Drew Linky
4th of August
There was a vaguely unpleasant mixup on the subreddit, of small consequence in the short term but perhaps more in the long scheme of things. A thread advertising the New Alternia Discord Server was posted, which obviously wasn’t going to be allowed to remain under any circumstances. Makin removed the thread and banned what he thought was the author (more commonly referred to as the original poster, or OP), but got the wrong person--SmolMuffin ended up being collateral damage.
Naturally they brought it up to me on Discord. Although I quickly grew agitated with her transparent attempts to influence me, I was already working on figuring out the problem. I confirmed that Makin banned the wrong person and got SmolMuffin unbanned, actually banned the OP of the post in question, and was left with the question, “what rule actually states that we can’t advertise different servers?” After a brief check, none of the official rules on the subreddit mentions that people can’t advertise their servers.
After a little haranguing Makin agreed to put up a new rule so people would stop asking about this particular detail. He was resistant at first, but the promise of being able to shut people down more quickly when asked about this was probably too alluring. There is some concern that people will see it as dictatorial, but I wonder who’s familiar with this community who doesn’t already see it that way. Nonetheless, I imagine there will be some ramifications somewhere down the line for establishing the hard rule.
Unrelatedly, after enduring yet more of La-Mulana talk in the chat, a number of people including myself broke down and decided to play it. In my case I’m playing it again, and I regret to say that I still can’t bring myself to care about it1 enough to get that far. I had resolved to make it at least part of the way without help and was successful to an extent--I actually quite enjoy the aesthetics and what little story there is, but I just can’t stomach the puzzles.
I subsequently started using a walkthrough in order to progress, and that changed the game from horribly frustrating to mildly enjoyable. When it was being discussed yesterday, I mentioned some very specific things that prompted Toast to ask if I was indeed using a walkthrough. I made the mistake of saying yes; the next hour or so was merciless flagellation from Toast and Makin, practically crucifying me for “being a casual” and “not actually playing the game”, among an assortment of other diatribes.
I really should have expected the outcome, and as soon as it began I realized my error. At first I was able to handle it just fine, but then with each passing insult I felt myself growing actually upset, more and more. It was vaguely humiliating, and it’s always more difficult to face when it’s more than one person poking fun at you at a time. I don’t know if they were legitimately trying to make me feel bad or if they were just going hard with jokes as they usually do, but it set me in an utterly foul mood for the rest of the day.
It’s difficult to overstate just how agitated I was at it all. On my way home from work I was thinking extensively about why I even bothered coming to the Discord anymore, or why I cared. I felt an intense unease the entire evening and avoided speaking in the chat, eventually going to bed disgruntled. I simply hoped that my mood would improve by the next day.
Miraculously, it did. After mulling it over for a while today, I realized that the jokes from yesterday literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things2. It’s amazing how deeply they nettled me at the time, but in retrospect none of it really bothers me that much. It’s increasingly difficult to understand just why I was so upset at their simple mockery.
I keep coming to the realization that this behavior is probably just how they interact with people that they’re friendly with, if anything. No matter how many times I make that connection it manages to jar me a little bit each time--it’s such a radically different way from how I interface with people that it’s kind of hard to accept. This all reminded me of a conversation from a few days ago where Tensei, Makin, and myself were all talking about friendship on the internet.
To keep a long story short, Makin and Tensei are of a party that treat friendship as a more special thing. They see fit to disparage the overtly affectionate displays we sometimes see in the HSD, which were solely responsible for the creation of #social. I understand their position and even agree slightly, but they perceive it as illegitimate or counterfeit--I only consider it naive most of the time. When someone is using it for deceptive purposes, I feel like that turns it into a different issue entirely.
This topic actually ended up cropping up once more tonight, where we rehashed the idea with each other. Tensei repeated his assertion from the other night, commenting that “actions speak louder than words”. He indicated that being nice to each other is a cheap and easy way for people to interact on the internet, which is true. However, as others in the conversation pointed out, the reverse is also true: being mean-spirited is also cheap and easy, if not more so.
The problem is that there’s an enormous degree of confusion when you get people who act genuinely and people who are fine with deception in the same conversation (to be clear, I don’t mean the evil brand of deception in this case, but the same manner of casually messing with each other). I hate to play into the centrist stereotype, but as usual I feel like the answer lies somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. We often behave or speak in the objective sense, as if there’s a real answer to our quandaries and discussions. The correct answer is more that it depends on who you’re talking to.
Funnily enough, I think that a good litmus test of friendship with people comes in the form of the opposite of their preferred form of interaction. This is only speculation on my part, but consider the following: for someone like Tensei, who feels that lighthearted deception with people you’re only acquainted with is natural, openness and speaking on a more personal basis is reserved for people he considers true friends; conversely, for someone like Oda or Olki, kindness and personal frankness is a given and it is in fact more difficult to engage in that casual mockery with people who aren’t close friends.
So it is that, like most things, this is just a matter of perspective and personal preference. I’m sure people will find fault with my assessment, but realistically I don’t know how there could be some kind of “true answer” to the question. The world is a complicated place, made even more so by human interaction--it’s easy to say that one thing is optimal, but every single time there’ll be a variable that isn’t accounted for, or some kind of illogic at play. I guess the best solution is not to worry that much about it if it can be avoided.
Really, even though we didn’t end up agreeing by the end of it, the conversation proceeded in such a way that I don’t think anyone was getting heated or upset about it. I almost felt compelled to continue with it, pursuing this intense feeling of engagement that I can’t remember experiencing for a long time now. The topic ended up going on into the early hours of the morning, finally ending around 5:30 AM of the 5th or so.
The conversation itself being relatively mundane, I think there’s a particularly fascinating quality to how it was handled that feels increasingly rare these days. When I was younger and habitated the Sydlexia IRC room instead of this enormous Discord server, there were many days where I would stay up until the rising sun because I was having such a good time just talking with the others in the group. This feeling doesn’t happen but once every few months now, but when it does it’s nothing short of magical.
Times like these serve as an effective reminder of why I enjoy being here so much. It’s worth chasing that feeling, because it does still exist. The spirit of the old internet chatroom has waned significantly, but pulses occasionally. In keeping with the conversation of today and before, I think I’m content with considering most of the people I talk to in mspa-lit my friends. Not bosom buddies, like Tensei and Makin feel the term should refer to, but I appreciate them and enjoy their presence enough that I hope this can all continue indefinitely. What more do I need than that?
Nothing more for today.
8th of August
Of note today, there was a Nintendo news broadcast--known as Nintendo Direct--concerning the upcoming game Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. For those who might possibly not be in the know, Super Smash Brothers (SSB) is an ensemble fighting game containing characters across an immense number of Nintendo-owned franchises. SSB as a series is something that’s talked about periodically in mspa-lit and the HSD as a whole, with people such as myself and Putnam and a swathe of others being fans.
SSB has come up frequently in the past in mspa-lit, usually in one of two ways: typically it’s Putnam, myself, and a token few others talking about our favorite characters and the competitive scene for it in a lighthearted manner; the other way it gets handled typically evolves out of the prior scenario, when someone like Makin overhears what we’re discussing and comes to wreak havoc.
Makin and an assortment of others, such as Tensei and Nights, are fond of other fighting games such as Skullgirls and Guilty Gear. These two examples are more in keeping with the traditional style of fighting games3, while something like Super Smash Brothers deviates from that formula. Most people don’t bother with this distinction, but Makin likes to hone in on this particular facet and use it as some sort of basis to invalidate or otherwise make fun of Smash players. I assume he thinks it’s funny, otherwise I have no idea why he would bother bringing it up so much.
Regardless, today in particular there was a Nintendo Direct about the upcoming title. Even people who have no real interest in SSB themselves watched the broadcast, and it was immeasurably successful at inducing hype. By chance I decided to take a look on the /v/ board of 4chan to see what was being said. I noticed a lot of behaviors that reminded me of Twitch chats for highly-populated streams, but when I brought this up in mspa-lit I was shut down quickly by 4chan regulars (“stickied threads are absolute cancer compared to regular threads”, Tensei remarked).
This eventually progressed into a similar discussion about the similarities of 4chan versus Reddit. Some people present (although I forget who) were inclined to say that 4chan is an inherently better internet platform, while others naturally disagreed. None of the evidence provided was particularly convincing, although the biases were shamefully obvious in some cases. Makin in particular seems to display the more impish behavioral traits of a common 4chan troll, when he’s so inclined.
This behavior was laboriously dragged out over the course of the SSB discussion as well. A common point of contention that was settled long ago is whether Super Smash Brothers Ultimate is to be considered a port (software taken from one console to another) or if it was a genuinely new game. Makin swears on his life that Ultimate is a port and not a new game, even after being shown a litany of evidence that mark it as something new.
It used to be more amusing when it was a fresh idea, but now it’s simply frustrating--this topic in particular is emblematic of his tendency to take jokes too far for no real reason. Or at least, I hope it’s a joke. There’s only two possibilities with a discussion like this, in the end: either he’s fooling around excessively and needs to learn some self-control, or he sincerely believes what he’s saying. If the latter is true, then it’s just one more piece of evidence that goes in the “Makin doesn’t actually know shit about anything” pile that’s been gradually building up over the years.
Yet, the maxim I outlined in a recent entry still holds true here: anyone who stays here must at least be tolerant of his nonsense, otherwise they would just leave. I definitely find it aggravating, some times more than others, but it hasn’t been quite so bad as to make me want to leave yet. Whether it may be classed as deception or charisma, Makin is definitely effective at deflecting the more negative aspects of talking with him.
Nothing more for today.
9th of August
I’ve noticed a significant drop-off in my activity these last few weeks, which can be owed to a multitude of things. Speaking to the external locus4, I was being overwhelmed by responsibilities I had to keep in real life, which there’s nothing anyone can really do about. On the inside however, I felt myself starting to get bored with checking in and keeping an eye on things when it seems that nothing changes. Today I decided to forego the hands-off, vaguely lurking behavior and actually engage myself again.
The difference was immediately palpable; dropping into a conversation after its begun is far more of a problem than I had initially thought. It’s easy to think that you have knowledge of what’s going on, but seeing others try to flop their way into a discussion that’s already been in progress is extremely obvious when you see it happen enough times--I believe this practice has graciously come to be known as Putnamming, which I’m not sure if Putnam finds amusing or frustrating.
Ironically, Putnam and I discussed the act of restricting who can participate in a given conversation the other day. Historically I’m not a proponent of this idea, but he offered the perspective that it’s actually a net benefit to do this. That statement was borne out of a conversation where Makin and a token couple others, including Revlar, were hefting around weighty and relatively esoteric philosophical terminology.
I was initially annoyed by this, as was Oda or Olki, because it significantly hindered other people's’ ability to engage and understand what was being discussed. Yet, what Putnam is true conceptually: more and more lately, I’ve understood that the confusion inherent in a discussion geometrically increases with the number of participants. A conversation between myself and one other person is usually a straightforward and perfectly amicable occurrence--then someone will join in and it becomes just a little bit more confusing, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and by the time you get to seven or eight people the entire conversation has degenerated into a complete mess.
To be clear, I still innately despise the idea of prohibiting people from joining in a given topic, at least on an arbitrary basis. However, for the sake of an actually productive conversation I find myself increasingly agreeing that it seems necessary to do so. If nothing else, restricting jokes and shitposts seems like it would be effective enough in keeping a discussion from going off the rails.
Some effort has been dedicated to this in recent weeks, with varying degrees of success. Typically people will grouch or question the reminder and then move on, but occasionally someone gets particularly incensed over the perceived injustice (Gnawms especially comes to mind with this). It is sluggish and largely ineffective at this point, but all it takes to set a trend is time. Our efforts are already paying some dividends; a token few members seem to have taken the warnings to heart and are preemptively destroying conversations that would have been highly interruptive anyway.
In this way, today progressed amiably; our fair share of theatrics occurred as normal, but without the accompanying frustration. Over the last several months I’ve found myself progressively more agitated with Makin’s chicanery--today he was as rowdy as ever at certain points, but staying engaged was weirdly helpful in reducing the general upset of witnessing his buffoonery.
I guess it’s safe to say that knowing where the jokes come from and being used to his demeanor in general really softens the impact of his more goofy bullshit. It’s still annoying to the nth degree, but less aggressively so. I’m not certain if the increase in quality was only perceived on my part or was more objective in nature, but today has been fairly comfy as a result: varied topics have come and gone smoothly, and some actual, light-hearted, and thorough discussion was permitted to happen.
It’s such a pleasant change of pace that even though it didn’t yield anything really substantial I felt compelled to write it down nonetheless. It reminds me that one needs to actually put time and effort into participating or else they’ll simply grow uncomfortable and bored with the proceedings. This brings me back around to the previous idea of this entry: gatekeeping may be one extreme end of the social scale, but permitting anything and everything is the other extreme end and just as ineffectual--some sort of standard must be kept if quality and consistency is desired. My worry over people wanting to join and not being allowed to may have been overblown in retrospect; going forward, it’ll be good to keep this in mind.
11th of August
It’s been a pretty quiet day, but there are some interesting quirks at play that I’d like to point out: first and foremost, Makin has been offline more frequently in the last few days. Whenever he has such enigmatic plans as require him to be away, he designates one of the mods (either at random or pointedly) to be in charge while he’s away.
This time he chose Nights and, as is customary, we’ve begun heckling him lightly about his temporarily uplifted status. Such heckling doesn’t extend too far beyond faint teasing, as it mostly involves deliberately pointing out small5 mistakes in a far exaggerated manner. This could be said to extend from a complaint that’s been levied against Makin in the past concerning his status as a Discord Partner.
I’ve mentioned this concept in passing before: Discord as a whole has a promotional deal where, if the server you own is large and active enough, you receive a few perks. The HSD is more than adequate to qualify for this in conjunction with the subreddit, although the benefits of being partnered aren’t that glamorous (the most exciting for most people is probably receiving a Discord hoodie). Yet, his partnered status tends to open himself up for criticism from people who don’t seem to really understand what being partnered means.
It’s been a severe problem in the past where people will try to run Makin’s behavior into the ground (more than is necessary, anyway) by claiming that his attitude is unprofessional. While this is certainly true, it actually has no bearing on his partnered status unless he’s actually violating Discord’s Terms of Service or what have you. This doesn’t stop some from using it as an angle of attack.
The oldest recorded instance of this is from Maxmikester, who in the confrontation at the end of last year said: “... this is behavior unbecoming of a discord partner...” That specific phrase has since been catapulted into popularity, mostly being repeated as a joke in mspa-lit and altgen. Occasionally someone like Tetra will use it unironically to express their unhappiness, which functions much the same way that pouring gasoline on a fire does.
To bring this around to the original topic, it’s common and great fun to make fun of the mod Makin places in charge of things by repeating that phrase ad nauseum at the slightest provocation. I was subject to this and other in-jokes (“You’ll never become the server owner at this rate!” is one specifically reserved for me) when I was placed in charge a couple months ago. They always feel a tad embarrassing in the thick of things, but in retrospect it’s all in good fun of course.
Later in the night around 2 AM EST, the chat remained unusually active. This was probably due to the topic at hand, surrounding on mathematical topics of various sorts. There’s a distinct cabal of people who are all involved with math at higher levels than most people, such as virtuNat and Ost. This includes people who dabble or are generally interested in higher-order math like Cty, Mines, Putnam, and Tmtmtl.
Historically, members of this group of people or anyone engaging in these heavily math-laden conversation tend to be really persistent or even disruptive, which is why #science-math was created to hold them. We’re supposed to move the conversations as they arise, but I had no motivation to do so this time; mspa-lit has been diverted so many times in its conversational underpinnings that I felt no reason for it, certainly not in the doldrums of the late night hours.
I’m not particularly fond of complex math myself, but watching their conversation proceed uninterrupted was amusing and even outright enjoyable at times. I was unable to participate myself, so I simply lurked and watched them divert into multiple tangents as time went by. The conversation naturally disintegrated after a few iterations of this pattern. Notably for me, the entire time that the topic was in progress there was a distinct feeling of coziness to it. The topic seemed to take on the most satisfying and friendliest form possible, with lots of actually helpful information being spread around punctuated with some light-hearted ribbing.
I would say that turning to this more cerebral topic may be due to school coming back soon--a matter of weeks or less for most now--but speaking honestly I’m sure that math taking over mspa-lit has happened dozens of times now at all times of the year. Regardless, school coming back is almost assuredly going to affect the activity of the server, although in what way I can’t be certain yet.
Nothing more for today.
15th of August
There’s been a noticeable increase in raids over the last couple of months. Nothing has hurt quite as much since the Fuckbot and child porn raids of early 2017; we still experienced some small-scale raids, but comparatively speaking they’ve all been extremely trivial since the two I named. The word that comes to mind is “pathetic”, first and foremost. Even regular users have commented on this, where the scale and intensity of all raids is a disappointment compared to what’s come before.
Then for a very long stretch of time, there was nothing. I think there was a period of nearly half a year or maybe even more where not a single raid was had. This is exempting instances where one person in particular came and caused a disturbance--unless it’s particularly spammy it hardly feels like a raid when there’s only one malefactor. Then, for whatever reason, we started having a long string of proper raids starting a couple months ago.
From an administrative perspective, all of these raids have thankfully been easy to deal with and of little consequence. It does little for entertainment value, though; when the first one came by we were all almost excited in some perverse way. Finally, an end to the monotony we had suffered for so long! Yet, it quickly became apparent that it was going to be more of the same weaksauce tripe from before. Now the only word that feels fitting is “boring”.
Then again, that’s probably for the best. We have had one or two of these recent raids that approached a middling competence, and it’s easy to forget that some people are actually quite bothered when the raider uses imagery that isn’t just spamming nonsense, or doing mass pings. I think the biggest one we’ve had in the last month has been a group of five to six people spamming porn and gore (a classic example of what one might consider a proper raid), but I wasn’t around for it myself.
On a miscellaneous note, I feel like commenting on a behavior that’s been growing progressively more intense as time goes by. VirtuNat has always been somewhat temperamental, but it’s gotten rather excessive in the last month or so. There is an on-going, playful-but-openly hateful dynamic between her and some others, especially myself: she is fond of mocking people to the extreme, to the point where I’ve had to repeatedly warn her about it.
This pattern has gotten much worse lately, with her casual barbs becoming cruel; they extend beyond a simple mannerism into something more sinister, and it worries me. She’s mentioned repeatedly that she has a crucial engineering exam coming up, something that’ll define the very future of her career. With that in mind it makes more sense to me that she seems so upset, but it’s hard to reconcile that when she’s so openly vicious. I’m waiting to see if she improves at all once she’s taken it; all I can hope is that her stress goes away once it’s done, and that her mood will improve.
Nothing more for today.
16th of August
There was more trap discourse today. The first and most appropriate reaction to have would be mild irritation, perhaps accompanied by a light sigh or even muttering the words “Really? Why even write about this again?” Yet, there was an outrageous twist to it all today that makes it completely worth mentioning.
The discourse was set in motion by a random user named “dennis was so wasted i mean damn”; I wasn’t around for the initial confrontation so I didn’t see it happen, but this user was promptly banned so it must have been at least vaguely awful. Yet, the damage was done by the time this user was disposed of: the conversation was in full swing, and everyone who’s experienced it recently was growing steadily more annoyed.
As could be predicted, Putnam appeared to be the main force behind not using the term, while Revlar and Makin were the main advocates against banning it. Other people such as myself, WoC, Toast, and Oda were all variously involved, although I got the impression that aside from the main three people were at least trying to keep their distance.
However, the paradigm was violently interrupted at 11:45 PM EST when another random user named HomestuckLover came. They posted a single bewildering message:
alright putnam im sorry for anything i said and i know it's bad what i did. if you unban me i will apologize to you in person and stop making alts and not get Reddit involved in this.
And then they were hit by the banhammer almost immediately. All conversation immediately stopped as people asked, “What the fuck was that?” I posted the entirety of the message again for posterity’s sake, and the sheer absurdity of it managed to completely decouple all stress or tension from the argument at hand.
Amidst great mockery and laughter, both sides started making small concessions to each other (for example, Putnam remarking: “i should probably note that i recognize that this is basically two people on the same side arguing over how extremist we have to be”), which was astounding and oddly heartening to witness. Shortly after this, the conversation ended up dissolving into other things naturally, such as life in the countryside and later the topic of artificial meat.
Then, about half an hour later at 12:12 PM EST, the promised Reddit thread miraculously appeared. It might extend beyond simple mockery to recite the post in its entirety, but I can’t resist:
A friend of mine with the name of "dennis was so wasted i mean damn" was recently banned from the Homestuck discord without reason other than a single mod got upset by something he said. He was in either altgen or some other channel and says he's sorry for any rules that he broke.
That friend of mine is a big fan of Homestuck and he's very upset that this happened, but rules are rules so i get that.
Also I myself am not a big fan of Homestuck which is why this is the first post on this subreddit. Sorry he didn't have a reddit so that he couldn't post it here himself (also, new account rule).
It’s so pathetically silly that it’s almost delicious. Carlarc managed to get in a solitary response (“this is so sad”) before the post was removed, for which he actually caught flak from the OP later in the night.
Regardless, the rest of the night was quite pleasant after that incredible interference. The instigator sounds really young to me, and I have my doubts that they’ll be a recurring problem in the future. It sucks to be the butt of a joke like that, but I’m sure everyone has at least a couple of those moments they hate to look back on. It’s almost like a rite of passage on the internet: you commit a few glorious fuck ups for all but yourself to enjoy, and you learn not to do it again as you get older. Such is the way of the internet.
Such was the good mood that we decided to watch not one, but two movies. Continuing the tradition of showing Nights popular movies that he’s never seen before, we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. After the Star Wars marathon we brainstormed about what other titles are as influential, and Indiana Jones was among the most commonly suggested ideas.
I was afraid that Nights wouldn’t enjoy it for whatever reason, but my fears were completely undeserved: he had a wonderful time, despite it being outrageously late for him. Tensei remarked at one point about “meme moments”, of which there were plenty in Raiders. This kicked off a protracted discussion about when we’re going to do the next one--with Nights going on vacation it’ll assuredly be a while--and some treatment of the topic of the fourth movie (“What fourth movie?”).
We’ll have to make sure to distribute the movies over a reasonable time frame so we don’t suffer from such intense burnout again--we’ve gone through the cycle enough times to know that’ll eventually bounce back, but going without any movies for several months is insufferably boring. Admittedly, we didn’t exhibit very good self-control tonight.
After a mildly disappointing game of Quiplash (which I’ll return to later), it was discovered that Cty has never seen cult-classic The Room. I’ve mentioned this movie before but never described it: without going into too much detail, it was an earnest attempt at a romantic drama by the eccentric Tommy Wiseau. It is universally hailed as one of the worst movies ever made and has accrued a significant following, often being shown in local theaters around the United States and even in the rest of the world.
Naturally, there are some fans of the movie in our fold. We actually watched it during a community stream earlier this year, along with related The Disaster Artist. Yet, due to the fact that Cty has never seen it, we decided to pull the movie up once again. Aside from Con Air, I believe The Room is the movie that we’ve gotten the most mileage out as a group by far. We even made plans to watch it again in the maybe-near future. At some point we may burn ourselves out on that too, but for now its value is intact.
Returning to Quiplash however, MrNostalgic set up the game for a number of us later in the evening. It was an ad hoc gathering and the game experienced some technical difficulties, which provoked my irritation more than I thought it would. Then, Cty began tearing into the admittedly frequent low-effort jokes that were being supplied. Eventually I lost my patience and yelled at him for it, which I fear would have ruined the night for many people if not for The Room afterwards.
Cty and I talked briefly about this, but there wasn’t a lot of time to flesh out the discussion as much as we need to. I’ve repeatedly felt that his way of wording things is agonizing and arrogant, but he asserts that he’s attempting to engage in good faith at all times. I’m not sure why this conversational difficulty exists, but regardless we’ll need to sit down and hash it out sometime soon. He seems to be a reasonable individual, so hopefully it goes smoothly.
Nothing more for today.
17th of August
Today is marked by the release of the tenth installment of the Hiveswap Friendsim. Anyone who hasn’t been paying the closest attention, like myself, is probably wondering: “How are there already ten of these fucking things?” To that, I can only say that we have eight more of these to go before we’re actually done.
There is some vague speculation regarding the future installments: the 12th volume happens to coincide with the anniversary of the release of Hiveswap: Act One, so a few such as Skyplayer are optimistic that we may receive a newspost on that day. Most people, however, have achieved a level of cynicism that precludes such positivity.
I’ve probably mentioned in this document before, but I’ve long abandoned hope that Hiveswap is still being worked on at all. If I happen to be wrong, that would be excellent news; otherwise, the combination of no forthcoming news and the thorough disposal of WhatPumpkin team members paints a fairly gruesome picture for the future of the game. It seems likely that Viz has shelved the property, if not outright abandoned it.
The Friendsims are contrary in this regard. Our understanding is that WP Studios are handling the Friendsims and possibly Hiveswap itself still, but since the team has been gutted we have basically no idea who’s in charge or what’s planned for the future. The Friendsims being handled so fluidly and regularly gives the appearance of preparing for something later, which the more eager would tell you is the release of Hiveswap: Act Two. The rest of us are too tired of being disappointed to even contemplate that idea.
At any rate, all of that is speculation and therefore worthless. Today’s Friendsim is more valuable to discuss because it features a couple of characters that have proven to be somewhat popular in the fandom. One of them is a walking anime stereotype which people like for obvious reasons, and the other has a uniquely complicated history in Hiveswap’s development.
Some years ago, Hiveswap had a drastically different appearance from what Act One eventually came to be. For example, information given to us by WP Studios showed images of a 3D game instead of the 2D game we now have. Some characters were also markedly different: while the characters who directly appear in the game were largely unchanged, some of the planned side characters underwent drastic changes by release. One such example is the infamous Beekeeper.
Out of all of the character designs from before the game was properly released, the Beekeeper was probably the most talked about. The name was fan-given, and was an obvious choice from her design. The reason she existed at all was that developers were allowed to work with models of their own fan characters while the game was being made. The reason any of this matters is because the character’s representative symbol was revealed to us directly through porn of her drawn by the author.
Naturally, this drew a lot of attention from the community, much of which was almost certainly uncomfortable. Bear in mind that all of this happened over three years ago now back in March of 2015, so many of the details are fuzzy. This has been exacerbated by an astonishing loss of the pertinent information related to this event (to be perfectly clear, this is NOT to suggest any systematic ill-intent on the part of WP Studios or Viz; I am only describing that the details are now much more difficult to find than they were originally).
Understandably the community’s response was pronounced, although I would be hard pressed to say that it was negative. Indeed, the top rated comment on the original thread discussing this (from which the image in question has been deleted) treated this as an almost expected development. It was jokingly considered part of the natural progression of the internet, and I feel that the reception the Beekeeper got in comparison to the other side characters at the time says something about all of this as well.
Personally, all of this is making me wax nostalgic for the fandom as it was back then, or at least as my largely uninvolved and forgetful brain makes me think it was. There has been an undeniable decrease in hype as the years go by and we’re continuously disappointed by the lack of news or substantial content. As mentioned in a previous entry, the Friendsims are nice but not adequate replacement for what we had before, or even what we were led to believe would be the future of the property.
We have truly entered a harsh cultural doldrum, and now the question is if the fandom as a whole will survive to see the end of it or if it will last perpetually; everyday it feels as if general activity decreases. Yet, a substantial lick of evidence in favor of survival is that the overall user count of the subreddit and the Discord only ever rise; once we start to see a net loss in members then it will be the time to truly panic.
Nothing more for today.
18th of August
There was a special occasion today, which was important more on a personal basis than for the community at large. WoC and I live close enough to each other that we decided to meet up and grab some food. We had been planning to do so as early as last year, at which point we were trying to turn it into an informal moderator meet up between myself, WoC, Sea Hitler, Ngame, and Wheals.
This didn’t pan out due to poor planning and ill timing, but the idea lurked in our minds afterwards. Finally, WoC and I had enough of the endless putting off and decided to get it done already. A picture we took of the occasion was appropriately posted in #hangout, where one user commented that WoC looked like “a crackhead” and another thought we both looked high. I guess this is the price we pay for daring to show our faces on an internet message board full of uncaring and cynical bastards.
Which wasn’t that high of a price, all things considered. The meetup was highly enjoyable, and it was exciting to finally meat I mean meet another HSD regular for the first time. I have some faint hope that a more proper mod meetup might happen in the future. We were discussing food the other night and it was mutually agreed upon by all parties--even in jest--that we would gladly get together for a BBQ. There’s nothing quite like a good steak or hamburgers to entice people. Yet, in reality this will almost certainly never happen; I would be immensely surprised if more than three or four people from the HSD were ever to be found in the same location on purpose.
More related to mspa-lit as a whole, I want to comment on the steady emergence of the term “boomer”. On a surface level this word relates directly to Baby Boomers, the generation of people born in the USA directly after World War II up until 1965. To briefly establish the terminology, “Generation X” refers to those who came just after baby boomers, then Millenials (less popularly referred to as Generation Y, as I found out in conversation today) and then the youngest cohort people have cared to identify is simply known as Generation Z right now.
It’s not far-fetched to say that the majority of people you’ll find using the internet are fairly young, with most people being millenials or gen Z, but with some gen X individuals hanging around. Everyone on the HSD is almost guaranteed to be a millenial--the oldest person that comes to mind is Tensei, who would both be categorized and self-identifies as such. Phantos is the only person I can think of who was older, and he probably also fits into that category.
As one examines the progression of the millenial generation, there’s a noticeable, increasing trend of people who consciously disparage baby boomers for their role in the world and how they’ve treated it. The common consensus is that baby boomers have solidly created a worse world for their children and grandchildren. This sentiment is even more apparent in generation Z individuals, although the exact nature of their disposition is obviously somewhat different (less pointed and more flippant in my experience, for whatever that’s worth).
Back to the main point, the term “boomer” has been popping up more frequently as of late. The most obvious meaning to anyone with even a basic grasp of US history would be to assume it refers to baby boomers and their stereotypical manners. While this is somewhat the case, the truth is more bizarre: Tensei described the origin of the term today, relating that it came from cryptocurrency circles.
Near the end of last year and into the beginning of this one, cryptocurrencies--most commonly referring to Bitcoin (BTC), but also altcoins like Litecoin in some cases--skyrocketed to prices that were nothing short of outrageous. For those who might be unfamiliar, BTC is a virtual currency (don’t worry about the in-depth details of this, it’s not important for this exploration of the topic. If you’re interested in learning more, this article from the NY Times is a good starting point).
At its height, the exchange rate was just short of an incomprehensible $20,000 for one BTC, which launched a frenzy of people trying to cash in on the idea. In what can only be described as a modern day gold rush, the price of computer parts, especially GPUs, went through the roof as they were bought en masse to try and start large farms for mining cryptocoins.
While the price was so massively inflated, news started to increase reporting on BTC and other cryptocurrencies enough that older people wanted to get into it, usually under ill-advised circumstances. Putnam describes that his own grandmother attempted to get in on the craze, but was so horribly under-informed that she had no idea what she was doing or what was optimal (he laboriously dissuaded her from doing this, if memory serves). While I may be missing some details, it is under these conditions that the word “boomer” came into popular usage on the internet; it now generally refers to someone who is horribly out of touch trying to cash in on something that’s new and unfamiliar to them.
This term has predictably transformed some in its usage; on 4chan (and to some extent here), it’s starting to refer simply to people who exhibit tendencies that are stereotypically associated with actual baby boomers. Tensei remarks: “its about older millennials that are starting to be out of touch and doing stereotypically boomer things / like owning a house and mowing a lawn”. Toast further explains: “boomer is a mindset”, which a person can fall into regardless of age.
The whole conversation was kind of a disjointed mess, but it did help to underscore a fundamental truth that I haven’t really bothered to consider before: we’re all getting older. Even just two years ago when I joined the server, I feel as if the core demographic was different. Now, most of the regulars I can point to are probably not millenials, but fall into generation Z. The only channel where this wouldn’t explicitly be true is mspa-lit, and even that’s changing with the arrival of people like tmtmtl and Tera, among a litany of others.
I mentioned very recently this cycle where new users obtain self-consciousness, and realize their previous behaviors were embarrassing or undesirable. The course of today’s discussion has made me reflect on my own progression through the internet, and while the landscape is radically different from what it was ten or fifteen years ago people are still experiencing the same patterns of development.
I wonder if this is something that we’ll go through in perpetuity, and if so, how will it affect the general consciousness of the public? Will it lead to any behavioral shifts as people more commonly have their entire life’s proceedings on display? Would such a shift be for better or worse? More immediately important for someone like me, but how will the style and manner of a typical online community change as the years go by? It’s a lot to consider, especially in light of how far we’ve come already.
Nothing more for today.
-
20th of August
Makin’s absence continues. He pops in often enough so that it’s not utterly alarming, and he’s successfully delegating tasks to us so that things continue to get done. However, it stands that he’s gone a majority of the time for most of the last week or so. As is appropriate for his mysterious ways he’s avoided elaborating on the reason for the disappearance. I assume it’s a school function or a business trip of some kind, but far be it from me to gremlin him on the issue.
In truth, there’s a tiny tickle at the back of my mind that worries about him6. I’ve felt myself being more curt and openly dismissive of him in the last month or so, having grown used to his particular flavor of behavior and recognizing certain patterns. I’ve also noticed a greater degree of dogpiling happening whenever he messes up; while he certainly puts on a tough enough act, I’m sure it would be sufficiently dispiriting to anyone after enough time.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my intentions are expressly not to make him feel bad about things in general--that’s the sort punishment an incompetent grade school teacher tries to hand out to children, and I respect him way too much for that. Getting him to admit fault is near impossible but he’s not a categorically evil person. I feel like people get wrapped up in their vendettas against him too much when really he’s just trying to have a good time in the only way he knows how.
This isn’t to say that he’s free of guilt: often he does in fact fuck things up and he should be held accountable, but people get way too obsessed with administering some kind of justice (usually ending up being twisted into something that is itself injust). Often enough it just becomes an enormous mess, and opens up the way for Makin to gain more amusement amidst the den of chaos.
I forget what my point with all of this is. Goodness knows I’ve retread the topic enough times to write an entire book (ha ha). I guess I’m just getting kind of tired, or bored even--I’ve heard a number of others echo the sentiment even. His chicanery used to be infuriating or sometimes successfully amusing, but it’s a very old trick at this point. I’m also furthered in my disillusionment of this idea by the presence of people who genuinely fit into the description of his “cult of personality”.
I used to handwave such ideas off, but after a while of participating in these discussions it’s become clear that such a thing does in fact exist. We were talking about this very thing a couple nights ago when hstanon was visiting. Both Toast and hst are both very prominent examples of people that fit this idea.
It’s worth mentioning that “cult of personality” is a real term that has a specific meaning: it refers to when a political regime or even a single politician uses propaganda and manipulative techniques to get the people to support and revere them as heroic or valiant figures. Some of those ideas apply here, but obviously there are differences to account for. I’m not sure who first used the term “cult of personality” to refer to Makin’s entourage, but a more accurate term would be star-struck.
Both Toast and hst, among others, have described Makin as being “fascinating and charismatic”, which is textbook for star-struck behavior. Their appreciation for him is--while not quite innocent--certainly not founded in maliciousness. It’s not really a matter of “Makin can do no wrong”; I would absolutely trust Toast to speak his conscience if he feels Makin has gone too far in something, we simply disagree on where that line of “too far” is.
For this reason, the cult of personality label has always struck me as facetious when applied to our circle. Those who are openly displeased with Makin’s behavior tend to use a more flagrantly vicious word anyway: they’re fond of calling people like Toast and hst outright sycophants. While I can grow very frustrated with their defense of Makin’s nonsense, the mere thought of genuinely insulting them in this way makes my blood boil.
Speaking personally, I feel that a not-insignificant contribution to my worry is that I’ve been going a little too hard lately. Not in an objective sense, probably; I would be surprised if anything I do or say genuinely hurts Makin’s feelings, and indeed most other people. However, my trenchant attitude of late is unconventional for me, and that’s what matters really matters. I can’t be quite as hard on people, I like to tease out their potential in more supportive ways if at all. That might be less effective, but so be it--all I can do is try to strike the most efficient balance of positivity with motivation.
Continuing with the idea of fairness, most of what Makin does is only negative depending on perspective, rather than being universally condemnable7. The most recent example would be a suggestions thread that he opened up on the subreddit a few days ago. He’s openly asked people what they think should be done to improve the subreddit; people with a more positive perspective will perceive this as him actually caring for the community; cynics will interpret this as trying to curry favor and maintain a grip on this piece of the fandom.
In a vacuum, it would be silly to assume the worst of this kind of action. Naturally we don’t live in a vacuum and there is an extensive history of situations where Makin has acted less than favorably. However, the point I’m trying to make is that people will try to extrapolate unfairly from those experiences; sometimes it seems as if people are trying to turn Makin’s negativity into some sort of a priori thing where it doesn’t deserve to be.
To be absolutely clear (even though I’m sure I’ve said it enough times now), he does in fact deserve to be called out for the things he does wrong. There is no shortage of people willing to do this, including myself. However, if the point of justice is to be respected, then it is inappropriate to automatically paint his actions as malicious in every possible situation. The fact that I feel the need to reiterate this so often should probably illustrate that there’s a problem with how people talk to each other here--too often, we end up at each other’s throats over simple miscommunications or grudges.
Nothing more for today.
21st of August
Revisiting the topic of the subreddit thread for improvement, it’s actually been the better part of a week since Makin’s post went up. His prolonged absence makes it difficult to carry out anything substantial. After some comments suggesting that we get rid of extremely low-effort posts, Makin asked us to create a poll to assess how the subreddit as a whole feels about that idea. Normally he would do it himself without hesitation, but I guess his business consumes too much of his time.
The low-effort posts have been something of a problem for a long time now; I described snowclones some time ago, commonly understood in our community as “when one shitpost gets a lot of attention, which leads to others trying to make the same shitpost with slight variations ad nauseum”. Notable examples of this behavior include “X is a valid character name” posts, which utterly dominated the subreddit for a good couple of weeks at least a while back, or any manner of slight visual/textual tweaks that catch for unknown reasons.
Arguably worse than snowclones are utter low-effort posts. Forgetting shitposts even, low-effort trashposts are distinguished by the fact that they are completely unenjoyable and thus have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Examples of this include people posting completely random and pointless pictures where they happen to see a meme number, which is only slightly above a blank photo in entertainment value. Such posts have been the focus of complaints for a while.
It seems the people generally agree that snowclones and especially low-effort posts are bad, but some people commented with dissenting remarks, saying that they actually liked them (Shadok even went so far as to call them the heart of the subreddit). This seems suspect to me, but such were among the only comments to appear on the thread. The difficulty is, as always, trying to figure out how to make the greatest number of people happy with these conflicting viewpoints.
The subreddit has actually had a tool for a while that allows one to avoid seeing shitposts. In light of this, the complaints about excessive shitposting make less sense to me; it’s very likely that they aren’t aware of this option, but I’m sure there are plenty who would be upset even with that knowledge. We might try to turn shitpost-filtering on by default and let people opt-in to see them, but that presents its own difficulties.
The most straightforward way of dealing with shitposts would be to handle them manually, but sometimes the shitpost volume is so high that it becomes exhausting, or borderline impossible on occasion. The mod team as a whole is going to have to talk about this for a bit to get a halfway decent plan going, otherwise we’re going to be returning to this issue the next time a joke gets repeated slightly too much or every time we see a random “413” post. I can already feel the migraine developing.
Unrelated, but the subject of the Homestuck and Hiveswap Amino (HHA) chat came up today. It’s been discussed in hushed whispers before, but today we took proper stock of them for the first time. Amino is a relatively new social media platform (recently as in started in January of 2014, anyway) that has been gradually coming into prominence lately. It functions like Reddit in that there are partitioned communities dedicated to a specific subject each. The difference is that, while Reddit communities are usually highly structured, once you’re inside an Amino community there’s no real organization to speak of, which is closer to Tumblr in style.
If this sounds like a weird or even bad idea to you, then you’re not alone. Amino has swiftly garnered a reputation for being used by children. When I say things like that, I’m typically referring to young teenagers or even 11 and 12 year olds, but in this case I mean actual children. People seeming as young as six years old use Amino on a regular basis, and this comes with all of the problems that any reasonable person would expect by grouping tens of thousands of little kids in a largely unstructured environment.
That isn’t an exaggeration: the HHA group as of this writing has just over 50,000 members. The figure is mind boggling to consider, and when we discovered this today we were immediately filled with repulsion. When the mere idea of contacting them for fun was brought up by some schmuck, even Makin could not resist weighing in: “AMINO IS GREAT BECAUSE IT SELF CONTAINS / do not bring them here”. For once, I don’t think even a single person disagreed with him.
The discussion that actually prompted Amino’s mention involves a serious bit of misinformation that sprung up there earlier today: a post on the website seemed to be confusing the age-old altercation between WP Studios and The Odd Gentleman, which I’ve described in the entry from the 12th of July 2017. The post in question seemed to be suggesting that Viz Media had effectively stolen $700,000 from Hussie that was meant to be used for making Hiveswap. Or at least, that’s what we think the post says; it’s not actually too clear what it’s trying to say sometimes.
Upon further reflection, the existence of the HHA is actually pretty fascinating when examined with a perspective that also includes the history of the subreddit and Tumblr Homestuck communities. The subreddit and Tumblr portions of the Homestuck fandom have almost always been aware of each other, and there is an extensive (if sometimes subtle) culture that has arisen amidst conflicts or interactions between the two. A similar phenomenon was visible with the 4chan community, although--with a few historied exceptions--it was always a bit more detached due to the forced anonymity.
Returning to the present, the HHA is interesting because it’s developed in absence of that dynamic. There is no established history between the HHA and basically any other extant Homestuck group; it’s a little like stumbling on an undiscovered civilization that’s risen in complete isolation. Obviously the focus of the Amino is in line with ours for the most part, but their social mores and customs are almost completely untouched by any other Homestuck community. This effect is even more pronounced due to the fact that these are primarily very young children who have probably had little contact with internet communities in general.
The size of it is completely daunting as well. I’m sure 50,000 users is a paltry number compared to the height of the fandom, but in the latter stages of the fandom’s decline it’s nothing to sneeze at. The question now is how long it’ll last: will the HHA stick it out over the years and become the newest, established piece of the fandom? Or are its members in a phase, just waiting to grow out of it and forget about all of this in a year or two? Given their age my money would be on the latter outcome, but we won’t know for sure until it happens.
Finally, this is unrelated to Homestuck itself but relevant to our interests as a community: Stefán Karl Stefánsson, the Icelandic actor who is arguably most famous for his portrayal of the villain Robbie Rotten on the kid’s show Lazy Town died today. The character and show were somewhat known to the internet but largely not notable up until a couple of years ago. There is one episode of the show from 2014, featuring a song called We Are Number One, that ascended into meme legend by being remixed on Youtube.
The earliest remix to gain popularity was by SilvaGunner--himself an important figure--appearing in mid September 2016. In October of the same year, Stefan revealed that he had developed cancer. I can’t recall if he set it up himself or if it was organized independently, but a fundraiser was started so that he could afford surgery to remove the tumor. In response to this, a glut of new memes and remixes were created that launched him into immense popularity.
Starting in November 2016, the We Are Number One song absolutely exploded. Over the course of the next year it became known on a ridiculous scale: a meme has reached maximal saturation when it can be detected in even the most surface levels of the internet, like Facebook and Twitter. We Are Number One didn’t just enter those places, it smashed through the wall to get there. There was hardly a person around that didn’t know about the song, to the point that even magazine articles were mentioning it.
Stefan himself became renowned through it, with him consciously and purposefully accepting praise from internet communities for his role and thanking them for their help in his fight against cancer. This only endeared him further; eventually in 2017 he announced he was in remission, which was quite literally celebrated by everyone who cared even remotely for the fellow.
Unfortunately, as it is wont to do, the cancer returned earlier this year. Finally, Stefan passed away today at the age of 43. As his improvement was celebrated, so to was his death mourned. It’s been some time so it wasn’t quite as intense, but no one has quite forgotten about Stefan. The news broke and spread in record time to basically every community I care to think of, the HSD being no exception.
This calls to mind the similarly tragic death of Billy Herrington earlier this year. Both Makin and Tmtm explicitly called this to mind, lamenting that we’ve lost two icons in one year. I remarked that the news of their passing was treated about as well as could possibly be hoped under the circumstances:
the death of billy herrington was kind of like how memes should be / short lived but intense and filled with positive energy / nobody dragged on about the death of aniki / i can only hope that stefan receives the same treatment that billy did / memes stagnate and become rotten when they're forced for too long / let them die gracefully and with love
The man will be remembered for a long time: he managed to entertain and make a lot of people happy, and was beloved by many people for it. We can only hope that he was happy too.
Rest in peace Stefan Karl Stefansson. Nothing more for today.
22nd of August
Makin has been around a bit more today, but still sporadic. I’ve taken it upon myself to carry through with the new rule on the subreddit, and I notice that I feel more comfortable making changes without his constant oversight. I’m having a fun time actually engaging with people a little bit and commenting on posts instead of quickly dredging through the subreddit like I usually do.
I’m not sure what’s different, or why I’m enjoying this more than before. As far as I can tell the subreddit hasn’t increased in quality (if anything it’s worse, as the new rule would indicate). It does appear to be somewhat faster this last week, although that may be because I’m able to check on it less often due to classes resuming. There might simply be more time for posts to accumulate while I’m away, so it gives the impression of greater activity. I’m pretty sure someone keeps statistics for this, I’ll have to find out soon.
The feeling of quickness, unfortunately, does not extend to the HSD: it has been a criminally slow day. Just like myself, school is starting back up this week for many people. On the one hand it’s afforded me the chance to get lots of things done, but coming back after a few hours to see only about half a dozen things posted is weirdly dispiriting.
Later in the night things picked up a bit thankfully: out of nowhere Tera mentioned a story from back when Anervaria was starting out as the art-pseudo. This was nearly two years ago, before I had arrived at the HSD. Apparently Aner was being harassed in voicechat by members of a fanventure called Artstuck (which predictably is about the then-regulars of #art).
Makin personally told them to cut it out or he would “be angerey” about it. They didn’t stop, although they were posting something inappropriate (I’ve received conflicting reports on exactly what), so WoC eventually chased them out of the channel by banning a few of the malefactors. Hearing this story put so bluntly was a frankly surreal experience: I’m reminded of how wildly different the cultural landscape of the HSD is now from how it was back when I joined.
It’s not unlike the general path of the internet as a whole, when I think about it: the wild west of our past is long over, and things are now pretty well-settled for the most part. There are few occasions where the place may be described as “turbulent” anymore, and there are major established channels to visit while others typically run dry except for a few scattered regulars. Overall, there isn’t a lot of horizontal or vertical mobility; while it seems we’re in a halcyon period, there is also the threat of stagnation if this continues for too long. I can already feel it creeping at the edges of the community just a little bit.
A brief note on a small but notable idiosyncrasy. For some reason three of our users all have the same prefix to their name: Anervaria, Marquis (formerly known as Tainted Angel), and Erieolae are all tagged with “Bitch Pussy Master”, for reasons that are utterly unknown to me. I initially assumed that it was only Marquis who had this title, and indeed many in mspa-lit had taken to calling her “BPM” for short. However, all three of them had the title today during the story above. When I asked, Aner only said: “We’re like a Pokemon legendary trio”. Utterly baffling.
Nothing more for today.
24th of August
I spent most of yesterday and some of today finishing up on the new subreddit rule. I feel like it’s important to interface with users and help them understand to the greatest degree possible what’s going on; to this end I created a discussion post, answered everyone’s questions, and so on. All in the name of making sure the transition into the new rule would go smoothly and that no one would be too upset.
As planned the new rule did go into effect today, but after checking around on the community guidelines I noticed that there was a rule in place already that stipulated all of these things we wanted to do in the first place. It was at least an amusing realization, and we can always use a little reminder from time to time. I’ve noticed a marginal uptick in the quality of subreddit for my trouble anyway.
That having been said, a post on the subreddit this morning was an edit of a highly NSFW image of a Homestuck character. It was only marginally changed so that it revolves around Subway imagery, and if it had been even slightly more NSFW then we would have had to delete it. With this one in particular there was no real harm done, but we proactively warded against the no doubt dozens of snowclones people were making of slightly edited porn. This reminds me of an intractable problem: the users will always do their best to push the line or find ways around it. It’s only a matter of time until this becomes a problem again.
More related to the HSD itself, it feels as if the level of activity has been rising somewhat over the last few days. Unfortunately I’ve been less able to participate, and have accordingly been intensely bored. In this state of mind I started getting interested in the idea of quantifying the “regularity” of a user, or how often they speak as a measure against the rest of the community.
When I had the chance, I posited the question: “what percentage of the conversation at minimum does someone need to take up in order to be considered a regular?” I guessed that given a set period of time, such as one week, 1% of messages is the threshold where people start to be considered a regular on even an unconscious level. Makin agreed with this estimate, and then Tensei appropriately brought up the problem that it’s not about quantity, but rather about quality of engagement.
I then realized that it was probably a terrible idea to bring up an idea like that, especially after I started to notice people trying to quantify their own involvement. While the idea of a regularity leaderboard as a function of “number of messages user has sent divided by total messages in the channel” is entertaining in theory, I imagine that it would quickly lead to annoying behavior in order to maximize peoples involvement. I don’t think I’ll bring up such ideas in the future.
A rare bit of news: today we had an update with the SBAHJ Book 2 Kickstarter. A proof of concept book is out, and so it may be reasonably assumed that our protracted wait is nearly over. The book itself looks exactly like the glorious piece of shit that it should, and I’ve noticed a few people beginning to express regret at not having funded the Kickstarter.
People such as Makin are extremely quick to shit on Kickstarter projects as being “complete scams”, which is certainly true in most situations. However, his prognosis on this particular project was almost assuredly wrong8 (I only say almost because the physical product is not in my hands yet, although I’m increasingly having faith that it will be). I thus retain the right to laugh at him and all the other non-believers when they’re missing out on this marvelous abortion of human ingenuity.
Nothing more for today.
25th of August
There was an extended conversation with User5 in mspa-lit today. He was actually in here a few nights ago talking about his own personal server, mentioning that he has a channel/other server dedicated to messing with people. About two months ago, WoC mentioned to me that he’s already on that server himself. Called “The Stone Cube” (at least back then, the name may be different now), he has described the members there as being “ferociously intelligent but they hide it really well”. I’m not quite sure I agree from the screenshots he sent me.
That having been said, User5’s speaking style isn’t quite as bad as it seems at first glance. It is stylistically discombobulating and very bizarre to read, but once you get past the general confusion of the wording itself the meaning of what he’s saying is rather easy to discern. The discussion today revolved around this dubious article Makin had linked (subject matter intentionally left vague to avoid misrepresentation).
User5 hopped into the ensuing conversation with his own perspective on it. And while it was naturally weird to read, but his opinion was solidly identifiable and I don’t think anyone had problems conversing with him. The topic switched around some and we started talking about the nature of Homestuck’s narrative and mechanics; User5 led a particularly animated brainstorming session where the main characters of a fanfic would not be inexperienced teenagers who are friends with each other, but competent and fully grown, dangerous men who hate each other’s guts.
As one might imagine the conversation itself was interesting, but more fascinating to me was how a few of the people engaged with him on the topic. Toast and Tmtml were both especially prominent in this regard: Tmtmtl is prone to being flippant and disengaged from the actual topic at hand, but she seemed absolutely entertained by the proceedings (User5 repeatedly mentioning that Tmtm was good at putting the things User5 wanted to say into words, the two seem to share interests or at least a common sense of humor).
All of this is also true of Toast, but it went beyond simply participating in the subject matter to emulating User5’s very manner of speaking: Toast usually speaks with full words, but shortly after User5 showed up and especially during the course of this topic Toast began using initialisms or contracting words in a similar manner: “bigot u like cant prove wrong bc everything is in his head” is an example sentence from Toast during this conversation. He continues to speak with straightforward ideas but the text itself has been warped.
I’m fascinated at how people respond to figures that they perceive as charismatic: first Makin’s behavior and now User5’s have both proven to be rather influential with a few specific people. I wonder if the full extent of this impressionability is limited to a specific subset of people or if anyone could be influenced by a sufficiently charismatic individual--I imagine the latter is more true, especially if the person in question shares similar traits to those being affected (such as sense of humor or philosophical outlook).
This aside, later in the day Makin, Tensei, and WoC were all viewing a Dota 2 tournament stream and liveblogging with each other about it. There was literally nothing special about this occurrence, I just felt like writing it down because they seemed to be having an especially nice time shooting the shit together. In fact, I mentioned in the channel that I was glad they were talking and Makin asked me if I was drunk. The bluntness of it made me laugh; I’m sure he finds it weird that I would comment on people enjoying their time together--or indeed, maybe he finds it strange that I care at all.
A minor last note for today: some time ago there was an infamous altgen user named Shirk, who at one point tried to “start a revolution” over some spammers being altgen-banned. Deus commented: “It got so bad shitler wound up permabanning shirk and his lieutenant”. Predictably they were quite irate over being banned, and have since been trying to seek revenge in variously impotent ways.
Today, the apparent scheme was in the Minecraft server, which has been consistently inactive for weeks now. Deus logged in or was informed by one of the Minecraft server mods that someone had left signs up at the spawn area that simply said “Deus is gay” repeatedly. Far from being disturbing or even mildly annoying, it was actually somewhat amusing. Deus further adds: “Hilariously the account that's dropping those signs at spawn is called "DeusIsGay"”, and points out that it’s not unlikely that someone spent money in order to pull this off, which is one of the pettiest and most extensive revenge plots we’ve ever seen, weak though it is.
Nothing more for today.
27th of August
Continuing with the trend of increasing prominence, User5 paid for his own channel on the Patreon, making #bastards-and-monsters. It’s an ad hoc art channel, with people drawing--unsurprisingly--“bastards or monsters”, which are defined on an arbitrary and often random basis (the most important rule seems to be that they must be “bad ass”). Users can “fight each other” with their art, which consists of taking someone else’s drawing and making an addition or editing it, often with violent themes. This is reminiscent of old 4chan drawthreads, where the OP would start with a very simple image with one element in it, and then the participants would edit it or respond in whatever way they deemed suitable.
Not much came out of this at first; it was certainly amusing to witness, and there’s about as much User5 gold as one could reasonably expect there, such as:
And so on. I stopped paying attention there as time went on, although it seemed to retain plenty of activity as the hours went by.
The exact moment that things changed was abrupt, but not immediately obvious. I was cleaning up after a minor raid in #general and had tabbed into mspa-lit to see what was going on. It was plodding along normally enough, and then all of a sudden the chat exploded: nine or ten different people all at once started exclaiming at something, and I couldn’t tell at all what they were talking about. Then I looked at the server icon, and it had changed to the cover from Halo 2. Suitably, the server name had also changed: “halo sucks! ur banned from halo!” The subsequent pandemonium was second only to the Rapture in intensity.
Away from the absolute din, it was revealed to me what exactly had happened: User5 had actually paid enough on the Patreon to also change the server icon and name for 24 hours, so naturally this was what he chose. When people started to figure it out, there was a bit of a mix in reception: most people like Nat, Reti, Cty, LRS, and a host of others found the change hilarious, with a few even resolving to download some strange games per User5's request to challenge him for glory.
Others were not so pleased. Ifnar in particular was a huge voice of dissent, making no bones about his irritation in mod chat: “... I've always spoken out against the patreon influencing this server, have I not.” I admit that this idea rankles me somewhat as well, but most users seemed to be taking it well enough: an argument against this sort of policy was that it would alienate most people who are using this place as a Homestuck server exclusively, but there have been remarkably few departures as of an hour since the icon switch. This may change throughout the night, but it seems to hardly be working against us.
Indeed, the opposite seems to be true speaking purely from an activity-perspective. Ifnar steadfastly refused to govern #general due to his disagreements with this, so Sea Hitler volunteered instead (as he should have been doing anyway). Shitler then commented later: “general is active again thank god for user5”. After peeking in there myself, it doesn’t seem as if the increase of participation is going to be long-lived, but it is a welcome breath of fresh air after the weeks and months of slowness.
As it is, Ifnar was not the only one who was upset by the change. Ceru was very blunt in his assessment: “why the fuck are we whoring out the server on patreon”, although it was pointed out that his dissent is a tad late. Makin retorted: “this goal literally has existed since the patreon was created”, and then brought up Ceru’s patreon for funding Aradiabot to try and illustrate hypocrisy.
The reverse criticism did not stick: Ceru rightfully defended his Patreon, stating simply that running Aradiabot actually costs money. “just wait,” Makin said in reply, “I have things planned / the next official announcement, shit will happen”. After clarifying that he meant the next update from Hussie on homestuck.com, there wasn’t much to be said; I can’t speak for anyone else, but from my position the chance that any such thing will ever be seen again is highly unlikely. Nevertheless, my curiosity has been piqued; who knows what insanity Makin must have in store for such an occasion?
Returning to the main topic: hilariously, User5 seems to have opened his own recursive Patreon in order to fund his channel. Aside from putting to rest the User5-kill40000 mystery for any who might still have doubted they were the same person, it is also flagrantly against the rules--anyone who’s been around for more than a month would probably be aware of Makin’s “no personal profit” decree. He can’t exactly make the Patreon go down now that it’s up, although I didn’t see any links to it from User5 himself--Carlarc is the one who alerted most of us to its existence. Regardless, it seems Makin tacitly approves this move.
I did take it upon myself to check the user count as time went by. The icon and name change went into effect with approximately 11,455 people on the server, and at the time of writing (approximately 12 hours give or take a couple) we stand at 11,425. The user counts have fluctuated strangely over the last couple of weeks so it’s hard to tell if this loss should be alarming relative to our pace of growth.
However, a more prudent point is that literally over 90% of the accounts that have left never spoke once in this server, regardless of when they joined (one such account had joined only a few days after the server’s creation, in March of 2016). Of those accounts that did say anything, none of them had spoken in several months. When the first such user left after the icon change, Makin used the lack of contribution to justify the loss. This doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me, but it also smacks of disdain that others will find contemptible, I’m sure.
The rest of the day passed without much to comment on--the HSD, aside from brief flurries when people would come on and discover the icon change for the first time, remained quiet. I spent most of the time in channels and servers that I was less familiar with, trying to get a better idea of what they’re like.
I didn’t find too much that caught my attention. #homestuck seems to have an entrenched group, but I couldn’t see very much personal interaction or familiarity between the people there for instance. The lack of a solid dynamic between people necessarily inhibits the formation of a proper community, and after enough time with no external input, this ushers in death.
Not to beat on a long dead horse, but this is what bothers me about how Makin treats mspa-lit. If a community is to survive without new content coming in, it must look to the relationships between the people in it. He strives to keep things from becoming too interpersonal, and we’ve had conversations where many of us are chided for considering others our friends too easily.
Yet, in the case of mspa-lit, what else could we call it? Homestuck has been effectively dead for two years. Makin’s stated policy for this group--reducing interpersonal interaction wherever possible--is inherently in conflict with the fact that our being friends with each other is the main reason we stick around. All of us originally came here to talk about Homestuck, and now that it’s gone we keep talking to each other anyway. Why else would we do that except that we enjoy each others’ company, and would go so far as to name each other “friend”?
Attempts to demonstrate otherwise are misguided at best and delusional at worst. I don’t mean all of this as some attempt to condemn Makin, mind; I’ve mentioned before that I suspect he’s a huge softie underneath the ludicrously callous exterior. Despite his posturing, I’m sure he would at least be somewhat upset if this group ceased to exist.
The idea that this should not be our primary mode of social interaction comes up often enough; I imagine he has plenty in real life to keep him occupied should something happen to this group, as do most of us. Yet, why waste a perfectly good thing? Internet communities where most of the people actually enjoy being together may not exactly be rare, but Makin is not foolish enough to squander one--especially not when he can exert so much influence in it9.
It was with this particular brand of thought that I proceeded through the rest of the evening. Things picked up later in the night as they are wont to do: there was a little alcohol discourse here and there on Putnam’s part, as well as other tense topics that seemed to spring up unexpectedly like the oft-discussed prospect of immortality (particularly contentious on the part of SolarSail). Yet, even when the conversation seemed to get heated, I couldn’t help but be relaxed: rather than worrying over potential destabilization of the group, I perceived it as long-time companions comfortably ribbing each other over well-understood idiosyncrasies or obsessions.
Of course it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies; emotions run high when more sensitive topics are brought up. Yet, beneath it all was a strange sense of understanding and acceptance for the things we discuss. With only one or two exceptions such as Nat, no one was intentionally trying to fuck things up for everyone else. Everyone present, old and new, was engaging in good faith, and that alone made for a satisfying evening.
This sort of conversation is what I initially started writing this document for: the potential is limitless, and there is a mutual respect that permeates everything. For the kind of community that we are, this is our lightning in a bottle--it is almost impossible to recreate on purpose, but when it happens it is nothing short of enthralling. Perhaps I’m drastically overthinking the matter, but I can’t help but think that my interest in the place has been substantially reinvigorated. I actively look forward to tomorrow for the first time in a long while.
Nothing more for today.
28th of August
After some observations over the last couple of days, I’m pleased to say that Nat’s behavior has improved significantly. She still berates people but it lacks the ferocity that was present recently. In comparison, the insults she delivers now are vaguely cute; it’s the difference between a full grown tiger randomly mauling someone to death and a kitten swiping at a person’s hand when it gets too close. I’m just glad that her mood is so much improved, she seemed absolutely miserable for a while there.
Today was rather interesting: at the beginning of it all, User5 further cemented his participation in mspa-lit, surprising some people who weren’t already aware of his propensity for actually making sense underneath the word soup. It’s increasingly clear that his enthusiasm for badassery is simply a veneer hiding someone with actually deep and complex opinions about things. He’s actually pretty interesting to talk to, between his outlandish claims (like “getting rich off bitcoin” for one) and the more down to earth comments, such as what we had today.
User5 spurred a rather engaging discussion about our motivations in life; even Makin was participating in good faith at first, mentioning that he if he could do things over he would probably go into aerospace engineering or something that he’d be “helping humanity in any cool rational ways”. Predictably it devolved into mocking each other for our career paths, as it usually does. This is a very common topic: Makin will endlessly taunt me for my choice of study while consistently getting details wrong, sometimes on purpose I suspect. I’ve only recently started to return fire when he does this.
On this note, I feel it’s necessary to point out a fine nuance to what he actually does in these conversations. At this point, I feel comfortable saying that it’s not an attempt to make anyone feel bad about what they do; I’ve witnessed this line of conversation enough times that it’s clear that he’s completely joking the entire time, recognizing and dismissing incorrect details in his “arguments” with little effort and other, similar behaviors.
However, something he probably does without realizing it is make these jokes over and over again until they are nothing short of annoying. Makin can indeed be funny, but he doesn’t seem to understand when he’s beating a dead horse. I left to do my work for something like half an hour, and when I came back he was still on the same topic and lashing out with the same tired quips. This isn’t unique to the discussion of our jobs, either--it’s an irritatingly common tactic of his.
He would be better off if he learned when it was time to retire his jokes; I seriously believe that it would cure about 85% of his social blunders. However, when I start mulling over this idea I have to remind myself that Makin joking around is less to make other people laugh and more so he can amuse himself. He finds it enjoyable to stir the pot and is perfectly content to blame others when they get upset about all of it. I guess the logical conclusion of this line of thought is that it’s an enormous waste of time trying to convince him to do otherwise. Indeed, trying to stop it will probably only make him do it more, and that frustrating reality is why people leave mspa-lit more than anything else.
Considering it further is pointless; I’ve rehashed that particular idea enough times as is. More pertinent and to his credit, Makin did open up another survey today, this time for the HSD instead of the subreddit. These are typically much faster and more entertaining than surveys on the subreddit (indeed, the HSD surveys are typically more entertaining than anything on the subreddit these days). With an everyone ping in #announcements, the HSD was briefly spurred into a higher level of activity.
As is customary, #survey was resurrected from the abyss to serve its masters once more. A quick perusal of the channel showed that the last time #survey was used is eleven months ago, near the end of September 2017 apparently. I could have sworn it was much more recent than that, but I digress. The channel was absolutely filled to the brim with all manner of shitters from altgen.
#survey has no ban role of its own, so we tied it to the mspa-lit and altgen channels such that anyone banned from one of those two channels will be unable to participate in the survey discussion. The effect on the conversation was swift and unmistakable, with Makin commenting: “channel quality improved instantly”. There was still the unmistakable altgen residue, though, with people trying to piss on basically every development. Little could be done about this.
I distinctly remember that the last time a survey was held, the results were rather disappointing: there was very little material to effectively lampoon, so Makin simply closed it and nothing more was said on the matter. “Anemic” this time was not, with Makin posting snippets and screenshots from the survey results directly into #announcements for prime roasting material.
He systematically went through each question and posted most or all of the responses that he felt were funny enough or that he could riff off of, and even provided a legitimate response a few times. Most of the comments appeared to be generically uninformed, unhelpful, or outright bad, but some made for good material. One suggestion was to put User5’s new channel above all the rest, which Makin did: similarly, he also followed another comment that said to rename altgen to #egg-hell. Naturally, both of these changes were reversed at the end of the survey.
There were even a few that warranted a proper comment: for example, someone wanted a channel for other stories by Hussie, but the unfortunate reality is that no real demand for such a channel exists (“look I really wish there was demand for this but there really isn't, it'd just be me posting over and over again about how good problem sleuth is”).
Ever present were comments about the exclusivity of mspa-lit, which were either entirely ignored or mocked into oblivion. At this point I think it’s worth mentioning that mspa-lit has been called #read-shills for so long that it has effectively taken root in the larger consciousness of this server; mspa-lit was never called that in the survey, it was exclusively referred to as shills or something similar. I think this is categorically a bad thing--what kind of fucking name is #read-shills? What does that even mean to a newcomer? There’s no mystery or attractive quality to the name, it’s actually mildly off-putting. Then again, that’s probably just how Makin prefers it. I would consider switching to that name in this document if it wasn’t so vile10.
Returning to the main topic, very interesting for me personally were associated stats from the survey. Makin asked questions and the questionnaire automatically created some nice graphs for us to look at. There were 321 total responses, for transparency’s sake (not the best sample size but not terrible either). For historical purposes, I’ve included the survey results in the Related Materials under Appendix D: Survey Results - August 2018.
One of the more exciting things he’s revealed is a plan to initiate a server-wide reread of Homestuck, to take place over the course of two months. This was something the subreddit already did previously, although I didn’t know of that until today. It would work on the basis of having so many pages to be read per day, and then everyone participating discusses the developments in the pages that day. I’m actually pretty interested in this idea, as it should reinvigorate interest for at least a little bit; I anticipate a large percentage of drop off as the effort proceeds though. We may start with a significant number of people, but by the end there will probably be only a dozen or so at most.
In totality, the survey was pretty successful. There are some people who lament the quality of the discussion channel (notably Hb, who simply commented: “#survey sucked”). A few like Marquis came on too late, verbally expressing regret that they had missed the entire occasion. For those of us who were present--and excepting those inevitable few who were genuinely annoyed by the experience--I would say that it was a grand time.
A more sobering note: one of the comments on the survey mentioned LLF’s absence from the server lately. There’s a peculiar habit of not realizing he’s there and him getting irritated at people not noticing he’s around, but a brief check shows that he hasn’t talked since the end of July. It’s a shame that he’s disappeared; the weirdness of his opinions was always a good way to get discussion going. Wherever he is or whatever he may be doing, I hope he’s alright.
Another thing I want to comment on: true to his policy, Makin reversed the server icon and name change 24 hours after it began, and we took the time to do a little bit of analysis. By his count, we lost no less than 40 people over the period of time that the change was in effect. However, the figures I reported in the entry from yesterday have held true: over 90% of all the departures were from accounts that have never spoken here, and the other 10% haven’t spoken in months.
In fairness, I think there were one or two accounts that had spoken as recently as this month. More disquieting to me personally was seeing an account that had just joined leaving less than a minute afterwards--that sort of consequence is what Ifnar was concerned about. However, it’s effectively impossible to tell if the server icon and name was responsible, as we’ll get accounts that do that all the time.
At the end of the day, the general consensus is that the loss was a little unfortunate but hardly impactful. Ifnar may still not be happy, but even he would be mistaken to point this out as a hugely detrimental activity. Everyone else was either positive or, more commonly, completely ambivalent as to the change. From my point of view it seemed to be a net positive: we lost a few mostly inactive accounts, but the people who use this place regularly had something to talk about for a while.
On the note of inactive accounts, one of the survey responses mentioned purging seemingly dead accounts from the server at some point. Makin predictably denied this idea, and offered some more information in the discussion channel: “even if I purged everyone we'd still have 6000 active users I think”. This proved to be a rather conservative estimate, as a purge of all non-active accounts would only get rid of 3,800 people.
He couldn’t help but delivering his own rebuttal to the idea of course: “the server is very active, the meme that it's a lot of inactive people comes from other jealous servers”. I have no way of even beginning to tell how true that is, but it doesn’t strike me as immediately or obviously false. I have definitely heard enough from the mouths of those in question to suggest they think that way. Regardless, the HSD itself seems to be fairly robust as of today. This pleases me greatly.
Nothing more for today.
29th of August
Very early on, there was talk of food. I blame myself for it--I got distracted by a marvelous set of instructions for steak seasoning, and that alone was enough to set the chat off. Tonight was actually fairly tame in comparison to previous iterations of the topic: I remember a number of times where the descriptions were enough to induce actual hunger in whoever was reading at the time.
To most, food is a perfectly mundane topic, yet it is nonetheless the subject of repeated attempts of discrimination and even fear from some. Back when the Patreon had first been created, I mentioned that I opted to buy a channel and name it #food, giving Cait control. The very fact that I had to do that should be an indicator of sorts: there is a systematic effort to keep food away from public discussion.
For whatever reason, Makin has always been vociferously against food-posting in mspa-lit. On the occasions it comes up when he’s present, the perpetrators are chased out in short order--they’re often sent packing away to #hangout, but really anywhere that isn’t near Makin will do. This is of course in sharp contrast to whenever he’s not around; at such times, food-posting tends to become very animate and surprisingly engaging.
It boggles the mind that he could be against the topic so drastically when it’s something literally everyone can talk about and enjoy together11, to the point that it’s another mark in favor of my “Makin is a sentient AI” theory. I’m actually reminded of Sydlexia, where a similar problem existed: food talk was popular, but no appropriate forum existed to talk about it; this led to people demanding a place to talk about food, and consistently being denied. Perhaps history will repeat itself, and a Food Channel Militia will be formed. Only time will tell.
Aside from this, in the aftermath of the survey yesterday, a dialogue was initiated in the modchat over what to do with #hangout. Toast describes that he and WoC were “shitting around” about it at first, but quickly realized that they felt the same way: #hangout should be eliminated and #general should become the primary channel for such purposes.
I myself am slightly in favor of the idea, as I described in a recent entry. The reasons are simple: #general and #hangout tend to have the same topics; keeping the channels separate contributes to channel bloat; importantly, #general has been a wasteland for months despite being the face of the community. This last point is of utmost importance; first impressions sell the community to newcomers, and I suspect a heavy portion of the totally inactive users (or those who leave shortly after joining) owe their sterile existence here to a completely mute #general when they joined. It is a blight on activity to have a dead welcoming channel.
There are some important nuances to #hangout, of course: the channel was expressly created as containment for interpersonal discussion and especially selfies, which have persisted in being shown there. However, if a merging of #general and #hangout were to occur, it would be a simple matter to keep the spirit of both and allow selfies in #general instead. I see no real downside to this. As Toast says: “the first channel they see is people being friends instead of a wasteland”, and such an arrangement would be very useful for retaining new members.
Of course, the entire conversation was for nought. With one sentence, Makin dashed any hopes for change: “neither is getting deleted”. While I’m mostly ambivalent as to whether or not it happens, I was at least hoping for some kind of explanation for his decision, but when I asked he offered up nothing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that, but it’s still terrible not being able to account for someone’s whims.
I pressed him on it for details and I think he mistook my intentions as trying to get him to agree to delete one of the channels, because he said “finish SPAT and i might consider it”. I know it was a joke, but I was distracted enough that this actually managed to irritate me a bit. I think I was specifically angry about the idea of him holding information over my head like a carrot, instead of just explaining in the first place like he fucking should have.
After rebutting him, I clarified that: “i don't have any real preference one way or the other, i'm just saying that it would be nice to know your reasoning / and by "nice" i mean "not knowing why you decide things is extremely unhelpful"”. I’m not sure if he was just humoring me at that point or not but he did in fact explain, saying that our reasons for getting rid of one of the channels were either dumb or insufficient (“channel bloat is a myth”; “it’s not a big deal if general is inactive”). It was small, but it all that was really needed in the first place.
The chat resumed a sense of normalcy. Twitch has been presenting a marathon of the first season of the Pokemon show, so naturally fans like Griever and myself have been liveblogging the occasion in #eastern-media along with some brief interruptions in mspa-lit. Today one such interruption turned into a very protracted conversation about the state of the show today, which Tensei eventually made fun of us for (“none of the pokemon anime is any good”). Those of us involved took in good grace--I don’t think any of us really perceive the show as being “good” anyway--and someone tried to substitute with Digimon, but Tensei didn’t seem too interested in that either.
Later in the day, Makin posted a link to a Tumblr blog with a similar icon as his own, except that the content is Russian. I’m not completely aware of all the details, but it seemed to open up something of a rabbit hole into a foreign, as-yet-unknown to us community of Homestuck fans (EDIT: I was informed the next day by user xoro that the Tumblr blog that spurred this conversation belongs to the team of “the most widely accepted russian fantranslation of mspa”). Shortly after posting the link to the Tumblr, Makin started sharing screenshots of a Russian 4chan clone, specifically of a thread dedicated to Homestuck.
Already eery, the uncanny factor got amped up to 11 when Makin posted a screenshot of Griever’s artwork being discussed on the Russian board. He must be using in-browser translation software, because all of the Russian has been turned into heavily bastardized English, with all of the hilarious bullshit that accompanies it (“Zodiac is a type of testicle, in which you are given at the output your canonical class and the sign of the zodiac. Hue, in fact, classes and aspects are explained on the fuck.” for example).
It’s been almost half an hour and Makin has not stopped yet. The posts are funny, but beyond that it also raises a question for me: how many Homestuck communities must there be out there that we have no conception about? Surely there’s at least a small group in major countries like China and Japan as well, anywhere with sufficient access to the internet that they would make these boards or chatgroups.
It’s not even strictly that important, because I doubt we would be able to seriously interface with them even if we did find them. It’s just that the mere idea of other communities floating around out there, completely independent of us, is exciting to me. Makin posted a couple examples of content this Russian board has to offer. I wonder: what other esoteric material has been created that we’ve never encountered before? What must the history of these places be like?
Nothing more for today.
30th of August
Despite his reluctance to do anything about #general and #hangout, yesterday Makin decided to initiate an “experiment” of sorts. He told everyone in #hangout to use #general for a while, as he was going to hide the former for “a long time”. The channel description has accordingly been modified to include the line: “TEMPORARY: selfies/hangout behavior allowed”. With my previous reasoning in mind, I’m very interested to see what the net effect of this change will be.
So far the change has been dramatic, if predictable. The activity of #general has skyrocketed, and now two questions remain: will this remain the case indefinitely; and, how will this change the perception of newly-joined users? Will they see it as a more interesting/active place and subsequently influence them to participate and stay more often? I guess we’ll determine the answers to these questions after the experiment has concluded.
Everyone so far, while not particularly enthusiastic, seems to be just fine with it. There was some concern that #hangout regulars would be upset by the move, but really only one person so far has shown a strict aversion: AnionCation has been making their ire well-known in #serious since #hangout was hidden, although their statements are blown somewhat out of proportion.
They’ve openly claimed that #general is “legitimately the most cancer #general you can be in…” and that there are several (around 60, they said!) people who are now ruining the quality of conversations. A quick perusal is enough to determine that literally the only people who have been talking in #general since the switch have been #hangout regulars. I hope that they’ll settle down and not be so afraid of the change, it’s really not bad at all.
There has been a tendency of people lately to make their own shill lists. Some people like Roots are doing so on a joking basis, but Gitaxian is among those who are unironically pursuing the idea. I’m getting increasingly annoyed at the behavior because it’s somehow even more attention-seeking than Makin’s original incarnation of the idea. Maybe it’ll highlight some of the less desirable aspects of having such a thing around, but I won’t hold my breath.
Later in the night, Toast was enormously bored and floated the idea of playing Left 4 Dead 2 like we’ve done on previous nights. For once, no one really volunteered to join in. My first response was one of concern, as it felt again--for the first time in a while--that the chat was dead. Realistically though, it’s probably more the fact that it was incredibly late at night when he asked. Hopefully on future nights we’ll be able to generate more interest.
Nothing more for tonight.
31st of August
The experiment concluded much more quickly than I expected: hangout is now gone, with its functions fully merged into general. Predictably this is leading to some friction; people who were fine with the experiment but didn’t expect it to come to anything have been rudely awoken, and there is some considerable friction between the erstwhile socialites and those they disdainfully regard as newcomers.
It’s not even been a few hours and we’re already receiving some complaints about the treatment of people who are not a part of the #hangout cabal. #hangout did, for what it’s worth, have its own refined brand of shitposting that flourished under olki: he seemed to function as the ringleader for a wide variety of behavior not really seen in any other channel, even #altgen. One specific type of posting that’s not really found anywhere else on the HSD (or shouldn’t be found, anyway) is referred to as “being horny on main”, which is just about what it sounds like. With this and other posting patterns, there seems to be some issues in commuting to #general.
This aside, there also seems to be some chafing between members of #hangout and the new modship, especially VirtuNat. It’s well established that, in the past before she became a mod and shortly after, Nat had trouble with being a little too harsh on other members of whatever conversation she was participating in. I’ve had to personally warn her when her mockery turns too vicious, and to her credit she has gotten far better about it; there hasn’t been a real problem with it for over a year.
Until today, that is. I was pinged by some people who wanted me to address Nat being too trenchant with her jokes again, and because it’s been an issue before I jumped a little quickly to guarantee that it wouldn’t happen anymore-- I went so far as to say that, if they contacted me about it, I would step in and ban her myself until things called down, which seemed to mollify people well enough.
However, this was going too far; Tensei and other mods like Tera appropriately called me out for this, saying it erodes Nat’s authority in her own channel. I agreed with this prognosis and returned to #general to stipulate that anyone doing this to try and supersede Nat would be punished severely. This probably did not rectify the situation completely, but it will have to do for now.
The incident responsible for all of this was some asinine garbage: Nat forcememed something called “crabposting” which, as one might guess, involved nothing more than spamming various images of crabs. Furrylatula was attempting to start a conversation about babies that were born black despite having two white parents; Nat ended up misunderstanding the intent of that conversational bent, banning latula from the channel. People then took this as Nat trying to harass users.
I would write about conversational mishaps more often, but a lot of them tend to follow that general pattern: a misunderstanding occurs and people get way more upset than they need to, which subsequently leads to more misunderstandings. After a certain point, it’s just not worth the time to explain every instance of this behavior. Today it was at least vaguely notable because of the channel change, but rest assured that this sort of thing happens multiple times every single day.
Regardless, after getting involved the channel seemed to quiet down. More than a few have expressed concern with the channel merger, with some like Sora constantly bringing it up and saying that they want #hangout back. After pointing out that literally every user from #hangout is still talking in #general and that it doesn’t actually change the quality of conversation that much, they seem to quiet down. Without fail, however, they end up bringing the topic around again. If this continues it may end up constituting bans.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
1 translation: he kept being bad at it. this is the man who played world of goo like an action game.
2 GOTTA WRITE THEM DOWN THO
3 lmao skullgirls is a mvc-like, look at this moron
4 who the fuck talks like this
5 HA
6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaG5SAw1n0c
7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Q0fx5r-H8
8 I never said you wouldn't get the book, I said the scam was it being a kickstarter instead of just letting you preorder the (already written at that time) book like a normal business
9 CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
10 cry more
11 ...and that's a bad thing!