Drew Linky
We had a conversation today about the nature of the fandom as it is now; this isn’t exactly rare, but today the conversation stuck out to me for a few reasons. As a point of reiteration, when we talk about “the fandom” it’s usually more in reference to the HSD than to the holistic fandom, including 4chan and Tumblr (what vestiges may be left in those places anyway). To our knowledge, we’re the only Homestuck community left of this size and/or activity, so it’s hard to gauge reactions from other communities that may still be out there.
At any rate, we were discussing what we think of the fandom in this era where Friendsim is the only regular content we receive. Griever spoke of the fact that we’re basically in an obscenely large gap between Hiveswap episodes, calling the default state of our existence “haitus culture on steroids.” Anyone familiar with the history of the fandom will understand the truth of this: we have grown increasingly bitter or jaded, and have started latching onto any scrap of news we can get our hands on.
In regards to the Friendsims, my understanding is that most people really don’t care about them--they have turned into a fairly pedestrian affair as time has gone by. However, Griever also pointed out that “... it at least recaptures like / the tiniest fraction of update culture / even if it evaporates in minutes”. If one takes a peek in #friendsim shortly after a new episode has released, they will see a torrent of people’s reactions to the content. This is indeed reminiscent of the fandom back when Homestuck was ongoing, but now it is a mere shadow of what we had before.
At one point in this conversation I made a comparison of my own. Update culture in antiquity was not unlike what made Twitch Plays Pokemon so entertaining: Homestuck itself was a manic thing when it was still updating regularly, though it was meted out over a great period of time. TPP by contrast was an incredible fever of excitement, if you weren’t paying attention for more than an hour it’s likely that you had missed out on something exciting.
Both Homestuck and TPP were events of unparalleled fan involvement and enthusiasm, both being great examples of lightning in a bottle. I often think that most of what we do is just waiting for the next internet phenomenon to capture that lightning. Griever pointed out that TPP is still so well remembered in general consciousness that references to it pervade every single episode of the currently ongoing Twitch marathon.
What’s so interesting about this is that, at this point, it’s been literally four and a half years since TPP’s initial run ended. Then one can look at the Homestuck fandom and see us, plodding along two years and then some since Homestuck ended. It’s been even longer than that since people ubiquitously considered the comic entertaining, and yet we continue mostly unabated.
At this point Andrew and Trickster chimed in with something I found amusing. Andrew commented, “... Homestuck isn’t what keeps us here, let’s be real.” Trickster responded, “it’s the sense of community most likely,” to which Andrew invoked a long-standing meme: “It’s literally the friendships we’ve made along the way.” Jokes aside, for most I’m sure this exchange is fairly unremarkable, but to me it was a perfect encapsulation of why this document exists.
Nothing more for today.
9th of October
The last week has been fairly unremarkable with few things of Big Importance or Interest occurring, if any. I was actually indisposed from real life events and unable to participate greatly for most of the time. One amusing thing took place yesterday: Makin brought up the idea of Boss’s Day, which takes place on the 16th of October.
Tera immediately took him up on this and started making an appropriate card; he laboriously made it clear that he was really joking and didn’t expect anyone to do this, but Tera is still going along with it for fun. The idea is entertaining enough that I’ll also participate for sure, and perhaps others will as well.
Aside from this, I noticed Nat getting increasingly rude with people again. There had been a number of complaints from people that she was being particularly mean-spirited in their interactions with her. This has been a problem in the past, although when confronted on the issue she seemed unwilling to talk about it--it’s unclear whether she just does it for fun (which is almost certainly true to an extent) or if she’s stressed out from real life events (also probably true). Attempts to talk with her ended in being excessively mocked.
Unfortunately, things came to a head today after I witnessed Nat calling Trickster worthless. She was digging into him extremely hard, saying that his contribution to any and all discussion are pointless and that he would be better off removed from the chat. I’ve gotten used to her diatribes against me personally, but going after other people just because she feels they’re stupid pushed past that limit of what I was able to tolerate.
I was so annoyed with her edginess that I brought it up in the mod chat, igniting a small discussion about effectively judging when someone is “being too much of an asshole”. WoC spoke in Nat’s defense, also pointing out that Trickster sometimes participates in ways that are almost criminally stupid. Tensei was also present, but most acted vaguely aloof about the entire situation while poking fun when he could.
Makin eventually came in, and after taking all of three seconds to figure out what was going on he naturally started mocking us, and especially me for “not getting along with the children.” However, after Nat made some more characteristically inflammatory remarks, Makin swiftly changed his tune: “okay / that was edgy / I side with drew now.” It was a meme, but progress is progress I suppose.
The joking continued for a little while, but eventually he did make it clear that he wants Nat (and to some extent WoC) to stop being edgy about other people in the chat. He went so far as to lampoon himself over it: “we already have me to deal with / I don't want another person antagonizing everything / I'll just replace you if you cause more problems than you solve.” He then made a limp threat about “another reckoning” sometime soon which no one really took seriously, but nonetheless wrapped up the conversation well enough.
After the discussion in mod chat, things did in fact proceed more amiably in mspa-lit. Tera brought up naturopathy, which provided ample conversation for a while. It’s worth noting that I’m fiercely against any sort of pseudoscience or alternative medicine. However, Tera mentioned that the treatment plan typically involves massages. Tensei, ever the hedonist, said that he would have no qualms subscribing to it if it meant he could get massages out of the deal.
Makin naturally came in after a while and joined me in my crusade against naturopathy. Tmtm mentioned that he expected Makin to shove the conversation into #general, to which he replied: “I'm sorry tm this is SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY defeating dumb shit / it belongs here.” It was not unlike uniting against a common enemy: when we’re not bickering with each other, things can be great fun here. Or perhaps it’s just that I hate it when I’m the one getting ganged up on.
That having been said, the problem from earlier in the day returned not long after. Nat and WoC were both posting with such misguided aggression and rudeness that it kind of spoiled things for everyone else. They were just toeing the line that it would have been inappropriate to chastise them for it, but I was so peeved that I just decided to stop talking in the chat for the rest of the evening. If this continues then something serious will probably need to be done to get them to stop.
Nothing more for today.
10th of October
Nights has been consistently ramping up production of Oceanfalls over the last month or so. He’s been pointing out when his comic gets threads on /co/--an increasingly common event--and is extremely excited about the fact that random people are talking about his work. For him, this is certainly good motivation to continue making Oceanfalls, and it’s nice to see his efforts being rewarded this way.
This lead to a conversation today where Makin spoke very frankly about fanventures and webcomics in general, to the negative. He posited that Night would probably not complete the comic: “I expect oceanfalls to fail because even hussie abandoned jailbreak / and adventures have a really really bad record / it's statistics.” Nights was pretty confused as to why he brought this up, which served as the primary conflict of the evening.
In situations like this it’s usually a kind of pointless tug-of-war between the two people talking, because it is a battle of ideology with no substance underlying it. However, in this case 1011686 has collected evidence about this very topic. They’ve compiled an enormous amount of data on fanventures and is essentially the resident expert on the topic.
Thus, 1011686 lent their opinion on the matter: “well saying you expect an adventure to fail because most of them fail is actually an accurate statement / although you would be expecting every adventure to fail in that case with no exceptions,” to which Makin responded: “I kind of am / nights just thinks I have something [against his] baby in particular / ... / what you call biased for failure or whatever / is just a premortem analysis.” This did little to mollify Nights, as one might expect; if anything this only made him more frustrated on the matter.
That having been said, after seeing this happen before it wouldn’t surprise me if Makin is actually trying to provoke Nights a little. He’s not trying to spark hostility, which would be completely stupid, but rather I think he’s trying to induce a sense of stubbornness and determination so he’ll actually go on to finish the comic. Makin has openly used spite and annoyance to motivate people before, so it would be perfectly in keeping for him to employ the tactic here as well. Whether or not it will work in this case is something only time will tell us.
Aside from Makin’s pessimistic prediction, Oceanfalls is actually quite successful so far. The threads on /co/ are perhaps an indication of their overall popularity; if even a reclusive and generally hostile environment has people talking about your content, then you might be doing something right. More relevant to us is the webcomic’s position on MSPFA, which at the time of writing sits at the seventh most favorited fanventure on the entire website.
Nights has expressed some annoyance that his fanventure is behind a few others that are, in his opinion, extremely inactive. I’ll avoid quoting him or naming the ones he was thinking of to avoid drawing flak his way, but after some reflection I actually agree: it feels like at least some of the fanventures that are most liked have actually fallen by the wayside, being updated very infrequently if ever. With the way the system works there isn’t any ranking decay where a story falls in rankings or relevance over time; besides people manually unfavoriting, which hardly ever happens, any given fanventure could remain up potentially forever, far past the point that anyone actually cares about them.
Nights is of course extremely happy about where he is now, but wants to keep doing better and reach the top someday. However, while his aspirations are strong, he is also fearful of what may happen if he achieves her goal: “i am scared of the threads soemtimes / its very ambigious i like being out there but also sometimes its uncomfortable run of the mill 4han stuff / … / its like being noticed by someone you admired for a whilr but then you find out that they like to occasionally set thigs on fire.” He likes the attention of course, but he recognizes that it can also be dangerous.
Bam brought up a fitting example that is definitely in line with the emerging threads: Oceanfalls porn. Nights is very heavily against lewd material of most kinds, and the idea of his art and concepts being used in such a way makes him extremely uncomfortable. We haven’t played witness to every single thread to come through, but thankfully it seems as if this hasn’t happened yet. That having been said, with the internet it’s just a matter of time before rule 34 kicks in.
Nothing more for today.
14th of October
Today there was a rather silly altercation between Gitaxian and Revlar: they started discussing incel culture and how to address or stop it. The discourse started simply enough, but somehow ended up consuming the chat for four hours, if not more. If this wasn’t frustrating enough, it was realized quickly enough by almost everyone present that they were actually arguing in favor of the same position, and just differing on the wording.
As soon as we understood what was happening the amusement quickly turned to frustration, a pattern that displayed itself numerous times over the course of the evening. At a certain point the focus of the conversation shifted such that Revlar was attempting to convince Gitaxian that the latter had been flip-flopping on his stance throughout the discussion. The wording of this accusation grew kind of vicious--it seemed to many that Revlar was gaslighting Gitaxian about what his own position was, which offended us greatly.
Thankfully before this could get out of hand in that sense, it simply got out of hand in a less stressful capacity: eventually they resorted to a hypothetical, centering around a figure they named Pablo. The conversation instantly became much sillier, addressing how Pablo might feel in the case of being an incel and approached with certain arguments.
This was far more entertaining to everyone present, and the peanut gallery grew so fervent that the very name of the channel was changed to #mspa-pablit. I missed this entire affair unfortunately, but the impact of it was felt far and wide; many people even changed their name to some variation involving Pablo, which is pretty rare occurrence. It’s not unthinkable that the Pablo meme will persist for some time after this.
At some point there was a problem where fetish discussion broke out which was extremely denigrating towards furries, which is pretty typical for mspa-lit. Tera quickly grew upset at the insults being bandied about and mandated that all subsequent reference to the topic would merit a ban. Revlar was in the middle of typing out a comment when Tera sent the warning out, and when he posted his message he was banned as warned.
I gave Tera some praise for holding to its threat, but Revlar quickly messaged me with thorough indignance, saying he would leave the server if he wasn’t immediately unbanned. The tone that he approached me with put me off rather badly, which I didn’t hesitate to tell him. I was afraid that it would escalate from there but we both managed to calm down. I talked him down from leaving while trying to explain why his initial response was inappropriate, and I think there was some success in the reconciliation.
He apologized for his actions, which was greatly heartening to me, and as was appropriate I conveyed that Tera should unban him. I hope in the future he won’t be so quick to anger when something trivial like this happens. Still, the overall tone of the conversation gives me some pause; I know Revlar can be perfectly reasonable when he’s in a good mood, but sometimes it feels like I must walk on eggshells to keep his good mood intact. I really do hope that any further conflicts with him will be minor, if they exist at all.
Nothing more for today.
15th of October
There was another silly mess I wasn’t around for, unfortunately. Discord recently released a new “slow mode” feature that forces people to send messages only so often, one message every x seconds depending on what channel operators deem wise. Makin turned this on as a test and forgot about it, going to bed and leaving it on all night. Naturally there was some confusion, but when people realized what was going on they immediately began trying to break it.
This led to some amazing displays of munchkinry: the entire channel was laid to waste and turned into an altgen clone as people messed with the system. The specific example given to me after the fact was Skyplayer, wherein she started posting pictures of some commentary from the latest Homestuck book that inflamed a historically contentious topic. The results were about what one might expect.
As an exceedingly brief explanation, the characters in Homestuck are “related” through strange narrative machinations, but are not actually related in any conventional sense. This is briefly teased in the comic itself where the characters flirt with each other before realizing it could be construed as incestuous. As with any social topic like this, there is fierce debate in the fandom over whether or not such a romance would be illicit.
This all having been said, the commentary recently released put that debate to rest in a very blunt manner. It simply says that “something happened between them”, although it is ambiguous on what that something might be or whether or not the statement itself is a joke. Returning to the evening at hand, Skyplayer was essentially posting that piece of commentary over and over again, effectively mocking those on both sides of the issue.
Predictably the channel was thrown into total chaos, remaining that way until Makin returned later and undid slow mode. Nights later confirmed--quietly--that the related Tumblr tag for the ship in question had positively exploded a few days ago because of the very commentary Sky had been spamming. It’s a little surprising that the news took so long to reach us, although it was bound to happen sooner or later.
In a perverse sense, I’m actually amused greatly by this development. While our group may be relatively active, the fandom at large has had basically no cause for controversy or furious discussion in a very long time. Seeing the brief burst in activity was something like watching a dormant volcano tremble ever so slightly. The fact that it all happened because of this particular topic only served to make the drama that much more entertaining, although I’m sure many would openly disagree with that.
Nothing more for today.
16th of October
Not a lot to speak of today, but something really nice to note: we did end up going through with the Boss’s Day celebration to some extent. A fair few people in the modchat made mock cards for Makin, some with more effort than others but all entertaining, to show their “appreciation” for his lordship over us all. Makin got a kick out of the different cards he received, and those of us who participated had a pretty good time as well. It was otherwise a pretty unremarkable day, but it was very nice to share in some lightheartedness together.
Nothing more for today.
18th of October
In contrast to the last entry, the only thing worth describing today was a fight with Revlar that ended disastrously. The incident involving Revlar from the 14th was mockingly brought up; WoC and Tera were--to my perception--lightly making fun of him of for the way he had responded, although not mentioning him by name. I joined in on the fun, defending Revlar against their mockery and lightly drubbing him when I thought it was fine, but when Revlar started participating in the conversation his responses were filled with rage.
I don’t think any of us really understood it immediately when he joined the conversation, but he was unutterably pissed off that we had started speaking about him in such vague terms. I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened, and I can’t tell if he misunderstood what we were trying to do or if he did understand and he had a fundamental problem with the concept. Whichever was the case, he became so angry that I was genuinely afraid of him in some capacity; I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation like it on Discord before.
After some back and forth, naturally he left the server. He made a comment near the very end saying that he knew coming back was a bad idea, that he knew it was just going to be a huge waste of time. I’m not sure how much of it was genuine and how much of it was just the anger talking. I was also upset and angry, but after cooling off I started to think about where the fault really lay for all of it.
This is one of the many times where I don’t really trust myself to say with certainty who’s at fault. My tendency is to try and see the interplay, where usually both people involved in a fight are at fault for various reasons (depending on how utilitarian or humanitarian you are). I also wanted to extend that idea here, where I was at fault for teasing Revlar but can’t help feeling that his response was disproportionate. A few others I asked in confidence agreed with that idea, but I still don’t feel comfortable saying in a final way, “This is where the blame lies.” It feels kind of disrespectful in a way.
The important thing from today is that I don’t think Revlar is going to come back, probably ever. Many of us said that last time and he did eventually, which suggests that time really does heal all wounds. Somehow it feels different now, and all I know for sure is that I regret that things have gone in this direction.
There are some other things that are ruined by Revlar leaving. He was the GM for a tabletop game that myself, Gnawms, Tmtml, Niklink, and Barry were all participating in which will almost certainly die now, and he was no doubt involved in variety of other things. Yet, all of that is kind of secondary to the idea that upsets me the most about this encounter: he felt so upset at what was happening that he no longer felt like he could stay.
At that point it becomes a question of, “Is that perception reasonable?” and this is one of the occasions where I can’t think of any answer. Nothing more for today.
21st of October
Today we discussed some threads about Homestuck on 4chan where the HSD was specifically brought up. Since mid 2016, Homestuck threads on any of 4chan’s boards are usually cut short, presumably because of some sort of janitorial bias against them. Today though, one thread in particular managed to achieve a far longer duration than normal. It was at the very tail end of this thread in which the HSD and some people on it were brought up by name.
Discussion of the thread in question was kind of vague and short-lived whenever it came up, which was weird to me. It got posted in a few related servers and in a couple channels on the HSD itself, but no one was talking about it at great length. Tensei pointedly brought it up to me during the day and I took a look through it myself; the references to the HSD and a few mods were mostly amusing, at least at first.
One poster ended up making some really disturbing claims: they were allegations that a member of the mod staff (who will purposefully remain unnamed to avoid wrongful witch hunting) was engaging in “recruiting teens and kids into some kind of pedophilia ring”. Naturally this was extremely alarming, and led to a couple tense reactions: I reviewed the thread entirely to try and get more information, eventually concluding that the poster in question was grossly misinformed or purposefully trying to slander the mod in question.
At one point I posited that it’s kind of pointless to take anything on 4chan seriously. Tensei instead claimed: “just because its 4chan thats saying that your house is smoking doesnt mean that its not on fire”. This was ominous to me, but I can’t help feeling that it’s silly to view information shared on 4chan with anything other than enormous skepticism--there are too many idiots masquerading as people who have all the facts, or even intentionally trying to stir trouble, to accept any of it as truthful.
Makin later came on and read the thread, at which point he demanded some sort of explanation from the mod being foulmouthed. Upon clarification from them and clarification from others of us, Makin agreed that it was most likely someone trying to stir trouble. More than likely it was recursiveSlacker seeking retaliation after their latest attempts at infiltrating the server were thwarted.
This of course segued into further conversation of what exactly recursiveSlacker has been doing. The answer is that they’ve been systematically trying to get Discord to revoke the server’s partnership status. Occasionally users will inform us that recursiveSlacker is still active on some splinter server somewhere, generally trying to stir trouble and slander the HSD or its mods in any way they possibly can.
It’s great that we don’t have to personally deal with such nonsense anymore, but these other places do now. The odious user is still in Smolmuffin’s Oven for instance, where they’ve apparently been insufferable over the topic. The Oven has collectively tired of their behavior and it recently culminated in recursiveSlacker being punished there, too. It would be better to remove the person entirely, because every minute they’re allowed to remain is another minute where innocent bystanders risk being swept up for some batshit revenge scheme, or simply to bend their ears for a while.
So that not all of this entry is awful, it would do to briefly describe a note I made about a regular here: Putnam seems to be attaining awareness of his posting habits. He’s likely been aware of them for a long time now, but this is the first I’ve personally seen him talking about it in a meta sense. Occasionally Putnam will suddenly post something completely unrelated, and all conversation will halt for a second while people are unsure of how to respond.
After some seconds of this they will either hesitatingly respond to him or move on with their original topic). Putnam openly mentioned this fact after doing so today, although it didn’t change much: he simply waited a while and then posted again, waiting for someone (who eventually was me) to bite. I guess old habits do in fact die hard.
Nothing more for today.
22nd of October
I mentioned that Makin casually threatened another Reckoning the other night due to generally angsty behavior, but he also mentioned that the demographics of the server have changed so much that it might be prudent to do one anyway. The conversations in mspa-lit tonight demonstrated just how true that is: the names involved in any given discussion now are really different from how this place looked even just one year ago--it’s given the entire channel a weird shift in tone and appearance.
There are of course an assortment of completely new names, including La vie est drôle (or just vie for short), Frumple, Vitis, and Potato, among others, all of whom are completely distinguishable from people who came before. These people are not the only users who show up though: the chat is still replete with older regulars. Their presence is not necessarily a constant, but there are long streaks where people like deadGuy, Tripheus, Soup_Main, SolarSail, and hb will pop up, as well as a large variety of others.
All of this is to say that mspa-lit, and indeed the HSD as a whole, is currently in some sort of strange transitory period where the culture isn’t anything like what it used to be, but it’s also not quite something solid or identifiable right now. #general was going through the same transition recently, but it has lately started to emerge with a distinct culture--it’s now largely what it used to be before #hangout was established.
From this, it can be said that the #hangout merger is more or less complete. This is further evidenced by the fact that many socially oriented topics are being openly discussed in #general regularly now: people will share selfies of themselves or pictures of their pets or places they’re going, which is the single biggest point in favor of the idea that the cultures have finally come together.
By far the most favorable thing about this outcome is the increase in #general activity; the statistics demonstrate that the activity of the now singular #general is far greater than #general and #hangout were even in tandem. Consequently, as I had argued would happen when #hangout was first deleted, this has also led to a sustained increase in users staying after they have joined. I won’t explain the hard numbers to any real effect; the important thing is that the rate of retention is massively increased, which suggests that the feedback loop I had hoped for is in place. How long it can be sustained remains to be seen, but this brings me great optimism for the future of the community.
User5 is conducting a Monsters vs Bastards competition: it consists entirely of having people vote against two different drawn pictures in a tournament style contest, and when he announced it it brought a small buzz: the distinction between monsters and bastards still isn’t really clear to us, although it probably has to do with whether or not the subject is an animal or creature. If it is then it’s probably a monster, but if it’s a human then it’s probably a bastard. We’re still not sure to be honest.
User5’s continued presence is something of a surprise, but also pleasing. At one point he made a comment about the fact that he’s still talking here: “i came here to troll u not become one of u,” which was extremely amusing to hear. The statement actually reminded me faintly of the original magic that I became fascinated with in this server, and especially mspa-lit: there seems to be a distinct capacity to convert people into regulars even if they weren’t terribly interested in participating at first.
People do of course leave on occasion, but as I pointed out earlier in this entry there always seems to be new people to talk to and discuss things with. The community has some sort of magnetic property to it that draws people in; this isn’t true for some of course, but the idea generally holds up. Explaining why this is the case is beyond me, hence why I call it magic--explaining all of the precise factors that make this place the way it is would probably take up a document that’s over 500 pages long and counting.
Later in the evening, Gitaxian started spamming the channel with a metric shit ton of conspiracy theory and “alternative science” infographics. This mostly concerned inane ideas like flat earth, alt-right Pizzagate-centric stuff, and the like. Gitaxian did this after discovering a twitter page dedicated to the stuff apparently. It’s horrifying to realize that people who believe in such things exist right alongside everyone else, but the chat got a lot of amusement out of the ordeal. However, Git was providing links for more than an hour, after which point it got really old and I had to ask him to stop. Thankfully Git is pretty reasonable, and he ceased without throwing a fit.
The last noteworthy event of the day was Makin restoring the name of the channel: it was #mspa-lit-returns at first, and then afterwards simply #mspa-lit. This probably won’t last (I suspect it’s to celebrate 10/25 and will become #read-shills again afterwards), but for now it is a sight for sore eyes. The restoration came with a bevy of joy from older regulars like Toast and Gitaxian. Obviously I’m quite happy about the development because it makes this record a little less confusing. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of October
There was a flare up with Putnam last night: he was talking about personal concerns he has regarding his hometown and how it treats LGBT individuals, which itself followed a similar discussion about the Trump administration’s policy regarding sex and gender. As he is wont to do, Putnam discussed or ranted about this for an extended period of time, immensely concerned because the newfound policy will directly affect him.
Unfortunately, Putnam also indulged his tendency to rant about the topic long after its expiration date. Nights and Toast both gave him warnings to stop talking about it, and after he continued to do so he was channel banned by Toast. A couple hours later, he mentioned that circumstances conspired such that he was no longer as agitated about the topic, and wouldn’t talk about it anymore. Thus I took pity on him and unbanned him from mspa-lit.
Nights and Toast criticized this decision, saying it encouraged Putnam to talk more about this stuff and that it undercut their authority. We hashed this out a little bit, and in their defense I kind of ignored their complaints because I just wasn’t interested in dealing with the issue. Tensei came on a little bit later and injected some extremely obvious bait where he asked Putnam what happened to get him to talk about it more. Gnawms chimed in with a meme answer for what was going on, Putnam responded in detail both to refute Gnawms and answer Tensei’s question, and then Putnam was promptly rebanned for it.
Immense confusion followed as a lot of mod drama got dragged out into the open. People such as Tera and Tipsy, as well as a number of others who wish to remain unnamed, were immensely uncomfortable about Putnam being banned. They weren’t sure why he was banned: the original topic was only banworthy because he was talking about it ad nauseum, but Tensei had specifically asked him a question about it and it was weird to forbid him from answering; further, they wondered why no punitive action had been taken against Tensei and Gnawms for stoking the altercation.
I was also immensely confused about this, and was myself upset about the fact that Putnam had been rebanned. At this point it was exceedingly late in the evening, 3 AM EST or so, and it was getting progressively harder to tie things together logically. I discussed the matter briefly with Toast and he suggested we ban Tensei for egregiously baiting Putnam over something we had just established was causing problematic discussions.
I had been yelling about the proceedings in modchat for a good hour at this point and didn’t want to deal with it for too much longer. After mulling over our conversation for a bit, I agreed that it was the right thing to do. Even though there was no way to really enforce it because Tensei could just remove the ban, the symbolic gesture seemed appropriate punishment for unambiguously breaking server rules. I applied the ban and then promptly went to sleep, resolving to deal with the fallout from the decision in the morning.
Predictably, I woke up to an extremely large can of worms. Tensei was bewildered at my decision precisely because it had no punitive weight, and he suggested that it had actually made things worse because of the way the hierarchy of our mod team works. We then had a lengthy conversation where he explained that principle to me: it’s nonsensical for one full mod to ban another because we’re on a level playing field.
I stipulated that it wasn’t really a matter of authority over each other, but rather that he had simply broken a rule that was well-established and no one should be above the rules. His rebuttal was that, in his point of view, he hadn’t broken any such rule, so which of us two mods is to be believed about what was the right course of action?
In my defense, rules aren’t just a matter of what a mod happens to believe is right at any given time. When I say that Tensei had broken a well-established rule, I mean that there have been a multitude of cases in the past where we banned someone for doing the exact same thing he had done: excessively baiting someone over a stupid topic and/or something that is known to set them off without fail has been a bannable offense for literal years at this point.
What’s more, the precedent already exists with Putnam specifically that baiting him over things is a terrible idea because he will take it without fail; he’s practically incapable of resisting bait unless it’s clear beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s actually a joke, at which point it’s not even really bait. This is exemplified by the alcohol conversations, so why would it suddenly be okay to do it about something else?
Yet, Tensei’s point kind of superseded these problems. At the heart of the matter is that we can’t have mod infighting, and there’s actually precedent against this as well: on the 31st of July this year, there was a conversation in the modchat where Toast thought pseudo-mods should be allowed to ban each other. That conversation was somewhat more complicated because pseudos have more power than each other based on where a given altercation happens, but it was also agreed then that the hierarchy of power should never be outright violated.
Thus, I had to agree that Tensei was correct. I retracted my argument that he should be banned for the bait even though I still believe what he was doing was wrong. He was gracefully receptive of that criticism, honestly. It’s actually not the first time that he’s stopped doing something simply because I expressed that it was inappropriate; he has completely stopped teasing Putnam about alcohol ever since I asked him not to.
Among us, we reiterated that as a general order for all mods we need to resolve internal disputes in the modchat only, and stop dragging things out in the open. Pseudos and mods all need to remain on an equal playing field respectively; taking unilateral action against each other is unacceptable. Hopefully a situation like this does not happen again, at least not for a long time.
Aside from this internal drama, there were actually a few fandom developments today. First was that Feferi, the Tumblr blogger who won the What Pumpkin comic contest so long ago, was apparently given an NDA. Ironically, she may have broken this NDA immediately after signing it by saying she’s under a contract in the first place (we’re not really sure, it depends on the content of the NDA really. The post in question may have been taken down, which is certainly evidence in favor of the idea).
This suggests that something is happening. The initial post from WP clearly said that the winner would have a fan character put into Hiveswap, although recent developments have made it clear that Hiveswap is not happening for quite some time. Some of us think that the fan character is now just going to be put into a Friendsim instead, but honestly have no real idea what’s going to happen.
The NDA certainly doesn’t help this confusion. The fandom as a whole is not fond of NDAs--and we especially are not fond of them--due to old events from the time of the Kickstarter for Hiveswap. The general perception is that, instead of simply explaining things to us, What Pumpkin or whoever makes these decisions prefers to keep information locked away. It’s understandable in certain cases, but the tactic feels overused and has led to a significant distrust of the practice. Makin has gone so far as to call them “evil”, a sentiment echoed by many of us.
Regardless, there’s little else to be gleaned from that just yet. Instead, there was some disruption concerning news about the future Homestuck books. In order for this to make sense for anyone not intimately involved, I’m going to have to explain the narrative structure of Homestuck a bit. Hopefully it won’t be confusing or overly indulgent.
Homestuck is principally split up into seven primary acts, the first four of which are undivided units. This is completely fine, but after that it rapidly deteriorates. Act 5 for instance is split into two parts: Act 5 Act 1, and Act 5 Act 2. This is due both to length and because there’s a huge narrative shift in the middle of the story that justifies it. Act 6 is the true monster of this system, being broken up into an absolutely mind boggling collection of act acts and even act act acts.
To anyone who hasn’t read the comic--and to most people who actually have--it is an incomprehensible mess and the narrative structure actually kind of stops mattering after a while. The point of this explanation is mostly to indicate that organizing the physical books is no doubt a Herculean task; most of us have understood for a long time that it was never going to be as easy as putting one act per book.
With this being said, the advertisements for the next couple of books went up today, but we became a little bit dispirited: Act 5 Act 1 will of course be its own book, but it looks like Act 5 Act 2 is going to be chopped up even further, with the fifth book of the rerelease being entitled, “Act 5 Act 2 Part 1”. At a minimum it looks like Act 5 is going to be three books long, further subdividing an already overwhelmingly modulated story.
A much more entertaining bit of news is that For Fans By Fans announced a few new shirt designs. This would be otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that one of the shirts is a quality rendition of the community meme “Eridab”, drawn by our very own user Sparky. The meme is simple: it involves one of the characters from the comic, named Eridan, performing the related pose. It is exceedingly silly to us that the meme made it in as a shirt design, and we had no other choice but to celebrate wildly by spamming the emote for a while. It is a great day for #altgen, and therefore the world.
Later in the day, however, another negative development struck: Putnam decided to leave over the recent confrontation where he was banned from mspa-lit. He stated: “this is the third time people have been totally incompetent over almost this exact thing / and thus i am out”. If this were one year ago I would be trying my hardest to bridge whatever gap in communication is going on here and to help people resolve the conflict. However, I’ve already embarrassed/exhausted myself once today, and am way too tired to reach out and try to help again.
There’s a good chance that I would actually make things worse anyway, given how distracted I am right now. Putnam leaving is a huge disappointment as always, but this has happened so many times before now that I’m actually struggling to get really upset about it. If nothing else, I’ll probably ask about it at some later date. Hopefully this can be resolved peacefully once everyone’s moved on from the upset a little bit.
I really need to reassess how I approach these things anyway (how many times have I said that in this document?), and make sure I can handle my responsibilities here. In my defense I’ve been getting progressively distracted by real life responsibilities, and ancillary tasks or hobbies. It may actually be worth mentioning one such hobby here.
Recently I began streaming casually again, doing a wide variety of content. This was spurred somewhat by getting Twitch Affiliated, which allowed me to install a custom emote and make things just a little bit more exciting for people. Sometimes there’ll be a decent viewership based on what exactly I’m streaming, up to fifteen people at the most, but when I’m streaming something less exciting or just for fun, it will usually come down to three people: Andrew, Qweq, and Tera.
So prevalent is their participation even when I’m just doddering along that it has become another group akin to what Putnam, Tera, and myself all had with streaming TV shows. It’s strange how these things can arise spontaneously out of a general activity, but the four of us have become comfortable with it; our enjoyment of participating together in this way is so great that we’ve dubbed it the Cozy Chat.
This having been said, streaming games seems to take up all of my spare time and reduce my ability to pay attention in the HSD proper. I’ve noticed myself drifting away from key issues and not focusing as much, which leads to altercations like today. Thus I’m going to try and get finished with all existing games or projects I want to complete, so that I can redouble my focus on the HSD and avoid causing any other serious problems.
Nothing more for today.
25th of October
Today is the second anniversary of my joining the HSD. I took a moment to look back at my first messages in the server. This was back when we still had a bot welcoming newcomers, so 72 bot announced my arrival and all that. I thanked it and then immediately dived in to the conversation taking place at the time. It’s weird to think that was two years ago now--the server looks so much different from how it was back then.
More importantly, today is 10/25! This is probably the second-most celebrated of the meme date holidays for the fandom, behind only 4/13. We commemorated the occasion with a community stream as is tradition. To celebrate his status as a running gag in Homestuck, Makin settled on a Nicolas Cage theme: on the list for tonight was The Rock, National Treasure, and Ghost Rider.
The stream was less active than we might have expected, lately they’ve been getting between 150-200 people, but this time we had around 100. We didn’t advertise this stream very much so I guess this is more or less to be expected. This is not to say that it wasn’t a delightful time, though; 100 people is still an enormous number for a community stream, and it was suitably entertaining occasion.
Outside of the stream, there were some rather interesting posts on the subreddit: user /r/spankety has compiled a massive archive of fandom audio, including original music, voice work, and other assorted projects. Called the “Lotus Time Capsule”, it includes work from the entire range of the fandom’s history, with whatever spankety could get their hands on really. Of note, Tindeck apparently announced that they will cease operations soon, so spankety personally ripped all of the Homestuck-centric audio off of that website for inclusion in the archive.
Another interesting project is from Youtuber The RPG Monger, who created a daunting 40 minute video explaining the early history of the fandom. This is an excellent exploration of the story and fans, and how each affected each other as time went by. For anyone reading this who may be curious about older things, I highly recommend checking it out. The running time is intimidating but it is definitely informative.
Both of these works bring me great joy--I’ve become increasingly worried about data archival as time goes by (why read this stuffy document when you could go experience the works themselves instead?). Seeing more efforts to keep things preserved against the passage of time is wonderful, the effort is invaluable for keeping our history intact. I’ve included direct links to each of these works in the Related Materials, under Lotus Time Capsule and The Complicated Story of the Homestuck Fandom.
Despite these incredible fanworks, there has unfortunately been no official information of any sort all day. While most of us didn’t really expect anything, it’s still disappointing: for some it’s yet another nail in the fandom’s already well-sealed coffin. Yet, between the fandom holiday and my anniversary here, today has been quite pleasant. Indeed, everyone is in a rather jovial mood from the stream.
We’ve only recently lost some people that were very near to the mspa-lit community, but today has successfully kept the darker mood at bay. There’ll be time to lament such negative developments another day. For now, it’s enough for the rest of us that we’re all here and willing to enjoy a nice time together. This year’s 10/25 has served to deliver a refreshing atmosphere and almost everyone is reveling together; I hope that everyone here will enjoy themselves for a long while yet.
Nothing more for today.
27th of October
I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the rate of people joining, even accounting for #general’s greater level of activity. Makin recently mentioned permanently purchasing ad space on MSPFA, and at his bequest (and also because I was already curious) I’ve started keeping track of usercounts each day. October will probably see an appreciable increase in user gain if this trend continues--it’s already rivaling pre-#hangout levels, so the end result may turn out to be pretty exciting.
The number of posts has also been going up. It resembles months like April or May, where the rate of posting is invariably higher than later in the year. My attempts at record keeping are already showing some trends of user behavior and participation--it’s exciting what kind of information statistics can reveal to us!
There was a noticeable event today where Makin experimented with a new channel configuration. Within a test channel he made it so that all users--not just mods--can edit messages, including pinning and deleting. Within just a few minutes of its creation, the new channel erupted into complete chaos as people were editing each other and mods with reckless abandon.
It didn’t last terribly long, honestly: Makin shut down the channel just a scant few hours after opening it. I’m not sure what he got out of it, but a little bit of discussion suggests that it might be useful in a future April Fool’s Day, or on special occasions for fun. Come to think of it, I have no idea what we could possibly do for April Fool’s next year. We might want to start planning ahead of time if we want to get something truly amusing together.
Later in the evening, altgen started getting riled up about something that I wasn’t actually present for, so I can’t comment on whatever it may have been. As soon as it was over though, I committed altgen to its weekly sacrifice as is now usual. The energy from the original event carried over and made it one of the most animate sacrifices we’ve had yet. What’s more, the energy didn’t dissipate once the sacrifice was done--it only seemed to increase in intensity.
People started joining the voicechat en masse and actually coordinating with each other on what to spam the channel with. For half an hour they went through various iterations of things to say. Even Makin got involved at some point, joining the voice channel and spamming Bowman’s Credit Score, and then later the thoroughly-hated fandom song Karkalicious.
As a brief aside: this song, released in 2011, has become widely reviled as a cringey but immortal contribution to the fandom’s collective history. There are few people that are fans of Homestuck who have not also heard of Karkalicious, which is both entertaining and very unfortunate. It’s sometimes used in a way that’s reminiscent of Rickrolling people: one may trick another into clicking on a link, thinking it’s for something else, and then they are greeted with this highly embarrassing fan video from 2011. The harmless prank has fallen out of favor in recent years, but it still rears its magnificent, ugly head every so often.
Returning to the topic at hand, chat spam rotated through various messages, including an spamming the shills list and even this document itself as an homage to Makin and myself respectively. There were of course a large assortment of other altgen-centric spammings, including “Bread” (I honestly have no idea how or why that one started), and it was only after about half an hour that the spam began to die away.
By the time they stopped, #altgen had managed to accrue a staggering 13,000 messages for the day, half of which were accounted for in the last 30 minutes alone. The experience was a whirlwind, reminding me greatly of older #altgen when the Purge still happened with some regularity. For obvious reasons this sort of spam is unsustainable, but I wonder if it might happen again sometime in the future.
Nothing more for today.
28th of October
At some point today I was informed that there actually WAS some kind of information on 10/25, specifically a tweet of Hussie wearing anime shades that was posted on James Roach’s Twitter account. I initially dismissed this because it was clearly silly, but a follow up from James himself also shows Andrew Hussie on Discord saying: “this is explicit acknowledgement of the epilogue’s existence”. It’s not much, but it’s definitely more than nothing.
A far more bizarre Twitter occurrence happened yesterday, where Hussie commented on the Twitter of a prolific rapper named Lil B, who had inadvertently shared a Hiveswap-centric picture. The picture features one of the more intimidating characters from the Hiveswap Troll Call, and says: “THANK YOU BASEDGOD! TYBG! TYBG! BASEDGOD FUCK MY BITCH!!!” Hussie responded: “thank you based god, i knew i could count on you.” There is literally nothing meaningful I could add to this sequence of interactions, so I’m going to move on.
On the server itself, there have been increasing problems with Biscuit. Lately he’s been consciously acting like a class clown, so that people would have a figure to point and laugh at. This was harmless, if annoying, but it’s been going on for a while already. I tried talking to him about it last week and thought I had helped him to understand that he shouldn’t do such things, but all of it was for nothing after today.
Biscuit started or inspired a raid on the Undertale Discord, which itself was almost completely unaffected; the raid was dissipated within seconds because they’re used to such shenanigans and have a bot function that minimizes the impact as much as possible. Everyone actually did manage to get some amusement out of how laughably ineffectual the raid was, and to prolong the inevitable I actually took part in poking fun at Biscuit for the affair.
However, one of the most serious rules on the entire server is not to start raids on other places. The outcome of his actions tonight were unambiguous. I shouldn’t have participated in making fun of him because I think it confused him; he didn’t believe me when I said I was going to have to ban him, probably just taking it as another joke at his expense.
He quickly changed his tune when I actually went through with banning him. There were immediately pleas to be let back on the server, all of which were very tiring to hear. Eventually Bisc, knowingly or not, began using some manipulative statements to sway me. This heightened my annoyance to extreme levels and I cut the conversation off immediately.
Biscuit was probably not actually trying to manipulate me or anything, he just comes across as kind of a dumb kid than anyone malevolent. However, I’ve only recently been burned by recursiveSlacker’s actions which fall in a similar vein. For the next few days, there’s no way I’m sticking my neck out to let Biscuit back on.
Even as I write that, though, I know it’s not really true. Banning people isn’t really a tool meant to just waste people who are ignorant or don’t know better, it’s for getting rid of actively malicious entities that can’t be reasoned with. Biscuit has shown in the past that he’s willing to listen to explanations of why he’s in the wrong, so I imagine that this topic will come up again in the near future.
I’ve told him to try talking with the other mods, but the result will most likely be the same either way. Even if he never comes back, hopefully he learns from this not to act like such a fool just to get other people to notice him. Last I heard he was on User5’s server, and if my interactions with him are any indication then they’ll knock the verbal shit out of him really quickly.
Nothing more for today.
29th of October
Tori got in trouble for shilling her new personal server today. The last one, quietly referred to only as “Walmart”, effectively died some time ago. She became upset at being confronted about it, berating herself briefly. I made an ill-advised attempt to fix things by listening to her describe what her new server is about, but it didn’t really help; she left the server soon afterwards.
I’m growing increasingly frustrated at this trend. In the last two weeks alone we’ve lost four established mspa-lit regulars: Revlar, Putnam, Biscuit, and Tori are all gone now. The circumstances differ of course--Putnam will probably come back soon and Tori might come back eventually, but Revlar and Biscuit are both effectively gone for good. I’m not sure what’s up with this month, but I hope that the departures and bans stop for at least a while.
On the other hand, there are so many new people joining the server thanks to Makin putting the ads up on MSPFA that we don’t know what to do with them. We’re experiencing a rare case of new user spillover, where they’re coming to mspa-lit and promptly getting sht on because they’re unfamiliar with the culture here. Some of these encounters can actually be greatly entertaining.
This is especially true of randoms who come in that are transparently from one community or another, trying to stir the pot somehow. One such example included a user named only Charlie. He came in to mspa-lit and immediately started talking about Smash Ultimate. Makin determined within seconds that he was using talking points from 4chan threads about the game, leading to some well-deserved heckling.
Finally, there was some great news: the SBAJH books are fully printed and ready to go. The only thing that’s left to do is send out the user surveys to figure out where they must be delivered. The post mentions only that the surveys will be sent out “soon”, which is unfortunately ambiguous. In this fandom, “soon” refers to about six months, on average. However, I’m confident that the surveys will be sent out within a month (still a laughably long time, but short on this fandom’s timescale) due to the comparatively unambiguous wording of the books’ completion. We will have that BBQ sauce yet.
Something potentially even more exciting in the announcement is that they found a bunch of old shirts sitting around. There’s no telling which shirts these may be, but they’re apparently classic. Makin has openly described wanting a particular shirt for himself, although he didn’t back the Kickstarter so he probably won’t be able to check if it’s available. The chance that his desired shirt will be offered is highly unlikely, but there’s really no telling what could come out of this. I’m just glad we’re getting close to having these books, a year after the initial Kickstarter.
Nothing more for today.
30th of October
The cover for the new Homestuck book has come out on the Viz website. There’s noticeably more excitement about this upcoming book than there has been about the previous ones. I assume it’s because of the characters that will be involved; or perhaps the middle section of the comic plays into a serious deal of nostalgia for people. Either way, talk is slowly building over these books. I wonder if the later installments will be more successful than the first few.
On the subreddit, Makin was convinced by user /u/maxdefolsch that Act 5 Act 2 would be split up into more than just two books, possibly as many as three or four. Makin’s reaction to this was nothing short of horror; he brought it up multiple times on Discord, becoming progressively more annoyed each time. His thoughts are summed up well enough in this screenshot:
Really though, few of us are surprised by this possibility. It’s just the reality of the fandom we’re all part of.
Slightly less related but arguably adjacent to our interests, the Undertale Twitter page suddenly started posting ARG-like messages, mysteriously referred to as a “survey initiative”. One of the tweets mentioned to check the page in 24 hours, and there is immense excitement over the announcement of a sequel. No one is sure what it is yet, but there is little doubt that it will be something related to a new game.
Even less related to our fandom’s source material but no less exciting, the final Smash Ultimate Direct was announced for Thursday morning. There’s no shortage of people in mspa-lit who are huge fans of the game, so this announcement on top of everything else was just icing on the cake. There was a ridiculous amount of stuff posted today, so between that and the newfound speculation over an epilogue for Homestuck there’s suddenly a lot to be excited about.
Perhaps because of this, the mood for today was overwhelmingly positive. In both the HSD and in adjacent servers, it was generally a really feel-good environment; there were multiple posts, unprompted even, from people who were just saying that they appreciate each other. It’s such a simple and silly thing, but it’s always extremely gratifying to see people enjoying themselves and each other like this. Maybe 10/25 worked some magic this year after all.
Nothing more for today.
31st of October
It’s Halloween night, and some of us immediately got into the spirit by switching names and profile pictures with each other. As a couple examples: Gitaxian and myself switched so that he looks like he’s on the mod team, MrNostalgic and Multivac switched as well. All in all, it was a harmless but effective prank. I lost track, but easily over a dozen people fell for the imitation. Even people in #general were thrown off, which was great for a few laughs.
Today surveys went out for the SBAHJ books, greatly exceeding my expectation of one month. The shirts didn’t turn out to be anything special, simply being four old versions of the most basic shirts available pretty much on every Homestuck merchandise website. The survey itself ends in about 10 days, at which point I assume the orders will be shipped out. It’s exciting that we will finally have our loot--many people are curious what the BBQ sauce will be like, including myself.
The project suspected to be Undertale 2 turned out to be an ambiguously adjacent game to Undertale, the first chapter of what is called Delta Rune. Accompanying the release was a cryptic requirement that said not to talk about the game for the next 24 hours, a request that basically everyone broke within the first five minutes of release. It is completely free, and there is now some interesting debate as to whether it is a demo or if it’s actually Chapter 1 of the full game.
Of all things, Putnam came back onto the HSD to discuss this more properly: he insinuated that it can’t be a demo for the same reasons that an episodic game like The Walking Dead or Life is Strange weren’t demos. However, there was flavor text in Delta Rune that clearly suggested it was actually an incomplete version of what would follow after, stuff in the vein of, “You can’t access this area until the full game comes out!” This unambiguously ended the debate, at least until such a time that we have even more conclusive evidence either way.
A new channel, #undertale2-spoilers, was created to contain discussion for the game. The new channel immediately exploded in usage, quickly rivaling the three biggest channels in messages sent over the day. This is due for a few reasons, not least of which that it’s shiny and new, but we’ve also been starved for some significant, game-changing content. Even if it hadn’t been for those things, we would probably still be discussing the hell out of Delta Rune because it is of very high quality.
It’s not often that we get the chance to pass around some new content that is both tailored to us and well done, but Delta rune has quickly established itself as the new thing everyone’s going to be talking about for months. The most succinct description I can offer is that it’s “Undertale, but better.” Everyone I can see has been greatly satisfied with their experience, praising the story, music, and enhanced gameplay elements compared to Undertale.
Delta Rune is roughly three hours long, which I have to stress is insane for something that is ostensibly a demo. Of course, three hours long means that the base content is exhausted fairly quickly (especially in our hands, where we usually tear through these things pretty maniacally), but much like its predecessor the game is chock full of secrets and easter eggs, and lots of genuinely endearing bits and pieces that you can easily miss if you don’t turn over every stone.
Oda described the game as positively oozing with style and passion--as near as I can tell, this response is practically ubiquitous. Within the first few hours of the game being released I had already seen people changing their names and profile pictures to various characters in the game, including Qweq, Sea Hitler, and Makin himself. I can tell that this game is going to be among our main focuses for quite some time based on this alone.
So fervent was discussion over Delta Rune that it leaked into mspa-lit frequently, among other channels. While spoilers were mainly avoided as he was playing it, the fact that we were talking about it outside of the new channel pissed Makin off so badly that he eventually hid mspa-lit from everyone until he finished the demo. That incident aside, the entire server has been positively buzzing about the game. Seeing what we got with this, it can be concluded beyond any reasonable doubt that we’re all eagerly awaiting the release of whatever’s next, be it Chapter Two or the full game.
More related to Homestuck and the HSD, WP released the full transcript of the recent interview Hussie did with the Washington Post. There was a lot of grumbling about the article as it was released on WaPo proper. Some people overwhelmingly were put off by the way Hussie sounded in it: at best it didn’t feel like his usual manner of speaking, and at worst he came across as some sort of faux-intellectual. Trip, characteristically inoffensive at most times, went so far as to say, “That interview was so fucking pretentious it honestly doesn't even sound like hussie talking.” No one was really quite sure what to make of the affair.
Makin was especially critical at the time, but with the full transcripts being released today it paints the interview in a whole different light. Apparently WaPo effectively ruined Hussie’s responses, and the full context makes it sound much better. Makin commented in a rare state of repentance: “fucking hell / they butchered his answers / this is way more sensible / sorry hussie”, but of course, after looking further: “christ the epilogue weaseling / I retract my apology”. In all, people are greatly mollified by the release of the full transcript.
That having been said, I was curious why WP felt the need to release the full transcript. It seems odd that they consciously decided to do this, because Hussie has done interviews before but they never bothered to follow up on them. Is it possible that they too were miffed by the way the interview went and wanted to set the record straight? Whatever the reasoning, we are more or less grateful that they decided to do so; the full conversation is much more reasonable and actually gave us something to talk about today.
Less positively, there was some conflict between myself and other mods tonight. I’ll avoid naming them, but at one point there was a user who inadvertently changed their name to a racial epithet. Spiral noticed this and told them to change it, which they did by modifying it slightly. Spiral was not satisfied with the modification, so she brought it up in modchat to try and get some help.
Nat and WoC were against the idea of forcing the user to change their name further, deeming it wholly unnecessary. After the recent power problem between Tensei and myself I’ve been trying to be more hands off when it comes to what the other mods are doing or what they want. Yet, today it seemed clear that they were going nowhere in their discussion of what to do.
I decided to step in and tried to manage the conversation in a way that was effectively neutral. I wanted to help them get a better understanding of each other if I could. However, my arbitration quickly went bad after we started discussing the relevance of the epithet in question: WoC insisted that it was antiquated to the point of obsolescence, citing the way that it would probably be handled in his town. He claimed that using it where he’s from would probably be met with strange looks, but wouldn’t really merit any punishment.
At this point there was a serious miscalculation on my part. I’ve been trying not to behave in such an anal retentive manner when talking with others--it can lead to the appearance of being kind of robotic if I do it too much, which I don’t really want. Based on this I wanted to try and engage in a little banter during the discussion, so rather than just explain flatly why his argument didn’t make sense I called it childish.
The intent of this wasn’t literally to insinuate he’s a child for believing the idea, in my mind it was equivalent to their practice of calling each other stupid over minor things. Yet, this immediately set WoC off. He quickly became furious, going off on me for being patronizing. I was extremely confused by this, and without going into too much detail the conversation only devolved further from there.
I was quite upset about this for most of the evening, alternatively trying to figure out how much in the wrong I was and being indignant about WoC’s response. At one point I messaged a few of the other mods to get an idea of what I was doing wrong, which they were all helpful about. It’s distressing when my ability to interface with other people fails like this.
Despite getting so frustrated with me though, later WoC was casually shitposting with me like nothing happened. On one hand this sort of thing makes it harder for me to tell if I’ve seriously screwed up or not, but on the other I’ve got to admire that he can make frustration roll off him like water off a duck’s back.
In truth, I really appreciate that he can and is willing to do that when it comes to talking with people. Toast, one of the people I messaged for help, was in a similar vein as the night went on. The fact that these guys were still willing to try and interface with me despite perceiving me as patronizing is really kind of them. That patience alone is worth their respect, and--as I usually resolve when these issues crop up--I should be actively treating them better. I really appreciate them and everyone else who remains patient with me whenever I’m hard to deal with.
Outside of mod drama, I want to take the time to describe a mild let down with altgen this month. The day where the channel got spammed to hell and back was great, but there’s an overall theme with October that was left agonizing unfulfilled for its entirety. Last year around the beginning of October, I wrote that it’s common among various groups to treat October thoroughly as a meme month, specifically around the premise of being “spooky” in a shitty and over the top way.
So great is this idea that October is commonly referred to as Spooky Month or Spook Month, depending on who you talk to. With how altgen can be, I was seriously expecting a slow ramp up in related memes throughout all of October. Yet it was more like the opposite: a lot of “spooky memes” came out to play at the beginning, and then by the end there was practically nothing except one or two particular users trying to post them frequently.
I am immensely disappointed. I was anticipating that Halloween in particular would be a veritable bonanza of shitty skeleton memes. Yet, when I checked the channel earlier today, there was a big fat load of nothing. The channel wasn’t even active! Upon some further reflection I realized this is probably because they’re all out trick or treating. That thought alone made me feel like I’m getting way too old for this--it’s easy to wonder how on earth I’m still here sometimes. Maybe I can force a cascade of spooky memes during the sacrifice this weekend instead.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
(No commentary for this month)