Drew Linky
1st of April
Today is April Fool’s Day, something that a lot of people in our server have been looking forward to. There is a lot of potential for japes and pranks in any online community, and ours especially is prone to some pretty big jokes even on days that aren’t dedicated to the concept. I’ve already described the prank that we did last year at great length, specifically in the entry from the 28th of August 2017. Given the ambitious nature of last year’s prank, there was of course great trepidation over what we would do for April Fool’s Day this year.
This year’s events involved some rather off-the-cuff stuff. First, shortly before April Fool’s Day proper, Makin created a poll asking whether or not we should split #art-music into respective channels. The rest of the mods and I all thought this was a horrible idea: historically, splitting channels has always led to a net decrease in activity, as was displayed with #cartoon-tv. #cartoons and #tv brought in less conversation combined than #cartoon-tv did by itself. Obviously, this was untenable so Makin recombined the channels sometime last year.
We’re afraid that this will be a repeat of history, but the responses to the poll overwhelmingly voted “yes” to splitting the channels, so now we have #music and #art-cosplay. They both appear active for now, but time will tell if this division is sustainable. Rar has also expressed some concerns about the development of #music in even just the one day since it was created, although I’m not privy to the details on that matter. I’ll comment further when I can.
Another, more nuanced joke for today is that people were allowed to type in “quirks”. Quirks are modifications to one’s typing style that are—in theory—meant to convey a distinct tone or feeling to one’s speech patterns. This is based off of parts of Homestuck itself, where certain characters display quirks that are meant to give them flavor (1337 speak is a historical and in-story example).
Unfortunately, this practice is one of the things about Homestuck that exploded into ridiculous popularity at its height. This led to significant overuse of quirks such that the practice is generally seen as undesirable, and now most places have a moratorium on using quirks. Some exceptions include roleplay websites and then Pesterchum, among others.
All of this is to say that the ban on quirks was “lifted” for today, and the result was actually quite amusing for a time. Quirks saw massive increase in usage at first, but then as people grew tired of using them they instituted their own ban on using quirks. This result was a little unexpected: it turns out a simple solution to the quirk problem would have been to simply let everyone burn themselves out on it ages ago.
I jest, of course. If people had been allowed to use quirks from the start then it would probably have ballooned into an outrageous problem over the years as the behavior was normalized. It was rather entertaining to see what many people came up with though; a lot of people end up creating quirks that are visually interesting or serviceable, but not really emotive or very good at expressing some sort of speech pattern without also being tremendously annoying.
In keeping with the holiday spirit, most quirks were only meant to be funny: Rar spoke in nothing but Chinese all day, with others following suit in various languages. WoC impersonated a character from Homestuck so flawlessly that it was honestly frightening on a visceral level, yet also extremely entertaining. It was a shock to discover he was responsible for the impersonation, and in the end it managed to contribute heavily to the bizarre atmosphere of the day.
The last and arguably biggest joke that was implemented was the creation of a channel which was filled only with automated messages generated from the neural network Difarem made the other day. Each message was attached to a person and given a smushed version of that person’s avatar to complete the uncanny repertoire. No one was allowed to post in this channel aside from the associated bot messages, but everyone in the server could see it.
For most of the day, #hangout served as a sort of viewing room: since we weren’t allowed to comment in the bot channel itself, most observations were conducted from there. Especially funny or noteworthy bot messages were pinned, and the channel was archived at the end of the day. It was named #read-tnc, TNC standing for “The Northern Caves”. TNC is one of Makin’s shills, and consists of a group of online friends obsessed with the works of a particular author. The bot channel was supposed to mimic a phenomenon in the story where the characters enter an alternate reality of mishmashed nonsense, after which they become insane—rather on the nose, one might say.
In all, this year’s April Fool’s Day pranks were satisfying enough but unfortunately just couldn’t hold up to the intensity of last year. We may need to plan something far more extreme for April Fool’s of 2019, I have no doubt in my mind that we could come up with something truly extraordinary if we tried. Then again, it will be difficult to top the idea of Makin leaving the server—there is little else I can imagine that is so unlikely. Thankfully we have an entire year to come up with something new.
There has been some more news about Hiveswap: it was discovered today through a post by James Roach that neither he nor Toby Fox will be associated with future acts of Hiveswap, and that apparently there is an NDA in place to prevent us from knowing anything else. This was somewhat expected given the recent loss of other employees from WP, but it is yet more of the trend that has begun to irk us so. What Pumpkin truly seems to be dissolving right before our eyes, and none of us are quite sure what to make of it.
The last thing I’ll say for today is a piece on how the entries for the month of March were received, at the risk of seeming yet still full of myself. I was greeted with a wide range of criticism on the last five weeks’ worth of writing, to the effect that it seemed to be too emotional or charged in nature. People who are usually wholly receptive to the document—Makin, Toast, as a couple examples—were instead rather unsatisfied with how it turned out.
They made mention that a lot of the entries of the last month were little more than glorified complaining, and after some consideration I’ve tried to come up with an explanation for why this may be. March seemed to be extremely turbulent, with lots of conflict happening as one might expect for us. Despite this, there was in fact very little that “happened” to give things that feeling of substantiation.
I’ve tried to quiet my discomfort with this by saying I only write about what material I’m given, but looking through some of these older entries it is very clear that I was upset and trying to unleash my personal feelings through my writing. My criticisms of Makin (while still well deserved) are less objective and more vindictive in nature than usual. It is clear that--yet again--I need to rethink how I’m approaching this and try to figure out a more tenable way of expressing my frustration whenever it should happen to arise, especially in an effort to more accurately preserve the events that occur here.
After some more extensive discussion on the topic with other people present today, I believe we’ve all settled on the idea that March was “just kind of a bad month”. Between our seeming collective irascibility and the lack of very many concrete events to hone-in on, it was just sort of a generally unfortunate time period. I guess the reality of non-eventfulness can’t be helped sometimes. We all hope that April will be a better month for us, and even just with today I think we all already feel like it is better. Here’s to hoping that the feeling will continue.
Nothing more for today.
2nd of April
One of the criticisms lobbied against me yesterday was the fact that I failed to cover something important from March, and I will do so now. This event comes in the form of an addition to Makin’s shill list, namely that of a “leaderboard”. In short, it is a list of all the works Makin is shilling, and every time you complete one of the works your name is put on the board. With this you can keep track of who has read what from Makin’s shills.
I initially ignored this development because it felt insignificant or like a rather large joke, but apparently I was hugely mistaken in this assessment: a sizeable number of people have started reading more of the shill list specifically because of these leaderboards, with two people now having finished the list in its entirety: Minish and Gitaxian. Toast is literally one work away from completing it himself, and then a smattering of others such as Revlar and Khauvinkh are within a couple works of completion as well. Griever has positively been tearing through the list specifically because of the leaderboards, which surprised me for some reason.
I was skeptical of the efficacy of this leaderboard in motivating people to read the shill list more, but it appears my doubt was misplaced. It feels as if the shill list is becoming far more institutionalized than it was before—no doubt this was Makin’s intent, but it went from something seen as a joke to something that is viewed with at least some degree of legitimacy. The general attitude among detractors has only deepened; people like Nights and Tensei have expressed displeasure with being included on the leaderboard since it makes it seem that they’re interested in completing the shill list as well. However, such complaints have been completely offset by the increase of readers. It’s interesting to me how fiercely Makin pushes this literature onto other people, I wonder if he might have any possible ulterior motive for it besides sharing what he loves with others.
Today I was consciously made aware of the fact that Rar wants to step down from being the #music pseudo. It mentions that the channel has rapidly developed in a way that it had not foreseen. Olki is also acting as the pseudo of #music right now, and Makin apparently expressed surprise that it had not asked to step down sooner. I assume Rar would still be acting as pseudo to #art-cosplay, which I am content with. Rar seems most happy there and is familiar with the lay of the land so to speak.
More related to the fandom at large, something incredibly tumultuous has happened. At some point early in the day, around 2:30 PM EST, the official MSPA website mspaintadventures.com completely disappeared. Instead, it now redirects to homestuck.com. The ramifications are unclear but no doubt far-reaching implications can be gathered from this change.
The website is, naturally, more dedicated to Homestuck than MSPA was. This comes with the nuance that it takes emphasis away from other adventures Hussie has made, which some are taking to be a sign that Hussie will in fact not be working on any other new stories in the future. This prognosis feels a bit premature to me, although I certainly hope it’s not the case.
Due to the complex nature of Homestuck, it has many pages that rely on the browser and page layout in order to achieve a particular effect in-story. In the first breath after people learned of homestuck.com popping up, there was concern that these pages would be significantly altered or, at worst, rendered so poorly in the transition from Flash to HTML5 or what have you that they would be unusable. Thankfully, with a few exceptions it seems our concern was mostly unwarranted.
Regardless of how necessary that concern may be, Skyplayer has begun reading through in earnest—checking more important pages first and less important ones after—for significant changes that could compromise the integrity of the experience. This would be noticed most easily by people who read the story on MSPA first, but there is worthwhile concern that such errors could drastically impact new readers as well. Skyplayer will present these transitioning-related errors to whoever is in charge of managing the site—likely Viz Media at this point—should such suggestions be requested by them in the future.
Particularly worthy of note was that, shortly after homestuck.com went online, there was an “Info” tab with links to related materials, such as a link to the fandom-driven Homestuck Wiki. I bring this up because, for a short while, the Homestuck and Hiveswap subreddit itself was also linked there, something that caught a lot of us off guard. The effects of this were immediately noticeable.
Shortly after the new site went up, we started receiving a far larger influx of people than we were used to seeing on any particular day. In the span of maybe an hour we saw several dozen new people join, and at this point we were what I could only call giddy at the development. It was highly amusing to us that this was happening, but then all of that was undercut a short while later when the link to the subreddit was removed from homestuck.com.
This change, while it probably should have been expected, was more than a little disappointing. We’re not sure why exactly this was done and any in depth speculation at this point is completely unwarranted, but for a short time there was considerable furor in mspa-lit over it. Tipsy echoed my feelings on the matter, saying something to the effect of “I would have preferred that they never added us honestly”. Others are more ambivalent on the matter, although in general I think all of us were at least greatly amused by the incident despite any anger over it.
On the opposite side of this are people like Niklink, who is distressed with the idea of Viz’s involvement in the Homestuck property. There is a warranted concern that corporate influence will turn the work into a veritable cash cow, and that Viz muddying the waters will lead to nothing short of complete fandom ruination in the pursuit of profit. Archie has taken this viewpoint to its utmost extreme, publicly saying that he was “literally in tears” over this development because it “is the death of fandom as we know it”. I can’t speak for anyone else but this felt overly dramatic to me.
I think that most of us are urging for calm and to not make too many assumptions on the matter. There is a nonzero chance that Viz will put the link to the subreddit back up in the future, although it’s impossible to tell at this point. It’s important to point out that, up to this point, Makin had been offline and thus was out of the loop on certain points. He had been around for the link being introduced on the website, going so far as to put up a “Welcome to the Subreddit!” post in preparation for it.
With this in mind, Makin was not around for when we discovered that the subreddit had been taken off the page. Many of us were worried what he might think about this development, but when he came back he seemed downright pleased with it. Confused, everyone present pressed him a bit further on why he was okay with the change. He mentioned the problem of getting too many people in the server, citing 10,000 as a decent amount to keep the place active “100% of the time”, and that many more would lead to destabilization of the HSD (a phenomenon I’ve described at length in the form of “The Eternal September”, the entry over which can be found on the 26th of January 2018).
The last noteworthy thing of today is that there were yet more firings at What Pumpkin, to the point that it truly seems the company has been gutted completely. Significant artists, musicians, and the creative director himself are all now unattached to the project. While this raises enormous questions over the future of Hiveswap and indeed Homestuck itself, there is the added benefit that our baggage with What Pumpkin is effectively gone.
We may have an opportunity here for a new start, and perhaps to establish some solid relations with Viz if such an opportunity may arise. While it is highly unlikely that such a thing may happen, it is still a possibility that people can get excited about—historically the community absence of WP has been enormously bothersome to a wide variety of people, but there is the chance that Viz will be more involved in the community from here on. Time will tell if this arrangement is a more beneficial one for us.
Nothing more for today.
3rd of April
The Reddit April Fool’s Day event is in full swing now. For those unfamiliar, Reddit always holds an event, which they refer to as a “social experiment”, on April Fool’s Day every year. Such events have become highly anticipated over the years due to a few of them being rather exciting and engaging for people in general.
This year’s event is called the “Circle of Trust”. Every user on Reddit with an account created before April Fool’s Day of this year (as is customary for each April Fool’s Day event) is allowed to create exactly one “circle”, which is graphically depicted as a literal circle containing smaller, orbiting circles. The circle comes with a password set by the owner, and one invites people to join their circle by sharing the password. Once the password is put in correctly, users then have the option to join or betray the circle. Betraying the circle permanently disbands and destroys it.
As more people are invited to a circle, the chance of that circle being destroyed grows larger. Therein lies the experiment: Reddit is no doubt collecting statistics on average circle size before betrayal, patterns of inviting people to circles, or innumerable other metrics that could be used to study human behavior through this event. This is something they have done for previous years as well; patterns will spontaneously arise throughout the course of the experiment, which is often what makes it fun for the people involved and any observers.
Naturally, this has had a noticeable effect on the HSD’s users as well. All throughout the day users were messaging each other seeing if they could join circles or have users join their circles, only distributing their own key to people they trusted. Nights and I joined each others’ circles, and his circle currently has over twenty users in it (some of whom being from CANMT, if I’m not mistaken). People are ruthlessly trying to join as many circles as they can convince people to let them in, and then betraying those circles immediately. Carlarc already betrayed Makin’s circle, and Gitaxian asked me to sacrifice mine (although for scientific purposes). Naturally they have grown quite the reputation in just a short amount of time.
Here near the end of the day, however, it is clear that this experiment is not as engaging as last years was. Many people are already tired of hearing about it (Makin: “can we stop talking about boring circles”), which is probably caused by one thing in particular: the scope of the Circle of Trust is just too small. The breadth and depth of this event is unfortunately nowhere close to what Reddit did for April of 2017. In order to help understand, I should now describe that event as well: it was an experiment simply dubbed “Place”.
With no warning or preamble, on April 1st last year the Reddit admins unveiled a blank 1000 by 1000 pixel canvas. For 72 hours any user on Reddit with an old enough account was allowed to drag and drop a colored pixel or tile onto any position of the canvas, after which there was a cooldown before they could place another. The tagline for this project on the subreddit was: “Individually you can create something. Together you can create something more.” None of us knew at the start just how true this would be.
The very beginning was loose and chaotic, with no one really sure what to do. Any creations were small due to the placement cooldown and lack of coordination. This swiftly changed, however—within a couple of hours, the first of many factions were born. In the lower right corner of the canvas, a large group of people began placing the color blue down and expanding it as rapidly as possible. Just above them, another group began doing this with the color green. In the top right corner, a similar faction arose with the color red. These three factions warred viciously for a while, until a semi-stable truce was reached and each color stuck to their own territories, eventually being subsumed by later groups.
More complicated projects arose: the flags of many countries were reproduced in various sizes, with some being fairly small and others being outrageously big; a group succeeded in completely recreating the Mona Lisa in pixel form; the Darth Plagueis copypasta was miraculously written out in its entirety and for the most part left unbothered by others; most commonly, an incredible number of individual subreddits carved their own spot out of the canvas to advertise themselves and pay homage to their subject material.
/r/Homestuck was one such subreddit, and for the three days that Place was active we organized both on the subreddit and on the HSD with frankly outrageous amounts of effort to immortalize our section of the event. Makin created an entire channel for discussion and coordination on our section of the canvas, sometimes leading the charge himself. Many such as myself, Cookiefonster, Linkslittlefriend, and Kingarthur furiously kept track of changes to our place (which had to be relocated at least once), sometimes sparking the annoyance of people who were less interested (none of whom I can recall now).
We struck alliances and bargains with other subreddits or groups in order to secure more space: at various points we were raided and attacked by other groups, and /r/India (yes, the subreddit dedicated to the country of India, of all places) once came to our aid to battle away aggressors. It was a manic event, with no one wanting to miss developments or sleep lest our place was destroyed in our absence--we were in fact forced to relocate entirely at least once.
Near the very end, we were aggrieved by a subreddit with a similar name to our own subreddit in a cheap attempt to subvert our effort for their own. As a result, some of our logo was wrongly colored at the time that the experiment was stopped, but all things considered our section of Place came out just fine. The completed canvas for Place in its entirety is commonly considered no less than modern art, and stands as a testament to the power of teamwork and sheer determination. If one looks closely enough they will find our immortalized and heartfelt contribution there as well (hint: it’s near the upper left corner just below the infamous clown from SS13, funnily enough).
More related to the modern day, the incredible flow of information from yesterday has not quite ceased: today we received yet more news, from multiple places in fact. First to comment on is a bona fide newspost from Hussie himself (in case of future updates, it’s the one on the 3rd of April), the first thing that he’s posted to the news section since Hiveswap came out last September.
The post itself is fairly dry, and simply tells us about the site makeover in an official sense. So bereft of his iconic witty humor is the post that some people, while still positive, remarked that it didn’t actually sound like Hussie very much (“I mean, they got him to do a news post, even if it did sound like they had Andrew at gunpoint”, says Squarewave). As near as I could tell, most people were simply happy to hear from Hussie again in any capacity.
As if that weren’t enough, we received word officially from WP on their blog about all of the recent firings. The post is positively dripping with the sort of language one might expect from a company profile. This isn’t entirely surprising on its own, but it did prompt an impressive number of people reblogging the post to ask, in various fashions, “What the fuck happened to all the What Pumpkin staff that were fired?” I will be nothing short of gobsmacked if we receive any sort of public word about this.
The attitude from Tumblr is a stark reversal of what people have noted in the past; it is typical that the subreddit community and the HSD are more negative in their perceptions of what transpires concerning Homestuck, whereas the Tumblr community is usually pretty accepting of most developments. Today, the opposite is true: most people here are pretty content with these changes and the Tumblr side of the fandom is nothing short of incensed.
The reason why this reversal has occurred is not imminently clear, and I hesitate to make any final judgments on the matter. If I were forced to speculate, however, I would perhaps point towards what it is that’s being affected exactly. What Pumpkin staff historically has not had very good interactions with people from the subreddit or the HSD, but their Tumblr presence is pretty solid. It may be that users on Tumblr are far more familiar with WP staff than we are at this point, so any of their dismissals from WP are more shocking to them than they are to the HSD.
There are certainly people here who are upset at the news; Tipsy is absolutely furious with this development, but she’s stated this is because it reeks of a similar incident in the past when Hiveswap was still in development hell (she has also written a post to commemorate the dismissed staff members). In general though, people from the HSD seem to be far more content with the proceedings, and this departure from more normal attitudes is interesting to watch.
Before I get into too much detail on that though, it’s prudent to comment on an exciting new development that was also featured in the WP blog post: they released a trailer to a set of minigames that WP will be “shifting focus to”, which has been dubbed “Hiveswap Friendsim”, to come out “sometime very soon”. The minigames will consist of a visual novel style wherein the player talks with characters from the Troll Call, heralding exposition on these characters that some feel was very badly needed. Hussie is even writing for it, which is something that everyone who even remotely cares about these properties should be excited about.
Ironically, this development was one that indeed caused some upset with users from the HSD. The newspost was worded ambiguously, such that some interpreted it to mean that work on Hiveswap would be halted due to these minigames. Toast and Spiral were ungraciously missing while this was occurring, so Nights and I ended up having to go into #hiveswap for an hour or two to keep the peace and explain what this actually means to people.
The atmosphere in #hiveswap was nothing short of tense, with people arguing viciously over what these developments might mean. It was honestly a rather interesting experience, sort of like traveling to another country. I was completely surrounded by people I didn’t recognize, and the proceedings of the place were culturally mysterious to me. There was an incredible, if understandable, emphasis on relating things to the various characters from Hiveswap and especially the Troll Call, but this was of course overshadowed by the ongoing conflict of the Hiveswap Friendsim news.
One user named Dudester joined the HSD specifically because of this news, calling it “worrying corporate lingospeak” and decrying the Hiveswap Friendsim as something that would take away from Hiveswap’s development. I ended up pinning a brief summary to discourage further rabblerousing, clarifying that it is clearly specified in the newspost WP released that development on Hiveswap was still the greatest priority, although it’s not clear at this point whether WP will be working on it or if Viz Media will get one of their teams on it.
One of Dudester’s concerns was monetization: they claim that WP putting a price tag on the Friendsim would be unethical given the “low quality of the game” as evidenced by the trailer. Most tried to assure him that WP would probably not be putting a price on these minigames, or if they did it would be somewhere in the $1-2 USD range. Even this relatively low amount proved too much to contemplate, and they left the server shortly after the discussion. It is worth noting that the “low quality” of Hiveswap Friendsim was deemed a misguided understanding of how visual novels usually operate, although perhaps they were truly that put-off by the art style.
Whatever the reason for their vitriol, Dudester’s fears were confirmed by a post from the developer of Hiveswap Friendsim. This fellow is named Trace, and he was previously in charge of the site for a webcomic we followed and critiqued heavily (some would say mocked) called Neokosmos. The post stipulates that all of the Hiveswap Friendsim games will be 99 cents each. It’s not known how many of these games they plan on creating, but this price point is so low that I don’t think anyone can bother being too upset about it.
All of these developments are inordinately exciting. Bambosh summed it up concisely, saying: “it's whiplash / we went from borderline silence to borderline hourly updates in the span of two days”. The increase in activity is unlike anything I’ve seen since joining the HSD, except maybe for when Hiveswap: Act 1 came out. I would go so far as to call it magical—the only question now is whether this trend will last, something I’m sure everyone is morbidly curious to see.
Nothing more for today.
4th of April
There was some discussion about Bowman and Stutzman today that I felt like writing down. I’ve mentioned before that the two created a series of comedy videos on Bowman’s Youtube account that the community has received warmly. Bowman in particular is already important in the Homestuck fandom since he composed music for the comic, but Stutzman is popular for us through his videos with Bowman and is also an independent composer.
Of the two, it’s noted that Bowman appears to be satisfied with his successes. Tensei lamented over Bowman not being as popular as he deserves based on his musical talent. Makin commented: “I've always thought bowman is comfortable with where he's at”, and Minish chimed in: “man you think bowman has it bad / stutzman only gets like / three sales each album”, which is the exchange that inspired me to write about this conversation.
To be completely honest I’m not that into the music from Stutzman or Bowman (not a reflection on them in any way—I’m notoriously unattached to music in general), but something about the way that the above discussion played out helped me to become cognizant of the affection this community has for them. I’ve always been mildly puzzled by how much everyone seems to care about these two people, but regardless of why this is the case I’ve been taken by just how much everyone here enjoys the duo.
Beyond a simple enjoyment of their work, it is clear to me now that people in mspa-lit earnestly care about the success and wellbeing of Bowman and Stutzman. At one point it may have been a more casual enjoyment of their work, but in the current day it seems obvious to me—if no one else necessarily—that there is real love here for these two artists. I find these displays to be utterly heartwarming.
A trend that I’ve neglected to write on before is the increasing popularity of Star Trek with various members of mspa-lit. I guess calling it a “trend” is disingenuous—I only know of two people who are actively watching it right now, but it has been notable nonetheless. Makin started watching it sometime last month, going through episodes of The Original Series as listed by a “must watch” guide on 4chan. After he completed this he watched the movies and, perhaps partially at Tensei’s urging, began watching The Next Generation as well. Minish followed suit not too long ago, and has been positively blasting through the show so far.
To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that Makin hadn’t seen the show before. Even if it weren’t for Star Trek’s enormous popularity worldwide, it is historically important in a rather specific sense: Star Trek gave rise to the modern concept of fanfiction, which I would have thought important enough by itself to warrant a look from Makin. Given the show’s success and long history of broadcasting, there is surely an unbelievable amount of fanfiction to sift through. Even better still, I’m sure that a significant portion of it is geared towards more rational bents of thought, which should satisfy him greatly. It is nothing short of a fanfic smorgasbord.
This all aside, there have been no more immense bombshells from Viz Media or What Pumpkin, which is probably for the best (I’ve commented often in the last two days that we’re being positively spoiled with all of this new information). I am delighted to say, though, that we are still witnessing some better interaction with Viz Media concerning the new homestuck.com website.
I mentioned already that there has been some significant trepidation with people in general over how the new website is structured, given the nature of Homestuck as a complicated form of media. A lot of pieces of the webcomic have been altered or in some cases even ruined by the transfer from Flash to HTML5, and people like Skyplayer have been meticulously combing the comic for evidence of changes or sections that need to be coded differently.
Even more impressive, Skyplayer themselves has assembled a thorough written list of these problems, and has been laboriously writing a changelog of stuff that changes in the site’s construction from day to day (this log may be found in the Related Materials document, in Appendix C under “Log of changes to homestuck.com”). The errors they find have been getting submitted to Viz Media, and here’s the part that’s catching everyone by surprise: Viz has been responding promptly to all of the important suggestions in earnest.
This has been true for all of the visual or structural elements of the website, such as the graphical inconsistencies in certain pages, but Viz has also taken other comments seriously: the site redesign initially featured agitating popup ads that would appear every 15-20 pages, which served as the basis for a lot of people’s frustration with the new site at first. After people criticized this, today we noticed that the popup ads are gone.
Another example of this behavior is in the so-called landing page, or what people see when they first enter the website. Since Homestuck came out MSPA’s landing page always displayed the very first page of the comic, which shows the protagonist standing in his room. The new website mirrored this and included that image as the landing page, but also enhanced it with similar shots of all the other main characters doing the same thing. Each character had a random chance of being the landing page for people visiting homestuck.com.
To the layman this would appear to be a positive development, and it was surely well-intended. Unfortunately, the very existence of certain characters is a massive spoiler for people who have never read the story before, and so this addition prompted some backlash. Astonishingly, after complaints were sent out people quickly discovered that Viz had removed all of the characters’ landing pages that counted as significant spoilers.
In the grand scheme of things this is a minor move, but the spirit of it is nothing short of astounding. For those of familiar with the near-complete lack of involvement from What Pumpkin, this is not unlike being found by search-and-rescuers after being stranded in the desert for years. Far be it from me to speak for everyone, but what this improved involvement signifies for the future is nothing short of exciting.
Obviously there are some who are not impressed. Revlar perhaps jokingly commented: “Stop worshipping Viz for doing basic, boring shit”, although he has always had extremely high expectations for just about everything (a more or less defensible position, all things considered). This has not deterred those of us who are excited by this turn of events, such as Makin.
Makin’s usually cynical attitude has been replaced by a joviality that is nothing short of striking. After effusing praise for Viz listening to user feedback, he suddenly brought up a possibility for what the epilogue might be now that Viz is involved; this is something Makin is usually rather pessimistic about, but in this scenario he was completely the opposite. Sora was thus prompted to asked: “Makin have you joined the "epilogue optimists" camp?” to which he responded: “with viz as they are, yes / if they can get hussie to do PR for them, they can do anything”. If that statement alone isn’t a sign of the times, then I don’t know what is.
Nothing more for today.
5th of April
Not a lot to speak of today: Hussie released an interview in which he spoke about his history with Homestuck and the partnership with Viz. I’ve only skimmed it myself, but from that and the reactions of others to it, that appears to be all that was worthy of note. It mostly serves as a reminder of the new print books that are supposed to be released before long, something that we’re unsure of whether to look forward to or not.
At this point the main attraction to printed Homestuck books are the commentary within--we’re certainly not enjoying them for the print medium itself, it robs Homestuck of a lot of the qualities that make it so good. Instead, the commentary itself is valuable because it offers greater insight into the making of the comic.
Unfortunately, we’re hesitant because it’s still not imminently clear whether these new printed books will features old commentary written for the previous set of prints from some years ago, or whether they will be newly written. Optimally it would include both the old commentary and new commentary, but I don’t think anyone is holding their breath.
Still, the increase in activity from Hussie himself is something we’re all happy with. Phantos described the sequence of events we’ve been subjected to over the last few years quite well:
Andrew runs out of money, inks deal with Viz, fires employees, gets rich again but has to keep working. / If someone told you that this would happen after so long and that it immediately jumpstarted a bunch of activity, idk.
It’s strange of course, but I doubt anyone could call this an uninteresting turn of events all things considered. In the end, we’re mostly just happy to have more to talk about again.
Nothing more for today.
6th of April
Today saw the last of the comic entries for Hiveswap. It proceeded as normal, but there was something a tad more disappointing about this week than previous. It is customary at this point to bemoan the choice of winners each week, talking about the quality of each comic included.
This was especially common of the second and third place winners when they were awarded to comics that were deemed “low effort”. One instance I can remember relied on the theme of a character (branded as being the “vaporwave troll”) to make a very quick one-off joke, which many found dissatisfying. Despite these grumblings we moved on each week, because almost every time the first place winner was satisfying enough that we didn’t mind the rest.
This week was different. There was an immense, 143-page comic draw by a user named SourisChicot called Another World. It is nothing short of impressive: drawn entirely by hand, the art is kind of rough in places but has all of the signs of a loving and dedicated creator. The story itself is enthralling at parts and actually does all of the things one would want a Homestuck/Hiveswap comic to do: it is interesting, faithful to the source material (and respectful with its exploration thereof), and is actually written well.
The comic had been in the making for a period of several weeks, and when it was finally completed recently everyone immediately assumed it was a sure win for the final week of Hiveswap comics. “if i could give this comic a rating I'd rate it 100 out of 10 tbh” one user named thedeer.jpg humorously commented, and while it’s hard for me to find them at this point rest assured that there were a plethora of comments all saying similar things.
The point is that it seemed obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that this comic would win first prize.There was some joking that Another World would only win second or third place, given the history of the comic contest and how questionable the judging has been in the past. Sure enough, our fears were confirmed and then some.
The comic in question didn’t win first place, or second place, or even third place. It in fact did not win anything, which prompted a veritable flood of confusion (“did the 150 page comic not fuckin win” from Carlarc) and then upset (“anyone else sad that the 140+ page comic entered / In the comic contest didn't get mentioned” from Prime) when people realized what had happened.
Ever since this was revealed to us, mention of the comic contest has been utterly tainted by this injustice. It’s even led to some rather disturbing conspiracy theorizing, with users speculating that the comic was skated over because the organizers are afraid it’ll make Act 2 look bad. There is real fear that the comic was selected against because it would draw unfavorable comparisons between itself and Act 2 once it’s released, which means that people are now questioning the quality of the second installment of Hiveswap. How close this is to the actual reasoning is impossible to say and it’s more than likely inaccurate, but the possibility is worrying nonetheless.
After some time of this, the furor naturally died down. Tensei mentioned that the real reason it wasn’t selected is probably closer to “it was too long” than anything else. Toast commented: “just passively agree that its a shame that he didnt win but say that if people are fans of the comic they can support him”, and in this way the community was not totally happy with letting the author of Another World go unrewarded for their efforts. After learning Another World didn’t win, Makin asked if people wanted him to gift SourisChicot some money from the Patreon--the answer was a complete, resounding yes.
The prize for first place in the comic contest each week is $75 towards merchandise in the affiliated store. Thus, after confirming whether this was an acceptable expenditure with the Patreon donors, Makin gave the author $75. It was briefly argued that this was a better prize than winning, even, because that money can be spent anywhere instead of just in the What Pumpkin store. Despite this, I think it’s safe to say everyone feels a little worse about the entire affair for the fact that we felt compelled to do this in the first place. Tipsy summed everything up better than I ever could: “this contest ends how it began / utter bullshit”.
Outside of this, I feel like describing this odd phenomenon that’s been taking place over the last few days. It was subtle at first, but now it’s undeniable: mspa-lit has been getting far more new users than is usual. We thought this was a raid from altgen when we first noticed it, because some notable figures like $trider were among those showing up to speak more often. Yet, it seems that the majority of these people are simply wanderers who found their way in by chance.
Nonetheless, it elicited comment about such individuals. I think that one such user who has come into at least vague prominence lately is a fellow named tmtmtl30, or just tmtm. Tmtm has been using mspa-lit regularly for the last few weeks now, and is still fairly enigmatic to us.
She appeara to be a fairly pessimistic individual: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of discussions involving how we feel about certain works will witness at least one comment from her saying, “oh, that? That sucked!” I don’t mean this as a condemnation, somehow she manages to say it in ways that we (or at least I) find amusing. It has been interesting having another such person in our fold, and I look forward to seeing how her presence plays out in the future.
Finally, I mentioned a long time ago the idea that I could have some pseudos write about their own channels if they felt like it. I won’t describe these pieces at any length, they’re for the writers to portray their homes in whatever way they see fit without my own words acting as a filter. Rar was very happy about this idea, and it has been writing away for some time now. A full length article is more than I expected, but Rar appears happy to do this, so I’m looking forward to what it can come up with.
A more unexpected but no less welcome addition is from WoC, which I have included in the Related Materials under Appendix B: “Channel Descriptions”, subsection “#gaming”. One of the things he writes about is in fact relevant to recent server history, so I feel like I should describe it here. I’ve actually touched on this topic before, but to summarize it, WoC feels like he is embroiled in conflict between himself and the rest of the mods--especially Makin--over the nature of #gaming as a legitimate channel.
WoC hates the treatment of his channel: in short he feels like it is considered nothing more than a joke, and he claims that all attempts to get people to use it are met with derision. He has been slowly ramping up this rhetoric for the last several weeks, and finally it came to a head. I think he considers me more approachable or bendable, so he has complained about this to me at length several times now, although I’m unsure if he’s done this with others. I’ve already made it clear to him that I support moving #gaming talk to #gaming (who doesn’t?), but he insists that no one else takes it seriously.
One of the oft-cited issues is that, when people are told to move to the right channel, they complain and resist. This is certainly true: however, WoC also stipulated that people actively hate on #gaming for this reason. After looking into this issue more closely, I discovered that people do this far less than he suspected.
In fact, across all 16.5 million messages this server has on it, the phrase “#gaming sucks” has been explicitly uttered exactly once (by a user named Kreuz, who is not exactly of the sort to take seriously). After telling WoC this, I think that he’s toned down a little bit. Maybe I’ve mollified him sufficiently, or perhaps he’s mulling over other things he doesn’t like about the treatment of his channel. For as hard a time as I give him on the matter, he is simply correct that people don’t use #gaming the right way sometimes. Maybe we should be making more of an effort to help with this.
Nothing more for today.
7th of April
Nothing of strict importance today, but there was an exchange that I felt would be good to include for posterity’s sake.
We were shitting around in mspa-lit as usual, and Nights mentioned that he’s at the beach. This is completely unremarkable outside of the fact that he hates swimming in the ocean, so naturally we wondered why he was bringing this up. He then mentions that there are two people, a couple, standing in front of him and blocking his path to shore. This is where the fun begins.
It started off innocently enough: we simply asked for clarification. “Why are they blocking your path? Why can’t you just go around them?” At this point Nights mentions that they are “PDAing too much”, meaning “public display of affection”. This might make sense at first, but then more questions followed. What does “PDAing” in this context mean? Nights refused to explain any further--it’s assumed that he was too embarrassed to say exactly what was happening--but naturally we started to lightly make fun of him for this.
This particular brand of mockery revolves around a joke that I personally consider on the same tier as haha long memes. It started on 4chan, but to put it simply there are two figures: the “Virgin X” and the “Chad Y”. “Chad” as a term is a catch-all for people who are somehow superior to the Virgin in this joke, and the two are typically graphically depicted (using bases that are edited to be context-appropriate) with short descriptions of each peppered into the image.
The Virgin is always a small, thin, and dejected looking person with undesirably skittish traits while the Chad is shown to be dominant and huge, heavily-muscled to the point of being grotesque (I believe the Chad is based on an indigenous artwork of some kind, actually). A similar example would be the far older and now ubiquitous meme about “alphas and betas”, which is rooted in wolf pack mentality. If you are somehow interested in learning more about this, I recommend you look up more details on your own.
All of this is to say that we started to make fun of Nights for his decidedly Virgin behavior; Tensei went so far as to call him an “anti-Chad”, which only propelled the jokes and laughter further. His constant typos grew only worse under this barrage of ribbing, until finally he said that the couple had moved on and he was able to go to the beach. The day’s fun was not over though.
Shortly before this conversation began, we were talking about a game called Kerbal Space Program (KSP), a highly-realistic rocket simulator game. I don’t remember why it came up, but we found a way to play it together and Makin briefly made a server for us to all to play on. At some point, Cookiefonster came in and started trashing on us for talking about video games outside of #gaming yet again.
For a time, the KSP discussion ran concurrently with Nights describing his problem at the beach. Cookie complained, calling this “the next flavor of the month game” for which we promptly yelled at him; we told him not to participate if he had nothing good to say about something we were all clearly interested in.
He was quiet for a while after this, but finally said, “Can I at least ask a question about the game?” To which we reluctantly said yes. On a relevant aside, at this point Nights was specifically complaining about the couple in front of him because “there are little kids at the beach”. Cookie’s question was thus: “first off are the "little kids" at the beach actual people or npc's or what”. As soon as we realized what he was asking, everything went completely off the rails.
I could never adequately capture the spirit of this conversation in my own words, so I’m going to break my unspoken rule of not including screencaps and do so for the immediate response to Cookie’s question. There’s too much for it to be included here, but here it is on Imgur. There are few things in this server that make me laugh so hard, but today came together in such a beautiful way. Cookie will surely not live this down for a long time.
Finally, this is more mundane but a quality of life improvement for our server was undertaken recently: Makin mentioned the other day that he wanted more color roles in the server, because the ones we had were starting to get a tad bland. Nights immediately seized upon this and created something like 24 new color roles for everyone to enjoy, which I have seen being employed more as time gradually goes on. The original colors were all based strictly off of colors that represent characters in Homestuck, but I can tell already that people are glad to have more to work with now.
Nothing more for today.
8th of April
Not a lot to speak of today, but definitely an interesting development: Sora was at a Barnes and Noble today, and by chance stumbled across a copy of the new Homestuck book. This is remarkable because it’s not officially out until the 13th of this month, and so naturally everyone turned to Sora once they learned of their serendipitous acquisition.
To make a long story short, the overwhelming reaction appeared to be a muted disappointment: after some analysis, Sora concluded that every single bit of commentary in the new version is identical to that of the old, so there is effectively no reason for owners of the first printing to buy this copy. This is unfortunate, but is more or less what people expected if I’m not mistaken. Developments after that make me suspect this not actually the case, but of course it will be impossible to tell until I have a copy of the book in my own hands.
More pleasantly, WoC writing his piece for the #gaming channel seems to have opened the floodgates: Rar, Ifnar, Deus, and Ngame have all written sections about their respective channels already, and Toast, Spiral, and even Ceru have expressed serious interest in writing sections of their own. I’m very pleased to see this happening, and as always their contributions may be found in the Related Materials in the same section as WoC’s.
Each of them have written more than I could have expected or hoped; it feels like they have managed to contribute part of their identity rather well. Even further, each section written functions as a nice little snapshot of what the server looks like at this point in time. I hope that all of this together will successfully preserve the zeitgeist of this place more effectively.
Nothing more for today.
9th of April
I’ve noticed a distinct pattern of behavior that defines various members of our group. When we all encounter and discuss statements or actions from other people, there are of course numerous members of the chat who take such things at face value and believe what they are witnessing. This typically consists of people like myself, Cait, Nights, Olki, etc. However, there is a second group of people who respond to these developments in the exact opposite way: those like Makin, Revlar, Tipsy, and assuredly many others will, for whatever reason, believe the inverse of what is being presented to them.
It would be one thing if this pattern only worked in one way: it is understandable and even natural for people to be pessimistic and even critical of positive developments. For example, things such as the Kickstarter or the upcoming book releases are all things that deserve a healthy dose of skepticism because of the many times we’ve been let down in the past.
However, this behavior extends in the opposite direction as well. This is far and away most pronounced with Makin, but in general negative proceedings will be met with a more optimistic interpretation from these people than what we’re actually witnessing. An excellent example of this strange, inverted behavior would be the appearance of a rather vitriolic post on the subreddit today.
The post is particularly odious, and I don’t know that I feel like explaining the actual content of it in any real detail. The long and short of it is that the author was complaining about their friend in real life “endlessly talking about Homestuck”, calling it no less than a cancer that was steadily destroying their friendship. I’m sure I needn’t say why that bothered people here.
I think that I’ve been affected in no small way over the last year and a half of my time here; my first thought upon seeing this was that it was pretty obvious bait material, and it would be well to ignore it. This was perfectly in keeping with the people I mentioned above, like Makin and Revlar. It was assumed among this group of individuals that the person posting on the subreddit was actually someone trying to get a rise out of us, so by them the post was downplayed or even made fun of rather jovially.
On the other hand, there were people in mspa-lit who were rather taken against the whole thing. A wide variety of responses began to accrue on the thread of interest, many questioning why the poster was bothering to bring up the problem in a subreddit wholly devoted to the material. To them, it was a completely genuine affair.
I don’t think we ever did find out whether the author of the post was serious or not, but it stands as an example of the behaviors I mentioned. There is a fascinating tendency of some in the group to immediately go against the narrative, so to speak: exacerbating the simple and downplaying the complex, decrying the good and softening the bad. It’s a strange tendency toward the neutral, although I’ve noticed this pattern’s employ in various situations elsewhere. I have more to say on this, but I need time to think about it--there are things I want to say that I feel would be too hasty at this point in time. More on that in the future perhaps.
In other news, an extremely exciting development occurred today concerning Viz Media. Makin has been running a blog on Tumblr for some time now, called the Homestuck + Hiveswap Community. It has gradually risen through Tumblr rankings (however that may work) until the blog entered the topmost Homestuck/Hiveswap centric Tumblr blogs1; high-quality posts from the subreddit are sometimes crosslinked to the Tumblr for more exposure, and the system has worked decently well in its modern incarnation.
The relevance of this is that Viz created a Tumblr blog of their own and ended up reblogging a post from Makin’s blog concerning the interview with Hussie on Newsarama that I’ve linked previously. There was clarification on the post that the interview had been found by Skyplayer, and there was a link to the HSD included on the post.
The ramifications of this are immense. It’s a sort of de facto recognition of the subreddit and the HSD, which is kind of funny in the context of the link to the subreddit being deleted from homestuck.com previously. Makin was actually asleep for all of this, so he missed out on it when it was happening; everyone lamented this and found this emerging pattern of Makin being asleep for momentous news amusing.
At this point, an account for Viz Media posted an official announcement for the first book on the subreddit. It consisted of a simple picture of a calendar with the day of release marked, but it was nonetheless successful in generating some hype for the release. There is some limited amount of rabble-rousing, but people are generally excited about the business practices associated with Viz.
This is especially true of people outside the United States who have a primary concern in shipping, such as Tipsy: “finally i can get homestuck books for the price theyre fucking worth, instead of paying over £100 to get a couple of shitty posters and a low quality hoodie to my local post office”. The previous set of books--and merchandise in general--cost a ludicrous amount of money in shipping outside the US, so the improved publishing practices will increase accessibility to the books for fans. It’s truly an exciting time for the fandom.
More immediately relevant to the HSD in particular, we also had a Discord account join with the name VIZ and the associated logo as a profile picture. This is itself exciting, but also vaguely alarming. It’s one thing to associate with Viz over the subreddit, where posting and interactions are all slower by nature. The Discord environment is different, in that it’s all in real time and very rapid.
There is some worry that Viz will see posting habits they aren’t fond of and leave, which may ruin our reputation and preclude future opportunities for association. Considering how this turned out with What Pumpkin, there is of course a pronounced desire to avoid repeating the past. It would be an absolute shame if everyone in the community was denied the chance for greater association with the people in charge of the property, especially if it’s caused by the actions of only a few.
Of course, this is all assuming that the Viz account is in fact from Viz Media and not simply someone pretending to be. It is impossible to rule out this idea, although the account has not posted since joining. Makin claims to have confirmed its validity independently; everyone is waiting to see what happens with this account; Kreuz fucking pinged it shortly after the account joined, but since then there have been no further issues. We are curious to see if they start to interact with people in the future.
Nothing more for today.
10th of April
I wanted to take the opportunity to speak about a smaller piece of our community that has popped up in the public view occasionally. There is a D&D group that’s being run by Revlar which includes various members of mspa-lit: Tensei, Nights, and Wheals are all regular players in this group. LLF was also a regular up until recently (which is what prompted the most recent discussion of it) and Tipsy apparently wanted to be involved (while never actually becoming a player) some time ago.
This group, affectionately called HSDnD, runs once a week on Sundays or more often Mondays. The group’s main priority, of course, is just to have fun. When I asked, Revlar mentioned that the current campaign has only been in play for two sessions so far, taking the place of an older campaign from last year that was disrupted when Revlar left the server.
The older campaign was subject to problems of varying seriousness over time. For example, Nights’ sleep schedule used to be even more treacherous than it is now, and I distinctly remember this jeopardizing a number of sessions. A problem plaguing the current campaign, as previously mentioned, is LLF’s departure from the group.
This has apparently been an issue historically where he would simply not show up for sessions or be otherwise unable to participate. Oda beat me to the punch in asking: “why is links so flaky”, to which Revlar responded: “Because he wasn't super invested to start”. It seems as if LLF’s absence today prevented the third session in this campaign from happening, so they have formalized his absences and are asking for someone to take his place.
I’m glad that Revlar and his group have all managed to engage in this activity together. It’s outside the purview of the HSD and I’m sure many people will question why I bothered to write about it this much. I feel that it’s an important example of the potential for friendship and interaction in our community outside of the scope of just Homestuck-centric content; it makes me happy to see users here becoming friends and doing more things with each other. I hope that their group finds another member so that they’re able to progress more consistently in the future.
Otherwise, more information from Viz today. They posted their first trailer for the Homestuck books on the subreddit. This was expected, but something rather extraordinary is associated with it: the music used in the trailer are two songs from LOFAM1. This inclusion raises a lot of important questions: how did they find out about LOFAM? How and why did they select those two songs in particular for the trailer? Did they seek permission from the composers for it (after some independent research, the answer to this last question at the very least is “yes”).
Most pertinent on my mind are what this means for the future of LOFAM, and whether more of this use of fan content will be seen in the future with Viz. It is unimaginably exciting to see this kind of interaction between a corporation like Viz and our community as a whole. There are some who must find this appalling, but for those of us who are more curious and optimistic this is a sign of good times to come.
The last thing I’ll comment on today is a discussion that was had later in the night. Niklink, Roots, and I were all watching movies together so I missed out on any existential debates or quandaries that might have been had throughout the day itself. However, once we were done, we came back just in time for a prompt from Sora. They mentioned that, without my going into any details here, they have been having a hard time in real life and that they are grateful for the people in the HSD; they appreciate having people they can associate with here.
This signaled the start of a conversational topic that I feel is rare (although maybe necessarily so). Anyone who has read this document with any real degree of attention will understand that I write about this community because, in short, I love it: the construction and maintenance of the server itself, the source material, the people here, and our interactions with each other all come together to form a spectacular experience.
For myself, the last two points are of paramount importance in this consideration. Without other people that we can interact with on a regular basis, there would be no point to this place. The source material is monumental even with its more negative aspects included, but by itself it is not enough to sustain interest and activity in this place. The fact that we’re all able to build off of each other and have a nice time talking about anything, everything, and nothing in particular at all is what gives this place life and meaning. It’s the people that matter; the people in the HSD are what I care for.
The comments from Sora and others like Toast this evening served to mirror my sentiments and validate them. I feel that it’s not often we get the chance to be sentimental--there is a considerable layer of plausible deniability for some or even most people here, a veneer of irony that they put in place to avoid saying outright how they feel in these scenarios. Sometimes though, like tonight, that layer can be peeled back and genuine expression may come through.
I love these moments. It may not always be good--indeed, for these interactions to always be positive is impossible--but the inclination to reveal your inner thoughts and nature to other beings is nothing short of magical to me. The willingness to share part of yourself with others is the spirit of this community, and is at the heart of what brings us all together.
Nothing more for today.
11th of April
There’s a pattern of behavior from someone that I felt like pointing out today, after I was reminded of some similar experiences dealing with it from the past. Throughout the course of my time here, there have been numerous situations where I felt it would be appropriate to consult others to see what they said. This is done more with some than others: occasionally I’ll consult Phantos, whom I trust for their wisdom; there are even a few people I consider staples in situations where I feel the need to do this (Cait and Tipsy being too such examples).
Putnam fits into this latter category, although upon recollection of the past I’m not sure why this is the case. The way he presents himself has something to do with it, I suppose; to contrast, it’s hard to take Makin seriously once you get to know him because so much of his behavior is derived from the desire to have fun and often involves making fun of people (the jury is still out on whether he wants this amusement to be inclusive of the person he’s making fun of or if it’s purely, even consciously for his own benefit).
Putnam, on the other hand, instantly and overtly includes other people in whatever deliberation he happens to be making. This has established a precedent where I will occasionally ask him about issues that I think are important enough to warrant talking with other users about, to see what they think. Yet, unlike Cait2 and Tipsy--both being more or less opinionated on any given matter--Putnam typically has little significant input for most issues here which aren’t directly related to him.
I don’t mean to suggest that he has no opinions; Putnam is himself rather opinionated, but unless he is strictly involved in an ongoing issue it’s likely that he won’t even know that it exists, or of the people involved. There have been many occasions now where I’ve turned to him for his perspective and he simply says: “I don’t recall what you’re talking about”, which never fails to make me laugh.
In my eyes, such responses lend heavily to an appearance of unwitting detachment. On the occasions where Putnam has relayed his lack of awareness, it very clearly brings to mind this mental image of one who is simply unconcerned with such earthly affairs. This absurdity is only heightened by the fact that Putnam cares very much for the well-being and happiness of others; his absent mindedness at times is offset by the very real and intense affection he feels for people in general, and his desire to see them prosper.
As for today, there was an extension of something that was actually happening yesterday which I didn’t quite feel like commenting on. Those who pay attention to the going-ons of the internet may be aware that, today and yesterday, the founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is attending a hearing in front of the United States Congress to answer questions about his social media platform.
“That’s all well and good Drew,” I hear you saying, “but why on earth is this relevant?” To keep matters simple, most of us in mspa-lit are either ambivalent or outright hateful of Facebook for its overreaching and extremely invasive data-handling policies. Makin is a clear and obvious example of this: his penchant for privacy (and assuredly many other factors) should be a clear indicator to all that he would never even dream of making a social media profile. At least, not one that wasn’t obfuscated through innumerable barriers to protect his identity.
While most of us aren’t quite so extreme, the atmosphere here is one decidedly against Zuckerberg’s creation. Thus, when we learned that this hearing was being broadcast live for anyone to see, we decided to check in and see how it was going. One might imagine that the proceedings of a congressional hearing or two would be enormously boring and unworthy of comment. Historically I imagine one would be right, but this time the right mix of elements was in play so that it became an event of its own.
Last night it was a hearing with senators, and today it is a hearing with representatives. In both cases, there are numerous people (over 30,000 total) watching this broadcast, and treating it like a game. The sentiment against Zuckerberg is not rare on the internet, and there was no shortage of people who came to watch him be humiliated live on television. There are numerous jokes about the corporate leader’s mannerisms and patterns of behavior (robot, lizard-man, etc), and these jokes were brought out in full force for the duration of the hearing.
It’s honestly quite refreshing: Zuckerberg is a figure of such infamy that there’s hardly anyone who objected to the overall roasting. Even those I would suspect of decrying the behavior have joined in, and the overall atmosphere is more of joviality than anything else to me. It’s one of those often-written yet rarely-seen moments of a common enemy uniting people together, so to speak. And then, of course, the fun was promptly interrupted by an update for Worth the Candle. Such as it is here!
Later in the day, Makin acted upon some jokes about Americans that he has steadily been ramping up in the last so many months. On the internet Americans are frequently taunted for being fat--sometimes referred to as “Amerifats” or more hilariously as “burgers”--and stupid, as well as a few other idiosyncrasies that people find amusing (such as clapping more often than people of other cultures, for whatever reason). Makin has gradually increased jokes of this nature for some time now, and after Tensei made a meme about this it culminated in the creation of a channel today called #burgerclapping.
It started off simply enough: memes about America are in abundance, already so people began posting those in the channel in short order. I pinged WoC, due to his stereotype as “The America Guy”, although he was initially confused. He posted only one meme at first, saying: “I don’t usually engage in Patreon channels”. When it was explained to him what the channel really was, however, all bets were suddenly off.
WoC took to the place like a fish to water, and before long everyone was marching to the beat of his drum. Calls for a democratic election of the pseudo mod rung out, there was demand for a ban-role simply entitled “communist”, socialism (among many other things) was bashed at length. It was every stereotype about “‘muricans” come to life.
Finally, after about 20-30 minutes of this, Makin stepped in and simply said: “woc is growing too powerful”. Without any further ado, Makin closed the channel and--some might say prematurely--ended the fun. Yet, #burgerclapping will forever remain in our hearts alongside the enormous quantities of cholesterol. Rest in peace, child of freedom.
Nothing more for today.
12th of April
I’m excited to write about today: Viz Media recently contacted me on Discord, saying that they wanted to perform a giveaway of the Homestuck book on the subreddit for 4/13 this year. I contacted the other sub mods and together we decided how we wanted to do it, giving them an affirmative. Niklink wrote up the thread, which went up in the afternoon and is in progress for 24 hours. After it concludes two people will be randomly selected to receive the book.
More involvement from Viz is always welcome, and we’re excited that they’re engaging with the community. There is some fear that they’ll drop away once 4/13 is over, but for now the activity we’ve seen from Viz over the last week alone has been more than we got from WP for the last so many years. I don’t think anyone can properly complain so far. I just hope (I’m sure along with some others) that they’ve gotten a positive impression of our community so far; we can be pretty weird at the best of times, I’m sure no shortage of people have been scared off by how esoteric or strange we might appear.
More related to the HSD itself, I ended up having an extensive discussion with Phantos in #serious about the nature of mspa-lit. There had been a long string of conversation about various facets of our personal lives being played out as the night went by, and finally it reached a point that I realized we should have moved the conversation ages ago.
As we are typically supposed to do, I asked people to move to #hangout, or alternatively #serious for heavier stuff. I assumed this was fine for a while, but then Phantos specifically said he wanted to talk with me about something in #serious. This kind of request from him is unusual, so I immediately assumed that it was pretty important.
When we started conversing, he brought up some things I’ve said about the nature of mspa-lit that he felt were discrepant: I mentioned in a recent entry that Sora’s been having a hard time, although I neglected to mention that I felt the need to step in at some of the things they were saying. Without going into too many details (again), I tried my best to impart to Sora what exactly mspa-lit is used for, and in theory it sounded accurate or fair to me to say that mspa-lit isn’t about discussing ourselves, but rather about concepts and things.
This didn’t seem controversial to me; #hangout is reserved for talking about our personal lives with each other, and mspa-lit is typically used for discussing stuff like Makin’s shill list or whatever thing/event that people are most interested in at the time. Obviously in practice that isn’t always the case, but I used this general principle to stress to Sora that barging in to a given conversation to talk about ourselves is looked down on in mspa-lit and wouldn’t win them any favors.
Apparently, Phantos was not pleased by this assessment. When we started talking in #serious, he mentioned that he’s grown increasingly frustrated by discussions in mspa-lit being railroaded into other channels, among other things. After prompting him on this for a little while he clarified that he was upset with the inconsistent moderation on the issue--sometimes topics are moved and other times they’re not, and it all reeks heavily of bias to him.
He summed up his feelings on the matter concisely: “Either abolish the rule or do better at being fair on whose topics get moved and whose do not.” I made it clear that I understand where he’s coming from, although I also stressed that I don’t know if I can successfully motivate other mods to care about this enough. In an ideal world, all topics would be moved to their respective channels immediately, but realistically I’m not sure if that’s remotely possible to achieve.
Regardless, this discussion brought into focus some of the problems people have with mspa-lit’s existence. Indeed, two others took the opportunity to speak, saying they disliked mspa-lit for various reasons. Furrylatula claimed to be confused by its very existence (“i basically have no idea what mspa-lit is about … its confusing and hard to get a handle on”) and then a user named qweq described that they find the place incredibly intimidating because of the high mod presence and the cliquey behavior.
Honestly, just thinking about the conversation is enough to exhaust me. I felt bad that I wasn’t able to address their concerns by myself, but I’m only one mod on a team of people--I can only do so much by myself on this matter, and that’s not even to speak of Makin’s influence. Nonetheless, I promised I would bring it up to the rest of the team and let them speak their thoughts on the matter, although (without betraying the names of the people in particular) some already seem rather dismissive of the idea. Time will tell how this turns out, I guess.
Unrelated, but I felt like briefly commenting on an extension of something I’ve seen play out in real life. There is a pronounced rivalry between the east coast and the west coast of the United States. The general structure of the USA is such that the coasts are--generally speaking--more progressive and technologically forward than the middle parts of the country, but the culture of the two coasts differs enormously. This rivalry can be lighthearted or can become deeply serious depending on who you’re talking to.
This behavior also exists on the HSD, although thankfully it belongs more to the lighthearted category. I can’t count the number of times jokes surrounding this topic have been uttered. For example, restaurant chains are a popular topic in this regard. I can’t count the number of times that a more easterly chain like Five Guys has been brought up only for someone like Toast to immediately shit on it in favor of Californian chains (“but do you have in n out B)”). Nothing else to be said about this, I just thought it was an amusing note to be made on the behavior here.
Less amusing lately has been a rather sudden shift in the conversational quality of mspa-lit. I mentioned recently that some users from altgen have been taking up residence in mspa-lit, and at first it was subtle but the quality of discussion in this channel has suddenly plummeted at certain times of day. No one is quite sure who is responsible, which suggests to me that it’s a loosening of everyone’s contributions somehow. Maybe it’s just one of those times.
This change has transformed from slight to massive over the last week, prompting a lot of comment from various users about how the place is more shitposty than usual (“What the hell happened this past week honestly / This chat is WAY more shitposty than it used to be” - MINES). No one’s quite sure what to do about it just yet, but I have faith in the system. If it gets to truly be too much, then Makin will probably step in and mandate some grand change that inevitably fucks the channel up temporarily, although I’m sure that will be entertaining an and of itself once all is said and done.
Nothing more for today.
13th of April - Ninth Anniversary of Homestuck
The big day has come. With the arrival of 4/13, so too has there been a massive influx of people all of a sudden. I believe this happened last year as well, but the flow is truly astonishing: we started the day with around 10,500 people but by the end of the day we’re closing with about 10,800. The amount of activity in #general is absurd, not to mention monstrously fast.
I actually came in a bit late, witnessing panicky discussion with the other mods about how best to police #general. At that point #general had slowed down so that it was still pretty quick-paced, but not panic-inducing by any means. After asking, Makin simply said: “you are late / it was basically AAAAAAAAAAAAing before / that kind of message speed”.
After this, Makin tried to compensate for #general being “too active” by establishing the channel #413. It was quickly and fiercely taken over by shitposting (the very first post was from Cait: “aeiou”), but it successfully siphoned most of the shitposting away #general while simultaneously giving it a focus. #413 became a one-stop repository for all manner of shitposts related to Homestuck. It will be retired (maybe even deleted) by the end of the day.
The stream was a wild success even by previous conventions of what we would call successful: at its height, there were over 300 people all watching at the same time, where previous community streams typically garner no more than 150-200. This was true even after the release of Hiveswap Friendsim, which itself was a rather fun event.
Makin tasked me with announcing the release of the game as soon as possible; on Steam the game had been announced as coming out in so many hours throughout the day, such that people were beginning to get hyped up for its release. Finally at about 2:50 PM EDT, the game became available. I announced this to everyone, and the stream was momentarily filled with cries of: “HIVESWAP FRIENDSIM IS OUT? FUCK THIS SHIT!”. No one actually left the stream from what I could see, but it did become momentarily less active as people began exploring the game.
For this, Makin made yet another channel in the Homestuck category called #friendsim, which was quickly populated by everyone who bought the game within approximately 10 picoseconds of release. The importance of this release is not to be underestimated: it’s the first real source of Hussie’s writing we’ve gotten in two years. Though the game itself is short (30-45 minutes is more than sufficient to exhaust all of its paths) the content is faithful to what we would expect and, from what I can see, the overwhelming response to it has been positive so far. This all speaks of good things for the future of the property and installments of Friendsim to come.
In all, I think it’s safe to say that this year’s 4/13 was immeasurably better than last year. I commented at one point that “last year basically didn’t exist / on an official basis” to which Cookie agreed: “all they did was the bare minimum then / a new hiveswap trailer / that gave a mild tinge of hope / but went back to silence right after”. The enjoyment was there last year but muted considerably, with no real developments to tide us over.
This year, however, so many things have happened that people feel truly excited about Homestuck for the first time in a long while. The energy in the chat is palpable with new interest in the comic, and this involvement from a figure of some authority has given everything a sense of legitimacy again. Personally, it feels like the HSD has aged and grown enough to warrant being called an establishment of sorts. It fills me with great pride to see us on days like this.
Happy 4/13. Nothing more for today.
14th of April
Over the week there has been a set of events that I’ve failed to describe so far. For Fans By Fans has announced a giveaway of their own, where grand prize winners will win a commission from “a popular community artist” to draw an original character of theirs. This is pretty substantial given the nature of Homestuck’s fans to create fanventures, and to make things even better this has been nested in a series of things you can do to win “entries” to the contest, including a number of puzzles that have taken the attention of people in the HSD.
The first puzzle was a wordsearch, then picross, a magic eye picture, and on the fourth day a simple alternate reality game, or ARG. The fifth day, however, consisted of something called Alphastuck and Omegastuck, which turned out to be a far more complicated and in-depth ARG than the previous one. Skyplayer was immediately taken with this and set upon the challenge with great relish.
Alpha/Omegastuck has since been solved, although not strictly by any one of us. Skyplayer commented: “some rando solved it in 6 hours and gave the community hints for the last leg / that's why we don't know what the right way to solve it is, other than guessing / like, the answer makes sense given the context, but not all the clues lead somewhere”. The prize for solving it, however, is of extreme interest: it leads to an official letter from Andrew Hussie.
It is an item you can buy from the store for zero dollars (you still have to pay for shipping) with limited numbers available, and most people that know about it are absolutely consumed with curiosity over what the letter could be. Some are less trusting and assume it’s just going to be a trollish thing of some sort, with Hussie making fun of people in the letter. This strikes me as a definite possibility, but at the same time something about this feels different. We’ll eventually see what the deal is.
Alongside the letter has been a flurry of other comments that border on the decidedly conspiracy theory-esque; before the first book release, Viz tweeted an image of a calendar that was lifted from the comic and edited to be related to the book. Of interest on this calendar is a little face that was drawn over the 16th of this month, being this Monday. Some of us immediately noticed that particular detail and grew worried; this is the sort of thing that sets off our theorizing sensibilities and leads to a whole host of (usually) baseless conjecture, which has the considerable potential to backfire.
Indeed, there is frantic talk about what might be happening on Monday. Others are not swayed by the mostly tenuous hints that have come out regarding this. Upon surveying the growth of hysteria on the topic, Makin commented: “is this how homestuck fans look to hussie”, which of course dissuaded literally no one from the current course. I’m mostly ambivalent myself, being hopeful of something happening but not expecting it in the slightest, and I look forward to everyone’s reaction no matter what happens.
Within the HSD itself, I wanted to take the time today to comment on a particular user I’ve noticed in the past that I feel embodies a highly specific part of our spirit here. They are named Jade Mail Delivery Service, with Jade being one of the characters in the story. Every so often, they’ll appear unprompted in #general and ask if people would like a random picture of the aforementioned character “delivered” to them.
Every single time at least one person will take them up on the offer, and after some follow up (as well as asking for and receiving one of these pictures myself), it seems the user will send them through DMs to everyone who asked. This is highly amusing to me because of how weirdly specific it is, but it’s such a wholesome and innocent activity.
Furthermore, the consistency of their actions is impressive; to my knowledge they always deliver the picture as promised, acting as nothing short of a consummate professional. It’s such a tiny part of what goes on in the HSD, but I feel like it’s a good example of the kind of quirky and touching behavior that can arise in the Homestuck fandom that made it such a special thing for most of us. I hope we’ll see more of this as time goes by.
Finally for today, I noticed something today that made me laugh. Occasionally the discussion in mspa-lit can be suddenly and swiftly converted into something completely different from what it was before, and this is often associated with some extremely specific topics. For instance, today we were discussing something casually and then Putnam for no discernible reason brought up jet fighters.
I didn’t expect much to come out of this; Putnam sometimes talks about a video game series called Ace Combat which is based around dogfighting, which is well-liked by some people in the group but is not exactly of great fame for us. To my surprise, Tensei also chimed in on the topic and the two started discussing various models of planes that have been in use or were designed historically.
I bring this up because I was kind of enamored by the conversation. With no real prompting, they suddenly pulled out a topic that itself is pretty narrow, and then started injecting some rather in-depth and esoteric knowledge on the matter. I think Makin echoed my thoughts on the matter: “why do you people suddenly know everything about planes”. It all came together in this bizarre blend that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I’m always fascinated when people discuss anything like this in such a specialized capacity, even when I’m unable to contribute myself.
Nothing more for today.
15th of April
Things are winding down since the thirteenth. There is still some residual excitement leftover from the festivities, but by and large the fun is mostly over. Talk about the Friendsim didn’t last very long due to its extremely short nature--there just isn’t a lot to talk about. On the other hand, most of the channels are experiencing a swell in the amount of activity it sees.
This is due, of course, to the relatively large influx of people we got for 4/13. Each channel has been variously more active with the newbies that came in, and server activity as a whole seems up. Unfortunately this isn’t an entirely positive phenomenon, as illustrated by the precise nature of the increased activity in one channel in particular. Probably only one guess is needed to find out which channel, too.
Altgen has been even more outrageous lately than it normally is. Dingus has specifically complained about the inordinate shittiness, and after poking my head in I can personally confirm that it is more frenetic than before. It seemed previously that the channel had been slowing down, but the addition of new blood to the mix has led to a small coup of the place. All semblance of order has been dispelled; naught but chaos remains.
To mitigate this, Dingus and Deus have been doubling down. The mods look in there sometimes, but both of the altgen pseudos have really been cracking down with mass bans of people who are failing to adhere to the rules, or even people who are raiding. I actually had to console someone who they thought was raiding but had actually just picked a bad time to make a dumb joke.
This problem aside, their efforts are clearly working. Altgen is at least vaguely usable again, and the raiders have slowed their pace in other channels. I suspect that by the week’s end the problem will be all but gone. That having been said, I kind of liked this form of altgen a bit. The raids were too much and obviously any really bad content like porn or gore is to be discouraged, but the energy was palpable again and the shitposts flowed freely. There must be some kind of balance that can be instilled here.
Nothing more for today.
16th of April
There was some brief alarm earlier today. I was checking Worth the Candle for an update, but then noticed that the story was not accessible. Concerned, I alerted Makin and he swiftly confirmed that WTC was not available. Given the story’s relative importance to us, this was obviously deemed A Problem. Before long, everyone who remotely cares about the shill in question was conversing about what could have brought on this development.
There was some concern on my part due to my understanding of the author. A rational writer under the pseudonym Alexander Wales, it is known that he suffers from depressive moods on occasion. In conjunction with some ill-timed, decidedly poor criticism from one of his readers, I was worried that perhaps Wales had decided to delete the story outright. It was made known to me that this was probably not the case due to the exact nature of Wales’ depression, namely seasonal; Toast commented “its almost summertime / his writing will only get stronger / until winter again”.
Makin actually made a thread on /r/rational addressing this topic, since WTC is a popular read there. Within an hour or two, Wales himself showed up to comment on the issue. Thankfully, it turns out to be a minor issue over conditions in the TOS for the website he’s hosting the story on. He mentioned that the story would be back up as soon as possible, and very shortly after this people were able to access it again much to the relief of everyone fond of the story.
In totality after it was all said and done, I think I liked this development a bit. It offered an easy opportunity to look into an alternate community Makin openly associates with, namely the rational writing community. He often talks about such things and the discussion can be guided that way in the HSD, but it’s not often that we are explicitly exposed to “the rational community”, such as one might be.
This occasion, however, offered a glimpse into Makin’s other places of habit. It’s interesting to see the stark contrast between how he behaves there and here, even if it was only a snapshot. On reddit in general he appears to be far more composed; I think the nature of the website contributes to that due to it not being real-time, but that’s a whole load of conjecture that I don’t feel I understand well enough to really comment on at this point in time.
Instead, I’d like to shift away from this topic to talk about the more Homestuck-centric announcement we got today. According to this post on Tumblr, there will be efforts towards an official Homestuck zine, which has simply been called Aspect. For those unfamiliar (like myself previously), a zine is a short document or work published on a more underground basis than other publications. Oda helpfully described them in the chat: ““Zines are how communities shared fanworks en masse before the internet / They're an important part of fandom history”, and in accordance with this the organizers of this (What Pumpkin and For Fans By Fans) put out sign-ups for artists who might be interested in contributing.
Fitting with the name, it looks like it’s going to be a celebration of a feature of the webcomic that I’ve described before called “aspects”. For lore purposes this is interesting to most people, and according to the post any artists who have their work used will be compensated. There is some concern, though, that the pay will be inadequate ($35 per work if I’m not mistaken), with many considering this a bar set too low.
Underpayment aside, there is also speculation that this is just a way for WP or whoever to look for more artists. Revlar described it thus: “The zine is absolutely a shitty scam … It's Paradox Space 2.0 / And probably meant for poaching / More than for profit / They're just trying to minimize their losses this time which makes it look more scummy”. Alternative concerns revolve around the scope of the project (“oh the zine is kinda limited. they're really looking for just drawings of characters and its only gonna be 24 artists. I thought this was gonna be like a big ol' thing” - Skyplayer), and at this point it’s hard to say how people feel about it exactly. There is hope that it’ll turn out well and be interesting enough to engage people, but time will surely tell.
Even with this though, people have managed to glean some related information out of the zine announcement. Wheals mentioned: “the biggest news about the zine is that WP still exists enough to officially endorse things”, which may answer some of the questions people have had about their overall position in what is being jocularly referred to as “The Viz Takeover”. It may not be inaccurate to say that Viz is handling the property on a more generalized basis while What Pumpkin and the merchandise websites like For Fans By Fans will be operating for the people who are dedicated fans.
Nothing more for today.
19th of April
It’s time to describe something that has recently swept through our group, catching some of us in its soft grasp. Omori, stylized as OMORI, is a game that was backed on Kickstarter, launched back on the 21st of April 2014. Centering around the titular character. Omori began as a short blog comic in 2011 by a person known as OMOCAT, and then in 2012 the creator started writing and illustrating a graphic novel for it (although the only thing related to this I can find now is a short piece from 2013). The Kickstarter for it was rather successful, although a demo for the game only just came out recently for backers.
There are some people here who have recently played it and have been trying to spread it. Minish in particular is rather taken with the game, as well as Toast, Rar, and Spiral. Tensei mentioned that he actually knows a person developing the game, and would like to see it become more successful (especially seeing as he considers it a legitimately good game). Their appreciation for it is infectious, and they have successfully persuaded numerous people (including myself) to play the demo. Even though it’s only for backers, the demo was “pirated” amongst us because it has no security; MINES helpfully provided me with a copy of it.
They further show their appreciation by imitating its art style; OMORI has a particular style to it, easily recognizable by anyone who’s played it already. Each of the people I mentioned above have adopted a profile picture in the same style; Toast, Rar, and Spiral all requested customized pictures drawn in the style and color palette of the game from a fellow user named Ivy, who helpfully provided some rather nice portraits:
Top row: characters OMORI (Tensei’s avatar), AUBREY, KEL, HERO, and user Ivy.
Bottom row: users Toast, Minish, myself (made as a joke by Tipsy), Rar, and Spiral.
I’m fascinated with how rapidly and thoroughly people have inducted this element into our server, and the ways that they’ve shown their appreciation for it is nothing short of impressive.
It goes without saying that there are people who don’t care for OMORI being included. Makin in particular tried to play it for a bit, but decided he didn’t like (although it’s worth noting that he was bad at playing it, so maybe that factored in). Red is also not fond of it, although VirtuNat seems to be the most vehement against it from what I can see. I haven’t been paying the greatest attention to the naysayers so I’m not quite sure, but their protestations are pretty amusing regardless. We’ll see if Omori has a lasting effect on the culture of our place sooner or later.
There are some developments for #altgen in the works, but they will be more relevant tomorrow--as such I will write about them then. Nothing more for today.
20th of April
Today is an infamous day: I’m sure most are already familiar with it, but for the uninformed it is Weed Day. Historically, April 20th is the day chosen by marijuana enthusiasts to celebrate their drug of choice, and despite its illegal status in various countries and states it has become a pretty widely-known event. Obviously we don’t strictly observe the event on the HSD for various reasons, but at the least it is being parodied in a way.
Hella Jeff as taken from the third SBAHJ comic. This image is our emote “howHigh”.
As such he is arguably our patron saint of Weed Day.
In the spirit of the day, Makin announced yesterday that he would be performing an experiment with #altgen. This is hardly unprecedented, #altgen is kind of a dumpster where we feel comfortable messing around with it as we please. The experiment started with Makin hiding #altgen and introducing two new channels: #general2 and #shitpost; the functions of these channels should be obvious.
However, he quickly deleted #shitpost and unhid #altgen, simply choosing to rename it to #nu-gen instead. #nu-gen has since gone through innumerable name changes, from song lyrics to various memes to random nonsense. It’s hard to tell if there are any real, overarching patterns, but so far that doesn’t appear to be the case.
It was hoped by some that this experiment would rescue some of the activity of #altgen, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. So far it is mostly as it has been for the last month or two. It’s unclear what may be done to fix this problem, although I’ve started talks with Dingus, Deus, and Shitler to try and correct it. More details on this will follow tomorrow.
Otherwise, there was an unrelated incident later in the day. A user named Kreuz began airing complaints in mspa-lit concerning the presence of mods in other places, claiming that we don’t listen to users. The nature of this complain involved our banning procedure: specifically, a ban in #general will also lead to people being unable to speak in #hangout or #serious. The guiding principle with this is that if someone is unable to handle being in #general then they probably can’t be expected to handle #hangout and definitely should not be trusted to act appropriately in #serious.
This explanation only prompted more complaints, and for the next half an hour or so we attempted to variously identify exactly what Kreuz was talking about and/or mollify him. After being unable to find any other users complaining about the same thing, we asked him to provide screenshots and for whatever reason he said that he wasn’t able to or simply didn’t want to. We tried to explain what was wrong with this (Tensei laboriously attempting to inject logic into the situation), but we were also admittedly pretty tired of dealing with it at that point, so we started making some fun of the issue in an attempt to move on.
To Kreuz’s credit though, this did open up some conversation about how we might improve the server some more. #general in particular remains destitute, as it has been for a while now. Makin briefly floated the idea of creating more #general pseudos, who would have the express purpose of generating activity instead of managing the channel. We ultimately decided against this and turned our attention to a more unique feature of #general.
Being the first channel that people see, #general has doubled as a place to talk about anything and also where one welcomes newcomers. Aradiabot has always included a message welcoming new people, announcing their arrival in the server for all to see. Lately it feels like this feature has been getting in the way--other servers will often sequester these introductions into their own channel, while others do away with them entirely.
Makin opted for the latter, and thus he asked Ceru to remove this function from the bot for the HSD. There was initially some pushback against this since the welcome messages ping the newcomer, which serves as effective bookkeeping. Since we have another channel that does this very same thing, we were ultimately fine with it. We’re not sure if it’ll actually help, but in this way Makin decreed that the bot will not welcome new people for the next month to see if it helps improve activity in the channel any.
I feel like pointing out at this point that Ceru briefly became upset with Makin’s request because he interpreted them as being aggressive. I always feel the need to talk with Ceru after incidents like this; he’s rather sensitive, but a quick talk always manages to help him feel better. It’s important to me to reassure him--sometimes it’s easy for Ceru to become discouraged about his abilities or his social position in this server.
I always find his discouragement to be unwarranted, though. Recently he created a function for Aradiabot that allows someone to call up Homestuck on Discord and read it in its entirety there. While I can’t comment on the technical difficulty of this in any sort of official capacity that sort of functionality is insane to me, and this is not to speak of the several other creative ventures he’s accomplished using Aradiabot.
I always try to stress to him that he undervalues his own abilities and worth here. It’s clear to me how much he cares about being important (indeed, he mentioned to me that he wants to contribute something of value to humanity as a whole someday); I try my best to help reassure him when these things happen. His humility concerning his place here is endearing to me, and I hope that he can build his self-confidence more as time goes by.
In a different but related vein, I was watching a conversation between Revlar, Toast, and Nights today. There was an extremely bizarre discussion in progress about how to define a punch or a kick, and how it would relate to Nights and Toast fighting each other. I joined in late so I was naturally confused--after making some comments about how their definition of punch didn’t really make sense, Revlar simply commented that it was how they were proceeding with the conversation and provided justification for the definitions.
This exchange was small, but it opened up my eyes to something Revlar does with precise consistency. I’ve complained about him doing this in a more rigid capacity (or when he was more rude about it in the past), but he is extremely good at remaining dedicated to a conversation’s flow of logic--even if what’s being discussed isn’t realistic, he can accept new definitions for the sake of an argument and hold them in mind with impressive accuracy.
The realism in their definition of what a punch or a kick is didn’t matter; it only mattered that Revlar knew how they were defining it and he was able to hold each of them to it as the conversation progressed. I’m amused and impressed at how well he manages to keep hold of even the most obscure facets of a conversation, something that he has done ever since he joined and for all manner of topics. For conversations like this one, where it is clearly joking in nature, it always makes it more entertaining to talk with him.
Finally for today, the second Friendsim was announced. It certainly isn’t hiding the spirit of Weed Day at all, which has actually been funny enough to make plenty of people look forward to it. The implications of this are good, namely that the Friendsims will be released often enough to tide us over while we wait for the second act of Hiveswap. A couple of weeks between each Friendsim isn’t bad at all, especially with Hussie responsible for writing them. The release date for Friendsim Volume 2 is next week; we wait to see if it will live up to the first.
Nothing more for today.
21st of April
I mentioned yesterday that I was in talks with Dingus, Shitler, and Deus about the state of altgen. It is undeniable that the channel has been declining in activity, and this is true even more so for its entertainment value. For whatever reason, the channel has not been as enjoyable as it once was. Is it a matter of us growing past the shitposts? Is there an actual, identifiable shift in quality or are we realizing it’s actually just not that funny?
To address these questions, we decided to take a look at the rules of the place. The level of activity has been inversely proportional to the number of guidelines we put in place over time, roughly speaking. It went from being a place of “few to no restrictions” to having more hard rules than literally any other channel in the server. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this makes no sense, and is probably hurting altgen’s viability.
To this end, I discussed a rework with the people mentioned above. There are Six Main Things that should be taken into account with the place, topics or concepts that are non-negotiable insofar as things that shouldn’t be allowed: porn, gore, spam, raiding, sexism, racism (or whatever -ism or phobic concept one might include in that list). Aside from those things, all of the rules that we’ve garnered in the channel over time are about specific behavioral instances that either no longer apply or didn’t need to be properly banned in the first place.
All of those problems that we instated hard rules with before will now be covered under a more generalized philosophy that we’ve taken to calling Rule 0. This name and concept were both taken from D&D, which says that the person organizing the game has full purview and final say on all matters, regardless of the codified rules. So too have we given ourselves that power here: no matter if the rule is explicitly detailed already or not, if we say something in altgen it goes.
I feel like this will give us all a little more breathing room: when it comes to moderation we’ll have more license to stop things if needed or ignore them if it’s not; similarly, the users will have more freedom to do as they please, assuming that their activities aren’t in violation of the few things they must actually avoid at all times. Hopefully this will help reestablish the flow and energy that altgen used to have in the past.
We floated the idea of removing the extraneous rules with Makin, who instantaneously agreed (he has always maintained that a more hands-off principle is desirable in moderation). Thus, yesterday we reworked the description of the channel and got rid of an immense picture kept in pins with a list of all the supplemental rules. All of this was explicitly an attempt to increase interest, activity, and entertainment value of the channel.
It’s a bit too early to tell having only been one day, but so far it seems at least mildly successful. We don’t exactly have a way to quantify this (and even if we did it’s been too soon), but even just in the last day the conversations had there have all been more hilarious, more energetic, and have more people in them than before. It may just be an effect of the weekend, but it is our sincerest hope that this will yield better balance in the channel going forward.
While there have been some unfortunate individuals trying to take advantage of this, it has been pretty easy to invoke rule 0 and get rid of the troublemakers. On the opposite end of this spectrum, there have been some rather savory people in altgen that I’ve increasingly wanted to recognize as time goes by. To this end, I jokingly created a role entitled “Altgenner of the Week”, to be awarded to one person each week that I feel deserves it.
This was discovered by Nights and other mods much more quickly than I would have hoped, but it hasn’t actually been removed. I’ve taken this as tacit approval for what I’m doing and have taken great pleasure in administering the role to people for the last two weeks. The first Altgenner of the Week was a relatively gentle user named Oblong Meat Product. The beginning of this week was $trider, and today (after a long streak of spamming “SACRIFICE” at blazing speeds with the other users) it was a fellow named Kople, who was rather graceful with some teasing we administered to him.
I don’t expect this to really go anywhere, if anything I’ll forget about it by the end of next month. In the meantime though, it feels like one more thing on top of the numerous ideas we’ve had for shaping altgen into a better place once more. I would speak more on this, but Makin actually forcibly removed me from the channel so that I would focus on writing this entry. Sad!
Outside of altgen, today there was an update for the SCP game; despite how infrequently we seem to play it in recent weeks we all decided to get together for it again. This was accompanied by a rather nice surprise: Jit, another member from the Music Team, decided to join us in playing the game. I wrote about Jit in the Music Team article, and he was one of the members who provided a rather comprehensive response to my questions.
Jit actually joined the HSD some weeks ago, although aside from an initial conversation with him I don’t believe he commented on much since then. Back then, he mentioned being worried that his responses to my questions were too dark or pessimistic for the article--he actually mentioned being prompted to come here because he thought his posts on the subreddit were being shadowbanned since he was critical of What Pumpkin, which we were quick to reassure him was not the case.
Personally I found his responses to be refreshing even if they were more cynical in nature. I’ve mentioned to him before, but it is useful to have as wide a variety of opinions as possible when critically analyzing anything. It was not uncommon to have positive responses about the Music Team, so having more negatively-oriented answers was beneficial too: it helps to establish a dynamic range of interpretations and memories. I hope that after his discussion with us he felt less apprehensive about his responses.
There’s been some development on the “Letter from Andrew Hussie” that is being offered as a prize for solving the ARG from last week. Some users have already received their letters. True to Hussie trolling fashion, it was revealed that the envelopes each contain exactly one gigantic alphabetic letter: the first we became aware of was an “R”.
Other letters gotten so far include “H”, “I”, and Sora just thirty minutes ago posted a picture of a freshly obtained D. I actually paid to get one of these letters which hasn’t yet arrived, but there is already speculation on what these might be spelling out. Based on the letter so far, Makin surmises: “yeah pretty much confirmed / letters spell ANDREW HUSSIE”, which would not at all be surprising. Until we have more letters it’s impossible to be absolutely sure, but from our current perspective the mystery seems to have cleared up.
Nothing more for today.
22nd of April
Some of the best times on this server are those days where the energy never drops and people manage to pass it along to each other without pause; such is at it was today, where everything seemed to accelerate into this whirlwind of fun and, at times, deepness. There was no room for awkwardness or the timidity of strangers, only a maelstrom of conversation and the warm glow of a close group of friends.
Nothing of real importance even happened today: there was no news about Hiveswap, Viz, the Friendsim, or Homestuck itself; there were no major issues in the server; everything that may have served to move people here was absent. Instead, the activity all came from within.
At first glance I imagine most would have mistaken it for something more sinister, as it consisted mostly of us arguing with each other about all manner of topics. We ranged from such inane nonsense as the best fursona to discussing which Star Wars movie sucks the most to what should go in this journal to geese being evil3. The full range of topics we’re willing to discuss amazes me still, and I would not be surprised if we haven’t even touched the vast majority of ideas that lurk within our collective consciousness.
It would be one thing also if it were simply the same group of people that this is possible with each time, but part of what excites me about this is that the people involved will vary throughout the day. There is a definite shift in the users present as the day progresses, which adds this sense of depth to the community that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It is refreshing to be able to go on at different times of day and witness these complex interactions and relationships that have formed, sometimes independent of each other.
There appear to be many people who have formed fast friendships with each other in the thicket of it all: Tensei and Nights are one such set, and then there’s Skyplayer and Sora. Some distinct groups exist, such as the Dragon Ball crew (primarily consisting of myself, Tipsy, Putnam, and Griever, although others like Revlar and Cait join in frequently). It brings me immeasurable joy to see such associations pop up in this community.
Then again, at the end of the day we’re all together too. There are plenty of people who are online seemingly at all times, defying time almost brazenly. I do this a lot, looking at the server from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Others may also do this, like Makin himself. Honestly, it’s hard not to think of someone who engages in this kind of behavior. Perhaps this group simply accrues those who are more naturally drawn to online socialization; it would certainly fit with the themes of the story that brought us all here.
In the midst of this thicket, we had a newcomer that asserted themselves more quickly than others have done. Another of Tipsy’s friends alongside Brooke, a fellow named Jun, came around after only two days of messing about in the server. It was only a matter of hours, I think, before they had firmly implanted themselves in our midst.
It was actually quite impressive: there was no weeks wasted on flitting here occasionally before settling down as it usually goes. Instead, they associated with us freely for a bit and then simply said: “its literally a clique / but still pretty welcoming … i love this channel”. They came here to reacquaint themselves with Tipsy, but have stayed for the camaraderie. I find it thrilling in a way--it’s always nice to have new people, and I hope they’ll stay awhile.
In the past, I’ve often wondered--sometimes publically, sometimes to myself--whether the long-term stability of our group is assured or not. Of course, it is still impossible to say one way or the other whether we will persist indefinitely; the threat of disbandment lurks always, sometimes closer and sometimes farther away from us. Yet, days like these convince me that the potential to last exists in our community, and I think I can be more than satisfied with that.
As time passes it becomes harder to remember what it was we talked about throughout the day, but that feeling of warmth lingers. At this moment I feel an incredible sense of kinship to the people that come here, which may be fitting since I talk to them each and every day. I’m sure that I will forget more and more of the finer details that permeate our existence here, but I will never forget the golden glow of our afternoons spent hashing it out together, total strangers and yet resolute friends.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of April
Nothing of real importance happened today, so I want to take a time to describe the pins list of mspa-lit. I realized only recently that I have not actually bothered to describe what pins actually are, despite mentioning them occasionally in the past (and recently, in reference to altgen’s rule list). “Pin” refers to a simple system where an important or otherwise noteworthy post may be stickied in a list for others to easily find at all times.
We may add or remove pins at any given time, although there is a limit to the amount of pins we may have. I’m not adamantly certain how many pins we’re allowed--I thought it was fifty at first, but upon review that appears to be too many and I believe the answer is closer to 25 or so. At any rate, this makes it so that pin space is a valuable resource; it is the rule for old or less amusing pins to be removed in favor of the new, although there are many older pins which have stood the test of time.
Looking through the pin list of mspa-lit, the earliest is from a month before I joined, at the beginning of October in 2016: it’s from Makin, and is a screenshot of one of Hussie’s Formspring responses. Less important than the actual pin itself is the precedent this sets (or once set) for the pin list, where an important piece of information may be selected so that it can be referenced with little trouble later. That of course changed as time went by, but for some the principle held true.
After this are a smattering of quotes from various people that used to come around the HSD, including James (with the infamous “Yikes”) and Cohen (“it’s not a meme if you never stop saying it, it’s respiration”). After this, the consistency of pins shifts rapidly. One of the first memes involves a comic edit involving the word “misguided”, which I’ve described at great length before.
From there, it only gets more shitposty the closer to the present you get. Sometimes the pins still function as bookmarks for important events, such as this video of WoC losing a bet about the release of Hiveswap and having to snort hot sauce up his nose. Niklink and Tensei both have a few pins in here, all of which are genuinely funny--each of them have a variation on the trolley discussion, and Tensei has an uncanny ability to recreate generic memes in a more HSD-centric fashion.
This one from Makin manages to make me laugh literally every time I see it, although I can only imagine what someone who has no previous exposure to any of this might think about it. It’s times like these where the absurdity of it all compounds on me and I’m reminded of just how truly nested our community is in the grand scheme of things.
I wanted to take some time to describe someone who isn’t around in the HSD, but rather on the subreddit. A user named Mindbleach is a figure of some note, with a remarkably consistent posting habit. Nearly every single day, Mindbleach will post several pictures of fanart on the sub that other people have drawn, with credit to the original artist.
This has been going on for as long as I can remember, and after consciously witnessing this for several weeks I decided to ask Mindbleach a question or two. I was curious especially if they ever reposted certain works for any reason, to which they said:
Oh yeah, sometimes on purpose. When good stuff doesn't do well it goes in a spite list so I can throw it at people later. The main list grew out of control after some art binges for my own sake left me with stuff so good it had to be shared. This bloomed somewhat into merely high-quality art with useful tags.
The hilarious idea of a spite list aside, I’m intrigued by this person’s implication. I would not be surprised if they have an incredible catalog or archive of Homestuck-centric fanart, which is something that anyone reading this should realize that I get excited about. I’m glad to see other people engaging in the spirit of preservation.
Nothing more for today.
24th of April
In the afternoon, there was some rather poignant discussion amongst Olki, Nat, Rar, and a couple others about members of a community suddenly disappearing: “its sad when people disappear” remarked Jun, to which Olki responded “especially when the people are like / an integral part of a close knit, super small community / the kind of person who drummed up half the talk through their presence”. I think that many of us quietly fear this possibility.
To my surprise, Nat in particular seemed quite upset at the idea. She’s always struck me as too gruff for that kind of affectation, but the mention of a tightly knit group breaking apart suddenly seemed to truly get to her in a bad way. She started to describe herself and her life’s circumstances a bit, but then she policed herself into going to #hangout before saying anymore.
I worry about Nat sometimes. She can be aggressive with people, beyond what I would deem acceptable from a pseudo, but she also carries this air of impishness that makes it hard to approach her about stuff sometimes. We aren’t terribly close--sometimes I get the impression that she just doesn’t like me that much for some reason. All the same though, I hope that she’s alright.
Speaking more broadly, Makin continued his pattern of exiling certain topics from mspa-lit by creating something that has been often joked about in the past: #science-math is now the official STEM-dedicated channel, provoking the ire of some (especially WoC) while also appeasing many others.
Putnam and Nat and a few other people are all rather pleased with the development, as they were the ones that this channel was primarily dedicated to. Putnam historically has ejaculated much programming or math into the channel, and previously Nat would hang out in #coding-tech habitually, posting long reams of code she happened to be working on. For them, and perhaps more in the future, the new channel is a boon.
Ironically, I’m not totally sold on its existence. I feel like splitting up conversation further is unnecessary, and that this is more just an opportunity for Makin to flex his administrative muscles and exert a little more control on the topic of the channel. At this point I would suspect him of earnestly trying to break up the channel, but that doesn’t really make any sense to me. I wonder what must go through his mind sometimes.
Nothing more for today.
25th of April
I was just describing this problem the other week, but the shitposting in mspa-lit has reached an uncomfortable high. Revlar was complaining about it as he is wont to do, but this time his words stuck to me. That was a few nights ago, and since then the cause of his concern has rapidly made itself more visible.
There’s a concept concerning memes called “snowcloning”, which is when a particularly funny meme is suddenly and quickly copied en masse. These copies are the eponymous snowclones, where the idea is that snowclones make for very cheap and easy humor following the template of the original meme, but they rapidly become annoying as hell. Snowclones were recently banned on the subreddit a few months ago after they started to grow massively out of control and were noticeably bringing down the quality of the entire sub.
So too has it been the case here lately, where memes long past or even new ones are now being snowcloned. This is normally acceptable but the rate of it has gotten to the point where people like myself and Revlar are starting to get sick of the pattern. Many people are ambivalent of the process like hb, or others will actively engage in it. Coupled with a tendency among some regulars like Toast, Rar, and Olki to engage in some decidedly shitposty behavior, it feels as if the channel quality has been dropping like a stone recently.
No one is really sure if this needs to be handled immediately or what to do about it should we decide to intervene. After my decidedly heavy-handed decisions in recent history I’ve decided to mostly recuse myself, only speaking up if it truly reaches a level that is clearly unacceptable. Revlar has been quick to condemn this, because he feels like my disappearances almost always coincide with a drop in channel quality (flattering, but he fails to consider my appreciation for dumb fun).
In the interim, once the discussion was broached there was some decent dialogue about how to proceed on the issue. Some blame was cast towards the new arrivals in the group, but Barry dissented: “i dont think its the new people specificly tho … shitposting is a way for people who arnt in the current convo to participate”. Null took it a step further and consciously admitted to engaging in the intense shitposting behavior: “... revlar brings up a good point and it sucks when things get just swallowed”. With that concession in place, at least one person is willing to try and rectify the problem.
It’s good to see everyone listening to each other properly for once. I would like it to avoid turning into some sort of fracas--mods getting involved is not supposed to be a commonly-required occurrence, I would much prefer to nudge them along the right course of action, if indeed any intervention is required at all. Perhaps I’m just lazy, but people being encouraged to police themselves is always more rewarding (when it can be made to work, of course). We can only hope that with some further guidance, people will start listening to each other more and we can avoid this problem in the future.
Nothing more for today.
26th of April
Sometime in the afternoon there was an altercation between Nights and Tipsy that I thought might escalate to dangerous levels. It began with a decidedly #hangout-centric discussion where people were trying to describe each other in as few words as possible, or identify relevant character traits. In the midst of this, Tipsy decided to describe Nights as having “child-like intelligence”.
It should be easy to predict the outcome to that particular statement; Nights very quickly questioned the statement and rebuffed Tipsy for it, and at this point I expected the situation to be over. To my surprise, Tipsy doubled down and repeated it, which prompted very directed ire from Nights. This continued one or two more times--all of us watching were utterly bewildered.
The statement by itself is denigrating enough, but it comes in conjunction with a pattern that Nights has spoken out against recently. Sometime last week a discussion was opened about how he hated it when people call her naive or gullible (although to my recollection no one has really done this, at least not outright). I’m afraid that his general demeanor and the way people interact with her may lend itself to the impression that he is treated as less than an adult by people, which any reasonable person should understand is frustrating.
Further, I imagine one might understand that this ill-timed joke from Tipsy only served to fuel those particular flames. Already unhappy with his perceived treatment, Nights quickly grew angry over the offense. It was quite stunning--I can’t speak for the others but I had expected Tipsy to stop after Nights asked the first time. Nights grew quite irate and scathingly insisted that Tipsy was being sincere.
Finally the latter understood that no one was really having fun and stopped repeating the joke. Nights was confused and asked why Tipsy wouldn’t actually believe it after repeating it so many times. At this, Tipsy shoved her foot firmly into her mouth, saying: “that would actually be racist of me to think”. Everyone was stunned, it was just such a bizarrely uncharacteristic thing to come out her mouth.
Thankfully she clarified quickly by saying it was a language thing, which was infinitely more understandable than the implication otherwise. There was much rabble rousing about the the discussion as a whole. Tipsy herself said: “this entire conversation is me being autistic as fuck”, which I feel managed to break the tension sufficiently. It kind of illustrates to me how many of our problems may arise from simple miscommunications and misunderstandings, though. What an absurd progression of events.
Aside from this, there was an event in altgen that I felt was necessary to cover. There is a tendency to post dumb shit asking for reactions, such as “ten smiley faces and I’ll post some picture”, which inevitably gets people to react to the image. It’s attention grabbing of the worst sort, although sometimes it is applied as a meme sufficiently well.
The particular instance of this I want to cover is a post by McMayor Nik made back on the 13th of November 2017: “if this image gets 100 :dingus: dingus will be promoted to mod”. These sorts of posts are frequent enough not to illicit comment, except that out of nowhere Makin pinned that particular message. People took this as an explicit contract, and so began the multi-month journey of trying to help Dingus reach modhood.
Today, that journey came to an end. I’m impressed myself, but the madmen actually did it:
People had slowly been ramping up their excitement for this moment for a few days, so the moment the crossover happened altgen positively exploded. Makin pings were made, we posted a screencap in the modchat so Makin would specifically be aware of it. Unfortunately he has already gone to bed for the day, so we have to wait until tomorrow to see how this plays out. Excitement abounds.
Finally, an event of minor note: the movie Avengers: Infinity War is being released throughout the world this week. It’s being released in America on Friday the 27th, or tomorrow. Some places already have it out, and people like Minish have been able to go see it already. In the case of movies that are this hyped up, there is a strict death penalty for anyone who spoils the movie for other people.
This leads us to a bit of a conundrum. #western-media is specifically designated as a spoilers-allowed channel, but the vast majority of people still haven’t seen it. Ngame, acting as the pseudo for western- and eastern-media channels, is American and thus has had no opportunity to go see it.
Minish came in absolutely blasting spoilers for the movie, as would be understandable, but due to most people not having seen it yet we had to rule this unallowable until the movie comes out in America. Minish was a bit miffed about this, but I don’t think anyone could really be put off by the ruling since he has his own entire channel where he routinely discusses spoilers for stuff he’s doing. In the end I felt like it worked out well enough, but in the future we may need to tweak the rules for the media channels just a bit.
Nothing more for today.
27th of April
Appropriately, Makin made good on his promise to mod Dingus. As of 9:37 AM EDT, Dingus is now a full mod on the HSD. Altgenners have predictably gone wild; their boy made it. He is the champion, it’s him. Yet, this modding comes with a caveat: Makin made a second post saying that Dingus would be unmodded as soon as there were 10 dingus reactions to his post, which he then pinned.
Thus, Dingus’s modship is a timebomb, and there is no telling how quickly it may go off. Optimistically it seems as if there are far few people willing to react to Makin’s post. In other words, there is some solidarity going on here. Some of the people involved are actually rather rabid in their defense of Dingus, but I fear that this will only spur the dissent to action.
In the meantime, the second volume of the Hiveswap Friendsim is due to come out today. There is actually going to be an update to the base game at noon, and then at 3 PM EDT the second volume itself will be available to purchase and download. People are slowly getting excited over the prospect of more content.
However, at noon no update came. Confusion spread quickly and uneasily. Hours passed, and no update was forthcoming. Makin came out and said what everyone was already afraid of: “probably no game today at this rate”. Confusion turned to upset, and for some time the discussion centered around what might happen if this proved to be true.
Then around 3 PM, the update actually did come out. Grumblings were left behind as people very quickly scoured the small and inconsequential update. Within five minutes of the update being available, resources for the game were posted that revealed features of future installments; the intense pace at which the assets were torn apart and analyzed was honestly hilarious to me in a way. Leave it to Homestuck fans to utterly devour any and all content offered to them.
The game itself was not immediately available, and after a few more muttered consternations it was finally released sometime after 3 PM. The HSD was a little quieter for a few minutes while people booted up the game and began playing. As with the last one though, the silence didn’t last long; people posted their reactions in #friendsim, which was opened up again briefly to allow for spoilers. Also true of the first volume, most people finished inside of 15 to 20 minutes.
The reaction was more or less neutral. Makin was decidedly negative, describing it as boring or even mediocre. Others were more forgiving, such as Griever: “friendsim verdict: makin was exaggerating - it's not as good as vol 1 but it's still fun”. It seems as if this was the most prevalent reception towards it, which is about what I had hoped for based on the reception to the first volume.
The writing was enjoyable but so brief that it didn’t allow for much of an impression. It was unfortunate that such was the case, but I feel like there’s a principle of the summed whole at play here: as more Friendsim volumes are released, the overall length of the game will increase and its quality should increase somewhat. As with Hiveswap itself, there is hope that the fully released product will be of greater note than the individual parts.
A couple hours after this, at 5:22 PM EDT, the appointed time came: all of the students from America were largely out of school at that point, which meant altgen was chock full once again of the more unsavory element. The post by Makin reached the required 10 dingus reactions, at which point he was promptly pinged. Like an angel of death he swept through, confirming that the reactions were fulfilled.
Just shy of eight hours after he had ascended Dingus had his power taken from him, was cast out from the pantheon, and fell back to pseudo status. Everyone went back to not giving a fuck, except for those more rabid supporters that I had mentioned in altgen. The user responsible for the final reaction, a shitter named Derpeyman, was lambasted appropriately. Altgen has since resumed its base status of debauchery and shitposting, and the server goes on like nothing happened.
We will always remember, though.
On one of my excursions to #general today I got to play witness to someone clamoring for an unban. This wasn’t really that remarkable in and of itself; however, the way it played out was amusing to me. Ifnar is rather dutiful and speaks in #general often, which is far more effort than I feel I can relinquish myself, so kudos to him. As it is, this user named Snippy had been banned from #serious and was initiating a decidedly lopsided campaign to get himself back in.
Ifnar’s patience for listening to people is astounding to me sometimes--this Skippy fellow was honestly pretty rude just about the entire time, but Ifnar took it without so much as batting an eye, only deigning to respond when there was something he could earnestly and professionally give back to the conversation. I chimed in a few times, but since I trust him well and it was about his channel I only gave my opinion and let him decided what to do on his own.
I didn’t actually get to see the conclusion of this confrontation but it was enjoyable to watch while it was unfolding. A brief search for the user in question shows that his serious-ban role has been removed, meaning Ifnar saw fit to unban him. Considering the content of the discussion I witnessed, this was vaguely surprising; I wonder how long it will last, hopefully a while. It’s nice to see things turn out positively every so often.
Nothing more for today.
28th of April
For some reason, today there was some brief discussion about the eventual fate of online communities. There was some vague reminiscing of previous online communities, especially among the older people like myself. It’s easy to get lost in the nostalgia for older internet homes gone by, Sydlexia being a prime example as always.
However, I’ve noticed that the younger members of the community don’t really have an analog for this. Minish has been a member of a different community before, namely the Undertale wiki of all places, but he found the experience to be profoundly uncomfortable in retrospect and doesn’t like to speak of it for very long. Others may follow a similar pattern, or more interestingly have never been a part of such a thing at all. For many, this is the first place approaching any sort of regular online hangout for them.
One must wonder at the sort of responsibility this foists on us. Responsibility I guess is the wrong word for it: there is no strict responsibility on our part to take care of these people, but there is some moral imperative (at least on my part) to make the experience a positive one. The lifeblood of a place like this is in the people who care about participating and interacting with each other, and it’s a lot easier to motivate them to do so when they’re having a good time.
My experiences with this sort of thing are exclusively in smaller, more dedicated groups, so it’s hard for me to say what the overall pattern to expect from this would be. It was necessary to have an influx of energy in some form or another--be it new members or information--in order to sustain a group. Is that principle different for larger groups? Do we deteriorate more slowly the more people we have, or is it possible to decay faster when the group gets too big? Is there a proverbial sweetspot we should be striving for in order to maximize the efficiency of this process?
I’m getting too technical of course, but these things are interesting to consider. If I were more inclined, I would try to look up more in-depth information on this and see if there’s any research that’s been done on the topic. I would be a little surprised if there was any literature available, to be honest; it’s not exactly like people are lining up to conduct experiments on exceedingly niche internet communities4. All the same though, the sociological implications of such a study would be fascinating.
In the meantime, I suppose we’ll have to content ourselves with what we’ve got. The server is rapidly approaching another milestone in usercount, which for some reason isn’t quite as exciting as it used to be (although that may be some hindsight bias). This has prompted some small discussion about the future in a more positive sense as well; people are openly thinking about what this place would look like if it were still somehow around a decade from now. Dingus kept it short and sweet with a message to himself in the future: “10 years from now me if you're reading this you're a bitch”. I’m sure future Dingus will enjoy being reminded of this.
Finally, we were discussing the HSD in terms of its raw structure. After some consideration, we settled on the idea that Discord is an interesting cross of a bunch of different platforms. There is a large degree of personalization available to people through the use of avatars and name colors, the ability to rapidly and easily change your name. The ability to personalize yourself is highly similar to that of a forum experience. However, Discord is a real time chat interface, with no delay as one waits for a response to come in. This latter feature is similar to IRC.
An interesting contrast, perhaps the polar opposite of our experience, is 4chan: the posting system is slow by design and there is virtually no customization available outside of tripfagging, which is openly disparaged when used. These differences explain some of the behavior that has arisen for us, such as relying on smaller reactions as opposed to full scale reaction images as they do on 4chan.
On 4chan reaction images are themselves a form of identity, where an entire post is defined by the reaction that has been signified. With us I don’t think that’s strictly possible; the identity of each person present is apparent and consistent as time goes by, which makes employment of reaction images kind of awkward. The inhouse reaction system that Discord has is far more discrete, while still letting people express some sort of visceral emotion.
None of this is strictly important, they’re more just my musings than anything else. I have no idea how many other people may have consciously considered this, and I wonder if it was a conscious decision on the part of the Discord devs to make the system work this way. I should stop dallying on the subject though, it’s probably not interesting in the slightest. The only other piece of news relevant to the HSD today is that Toast finally completed the shill list, making four to do so alongside Revlar, Minish, and Gitaxian. I’m not far behind though.
Nothing more for today.
29th of April
Perhaps in keeping with yesterday’s discussion about the fate of online communities, today witnessed the topic of older times in our own fandom. Given how contentious we can be there was unsurprisingly some conflict over particular details or the accuracy of recalling various events, but overall it was a pretty informative experience. The forums were not spoken of in any detail, but the subreddit’s history was touched upon.
Details about Makin’s involvement naturally surfaced, and it was revealed that he joined the Homestuck fandom as it was sometime back in 2010; there were some pretty open accusations from people saying that the fandom was better off without his involvement, but in the end he brushed this off. After some of the things I’ve witnessed here I can easily imagine Makin getting embroiled in or even manufacturing substantial drama, but at the end of the day I can’t really comment on stuff that I wasn’t around for. No one elaborated on the exact nature of past events, so I can’t even record them. It’s times like these that I really wish I had been around back then so I could record events more properly.
For awhile at night there was a pretty intense discussion about music. It is a common convention in the group to disregard each others opinions on artistic concepts as “poor taste”; without fail, people who disagree with each other will end up attacking the others comprehension. This follows for movies, video games, or any form of media really.
The problem is that it sometimes becomes hard to discern whether people are simply mocking you for having a different opinion or if they actually believe your opinions are bad. Makin is of course particularly fond of busting out “you just have bad taste” when people naysay him, which is clearly an example of the former, but sometimes I witness people actually trying to claim some sort of objective superiority in this way. It’s a uniquely frustrating behavior to come across because of how pretentious it is.
Thankfully it’s not typically the case from what I can see. Rather, taste is just used as a cheap joke in the context of larger overall discussions. Such is as it was today with music. It turned out to be something of a repeat of the food discussion I had with everyone some months ago: I have rather unconventional opinions on both food and music, which very quickly led to a dogpile from everyone questioning how I could possibly feel the way I do.
It began with a rather innocuous question about Kanye West, after which Toast, Barry, and myself started talking about rap. They’re both avid listeners and were trying to share the tracks they like most, but I don’t particularly care for it. This snowballed into a fracas where everyone was sharing music in an attempt to get each others’ opinions on various musical genres or particular songs. It was an interesting mix, but naturally some (like Revlar) were displeased with the admittedly ectopic conversation.
It’s important to note that Revlar’s displeasure was not in fact because it was taking place in the wrong channel, but he feels the nature of these discussions is fairly banal. Above all else it seems that he hates conversations based around subjective and especially trivial measures; he prefers to talk about things that can be couched in more substantiated terms.
Sure enough, most of the musical conversation was a cock waving contest at first, and it took a little bit of time for us to start discussing the actual merits of certain types of music over another. Though, after the conversation had shifted he seemed eager to share what he liked as well. It seems that getting him to share his opinion is just a matter of approaching him the right way. Then again, I guess that’s simply true of everyone.
Nothing more for today.
30th of April
Makin added a new work to the shill list called Transdimensional Brain Chip, or TBC. This work is pretty unconventional in the shill list for a variety of reasons. Of note, it’s a comic; this is unusual in the sense that Makin typically hates comics (Homestuck excepted) due to how they’re constructed. He views the panel scheme as a waste of space that could be used on words.
More important than the fact that it’s a comic is that it fucking sucks. TBC looks like it was written by a five year old and is festooned with grammatical errors and weird, awkward sentence structure. The premise is simplistic, the humor is intensely sophomoric, and the progression of the narrative is ridiculous. Everything about TBC is remarkably terrible without exception.
And that’s why I love it. I earnestly thought it was one of the more entertaining works of the shill list, although--as would easily be predicted--the response from other people was not nearly so positive. Many such as hb, WoC, Toast, MrNostalgic, and Rar absolutely hate the comic. Surprisingly Revlar defending it alongside me, and Makin is casually insulting people who complain about it as is expected of him.
In all, the work has been far more controversial than I would have expected. The consensus leans more in favor of people who think the comic is trash, and although I agree with that statement it doesn’t mean I dislike the work. There’s a sort of raw quality to it that I appreciate; it’s so unpolished that it feels visceral. By itself that wouldn’t mean much, but the work is extraordinarily funny to me. The immediate comparison that most people came up with was Beavis and Butthead, although anyone who’s familiar with the show would understand why that doesn’t mean everyone would enjoy it.
There’s not much else to say on the matter I suppose. There have been few shills as contentious as this one, although Ever 17 has certainly come close, especially in more recent conversations. Without going into too much detail, the conclusion most people come to is that the story is exceedingly slow at first, but then the ending makes the entire experience worth it. I disagree completely, but I suppose that’s not strictly important.
It’s neat to see how individual people all feel about the various works that Makin has tried to share with us. Some works like Worm and Worth the Candle are pretty universally agreed upon as being good, except for some isolated shitters like WoC. The reverse doesn’t seem to be true either: none of the works, with the possible exception of TBC, are universally hated. Then there is of course a wide range of those works in the middle that people don’t feel strongly about one way or the other, like The Northern Caves. In the end, I think we’re all just waiting for the next big work to come and sweep the HSD into a frenzy for a month or two.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
1 to add to the tumblr thing: solid #1 hiveswap blog, homestuck varies wildly between #9 and #13
2 she has argued viciously against me and made me cry
3 I missed the conversation but geese are indeed evil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81ptFSA4mk
4 or are they....