if she was joking. The implication of this bothers me somewhat but I can only assume she was being more or less flippant.
In addition she is, while not radiantly positive, at least warmly neutral or indifferent as to the direction the community is heading. I can appreciate this outlook, perhaps even more than I would one that is positive (assuming it becomes saccharine). Tipsy’s been around in the community for a long time and is actually a pretty well recognized figure, so I feel inclined to trust her perception of such things. I also think of her as a sort of litmus test for this place; if something is wrong then she’s usually the first one to say so, although as time has gone by I’ve developed a more nuanced view of her reactions. It’s kind of nice to develop that sort of intuition; hopefully it serves me well in the future.
Also a positive note in this regard, Tipsy said that I was one of the few people she (and conceivably others) would trust to write a journal without issue. Other figures, like Makin or especially Flare, would generate intense controversy with such a thing. However, in her words I’m “too inoffensive/impartial” for such problems. I have to confess great pride in the fact that people view me as trustworthy. It makes me feel like I do my job well, and I hope I can help that perception continue as time goes by.
Nothing more for today.
15th of October
Not a lot for today. Some gentle discussion has occurred, of which I’m pleased to say that Sora has started participating more often again (among a few others who had seemed to leave) and appears to be feeling better than they did before. It’s heartening to see them striving for self-improvement. Additionally, the server is just a few members short of 9000 users; Makin has demanded utter silence from the mod team when this 9000th member joins, for mysterious purposes as yet to be unveiled. The secrecy is amusing, and I eagerly await to see what he has planned. As it is, nothing more for today.
16th of October
The server reached 9000 people as of 3:33 PM EST, a moment that many of us in the mod chat were waiting for. As soon as it happened Sea Hitler declared it in the mod chat, and as per Makin’s orders none of us said anything about it publicly. We asked what he had in mind for the surprise, and all we got in response was this:
This is the “itisamystery” emote, and it has a somewhat infamous usage here. It can be employed regularly by anyone without any issue, but when Makin uses it that usually means there are japes afoot. It can be his way of signaling he’s baited you successfully, or as a way to deflect questions. The latter is the case here, a rather insidious tease; when Makin gets secretive about upcoming events it’s a sure sign that pandemonium will follow. We’re not sure what he has in store yet, and we probably won’t find out until it’s already begun. Should be interesting.
Nothing more for today.
17th of October
At some point today Makin enacted his plan, which involved creating a new channel, entitled #aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. It’s probably a different number of “a”s but by the time I started writing this the channel had already been archived, with a different name. The channel name is a reference to an extremely widespread meme, now several years old, taken from an episode of Dragon Ball Z.
I’m sure anyone reading this who has any grasp of the history of humor on the internet will be familiar with it, but in order to contextualize the name a little better I’ll explain as briefly as I can for those who may not be aware. In the Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z, episode 21 (“The Return of Goku”) has a scene where the villain Vegeta comments on the strength of protagonist Goku, referring to his “power level”. When asked he says, “It’s over 9000!”. The episode originally aired in 1997, but the phrase itself was popularized on the internet in 2006, for some reason exploding in usage over the next few years. Now that it’s 11 years later the meme doesn’t get used hardly at all, but it is permanently burned into the memory of anyone who happened to be around back then.
The popularity of this particular meme in our community—as well as others like it—was enhanced by a particular work of CANMT entitled “Savior of the Screaming Dead”, which Griever created. He takes a clip of the protagonist screaming for about four minutes straight and overlays it on top of normal Homestuck music, among other things. This caused nothing short of a small renaissance of the subject material for us.6
Indeed, such was its usage that we can still see its residual effects, today in the form of Makin’s new channel. 9000 users was the meme number he’s been waiting for, and I am both delighted and horrified to say that the opportunity was not wasted. The channel was dedicated to screaming—a closely related joke associated with the source material—and scream people did. For almost the entire day the channel consisted of nothing but people posting “AAAAAAAAAAAAA” in varying lengths and forms, spamming it to the point of absolute absurdity. The pace people were posting at was so intense that stepping into the channel for even one second caused my Discord client to crash, repeatedly.
While greatly amusing even by itself, the entertainment was only amplified for us when it was discovered that the disturbance caused around 30 people to leave, and thus we fell below 9000 members at some point. We’ve been catching up again slowly, but for now it is a shining example of hubris at work. As I mentioned though, the channel has since been archived, so now things have returned to normal. In addition to all of this, Makin announced a community stream for the 25th of this month; 10/25 is one of the important calendar dates for us, so this move was expected. As it is, I believe this will be a good opportunity for the server to break free of the conversational doldrums it’s been experiencing lately. #general could stand to use a bit more conversation as is, we’ll see how it works out.
Nothing more for today.
18th of October
It’s been a couple weeks since Makin gave us the news of being blacklisted on MSPA advertisements. While this originally led to some pretty fierce debate on what should be done with the money raised, Makin has continued to be secretive. We did know that he was going to run ads on MSPFA instead, which seemed a more or less tenable solution. In addition, however, today he bought server space for two games that many people are familiar with: Team Fortress 2 and Space Station 13 (or SS13).
Team Fortress 2 is popular enough that I don’t feel the need to explain it; Space Station 13, however, is a far more niche item. SS13 for short, it is the product of this free software called BYOND, which is used to create games or other net-related applications. SS13 in particular is a sandbox simulator, wherein any number of people may join and move about on a space ship7, with various assigned roles.
The objective of this game will change depending on what everyone has agreed to play, and indeed people may ignore the objective entirely and do whatever they wish (albeit with some penalty, depending on the nature of their actions). The space station has all manner of objects on board, with which people may interact in a plethora of ways. Rather than go into any lengthy detail about the mechanics of this game, I’ve elected to offer an example of my first time loading the game and actually playing it with people from HSD.
Makin had just created the server and was unfamiliar with the controls, as were most of us. I distinctly remember him, myself, and Tensei all trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. We started the game together on a shuttle that had brought us to the station itself. We were all buckled into seats; the first goal thus became to free ourselves, and after some messing about we were able to move around without issue.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that Makin had a second, administrative account on at the same time, which he had designated as a literal clown. Being inactive, the clown did not unbuckle itself from the chair. The rest of us continued trying to sort out the controls and figure out how to interact with other objects appropriately; in the process, we started using the clown as a training dummy for figuring out the user interface. In this fashion we started to punch the clown by accident.
This was amusing to us; we continued to punch the clown seemingly without issue, although for some reason I was only hugging it instead. This continued for some time as we tried to figure out how to change the appropriate settings. Once we had completed this task, we decided to unbuckle the clown from the chair. At this point I noticed that when I clicked on the clown I was giving it CPR. “That’s an oddly specific action, I wonder what I’ve done to enable it,” I thought to myself. As it turns out, when we finally managed to unbuckle the clown from its chair it immediately slumped over and fell to the ground with a wet “honk”. In our careless experiments, we had accidentally murdered this poor clown.
Thus set the tone for the rest of our escapades on this station. While there are defined objectives available for us to complete, what usually happens (at least so far) is that we’ll become hopelessly distracted by some random factor of our various roles—the assorted flavors of scientist or engineers being able to accomplish highly specific things—or even by nothing in particular as we simply explore the station itself and the broader possibilities of the game itself.
SS13 is highly reminiscent of some early internet programs I used to enjoy, and is actually extremely suitable for our particular brand of culture: easy to pick up (if difficult to master), conducive to casual hangouts, assigned goals available at our whim, among other things. For me it feels like a return to some of the early massively multiplayer online games I used to play in the early 2000s, although with far more complexity than any of the programs I personally encountered. I’m interested to see where this program will be with us in a month or two; experience tells me it’ll be a flavor of the month sort of deal, where we enjoy it greatly for a bit and then it fades away (as has happened with Minecraft and other things). On the other hand, perhaps it will have a lasting effect? Time will tell as always.
More directly related to the server, there’s been a bit of a ruffle concerning the practice of liveblogging. Liveblogging is basically the process of announcing your progress in a given piece of entertainment, often accompanied with a personal reaction; it may foster discussion but is also just a way to alert people as to where you are in the work. This latter use has become something of a problem lately; there are a number of works that Makin or others in general are attempting to spread as much as possible, and naturally it’s nice to have affirmation from people engaging in those works as to their progress. It’s not uncommon for someone to read HPMOR and then speak briefly when they reach a given segment—when Hiveswap Act 1 came out, this happened extremely frequently until everyone was caught up.
Unfortunately the practice has been occurring with a more alarming frequency as of late. Danganronpa v38 came out recently, which is a fairly popular franchise with people here. As such, Makin himself liveblogged it when it came out, among a few others. When the liveblogging is conducted appropriately it’s not too intrusive, but sometimes it can be excessive. Minish ended up playing Danganronpa v3 for the last day or two, and every time he does there has been a rather egregious stream of pictures that signal where he’s at, or his reaction to certain parts.
Usually when the reports concern sections that are famously known, then it can reasonably be said that most people are interested in and thus fine with the liveblogging. However, Minish has been posting pictures of almost every conversation or event, regardless of importance; this has landed him firmly in “inappropriate usage” territory, and it has drawn attention to the overall problem, which is that this system is prone to abuse.
After the topic was initially breached in the wake of Minish’s spree, a number of people were asking to ban the process, not least of which included Toast. In his words, liveblogging has “nothing constructive or interesting, it’s just spam”. Alongside this and others complaints I brought this up in the modchat, although based on the fact that Makin does it himself I don’t really expect much to be done about this.
More details on this situation as it unfolds. Nothing more for today.
20th of October
The SS13 server seems to have temporarily become the default method of interaction for us. I got online and it appeared that people had already been playing for hours, and this lasted throughout the day. This kind of intense usage is in line with my past experiences, suggesting that it will be heavily used for about two weeks to one month and then subsequently see an incredible drop off in activity. Within two months it will have been dropped almost completely. I could be wrong, but as I’m so fond of saying: time will tell.
My humorous SS13 note of choice from the last day or two: at some point, Tensei was a botanist or a geneticist, perhaps some other brand of scientist, and was experimenting with cannabis leaves. Before long he took some “unstable mutagen” and somehow transformed the cannabis into “omegaweed”, a glowing and much more potent (as well as lethal) form of marijuana. I’m not sure on the next step exactly, but apparently he consumed this himself and then force fed it to Makin, upon which they both nearly died from how insanely high it made them. Or it may have simply poisoned them, but I digress.
There is a definite decrease in activity from mspa-lit when this game is active, a fact that perturbs me slightly. I imagine that as time goes by, participation in SS13 will slowly decline and we will inexorably start to filter back into the HSD, so I’m not terribly concerned. Instead it’s just another thing that’s made me aware of how attached I am to this place; I’m slowly becoming cognizant of my overwhelming fear of this place being significantly disrupted. I’m going to have to work to dispel that feeling, or else it’s going to bite me in the ass later on down the road.
As a follow up to the liveblogging discussion, I don’t think Makin ever did respond to my request for a discussion on the matter, although I may have just missed it. More importantly, I’ve come to a conclusion that I probably should have reached immediately, which is that we can dispel Bad Liveblogging without chartering a rule for it. Sometimes liveblogging is good, or can even promote discussion—this is desirable, so instituting a server wide ban for it is nonsensical. Rather, we would be better off tacitly allowing it, and then forcibly stopping people who are abusing the practice. This may offend some but it’s a better approach than wielding our influence like a cudgel and completely getting rid of something that may have positive effects for us. Hopefully this does not lead to any further issues.
Nothing more for today.
22nd of October
SS13 discussions have only continued to grow in intensity. It has officially reached the level where others have started to decry its presence; indeed, many people have requested that SS13 conversation be sequestered in a more appropriate location. This tension reached its height sometime after Makin renamed the channel “play-ss13”. This was amusing for many of us, bfut those who were opposed found the topic disruptive, and seemed to crowd out discussion of anything else.
There was a dedicated cabal trying to mollify those who were upset, with such arguments as “this has always been a channel for Makin to shill what he wants” (which is not altogether untrue, at least in practice). However, this sort of explanation has been progressively less effective as time goes by. Such was the case today, and people were not satisfied with this response. Ordinarily I would expect Makin to simply dismiss these concerns and allow things to continue as they are, but tonight he acquiesced to these concerns (albeit with heavily applied skepticism).
When people continued clamoring for SS13 to be moved, he finally decided to create a new channel for it, much to the relief of those present. Simply entitled “play-ss13”, and with mspa-lit subsequently changed to “read-glow-worm”, this new channel was not without its controversy as well. WoC left the server again, citing indignance at the fact that Makin created an entire channel for discussion of a video game, stepping directly on #gaming’s toes and undermining its purpose. This offense is hardly the first of its kind, and I suppose WoC finally decided it was too much to bear. Personally I assume he’ll be back at some point in the future, but I would not be surprised if he stayed away on principle (or perhaps through apathy). Time will tell.
The new channel was created with one stipulation: Makin required that the channel being split in two would not jeopardize activity levels. He looked at the number of messages sent the day previously and required that each channel should match that in order to keep them both. An amusing side note, Makin mistakenly took the sum of ALL channel activity instead of just mspa-lit, which led to him saying 20,000 messages were required. After investigating, I determined that the average number of messages sent per day was just under 5,000 instead. In either case, I’m interested to see how this holds up.
Aside from the SS13 nonsense, a particularly enjoyable conversation occurred in the evening concerning the nature of humor that this community—both the Homestuck fandom in general and the HSD itself—has dabbled in over the years. A great number of people participated in this conversation, of note Toast, hb, Gnawms, Dingus, Niklink, Trip, cookiefonster, eclair, wheals, Skyplayer, and an assortment of others. A wide swath of history was considered, and the diversity of our backgrounds assisted greatly in the sharing of tales.
Of particular note was the background of these comics produced by the 4chan board /co/ (an abbreviation of “comics”), which are all in the same vein as Not On My Watch. Often they are dedicated to offense and baiting, and are expertly crafted in this way. More amusing to myself and others than the comic itself is the audacity with which these people made these comics; real people, thinking and breathing like the rest of us, conceived of and subsequently created these comics, and their content is so strikingly offensive that I simply have to laugh to consider what must have been going through the minds of these people. Obviously, anyone with a sense of decency would condemn the “message” (if it can be called such) of these comics as unethical at best and evil at worst, but their mere existence is a sort of joke in itself.
Nonetheless, these comics do still manage to accomplish their purpose as bait; even when publicly recognized as such, people fall prey to the offense and deem it unacceptable. This is a particularly difficult subject to approach because, from an idealistic standpoint, those who are repulsed by them are more than entitled to be—by all means, these comics are repugnant in nature. As such, I’m fascinated as to why some of us are able to simply be amused by them, instead of so thoroughly off-put like others who are unable to reconcile the potential humor with its inappropriate nature. I’m sure this is a question better suited to a brand of science I’m not familiar with, but I find myself wondering about it all the same.
Outside of these comics were a host of other historical memes, including many from the HSD itself. It would be madness to go over them all in such detail, but suffice to say that it was helpful in reminding me of how colorful the history of this place can be. In fact, the timing of this conversation may never have been more serendipitous, as hb announced earlier in the day that he was crafting his own document, related specifically to cataloging the various memes of the HSD. His list is ever expanding, but I was delighted to hear that someone else is interested in preserving the culture of this place in some way. The document can be found in appendix B, and I look forward to seeing how it may evolve in the future. Toast mocked me for my warm reception of this document, calling me a “data junkie”, but I know he means it in a friendly manner. Besides, he is completely correct—I’m hopelessly excited about the idea that our culture may be preserved in the future, against all possible odds. Every scrap of evidence goes at least some length in achieving this preservation, and I will do all I can to ensure it. Efforts on the part of people like hb really assist in this matter, and I hope others are inspired to keep their own records if necessary or even possible.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of October
The SS13 channel is not quite living up to the level of activity that Makin specified, but he has not taken it down yet. I and others are of some hope that he’ll leave it running anyway, as its presence has successfully ameliorated most people’s feelings on the matter, WoC excluded. The activity level of mspa-lit itself has not been jeopardized at the very least, and may actually have been promoted by this new channel, since SS13 discussion no longer dominates. There’s been at least a small flourishing of activity, which is always heartening to see.
In light of the conversation we had yesterday about the history of humor we’ve all been through, we also began reminiscing about the older days of the Homestuck fandom in its entirety. The fandom grew from the comic’s inception and then positively exploded in 2010, going through a consistent crescendo until finally reaching its greatest height somewhere in 2012. At that point, the comic started to diminish in quality, although only slightly at first; October 2013 began a period known as the Gigapause, a full year where Hussie took time to create panels in relative peace, in which no updates occurred. The Gigapause was the first instance of these pauses, which would become more frequent later in the comic’s run. It was at this time that the fandom began experiencing some significant signs of strain.
The gradual increase in fans throughout 2010 to 2012 was accompanied by its own slew of weirdness to be sure, but I think this period of time was culturally amenable to it. Both within the fandom itself and outside of it, people were less immediately put off by the sighting of people wearing strange costumes or doing strange things in the name of Homestuck. Then as things go, people became less okay with it and the weird only got weirder. Homestuck became recognized more widely, and people in general began to preemptively castigate those fans who made themselves known.
This behavior only continued to worsen. In the absence of any regular updates, people made up for the lack of new content by acting out in more spurious ways. The fandom began to witness its first decline since the initial pick up, but the hate against it grew ever stronger. This process of indiscriminate hatefulness in the face of declining numbers of fans led to a rather weird position on the internet in general, where Homestuck fans became fairly self-aware, perhaps even contained in a sense. They became more or less withdrawn, and their general presence on the internet was substantially lessened. The only really extravagant or flamboyant expression left to them were conventions, where people dressed up as characters from the comic. Some of the cosplays that popped up during the Gigapause were apparently utterly insane, although I didn’t get to play witness to any such thing during that time.
I could ramble about this topic for a while, and in the future I may do just that. As for now though, more immediately relevant to the server was part of the discussion involving the old #nsfw channels that we used to have on the server. I mentioned at the beginning of this journal that we got rid of such channels and instituted an entire dedicated server to NSFW material, and now I believe is the time to describe the factors that led to this development.
Sometime after the server started, a NSFW channel was created to house such discussion as was meant for adults. At first, if memory serves, the channel was basically open access—this proved to be somewhat problematic, and so rules were instated. It was required that people should give their date of birth to indicate that they were over 18 years of age. This system worked for quite some time, and was in place when I joined and then for a few months afterwards.
In this form the NSFW channel developed its own comprehensive culture, and I had some rather incredible experiences talking with the people there. People like Dickle made it rather unique, although decidedly hectic and strange. We reveled in that weirdness though; it was liberating to be one of the older people present, and to have access to this place that not everyone could see. We were free to talk with each other openly, and revealed details of ourselves to each other that, realistically speaking, we probably shouldn’t have. Yet we did, and the sense of community deepened for a while.
At one point, there was an intense encounter between WoC and one of the NSFW regulars that I’ve mentioned previously, HP. I’ve already described this incident in some detail, wherein WoC accidentally sent a .gif file of a deer getting its head blown off to HP in private messages. This led to WoC nearly being demodded from #gaming, and I almost ended up getting his position. This situation ultimately resolved itself, but it was the beginning in a long series of incidents that eventually culminated in #nsfw being removed from the server completely.
Some of the incidents are lost to me, but more important among them was the incident of nude images being collected by Itoan, which I have already described at length in a previous entry. At one point the original channel was accidentally deleted entirely, and a replacement was created. This replacement was ALSO trashed for some reason, and archived as #nsfw-older. An additional issue from after I was modded involved the former pseudo-mod of #nsfw, a fellow named Master Emp. Part of the rules concerned the exact level of “furries”, or people identifying as anthropomorphic animals, that would be allowed in #nsfw.
Furries are a contentious topic at the best of times, with anyone who openly participates as one being subject to social ridicule at least part of the time. There are a number of people on the server who are openly furries so that discrimination is not quite as prevalent here, but they do not go without some push back from various people. Master Emp was, at best, tolerant of this subgroup and had a rule that succinctly described his position on their presence in #nsfw. Basically, it graded “levels” of furries based on how human-like they are in the image in question, and if they became too animal-like then they wouldn’t be allowed (a not unreasonable rule, I would say). However, as time went by he began to punish people who shared such images more readily. This drew the ire of many, and debate shortly began about the nature of the rule.
Makin himself was only barely tolerant of #nsfw’s position in the server, and this incident was the final straw. In one fell swoop, #nsfw was destroyed. It now remains on the server archived as #nsfw-old, alongside its sister channel. This was also done in the wake of the Discord search function being implemented, which would have made it far easier for people to creep on others’ posts and find sensitive material. In its stead, we collaborated to craft a new option—eventually, Homesmut was born.
Homesmut has been developed as a more complex replacement to #nsfw. The system for getting in is the same, and there are now a number of channels instead of one to contain everything. Its existence as an entirely separate server also mitigates some potential issues for us; as a partnered Discord server, hosting NSFW content is against the Discord TOS, which puts us at risk of losing partnered status (this risk being a substantial reason for Makin’s distaste for the channel). Thus, having the NSFW material completely outside of the HSD removed that problem. Further, it prevented the effect of any drama from being felt in HSD proper. For these reasons it seemed to be a great idea.
In practice, of course, it hasn’t been as I had hoped. #nsfw had its own complex dynamics and regulars, and it felt like a real community of people together. Homesmut has way more people than #nsfw did, but is utterly devoid of that feeling of culture or mutual understanding. It is a mindless place, filled with people who are only interested in the porn. While more or less understandable, it is simply disappointing for anyone who was around for #nsfw. I take no pleasure in the place, and generally avoid it except to keep it running as needed.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Discord TOS has been changed since then, so now one of the main reasons for its existence is no longer valid. Despite this, the new server remains our tool9. Thus is the history of the NSFW portion of our community. If anything more happens to the place, I’ll be sure to record them here as well. It is worth mentioning that #serious on the HSD can be used for discussion of NSFW topics, but only discussion; images are strictly relegated to Homesmut. However, I feel the barrier of access to #serious for casual NSFW discussion is discouraging. Often there are people already there, discussing things at length or at the very least venting about something. This does not foster NSFW discussion. However, as has been pointed out to me by others, that may be for the best.
Nothing more for today.
25th of October
Today is an important day for myself and the community. October 25th is the day that I joined the community last year. It’s weird to think that I’ve spent an entire year of my life in this place, and yet I hope that many more are to follow. As for the community, it’s a date of importance within the comic itself. Like the 13th of April and the 12th of June, the 25th of October is a meme date. Every year something important typically happens on these days, and in this way we celebrate them.
For the HSD and the subreddit, this usually consists of a community stream. We enjoyed such a stream today, although the timing was less than advantageous for people in America: we started at 10 AM EST and ended just as the people on the east coast were getting out of school for the day. The west coasters never even had a chance. Unfortunately, this sort of scheduling deficiency is always inherent in the system; we’re simply too spread out globally for any sort of cohesive, all-encompassing plan to be developed. To make up for this, there is usually someone who records the streams in their entirety. I believe Ngame takes care of this task most of the time, if not every time.
One of the things we streamed today was an exceedingly strange show from Adult Swim back in 2007, called Xavier: Renegade Angel. There is little information available about the show or its reception, but suffice to say that it employs an extremely surreal, dark brand of comedy as it follows its titular character around in these strange, metaphysical journeys, often with no real conclusion or goal.
WoC stumbled upon this show some months ago, and has taken great pains to advertise it to us. He deduced correctly that Makin in particular would appreciate the absurd wordplay and setting of the show, and thus it was streamed today. The reaction was as you would expect, with people continuously left agape or in disbelief at what they were seeing. The show touched on a broad variety of taboo topics—enough that it’s not really worth listing them here—to the point that it was mildly uncomfortable at best and indiscriminately offensive at worst.
Naturally, it was a huge success. I don’t know what kind of staying power the show will have, as only about 75 people were watching at any given time, but I’m sure that we’ll see references trickle through here and there for weeks, if not months. Altgen in particular should be pretty taken with the nature of this show, although I haven’t strictly checked to see what the effect has been.
Speaking of WoC, I mentioned before that he left the server after Makin instated SS13 as its own channel. This is due to the fact that it’s video game discussion that’s actively being taken away from #gaming, a stance I find myself sympathetic to. WoC feels as if these sorts of barbs have been thrown his way for a long time now, and amidst another factor or two he decided he would leave, at least temporarily. I’m not sure what exactly he hopes to accomplish with this, so I talked with him for a while about it today.
The SS13 channel is in fact a large portion of the concern, with it directly undermining #gaming. SS13, while not as active as mspa-lit is, still garners around 2,500 messages per day on average. #gaming, meanwhile, only sees about 1,000 messages per day, or as low as 500. This is a pretty unfortunate disparity, and I assured WoC that I would bring it up to the mod team (although I’m not exactly hopeful that any meaningful change will come about once I’ve done so).
Unfortunately, that’s not the only reason he’s decided to go again. He’s tired of people referencing the same stories about him ad nauseum, a declaration that initially confused me. After some clarification, it makes more sense though; he’s perfectly happy with sharing stories of himself and he enjoys doing so, but it seems people latch onto various incidents of his and refuse to let go, even after a substantial amount of time has passed. In his words, they’re beating a dead horse.
I’m not quite sure what to do about this, or if anything even can be done, strictly speaking. I brought up this issue to people and a few were immediately amenable to stopping this behavior, but others were skeptical for some reason. I’m not sure what they might be thinking, but it may be difficult to get everyone on board. I stressed to WoC that he would be better off talking to people himself; it’s more meaningful to express your feelings directly than to have it relayed by someone else. However, he insists that he has spoken about it at length already and people continued regardless. As it is, I’ll try to see what I can do to make everyone happy. It may be that that’s not possible in this situation, but as I’m so fond of saying time will tell.
Nothing more for today.
27th of October
I mentioned some time ago that I would be describing LOFAM at length once Cait finishes writing up a document with the necessary information. She’s still in the midst of writing it, but a similar file has been given to me today by wheals, concerning the history of CANMT. I’m very happy to have this document—it’s a rather thorough account of history of the group, with a precise amount of detail regarding dates, people involved, what projects were accomplished, etc. I’ll provide a brief overview of CANMT here, but I encourage anyone who wants more exact information about this community to examine the document themselves: it may be found in appendix B, under the name “History of Cool and New Music Team (CANMT)”.
The history of CANMT is better understood in light of the presence of another work that the HSD is heavily concerned with, being Cool and New Web Comic (CANWC). CANWC is a fanventure that started literally three days before the end of Homestuck on April 10th, 2016. It is a mix of Homestuck itself and another, ancillary work of Hussie’s called Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff (SBAHJ). SBAHJ was originally released far before Homestuck was ever conceived, back in the days of Hussie intermingling with his friends on the Penny Arcade forums. After Homestuck started to be released, however, SBAHJ became a part of it—it is canonically written by one of the characters in the webcomic.
SBAHJ itself is devoted to an aesthetic that can only be described as the lack of aesthetic, or indeed the lack of any sense at all. The art is very heavily broken, with all rules of design or basic drawing ability thrown out the window. The dialogue is similarly broken, with grammar being nonexistent and typos more frequent than actual English. These are both conscious, purposeful effects: in short, the comic is designed to be “BAD ON PURPOSE” (a phrase that has been the source of innumerable debates and discourse on the HSD). It has become as memetic to us as Homestuck itself (if not more so), with references being bandied about frequently and casually. It’s fairly well ensconced within our culture at this point.
If you’re at all curious, I recommend you seek this material yourself. It requires far less time and dedication than Homestuck itself, and seeing it will do it far better justice than any words I could ever write on the subject. This all having been said, we can return to CANWC. It begins as a simple retelling of Homestuck with the intentional shittiness of SBAHJ style, but after some time it transcends into something else entirely. Most people were either pleased with the humor itself or seemed to ignore it entirely at first, but then on April 30th or so a twist occurred that launched it into popularity. Suddenly people were talking about it in force. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Homestuck’s end had been received overwhelmingly poorly, but by the end of the month they were already exhausted of talking about why, so I imagine there was some eagerness to move away from the topic. CANWC offered a convenient way out for them, which may have contributed to its success.
The author of CANWC, an enigmatic figure simply known as “o”, posted it originally on the Omegaupdate forums. From the first post, o has never broken character—the same kind of haltering, broken speech as the comic itself—which contributes heavily to the mystery surrounding him. The general weirdness of the fanventure and its author have elevated it into something that is now more or less automatically regarded as part of the Essential Readings. CANWC is inextricable from this place just as much as Homestuck itself.
Shifting gears a bit, it’s also important to recognize that Homestuck has been accompanied with a wide array of music for its entire history. The Homestuck Music Team, which Tensei is a part of, released albums full of music that was crafted by artists for Homestuck, some of which was used in the comic itself. This became a significant part of our culture as well, with people fervently discussing the latest release or their favorites as time goes by. The last of these albums, simply entitled “Volume 10”, was released a couple months after the end of Homestuck, on June 12th of 2016. It was in the wake of this release that certain key members of CANMT first met each other.
At first there was only talk of creating a CANWC fan-album, but ost eventually created a new Discord server called “Cool and New Webcomic Soundtrack”, inviting Ngame, Niklink, Putnam, a fellow named daviddrawsgood, thunder413, a member of the Homestuck Music Team named Alexander Rosetti, and Jamie Paige. Wheals joined a couple of days later, and as he says, “the rest is history”.
The guiding principle of the group was originally to create music that would fit CANWC’s narrative style of purposeful shittiness. Most of the tracks in early albums, such as “Voulem. 1”, do in fact follow this rule. Eventually on the 8th of October of 2016, the name was changed to CANMT. More and more people joined, and some of the people involved in CANMT eventually got involved in the HSD itself, and vice versa. One of the highlights of CANMT was when o himself submitted some music tracks to the group. Additionally, CANMT’s songs have started being regularly used in flash animations for the fanventure. Minish, Makin, Difarem, and a host of others became involved at some point.
The group continued to grow for months. Eventually, through Makin’s involvement, CANMT projects became widely anticipated in the subreddit and HSD communities, with new album releases typically being showcased in a community stream. The types of music that were involved continued to grow as well, with more artists contributing their favorite genres and styles. Even outside of music, people were recruited, such as when “Bambosh was taken on to increase artist representation on the team”. The collective pool of creative talent only ever seemed to get bigger.
It was not without its hitches either, of course: as time went by, ost and minish (among others) were less enchanted with CANWC’s style and direction, and so wanted to distance the group from purely CANWC-centric content. This is what influenced the name change to Cool and New Music Team, and this was accompanied with a mandate for an increase in quality of tracks. Rather than accept any song no matter how shitty, ost wanted there to be standards. Many songs that were to be on the sixth album release were nixed, the composers being told “this will not be on the album as is”. This transition was accompanied by a large degree of argumentation; in retrospect, while people like wheals deem the change a good one, he also admits that it was “handled poorly”. Since the change has gone through, there are now rules for what kind of content they’ll publish.
Most of the recent activity for CANMT was laced within May to June of this year, with the release of their album “9”—this is, according to many, unquestionably their best work to date. Unfortunately, there’s been a lull: CANMT appears to mostly be dormant at this time, although according to wheals they “never stopped working”. He goes on to say that there is an intrinsic connection with CANWC, where the quality and speed of CANWC updates are reflected in the speed of updates for their music team. Even after the group distanced themselves from the fanventure, it has been this way. O himself has said “o is slow”; there is fervent hope that both will be able to return to the manic pace that they set earlier in the year.
Whatever the case, CANMT has firmly cemented itself in our community at large. The more I write about these topics, the more I consciously recognize that only writing about the HSD itself is an untenable and unhelpful way to describe the overall system affecting us here. I’m glad I’ve decided to write about these other projects and qualities of our place here. Once I have the LOFAM description I’ll also be writing about them as well; Cait has promised to contribute a significant piece of writing. I hope I’ll be able to follow up on this soon.
Nothing more for today.
28th of October
It’s been a very slow day. This state of torpor has been more or less consistent for the last week or so, and it’s this sort of downward trend in activity that starts to worry me more than I like to admit. Not a lot has happened, so I’ll use this entry to describe my musings on this topic more than anything else.
My thoughts on this matter are split in a couple directions. Part of me harbors doubt that my perceptions are accurate—this is an additional, unneeded phantom on top of my already profound feelings of unsureness. On the other hand, the brunt of my consideration in this matter focuses on a couple of factors that have heavily fed the idea that things are downtrending in activity. Despite the number of people on this server being higher than ever, it seems as if a rapidly dwindling number of people are talking at any given time. The exact numbers here are difficult to assess—I determined that mspa-lit has an average of about 5,000 messages per day, but I don’t know anything about what the average is for other channels, or how that’s morphed over time. Thus—with the exception of daily messages for mspa-lit—I’m forced to rely on my feelings in the matter, and I don’t generally consider that a good metric for much of anything.
Another factor to consider is the people themselves; there’s been a gradual disappearance of certain key members from the server. Nights has been gone for months, and Rune left when Hiveswap was released. I talked with Rune recently, who had joined the server briefly to shill something and left again; they stated that they’ve been happier after leaving the server, a fact that troubles me greatly. When I pressed for more information, they said that the channel organization is an unmitigated mess and that Makin’s methods for handling the server are what has influenced their decision to stay away, as it causes them too much stress.
I can’t really fault them for this of course; their health is important, and far be it from me to force anyone to be here who doesn’t want to be. Even if I plausibly could do that, I wouldn’t—the point is defeated if people are only obligated to stay here, and they don’t truly want to be. However, this leads me to my next thought: perhaps people enjoy it here less, and are going elsewhere to spend their time?
This possibility truly worries me. There’s been talk recently between people, including myself, that we would like to stay here and that we enjoy our time together. However, when we go through these lag periods it makes me feel the opposite is true. Has there been some sort of change in the server that is influencing people to spend less time here? Is it real life obligations getting in the way?
As to the former, the main reason that pops out to me would be the Patreon channels. The server seemed to have too many channels before the Patreon was established, with 13 visible to the public. Now that the Patreon has been around for some time and we have the play-ss13 channel, we now have a grand total of 23. That is entirely too unwieldy and exhausting to look at for many people. Additionally, it’s problematic because the ability of anyone to make channels for what they want ends up withdrawing conversation from the other channels it was already found in. This effect has been pronounced the most in altgen and mspa-lit—altgen topics, usually of shitty memes of some sort, are being held instead in a slew of channels elsewhere. The same is true of mspa-lit—hb’s channel has been converted into a Pokemon theme, which subsequently has kept conversations about it from happening in mspa-lit.
I think this sort of harsh conversational distribution actually leads to a net decrease in conversation. It’s nice to keep certain topics from completely overriding discussion, such as in the case of play-ss13, but it seems to discourage people from talking in either channel as a result. It’s disadvantageous and I’m regretting the proposal for SS13 to have its own channel. On the other hand, Sea Hitler has expressed that SS13 conversation being directed to #gaming would completely overwhelm any other conversation and flood the channel, so it may be that this is untenable as well.
My doubts on all of this are more agonizing than anything else. I’ve tried to remain objective throughout the course of writing this journal, but situations like this are sincerely bothersome. It casts a pall over my faith that I can write all of this in an adequate fashion; am I viewing this place objectively enough to write about it? Can I be trusted to not inject my biases into this document?
My own writing abilities aside, all of this leads me to troubling thoughts about the future of the place, broadly speaking. I’ve mentioned before that I would like to see the HSD persist as long as possible, and of course I’m sure that it will last for quite some time yet (9000 people don’t disappear overnight). I’m simply unsure of how long, or in what manner.
This actually brings me to a discussion we had the other night, where I felt it was necessary to point out that the emphasis of Homestuck on our server is gradually diminishing. We’ve already had channels dedicated to all manner of conversation since the server’s inception, so it’s not entirely inconceivable that we could simply rebrand into a server dedicated to some other topic. I don’t know if that’s advisable at this point, but in the future who can be sure? Makin seems fine with the idea of incorporating new content into our culture all the time, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such a change did occur at some point in the distant future.
Furthermore, what kind of demographic changes will the server go through as time passes? It may be that the cabal of regulars we currently witness get totally recycled as time goes by, and within another year the differences will be quite noticeable. This aspect bothers me less, although is still bitter to process. I greatly enjoy talking to the people that talk here currently, it’s always a sad occasion when a regular departs. On the other hand, gaining newer regulars is a great thing; it keeps the place interesting, if nothing else. Optimally we would keep as many old regulars as possible while still gaining new people.
I don’t know. I’m simply filled with a great deal of fear of the future, my worst fear being of course that this place will suddenly break apart completely. Alternatively, if we are simply forced to go through great change as time goes by, then it’s a different matter. I will still be greatly disappointed in the loss of anyone that currently talks here, but as long as this place still exists and people still talk in it, then I will go forward. I am resolute in this matter: I will not abandon this place as long as there are others who I can share it with.
I sincerely hope that things improve in the future, and that my trepidation is baseless. Nothing more for today.
30th of October
It’s occurred to me that I’ve gone for quite some time without explaining one of the more seminal works that have been introduced to us in mspa-lit. Worm, by an internet author known as Wildbow, is a sprawling, ambitious work concerning superheroes. It was introduced by Makin some months ago, and—due both to the quality of the work and Makin’s intense shilling—it became one of the more popular works we’ve discussed here.
The story itself concerns a young woman named Taylor, who can control all manner of arthropods such as insects, arachnids, etc. Without going into too much detail, the story concerns her rise from being naïve, idealist, seeking to better things to being exposed to the harsher realities of a system that forces people to work according to its whims or be punished. The scope of the work is incredible; in many ways it’s reminiscent of Homestuck, specifically how it begins small and then rapidly balloons into a work encompassing the entire world and more.
This kind of pattern in the literature that attracts us is fairly evident at this point. I had come to the realization some time ago that it was what I really enjoyed, and the more we discuss such works the more obvious it becomes that this is the sort of thing we’re interested in collectively. It should be blindingly obvious based on the strength of our attraction Homestuck and its fanventures already, but it’s also arguable that the fanventures are more attractive to us because they specifically follow the plot devices of Homestuck, rather than just its general literary course.
As far as Worm on our server is concerned, however, it was the source for mspa-lit’s longest name change by far: read-worm was the dominant name of the channel for months, and (as far as I’m aware) has come to be regarded as a default for it. Now the name is the similarly entitled read-glow-worm: Glow Worm being the prologue to what is effectively going to be Worm 2, and is coming out now.
The story of Worm and the other works by Wildbow have injected a large amount of conversational energy and culture into our group, and since Wildbow releases new installments on a regular basis it may very well be that the primary focus of our channel switches from Homestuck centric content to Worm 2 instead10. There is also the chance that Hussie begins writing a new work, in which case I’m confident in saying that we would very swiftly come back to MSPA content.
Of note, since Glow Worm has started there’s been a rather interesting development: appearing for effectively only one sentence, a random character named Mlekk has somehow captured our attention. Their line included roleplay, with them “oozing” into the conversation and leaving. This was just enough for us, it seems, and many of us in mspa-lit changed our names to reflect our solidarity with this unimportant fictional character.
There are at least a dozen people with #CultofMlekk appended to the end of their name; this sort of spontaneous change in atmosphere never ceases to entertain me, and it’s always heartening to see numerous people involved with it at any given time. There are many such examples of this behavior, although whether they’re short-lived or will actually acquire some longevity is never certain. I wonder if there’s some sort of definite quality that can help to determine the fate of these interactions.
Nothing more for today.
31st of October
Today was rather nice on the server. I got home at around 6 PM EST, and at first there was a lag in activity that fed my fear greatly, and I became somewhat worried. However, I went and talked in #general for a while and refamiliarized myself with the channel a little bit. Some of the regulars were around, notably fash, Neth (aka “it’s ya boy”), sea hitler, Nujaka Knight, and Erieolae. I spoke with them for a while about things seemingly at random, and rather than worry about the relative level of activity I simply let things progress as they willed.
It was surprisingly enjoyable to not care about the progression of the conversation. I was able to take in the relative personalities of the people involved a little bit more; Nujaka is extremely concerned with shitposting in gen, to the point that they forcibly tell people to move it elsewhere. I’m sort of concerned about this, in that it may hinder discussion if they’re too domineering, but it is a rule that shitposting absolutely does not belong in #general. I guess that’s just how it goes. Neth is also an mspa-lit regular, one who has shared my concern of declining activity in the past. They seem to accept it more than I do, although I’m not sure if this is due to previous experience or lack thereof. They seem fairly calm and collected whenever I talk to them, although the more nuanced details of their nature are a mystery to me.
Speaking of mspa-lit regulars, there’s a rather interesting character I’ve yet to speak about. Cookiefonster used to have more presence on the server some time ago, expressing that he left because he was “annoyed that this server was basically nothing but arguments about dumb things”. Without fail I could find him talking on the CANMT server, however. After some months of this, eventually I received a message from him asking to see this journal. After providing the document, he started talking in mspa-lit again. I’m not sure what inspired his request, but he said he feels like he’s missed out on a wealth of history here and wanted to come back.
As a side note, I’m intensely pleased that my document was the catalyst for this. Inspiring interest in this place has become a rather significant goal of mine in writing this (if not a realistic one). That cookie felt the urge to come back after reading it is rather heartening. I wonder if this document will accomplish such again in the future.
More immediately important, however, cookiefonster came on to discuss some events concerning the nature of internet post history; apparently cookie has been the subject of some intense stalking behavior in the past, with someone going through his post history to an insane degree. This sort of behavior is referred to as “gremlining”, and is more formally defined amongst ourselves as “searching through someone’s posting history with the intent of discovering sensitive or pertinent information”. Toast and WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES both began participating in this conversation as well; it eventually snowballed into a fairly robust conversation that has managed to persist all night, although of course what we’re discussing now is nothing like what the conversation began as.
The conversational shifts have been wild and entertaining: we began of course with the talk of gremlins, but then it transitioned somehow into Youtube Poop history, school, our careers, the Patreon, and so on. The breadth and width of our discussions always entertains me; it’s fascinating how we can switch from serious topics into something extremely lighthearted and decidedly stupid, but then transition just as smoothly back into something serious or personal. It’s actually quite helpful in self-reflection, to talk about our problems and real concerns with each other.
This is a return to the activity that I prize so much in this channel, and is highlighting just how crazy and paranoid my fears of dropping activity are. I feel real sorrow over the fact that I’ve brought this topic up so frequently lately, to the point that it’s become obviously noticeable to anyone I’ve spoken with. I need to have more patience and understanding with people; there is indication that people still care to talk here and will for some time, but even if they don’t I mustn’t grow afraid. The eventual outcome of people leaving or not speaking anymore is why I’m bothering to keep this journal in the first place; it’s the nature of all internet communities to fade away at some point.
That having been said, today is not that day and it doesn’t appear that it will be that day for some time. I will do my best to end my current obsession by the end of this conversation, starting by saying one more time that I sincerely hope this place will not falter anytime soon. I care deeply for everyone here and the place itself, perhaps too much, but I cannot alleviate that feeling (at least not on my own). When the time comes that it does in fact fade away I will absolutely be distraught, but I’ll have this document with me when it’s time to go. As I’ve said, perhaps there will be others who are reluctant to move on as well, and we can remain together as a more tightly knit core? That outcome would certainly be desirable. While I still harbor some nervousness for the future, this idea fills me with some hope.
I wonder what others have to say about this topic honestly. I’ve asked once before publicly and to do so again would probably appear desperate, so I don’t believe I will; nonetheless, I’m interested to hear what others think about this idea of a more reliable cabal of regulars remaining, once all else has fallen away. Perhaps this would be a good idea for a story to write someday.
I really appreciate the presence of these people, and getting the opportunity to speak with them so often. Tripheus, Minish, cookiefonster, Toast, MrNostalgic, CanisLupusAqua, akaTrickster, Shoktherapy, Ngame, tori, wheals, Sardonyx, S, Putnam, Cait, Null, Archiewhite, Solarsail, phantos, sea hitler, and octacle (perhaps a couple more I missed) were all prominent in tonight’s conversations at one point or another. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the people who regularly speak in mspa-lit; it’s simply a small slice of the people involved, those who were present for this set of conversations in particular. Nonetheless, I appreciate them all; I am genuinely thankful that I’ve had the opportunity to get to know these people and talk with them on a regular basis for the past year.
Barring special circumstances, I won’t be talking about this topic any further in this journal. I’ve taken up an egregious amount of space talking about my fears; it’s not the purpose of this journal and I’m starting to worry that harping on this topic will drive people away. It’s time to return to at least a semblance of objectivity, if possible.
That having all been said, I’ll close this entry by saying: thank you guys. I don’t know how many of you will get to see this, but you mean a lot to me—even if I didn’t list your name, the fact that you’re reading this means I appreciate you. Here’s to another year, and hopefully many more after it. Nothing more for today.
Makin
1 by being written about repeatedly in a journal no one will ever read? pretty mean of Toast to imply that
2 important to note I was just saying good night with no additional meaning
3 editor's note: the author of this ancient document transcribes game grumps videos as a hobby.
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
5 me after realizing I'm not even halfway through and I have to review all of it
6 https://youtu.be/5ci7EDcT-7M?t=374
7 despite the name of the game being space station 13, drew manages to miss the point entirely yet again
8 Danganronpa v3, Danganronpa 3 is the anime and Dangan Ronpa is a common mistake for casuals like yourself go play it already -- Fixed, but keeping comment for posterity
9 Drew also remains our tool
10 worm 2 ended up being kinda disappointing so no way unless it gets its shit together