Drew Linky
4th of September
Very early in the morning, there was a conversation in #western-media that was worth participating in. Long running show Adventure Time finally ended, bringing an end to an impressive eight year run. Enough members here have been or are still fans of the show that it gets discussed often, even in just the average week. The end of the show drove up discussion on the topic substantially, as one might expect.
On a general basis, reception to the finale is heavily polarized depending on where one goes to talk about it. For instance, people using 4chan seemed to overwhelmingly hate the finale, but those on the Adventure Time subreddit seemed fairly positive about it. There are two people on the HSD that are generally understood to be “the Adventure Time fans”: Roots and Tipsy.
Given this perceived status and the fact that they use the subreddit and Tumblr, both of which are typically receptive to developments in the show, it’s reasonable for one to predict that they would enjoy the end of the show. However, on this occasion they defied expectations: they absolutely despised the ending. Regardless of why, the manner in which they went about explaining their thoughts was pretty revealing.
Upon reexamination, this negative response to the show is actually somewhat in keeping with Tipsy. She has often had unexpected opinions or reacted to things in unconventional ways, often surprising people when she explains. This occasion was no different; Tipsy is so emotionally invested in Adventure Time that most people probably expected her to enjoy the finale, but at the end of it she was very swift to condemn the episode. She later tried to claim that she didn’t hate it, which someone quickly juxtaposed against a screenshot of her literally saying she hated the finale.
Mocking aside, when she had calmed down on the matter she began to discuss it in earnest, which of course is where the gold of the conversation can be found; after the initial shock wore off she adopted a much less extreme stance. Her criticisms were fair and cogent--they usually are, no matter how bizarre what she’s trying to say is. The takeaway from this is: Tipsy has a talent for catching people off guard with weird positions and then is able to justify the strangeness afterwards, most of the time anyway.
Roots is a different case. He was similarly disillusioned with the finale of the show, but seemed to struggle with explaining his perspective on the matter. An extensive discussion with him seemed to go in circles, although at the end the confusion seemed to clear up somewhat. He made an ill-advised post on the Adventure Time subreddit saying the episode “wasn’t good”, for which he was promptly and hilariously destroyed.
Roots caught a lot of shit for it even in #western-media, although naturally it was less serious than the hatred he received for his views on the subreddit. He mentioned that he felt so irritated and upset with the progression of the finale that he felt compelled to vent by making jokes about it, which no doubt was part of the reason it was confusing to discuss with him.
He and Tipsy had apparently commiserated over the finale for some hours, and both of them expressed considerable surprise at the positive reception on the subreddit (a cursory glance reveals that the Tumblr side of the fandom was similar). It’s curious to consider why exactly they felt so differently from everyone else--while most people involved in the discussion were less invested, there were certainly a few others who were just as invested as Tipsy and Roots. In the end, perhaps there’s just no accounting for taste.
A less intriguing and far more infuriating encounter took place later in the day in mspa-lit. Politics were being discussed (which, in retrospect, that sentence should almost always be accompanied with “and this was a bad thing”); as discussed in a previous entry, conversations where some of the participants are serious and others are not are a recipe for complete disaster if the topic itself is something that should probably be taken seriously. With the subject of journalistic integrity in question, it would be more reasonable than not to assume that the topic was serious in nature.
After some consideration, this topic has been hashed out so much in this document already that it’s not worth revisiting. Suffice to say that I’m perturbed by the outcome of the discussion and I’ve been reminded that I need to maintain an emotional distance in conversations like it. This shouldn’t be so, but reality doesn’t permit otherwise. It’s a very disappointing reminder, but there’s no other logical conclusion based on the proceedings of the conversation. I feel too demoralized to write more about this right now1.
5th of September
Not a lot happened today, so instead this entry will be a brief cover of the statistical changes since #hangout was deleted. It’s been one week since, so this should serve as a decent preview for what can be expected regarding the activity of the server.
The number of messages sent in #general over the last week (August 29th to September 5th, or 7 days) as of 10:30 PM EST is 46,587 coming to an average of approximately 6,655 per day. The number of messages sent in #general over one month (July 28th to August 28th, 31 days) directly prior to #hangout being first hidden was 14,438, or an average of approximately 466 messages per day. Taking this at face value means that after #hangout being removed, there’s been a roughly 14-fold increase in activity of #general.
This obviously seems very good with regard to the goal of increasing #general’s activity. However, it’s also worthwhile to examine the level of activity across both channels. In the same time span of 31 days right up until its removal, #hangout saw 114,072 messages or an average of about 3,680 per day. Combining this with #general for the same time period yields a total of 128,510 messages for an average of 4,145 per day. This comes out to a net increase of 2,510 per day, just about a 1.6-fold increase.
This is still positive while markedly less impressive, but there’s still another factor to consider: Tera appropriately brought up the fact that large and drastic changes encourage the most activity just after they’ve occurred; over time there will be a predictable decrease in the amount of activity until things reach a certain baseline. Such has held true in this case: each sequential day starting on August 29th had 4,282 messages, then 9,582, 9,068, 5,638, 3,600, 4,760, 6,416, and finally 3,312 today.
This does not bode well, but could also be much worse. I’m not an expert in statistics by any means, but based on this I imagine the baseline of activity for #general will be roughly 3,000-5,000 messages per day, which means that on an immediate timescale the merger won’t have accomplished much. One final thing is important to keep in mind with all of this though, which is the ancillary goal to increasing activity in #general: improving newcomers’ impressions of the channel since it’s the first thing they see when they arrive.
At this point it’s nearly impossible to tell if the noticeable increase of activity has had an effect on user retention and participation. The #userlog helpfully gives the number of users every single time someone joins or leaves the server, which can itself be used for statistical analysis. The kerfuffle with user5 changing the server icon and name throws a wrench into this a little bit, but some extremely premature figures can still be determined.
The usercount for the HSD was 11,329 on July 29th. This gradually increased to the high of 11,450 on the evening of August 26th, at which point the server icon change happened and it dropped down to under 11,400, and then at the close of the 29th it closed out with 11,412 for a net increase of 83 users for an average of a bit more than 2.5 new users per day (as an aside, this is slightly greater than the approximately 60 new users per June and July, but about half the rate of growth experienced during April and May).
Conducting any sort of analysis on this particular metric would be extremely premature at this point; it takes a lot longer to gauge population than simple message counts. That having been said, the message count isn’t particularly accurate at this point either. It would be prudent to conduct another look at these figures once more time has gone by. The end of September should provide a much better idea of how the channel rearrangement affects the pattern of discussion.
In fact, at the end of the year I want to try and do a much larger-scale analysis of server statistics. Ceru would be able to help with this through Aradiabot, which would make it a lot easier to obtain this information than the ad hoc process I’ve been using. Maybe Ceru could even use some graphing functions to make this more interesting or easy to read instead of just listing it all out in text. It would be useful to get a better idea of where this server is headed and how major events like community streams or official news from Viz or Hussie affect things here.
It’s worth reiterating that, even if the number of messages goes down in the short term, the long-term goal is to improve the retention and activity of new users over time. The idea is that people are more motivated to participate if they join and immediately notice the place is already active. It’s anecdotal, but this principle applies to myself and several people in mspa-lit I’ve asked about this.
Moving on: so that this entry isn’t nothing but boring number crunching, there has been a significant change in the posting habits of #general since #hangout was removed that merits some discussion. The vast majority of the population of #hangout did move over and have remained active in #general, and the smattering of #general regulars were low in number enough that they were simply assimilated into the culture. This would be the end of it, except that some members of #altgen have started participating and have been adding their signature flair to the channel.
It was subtle at first, with few people complaining about the influx of shitposting if indeed they noticed at all. However, after a week it is undeniable; there is a greatly increased frequency of shitposting in the channel than is preferred. To be clear, #altgen’s brand of shitposting is far removed from the similarly-named behavior that was found in #hangout; the former is clearly low-effort posting that the users post with with reckless disregard for any other people present, while the latter was more socially influenced and followed the mores of the channel, most of the time.
It would be inaccurate, of course, to suggest that #general has been completely taken over by #altgen’s more disruptive style. Rather, that behavior has fused with the #hangout culture to form something new, but still very rough and unformed. The exact identity of #general is impossible to ascertain yet, and will likely take several weeks or even months to settle down into something solid. As long as the activity of it keeps up, though, that’s the most important part for now.
Nothing more for today.
9th of September
The comparative dry spell continues. Early on the morning of the 6th, a number of people who were around for the frustrating development of the 4th agree that it’s at least better than it was, with even Toast agreeing that it was an exhausting affair. We seem to crave activity, and then inevitably some dramatic thing happens that hurts someone’s feelings. Most people aren’t here to engage in bad faith, it’s more often just a confluence of nonsense that happens by chance sometimes. With that in mind, it’s been a weird and aimless few days since the event in question.
It’s not clear what exactly we should blame this streak of inactivity on. Today, the chat itself brought up the intractable problem of a lack of content. The fandom in its entirety is slowing down without anything putting enough energy into the overall system, although it’s safe to say that the effect is being felt more in certain places than others.
For instance, the subreddit is plodding along at pretty much the same pace as it has for the last few years, with roughly consistent quality from what I can tell. The 4chan base has been all but defunct since the comic ended, burning itself out over the frustration of the ending, so it hardly factors in here. Most interestingly, Makin brought up that he thinks “the tumblr fandom is imploding or something” due to a radical shift in behavioral patterns across a few other places.
Specifically, the evidence he brings forth in favor of this includes: “suddenly there's a fanbase on twitter of all places, and we're getting fantroll-type people on the subreddit”. Both of these developments appear to be true, with a massive number of posts concerning the aforementioned fan characters appearing as if from nowhere on the subreddit. Whether this is a larger pattern or just a sudden and transient shift remains to be seen.
In lieu of spending all of my time monitoring a dead channel, I’ve taken this opportunity to take a cursory glance at other channels on the server for once. #western- and #eastern-media were good candidates for this due to a lot of interest-overlap with members in mspa-lit. Although these channels are firmly Ngame’s domain, he doesn’t appear to speak there so often (he responds promptly when summoned though, so it would appear he has his eye on the channels regularly).
A loose group has developed in each channel, with some people lingering across both people and then dabbling in mspa-lit on occasion as well. Zentoyo is one such individual, seeming to drift between all of these places as they please--they remind me of Tipsy a couple years ago, speaking in an almost shorthand style with a generally positive but also firm stance on whatever topic they chime in on. Goobatron is another such individual, who I’ve described at length previously. These two and a fellow named Ciderelles, among others, all speak in #eastern-media frequently enough that I’ve come to associate them as regulars of the place.
The details are lost on me because I’m not typically interested in the subject matter, but it’s clear to me that all three of these people seem to gain a lot of pleasure from trashing on what they deem “lower quality” anime and manga (Zentoyo lampooning this with statements such as “People are weebs n weebs should get out anyway”). Then again, making fun of the content regardless of its actual quality appears to be the cultural rule for the channel as a whole, so this may not be representative of their actual behavior on an individual level.
Ngame will more frequently participate in #western-media itself, and Tipsy, Roots, and Griever are also pretty active there as well due to their interest in cartoons such as Adventure Time (again, crossover with #eastern-media is typical due to their interest in shows such as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures and Dragon Ball). There are some users with a decent smattering of messages in the channel such as one fellow named Big Salty, but from the glimpses I’ve seen most people have less than 2,000 messages.
Rather than sustained conversation more typical of channels like #mspa-lit or #altgen, #western-media experiences staccato-discussions, where most serious talk is begun, transpires, and is completed within a short amount of time. These bursts of activity are separated by long spells of shitposting, it would seem. The exception to this is when a highly anticipated show comes out with new episodes, upon which the channel is usually swarmed with outsiders and whoever could be deemed regulars tend to struggle in order to regain control of the channel.
#coding-tech, by comparison, is an extremely well-organized place. In undergraduate school I took three computer science classes and have had a loose interest in the topic since, so I’m at least able to follow along in conversations and know a little bit more than nothing at all. Even so, the level of discussion is usually so far above my head that I can’t contribute anything meaningful. What’s more, I would wager that most of what the participants in #coding-tech know is self-taught, or even just a hobby.
Channel regulars such as virtuNat, anoymous, Sein, and even Kreuz have all gathered an impressive knowledge in computer science in general, and some of them have developed that even further. The pins are chock full of helpful links that provide tools for people to learn about these things as well, should they have the aptitude and motivation to pursue it. One such link is for a game that teaches people how to build a basic functioning computer out of standard logic gates.
In a society where most people treat computers like pure magic, the fundamental importance of that game alone is difficult to overstate; it provides the basis for creating the more complex systems we’re familiar with practically from scratch. There are also links for learning programming languages, and a few projects that members of the channel worked on to relate the overall topic back to Homestuck (such as creating a functioning programming language based on one that appears in the story).
There is of course the required assortment of shitposts, but even those typically approach esoteric by general standards. That having been said, the channel’s discussions as a whole appear to be insanely productive compared to most other channels. If I were to guess the amount of empty conversation or even shitposting that goes on in the average channel, it would approach anywhere between 50-75%. By comparison (and this is admittedly a very narrow and therefore flawed view), #coding-tech approaches anywhere from 80-90% productive conversation. The culture of the channel is nothing short of an enigma when compared to the rest of the server.
Nothing more for today.
10th of September
I mentioned yesterday that we started receiving a massive influx of posts from people who wanted to show off their original characters, or OCs, on the subreddit starting about five days ago now. That type of post is already made a lot compared to other types, but for some reason the volume of OCs increased dramatically over the course of 24 hours or so. On a given day there’s usually a handful of OC sprites or art, but starting four days ago that number skyrocketed: we went from getting two or three of these posts a day to over fifty of them in the span of two days.
This prompted Makin to start a megathread explicitly for containing the posts, although the damage is mostly done already. It’s possible that establishing a megathread hampered the willingness of people to participate, as the number of these posts in the megathread is substantially lower than from when they were being posted wholesale. Alternatively, people may have tired themselves out already.
In fairness, the level of activity for those two days was astonishingly high given the state of the fandom these days. We seem to have our good days and our bad days, although it’s pleasing to see that the subreddit has been slightly more active since the OC invasion. Incidentally, this means that the quality of the posts is way up from their normal baseline of “mediocre” or “outright shitty”.
While there are still a few shitposts meandering the subreddit, they are far and few between for once; best of all, of those insufferable posts that are not actually relevant to Homestuck except as cheap jokes the frequency is down to almost zero. Very gratifying after the whole rule change debacle in previous weeks.
This flurry of activity is actually pretty heartening in a more general sense as well. While things seem to be slowing down for the fandom even more than we might have feared, this near spontaneous burst of posts is a reminder of the original spirit of this group. I’ve often expressed fear that, even if substantial new content showed up, the members of the fandom would not be sufficient to pick it back up. Times like these serve as an indicator of the opposite, where all we need is a good tap to get things going again. Hopefully this is the case in the future, whether it come in the form of Hiveswap Act 2, Hussie beginning his next story, or something else entirely.
On the other hand, mspa-lit hasn’t really held to this trend. When I pointed out the sense of slowing down, he claimed that school coming back is responsible for the feeling of less activity. While this makes some sense, in the case of mspa-lit in particular I’m sure it also has to do with disallowing generalized topics. Further, Makin’s shill list is simply not compelling or substantial enough to generate higher levels of discussion2.
The reasons for this are manifold and unfortunately we don’t really have the tools to pinpoint it: the most obvious would be that not enough people are reading it, but other possibilities include the fact that it’s simply not an accessible reading list (overestimating the tolerance most people have for it), that there’s not enough content to keep discussion going for long, etcetera. That first point sticks with me; I can’t help but wonder if things would be significantly different if the only change was the sheer number of readers for the shill list.
I brought up this principle with Tensei when we were discussing the idea of fanart for some of the shills like Worth the Candle: he stipulated that the characters are too boring to inspire fanart3 from anyone, and I felt obligated to point out that the fanbase for WTC is prohibitively small: the quality of a work is less important for garnering fanart, far and away the most important factor is the number of fans.
Obviously the quality of a work would ideally correlate to how many people appreciate it, but this doesn’t necessarily follow in real life; a quality story does not always attract attention from enough people to become successful or renowned. Conversely, a story with a sufficient number of fans will almost always get artistic tribute regardless of its quality: if you have a really good work with 100 fans and a mediocre or even shitty work with 100,000 fans, the more popular work will inevitably have more fans that turn out to be artists, some of which will be motivated to create fanart.
To bring this tangent back around to the main point, the reason that the shills don’t get discussed often isn’t necessarily that they’re bad or unworthy of being discussed; rather, it’s due to the fact that so few of us ever actually end up reading them. It is impossible to sustain conversation without a sufficient number of people who know what’s being talked about, and the shill list doesn’t receive the kind of exposure it needs to really take off with people. Whether this is by design or is accidental is a different matter entirely, but it would strike me as kind of weirdly stupid if Makin prefered the shill list to remain this impotent.
Speaking less about mspa-lit in particular, there was an incident this morning with two users who were engaging in some outrageous tomfoolery: one of them was pretending to be hacked by the other, which seriously alarmed an uninvolved user who promptly notified mods about it. It was clear from the onset that whatever these guys were doing was asinine garbage, but hacking another person’s account is not something to be joked about.
We did the most sensible thing in response and decided as a team to ban the fools. The entire debacle was infuriatingly stupid, so it was a relatively quick and painless decision. Unfortunately, later in the evening one of the offending users came on with an alt to try and heckle the mod team for “not looking closely enough into the issue”. The only reason I describe all of this is because the actual procession of the event was unusual in structure; in terms of importance, this event was about as unremarkable as one can get. With that in mind, I shut down the alt with extreme prejudice and went back to doing something more important with my time.
Final note for today, but altgen has gone and done it again. Despite repeated attempts to warn people against it and even providing an appropriate example of what and what not to do, cropped porn has seen so much abuse that Dingus and the other of our milieu have decided to ban the practice once more. It looked like people caught on the last time I demonstrated how it should be done, but I guess that was too much to ask for.
At this point, we’re not even sure whether it’s a widespread problem or if it’s only a couple of particularly energetic people perpetrating this issue. If it were the former, then it could be chalked up to altgen simply being shitty as it always has been and is technically supposed to be. If it’s the latter, then it’s just the latest in an infinitely long series of things being ruined for everybody at the hands of a couple jackasses.
Nothing more for today.
12th of September
Advertisements for Homestuck Book 3: Act 4 began in earnest yesterday. Makin used this as the signal to start uploading commentary from book 2; he wanted to avoid doing this until the next book started being pushed so that his extension would avoid hurting sales of the book as much as possible. I’m not sure how effective this policy is, since it’d involve gauging the initial excitement of the book releases versus sales over time and a bunch of other complicated factors I’m not really interested in quantifying. Regardless, it’s at least an attempt at good will to make sure the books are more successful.
That having been said, I began work on organizing the commentary today. It’s a long and generally monotonous task, but it forces me to read the text of the comic more thoroughly to make sure I understand where everything’s supposed to go. This usually means that I pick up on small jokes or setups that I didn’t notice before or simply don’t remember, and I feel like sharing it with the group occasionally. I did so a few times tonight, not expecting much of a response, but pleasantly a veritable font of conversation sprung up from this.
Similar to the outbreak of OC posts on the subreddit, all it took was a small bit of prompting to unlock some of the old magic that was around from discussing Homestuck-centric content in the past. Tonight we delved into that feeling, reacquainting ourselves lightly with the sheer density of the comic. We were able to freely enjoy our obsession with all of its various facets once more, and while the discussion petered away in less than half an hour it was an energetic and truly enjoyable break from the very gradual decay of entertainment value.
With this in mind, I’m now looking forward to the community reread much more than I was before, which was already considerable. It seems that we simply need someone willing to lead the reread, which I might end up doing if no one else wants to. A few other people like Nights are starting to ask about it as well; unlike last time the reread happened, the Discord may get its own channel dedicated to the event, which would almost certainly improve participation and lead to interesting discussion.
This ended up getting sidetracked after some time by a discussion of server statistics; after bringing the idea up with people in mspa-lit, I decided to bite the bullet and create a spreadsheet with all the data available on the server about user and message counts for each month. No bots were around to record the usercount data from before April 2017, but message counts are easily obtainable with Discord’s search function.
Though there isn’t much to work with, some patterns or events can already be elucidated: the beginning of the server displays rapidly increasing message count with a particularly large spike after advertisements were put up on MSPA. January of this year had a statistically significant dip in message count due to Nu-Altgen, with messages in altgen alone being cut literally in half to 150,000 as compared to 300,000 for December and February each. This was only a temporary faltering though, with the count picking back up in subsequent months.
While the rate of growth has slowed significantly, the amount of messages being sent is still increasing steadily as is the usercount. I’ve decided to release the graphs of the information I was able to gather from 2016 and 2017 since those years are obviously complete already, although it’s hard to glean many meaningful patterns from the data since it’s only been a couple years. Thankfully, now that the framework is complete it’ll be easier to release information for each subsequent year for however long this document and the server itself persists.
Later in the night we started discussing the latest addition to the shill list, an unusual work by the author of Slate Star Codex called Unsong. The response to it has been generally positive, but a few detractors have dismissed it as utter trash, notably WoC. The disagreements between him and those who liked the story so far are very protracted, and have touched on the heart of some conversational difficulties that I personally take issue with in mspa-lit.
The argument proceeded in a vaguely circuitous manner as they typically do, with the same problem being run upon time and time again: one side found an element of the book to be a problem and the other did not. At this point, any onlooker who isn’t an expert in what’s being discussed would probably be able to dismiss it as a matter of individual taste. Not WoC: at this point he began to assert that the opposing side was literally wrong in their assertions, which automatically bumps conversations like these up to another level.
The problem with most conversations that take place here is that it’s a bunch of non-experts trying to talk about things they have no real education in. This is both harder and easier to do with stuff of a mathematical or scientific nature: if it’s quantifiable then it’s pretty hard to fake knowledge about it, although education is still extremely helpful for figuring out how to interpret that information correctly.
When it comes to the arts, though, all bets are off. WoC tried to talk about this as if he has objective knowledge in something that can usually be reduced to what people seek as a matter of preference. As soon as one tries to inject objectivity into it, it raises a question: what determines that the person claiming authority is actually correct in their views?
I’m not averse to deferring to people who are well-educated in what they’re trying to talk about: I would infinitely prefer to listen to someone with a degree in a given area over someone who doesn’t have one. The problem is that WoC is not one of these experts in the subject of writing; he’s passionate about it and he knows a decent amount, but he tries to pass his ideas off as authoritative and his ideas thusly stink to everyone else present.
In more simple terms, I responded that WoC overvalued his own opinion. He speaks strongly, but at the end of the day he doesn’t have anything more to stand on than anyone else in the chat does. Wave provided a very succinct explanation of why the behavior is bad: “A snob without merit is just a douche”. Some people are very good at convincing themselves and even others that their opinion is worth more, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re no better qualified to speak on the topic than anyone else.
Nothing more for today.
13th of September
Makin ended up adding another bot to the server, called Disboard. It’s apparently just to get put on a public listing so that people have an easier time searching for servers related to a specific topic, which is honestly nice. We had a discussion recently about ways that people can find the HSD, and he made it clear that: “right now the only way people can find the server is if they look for it”, assuming they aren’t already using the subreddit. Seems appropriate to put it on more searchable lists if possible.
A quick perusal of the tag “homestuck” on Disboard’s website reveals 23 other related servers. I wonder how many have population overlap with us? Further, they only appear in the listing if Disboard has been added, so how many dedicated servers exist that remain unknown? I can easily imagine dozens more of these servers with less than 50 or 25 people on them, floating in the ether and completely unknown to us.
More relevant to us, Makin is trying out something to attract new users to mspa-lit and get them to read the shills: he’s alternating the name of the channel as #read-x, where x is a different shill each and every day. I suspect he’s too lazy to actually follow through with this for an extended period of time, and if he manages to do so then I also suspect it won’t accomplish much. Everyone seems pretty ambivalent or dismissive of this development; in all it’s actually quite inoffensive, albeit slightly attention-grabby. If it generates some interest in the channel then that’s great.
I steadfastly refuse to call the channel anything but mspa-lit though. Since it’ll be hugely annoying to keep up with the daily name changes, I’m just going to keep the channel name as “#mspa-lit” in the list at the beginning of this document; it’s probably the best option for this document anyway, as it’s useful for historicity/consistency’s sake.
Also, read-shills/read-x is a terrible name. I will never change my mind about this. Nothing more for today.
14th of September
Today is the anniversary of Hiveswap: Act One coming out. As might be expected, people are immeasurably disappointed that it’s taking so long to get the second installment. Many including myself are openly expressing fears that it’s been abandoned as a dead project. The most upsetting thing for most of us is the complete lack of communication, which of course is a long running theme of the last four years.
Two examples were brought up as to why the project should not reasonably have been delayed this long: Oculus Rift, the VR headset, was crowdfunded to a similar $2.4 million figure as Hiveswap, and despite the immense complexity of developing such technology it was successful or enticing enough that Facebook bought it for $2.3 billion; a more fair example, Hollow Knight is a game that was partially crowdfunded with about $57,000 being raised on Kickstarter, was developed on Unity, and despite not achieving certain stretch goals the development team delivered extra content.
Despite having over 40 times the budget of Hollow Knight and being crowdfunded earlier, Hiveswap was released half a year after Hollow Knight and is still only a quarter (or an eighth, if you count Hauntswitch) complete. With these things in mind, the only possible--let alone reasonable--explanation for this discrepancy is profound and thorough mismanagement. Even taking into account the loss of funds in dealing with The Odd Gentleman, the fact that it’s taken so long to get what we have now is nothing short of mind boggling.
The conversation today mostly consisted of the long history of pushbacks on the date of Hiveswap’s release even just for Act 1, and about how we’re now going through the ringer again with Act 2. Some time ago there was a newspost saying that we would have more information about Hiveswap coming in “several weeks”--that was at the beginning of April. It has been nearly half a year since, and our patience only continues to dwindle away.
Especially now that the anniversary is here, more doubt surrounds the future of Hiveswap than ever before. Or, rather, it may be more accurate to say that people are finding it hard to care anymore. With each passing week, less people bother with playing the Friendsims and less bother to even bring up the fact that we have no information to work off of. If anything, the only sentiment I see anymore is a gradually growing bitterness over the state of affairs.
Makin weirdly insists that Act 2 will definitely come out on 11/11, despite not having (or at least not showing) any evidence as to why. He is so certain of this that he has entered into a bet with WoC regarding whether it will come out this year4: if it does come out, Makin gets ten dollars; if it doesn’t come out, WoC wins the money instead. This echoes the “bet” that WoC made last year with no one (he claims it was with Anervaria in particular about Act One coming out, which of course he lost, except this time he won’t be snorting hot sauce up his nose).
Back to the point, Makin’s insistence that it’ll come out in November is vaguely nonsensical. Assuming this wasn’t a joke, even if the complete lack of absence in that direction didn’t say anything then there are a couple of things that possibly go against the idea: the official Homestuck Youtube account actually unlisted the trailer for Act One, meaning no one can see it anymore. This might be simple housekeeping (although goodness knows why they would bother), or as Makin puts it: “is this going to be like namco high / where hussie pretends it never happened”. It’s hard to tell, but the development doesn’t exactly bode well.
There was also some debate over whether Viz or WP is responsible for Hiveswap’s development and PR at this point. It’s not immediately clear to most people whether Viz has any sort of stake in Hiveswap at this point. I’m not sure why, but some are under the impression that Viz’s hand is definitely involved with the game; we mostly appreciate Viz’s handling of Homestuck--there is some displeasure about the handling of the conversion from Flash to HTML5, the early animations are still crappy-quality Youtube videos-with the books especially being well-received, so the disconnect between Homestuck getting handled well and Hiveswap getting this extremely subpar treatment is confusing to people.
I too was under this impression up until today. A cursory glance at the webpages for Viz and Hiveswap doesn’t turn up anything suggesting a link between the two. The conclusion from this is that WP is still at fault for the property being mishandled so badly. The real question then is: is this ever going to change? The extreme upheaval in WP’s development team does not exactly inspire confidence, even so many months later; the entity still exists and is active to some degree, as the Friendsims suggest, but what on earth is really going on?
As I said before, the situation seems increasingly untenable for most people. Without a serious update of some sort, the number of fans who feel alienated or downright apathetic increases. If this trend continues, then we can only wonder how long it’ll be before people permanently drift away, potentially crippling the fandom. While some suggest--jokingly or not--that this outcome is inevitable or even good, I can’t help but feel that it would be a horrible waste.
(Update as of 9/29/18: I’ve been informed that James Roach released a video with some Hiveswap: Act 2 concept information. Enjoy.)
Nothing more for today.
17th of September
As it’s continued to be slow for the last few days, I’ll describe some events that have loosely happened since the last entry in today’s update.
On the 15th, I was celebrating the end of a long week of real life circumstances by drinking. After some time, I was taken with the sudden and violent urge to absolutely destroy a channel in as profane a manner as possible, so naturally I decided to pay altgen a visit. They quickly deduced that something was happening and the channel managed to accrue some significant activity beginning around 10:30 PM EST.
I’ve already described the Altgen Purge of days past and the more restrained but still frenetic Sacrifice. The former has not been allowed on the server for over a year now, and the latter is still new, only being around for a couple months or so, and is performed on a weekly basis. The channel is trying to find out ways to optimize the experience or better establish it; right now it’s in a gimmicky state, with each week being slightly different and/or based on a specific theme.
Some ideas that got tossed around after the last Sacrifice, taking place on Thursday, involved making it more of a regulated contest than the ad hoc mess it is now: typically what happens is I am reminded that it’s been a week--or I barge in with no preamble should I remember--and simply begin chanting “SACRIFICE”. This only works if a sufficient number of people are present; if not enough people join in or if the chat isn’t spamming “SACRIFICE” hard enough then I deem it a “failed sacrifice” and leave it for another time.
Once this part works, I typically select someone at random based on if I noticed them in the last week or if they’ve made a particularly good contribution to the channel. The person I choose is deemed “the sacrifice” and I ping them, give them the role “Altgenner of the Week” with a nice gold color to distinguish them, and then it’s over. Some weeks have a better result than others, with the best Sacrifices rivaling even the Purge in terms of sheer spam and shittiness. It is quite something to behold.
At the conclusion of the Sacrifice on the 13th, I recognized that the formula was getting stale and asked for some ideas. Someone, I believe qweq, mentioned that we should do the next event purely in the form of caveposting. Along with trying to establish a better system in general this was better than any other idea so far, so we were planning on doing it this Thursday the 20th. Then, I got drunk.
Thus on the 15th, fueled with a limitless desire to shitpost, I stumbled into altgen and initiated the Sacrifice a mere two days after the last. Being a Saturday night, there were plenty of people around for the occasion, and despite some initial confusion about the timing it picked up steam very quickly. True to qweq’s suggestion we conducted it solely using caveposting manner, which somehow whipped people up into a greater frenzy. I sacrificed qweq for providing the caveposting idea, and resolved again to come up with a better system to determine sacrifices in the future. At this point though, altgen started to truly spiral out of control.
Much like how the Homestuck fanbase has a lot of untapped potential for excitement, so too does altgen have this hidden reservoir of energy, except for shitposting. It used to be easier to draw out, but rule changes, politics, and a shifting userbase have made it much harder to unlock that potential. This is probably for the best, as the results of successfully doing so are fearsome to behold.
Altgenners launched into some of the most spirited shitposting I have seen in many months, fueled somewhat by their own restlessness, the momentum of the now-completed Caveman Sacrifice, and my own drunken stupor. I cast all hesitation to the wind and insulted whoever for whatever reason I so chose, broke rules with thorough whimsy, and overall just stirred the place up as much as possible.
The details after the first hour or so are gone from my memory, but I checked the results the next morning after nursing my aching head and was impressed: altgen usually sees an average of about 5,000 to 7,000 messages a day, give or take depending on if it’s the weekend and other miscellaneous factors. On the day of the Caveman Sacrifice there were just over 10,000.
Altgen was allowed to bask in this glory for a day or two; I felt satisfied enough with the effect of my presence that I mostly kept my hands off the place until today. After the brief discussion of how to more normalize the Sacrifices, I asked if anyone had done any thinking or come up with plans to do so. Sea Hitler and Dingus revealed that they actually had come up with a small system, one which would involve creating a contest where people can participate weekly.
Their version of it involves having a meme contest, where the person with the most votes for best meme wins altgenner of the week. While I dislike the idea of always being about memes, the idea is simple enough that it could be tweaked into something more effective. I’ll be working with them in the upcoming weeks to improve the system as much as possible and make it more engaging/workable, especially considering altgen’s intense capability to fuck things up.
Today, Makin mentioned a unique development that will go totally unnoticed by the average person but is nonetheless important: the Internet Archive has ceased complying with the robots exclusion standard. Like the vast majority of people this meant nothing to me, so he explained that the standard, also known as robots.txt, refers to a system that guides archival as performed by automatic programs.
Internet Archive does much what it says on the label, serving as an archive for as much stuff on the internet as possible. One may search for a webpage that is no longer around, and if one of the pages was cached in the past then it will be archived so people can see it indefinitely. The process of archival is insanely tedious, so anyone who bothers typically uses crawler programs, or robots, to automatically look through websites and archive them.
However, there are reasons why someone might not want a page archived, such as revealing personal information. If this is the case, then the owner of the webpage can specify in the settings of the page (robots.txt) whether or not a crawler should actually archive the page (“it's a honor code thing / it doesn't actually stop it from being crawled / it's a REQUEST / to not get indexed by google or other searchers”, Makin specifies).
The unfortunate part of this is that if a website tells crawlers not to archive it, that applies to ALL forms of the website past, present, and future from the time it specifies in robots.txt. This effectively ruins the idea of archival: “... what many people did was like, to erase history, they bought the domain and added robots.txt saying to not index / fucking over a lot of people / used in a lot of disinfo campaigns too”. It became trivial to thoroughly destroy efforts at keeping information preserved.
That is, until today. Internet Archive will no longer follow the robots.txt policy: "it'll help billions / a huge part of history is now available to humanity”. Those who relied on the principle in good faith will no doubt be upset by it, but Makin mentioned that Internet Archive also does information removal if one contacts them about it. It’ll be less convenient, but ultimately a better service for the effort.
Looping this around to why this matters for us, it would be remiss of me not to say that this opens up possibilities for Homestuck fans. The forums are sadly not affected by this, as the problem with them is extensive depth; in order to avoid storage/memory problems, Internet Archive only caches pages that were obtainable on an index search (the exact specifics of this are lost on me, but the overall point is that not every page gets cached and most forum threads are exempt from the process). However, who knows what resources will become available that previously weren’t? I find it hard to imagine that not a single lost fan adventure or information would be recovered from this policy change.
Aside from that, not a lot has happened. There have been remarkably few things for mspa-lit to comment on lately, although there was a Worth the Candle update today and SpaceX had a presentation about the future of the Big Falcon Rocket and a future mission to the moon. Relatively few people commented on the proceedings of that, mostly being myself, tmtmtl and Makin. The rest of the topics were fairly isolated from each other or insubstantial.
This is a very dangerous pattern. I’m reminded significantly of posting tendencies in the later days of both the Sydlexia and the Twitch Plays Pokemon IRC chats: it is fairly common, practically expected, that any given group will have members post things seemingly at random and/or according to their interests, and then the rest of the group will seize on the topic and talk about it for a while. It is the most base form of giving conversational sustenance to your group.
However, in both of those groups the amount that people would participate lessened gradually over time. The willingness or ability of people to participate and give a shit about what was being discussed seemed to dwindle. The rate at which users would submit something to be discussed decreased along with the actual rate at which people decided to discuss those things. Naturally, after enough time passed, each community became moribund.
I have seen this happen in mspa-lit before. I have grown quite depressed whenever it occurs, although it’s not an irreversible process. Even a little trickle of news or attention is usually enough to inflame us once more, giving rise to conversation like nothing happened. Even as I write this, Niklink posted a link to a spontaneous 4chan thread and now those present (for posterity’s sake and as a loose representative example: Gitaxian, Trickster, Solarsail, Putnam, Reti, Biscket, Dingus, tmtmtl, Sora, Tori, Revlar, and two or three others) are all posting with wild abandon. This has actually been in progress for half an hour or so, which is heartening to see.
Thus, the measure becomes more complicated: obviously how much people talk in your community is a sign of how strong or healthy it is, but the exact resilience of it is harder to assess. Clearly our community has the ability to bounce back from slow periods just fine, which makes me more optimistic for the future. Even the smallest amount of news we might care about rejuvenates us. The only question is, how long will that hold true?
I don’t believe that the community is dying, necessarily; I’ve expressed that fear multiple times, but at this point it’s more of a distant thought than anything else. I have faith that we’ll continue largely unabated for some time, if all goes well; I simply think it’s important to keep all the variables in consideration. It’s only true that everything is okay up until the point where it suddenly isn’t.
Nothing more for today.
19th of September
Yesterday, Makin made a claim about SBAHJ Book 2, commenting that they’re being moved from China to a Topatoco warehouse. While the assertion that they’re being moved from China makes sense (with the amount of manufacturing that occurs there), the specificity and confidence he had in the statement gave me some pause. After asking about it, he said that he had insider information of some sort and steadfastly refused to elaborate. Most people in the conversation just kind of moved on, and I certainly didn’t press for more--yet, I wonder whether he actually has an inside source and who it could possibly be. I’m certainly not about to make any guesses.
Today, on the other hand, we ended up discussing the shill list and why people are motivated to read it at all. It touched on the idea of Makin’s supposed cult of personality again, with people like Ost claiming that no one would actually read anything on the list if it weren’t for Makin being in the position he is, not to mention working so hard to gamify the list. And the fact that he’s been pushing it so hard for several months now.
I got burned in that conversation so I was already kind of hesitant to get involved further, but then it somehow morphed into yet another conversation about Makin’s suitability as leader of the community. This would have been perfectly rote but for the involvement of user5, who kept trying to comment on the proceedings in ways that were completely unrelated and frankly confusing. I would have been more upset if I could’ve actually parsed what he was trying to say, but in the end all it did was make things weird and difficult to understand.
As it is, I think I’m okay with that. Conversations about Makin’s leadership qualities are so old and over-hashed that I would never have considered including today’s discussion in this entry if it hadn’t gotten super weird for some reason. At this point I have no energy left to revisit that particular avenue of thought. As it always does, it ended without any sort of conclusion--satisfying or otherwise--and was just kind of a mess.
Instead, I’ve been trying to work out some additional angles for statistical research on this place. After assembling monthly activity graphs, I’ve been really curious about the activity of all of the channels individually. After looking into it, there appear to be three channels that could be identified as “major”: #general, #altgen, and #mspa-lit each with over four million messages (altgen has nearly five and a half million).
#hangout was the next biggest with just over 800,000 across its lifetime, but like some other channels it also had the disadvantage of being around for less time, being created on the 7th of May 2017. It dwarfs the other decidedly “minor” channels, such as #serious at just under 300,000 or #coding-tech with 200,000, not even to speak of the ones with less than 100,000 each. Yet, I wanted to include #hangout with the major channels in this analysis due to its relationship with #general.
After looking into it, there is an absolute correlation between the two. #general has about the same level of activity for a good month after #social was created, but then starting in August that year it started to decline rapidly. Messages dwindled from an average of 4,000-6,000 to about 1,000-2,000 a day. This got progressively worse as time went by, and in May of 2018 it was impossible to ignore: #general had fallen to less than 1,000 messages a day on average, roughly speaking. Around this time the channel was essentially dead, with the lowest days having less than 100 messages each.
Thus, even if there’s a slight net decrease in total messages in #general from when we had it and #hangout, this should more than make up for it with an increase in user retention. After checking briefly, the number of messages in #general has remained consistently high. Although it’s only been a month, that’s still a 10-fold increase at minimum for what is widely understood as the face of the community. It will undoubtedly be more palatable for anyone happening to step in than a completely dead channel.
That having been said, there appears to be some difficulties in getting the culture of the place to stick. For about a week after the two channels were merged, the socialites were desperately trying to hang on to their mannerisms. Eventually though, they succumbed to the slow but steady inflow of other people--between people joining the server, the (few) people already using the channel, and a couple other factors, the users from #hangout have inevitably changed a lot of the characteristics that were emblematic of their channel.
#general is now a weird amalgamation of various elements: it occasionally displays what is verifiably #hangout-ish behavior, mixed with the gentle and unassuming attitude of people from #general before the merger. One of these other factors I mentioned comes in the form of a surprising amount of participation from altgenners such as qweq. One might suspect that this would be a problem, but it hasn’t been: none of them are actually shitposting.
Yet, there is a certain quality that their presence brings to the channel. It’s almost impossible to put my finger on it, but even without the actual act of shitposting their mere behavior has managed to alter the emotional and behavioral undertones of the channel. The dynamic feels different because of them. It might be because of a bias towards perceiving the attitude of people from altgen, and this is just normal behavioral mixing. It’s really hard to tell at this point.
In an effort to understand all of this better, and to bring it back around to the topic’s origin, I’ve embarked on a quest similar to pulling the message and user counts out for statistical purposes. It’s essentially the same idea but bigger in scale by an order of magnitude: I want to get the data for how many messages are sent each day in every channel. For a channel that’s been around for the entire duration of the server, that’s over 900 days so far; with every channel combined, even with those that haven’t been around the entire time, that’s a lot of data points to collect.
I already attempted to gather the data for #general, and after two hours of repetitive clicking finally got caught up to the current day. Upon seeing just how many channels there are, I promptly said “Fuck that” and decided to ask Ceru for help. If this were a couple years ago I would probably have done it by myself anyway, but after some of my previous projects like this I’ve lost the energy for doing things the ridiculously, unnecessarily hard way.
Ceru wrote some code to go through and do it automatically; there were some difficulties with it at first and I was afraid it wouldn’t work, but after finagling things he managed to get it working. It takes some time, but it’s a damn sight faster than me doing it by hand. It’ll be tomorrow at the earliest, probably a few days, before all of the channels are caught up, at which point I can continue updating the data by hand with no problem whatsoever. Ceru’s help with this is enormously appreciated (update as of 9/29/18: it worked! Results are here).
Nothing more for today.
20th of September
As I tend to do when things slow down, I decided to cast out into other servers a bit more frequently today. A few choice conversations actually reminded me of a topic that I’ve touched on before, but only in passing. The concept of splinter servers has been explored a few times in the past in this document, but I’ve never really offered a history of what are arguably the most well known of them.
Back in Ye Olde Days of mid 2016 or so, characters such as cynicallyCritical and Aradia were still around in conjunction with Toast. They established a very firm camaraderie with each other; there were an assortment of other people involved, none of whom I’m really familiar with unfortunately. For reasons that I am also not familiar with, presumably a mix of being upset with Makin and just wanting a group of their own, these individuals decided to create what might very well be the first HSD splinter: Stargazing.
Bear in mind that I wasn’t around for these proceedings and I’ve actually gotten conflicting reports from people on why or how things happened, so events get a little fuzzy from here. If I’m not mistaken, Stargazing started sucking out activity from the HSD to the point that Makin grew concerned, which is kind of the origin of his poor reception of them now. Stargazing was on an invitation only basis, but over time the server accrued more and more people that were deemed cool enough to join.
For reasons that are again unknown to me5--the reason I was offered was simply “drama”--Stargazing was dealt a fatal blow later the same year when a group broke off to form yet another server. Pointedly named Microscope, or Micro for short, Ost and a user named Callum were responsible for forming this new group. To distinguish it from Stargazing, they made the decision to have relatively open invitations.
Twonks and “a large number of altgenners” ended up joining, and Nights mentions that the high proportion of randoms ended up killing the server quality. Amusingly, the solution to this was to simply create what is humorously referred to as “Microscope 2: Electric Boogaloo”. Even fewer details are available to me about this particular incarnation, although at this and all potential subsequent instances of servers being created, it’s basically irrelevant; only the first one or two “generations” of splinter servers can really be called relevant to the origin; after that they have essentially become insular communities with their own sets of history and rules.
It’s important to note too that it doesn’t proceed in a straight line of servers like this, either; rather, it’s actually pretty common for members of a splinter server to become emboldened and create their own even more derivative servers; in some cases this becomes such a nested phenomenon that everyone has their own server that everyone else from the parent server become members of. After even a short time, the process can become so incestuous that it’s nothing short of overwhelming to keep track of.
Another server worthy of mention was borne out of the whole Nu-Altgen fiasco. After doing that number-crunching the other night, I noticed that January of this year had one of the lowest message counts of any average month, about 150,000 less than would otherwise be expected. Makin was nothing short of mystified when he saw this, trying to come up with a whole host of (incorrect) reasons for the discrepancy. He didn’t feel like systematically getting the actual answer, so I went ahead and did that too.
It turns out that Nu-Altgen happened literally at the beginning of this year, and when one compares the message rate in altgen to months before and after January it becomes fairly evident: November and December of 2017 both had over 300,000 messages in that channel alone, then January saw the rate get cut literally in half with less than 150,000 messages. This serves as an example of how devastating the formation of a splinter server can be: around 20% of the total message count for an entire month was wiped out.
I can recall Makin being pretty concerned about this. He went so far as offering Nu-Altgen their own channel in order to get them back--something I warned against him doing--but they declined. The outcome appears to have worked out anyway, as the message rate for altgen absolutely exploded in later months, rapidly climbing to nearly 500,000 messages each month. What’s more, there have also been some reports of Nu-Altgen basically self-destructing as time goes by due to infighting and lack of interest.
There are, of course, numerous other servers, but not all of them formed in the same manner as Stargazing or Nu-Altgen. I’ve described this before, but it’s an idea of some contention whether or not a given server qualifies as a splinter; some argue that being a “splinter” depends on the intent with which it was originally created, while many claim that it has to do with the server’s population and how its members all met. If the latter is true, then many private servers with a mix of HSD residents and more personal friends would all qualify as personal-splinter hybrids of some sort.
It’s actually a pretty complicated issue, although one that has cooled down considerably. In addition to people not really caring quite as much about bringing them up, Makin has stopped persecuting the idea quite as much as he used to; he has defaulted to the idea that all splinter servers are doomed to fail eventually, and whether or not this is true it seems to mollify him enough. Besides, as near as I can tell there hasn’t been a significant splinter formed in months.
The splinter server phenomenon is actually something to consider on a purely conceptual basis as well; from what I can tell, the concept is actually related to similar practices on IRC. I’m hardly an expert in communication, but it seems obvious to me that the reason this happens is because of the way these services work: even back on IRC, it was easy enough to create and register your own server on a given network. This is even more true for Discord, to the point that it’s trivial to set up and give one fairly complex and personalized settings.
This isn’t really the case on other media platforms such as boards and forums. The communication is simply too slow, and creating these other domains involves too much technical work. It does in fact happen: the multitude of 4chan clones is clear-cut proof that this phenomenon exists, but there seems to be a correlation between posting speed and the frequency with which splintering occurs.
My own past with Sydlexia is another point of evidence towards this: we only experienced a serious schism once it was clear to everyone who even remotely cared that we were perilously close to community death. The amount of momentum required to successfully forge a new forum--with other people--is just too much for it to work, even if it’s not strictly impossible. This fact leads me to suggest a rule (which, knowing the internet, has probably already been postulated approximately 400 billion times): the rate at which an internet community can splinter into derivative groups is proportionate to the speed of communication.
All of this may lead one to wonder: if the splitting of a community is so common, then why bother trying to attach meaning to associating with specific people? Indeed, I wonder about that idea a lot already, questioning why it is people seem to be as nonchalante about the loss of community members most of the time. Mines provided an interesting if somewhat troublesome answer: for him, at least, it’s less about the concept of forming a community and more about forming a space.
When I asked for clarification, he described it thusly: a community is based on people and the connections they form, whereas a space is based more on the feeling or atmosphere. He mentioned that, despite the milieu of mspa-lit changing drastically over time, the atmosphere of the place feels basically the same as it has for the last couple years. While the exact details of this could be thoroughly debated, upon some reflection I feel like this is actually a pretty accurate assessment.
However, I take issue with the idea that the state can be derived without people. It’s easy enough to say that the atmosphere of a place is why you go somewhere, but the atmosphere is typically informed and cultivated by the kind of people who go to it. It’s entirely possible to manufacture a desired feeling or tone regardless of who is participating, but when that happens it usually just feels forced and fake; in the big picture this is only really successful in driving people away. I don’t think I need to explain why this defeats the purpose of having an internet group in the first place.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of September
There’s been a small but noticeable shift in the population of mspa-lit: in addition to others, there’ve been two people who suddenly showed up and are participating a notable amount in the proceedings. In a time of bereft of substantial developments of any kind, it’s nice to see that there are still newer people showing up and participating. The people joining us recently have been ᛈᛟᛏᚨᛏᛟ and Vitis.
ᛈᛟᛏᚨᛏᛟ, runic letters equating to “Potato” (which I will strictly use to refer to this person from here forward), appears to be an extreme cynic. So far they remind me heavily of tmtmtl for various reason: they express significant disdain for most things we end up discussing in the chat; or, rarely enough they will latch onto something, usually highly specific, silly, or otherwise mundane, and designate it as cool. These behaviors makes very little sense to me and leads me to believe that, also like tmtmtl, Potato is a younger member.
Vitis is also highly cynical, although this manifests in a slightly different form. The few interactions I’ve had with them so far suggests that they are a Carlarc-esque shitter, although at this point they appear far less blatant or frequent in their shitposting; while Carl is typically pretty shameless when he engages in his usual manner of fuckery, Vitis appears to be markedly more mild, or at least is showing some restrain as they get used to the group.
Both of these users appeared almost from nowhere a few nights ago, and I first took notice of them on the 21st. I’m actually somewhat taken aback at how quickly they’ve inserted themselves into our fold, although they have done it in the ideal sense: rather than making a big deal of participating and joining up, which is often seen as attention seeking behavior, they have simply moved in and made themselves at home. If they have questions they either work to inform themselves, unless it is sufficiently confusing, in which case the “lurk moar” rule is willingly suspended.
Based on this, should they choose to continue talking here, I assume they will be well-accepted. Their attitude is definitely fitting: we are more or less infamous for our collectively negative appraisal of most things, or for being too harsh on stuff we talk about. In true form, both Potato and Vitis have been very quick to lambast most of the topics they’ve been around for, including HPMOR and video games such as Kerbal Space Program or especially Pokemon. If they continue at this rate I have no doubt they’ll become recognized fixtures in the community.
In the last couple of days a few remnants of ideas from earlier this year were brought up: less relevant of the two I can think of is the Homestuck Zine, which appears to have been completely dropped. This was brought to my attention yesterday when Makin posted a screenshot of the Twitter page, saying they were “in the process of wrapping things up,” and I briefly got excited. That’s before I realized the tweet in question was from the middle of June.
Since then there has been absolutely mention I can find of the Zine. It would be one thing if, after the initial announcement, there had been nothing; the tweet previously linked suggests they got far enough in the process that they were finishing up the issue, and then it was just scrapped for some reason. The What Pumpkin staff releases all happening months prior, even before the Zine was first announced. What on earth happened that the Zine just completely disappeared? Revlar’s initial prediction that it was all a simple scam may turn out to be correct6 .
Similarly, and arguably more importantly, what about the Friendsim art contest? The winner of the contest has not received any kind of word from What Pumpkin, and after so long it honestly feels like they’re just not going to bother. After this topic came up the other night, I distinctly remember Mines commenting: “I just want Homestuck to die already / It’s been so mismanaged,” a sentiment that is slowly but surely spreading throughout the server as a whole. Resentment towards whoever may be responsible is rising and it’s eventually going to culminate as something terrible.
This led to an overall discussion of the state of the fandom now and in the past. I started reading Homestuck back in late 2012, although my participation online was sparing enough that I know little about the state of things back then. The number of people around who were solidly present in those days is gradually decreasing, as time goes by and interest in the comic wanes. I’ve been under the impression that the zenith of the fandom was throughout late 2012 and 2013, but Tensei--obviously present for that time period--insists that this interpretation is incorrect.
Instead, he says that 2012 by itself was the peak in fan participation and comic activity. While it’s trivial to corroborate the rate of the comic at any given time, I tried to argue that the fandom still had serious momentum even when the comic started to slow down. Other people present argued that, once the pauses and hiatuses began, the relative activity of the fandom was basically a flatline compared to before--even just a short time after Hussie initiated whatever pauses, the fandom was apparently dead by the end of 2013.
This raises an interesting question, for me at least: if the fandom was pronounced dead in 2013, then what on earth could it be considered now, five years later? Further, if the law of averages says that the more “normal” fans (some would say “less obsessed”) all disappear over time, then are we starting to reach the tail end of those who are properly invested in the comic? How much longer will this continue until even the most ardent among us are dispirited and give up the chase?
Then again, I’m sure people have been saying such things or asking these questions since even before the comic ended, and there’s still a lot of us here. Maybe our general willingness to discuss things together will prevail over the ever-increasing gap in content? I’m reminded of the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is receiving a Netflix adaptation that will probably revitalize their fandom for at least a while, depending on the overall quality.
Comparing Homestuck to The Last Airbender might be disingenuous, but what I’m suggesting is that something similar may happen: perhaps Hussie will finally begin a new comic or there will be some sort of development that kind of reinvigorates us for a while. I joked the other night that WP or whoever is making decisions might be trying to starve us on purpose, making sure we fade out before releasing actually new content in order to start the fandom anew. Actually believing this would be kooky beyond simple conspiracy theorism, of course, but it’s a more palatable explanation than simply “nothing is happening right now”. It’s distressing to be told how far we’ve fallen.
This discussion about the state of the fandom actually began on the 22nd and carried over into the next day. A more in-depth examination of the change in activity involves looking at the actual things the fandom produces and how popular they get. There are relatively few things from the modern day that can be said to approach any level of true popularity in the fandom as a whole, but there are multiple examples of content from 2012-2014 that are still fondly remembered by nearly everyone who was around back then.
Even I, with my minimal contact with the rest of the fandom at that time, can very rapidly identify stuff like the old Octopimp videos (which the creator now looks back on with some shame, if I remember correctly) and the Homestuck Gif Party videos (which nearly everyone who knows what they are cringes over nowadays). More positive examples include the beloved Lullaby for Gods video. The underlying point of providing these old things I’m sharing is that nothing quite like them is produced by Homestuck fans anymore.
I don’t believe anything in the fandom will ever again approach the level of recognition that these things did in the past; the crux of this argument is that this would be true even if things made now are of similar or better quality, which is a really important litmus test for the overall strength of a group. This leads into one of the explanations for why the fandom has declined so much: the obvious reasoning we’ve discussed before is that the source material has dried up and we’re basically starving to death, but we mentioned that the style of the comic--bearing in mind that it was started in 2009--simply isn’t palatable to modern-day culture.
There is serious merit to the idea that the same comic released in 2019 would simply not attain the level of popularity because the culture from now as compared to 2009 is just too radically different. User5 mentioned: “literally every single character / is some fkin stereotype of how ppl talked in 2000-2009 / … / its just more sanitized and weird / … / [now] people are alot less genuine and therefore alot less verifably fking stupid”. Talking on the internet seems to require a lot more appreciation for nuance and sarcasm now than it did a decade ago; thus the argument goes that now people are far less able to relate or appreciate the characters and their behavior.
I disagree with this on a general basis. It’s certainly true in specific communities, ours being a good example, but I wouldn’t expect this to be the case ubiquitously. I suspect that too many users here are having their behaviors erroneously informed by 4chan or other websites that are purposefully cynical/ironic/deceptive to the extreme, which colors their perception of everywhere else. Not to suggest, of course, that the internet at large is completely innocent or naive, but rather that most internet communities will consist of a mix of both, which should be expected. If there’s another explanation for why Homestuck has decreased in popularity so much aside from simple decay, I don’t believe this one is particularly accurate.
Nothing more for today.
24th of September
Yesterday we mildly began a more concerted effort to actually handle slurs to err on the side of caution from Discord. Makin has repeatedly asked in the past what Discord’s policies actually are regarding censorship or guidelines for handling slurs, but they’ve apparently always waffled on the answer somewhat. Instead of waiting for any sort of hammer to drop, he’s decided that we should take the initiative on this matter and fix things up ourselves.
I’ve actually been waiting for something like this for a while: Makin enlisted the help of DeltaPsi and Ceru in getting rid of all instances of slurs (the list of which is fairly arbitrary but culturally sensible), although the question of what to do after that has remained unanswered for the most part. Was the cleanup all that needed to be done or should we be more proactive?
If we’re speaking terms of quantity, the number of slurs wasn’t even that great in the big picture. I don’t have access to the raw numbers since most of the posts are now deleted, but the number of posts that had slurs in them probably didn’t even come to a tenth of a percent, which suggests that the behavior was rare enough to not merit much of a response to begin with. That having been said, what we’ve done already chafes with some of the other mods.
Tensei, WoC, and Toast have all very strongly spoken against this censorship; WoC in particular is not happy at being rendered largely unable to inflict his more choice words on people, but in the end he’s submitted to the change as well. They were even more vehemently against my idea, which was to take it a step further for altgen and proactively ban slurs from being spoken there.
Altgen has been a problem in this way even when we were less concerned with this in the past, so it felt like a natural next step to prohibit them from saying them now. I didn’t expect my mandate to be so controversial since it was only one (evidently problematic) channel, but Tensei was strongly outspoken against my plan anyway. After an appeal, Makin basically said: “I don’t care about this one way or the other, let Drew handle it if he wants”, and that was that. I don’t anticipate it’ll be much of a problem anyway, but we’ll see how this works out.
Later in the day, there was a remarkable development on the subreddit: a fellow named /u/XanDavis came and gave an impromptu AMA. They explained--and gave proof that--they were previously known as Mayonaka on the MSPA forums. This is notable because Mayonaka was a user who inspired an entire segment of Homestuck, which I will explain shortly. Back when it was just Problem Sleuth, Hussie would let people pay him to draw their ideas and make short comics out of them.
Mayonaka was around during this time and decided they had an idea they wanted to see Hussie write and draw out, so they forked over the cash and described an idea called the Midnight Crew. Later when Homestuck became a thing, glimpses of the Midnight Crew were jokingly shown in certain panels, and then the first Intermission was dedicated solely to a story about them. This eventually looped back into the comic proper, and is now regarded as “one of the best elements of the entire story” by a significant proportion of fans.
In the AMA, Mayonaka describes these circumstances and then elaborates further, explaining that after the Intermission started they wanted to make a sort of prequel to the events concerning the Midnight Crew in Homestuck. Apparently this fancomic attracted a lot of attention and sparked some serious controversy, so they eventually deleted the entire thing. Now only a few sparse images on the Internet Archive can be found; by the author’s admission, the rest of it is completely lost unless some random happened to archive it by chance.
Mayonaka showing up to talk on the subreddit is our equivalent of one of the Knights of the Round Table appearing and casually giving out details that Arthurian scholars have been debating for centuries7. In one fell swoop they put to rest a question of a continuity problem concerning a pendant that appears in the Intermission but was retconned out later, something that has been a curiosity for us for literal years. Seeing this figure appear and give out such details like so much candy is really cool in a silly way.
Sadly, Mayonaka doesn’t seem interested in Homestuck at all now. After questions from myself and MoreEpicThanYou, they mentioned that the comic got too complicated after a while and they stopped bothering to keep up with it. They also mentioned that they were “looking forward to Andrew’s game”; I don’t know if they keep up with modern developments like we do, but we didn’t have the heart to tell them it’s probably not happening. This does kind of underscore the musing from yesterday about what we must be like in comparison to an “average fan” obsession wise, but if one thinks about it for too long it actually paints a fairly grim picture.
Nothing more for today.
28th of September
For the last few days I’ve been musing on the very noticeable decline of interest in mspa-lit. After keeping track of discussion in #general and #altgen for a while, it feels like those channels are self-sustaining enough that it doesn’t really matter, but mspa-lit’s level of activity has been dropping gradually as time goes by. It’s hard to say conclusively without the actual numbers to visualize the trend, but the feeling from earlier this year is back in full swing. Perhaps this will change in future months; I can only hope for such an outcome.
A conversation we had today briefly led to discussing SPAT: tmtmtl mentioned that it gives us a greater sense of community, which I misinterpreted initially. I thought she was saying that SPAT is one of the only things left that’s keeping the channel alive and I was instantly filled with a profound sense of disgust at the idea. I used to say a while ago in this document that I don’t want to affect the flow of community events with this document, and the idea that it would continue past its expiration date just because of what I’m doing is ironically revolting to consider--it made me feel like I was interfering and meddling in things.
Returning to the original point though, she claimed that these updates are simply something that the group looks forward to, and I appreciate that perspective a lot. I hope that this document deepens their appreciation for each other, if nothing else; the chances of my writing actually being picked up by anyone in the future is slim to none, and I hold to no illusions that it will keep the memory of this place alive except for maybe a few extremely eccentric people interested in the remarkably obscure.
More realistically, I would just like everyone who I have described here to be able to remember their experience of this place fondly. Sometimes more than others it’s no doubt hard to achieve that, especially between pointless drama and a steadily decreasing interest in the thing that brought us together; occasionally, though, there is a fine balance that leads to golden moments, filled with just the right topic to engage people and the perfect level of banter for everyone to enjoy. The less enjoyable times are important in their own way, but as long as we can remember the reason we endured then it will all have been worth it.
I believe that, however briefly, we had such a moment today. This was perhaps aided by the first bit of anything that we could reasonably call news in a long time: James Roach released a track on Tumblr that was originally going to be featured in Hiveswap Act 3, then was put into the end of Act 2, but he wanted the full thing to be released; thus this post. Nested at the end is some information about Hiveswap’s developmental status.
As we feared: “we’re basically just on hiatus rn”. James posits that this was implied by the announcements that came before, and while the post is not fresh in my memory this is disappointing to hear. I was afraid that there would be a lot of negative response to this, but it seems as if everyone who’s bothered to comment is being supportive, thanking James for breaking the many months-long silence on the topic. It’s really gratifying to hear just about anything about Hiveswap from one of the few who would reasonably know anything about it.
After the post came out, Makin preemptively forfeited his bet with WoC about the release of Act 2, saying: “remember I am always right / except when I thought act 2 would come out this year / that was a critical miss on my part”. WoC demanded compensation in the form of a video game on Steam, or perhaps a Team Fortress 2 hat. After some consideration he settled on Fallout: New Vegas, and in this manner the bargain was upheld.
James’ post comes out after some news from Viz yesterday, which is subtle but possibly important: the release date for Homestuck Book 3 was originally October 25th, but it has been pushed up to the 23rd. Even if you aren’t familiar with Homestuck itself, if you’ve been paying attention to this document at all then you should understand the significance of toying with specific dates by now.
Naturally, the change has led to a lot of speculation over Hussie saying there would be “some news” later this year over the status of the epilogue. October 25th is the second to last Meme Date in the comic, followed only by November 11th. There is also potential for Christmas or New Year’s, but we consider those times far less than the ones that have immediate, canonical relevance to the story. June 12th this year was completely devoid of any news whatsoever, which played a significant part in our general dissatisfaction now.
The release being moved up from the meme date, while admittedly not being much to go on, is an impossible-to-miss sign for basically everyone who cared enough to join this server. As soon as the change was noticed, it set off a flurry of excitement; some are actually looking forward to anything, although most of us I suspect are still being cautious. I certainly have no intention of getting my hopes up for an update of some sort, as nice as it would be.
I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic, but recently we had a run-in with an older, intensely ignominious figure from our community. For those reading this that are aware of what I’m referencing, I’m personally requesting a moratorium on the subject’s details. For the purposes of this document, I’m only commenting on it at all to avoid confusion regarding past versions: I have scrubbed all instances of a particular name because the person it belonged to was fabricated. They deserve no recognition of any kind, and in all instances where I must refer to them I will name them only as recursiveSlacker. This is retroactive as well: the first mention of recursiveSlacker is now marked by a footnote in the entry for 14th of July, 2017.
For something less horrible to write about concerning the general goings-on of our community, it is high time that I described some more of WoC’s behavior. WoC runs a comic that he has literally titled Low Effort Comics, of which he delights in posting updates for to people with a ping or a DM. It’s actually been pleasant witnessing the steady increase of his artistic prowess over time. Occasionally he’ll put his skills to work making edits of other comics like Dilbert, which are often used to poke fun at various people in the community, especially myself and Makin.
Recently however, he’s just started posting screenshots from an older comic known as Bloom County. There’s a character known as Bill the Cat who is, in a word, a complete moron in every conceivable way8. There is a specific image of Bill the Cat that WoC has started posting whenever he deems the current conversation or participant pointless and meandering. As one might imagine, the mere words “Bwong bwong bwong twang” have become a point of extreme annoyance.
WoC and Toast have both been doing this recently, where they seem more and more determined to shut down people or topics they don’t care about. This is being done at the risk of making things fatally boring--even more so than it already is--and just making it generally less worth talking. It’s an aggravating habit that they seem completely devoid of remorse for. I’m not sure if they’re attempting to improve things in a perverse way or if they’re simply trying to squeeze some blood out of this joyless stone in their fashion.
Toast, to his credit, seems to realize that he’s having an adverse effect on the quality of the place lately. Without going into too much detail, he asked for some advice on how to improve. I’m afraid that I don’t actually have the tools or experience to effectively help him, at least not in the way he’s describing. The fact that he’s asking at all is important though, and I hope that he’ll reach out to other people to hear what they have to say.
Too often it feels like people here trying to be genuinely interested in stuff get shut down. Sometimes people end up killing conversations prematurely because they’re not personally interested, or they do something so inconvenient that it ruins what would have been an amicable topic. Nat did something like this the other night, where she brought up a genuinely cool coincidence (“avogadro’s constant times boltzmann’s constant = ideal gas constant”).
I commented lightly on this and she took the opportunity to make fun of me for the perceived ignorance, which succeeded in immediately annoying me mostly. I’m not sure if she was going for that necessarily, but it is one of the countless examples of this sort of thing: an ill-timed joke or general mean-spiritedness, whichever it actually is, ruins a legitimate interaction. I’ve seen the same process play out dozens of times now.
Not any one person is responsible for this problem, but there are some who are more guilty of doing it than others. Regardless of who’s to blame, when this happens so many times it becomes a natural response to want to visit other places. I’ve been checking out other channels and servers more and more commonly over the last month; the population of our community seems to drift more often than it did before, with old people leaving at random and new people coming in, or even vice versa sometimes. The worry of activity is almost certainly just in my head again, brought on by long days where I think too much. The only thing I can consciously grasp that suggests the opposite is that Tipsy has recently started speaking again, which for some reason I take as a good omen.
I’m sure it’s clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that I want this place to endure, and I think it easily could if we just had a little bit more to go on than practically nothing. The news post from today led to a small but noticeable burst in activity. However, it couldn’t keep up for more than half an hour or so; the question here is in sustainability, and whether or not we’ll be able to keep a hold of ourselves for much longer.
In one of these related servers9, I was talking about how fearful I am of an actual collapse of our community because the fear is more real now than it has been in months. Tensei eventually commented: “embrace the fucking mono no aware”, a Japanese term for the “awareness of impermanence”. It suggests that accepting the transient nature of things is important, and while it is sad that things will pass, there’s not a lot we can do to resist it as time goes by.
I recognize that this is ultimately true for us as well--I’ve consciously and unconsciously considered the idea for a long time now--but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept that this place is going to go away eventually. All I can say is that I really hope this outcome is a long time away, as long as it reasonably can be given the circumstances. I might be surprised yet--activity seems to fluctuate right now, and there could be a renaissance of some sort if the right circumstances arise.
Such a revival is really unlikely at this point, but even without one I don’t think that’ll change things for me very much beyond being increasingly wistful. I effectively made my decision a while ago: even if the community does dry up someday, I’m okay with staying until the very end. This place, the events that have happened here, and especially the people that inhabited it are things I don’t want to forget, and I’ll do what I can to preserve them.
Nothing more for today10.
29th of September
Today there was a pretty considerable altercation between Tera and Tensei. Apparently some potent discourse happened involving the word “trap” again; I was busy at the time so I didn’t get to witness any of it personally. Tera claimed that it asked Tensei to stop using the word and that he refused, accusing Tera of virtue signaling. As one might expect, Tera became rather upset at this and decided to stop using mspa-lit as a result.
Naturally I was pretty irate at this turn of events and, as usual, decided to weigh in to try and help--I wanted to fix this unfortunate turn of events. After confronting Tensei he claimed that none of what Tera mentioned had actually transpired, but when I asked for evidence he said that “the log is right there” and I should go check it myself; Tensei was completely unwilling to engage on the matter because he thought it was unworthy of concern in the first place.
I was initially baffled by this and unsure how to proceed, but after some consideration it only served to make me angrier. Tera was somewhat vague in its explanations, if indeed it offered any, and Tensei was loathe to treat the matter with any sort of respect or concern. In a last ditch effort to try and get the two to reconcile I bridged the conversation in the modchat, but neither of them really cared for some reason.
At this point I had a vision of myself struggling futilely for hours or even days to fix a problem that neither party actually cared about, and as a result of this I suddenly gave up. It is possible that it really wasn’t that big of a deal--although the intense lack of respect or willingness to cooperate seemed itself to be a huge problem--but all of the underlying tension of the previous few weeks came to a head and I dropped the topic almost violently.
In truth, I was very disappointed in both of them. Tera seemed unwilling or afraid to face the issue, which is more understandable, but Tensei was utterly dismissive of any ill-feelings he may have generated. He often touts a personal philosophy that seems driven by self-interest, which by itself is not necessarily bad, but occasionally I can’t help but see it as full-blown selfishness.
I don’t really want to pass judgment on either of them because my assessments are flawed in a variety of ways. But, regarding the incident today, I think that I’m allowed to be disappointed. Two people that I trust to behave like reasonable adults both displayed an inability to act in responsible, considerate ways. At a certain point there’s nothing I can really do with that, especially since neither of them perceive it as a bigger problem; normally I would throw myself into the middle of this to make the people involved reconcile, but this time it’s not worth the anguish.
My decision to remain uninvolved paid off anyhow: Tera started reusing mspa-lit later the same evening, calling itself “weak-willed” or some such. While I’m glad it’s decided to stay, the development also served to heighten my frustration in a subtle way. How many times have I involved myself in the affairs of other people for no real reason? This outcome makes me wonder if my efforts in similar predicaments have been more or less wasted.
At the end of the day, though, I’ll settle for Tera being back. The rest of the day was filled with a more interesting, pleasant development anyway: Makin found a Homestuck-related Bay 12 Games Forum thread from mid 2009. Funnily, Putnam can be seen speaking at various points, but the main attraction is the enormous quantity of art and fan-theories. It’s basically a mega-thread that spans literally from the end of July 29th in 2009 to the current day (the last post at the time of writing being May 4th, 2018).
While it’s certainly not the MSPA Forums, this thread provides an excellent snapshot of the state of the fandom from even the earliest parts of the comic. Because the thread also has persisted to the modern day, it’s useful for tracking the evolution of fanart and commentary. Since Homestuck ended in 2016 the thread has been mostly abandoned, with only a few posts each year keeping it afloat.
Before that though, everything from the beginning of the thread up to a few months after the comic ended is extremely dense: there’s literally 3,522 pages with 15 comments each, meaning there’s over 52,000 posts in that thread alone over the years. I haven’t really trawled through it myself (and can’t really think of anyone who would have the time to do so), but I imagine there’s a lot of forgotten gold resting there.
Indeed, so entertaining were the contents that Makin and a few others were consistently posting art from the thread for several hours. Most of the images were actually quite interesting: the quality varied considerably, but most of it was clearly earnest and some of it was even quite well done. There were many pictures that portrayed ideas or events that fans thought would happen; most of these ideas turned out to be incorrect of course, but it illustrates the mentality of the fandom in its youth.
For a long time Homestuck operated on a basis of expanding scope: each development in the story brought up more questions than it answered, and everyone who was a fan enjoyed hashing out possible answers to those questions. The intense theorycrafting is something that most older fans of Homestuck remember fondly, and giving the thread even a cursory glance indicates that the viewpoint is well deserved (from user Neruz on October 18th, 2009: “Nothing is coincidence in MSPA. Nothing.”).
One of the parts of discovering this thread I find most important is what it implies for the fandom as a whole. In keeping with the nostalgia of old theorycrafting, this lone thread on a completely unrelated website is a visible example of the kind of energy and intensity that fans had for the comic so long ago. Makin once said a while back that losing the MSPA Forums was probably the greatest blow to fandom history; based off of this thread alone I imagine he’s right.
Nothing more for today.
30th of September
Just a scant couple of hours before I woke up today, mspa-lit witnessed the return of a number of people who have been missing for quite some time now. I missed the first portion of it of course, but it lasted even after I managed to get involved: Minish, CookieFonster, and Yaz all popped onto the server and started a conversation that truly did feel like old times for us.
A lot of this consisted of really casual, lighthearted mockery--Tensei at one point remarked, “isnt that a proverb or something / trouble never comes alone”--and Makin feigned dismay at their return. It turned out Minish was celebrating his birthday, which is the reason he and Cookie came back apparently. Yaz ended up coming back when they heard a “reunion” was taking place and wanted to join in on the fun.
Other people besides me were fairly happy with the change, no matter if it was temporary. Bambosh remarked on “all the friends we made along the way / its like christmas”. There was much ribbing about the festivity, Makin at one point saying “I’m out”. Minish jumped on the opportunity to say we had unlocked “The Drew Ending” of the server, as opposed to “The Makin Ending”, an overt reference to visual novels and their pathed storytelling.
At one point Nights made an errant comment: “why is there like a highschool reunion happening here”, which is honestly a fitting title for all of this. A similar event is actually what inspired me to get more involved on the server in the first place; on one of the very first nights I had joined, I was enamored with an interaction between Toast and older regulars CynicallyCritical and Aradia, among others; their familiarity and in-jokes reminded me heavily of what I liked so much about the Sydlexia community.
Just as back then, though, eventually the event today ended. Yaz and then Minish left the server once again, although Cookiefonster appears to be staying for now. I’m sure something will cause him to go once more eventually, but in the meantime it’s nice to have another oldie around. There’s no telling when the next Highschool Reunion will happen, but it will undoubtedly be just as entertaining.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
1 note: drew was mad because we disagreed with him, there was no other drama -- :die:
2 dirty lies
3 he hasn't even read it -- Tensei says he’s read it “allegedly”, so go figure
4 I said that would be a good date, not that I was certain, and the bet was done like over a year ago after act 1 came out, FAKE NEWS
5 why would people only brought together through shared hatred split apart, what a mystery
6 It's not a scam, the person running it is really nice, I have no idea what happened but blaming WP by default usually works
7 is that a motherfucking WORTH THE CANDLE reference
8 very much like drew
9 evil splinters
10 sorry for the Angst Arc (tm) of SPAT, next update kickstarts the Epilogue/Return of Bill Bolin Arc, which is universally considered the best arc by the manga fans -- don’t you have some splinters to destroy or something