Drew Linky
2nd of March
Today witnessed the rehashing of an old problem a la SS13 and SCP discussion being hosted in the right or wrong places. SCP is the latest "flavor-of-the-month" game, which as the title implies means that the game is (more than likely) going to be of immense importance for the next few weeks and then interest in it will rapidly fade to the point that no one ever speaks of it again. This pattern was also true of SS13 for us, and such has happened countless times for various games in the many pockets of the internet.
Just as SCP is a flavor-of-the-month game like SS13 was, so to has SCP inherited all of the negative aspects of what that entails. Such status is usually conferred by being of interest to Makin and the broader cabal of mspa-lit regulars. When this happens, discussion can often be completely consumed by the material in question, sometimes for a matter of weeks. This is perfectly fine for all of the people who enjoy the topic, but others who are less interested will often find themselves frustrated with how the channel is being dominated by one topic for so long.
Cookiefonster is one such person who fits in this category. He has, on a few occasions now, voiced his discontent with how games like SCP clutter the channel (a sentiment he also held over SS13) alongside others like Ifnar and Gnawms. This has understandably attracted the ire of most who do enjoy the game, and it led to the predictably terrible and exhausting discourse of where SCP talk goes.
One might remember back during SS13 that this very conversation was already had, and it culminated in a couple of axioms: first, and most readily understandable, is that the topic at hand belongs in the appropriate channel. Second and more controversial was the problem that cluttering the appropriate channel is rude for its current denizens. SS13 chat was ubiquitous while it was popular, and everyone who already used #gaming was more or less weary at the idea of having to host many-hours long, all absorbed chatting for a game they weren’t interested in. For this reason, a compromise was reached and SS13 had its own channel created.
This proved to be a uniquely terrible decision, leading to WoC leaving the HSD for several months and a whole host of other problems that were utterly boring and agitating to deal with. The net result was having the SS13 channel deleted and discussion of that game merged into #gaming, which is honestly what should have happened in the first place. This did kind of bother #gaming denizens but they soon learned to cope, and SS13 talk stimulated the channel greatly for a while. It was overall a much better idea and was fairly appropriate.
Which is why this talk now seems even more laborious than it did back then. The end result of all this is clear, and not putting such actions into motion strikes me as delaying the inevitable at best, and intentionally stirring trouble at worst. Yet, people are defending the decision to keep SCP discussion in mspa-lit for the time being, for various reasons. As confusing as it is, I can understand at least one of their points: mspa-lit is widely considered Makin’s playground, and as such he’s technically allowed to do what he likes there without too much interference from others. The reaction time for these problems coming forth also doesn’t help—Mines described it succinctly: "Someone complains for months without having any real reason to but then the people who actually have good reason to be irritated start speaking up like / 2 months later", a significant lag that can rob the complaints of their weight. WoC is certainly displeased with the decision to keep the game-oriented chatting in a place other than his channel; I can tell this is going to cause problems later.
Other than the SCP talk, people are also disgruntled over the idea that mspa-lit has very inconsistent or no rules besides "listen to what makin says". I’m also not fond of this notion, because allowing him to operate with impunity is a self-reinforcing behavior. Makin will become more and more comfortable with doing as he pleases regardless of how people feel, and I fear the end result will be catastrophic for us.
Tensei is an interesting figure in all of this, where he seems to neither directly support or refute Makin’s tendencies. He seems like he more or less accepts the state of the channel, but then I’ve also seen him freely criticize Makin when he sees fit to do so. In this latest debacle, he’s mentioned that Cookie’s aimless complaints are annoying, and that if he truly wants to incite change that Cookie should speak directly to Makin since he’s the one in charge. Statements like this make me wonder what he must think about all this nonsense on a more personal level.
As for Makin himself, he was noticeably quiet about everything at the beginning. I wondered what he was doing, surmising that he was watching Star Trek (which he’s been binging lately), but it appeared he was simply waiting for the opportune moment to strike: at a key moment in the discussion, he changed the channel name to #anarchy in a font that was literally unreadable on some devices. People trying to take the conversation seriously were upset by this, although most found it unintrusive enough. Then Makin took it another step further, freezing the channel completely and renaming it to #meme-run, then mandating that the discussion could only be about the game Meme Run, which successfully threw off the entire conversation.
With this, the SCP discussion appears to be tabled. It will no doubt crop up again in later days, and I fear for what might happen when that day comes. People are weirdly resistant to the idea of moving discussion, and it bothers me intensely. Makin will no doubt go for whatever he thinks is the funniest outcome, a stance that is perplexing to me. We’ll just have to see what happens.
Nothing more for today.
3rd of March
There was endless discourse today, compounding the already impressive exhaustion from yesterday. The topic today was over something far more sensitive and immediately offensive to some people, for reasons that I’m still struggling to understand. People familiar with 4chan will probably also know what this is, but in short the discussion centered around the use of the phrase and meme "are traps gay?".
As a bit of background on this topic, "trap" in its original context involves a character from an anime or a picture of a person who is androgynous, or whose gender is otherwise ambiguous. The "trap" therein refers to people or characters who appear feminine and attractive, but have male genitalia. From this, it was an enormous meme on 4chan to debate whether someone was gay for being attracted to such figures.
I have to make it completely clear that I’m not joking about this: it’s a real joke that has been around for over ten years at this point. Interestingly, the conversation was carried out in relative peace for many years, but recently in the last year or two it’s come under heavy fire from the LGBT community. The term "trap" has become widely recognized as a term of harassment geared towards transgender individuals. My own understanding of the issue previous to the discussion in mspa-lit was that it referred to people who are intentionally trying to deceive others with their physical appearance, which to me makes a lot more sense semantically (and would also make the term a synonym for "catfishing").
However, it appears to be used disparagingly towards anyone who crossdresses or identifies as transgender. I haven’t seen this behavior myself so I can’t speak to how widespread it is, but it’s apparently enough of a problem that people felt the need to speak out against its use, and it’s become widely recognized as derogatory. With this in mind, it’s easy to imagine that one of the sides of this argument was arguing to keep people from using it despite its initial history as a meme.
Then, there are people who want to keep it in use. I won’t name them here because I don’t see a reason to do so, but as it is mspa-lit was positively consumed with rhetoric over why it is or isn’t acceptable to use the term. I would remark on the proceedings of the conversation at length, but honestly it became such a garbled and confusing mess after a while that I don’t think I could provide an accurate account if I tried. All I do feel like commenting on in particular is that Rar was made exceptionally uncomfortable by the discussion.
Rar, being transgender, was one of the more vocal opponents of the term’s use, and so I decided to ask it about why: "yeah i just / really hate the term / and the people that defend it / its a term that means 'guy that looks like a girl' / being used in reference to trans women / [...] / as well as like / generally used to harass". Obviously the description it provided doesn’t shack up with my own historical understanding of the term, but I guess it’s undergone some cultural shift in recent years. The implication now is that using the term is a kind of tacit denial of the validity of trans women. I’m not sure when this happened, but as it is using the term is effectively taboo.
With this in mind, it might be easier to understand why the conversation was so confusing. There was fierce and immediate pushback against the term’s use, to the point that people, especially Tipsy, were belligerently tossing out accusations as to people using it or defending its use. Tensei was notably caught in the crossfire of this discussion, among others—I keep wanting to describe this situation in more detail, and yet I don’t think it would be responsible to at this point. The details so far are all things I witnessed personally and feel confident about, but anything more explicit would be wandering into the territory of the decidedly tenebrous.
Aside from this, there was an interesting encounter with Icel tonight. There’s been some decidedly dramatic nonsense regarding staff on WP: the details are already fuzzy to me and even if it were explained further I don’t think I’d care to clarify that much, but the overall idea is that someone has been attempting to foment ill will or otherwise harsh feelings between WP and HVSD. Icel was naturally displeased by this, but then came onto the HSD to complain about it and tried to point fingers at Makin. Despite her explanation as to why and my already sympathetic understanding of her distaste for Makin, many others and I immediately disagreed with her reasoning as it didn’t really fit Makin’s modus operandi, among other things.
We realized after some time that we were defending Makin for him, despite his presence at the time. He hadn’t said so much as a word since Icel showed up, and once we realized this we backed off and waited for him to chime in personally. His only contribution to the entire conversation was as thus: "I'm not saying anything because silence will cause funnier situations". This was frustratingly unhelpful for obvious reasons, but it also helped me glean some interesting insight into his personality.
I’m sure that this is painfully obvious for most involved at this point, maybe even for those who only know about him by reading this document, but it seems clear to me now that Makin is trying to emulate the feel and posting style of 4chan boards. Most of his conversational tactics fit this, including discouraging people from becoming too chummy or familiar with each other if possible, and especially his tendency to engender as much chaos as possible in any situation he’s in.
His larger goal with this is to generate situations that are as funny as possible to him, and sometimes I wonder if he understands or particularly cares that this behavior is frustrating to other people. It’s one thing if he’s simply ignoring the agitation of others in favor of his own amusement, but sometimes it feels as if he derives his enjoyment specifically from upsetting other people, which I would find too sadistic to tolerate. It’s hard to say if this is the case and I would prefer to lean towards "no", but as things are the nature of his treatment of others is something that continues to perplex me.
I can feel myself beginning to get tired of this thought process. I’ve dedicated a lot of time and care into understanding why this happens, and why Makin behaves the way he does. It’s not out of an attempt to validate him or feed him attention, but almost purely so that I can understand what’s going on and how to make things better in general. I fear that I’m beginning to approach the idea that I will never understand him or how to help the server in a more concrete fashion, which is intensely agonizing. If this turns out to be true, what should I do?
I don’t feel like musing on this right now. Nothing more for today.
4th of March
A couple of things happened last night that I didn’t remark on at the time for various reasons. The first and most relevant is that I got exceptionally drunk, far more than I’ve ever been (in celebration of a real life event, for clarity’s sake), and promptly made an ass out of myself all night. Drunkposting is a weird thing in our community, considering that most of us are legally underaged. Those of us who are legally able to drink tend to go about it in two ways: for most I imagine the rule is to keep quiet about it, which is probably the safest option. Myself, I like to make a small event of it: drinking usually lowers my inhibitions sufficiently enough that I start to feel more confident fucking with other people, or otherwise having a dumb albeit fun time.
I’ve done this a handful of times in the past, and usually it’s not that big of a deal. It’s always asinine, but never to the point of ridiculousness that it got to last night, to my knowledge. In review I actually feel kind of mortified at some of the utter nonsense I posted, most of which consisted of me ruthlessly gushing over the other people in the server. As far as things I do while inebriated this was absolutely not that big of a deal, but it’s still kind of weird to do such a thing publicly. I’m electing not to worry about it in favor of being short-tempered with people and nursing a horrid hangover.
Unfortunately, this behavior has already led to a problem or two, at least indirectly. At some point we got onto the topic of KC Green’s comics, and were discussing their overall quality. There was some intense confusion or outright misunderstanding of the nature of Green’s work: a lot of webcomics, as the name implies, are primarily comedic efforts. Green certainly has his litany of works that are meant to be humorous, although it can be rather hit or miss: when it hits it’s usually extremely good, but often people find themselves confused as to what the punchline is supposed to be or why it’s funny.
Conversely there are a lot of comics Green has made that are explicitly not meant to be funny, at least from what we can tell. Certain comics like The Dog’s Sins are unabashedly gloomy and existentially driven, and therein lays the confusion for some. Minish in particular was not okay with this, a perspective that was fairly puzzling for some of us. After pressing further, Minish revealed that he found the organization of Green’s overall comic frustrating: there were comics dedicated to being funny and others that weren’t, and that this lack of consistency in its tone was why he found it confusing and disliked it.
Most of us present at the time for this found the explanation to be completely unreasonable, in light of the fact that—aside from various one-offs—Green’s comics are usually encapsulated as distinct from one another, so that the tone is hard to confuse between them. It’s not hard to differentiate between stories, so the confusion over their organization seems baseless. Yet, despite our explanations, Minish proved obstinate on the issue.
All of this is to say that I handled the ensuing tension poorly. Normally when this sort of thing happens I either ignore it or keep trying to help the person involved to understand what’s going on, usually with varying degrees of success. But today, with my considerable hangover in play, I was not having such unmitigated horseshit. No, I was quite disgruntled over Minish’s behavior, and I ended up yelling at him for it. A brief shouting match ensued, in which Makin chided me for acting irresponsibly and then telling Minish to be quiet because his additions to the conversation were not very constructive. This predictably led to Minish leaving the server again, which is an infuriating outcome to any conversation.
I don’t feel like hashing out the entirety of this sequence of events yet again, so I’ll keep it short: I spoke with Minish after some time passed so that we could both calm down, he came back, but he believes Makin doesn’t want him around or some such nonsense. It’s a thought that I’ve seen in a few other people at this point too, and every single time it proves to be a pretty self-absorbed notion. I don’t mean this to disparage the people involved, but rather it’s simply a baseless idea—Makin doesn’t actually care that much besides wanting people to stop posting things that are "irrational", or whatever may fit the bill at the time.
With this generalized description out of the way once more, I’ll turn to the more pertinent event of the day. It’s with great sadness that we learned Billy Herrington, the subject of the Gachi meme that WoC wrote about in a previous entry, was killed in a car crash. It feels like extremely uncanny timing, what with WoC deciding to write about it so recently. The man himself was basically a meme legend, with countless parodies and various sub-memes surrounding his existence. The fact that he’s gone now is hard to recognize, and everyone who knew of him is paying tribute in whatever way they deem most suitable. WoC was allowed to make a post in announcements addressing this containing a short description and examples of the gachi meme, the final part of which reads: "He will be remembered for his legacy of gay porn and gay porn music remixes. The gachi community mourns him. ♂ RIP Billy Herrington, boss of the gym eternal ♂".
Nothing more for today.
5th of March
Today was fairly devoid of open conflict, which I’m thankful for. I don’t know that I could have handled another day of discourse in a row. In absence of any concrete events to write about, I’d like to instead explore some cultural elements that are more general than the Homestuck fandom, but are still important to various facets of our community.
I’ve touched upon the topic of furries previously, but not in depth: I’ve described them as people who are variously interested in anthropomorphic animals, especially being attracted to them or dressing up/identifying as them. Furries are a rather notorious subculture, enduring a lot of discrimination from people who view this interest as being too weird or just particularly degenerate. For whatever reason, perhaps because of the comparative strangeness of their community versus more conventional ones, they seem to be in the public eye often enough that even people who don’t use the internet will probably understand what you mean if you refer to them.
All of this leads to furries tending to group up or seek each other out, at least in my experience knowing them. It’s far easier to withstand external pressure and harassment as a group than alone; for this reason and probably also because of their common eccentricities, furries can quickly become a dominant aspect of discussions if indulged. Such is what happened earlier tonight when the topic came up: even though (what I assume is) the majority of people involved weren’t actually furries, as soon as the topic cropped up we managed to discuss it for a considerable length of time.
This is honestly not surprising. I say that the majority of people involved probably aren’t furries, but that having been said I wouldn’t be surprised if a much higher than average proportion of our userbase turned out to be furries. I’m not exactly sure why this is—it might have something to do with some of the characters in Homestuck having animal-related motifs or characteristics—but it stands that the discussions are more prevalent here than they might otherwise be.
Some rather notable people in the HSD are furries, although I’m hesitant to name them because it might lead to them getting singled out. One in particular fears discussing the topic because they feel Makin has an overwhelmingly negative opinion on furries, and they think he wants to earnestly ban or get rid of them from the community. I and others think that this fear is unfounded, but somewhat understandable given the likely considerable amount of persecution they would face for their interest anyway.
At the risk of delving too deeply into the weirdness of it all, I feel like it’d be entertaining or even interesting to explain the various "types" of furries that exist. It’s not a hard leap to make and understand that they’re so called because of the connection to furred animals; indeed, some of the most commonly adopted animal personas, or "fursonas" are mammals like foxes and wolves. Less conventional fursonas involve other classes of vertebrate animals, such as reptiles or fish (commonly referred to as "scalies"). Even less common but still more or less findable are cephalods like squid (apparently experiencing an increase in popularity after the release of the Nintendo game Splatoon) or arthropods such as bees, even praying mantis according to Phantos.
Considering stuff like this reminds me of how diverse and wildly strange our community is, both as an isolated group and then as a part of the greater internet. The internet itself has allowed such bizarre things to arise—it’s amazing to consider how these eccentricities have been allowed to develop, where in other time periods they would almost certainly be seen as aberrant and stamped out in no doubt violent ways. I often grapple with the idea of how strange it all is, but I feel as if that strangeness is a net positive, at least in terms of making things interesting. I wonder what other interesting subcultures we’ll see rise over the course of our lives.
The other thing I want to comment on today is a much more localized idea, a meme that was recently forced into the spotlight. Actually, I should take this opportunity to explain that "forced memes" are a real phenomenon: true to their name they’re memes that end up becoming popular through being abused and spammed by people, to the point that anyone paying attention has grown sick of seeing them by the time they see widespread use. This happened recently with something we call "haha long memes".
If you think the name sounds stupid already, then I’m afraid it only gets worse. The origin is fairly moronic, but bears some telling anyway. WoC has a personal server dedicated to his close friends, but he has also invited a number of us from the HSD for the purpose of playing a game called PlanetSide 2 together. WoC and his friends understandably have a wide variety of memes of their own that, by osmosis alone, us visitors have picked up on. One fateful night while playing together, we were informed of a long-forgotten meme of theirs that consisted solely of the phrase "aren’t guns just haha long knives?".
I’m honestly not sure if I can explain it more, that’s basically all you need to know. The format is simply: "isn’t x just haha long y?", where x is something that performs a function better than y, where the function in the original meme is "killing other people". An immediate variation to help solidify understanding would be "aren’t tanks just haha long infantry". Even typing this out I’m realizing just how absurd and idiotic the idea is, but it’s making me laugh all the same. I guess it illustrates an important lesson: a meme doesn’t need to be complex or clever to be funny, it just has to tickle your funny bone in the right way.
That all having been said, it was successfully forced into prominence recently on the HSD, although I don’t think I could point out who the exact culprits are. I’m sure WoC played at least some part in it, and the only other person I can say with certainty was there the night we learned about it was Barry. Regardless of who’s responsible, it’s now in use in altgen and I’m sure it crops up in other channels as well. I doubt that more than a handful of people know where it’s from or are even using it correctly, but if nothing else it’s an interesting demonstration of how memes spread here.
In a similar vein, another meme that’s popular in our community is something referred to simply as "Loss". It’s a single strip from a webcomic called Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) by Tim Buckley. CAD has been the subject of criticism from more than just our corner of the internet, mostly because it was historically not very good in either art or writing. However, it was arguably launched into meme status with the release of the aforementioned strip "Loss" back in 2008. CAD has variously comedic and serious attempts at writing, but "Loss" was of an especially dramatic bent: in short, the female lead suffered a miscarriage.
With anti-fans already doing what they could to take the piss out of CAD, this presented an ample opportunity, and they successfully amplified "Loss" until it was known all around the internet. Over the course of several years, it’s become probably the most parodied strip from the entire comic with countless edits in existence and unbelievable variety between them. It has been stretched to hell and back in all kinds of forms, and it’s referenced fairly frequently on the HSD (although I couldn’t tell you what exactly prompts this).
Honestly, thinking about all of this stuff in aggregate serves as a good reminder of how utterly weird internet culture can get. There’s an entire pronounced culture to this stuff that the vast majority of people will never even know about, much less understand. I have to wonder what someone who was born before the internet even existed would think of these things if they were to suddenly be fully exposed to them. Hell, there are plenty of people around now who would likely think us completely mad if they knew even one hundredth of what it is we discuss and laugh about on a daily basis.
I kind of like that though. In our collective strangeness we’ve found a common niche, and for the most part I think we all appreciate it. It’s gratifying to have this pocket of the world to ourselves, and I find it especially delightful that the medium itself is conducive to creating archives, so that it’s relatively easy to peruse even after the fact. Sometimes I can’t imagine where I would be or what I would be doing without the complete absurdity of the internet at my disposal. I imagine I would get a lot more done, but I might be a lot more miserable too. I can’t say enough times how glad I am that it’s given me the opportunity to meet such interesting people.
Nothing more for today.
8th of March
Today has been thoroughly exhausting. It is arguably the end of an era: we were finally compelled to act on something that, based on what we were shown today, we should have acted on many months ago. Now that I think about it actually, it’s two or three things we should have taken care of. I’ll elaborate on each in turn.
The first is Zoey. Previously VDNW, I’ve described her (or others have described her) as one of the oldest users in altgen, present throughout most of its stages of development as a channel and a witness to the various cultures it has played host to. She’s been a fairly amicable figure for mods to interact with, if rather eccentric, but given the nature of the channel she frequents we didn’t think much of this outside of the obvious.
Occasionally we would get reports from people that Zoey was acting, in soft terms, more outlandishly than could be allowed. In these cases we were largely content to give her a slap on the wrist or reprimand her in private, which at the time seemed completely appropriate for the type of behavior that we were shown evidence for. This sort of thing happened for months, and then again today we were approached with complaints.
Except it wasn’t just one complaint, it was a litany of various complaints from many users, I estimate as many as two dozen people in all. I urge the reader to make no mistake about the magnitude of the evidence submitted: it was a truly staggering number of incidents that were reported to me. I felt compelled to include Dingus and deusAscendent, as they’re both altgen pseudos, and to see what they had to say. A group chat was quickly established in order to better share evidence and discuss things; group chats can only handle ten people at any given time, and so in order for everyone to present their evidence and complaints users had to cycle through!
Even more astonishing than the sheer amount of comments and screencaps we were given was their content. The complaints we’ve received in the past indicated behavior that was no worse than some light mockery or something like playing with others too hard, it was certainly nothing vicious. Today though, everything we saw seemed geared towards foul and fouler: manipulation, abuse, lying, targeted harassment, a plethora of offenses that signaled clearly and vividly that Zoey did not care how she treated other people except for her own gain.
I won’t share any of the intimate details here, for fear of giving away the identity of the people who approached us—suffice to say that no one present felt comfortable with Zoey’s presence after everything was out in the open. Some of the stories we heard were nothing short of frightening, and screencaps of these things made it absolutely clear to us what had to be done.
After sharing some of the evidence in the modchat and briefly discussing what to do with other mods less embroiled in the situation, it was quickly decided that Zoey would be fullbanned from the server permanently, pending some sort of further evidence that she was taking real, solid steps to improve her behavior. The people we were talking with were suitably mollified afterwards, and we set forth guidelines wherein they should absolutely present this evidence to us sooner if they want things to improve faster.
In all, the experience was kind of harrowing. We were asked to make a small announcement about Zoey being removed in altgen, since there were a number of people there who were involved with her positively or otherwise. After making the announcement there were a few people who lamented the decision and then an uncomfortably large swathe of people who were happy with the decision. It’s hard to imagine the extent of what kind of damage may have been wrought here, but here I hope that this will be an effective first step in mitigating any further problems, as well as beginning a process where people in altgen can recover.
On a similar note, we had to deal with Molly today. Nothing Molly has done has been quite so bad as Zoey, to be sure—however, there were some distinct elements in her behavior over the last several months that, combined with the lack of a need for a janitor and a proverbial last straw today, motivated us to remove her janitorial status.
Molly has been an odd janitor, who seemed to take her position seriously and then also not. This was more or less expected given the nature of the place, but it lends itself to some behavioral intricacies that have been less than amusing. There was an incident some months back where some silly discourse was began over "light mode" versus "dark mode", meaning the way Discord is viewed (light mode is a white interface for visibility and dark mode is black/grey, to make it easier on the eyes).
For some reason people were seriously getting bent out of shape over this, and Molly was being "persecuted" for using light mode. I don’t understand why people need to get up in arms on the topic, but nonetheless Molly saw fit to state that the opposing side should "kill themselves", which one should immediately take as a joke given altgen’s reputation. Yet, when we questioned her about this, she claimed that the statement was perfectly genuine.
Speaking honestly, we wanted to remove her janitorial status directly after this incident, but we didn’t because we wanted to see if it would be a problem again. There have been a variety of other circumstances that have arisen where she behaved poorly, none of which I feel particularly motivated to explain at this point in time. This all came to a head today where, after banning Zoey, it was found that Molly was distributing invite links to other servers with Zoey on them.
Again, being honest this is sort of a weak basis for us to go after Molly and unjanitor them. Yet, with everything that’s gone on today, it was too much to bear. I was personally stressed out from dealing with the Zoey fallout and the other related mods were also having a hard time for their own reasons. It was thus that myself, Shitler, Toast, WoC, Dingus, and Deus all conceived of a pink slip that would alleviate our stress a tad and put on a show.
This was probably ill advised in retrospect, but WoC drafted a statement detailing what we were doing. We went to altgen and froze the channel, announcing a "public shaming". After all eyes were pretty securely on us, WoC posted the reasoning and Molly had the janitor role removed. After this we turned it into a bit of a circus, shouting inane nonsense like "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD" repeatedly for some minutes.
We expected this to rile up altgen sufficiently and turn the event into something more jovial, but people weren’t very amused. Molly was well-liked by some regulars in altgen, and they immediately sought her out to make sure she was alright. This succeeded in making me feel like a bit of a tool for a few minutes, but at the end of everything I think I’m too tired to really care that much. Our reasoning was clear and, honestly, it’s just a janitorial position. Nothing to get bent out of shape over.
This all did succeed in royally pissing off one person though, named [as]. [as] has been in altgen for a while as well, and they were immensely peeved at our treatment of Zoey today. They viewed it as the second time we’ve punished a user who "did bad things in the past but has improved over time" (the other such person in question wishing to remain unnamed in this document). Even after explaining our reasoning, [as] very stubbornly pursued the topic anyway.
It was what I would call relentless—after we gave up trying to reason with them, they began resorting to petty insults, saying that the HSD suffered from "shitty moderation". The apex of this was [as] sending a picture of a furry vore (yes, unfortunately it exists) of a disturbingly engorged fox labeled "shitty moderation" graphically devouring what I believe was an ewe, labeled "HSD". Obviously we couldn’t let this sit and they were banned for it.
Thus, a stressful day. From all this it’s become painfully clear that there is a serious potential for maladapted or otherwise malevolent people becoming situated in altgen. We’ve openly asked people to look out for these kinds of people more often and to report them to us so we can help, but who knows if those requests will be effective. All we do know for sure is that a tighter eye must be kept there. Perhaps it really would be better to do away with the channel entirely, if it can lead to this.
Nothing more for today.
9th of March
We had a rather nice change from yesterday. For some time now I’ve been variously busy or distracted, and although I talk in the HSD every day and try to involve myself as much as I can, I don’t typically get the opportunity to thoroughly wash myself in the stream of our collective thoughts. I get glimpses more than anything else, but on those days where I’m able to fully enmesh myself here it’s usually a pretty engaging and fun experience.
Today, we had a rather involved discussion about the quality of the first act of Hiveswap. I would call this topic "tired" if it weren’t for the fact that hardly any of us seem that tired of discussing it. Despite the no doubt countless times we’ve bothered to hash out the subject, we always seem content to revisit it, or we manage to think of a new angle in which to discuss it. I can’t exactly speak to whether today’s conversation was particularly unique, but it was certainly engaging for us.
Hiveswap is a fairly controversial topic for us, which might be no surprise considering even just its history. The fact that it’s been delivered to us at all despite the intense brand of development hell it’s gone through is nothing short of miraculous, and is surely a testament to the dedication of the people who have been involved with the project since its inception. Yet, as is often true of projects that go through development hell, it is arguably lesser than what it could be, or at least less than we could have hoped for.
I don’t mean that to disparage the game in particular, as it had many, many factors against it seemingly from the beginning. Yet, it would be a lie to insinuate that Hiveswap: Act 1 is anything close to a perfect game. The more or less common consensus is that it’s a fairly mediocre game—most people in the HSD I’ve talked to at least would rate it about 5-7 out of 10, and it is compared unfavorably to Act 1 of Homestuck itself. I’m in agreeance with this, although I think it would be beyond premature to suggest that the rest of the game will be this way. Hussie himself reviewed it favorably (although to be fair, why would he review it unfavorably?) and we have seen literally 1/8th of the total product so far; condemning or lauding it as a whole would be laughably stupid at this point.
There are some outliers who think the game is worse or greater than the average provided above: Revlar is particularly vocal of his distaste for it, calling it "worse than bad": he insinuates that the game would be better if it was actually an unapologetically shitty product, a la The Room. However, he feels that it—while being completely fine—has committed the grievous sin of being largely unremarkable, and therefore utterly forgettable.
This contrasts directly with people like Cait, Olki, and Tipsy. They all feel that the game has accomplished what it was meant to do, inasmuch as being a fairly enjoyable game with clever writing, good music and art, and an interesting story. As such, they’ve rated it fairly positively.
There’s a distinct difference in the way these two camps perceive the project I suppose, where Revlar is interested in its artistic merit and the second group are more concerned with how enjoyable it is on a visceral level. I can appreciate both of these perspectives, although I don’t feel very strongly in either way myself.
Personally, my feeling is that it exceeded my expectations, but didn’t fulfill my hopes. It did make it through five years of utter ambiguity, and many of us were completely convinced that it was never even going to come out at all. That alone merits it as somewhat of a success, but speaking as an objective experience Revlar’s sentiment about it being unremarkable rings true to me. It doesn’t really push the envelope technically or artistically, and the story so far doesn’t grip me.
As I said though, we’re not that far into it at all. I’m waiting, cautiously and optimistically, to see if it’ll become something that deserves the sort of recognition Homestuck got, something that I speak for everyone on more or less. Despite how negatively some may view it, I can’t imagine they would want to see it fail—they wouldn’t be here if that was the case.
Nothing more for today.
10th of March
Today was disappointing but in a less explicit way than from a couple days ago. I just got done removing a relatively sizeable portion of the document, about three pages worth, concerning people who want to remain uninvolved with it. I will admit this was really upsetting: it’s a sharp reminder that my disregard for the privacy of others in releasing this was going to rub people the wrong way. Yet, I still feel compelled to write in this document and a few people asking to be removed isn’t going to stop me. I’ll just have to redouble my efforts to make sure that the parts I do include are not to the detriment.
This statement is in direct conflict with the situation from the 8th, however. How should I treat situations where someone is clearly in the wrong and would almost certainly not want to be mentioned? Speaking philosophically, I don’t think that a distinction can be made for people who we have come to consider problematic elements. People like Talons are clearly undesirable individuals, and yet is it allowable for me to discuss them? At what point is it acceptable to discuss people even without their permission?
I had a very involved conversation with Putnam over this, and although my original stance wasn’t really moved I feel it’s worth uttering here: people should be treated as more important than any particular thing, and that goes for this document as well. I’ve made it clear in the past that this document does not take precedent over the wellbeing of a living person, and now I’m simply grappling with the finer details in my head. I’m not sure when it could be appropriate to describe someone even against their wishes.
For people who leave a strict and pronounced mark on us and are of incredibly negative stature, the extreme example of this being someone like Talons or Itoan, I don’t think that I’m particularly obligated to honor their requests should they ask to be removed. It becomes more complicated the less offensive a person is, but this general idea should suffice for now. At the end of the day I trust myself to be more judicious with this as time goes by. I just hope there’s no one else in particular that’s going to be affected adversely by this document.
This musing aside, not a lot of note happened today. There was a series of discussions in mspa-lit that Toast wanted me to record for some reason, which I’ve elected not to do so. Some of these discussions were pretty funny, but nothing that I felt was strictly necessary to include (bite your tongue, Toast, I’m not interested in your complaints this time). I probably would have been more amenable to it if I had actually been around for these discussion, but as it is there’s only two things I really want to comment on.
The first is extremely brief: Yazshu came back to the HSD at some point that I don’t recall, but I was informed of a period of time where he was called "knifeass"—I don’t think I really need to or even should explain the story behind this one. On the other hand, the concept of lurking was brought up and discussed to some degree. I’ve mentioned this practice many times without actually describing what it is, although for most people who use the internet regularly the term’s meaning is probably already familiar to them.
Lurking is the practice of physically being in a chatroom or other media platform and not actually posting on it, rather only watching what other people post. For instance, while I’m a very active poster on the HSD, I don’t post on the subreddit nearly that often, but I do linger there and keep an eye on things, so I qualify as a lurker there. There are many self-described people on the HSD who have admitted to being lurkers in the past, such as Rar. Sometimes there may be a pronounced shift in this habit, from lurker to poster—it’s usually kind of surreal when this happens, as you’re being faced with this person who knows your history yet you’re not familiar with them.
As a general rule it’s better to have people posting actively instead of just lurking. We have over 10,000 people in the HSD, of which around 1,500 to 2,000 are active at any given time. Yet, out of those 2,000 I would estimate that no more than 100-150 are actually posting at any given time. It’s hard to say how many of the remaining 1,850 are actually watching the chat go by (as opposed to watching some other server entirely), but I have to imagine it’s a decent number of people. I wonder what they must think, watching the chat day after day. Do they form attachments or affection for people the same way regular posters do, or are they generally more detached? Might be interesting to seek one out one of these days and ask them directly, although that would of course prove to be difficult.
Nothing more for today.
11th of March
I woke up to a complete shitstorm regarding my actions last night. There were no less than fifty private messages I had to read through, which were variously trying to console me and to berate me. Groggy and already sour at this figurative assault I got onto the HSD as quickly as I could to see what the fire was actually about. As it turns out, the fire was about me.
Removing certain portions of the journal proved to be far more contentious than I thought, and I was repeatedly interrogated by Makin, hb, and a couple others as to why I had done it. I was accused of being manipulated and weak-willed or having no spine, and I quickly grew furious with the utter hypocrisy of these individuals trying to sway my opinion on something that I earnestly believed was the right thing to do.
Certain people like Toast, while I’m sure they actually disagreed with me, were simply taking the piss out of it and tossing out as many jokes as they could. While I wanted to appreciate this, it only served to fan the flames and make things more chaotic, as well as agitating me further. For one of the only times of my tenure here I lost my patience and withdrew from the conversation. I didn’t handle this as well as I could, but even so many hours later as I write this I’m still indignant at their accusations and generally ungracious and especially ugly comments about my decisions.
This is not to say that they were the only crowd of people with something to say: plenty of people were completely supportive of my decision, even if they didn’t agree with it, and there were even people who outright agreed it was the right thing to do. I’m immensely appreciative of the people who were supportive of me in this endeavor: Cait, Olki, and numerous others were really nice about the whole process.
To make matters worse, these people began arguing with each other over me and my work. That is the absolute last thing that I want to see out of people I respect and care for. This nonsensical fight between them only served to make things seem worse and I felt horrible for being the ultimate root of this enormous fight between ourselves. It was one of my basest fears with releasing this document publically, and I guess it should be no surprise that that fear would come to pass by my own doing somehow.
Honestly, after all of that I feel too tired to continue writing about it in depth. Today was simply exhausting and I’m honestly quite disappointed at the more negative responses to what I’ve done. It’s worth reiterating that this work is my own, and while it’s open to suggestion absolutely no one but me gets to determine what is finally written down at the end of the day. Besides, other than reading about it again here they’ll all probably forget about it in a day or two. No sense in carrying a grudge when no one will reasonably keep pursuing this idea—if people continue to harass me for my edits then I openly and derisively call them foolish here.
With that, I really need to rest. I might describe this day in more detail tomorrow once I’ve had a chance to recuperate, but we’ll see; it was honestly really upsetting. Nothing more for today.
12th of March
I want to briefly describe something that has entered the common HSD lexicon, namely a series of videos on Youtube under the name Khonjin House. Created by Connor Lavery, it is a rich set of videos concerning the son of a mafia boss who is simply attempting to obtain some pepperoni pizza, and in the process utterly ridiculous things happen. By chance it was streamed for the first anniversary of the HSD if I’m not mistaken, and due to its ribald wordplay and aesthetic style highly reminiscent of classic Youtube Poops, it became an instant classic for our community.
Youtube Poops themselves are a fascinating element to crop up in internet culture, and arguably one of the most famous. I’m not necessarily an academic on the topic but I think it’s safe to say that these videos, abbreviated to YTP, are a bit of a gateway to the larger collection of obscure internet culture: memes themselves have entered the mainstream consciousness, but YTPs are one step removed from all that.
YTPs involve taking source footage, from a TV show or a video game or anything else on video, and editing/manipulating it to achieve new jokes. A great example of this that I’ve linked before is Fesh Pince of Blair, a parody of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air by KroboProductions. Another famous example is the assortment of King of the Hill YTPs by a Youtuber named DurhamrockerZ, whom many of us feel has shaped the fate and nature of YTPs throughout the history of their existence. His influence on them is not to be understated.
Bringing this back to Khonjin House, unfortunately Connor Laverty has been suffering from a bout of financial instability. Some months ago he opened up a Patreon so that he could stop working a day job and make videos--a job humorously and seriously called “vidsmithing”--which was far more successful than any of us expected it to be. This proved to work for a while, but now it’s become clear that it’s unsustainable and he’s needed to cut back on some things. Connor is even going so far as to disconnect his internet, although he will still upload his creations using internet cafes. All of us who are fans of his work wish him the best.
Not to bring more journal talk into this, but Putnam mentioned repeatedly today that he feels bad for his part in talking with me about edits or removals in this very document. I had to reassure him that, while his input was valuable, it was already something I was considering doing. I feel the need to reiterate my annoyance with anyone attempting to manipulate me in my efforts, or to assuage those who are afraid of doing so. I’m not going to be easily swayed unless I already was considering something heavily, I’m not so soft or impressionable that I twist in whatever wind blows at the time. I just hope everyone forgets about this editing debacle soon so I can go back to writing without people meddling, inadvertently or otherwise.
Nothing more for today.
13th of March
Not a lot to comment on today aside from some particularly frustrating nonsense in mspa-lit, although that in and of itself is hardly surprising. Everyone in the channel was discussing socially-oriented matters in a more persistent manner than usual, which naturally led to Makin freezing the channel. In fact, he froze it no less than three times in rapid succession, which succeeded in pissing off myself and no doubt several others.
It was all done with some pretty severe mockery, too. Makin has secured the channel as a place where only he has any direct control over it: mods aren’t allowed to freeze or unfreeze the place, and only he has channel editing permissions, the only channel on the entire server where that’s true if I’m not mistaken. This leads to some pretty blatant, hypocritical uses of power whenever he feels like overriding other people.
The worst offense of all this was in the second and third freezings, I believe: after freezing the channel to stop other people from talking, he began talking to himself about Star Trek episodes he was watching at the time. It was strangely frustrating to watch him spin yarn to no one in particular, treating the channel as his own personal soapbox and playground.
I recognize that this criticism may sound particularly weird coming from me, given that I’ve literally explained mspa-lit as being Makin’s designated sitting area several times in the past, but make no mistake: I don’t actually support this interpretation, it’s simply the one that’s closest to true. It’s actually quite agonizing to have to deal his chicanery on a daily basis, and I find myself fervently hoping for some sort of resolution to this where he stops mucking with the channel, at least in so blatant a manner. Increasing server activity is important, but he relies too much on tactics that are naturally controversial, which I believe stems from the Slate Star Codex post entitled "The Toxoplasma of Rage".
I’m going to go on a tangent here: the author of the post explains the nature of a disease called toxoplasmosis and relates it to societal interactions based around controversy. For those unfamiliar, toxoplasma refers to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found ubiquitously in cats. The disease is transmitted to rodents in various ways, mostly by cat waste infecting water sources, and once infected the rodents‘ behavior is actually altered in such a way that they are more prone to being caught by cats and eaten. Once the parasite is back in a cat body, it can fulfill the rest of its lifecycle and repeat the process.
The author connects this idea of altering behavior to situations where, instead of a biological toxoplasma, it is a societal one that explains why controversial stories or events are focused on so much more than stories that have more straightforward or logical conclusions (for example: the few sensationalized news stories about false rape allegations compared to the countless, unpublicized stories about verifiable accounts of rape).
The nature of toxoplasma is that it replicates by altering the behavior of those infected by it: in social contexts this takes the form of situations where distinct "us versus them" scenarios arise, and the "parasite" replicates when each tribe strikes at each other in return for previous offenses, real or perceived. The long and short of it is that these more controversial stories are driven by outrage and generate far more interest—and therefore activity or revenue—for the people who bring them to light.
To wrap this back around to why it’s relevant to the HSD, it is a relatively simple matter to identify this behavior: as anyone who has bothered to read even a fraction of this document may surmise, Makin has been by far the largest source of this supposed toxoplasma, at least in the last several months. He has made it known many times that one of his goals is to increase server activity and have people talk more often, and he utilizes this concept as a justification to inject controversy and achieve that goal.
In light of his desires this seems like a logical thing to do, but it’s not without various ramifications. The original post on Slate Star Codex stipulates that relying on this sort of behavior in order to manufacture interest or activity is often accompanied by a decrease in the reputation of the person or organization starting it.
Again, this is an easily traceable pattern with Makin: every time he does or says something inflammatory, he does in fact achieve greater activity, at least for a short while, but so too does it manage to alienate someone or make them see him more negatively. Every time he invokes the toxoplasma, so too does he exhaust a little bit more of his social capital, eroding the trust people have in him. Several real examples of this can already be found, such as the plethora of splinter servers people make explicitly because of Makin’s vexed behavior, and more severely in terms of What Pumpkin’s relationship to the HSD (or perhaps even to the fandom at large).
With all of this in mind, I’m forced to wonder how long this pattern may continue. Makin’s reliance on the tactic is never a net positive: even if it may temporarily spur conversation, the overall outcome is a decrease in his reputation among those who know him best. It’s actually quite frustrating to witness in light of the fact that he doesn’t behave this way in other servers. Everything I’ve ever been told about his presence in other places has suggested that he behaves like a more reasonable, even amicable person in places like CANMT or LOFAM.
Why then does he insist on playing this game here, in the HSD? I’m growing increasingly afraid that it’s a simple case of the old internet truism: "a normal person rendered anonymous and given an audience is turned into a total fuckwad". This would be less bothersome to me (routine, even) if it weren’t for the fact that most of us variously respect Makin or like engaging with him.
Part of the Fuckwad Theory is that the person being examined doesn’t care about the people they’re interacting with. If this is indeed the case, then the implication is that Makin does not return our respect or feel any sort of attachment to us and instead sees us all as disposable, or unworthy of consideration. In this case, the users of the HSD and everyone Makin talks to will have been rendered as mere tools for some undefined purpose. Anyone with even a basic comprehension of humanity should understand why this is upsetting to consider; I sincerely hope that it turns out to be untrue.
Nothing more for today.
15th of March
There’s been a trend in the last week or two where everyone seems to be more involved with personal projects. There’s a lull in the organization of community activities: nothing is currently being done, but plans are being made for the future, especially with the anniversary of Homestuck coming in a month. With a lack of larger overall events to discuss I’ll comment on some of the individual activities that are happening, interspersed throughout the community.
I guess it’s inaccurate to say that we’ve had no group activities: we still play SCP on a fairly consistent basis, at least once a day. It’s actually been a fairly solid mainstay, all things considered; there was some rather intense discourse with Cookiefonster and a couple others over where the talk should be located. Cookie actually left the server (or stopped talking in it, rather) for a couple of weeks over this issue, something that bothered me somewhat. I can’t begrudge him for not dealing with something that obviously bothers him, but I don’t understand the nature of his distaste for it.
That having been said, it’s not that I disagree with him: I don’t feel the same way about the talk itself, but historically and logically SCP talk should have been moved to #gaming ages ago. I think we’re going to try and make a more concerted effort to guide conversation there in the future, in keeping with SS13 in the past and to avoid these kinds of pointless confrontations in the future. Hopefully we can be more preemptive with this sort of problem in the future, with other games.
Honestly, gaming has been a common theme in general, even with individuals. Makin plays Skullgirls frequently, and if I’m not mistaken he’s been trying to get others to play the game1 as well. These attempts have been met with some success: Nights, Cait, Putnam, and possibly others have all begun playing it, or at the very least are playing it more obviously.
Indeed, they’ve all been playing with each other periodically. There is some spirit of competition in the community, and occasionally they face off against each other for fun. This is not unique to Skullgirls, either: recently Putnam and I did something similar with Super Smash Brothers Melee, playing together over the internet for fun. I’m sure there are other examples of this throughout the community, and is something I’ll have to keep an eye out for.
Also relevant to gaming, I finally felt motivated to set up streaming software so that I could play games and have other people watch. This was an activity I dedicated to anyone who was interested: I started playing Super Metroid because it’s a classic and I’ve been curious about it for years, never having played it before. It’s Putnam’s favorite game, so naturally he decided to watch. Rar was also a regular participant, and then a host of various others joined at will. It was quite exciting having them around and playing for them, and I believe I’ll be doing it again in the future, especially if people have recommendations for me.
Speaking of Putnam and Rar, lately it feels as if the three of us have, by chance, repeatedly been engaging with ourselves during smaller stream events. Occasionally when we watch a movie or a TV show off the cuff, there will initially be at least ten people involved, but then as the evening progresses people naturally fall away. For whatever reason, myself, Putnam, and Rar have always been the last three involved, to the point that we’ve all consciously recognized the trend. It’s been kind of nice to indulge ourselves, calling ourselves a club and such. It serves as an effective example of the spontaneity with which smaller groups can form, completely by accident sometimes. I’m interested to see if this proves true for us more in the future as well.
The journal has occasionally cropped up in conversation, usually serious at first but then slowly turning to jokes as people grow fatigued with the conversation. I feel compelled to reexamine my work in the past and see what I can do to improve it, especially ethically. I’ve already taken steps in this direction, but there is still more work to be done. I’m going to vague this for now unfortunately until I know better what to do.
On a similar note, I feel worried about the prospect of me trying to put too much stuff into the journal that doesn’t actually need to be there. Since things have been generally quiet lately, I don’t feel it would be appropriate to write down stuff that’s utterly trivial or unimportant just for the sake of having it. Fluff is not really something I want to fill this document with. If nothing of importance happens then I guess there will just be large breaks in the entries—it’s unfortunate, but quality over quantity is still a good concept.
Nothing more for today.
19th of March
There has been a significant uptick in how many times content has been streamed. I think that today was the end of that crescendo: we ended up watching a few Doctor Who episodes today because there is a decent spread of people who have seen it and then a number of people who haven’t—it felt appropriate to expose the unfamiliar to it, and much reminiscing about various episodes and sagas was had.
One would reasonably expect the stream to end after its original purpose is complete, but in keeping with the procession of events over the last so many weeks the stream continued with some suggestions from various people. I mentioned previously that Rar and Putnam have both been a staple of my events lately, and sure enough Rar conceived of watching some Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) to help the stream along as much as possible.
This was initially a great idea, and all who participated enjoyed it very much. However, it’s become clear that we’re running into that point of fatigue once more, where the streams have been too plentiful lately and we’re starting to get tired of them. Consistently streams have dwindled down to two or three people, which is usually the point where you turn it off unless you have a really dedicated cabal in place for the occasion. With this in mind, I think the streams are basically over for now.
Similarly, it feels as if SCP is winding down in a big way. It’s hard to remember when we started playing it exactly, but for various reasons people have been a little more sparse than usual. At its height we had over 15 people (not including the time where Makin misguidedly invited 4chan to play), and that number has pretty regularly gone down over the last so many days. I’m sure that we’ll continue to play regularly for a week or two, maybe more, but numbers will continue to decline and before we know it SCP will be a thing of the past. The exact point at which this happens will be difficult to determine, but I’ll try to pinpoint it regardless.
The lack of commentable events lately is not to say that we have stopped talking. The opposite is actually true: for the last few months it’s been a fairly consistent amount of discussion at all times, which has lent considerably to a unique energy surrounding the place. It feels as if mspa-lit is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan in nature, with participants from all parts of the globe and all manner of viewpoints engaging in the discussion at any time. It’s quite nice to see this in action, especially in light of my fears from a few months ago that the place was growing too inactive.
It is such that our community is growing steadily more comfortable with itself and the position it happens to be in right now. Another result of the increasing activity is the development of familiarity with each other. With every conversation we have, people become more in tune with the idiosyncrasies of other chat members and they become more self aware about their presence in the community, and how they affect each other.
This general trend led to a discussion spearheaded by Tipsy today, concerning the nature of interacting with people online versus in real life. She mentioned feeling uncomfortable with the idea of socializing purely on the internet versus real life, and cast aspersions towards the idea. There were a number of people who were quick to disagree, claiming the more neutral position that whether online or real life interaction is better depends entirely upon the individual. I imagine there are some sociological studies about this very topic available, but our layman sensibilities are as yet unaware of them. I’m sure anyone familiar with this document will at this point be able to intuit how I feel about the subject.
After this, the discussion turned into something far more absurd. It is not uncommon for users who are fond of each other to tease each other endlessly about all manner of in jokes or past events. One particularly sophomoric example of this would be a common exchange had between Toast, LLF, and others within the community at times. I can’t help but laugh to describe this, but the idea—brought up again today as like from the dead—is a long running joke where each person mocks the other about being aroused, and specifically involves the imagery of "nipples hardening enough to clink on glass".
As weird as it may sound, this is the sort of thing that drew my attention and got me to start using this place so frequently. The nipple example aside, this sort of ribaldry is a calling card of communities where the people involved are witty, amusing, and—most importantly—fierce friends. If it weren’t so utterly stupid I would call it nuanced, but the overall point is that it’s one of the many things about this place that will catch one off guard, but is worth looking into. Other examples of this phenomenon include much teasing over "tender ass valleys" and casual insinuations of incest between various members of the chat.
After phrasing it in this way I can see why people might be made uncomfortable by all this. I imagine that those not inclined towards the weird would find all of this pretty disturbing, especially if they’re not familiar with socializing on the internet. It all makes for a fantastically funny story for us though, and in the end that’s what matters.
Nothing more for today.
22nd of March
Speaking with people is a skill that must be developed and paired with a variety of other understandings, if one wishes to effectively converse with others at least. Even this is not enough, however; all participants must be operating in good faith, or else a conversation is not what it is taking place. Rather, in conversations where bad faith is in play, one or both people involved will not actually be interested in interfacing with the other and will instead be attempting to "win" the conversation by whatever metric is most desirable to them.
Winning a conversation is fine in something like a debate, where all parties are ostensibly attempting to sway each other and rely on employing the finest logic or rhetoric available to them. Sometimes people will soil this with ulterior motives, and especially in cases where the underhanded or even nefarious methods are employed this thoroughly ruins a conversation. It is a particular brand of frustrating to encounter conversations where this is the case, and it is especially so for those who, instead of trying to engage with others in earnest, care only about being technically correct and "winning" the conversation in their own eyes.
Sometimes I feel at the mercy of those belonging to this latter group. On several occasions now I’ve found myself trying to explain something or bridge a gap in understanding between people, only to have one of them errantly dismiss everything that does not conform to their expectations or serve their interests. This is a particularly insidious and despicable conversational tactic in my opinion, serving as willful ignorance at best and dedicated evil at worst.
All of this is in the wake of an immensely disappointing conversation I had last night which had the gall to follow me today. Without going into gratuitous details, it was singlehandely one of the most upsetting events I’ve been through on this server. I’m still processing everything that was said, or wasn’t said perhaps, and being forced to come to terms with the fact that the other person involved doesn’t actually care what you have to say is exhausting and disheartening.
This actually carried over to this morning, where I was attempting to explain what happened to everyone present. The conversation ended up progressing back to journal discourse and, due to the changes I’ve made, Makin demodded me. At this I decided to take a small break from talking in the server. After I mentioned I was leaving the conversation, Makin said "it was a meme" and reinstated me, but I wasn’t really feeling up to the joke at that point.
I took my time outside and thought about the state of the place for a while. Last time I wrote I was under the impression that things were settling in more or less desirable ways but clearly something is not working out with all of this. There is still room for intense disquiet of the unamusing kind: it feels like there is little distinction made between jokes that are pleasant and enjoyable versus those that are disruptive and upsetting, and there is no shortage of people who are interested only in "winning" conversations, like I said. There are too few people trying to bridge gaps and establish understanding between each other, and it’s all due to the influence of a choice few people who are arrogantly selfish in their desires and ideals.
By the end of the day I had returned and felt sufficiently ambivalent about the events of the day that it wasn’t a big deal anymore. This is not to say that I did not care, but in the face of overwhelming nonsense what can one do but accept it, at least for the time being? No, instead of continuing to fight I reminded myself that I get too invested. It is habitual at this point, and I have no doubt it will happen again, but all of this stinks in a way that is hard to put my finger on.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of March
Yet more discussion about the journal. This did happen yesterday, as I mentioned, and in my low spirits I neglected to describe this in any detail, but in summary the conversation largely concerned the nature of this document, and what I should do with it regarding censoring certain details.
This is particularly frustrating for a few reasons: I’m afraid of bringing this up too often, both in the chat and here, because it feels sufficiently narcissistic and annoying. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m forcing this topic to crop up, which would be self serving at best; most importantly, the controversy of bringing this document into the public light was worse than I anticipated, and I foolishly assumed that I could attempt to compromise with everyone in a way that also preserves the integrity of what I’m trying to do.
On that note, what am I trying to do with this? What is this document and how should it be treated? I want it to be useful and interesting to people, but I also want it to serve as a record of things that happen and people that are here. This latter point feels to be the most important to me, and thus removing certain details outright is inappropriate. There is concen with this in the sense that what I’ve written can’t be objective: my position in this community is well-established, so writing about it will be an inherently biased activity.
Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever said that this account is objective. It is certainly true that I would like for it to be so, but in the end I recognize my fallibility. Beyond seeking external corroboration for certain events, there isn’t much I can do to illustrate the subjective nature of my writing besides disclaiming so, which I have done repeatedly. The problem with what I’ve been trying to do after releasing the document is that I’m changing it for other people, but it’s time to start focusing on what I want to do with it.
This is my project after all, and it’s under my purview what happens to it. I need to think a little more about how to accomplish what it is I want, and this time I will make sure to more firmly establish my "rules", so to speak, so that I feel less obligated towards others and their desires. Above all else, I want to preserve the history of this place as thoroughly as I can: completely removing events or entities defeats that purpose. Anonymizing is fine as long as the essence of what transpires is retained.
These deliberations are tiresome and I’m sure particularly boring after going through them so many times, but in a way I feel a bit more free after this latest instance of the discussion. I’m not beholden to anyone over this project, and while ethical consideration is still important obviously it’s my decision what goes in and what doesn’t, complaints be damned. With this in mind, it’s time to reevaluate what I’ve been doing and hopefully craft a method that works better this time around for what I want to do.
Returning to the events of the HSD finally, today was notable in the community: Austinado’s project Vast Error experienced its seventh anniversary yesterday, marking the occasion with no less than a stream for their community and a new music album release. This was understandably a pretty big deal, and it was assumed by most that all this activity would merit an announcement of some kind. Yet, when the appointed time came, Makin explicitly told us not to announce anything.
This flies in the face of a lot of precedence with VE. It’s one of the most popular fanventures on MSPFA, being the fifth most liked and thus listed on the front page, and has been around for a long time. Historically we’ve almost always announced significant VE events, and so this refusal from Makin was puzzling to many. It escalated quickly throughout the morning, discussions being hampered significantly by my frustration with Makin’s capricious whims and, unfortunately, because I was distracted at the time.
Not that my frustrations were ever satisfied—due in part to my anger at the time, I’m sure Makin was simply motivated not to listen to anyone else on the matter, which only served to make me angrier. I maintained then and still now that I was not too angry to discuss the matter, but having my concerns and points dismissed offhandedly because of how they were presented was nothing short of infuriating. It is the worst sort of rhetoric: rather than focusing on the content of a message, it becomes easy to ignore the statement if it’s not issued perfectly. This is a common conversational tool of cowards, and in this way the topic only escalated with nothing accomplished by its end.
After some hours spent away from the chat, I tried revisiting the topic to try and get a more solid answer out of Makin as to why he was doing this. He listed a few different metrics, saying that Vast Error was not "quality" enough for an announcement. He also declared that he was unsatisfied with the idea that Austin is "hogging all of the good artists and musicians and not doing anything with them", in the sense that the update speed for VE was too slow. He further clarified that he feels compelled to reward content producers who release content quickly.
These claims felt odd to me, at the very least, and I’m sure others commented on this as well. Vast Error’s quality is indisputable—Makin even acknowledges that Austin has a litany of artists and musicians working on it with him, all of which have contributed really clean and admirable content to the fanventure. Thus, his claim that VE isn’t "quality work" is nonsense at best. The point about rewarding faster content producers was also upsetting: he mentioned offhandedly that he would probably announce an adventure that updates with 1,000 pages in one go, but failed to address what would happen if all of those pages happened to be utter shit.
There is a disconnect between Makin’s explanations and what he’s actually doing. Encouraging faster update schedules at the cost of quality is in direct opposition to the reason he gives for not announcing VE—encouraging comics that update faster but have less thought put into them is the exact opposite of what most people want. There is indeed a middle ground to be had between quality and pacing, but encouraging one over the other is farcical.
Of course, these discreptions in his explanation make less sense assuming that he is giving this criticism in good faith. The alternative is that he is simply following his desires and giving empty justifications in order to get people to stop bothering him about it. I can’t say with complete certainty which he’s doing at this point in time, but if it turns out this is in fact what’s going on then he deserves every ounce of anger and controversy that follows him.
His wanton disregard for the power that he holds over people is a continued source of agony and community wastefulness: instead of recognizing the potential he holds as the leader of this community, he renounces his responsibility when he doesn’t want to deal with problems (many of which he causes himself) and retains it when he can get what he wants. These are categorically selfish traits, and being forced to recognize that over the last so many months has been an exhausting, often deeply saddening experience.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if there’s any way to get through to him on these matters. I’m forced to resume my position of solidly ignoring him when I can and taking care of things regardless of his chicanery. Revlar has spoken at length, especially today, about finding ways to convince Makin to abandon his nonsense; he was prompted in this discussion by my anger earlier in the morning, as he understands very well that Makin is not swayed by such displays.
Yet, for all of Revlar’s advice neither of us have come any closer to actually devising a fool-proof way of getting through to him: the biggest way of convincing Makin to do something would be through the tyranny of the masses, and I have serious doubts that even that would work—gathering a large enough group of people to air their grievances against him would only succeed if everyone were unified in their message and refused to let it go. Unfortunately, I am certain that he would create some distraction and would succeed in breaking up the coalition through diversionary tactics, and it would amount to nothing in the end.
All of this is very dispiriting to consider and reinforces the idea that I need to rethink Makin as an individual in his entirety. It’s especially disappointing because I feel as if he and I manage to get along most of the time. Toast and I had a discussion about this where he states that Makin and I are foils of each other (an assessment that made me personally uncomfortable in its implication), and that Makin is given more license to do what he does because I exist, in a way. I don’t know how much stock to put in this—it is amusing in a way, but also unsettling. What am I supposed to do about all of this? Is there anything I can do?
Nothing more for today.
25th of March
There has been some alarming developments that I was previously unaware of. Apparently about a month ago, James Roach announced his release from What Pumpkin. A couple days ago on the 23rd of this month it was his last day. In addition to this, artists Poinko and Gina were let go as well. It is clear that James at the very least is under an NDA about the conditions surrounding his release, which is extremely concerning to a lot of people.
Tipsy made a post on her Tumblr yesterday which was over this subject, and provides a good background into the history of these sorts of developments and why people are increasingly worried over the departure of these workers. In short, the pattern of staff releases and a lack of communication from WP over the matter preceded an intense delay in the release of the game, where "several weeks of bug-testing" turned into nine additional months of hard development time. All of this is—for all outward appearances—sudden and most importantly unwanted. Not only are we unaware of why the staff being released is happening, but we are also left in the dark as to the future of the project.
James, Gina, and Poinko all being released can only be to the overall detriment of Hiveswap at this point. It is no secret that many of us were at least partially unsatisfied with the way Hiveswap was being handled, but it was obtaining a style that we could be familiar with and recognize immediately. With two concept artists and a musician gone, what is going to happen to the artistry of the game? With luck it’ll remain unchanged or maybe even improve somehow, but it would be extremely jarring and—in a word—bad for the game to suddenly shift in the way it’s being presented.
On a more personal note, too, James has released a couple of details about Hiveswap development that I found interesting, such as a post mentioning a concept character codenamed "Busker". Busker was apparently written so that if you came up to him and said the right things, he would play you a small song as a street performer. Busker was written out of the game due to being a one-off appearance, and thus not needed. This is a fairly esoteric detail in the face of everything else about the game coming out right now, but it is something I find intriguing and somewhat concerning.
I like to play video games a lot, and naturally so do many others in the HSD. After so many years of playing them, a lot of us have begun to intuit various things about game design. I don’t claim to be an expert by any means, but a game like Hiveswap is predicated on having interesting interactions with all manner of things. Act 1 accomplished this to a pretty significant degree: the game was fun and compelling because you felt like seeking out connections between things to see what those interactions would yield.
The removal of Busker is kind of the opposite of that idea. He may have been a character you only see once, but having the extra, unimportant goal of being able to get him to play music for you is a detail that adds life to the game and makes it more fun for people to try to do everything they can. In a game that’s about exploring your environment and finding answers to puzzles, what good is it to remove interesting elements which would otherwise compel people to explore the game more?
That personal gripe aside, all of this just signals an increasing disconnect of this game from its target. Although it is meant to be accessible to anyone, Hiveswap resonates far and away the most with Homestuck fans. Part of the dynamic of Homestuck has always been involvement with the community, and this news feels like the latest development in a trend of trying to get away from that community. Concerns about the eventual fate of the property and how fans will be treated are common now—we earnestly hope that this is not ill-fated, but the treatment of these artists who have been enmeshed in the project for so long does not inspire much confidence.
I had a rather pleasant exchange with everyone later at night—Toast and others were asking about my history with the Sydlexia community, and I provided a more fleshed out history of the decline of that community, and stuff that came after it. This led to a general powwow of storysharing, wherein many of us revealed their histories on the internet. Some, like a user named tmtmtl30, lamented "not having an interesting history", which I found amusing. Minish briefly described his history with the Undertale Wiki, a revelation which was vaguely stunning to us.
Minish described us as being far less "abusive" than his previous internet community, which was gratifying to hear. We have our problems with him on occasion and I worry what he must think, but I believe that at the end of the day, no matter how fierce a problem may have been he manages to come around and realize that we’re fine in all actuality. It reinforces to me the idea that this place is a positive one, and I’m happy it can serve as such for people.
The conversation proceeded in much this way for a while, and now many hours later a few of them, including Phantos, Kayjeth, Lobster, Minish, Canis, and a fellow named gslayer14 are all discussing random tidbits like SCP and the eventual fate of humanity. It’s 3:30 AM EST, and everyone involved in this discussion appears lively, with their own interpretations of the end of the universe. It reminds me greatly of long nights spent chatting idly with friends from Sydlexia, often going into the wee hours of the night. I feel an immense affection for them right now, and I hope that at least everyone present can be happy with their time here.
Nothing more for today.
27th of March
The glowing feeling of the last entry faded yesterday as I was reintroduced to old conflicts and annoyances. Yet, I don’t feel that bad about it all. It is certainly tiresome to deal with various aspects of this place, especially if one is concerned with approaching everything in good faith, but it is something that I’m willing to involve myself in and try to improve as long as I’m able. An assortment of interactions over the last couple of days have reconfirmed my appreciation for this place, even in spite of its problematic elements.
Yesterday, I finished streaming a game called Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for an average of ten people at any given time, which was really exciting. It was suggested by Tensei and Niklink, and I had been putting in at least a couple hours each night. The conclusion brought with it a flurry of excitement, and participants of the stream like Tipsy and a couple others began posting relevant memes in the HSD.
Far from annoying people, it only inspired the discussion to turn towards what I should play next. I’m really happy that everyone involved enjoys watching me, at least so far. I’d like to pick something that continues to be fun for everyone, but of course it’s hard to ensure something like that. Hopefully this continues to be a positive experience—I might give it a break, I’m sure saturating people with my playing games all the time is a surefire way to bore them.
After the stream ended though, I was massively exhausted: it takes a lot of energy to do something like that, and the net result was that I was only sort of present for the rest of the evening. That is, until later at night when we started discussing the end of Homestuck as we’ve got it so far. I’ve touched on this subject at length, but a refresher may be helpful.
Back on April 13th 2016, the final major part of the comic, Act 7, was released. As I’ve said in the past, an enormous part of the response was confusion and, eventually, upset at the conclusion. It was not what we had expected and it felt like it left an absurd of plot threads untouched that we had been curious about, so naturally there was significant furor. This was accompanied by a newpost from Hussie declaring Act 7 to be, in no uncertain terms, the final installment of the comic.
With the response being what it was already, one should understand why this concurrent newspost would have only made matters worse. In a matter of hours, Hussie made an edit to his newspot saying that "for some time" he had been considering an epilogue. This mollified people, but the initial response was not subdued; this assurance was too little too late, and the comic was for all intents and purposes a perceived disaster.
Today, the discussion centered around what Hussie’s true intentions may have been in writing the edit to that newspost. "For some time" implies a considerable length of time, indicating that he never intended Act 7 to be a standalone thing. Yet, the way in which the addendum was supplied felt like a scrambled, hasty attempt to pacify angry fans to many at the time. This last point was the focus of the talk: mainly between myself, Revlar, and then Putnam, it centered around the likelihood of Hussie actually planning to include an epilogue or if he had attempted to mislead us way back when.
Putnam was vehemently against this interpretation, because it assumes bad faith on Andrew Hussie’s part. The overarching idea to this is that there are two equally likely possibilities, one of which makes out Hussie to be a liar and the other to assume that he was telling the truth. Given that the probability of either one being true is the same, to Putnam this means that one should assume good faith and perceive Hussie as speaking truthfully on the matter.
Yet, Revlar and I weren’t convinced. Revlar spoke in much harsher times than I did, which lead to comments from Cait on the matter. Initially I tried to speak in more neutral terms—while I personally believe that Hussie only added the edit in to calm people down, I didn’t want to speak so bluntly on the matter in case that proved to be untrue. Unfortunately, I was tired at this point and eventually stopped caring about maintaining this air of neutrality.
I abandoned all pretenses and started siding with Revlar, speaking perhaps in more blunt terms than even he. I brought up Hussie’s past and made a few scathing jokes about how Hussie "has never misled anyone on anything ever", and eventually lost interest as it dragged on for many minutes afterwards (we’ve been through this song and dance enough times in the past that I felt it unnecessary to stick it out and see what happened).
Today after some much needed rest I was reflecting on this, and I felt bad about my untoward behavior towards Putnam and whoever shared his side of the argument. I thus went to go apologize to him, but he responded only with "literally when were you being rude?" This took me by surprise at first, but then I had to laugh: this exact scenario has played out a number of times before.
There has been at least two or three occasions where I’ve become flippant or (what I perceive as) rude in a conversation with Putnam, only to feel bad about it and offer an apology to him later. He rebuts by saying that he didn’t see me as rude at all, which always manages to catch me off guard. Makin explained today that it’s because people like himself and Putnam are emotionally detached from conversations, hinting in a possibly taunting fashion the idea that it was because they were too rational for emotional attachment.
Of course, I think this is mostly a crock of shit. I have my doubts Makin believes this instead of merely trying to propagate the rationality meme even further, and indeed I feel as if most of the conversations he participates in are so he may gain amusement out of them. Even if he does sincerely believe it, he has shown emotion in conversations before; his supposition is thus silly to me. Otherwise, Putnam is decidedly more rational than Makin—at least outwardly—but argues often about things that are not strictly rational in nature. Perhaps I’ve commented on this subject too often, or it’s becoming tired; I can feel myself growing bored with this conjecture as I type.
Far more interesting to me is the revisiting of a topic today that I seem not to have written about in a long while, and for relevant reasons: Hiveswap Discord has fallen out of the collective consciousness of our group and has been relegated to something less related to us in nature. People there, like Icel, have repeatedly suggested in no uncertain terms that they want to cut ties with the HSD completely and be allowed to do their own thing. I‘ve honestly been arguing for that almost since day one.
Even if it weren’t for that outright intent, there just haven’t been that many noteworthy events between our two communities lately. I would go so far as to say that there have been none whatsoever: it seems as if more modern conflicts arise as a result of already extant ones, which is pointless and frustrating to pursue. I think that HVSD has already achieved its desire of being irrelevant to us, and I think there are no shortage of people who will agree on both sides that this development is for the best. This will be the last I write of them, save for some immense catastrophe between us.
As insurance against anyone so inclined to manufacture such a disaster, I will also not write about HVSD if anyone from HSD can be conclusively pointed to as the catalyst for whatever problems may arise. As a general outward statement, don’t make me have to write a disclaimer out in full for this issue. I’m tired of having to deal with people trying to be "clever" and finding gaps in my words instead of understanding the spirit of what I’m trying to say. You know who you are.
Later in the day, Difarem made a program—a neural network—that took in all of the posts in mspa-lit as data and spit out randomized phrases attached to also random handles in text files. Dif provided text samples filled with dozens of of these random phrases, and the chat was quickly consumed by their silliness for about two and a half hours, predictably to the great enjoyment of some and immense annoyance of others.
In total there were over 30 batches of text samples that Dif provided, and each one of them contained an ample amount of chance phrases or groups of phrases that were humorous to us, often as flanderizations of our behavior. My personal favorites included one such grouping of Makin and myself, structured as such: "Makin: it’s good bad / Drew Linky: no", perfectly encapsulating the spirit of our interactions. There were countless examples of this from a hefty portion of our users.
This was greatly amusing to most present, but a few such as Tipsy and Cookie were not pleased with how much it dominated the chatroom in the process. In keeping with my apparently lowered inhibitions I tried to cut to the heart of the matter:
the only time anyone gets upset about shit in this channel is when they can't be part of what's going on, if people were more patient and just decided to come back when things were more accessible none of these things would really be that controversial.
A small part of me regrets being so blunt in this matter—I’ve stressed before that I try to be diplomatic in what I’m doing at all times, but at this point in the conversation being tired was overriding my desire to maintain the cordiality of it all.
Thankfully, despite any of my perceived rudeness the conversation continued just fine. I think I give us too little credit in our ability to handle criticism or behavior that is decidedly "smushy" in nature. As an aside, "smush" is a concept loosely defined as flamboyant and often inflammatory behavior that forces people to stop and regard you with bewilderment, as typified by an emote we have called "makinsmush": which is often used liberally to great comedic effect. As should be expected it is also used as an actual callout when the need arises.
Nothing more for today.
28th of March
Something happened today that I feel vindicates everything I’ve been trying to do over the last couple of months with prepping this document for public release. Pushback from people was upsetting and made me feel as if I was making an enormous mistake in doing this, but I was reminded in a very concrete way of why I bothered to do all of this in the first place.
Before I made this a publically accessible document, I distributed all of this material on a more private basis: people asked to see it, they were vetted somehow since personal information was more excessive back then, and if they were approved they got a copy of the latest release, as well as being put on a list for people to automatically receive updates (a laborious and exhausting effort due to its inefficiency). There were of course people who asked to see it and were denied for a variety of reasons—one such individual was a user named Tetrahedron.
Tetra is an altgen personality, shitposting lightly in places they’re not supposed to (or at the very least, appearing to shitpost and generally confusing everyone involved as to their true intentions). Due to this, it was decided not to give Tetra a copy of the journal, at which they became extremely upset at being left out. This pattern played out with a number of other individuals, and every time I saw it I felt a little worse about being unable to share this information with them.
Thus I was inspired to really push for making it a more accessible document. I was extremely happy to have it out there so that people like Tetra would be able to see it. I had assumed he would find it when it was announced, but apparently Tetra took a break from the HSD for a couple of months for unspecified reasons, and wasn’t aware of any of this.
Journal discussion came up briefly again today and Tetra briefly mentioned being upset about and requested people not talk about it (a move I would consider selfish, but that’s less important for the purposes of this entry). Everyone was confused about his statement so I decided to pursue it, and discovered he was unaware of our efforts to push it out publically.
He was still upset that everyone else was getting to read this and he apparently wasn’t. I actually laughed at this and immediately informed him of the truth. It was a trivial matter to tell him he could read it now and provide a link—I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the slightest bit smug, and even later I still feel pretty satisfied with the chain of events that has culminated in this encounter.
I feel it’s worthwhile to restate that this document is for people like Tetra, who want to know more. I don’t know if any ulterior motive is involved here, and unfortunately I’m aware that people would try to use this information inappropriately, but for my ideal—openly available information for the convenience of the curious—this is optimal. Everyone should be able to read this if they want to, and I’m happy that my efforts appear to be paying off so far.
Nothing more for today.
29th of March
There was actually really comprehensive discussion today, I’ll do my best to render it with justice to the original.
It all started with an errant conversation about the bigwarnings tumblr, which hasn’t been relevant since it was created (a fact many of us are thankful for). I’ve written at length on bigwarnings before but it merits a brief reexplanation: bigwarnings is a Tumblr blog that was created by someone many months ago with a significant amount of knowledge and experience in our general community, as evidenced by the highly specific nature of the posts there. It is written anonymously, no doubt so that the person responsible will not have to face direct criticism for it. To this day no one is sure who wrote it, although many people have guessed.
The very existence of the bigwarnings blog is extremely annoying for obvious reasons. It would be more defensible if we knew exactly who was responsible, because then we might understand the circumstances that led to its creation. As it is, all of the complaints on bigwarnings are aggravating in the extreme for two reasons: the first and most obviously gross violation is that all of the screenshots used as "evidence" are taken out of context and specifically made to look as bad as possible, without any real substance to them.
The second and less obvious problem, which is arguably more important, is that these complaints rob the criticism of real weight because they fail to address actually significant issues that do in fact exist in our server. Anyone who has read this document and especially those personally familiar with the HSD know that it is replete with all manner of problems that need to be addressed somehow, but none of the things that the bigwarnings blog brings up are particularly substantive or convincing.
I guess rehashing this further is unnecessary, except to say that it is extremely annoying. Yet, in the end that was all it ever was: annoying. It was the attempt of a disgruntled malingerer to draw attention to things they deemed a serious issue, but instead their whinging only served as a reminder (to me, if no one else) of the scale of what is so hotly contested. That is to say, it is a reminder of how small our place in the world really is.
Our community is rather large considering the source material and conditions of our existence, but in the grand scheme of things we are fairly insignificant. I don’t say this as admonishment of some kind, but rather as a simple truth. Indeed, I think it’s actually a nice thing. It’s a pocket of our own, something that we have to ourselves and for the most part insular. Nothing we do here matters in terms of the seriously concrete.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that idea though, in the midst of all the discourse that happens. More often than not we find ourselves involved in criticizing others, to the point that it blinds us to all else or removes our sense of scale. I recognize the hypocrisy in saying so, but that sort of tunnel vision is abhorrent, if not outright dangerous. In light of this, my defense is simply that I try to maintain that sense of perspective and consciously recognize the exact extent to which this place actually matters.
None of this is to say that I don’t think our community is pointless or doesn’t matter: I still care very much, but it is necessary to compartmentalize things and treat them appropriately. I wonder if our influence will grow in any significant way. Of course, we will (without some exceptionally bizarre turn of events) never become influential beyond the scope of Homestuck itself, but there is a non-zero chance that the HSD may become more significant in the future of the fandom as a whole. I’m interested to see how this plays out.
More relevant to today, our talk about the bigwarnings blog also led to some timely reminiscing about Elvish. The exact progression of the conversation made sense at the time, but in retrospect makes me laugh with how convoluted it is to spell out:
The talk about bigwords led to Tipsy recounting a callout post she made; Makin jokingly asked why Tipsy hasn’t called him out, but she said that Makin hasn’t done anything shitty enough to warrant being called out; after some laughing and pointed reminders of Makin’s previous behavior, Tipsy clarifies that Makin hasn’t done anything similar to the person she was personally calling out, namely "abusing a teenager"; this prompts further reminders of Elvish, and how many of the greatest complaints levied against Makin involve that specific event.
And so it goes.
From here we got into a rather lengthy conversation about the actual nature of Elvish’s presence in the HSD, and the circumstances leading to their departure or dismissal from the community. NOMW discourse contributed to this as I’ve previously described, but then I was made aware of something that I had never heard of previously: apparently Elvish personally messaged or pinged Cohen in an attempt to get him involved. At the risk of spreading misinformation, let it be assumed that this is only a rumor until it’s otherwise confirmed; in the case that it’s true, however, it paints a very disquieting picture.
This previously missing piece of the puzzle was small, but significant nonetheless. It also prompted a conversation about the state of What Pumpkin’s relationship with us, and their attitude towards the HSD. It was clarified by various people that they don’t necessarily hate the server as a whole, and instead only hate Makin’s presence here (hardly surprising, unfortunately). Makin himself mentioned that the only one of WP that has a reason to dislike him anymore is Cohen.
This line of discussion petered out eventually, but not before a good round of joking centering around the concept of non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. There is an intense hatred of NDAs that abounds in our server because of their very nature: it shrouds things in secrecy that most would prefer to be in the open, a symbol of contractual power that complicates things beyond what should be necessary or morally supportable.
Many people belonging to WP have signed such documents, promoting much ire among us whenever we learn such is the case. It is fairly common for us, then, to trash such NDAs and turn their existence into as much of a joke as possible. I don’t recall the exact reason why it was said, but the last thing I want to comment on is another joke that’s repeated incommonly here: Tipsy made a pass at Makin based on his behavior, saying that he’s secretly an AI learning to interact with people, which is why he’s often so bad at doing so. I’m actually quite fond of this joke myself due to some parallels in the literature he likes to share with us.
Nothing more for today.
31st of March
There have been some more alarming developments regarding What Pumpkin. Tipsy wrote another post on the matter: the most radical of all the listed changes is Cohen changing his description on Twitter from "makes Hiveswap" to "made Hiveswap", the ramifications of which should be obvious. Additionally, sections of the What Pumpkin website have been scrubbed and the link to the WP merchandise section has been removed.
Tipsy summarizes all this succinctly: "It seems to me like Whatpumpkin is being stripped from their own website." There is significant cause for distress in these latest events, although no one is quite sure what to do about it at this point. I mentioned in a different entry that I worry about the future of Hiveswap: how will it turn out based on all these changes.
It seems Hiveswap: Act 2 will appear much the same as Act 1 did in tone and style, which is fine. Even if it’s not spectacular, the consistency is important. Where many people will become upset is if there is an incredible shift in the aesthetic or the way the game is played, fans will become despondent. Not to mention if the game is somehow canceled after all this time: nothing less than a riot would ensue.
In absence of and other concrete news, I will wait to describe the situation until more news is available or something significant occurs. The last I will say for now is that I hope the project itself and especially all the people involved with it—past or present—will be fine.
Honestly, I guess there isn’t much else to say for today. I feel like I should say something more: in a matter of hours I’ll be releasing the latest update to this document publically, and based on patterns in the past I’d say it’s become something of a tradition to write something optimistic or positive in the last entry before doing so.
I don’t think I’d pursue this if it felt wrong or inappropriate to do so at the time: I could be wrong, but in the past when a particularly heavy or disruptive event was taking place at the time of a release, I kept the tone of the release suitably somber. I’m not actually sure why I’m pointing this out except to call conscious attention to the fact that it is indeed something I do. I admit that this explanation is making me laugh even as I type it, but this sort of self-referential analysis is becoming a tad masturbatory so I think I’ll move on.
In the last entry on the 29th, I wrote a whole thing about the nature of the community in the grand scheme of things, specifically that it’s kind of small. I still maintain that this is true, the HSD is just a tiny and insignificant thing nestled away in a remote corner of the internet, and after so much time has passed it is a near 100% chance that no trace of us will remain and that we will have been completely forgotten.
This is not to say that it renders the HSD meaningless or unimportant, certainly not on a more personal scale. Some people have openly criticized this document as being inherently worthless or a waste of time. Even if I didn’t find this offensive, it’s simply untrue: the HSD is important, to the people who use it. Even more so for people like me, who might consider it their internet home so to speak.
Is that sort of behavior healthy? I’m not really sure. Probably not, but this is all I know for now. Last night I was writing down some thoughts about this place, deciding what it is I wanted to say based on what I said in the previous paragraph. What I settled on feels somewhat inadequate for what I would like to say, but it’s enough for my purposes: "I love this place". It’s of course important to remember not to take it so seriously all the time, but isn’t that true of everything, more or less?
It’s good to maintain a sense of perspective and remember when not to care too much, but there’s no harm in that affection otherwise. I care a lot for all the people that I see here on a regular basis, and seeing the HSD change as it has over the last year and a half is wonderful. Sometimes those changes are unpleasant, sometimes they’re enjoyable.
As turbulent as it may seem, this is just how life is: the more time that passes the more I’m convinced that this online habitat of ours is less a simple simulacrum and more a bona fide abode. We have our rough patches, and as it is in real life people will come and go, offenses will be had in abundance. This doesn’t need to be the only take away though: so too do we laugh and enjoy ourselves, and grow closer over time. It may seem weird to some, but in spite of the problems we have sometimes I’m genuinely glad this place and all the people in it exist.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
1 you are mistaken, this game is only for TRUE PROS...