Drew Linky
When I first thought of ending SPAT in the first few months of 2019, I immediately knew that I wanted to get the thoughts and feelings of people here straight from their mouths. This page is a monument to the time that we've spent together, and to the spirit of the document I've written.
Most of these are untitled; those with a title have them included in the table of contents. There are footnotes in a couple, so keep your eye out. As I've requested elsewhere, please keep the memory of these people with you--they deserve it.
ADDENDUM 4TH OF OCTOBER 2025: clearly, I did not end SPAT like I thought I might. During a site wide reorganization, I have included these near the beginning of 2020 where I had initially decided to call it quits, since that's about where they belong.
Table of Contents
Ephemerald - Of Homestuck and Discord
Gitaxian - SPAT Was a Complete and Utter Failure
interrobang - "What can you say about HSD?"
Shill Talk
MrNostalgic - My Experience with Homestuck and the HSD
tensei - Small collection of haikus
TIPSY - Some tipsy reflections
valkyrie - HSD is a dumb little big thing
Wizard of Chaos - WHY USERS ARE THE ENEMY
Andrew
Being the first to join the server, I feel obligated to go on a long retrospective rant about how the server’s humble beginnings and how it’s grown over the years, and while I could do that and I love HSD to bits (probably more than I should, if I’m honest), I feel HSD’s little uniquities have stacked on top of each other for so long that it’s become something quite esoteric and sort of hard to explain. I’d imagine that the goings-on and characters seem quite bizarre to an outsider to the server. I’ve been around to witness the entire life of the server so far, from its first day as basically just an Overseer v2 game chat to whatever it could be called now, certainly not just a Homestuck server, and with SPAT ‘ending,’ I feel a sort of melancholy.
SPAT hadn’t always been around, of course, and though in truth I haven’t even read most of it, it was nice to know that some things were being recorded. It’s important to me that something be left behind, that things are recorded, and I’m glad SPAT fulfills that purpose, however I do feel that SPAT is somewhat inaccurate to HSD as a whole because it, like nearly all historical records, only tells of the ‘drama,’ events, and important things. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really transcribe the day-to-day normalcy very well, I’d say. Things that aren’t noteworthy but still happen, irrelevant things that are what keep the server going.
It’s not like we’re on razor’s edge waiting for the next Homestuck content to come out, we’re talking to each other about music or books, sharing our personal endeavors, thoughts on odd subjects like politics or food, and just generally being a community. It’s what keeps people here, much more so than Homestuck does, at least from what I see and from what I feel personally. Not everyone feels the same way, of course, but that’s sort of my point. There are a lot of people in the server and even outside of mspa-lit/cafe-mspa/read-shills or whatever name that channel has at any given moment, which is Drew’s (and most people mentioned in SPAT’s) main haunt. That’s not a criticism on anyone’s taste or habits, it’s just an observation and a sort of disclaimer; no one can be everywhere, and splitting one’s attention to several channels of decent activity is draining and somewhat of a hassle.
Point is, I hope that these user-submissions into SPAT showcase to outsiders a more mundane version of HSD than SPAT proper so as to better convey the general vibe, I guess, of the server as a whole, or else one may get the wrong idea. The old Romans, for example, are thought of as philosophical and such, but the Pompeian graffiti reveals the greater truth of the everyday of the civilization and peoples’ senses of humor, their hobbies, their preferences, their friendships, and so on, and that’s what I hope these are.
“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
Anervaria
HSD to me
Hi, I'm Arya, but most people know me as Anervaria, and if you're really old, you might know me as CreatorofJanespeak. I joined HSD nearly three years ago now, it will have been three years on August 8th. On my three year bizarre adventure on Discord, I've seen a lot of things and joined a lot of communities. I've matured and learned through my experiences, even though I feel like nothing has changed since I was like 13. I've met friends who I feel who I can talk to about anything, and I've met some pretty shitty people too, ranging from simply being an asshole all the way up to being a pedophile. But throughout it all, I feel as if HSD has always been there as a place that I could come to when I want have some nice conversations and nice laughs. And I think that trait is what really makes the server special to me. I'm not sure if many other regulars in the server feel the same way, but still, I think HSD is pretty cool, yo. Thanks to all of you who have unintentionally made my days better just by joking around with me for three years.
wackyZany
carlarc
i don't really know how to… do this, so i'll talk about my perspective of the server and what I perceive of my growth on it i guess. not a lot of homestuck stuff because the read-shills community has mostly outgrown it.
i do talk about it in other channels, primarily #homestuck and #original-characters, but for the most part my homestuck talk in #shills is making fun of people ‘classpecting’ themselves or others, which is somewhat hypocritical since i love getting into ‘real’ (talking about how they work) classpecting discussions.
it’s been very interesting to look at what past-me used to say, and what i say now. when i make jokes now, i try to make them funny. give them punchlines, make them the usual drew/tmt-me banter, and having them fit and not derail the conversation (unless i don’t care about it).
way back 2 years ago, i was about as much of a relentless garbage poster as you can get. my jokes weren't even nearing jokes, they had no punchline, i kept spamming meaningless garbage sentence by sentence Andrew-style (basically sending a message every word) and trashing up the channel.
the worst moment i’ve been able to dig up is sending a screenshot of google results when i was looking for the flashlight redline joey video and asking the channel to tell me which link to follow, because i hadn't seen it at that time (i have no idea how i didn't get banned from that). which is kind of really fucking embarassing.
i also try to actually participate in discussions: if it's something (that I perceive as) serious, i'm not going to joke around. if i actually care about the topic, i'm going to discuss it and give my takes on stuff, while reading & responding to what others say. i also often attempt to steer discussions back into place and berate people who make useless statements (like, “what the fuck” or “this conversation sucks”), if it’s something i feel deeply enough about/am actually engaged in.
it doesn't happen very often because there just isn't that much stuff i actually do care about that's talked about, what i do care about others probably don't, and i'm really bad at starting conversations, something i have no idea how to work on. this has the result of me not really doing noticeable things: the last real result in SPAT of me is just disappearing, which is kind of a bummer and highlights how vacuous i am. i don't want that, i want to be more.. important, i guess. but i have no idea how to do that.
i feel as if over time, i've matured somewhat, at least in conversations and when i actually want to be mature. i'm still pretty bad at it though (i got jobbanned from space station 413 less than a day into both of its premieres). hopefully i get better, since i actually do want to make an impact in things. i'm just too fucking bad at being mature to even have a chance at it, which is entirely my fault.
but on the server itself; it's kind of Great. people (used to) shit on makin for his "problematic" hands-off moderation style (or too hands-on in mspalit, where he keeps banning conversations he deems too 'general' or 'nsfw'), but HSD is without a doubt the best discord server i'm in.
it strikes a great balance in a lot of things: it's woke, but not too woke (as in too centered on LGBT+ stuff), it's memey, but not too memey (there's altgen for that), it's feels like a community, but not like a hugbox, and it's filled with good people i talk to every day. there's no other community like it, and i dread the day it dies, since i don't know if anything could actually fill its void the way it does. it’s the first real internet community i’ve been in, so i don’t know how i’d go hunting for another, especially since i don’t have many interests that aren’t linked to HSD.
and on the community proper, it’s for the most part pretty good. from the readshills community, pretty much everyone ‘fits’ together, and knows how to talk in the channel. some people are more abrasive than others, but if they go too far the other mods just tell them to quit it. it’s actually healthy to a degree, since it prevents the place from getting too.. soft? i guess that’s the right word for it.
it’s actually pretty jarring sometimes, because when new people come in they have no idea what the ‘unwritten rules’ are of the channel.
they often hellopost, talk about #general-tier stuff (it’s hard to encapsulate what exactly that means, but it’s mostly talking about IRL stuff that’s mostly interesting to themselves and doesn’t fit the tone of other conversations in the channel, which are mostly veiled in several layers of irony), and make empty statements that don’t really.. fit the conversation.
i’m probably being a hypocrite with the latter two points but it’s what i see, i guess?. i’ve this process happen with a bunch of people, but the last one i remember is actually Rina, who quickly adapted to the customs of the channel.
i don’t want to talk that much about specific users, because i feel it’s kind of… weird? like, it’s intrusive or something. plus, there are a fuckton of people worth talking about, so it would take me forever.
i guess that’s pretty much it. wanted to add my part to SPAT because it’s a great project, and the other reason should be pretty obvious if you look for it.
I wrote some stupid extremely self-absorbed HSD autobiography or something back in November 2017 and let Drew attach the first part, which was the least self-absorbed part, to SPAT. I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I wrote that thing. I promised Drew I would finish it because at the time he seemed genuinely interested in it.
Here I am about two years later with SPAT concluded, with everyone given free rein to submit things to the "user contributions" page. I have a turbulent relationship with this server and have done a lot of embarrassing shit on it over the years, but if I'm given the chance to contribute I may as well give a pseudo-conclusion(?) to that embarrassing document I made and say some positive things about HSD.
First off, I fucking love Homestuck, like way too much. And I really enjoy talking about it on this server, probably more than anywhere else. HSD is home to people who know the comic through and through and have a sufficient variety of views on it to make discussions always interesting.
Second, I kind of love the concept of the Shills List? Normally Makin is the absolute last person I would ever give a sincere compliment, but I can tell from the several works on the shills list I have read that he has surprisingly good taste in media and knows exactly what media people would enjoy if they liked Homestuck. I've only read a few works on the shills list but I deeply, thoroughly enjoyed all of them. *Especially* Transdimensional Brain Chip, please for the love of god don't be turned off by the crude art. It's kind of scary how well the shills list accomplishes its intended goal.
Third, SPAT itself blows my mind. I've always been a fan of history documentation, and this journal documents HSD's history thoroughly with lots of honesty and passion. I'm very glad to witness its completion and hosting on its own web domain. I hope it stands for many years to come as a documentation of not just the Homestuck community, but the nature of online communities in general which I think is a topic many people don't give enough appreciation.
I'm also obligated to say the Homestuck fan music community blows my mind, but I really don't have anything to say about it that hasn't already been said in other attachments to SPAT which I highly recommend reading.
Cuil
Hi, I’m cuil, a semi-regular in read-shills or cafe-mspa, whichever makin has decided to name the place this time. I started posting there when I first read SPAT - where i came to the conclusion that read-shills was an exclusive club that was hard to get into. The person I am, I immediately decided to try and get in - and to my surprise, it was far easier than i thought it would be to get in. I just said hello, and people seemed to accept me - even without reading any of makin’s titular shills.
Even after becoming inactive several times - sometimes for months on end, the same people were there to welcome me, time and time again.
Once you get in, read-shills is like a family. the homestuck fandom as a whole is one - but shillsregs share a... tighter bond, perhaps, messed up as we may be. some of my best friends are shillsregs - the people in there are amazing.
This wasn’t supposed to be some long ramble like some people can sometimes embark on - just a reflection of sorts, a goodbye to SPAT. SO! long story short...
THANKS.
thank you to the shillsgang, to drew for introducing me, to the HSD as a whole, and to makin, the supreme saltlord, the wacky and zany, long may he live.
to those reading this in the future -
i hope you’re well and thank you for reading my little thing, and, of course, SPAT.
cheerio.
Cuil
xxxx
CyclopsCaveman
“when Kanzaki posted about wanting to create a place where people could gather in peace. I feel like he achieved that goal.”
On June 30th, 2019, at approximately 11 am EST, the website knzk.me was shut down indefinitely. A relatively small corner of the internet, the community was unique and special in the larger community it’s a part of, the fediverse.
What is the fediverse? I won’t bore you with the technical underpinnings, people much smarter than me have explained it to death already, but there is a basic gist that’s important for some context. The fediverse is a group of websites that runs on software that federates. You can set up your own site that uses Twitter-like software (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey et al), or in some other cases there are softwares that attempt to mimic other sites like YouTube (PeerTube) or Instagram (Pixelfed). The aforementioned federation means that your website is able to communicate with other websites that are set up with this software as well, in much the same way that you can email someone with a gmail address from a completely different domain name.
Many users typically gravitate towards an already established community, and may sometimes move from site to site, depending on personal motives. Most fediverse sites are an instance of one of the aforementioned Twitter-like softwares. The two major softwares are Mastodon and Pleroma, although there are a few more. The common name for the series of federated websites is the fediverse. Some others that were naturalized on the Mastodon platform may also refer to Mastodon specifically (or Masto, for short).
Mastodon, the software that KNZK ran on, was created by Eugen in 2016 and pulled in a relatively small amount of people at the start. Most major upticks in new member counts came in migration waves from other platforms after various controversies or general dissatisfaction cause mass groups of people to choose to leave their previous websites for others. The majority of users speak English, and typically start out on the flagship instance, mastodon.social, or one of a few equally popular websites.
In August of 2018 one of these migration waves hit the fediverse from Twitter. Users were either banned in large capacities for one sleight or another, and whether just or unjust, this sudden increase in bans was what caused many users who were already dissatisfied with Twitter and its moderation policies to seek out a new home.
“I was fed up with the current social media options, especially twitter,” wrote Idopa, a former knzk.me user. “The algorithm was annoying and blatantly pushed their own agenda, the sponsored posts were getting to be very creepily targeted, and reporting shitty posts / accounts did nothing. I think this was also around last August when they were going to start suggesting posts that your friends supposedly liked but they didn't. Bottom line I felt powerless and frustrated so I wanted to see what other options there were out there.”
“as to what brought me to the fediverse? i'm not sure, honestly,” wrote Evelien, another former user of knzk and a relatively popular user on the fediverse, with about 1,000 followers on her currently active account at the time of writing. “it was during this big migration off twitter, in, like, august or something. everyone was getting banned and i was told people with old accounts that got suspended before were especially being targeted. i knew i had an old account that got banned (still no clue why. never got an email) so anxiety was startin' to creep up on me. i saw like, 2 people mention mastodon so i thought i'd do some googling. i had the tab open for the google search for like, 2 days straight 'cause finding where i was supposed to go was confusing as hell. i guess i ended up figuring it out!”
This was the environment at the time of the Twitter migration to Mastodon. It was one of new discovery, and the beginnings of a community from the ashes of an old one.
KNZK, however, was a majority Japanese website. The staff was all Japanese and most users of the website only spoke Japanese. There was a dedicated app made for KNZK, called KNZK App (which is still under active development to my knowledge), which has a description on the Apple App Store in Japanese, and the App itself’s primary language is Japanese. KNZK was, for the most part, largely isolated from the English-speaking sector of the fediverse.
Yet people still managed to sign up for KNZK. In fact, as people signed up for KNZK and began posting and interacting with other users across the fediverse, it drew yet more people’s attention to the website. In short order, KNZK had amassed a sizable English-speaking community.
Here should come the inevitable stories of the culture clash, and strife caused by the sudden influx of new users, none of whom spoke Japanese, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, most users time on KNZK was peaceful and included lots of positive interaction with the site owner, Kanzaki-san.
A lot of this had to do with the very “hands-off” moderation employed on KNZK. “when it came to the administration,” writes Evelien, “it was quite lax. it's kind of what everyone on the instance wanted, though. if there was harassment or anything terrible happening, we would always be able to cross that language barrier and kanzaki-san would listen to us.” Aleums, another former KNZK user, wrote, “knzk was a fantastic admin. He really just wanted his users to have a good time and trusted us to self-govern, and would only rarely take action. He was kind and interacted with our posts, liked our selfies and chatted to us. When he did have to take administrative stances they were sensible and well-explained. I never had trouble with him and the good will he embodied led me and others to treat him and the instance in general with respect.”
Many users had fond memories of KNZK, and those that spoke English felt welcomed on the website in spite of the language barrier. When asked of his favorite memory from KNZK, Aelums wrote, “It's gotta be the time @knzk and other japanese speaking users made a music hellthread and started tagging in random other users from the instance. We didn't share a language but we all enjoyed music and had a great time sharing things, listening to each other's recommendations and having our notifications destroyed.”
Kew, another former KNZK user, wrote of the same question, “Maybe not technically a memory, but a post: when Kanzaki posted about wanting to create a place where people could gather in peace. I feel like he achieved that goal.”
“It's funny to say but my favorite memory was the blackout in December,” wrote Idopa, “It was so unique in that it was the only time you could ONLY interact within your instance and those of us who were still active on knzk made friends and of course made jokes about it. It did feel like a little deserted island where you end up bonding.”
With the sweet must come the bitter. That blackout was part of a series of site issues that would eventually lead to the closing of KNZK in late June.
Many users are still on the fediverse, but some have chosen to leave the fediverse behind with the closing of their chosen website. It’s not difficult for those enfranchised in the fediverse to find one another again, but there will always be a KNZK-shaped hole in our hearts with the loss of a cherished website. Perhaps we can celebrate the joy KNZK gave us while it was there, and cherish the fond memories from a special corner of the fediverse.
From radical.town, with love,
CyclopsCaveman
Included here are the full transcripts of all the interviews I managed to collect before writing the project if you’d like to read some more personal accounts from people that were on KNZK. Enjoy!
Daniel111111222222
First thing I thought when I came into read shills, sometime in January or February of 2019, was that the shill list was a list of works you had successfully shilled to others. I thought I had walked into a gathering of master shillers. The only thing I had shilled was Worm, and that was to my brother.
After a short time I got used to the place. I don't fit it exactly, but I fit it well enough. (It certainly helped that I had already read Worth The Candle and other shills, and that I binge-read SPAT upon learning several days after joining that it existed.) All of the various internet communities that I've been a part of have been places where I deemphasise different aspects of myself. Perhaps across all of them, you could stitch together what I've posted and get a complete psychological picture of me, and this is the reason that I use different names in different communities. One day, I will retire "Daniel111111222222". I hope that when that day comes, I will have found a community that has much in common with read shills.
This channel is a pretty decent place to lurk. The main thing I get out of it is entertainment. I can drop in at any time and there is some long conversation between various characters. Most of the time, it will be something that makes me laugh, and if not that, then something cool and interesting. Every now and then, drama, interesting in its own way, and made more interesting when I care about the people involved. It occurred to me while writing this paragraph that it's very much like Homestuck itself. Perhaps the ease with which people roleplayed as Homestuck characters during the April Fool's event is a testament to that. I say all of these things as if all I do is lurk, but somehow I've become a part of the community too.
How communities of internet people die out or continue to live is something I think about a lot, and I don't have anything approaching a fully formed theory of that. What floats around in my head are things like Schelling points of conversation, and the amount of people/engagement being above some critical mass that ensures conversation is present at all times, and people having personal relationships with each other that go beyond being acquaintances. They need to be present, but not necessarily to completion. They can substitute for one another to a large degree, so internet communities can have a strong flavour of just one aspect. The server as a whole has Homestuck as its Schelling point (I am surely misusing that term), and read shills meets the critical mass threshold with style while being tied together through many personal relationships. And who can forget the shill lists themselves as the channel's Schelling point? A decent balance exists here.
Unless something unforseen happens, I think I will stick it out for another four years. I estimated one year, then doubled it to account for the chance that I underestimated the time, then doubled it again to account for the initial guess being too low as compensation for the first doubling.
SPAT is something that I'm glad exists. I would like more people to write documents like it, so that I may read them. I'm glad that young people can have much the same wonderful experiences that come with being raised by the internet in this decade as I did in the last one.
Keep being wacky and zany,
Yours truly.
Ephemerald
Of Homestuck and Discord
I vividly remember when I first joined the Homestuck Discord.
That's what I wanted to say, and I would go on a whole spiel to accompany it, probably washed out in excessive, irreversibly rose-tinted nostalgia. But as it turns out, I didn't vividly remember it. I had to call up the search tool and scroll through the archives to find my first message on this account. And after a period spent fondly remembering the idiosyncrasies of Past Me, I re-remembered a fact I usually forget: that I'd joined the Discord much earlier, on an old, abandoned, account. I decided to go back and take a look.
My old account, whose username at that point has been lost to time, even though I can take a guess as to what it was, joined the Homestuck Discord on April 5, 2016. It isn't hard to guess why I chose that date: sure enough, my first messages are me anticipating [S] Collide, which would undoubtedly arrive in a short period of time. I'd been waiting for years, of course, we all had. I could stand to wait a couple of hours more. My messages were drops in a toiling sea of fans, all shouting and clamoring for an actual conclusion. I barely recognize anyone from that time, going back. The short remainder of my messages were directly before Act 7, then a brief stint in May, and then radio silence.
It's hard to think of a work of fiction that's had such a dramatic impact on my life as Homestuck. After seeing snippets of it across the Internet for years — a fantroll here, a profile picture there, and on one infamous occasion, stumbling upon a link to that Act 6 Act 5 Act 2 flash perpetually zooming into a Zilly Santa — I had no idea that reading it in earnest would change as much as it did. Homestuck coincided with me beginning to take my art seriously, with me discovering Reddit, and therefore, gaining a broader understanding of the Internet and its subcultures, and with me getting a computer that could actually work, and didn't require constant antivirus scans to stay up to date.
I don't want to spend all this time going on tangents about my personal life outside of the HSD, though, because I'm not entirely sure that's what I want this to be about, or what you want to read. What I'll say is that /r/homestuck became an absolutely invaluable "companion text" to the actual comic, both while I read it, and while I suffered through the interminable Gigapause. Though it was clear I'd been denied the fandom's glory years (or inglorious, by the same measure), I could at least lurk through what remained. For months upon months, I watched the subreddit develop and change, especially once Homestuck began updating in earnest, and I began to pick up on important, recurring names. One of those, of course, was Makin, who at that point was Makinporing and had Lord English's billiards balls on either side of his name at all times.
I'm sure I happened to join the Discord because it was linked on the subreddit, or maybe on one of the accompanying Cyutube streams, and then thought nothing else of it. It wouldn't be until August 28, 2016, that I'd join the Homestuck Discord on this account. Back then, my account name was "Bill Cipher," and people were quick to make accompanying jokes. It was only about a month earlier that I’d permanently joined the platform (after a few false starts), with my only other major servers being the unofficial hub for the Cipherhunt (a worldwide scavenger hunt plotted by the creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch), on which I roleplayed as Bill Cipher and somehow got people to think I was Hirsch himself, and the official hub for a weird niche Internet community I’m partially responsible for creating.
Though many Discord servers came and went in the time since, as 2016 bled into 2017, and so on, the Homestuck Discord remained one of those universal constants, largely because it represented not just a Discord, but a facet of a much larger community — Homestuck itself. To me, Homestuck was the subreddit. It was those community streams where we’d watch Con Air Special Edition, it was the annals of MS Paint Fan Adventures where Cool and New Web Comic entered the mainstream. It was the people that tied it together, people I’d recognized while on the subreddit, and people I’d come to recognize since: Makin, of course, Tensei, Toast, Dingus, Wizard of Chaos, tripheus, MrCheeze, wheals, Niklink, Cerulean, yazshu, XenoZane, meems, and william_, just to name a few.
A large part of the appeal of the Homestuck Discord back then was, if you’ll excuse the incredibly obvious pun, the discord. There was this chaotic energy associated with the whole thing, presumably because of the zeitgeist — Homestuck had just ended, Volume 10 had been released, the Cool and New Music Team had begun production, and it seemed like everyone was creating their own takes on some kind of fan epilogue project. It felt like I was finally “in” on the fandom, in a sense — here I was, able to see the unfiltered thoughts of a community I’d spent years following. I still remember seeing Tensei first talk on the Discord at a time when the reaction feature had just been added, with everyone adding droves of :tenseifaces: to anything he’d say.
The most important part of the Homestuck Discord for me, though, was how it acted as a nexus to so many other opportunities. If the HSD was the fortress of the Homestuck community, then the Cool and New Music Team was its inner sanctum — a group of people carrying on Homestuck’s legacy by mercilessly, hilariously shitposting to the top of the charts, and managing to sneak in actual quality more and more often along the way. Joining the CANMT introduced me to people that would essentially become my closest friends in this community, and it gave me an outlet to share my art that could actually be seen by, you know. An audience. And the scope of the HSD’s rabbit hole never shrunk. From there, I joined the Unofficial MSPA Fans, the Oceanfalls and Vast Error Discords (and their respective music teams), and a whole host of smaller, more personal servers.
Despite the negative connotations associated with the term “splinter server,” what with their link to dysfunction and drama, being in these smaller, personal servers has been undoubtedly the real highlight of my time in the broader HSD community. Months spent in the CANMT Discord and elsewhere changed my viewpoint of the actual HSD to this monolithic, alien presence. It continued to grow, despite wildly inconsistent official and fan Homestuck output, yet it never shook off the chaos that was there from the start. I began to talk there much less, favoring the tighter nature of these team-based communities. Oftentimes it seemed like I’d only hear about HSD in a negative context — a bout of drama, a reckoning, personal gripes against the modteam, et cetera. In spite of this, there was one part of the server that had the feel of a smaller, recognizable community, and always had: #read_shills.
I can’t say for sure how long I’ve been lurking on #read_shills, though it definitely hasn’t been consistent. As far as its explicit purpose as Makin’s advertising corner goes, there’s no doubt it succeeds. The Shills List has inspired me to read works I never would have even heard of otherwise — and thankfully, they’re usually consistently high-quality. It isn’t hard to describe the shills in general. They’re rationalist, metafictional, metatextual works of commentary. I’d say their greatest commonality is exploring what it means to exist in various ways. The protagonists get meaning from the relationship between a work and its fans, from dealing with an absence of death and the inevitability of the apocalypse, from understanding and overcoming the limits of their universe. They’re harrowing, insightful deconreconstructions of what means to be a character in a work of fiction.
If what I’m saying seems like nonsense, and maybe it is, know that I’d describe the Shills List as, essentially, what required reading looks like in a world post-Homestuck — moreso after the release of the Homestuck Epilogues, which in any other server should have a spot on the list too. I think that the Shills List, and by extension #read_shills, is in a sense the end result of the Homestuck Discord, something formed because of the way Homestuck developed and ended, whether it was intended that way or not. Regardless, it has real merit.
The Homestuck Discord is everything I’ve described and more. It’s essentially the only centralized hub for the Homestuck fandom, and has been for some time. It’s full of users of essentially any kind, with enough channels that there’s a place to talk about nearly any topic. For months, it’s been my number-one place to get Homestuck news (anyone who mutes #news and #announcements are cowards). But it’s a very weird case, really, solely because it’s formed around Homestuck. It’s a work infamous for incredibly vocal fan participation, a mark hardcoded into its design as a pastiche of choose your own adventure games, and for its hiatuses, which only grew more frequent and longer as Homestuck piled on the convolution and malformed side projects. So how do you manage an idealistic hub of discussion for a work where the next update is a pipe dream, yet has a fanbase uniquely empowered by the medium to produce and discuss content?
Well... I guess you do it like this.
In spite of having thousands of users at any given time, it’s clear to me that the modteam of the Homestuck Discord knows what they’re doing. The channels have strict, clear rules, the team is diligent in fighting raids, there are always interesting and engaging community events, and decisions, even if they seem questionable at first, usually tend to work out in the greater interest of the server. Makin, of course, is at the center of it all — the face on the ~ATH scrapbook that is Several People Are Typing — and despite all the infamy and scorn he’s received, he really has achieved someone that no one else has. He’s created the Homestuck* Discord. Of course it’s a discussion hub for Homestuck. But in spite of the hiatuses, or really, because of them, it’s grown to be so much more. It’s a thriving community with its own separate injokes. It’s a place to share original art, writing, and music. It’s the library unpublished, full of works adjacent to the source. Because of all this — because of the music streams, the celebratory images, the Space Station 13 and SCP: Containment Breach games — the Homestuck Discord has its own identity. It’s developed into something beyond its parts.
Towards the start of the year, I decided I’d talk on #read_shills more, and make more of an effort to actually read the titular shills. As I said above, I wasn’t disappointed: some of the shills rank among my favorite works of fiction. Though I haven’t upheld my former decision as much as I’d like, I really do enjoy the channel. Like I said, it feels much more like a community I can engage with than other channels like #general (or #hangout, may it rest in pieces); there’s always something new to discuss, or some semantic discourse to get wrapped up in. Hopefully in the future I can talk more here, read more shills, and work my way up to the top of the charts. And from there? Well, I’ll have to shill something. Guess I’d better find something that’s worth the candle.
And then, of course, there’s Several People Are Typing itself, which I haven’t really talked about yet. I’ll put things pretty simply. It’s absolutely fucking mind-boggling that one person would put it upon himself to extensively, exhaustively catalogue the day-to-day happenings of their community. Especially one like this, a shifting, ravenous ouroboros of Homestuck and discord. But Drew did it. The ups and the downs, the cold hard stats and the poetics on the ephemerality of friend groups... And now we’re here. With the epilogues firmly behind us, and Hiveswap an impossibly long ways ahead. It’s really as good a place as any to close the curtains.
SPAT is really important to me because it’s something that I wish I had, for the community I helped make. I know what it’s like, to be a part of a group like this. To have a corner of the Internet all to yourself, to collaborate and build and create a project you can be proud of. To be a cornerstone of something greater than yourself, to work with the tedium of running things behind the scenes. To go through golden years and periods of incessant drama and to wonder if you’ll still be here, far down the road. And I wish I could have had a record of everything that happened. Something to remember all those conversations and arguments by. A way to chart what it feels like I’ve spent my entire life working towards.
I’m glad that the Homestuck Discord has that. I’m glad that I’ve been a part of this community for as long as I have, and even if we don’t get any more Homestuck content, I’m confident that I won’t be leaving any time soon, unless the crystal sphere surrounding the world cracks and the Internet is replaced by the thousand thousand Names of God.
I’m Ephemerald. Stay tuned.
Gitaxian
SPAT Was a Complete and Utter Failure
From the beginning, Drew’s constantly been concerned with ensuring the integrity of SPAT. At first, it wasn’t even shared at all for fear of influencing the culture it documents. Later, it would be shared with a select group of people (including me) privately, and then later as a public document. I followed it for a while, then stopped when I felt like I didn’t have the time to keep up with the absurd volume of words Drew was churning out.
In theory, SPAT is supposed to be an objective document to record and preserve the culture of the HSD so it doesn’t end up forgotten when the community inevitably dies as all internet communities must. If the goal is to preserve the culture being examined, the examination has to avoid altering that culture in the first place. At the same time, an account needs as much detail from as many perspectives as possible to be objective. This presents an inherent contradiction. Objectivity demands interaction, while preservation demands separation.
Drew navigated this dichotomy as best as he could. SPAT wouldn’t be what it is without having others around to fill Drew in on events he wasn’t around for and provide their perspective to him. At the same time his constant insistence that we not try to let it affect our behavior was vital in shaping it. Unfortunately, it was an effort doomed to failure, because both Drew’s goals were impossible.
~~~
You’ve almost certainly heard of the butterfly effect before. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet, as a complex and chaotic system amplifies even the smallest changes. Chaos Theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with such systems, and demonstrates the impossibility of predicting how they will behave beyond a certain point. The further away from the present you get, the more tiny changes have a chance to propagate through the system and create huge differences, and the more details you’d need to know to predict the future. Beyond about two weeks, predicting the weather becomes effectively impossible because you’d need so much detail to simulate anything accurately.
A Discord server makes the weather look impossibly stable. A single message can wildly divert the flow of conversation in seconds. Trying to predict what the HSD will look like in two minutes, let alone two weeks, is absurd. What this means for Drew is that preserving what the culture of the HSD “would be” without SPAT existing is impossible. No amount of telling people not to SPATbait (deliberately acting in a way they think will get them a mention in SPAT) will erase the fact that the existence of SPAT affects people, and even the tiniest effects will be amplified until the course of the HSD is forever altered by its existence.
Some hypothetical third party who’s not a part of HSD could view and document the message logs without affecting them. Drew, however, is trying to preserve more than the contents of those logs. He’s trying to preserve the culture of the HSD, the experience of being a part of it, what it means to him. Drew is able to do so because he’s interacted with the server, because he’s a part of that culture. Even when kept private, it no doubt influenced the way he thought, the way he interacted with others on the server. The moment it was made public, any chance of limiting its influence vanished. I can never be the person I was before I knew about SPAT.
In a way SPAT does preserve the HSD’s culture by recording it. At the same time, it destroyed that culture again and again. Each update captured what the HSD was, but nothing can ever capture what the HSD is, because anything that could alters its trajectory in unpredictable and unknowable ways. It is just as much a part of the HSD’s culture as it is a depiction of that culture.
~~~
What exactly does an objective account of the culture of the HSD look like? The most obvious objective account would simply be logs of every message ever posted to the server. It would contain everything, and have no bias. It would take way too long to actually read, but it would be objective. However, that’s not really sufficient for what Drew wanted to accomplish. Drew wanted to preserve the culture of the HSD, not simply its content. That culture requires a massive amount of context to understand. How could a scholar a hundred years from now, given those logs, truly understand the HSD without first knowing about Homestuck itself, let alone the thousands of memes, events, and shills that influence it daily.
Drew has of course endeavored to provide context wherever possible in SPAT to ensure outsiders can understand it. The question he then must have faced is exactly what context to include. As we went over before, even the tiniest and most tangential inputs to the HSD can have drastic effects on its output. Drew can’t possibly include the entire universe in SPAT, so he must pick and choose which parts he thinks are important to the HSD.
Those internal choices are matched, and in some ways exceeded, by the choices Drew must make for external reasons - choices made due to how SPAT interacts with the real world. Names have been censored and entire events have been excised from the record because Drew doesn’t want to make people the subject of gossip or create unnecessary drama. It would be irresponsible for Drew to ignore the way his writing affects people. Instead, he chose to take advantage of that fact and influence people for the better.
It is these choices that prevents SPAT from being objective. SPAT is not an account of HSD, it’s an account of HSD as Drew experiences it, and thanks to the input he often takes from us, as we experience it. The choice of what to include is a reflection of our perception of the HSD, our subjective experience of it, and our desires for what it should be. It couldn’t be any other way because that’s what HSD’s “culture” is. All the things that come to mind when you think of it, what you associate with it.
So SPAT can’t be an objective record of the HSD, because it can’t possibly contain every single unique perspective of what the HSD is. Instead, it’s a record of us, and who we are in relation to it. Twenty years from now, SPAT would be practically worthless to someone who never had contact with the HSD. To us, it’s a part of ourselves, a fragment of who we used to be.
~~~
SPAT failed to be an objective record that preserves the culture of the HSD, because it could never be that and never should have been. It’s something much more important. It’s affected us irrevocably, become a part of us, and in exchange we’ve put a piece of ourselves in it. SPAT is not a record of the HSD, it is the HSD. Twenty years from now it will serve not as a record, but a way for us to retrieve that piece of ourselves, to be just for a moment who we are now once again.
Ifnar
As the reader is already aware, Drew asked people on the discord to write something for the end of SPAT.
I really have no idea what to put here exactly, even on this day of the deadline, but I do feel that as a member of the mod team who appears periodically in the main text, I should add something here so this will just be a random assortment of stuff about the server.
I joined the server only weeks, maybe days after it was created for a reddit Overseer session during what was the summer holidays for me.
It was the first online community I was this level of active in, which, yes, is quite late in life comparatively.
I attribute this to my general anxiety and paranoia interacting with strangers.
Nevertheless, becoming a more active part of the fandom and helping the community be a better place through my moderation was a very nice experience overall.
Over time, several people have told me that I appear scary and stuck up, especially after becoming a pseudo.
This is obviously due to my grammatically correct typing whcih stands out among the more casual writing of the other server members.
I can't really explain why I type this way (though I've certainly made excuses for it over time) but it feels wrong to me to drop it, even though it is obviously accepted among the community.
I want to comment that I find this project pretty neat as a repository of documentation about both the Homestuck fandom and the discord community over the years.
The thought that academics have to take online events serious as a part of modern culture still warms my cockles and imagining someone slogging through the descriptions of meandering #cafe-mspa discourse fills the same niche.
Even had I had the idea for this, I would likely not have had the motivation to actually work on it so props to Drew for going through with this over the years.
Interrobang
“What can you say about HSD? It was HSD.”
- Philip Banks
Yes, you are certain Philip Banks (that’s b-e-a-e-n-k-e-s, no e) said that.
Memes aside, I think this quote sums up my experience here pretty well. Describing an internet community is a challenge - especially one with tens of thousands of members. One could imagine someone simply listing qualities of the group in question, until they feel they’ve captured everything (“what can you say about HSD?”) - but I feel that such an approach would inevitably leave things out. No, the only way to truly get a community is to live it (“It was HSD” - I guess it still is). SPAT, or something like it if we’re generalizing to communities in general, is in my opinion about as close as you can get to a good description - not a full one, but a good one. As for everything, and everyone, else - I just want to say its been fun. Thanks for the memes.
John Keel
Hussiemandias
I met a Homestucker from an ancient forum,
Who said—"Two vast and simple works of art
Live with VIZ Media... Near them, in the store,
Half finished a broken artist lies, whose frown,
And massive lips, which sneer and nothing more,
Tell that his fanbase well those passions read
Which yet survive, printed with empty words,
By the man who mocked them, and the spade that fed;
And on the website, these words appear:
My name is [S] Cascade, Thing of Things;
Play in Adobe Flash, ye Readers, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. From the dead link
Of that colossal Wreck, changed by the Heir,
The homepage of Newgrounds is linked today.
Linkslittlefriend
If i could be pleb to mod to pleb in a matter of days, then anything is possible for you.
Makin
WHY WE EXIST
A lot of criticism is directed at the elusive figure of “Makin”, the /r/Homestuck subreddit and the Homestuck + Hiveswap Discord, and I think people really don’t understand why, so I’m going to explain.
But first, we need to talk about 2D Minecraft clones.
On one hand, we have Terraria. Originally a straight ripoff of Minecraft with some bonus action, it’s now the second top rated game on Steam, extremely cheap and still receiving free updates. Most of them are ease-of-use features, things people have been asking for. One of the most loved PC games in history.
On the other, we have Starbound. A crowdfunded game, Starbound tried to ape Terraria’s success by offering a similar concept, scamming its userbase and promising features that, 7 years later, still aren’t in the game, or even supported by its engine. One of the most controversial PC games in history.
What’s the difference? People point at management techniques, or a better use of resources, but the truth is, Chucklefish, the Starbound company, is a pretty successful video game publisher. No, the difference is how they approached communities.
/r/starbound was instantly taken over by Starbound developers the moment the game got popular. /r/terraria wasn’t. That’s all it takes, I think. The Starbound developers didn’t set up the community so they’d get the most valuable feedback, they set it up so it would distract them from developing the game as little as possible, and it wouldn’t have any consequences on their bottom line.
Terraria developers understood that sometimes it’s important to let fans speak their mind in an environment not controlled by a corporation, and it provided a constant pressure to improve the game. The feature and feedback threads that mattered most were upvoted to the top, they didn’t get deleted so the developers could avoid any distraction. The incentive structures promoted what was most important to the fans themselves.
When I created /r/homestuck in 2010, I made it as the alternative to the MSPA Forums. While it’s a shame they are gone (with thousands of lost fanventures, discussion threads and projects), the truth is it had many of the same issues /r/starbound did. People with a vested economic interest in the franchise were deciding what was allowed to be discussed and what wasn’t, and they chose what caused the least work possible on their part. I suggest reading 1011686’s dissertation on the subject if you want to know more.
In the end, they didn’t even bring the forums back when they were hacked, so they didn’t have to pay any mind to it, and so /r/homestuck became the de facto replacement for a centralized fan hotspot (alas, while Omegaupdate exists and I appreciate what they were trying to do, I don’t think they were ever really active or successful).
If we want Homestuck to succeed and endure, we need to stay like /r/terraria. A clear separation between fan and official environs. A space where fans can (respectfully) speak their mind about the franchise without being “cancelled”, controlled, censored or harassed, but that also doesn’t devolve into mindless spam and hatred like 4chan’s /co/. A place where people enjoy the content instead of the drama about the content.
Some of the biggest name fans on Twitter heavily disagree with this approach. They want What Pumpkin to completely control fan discourse. They also desperately want to get hired, but I think that’s obvious to anyone with eyes. This is why you’ll see them constantly “throwing shade” at /r/homestuck and the Discord, baselessly calling their users nazis, homophobes, etc.
I have received multiple death threats, been painted as a racist, homophobe and, in one particularly silly occasion, a cryptofascist. Apparently fake screenshots and callouts, or screenshots of things I’ve said sarcastically, have been spread in private DMs to justify it all.
The “good guys” don’t do this. The truth is, they just want us to be gone because we're not them, and if people are going to /r/homestuck they’re not exclusively reading and posting their Approved Homestuck Opinions™. Last I heard, some of them even wanted to get Andrew Hussie fired or somehow disallowed from writing something like the Epilogues again.
While I’m sure that my style looks wacky from the outside, everything has been carefully planned to avoid as little external influence and control as possible. A completely different, healthier culture has been allowed to foster. A delicate channel design methodology has helped this, which I call the Water Filter theory, allowing initially shitposting #altgen tweens to pass through each main channel’s subculture standards until they become perfectly non-toxic users (qweq's entry is a perfect example of this). Until then, they don’t have to bother anyone outside their little bubble of alike-thinking shitposters.
I’ve got a lot of other plans in the backburner, letting the right people take over if I leave and making specific information available, so control of the biggest centralized Homestuck forum isn’t in the hands of anyone with business hungry or evil intentions. Discussing details of them in a public website would be beyond stupid, so you’ll have to trust me.
This is why Drew Linky, despite writing the really weird but interesting SPAT, is never going to inherit the server. As you can see from the many redacted nicknames, he will bend and break under negative influence, and cannot be trusted to keep /r/homestuck as free as it needs to be. Ideally, I’d get someone like me, who won’t allow death threats to endanger a silly internet forum. Does that person exist? We’ll see.
But there’s no need to worry about that. Indeed, I’ve been at this for 9 years and I can’t really picture any situation in which I wouldn’t have the minimal time to delegate responsibilities and choosing the right people to run /r/homestuck. This place will live on as long as Reddit and Discord exist, and maybe beyond. The big man hass the rock, and nothing beside remains.
The previous contribution might have made me sound like I'm obsessed and insane, but do not panic, because I'm about to be obsessed and insane about a different thing.
Let's talk SHILLS.
Though often mentioned in SPAT, I doubt many people have done anything more than give it (or homestuck.net/shills, or whatever URL the list has at the moment, gotta future proof this) a cursory look. I feel that people are missing extremely important and highly good fiction, so I'm going to go through every single shill in the list and explain in my own words why it's worth reading with minimal spoilers. I might add this to the page itself eventually, I dunno.
…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes, by Scott Alexander
This is a perfect introduction to the list. It's really hard to talk about this without spoiling it, because it can be read in about twenty minutes. But I'll try.
The story is based on a common internet meme with a list of pills, each of which give unique powers. You're meant to choose one, and the pill you selected is kinda meant to cause an internet argument with whoever chose differently. "Well, I think immortality is better than mind powers", stuff like that. But Scott takes it in a different direction: what if he wrote a story where all the pills were taken by different people in a shared world? What would the consequences be if they were to exploit the silly powers to their natural conclusion?
This story really embodies the "rational fiction" ideals in a small package, making it the natural choice as the best shill to read.
Worth the Candle, by Alexander Wales
A writer with a strong talent for interesting worldbuilding and magic systems decides to put all of them in a single story, and drop a fictional copy of his 17 year old self into it. You'd expect this to quickly devolve into a power fantasy self insert, but it never quite happens. The protagonist has to deal with all the psychological baggage from his real life, also dropped into the game in fictionalized, gamified ways. Everything is examined, the narrative is analyzed, and no stones are left unturned. All done in really intelligent, subversive and entertaining ways. You'll never wonder "Why didn't he do that instead?".
This is the next Homestuck. Think about it. A game world based on the player's life and personality, and a story filled with random concepts that the author had consumed and worked on for years, over a million words long? I personally believe this is better. If you're willing to put in the time investment, I recommend starting with this one right after Pills.
Worm, by Wildbow
Do you like the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Now imagine if the world actually made sense, if the powers were used cleverly, and if the plots were actually good. A superhero story for people who have suffered too much of the average superhero writing. Enough has been said about Worm, I think, that I feel comfortable leaving this one as it is.
The Northern Caves, by Nostalgebraist
What would happen if Andrew Hussie had died right before releasing the insane end of Homestuck, and the hardcore fans unearthed it a long time after the death of the mainstream fandom?
A story loosely based on the history of the MSPA forums, it's particularly worth reading due to its format and use of the medium: you'll get a ton of forum posts that read true to life. Horrible signatures, horrible nicknames, and a culture you wish you could know more about. Unwittingly predicted some of the reaction to the Homestuck Epilogues. An excellent mystery story with some supernatural dips, just don't expect an ending that ties everything up.
17776, by Jon Bois
Honestly, if you're a Homestuck fan you've most likely already read this one. What if Andrew Hussie wrote a hilarious story about what football would be like in a future with virtual immortality and no limits, examined from the perspective of a naive newcomer? Not just for football fans, and featuring the most accidentally Dave-like character of all time.
Crystal Society, by Max Harms
The first "real" novel of the list, but available for free. A mildly sociopathic group of Artificial Intelligences has to work together to control a robot body and escape their current circumstances. What is an AI society like when every individual component was designed to achieve a different goal? Pretty amazingly well written sci-fi.
Modern Cannibals, by Bavitz
Another story based on the Homestuck fandom. Written by Bavitz, a mysterious writer with a penchant for literary writing of the highest quality, so expect Themes, weird prose and unique character voices.
The main character's friend has been taken over by Homestuck mania, and she chases him to a fan convention where Andrew Hussie is going to be at. Weird shit happens as you'd expect from the Homestuck fandom, including insane canadians, anime, drugs and rap battles. More of a serious story than you'd expect from the previous description, and the perfect read for someone wanting to get a feel of 2012's Homestuck fandom.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by EY
Go to the Worm description, read that and apply its message to Harry Potter. Featuring a highly controversial main character who is actually meant to initially be a little shit and mature by the end of the book. It's not required to know Harry Potter from anything other than cultural osmosis to understand HPMOR, though you might miss some jokes. Some scientific and "rationality" concepts are thrown around, so it doubles as a somewhat didactic work.
Unsong, by Scott Alexander
Imagine if everything in the Bible was to be taken literally. Yes, even that part. The protagonist wields his expertise in religious wordplay in a new world where scripture is a real magic, and societies struggle worldwide to adapt to the new state of events. A completely silly and hilarious story that Terry Pratchett might have once written.
CORDYCEPS, by Benedict_SC
Do you like SCP, or horror stories about memetic threats? This is actually a good, short, regrettably obscure take on that. The one story in this list where being rational is actually harmful to the user.
The Man From Earth, by Jerome Bixby
Okay, the very premise of this movie is a spoiler. It's available for free on Torrent sites, uploaded by the director himself, since he cared to get his life's work's story out there more than he cared about profit. Do you like normal people talking in a room about interesting stuff for 90 minutes? This is your film, but there might be some twists oOoOoO.
Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe, by Crippledvulture
You... like Homestuck and Problem Sleuth, right? Now imagine if the adventure game mechanics were actually good. Another work where the premise is kind of a spoiler, so just expect a surprisingly poignant story based on tackling problems with Imagination powers. The best adventure ever made by someone other than Andrew Hussie.
Mother of Learning, by nobody103
An incredibly comfy story about an untalented mage taking advantage of a time loop... to study harder. There's also a city-wide invasion coming he probably needs to stop, and threats that you wouldn't expect from this spoiler free description.
This has taken a dive quality wise in the last two books, so it might not be in the list by the time you read this. The first couple books are definitely worth reading, however. Think all the whimsy and fun of Harry Potter magic combined with the mystery and growth of more complex fantasy stories and some original exploity twists to the genre.
Kid Radd, by Dan Miller
This was the story Wreck-it Ralph ripped off (and then its sequel, even harder). A video game character achieves sentience right in time for its game to be discontinued. He joins a team of characters from different video games to save others, and eventually fight an entity threatening the future of retro. The one good sprite comic in the entire internet. Video game mechanics from different games used together in clever, unique ways. An unique story that Ralph entirely failed to live up to.
Dream Drive, by Andrew Ball
Much like WTC, this initially by-the-numbers literary RPG eventually uncovers some twists that turn it into a sci-fi masterpiece. Expect a lot of character growth, with the main character constantly being called out on his bullshit and the "villains" often having justifications for being like they are. Many interesting twists to the dropped-into-a-game genre, but unfortunately the best ones are too spoilery to be included here. Just trust me.
Oh yeah, it IS hosted on literotica and has like five sex scenes. It's a 375k word story and the scenes only take up like 5k. Just skip past everything but the beginning and end of them, they're usually not entirely pointless.
Three Worlds Collide, by EY
A complex moral and philosophical quandary between a human ship and baby-eating aliens. Featuring the stupidest comparison between Hamlet and Fate/Stay Night ever put to virtual paper. Any takes I'd have on this story are already in the (very short) story itself, so you'll just have to read it!
Transdimensional Brain Chip, by Øyvind Thorsby
The art of this story is complete trash. Give this a pass if you're a baby that can't deal with that. Do you enjoy reading hilarious visual comedy about sci-fi plots that quickly devolve into insanity? Then don't give this a pass.
A chip is installed into idiot Ulf's brain, and it allows him to coordinate with alternate-universe, choice-splitting versions of himself. Those versions quickly diverge and they uncover a secret threatening every dimension. These idiots are the only chance to save it, through the power of throwing enough alternate selves at the problem.
Ever 17, by Kotaro Uchikoshi
The best shill on the list. It is also the most annoying shill to read, since you have to deal with 2005 visual novel graphics and "gameplay", but it is also the most worth reading. People who recognize the name Zero Escape or even Danganronpa somewhat know what to expect from this, but for everyone else, just be sure that this story uses its medium perfectly to deliver the best series of twists in fiction and outdoes them all. Do follow the guide with the order Tsugumi->Sara->Sora->You, please, instead of the one the guide suggests.
I can smell Drew seething at Ever 17 being called the best shill on the list from here. It is, deal with it.
John Dies at the End, by David Wong
This story is just fucking funny. While it does have the philosophical themes and munchkin-like exploits that this list is known for, this story mainly excels at making people laugh, which is an achievement in an otherwise horror story. Also the main characters are named John and Dave, which can't be a coincidence (or can it???). Actually published, a best-seller even, but sadly gone missing from the cultural zeitgeist lately. The movie is fun once you've read the book but otherwise trash and not worth watching.
The Library Unpublished, by al_fa
Don't read this before The Northern Caves. A similar type of story, where the internet and the power of choices feature prominently. Very meta, very mysterious. Don't want to say more about it
LOST, by Damon Lindelof
Wait this is actually in the extended shills list. Just watch it, okay? I hear Drew is going to stream it sometime this millenium.
Several People are Ty-pfft
If you made it here you either are a coward who skips to the end or a brave literary warrior still looking for good stories. Stop reading this then, you moron, and go read the stories above and in the extended list. Who knows if the original has had more stuff added since this was posted?
Misha
Spit for SPAT
Hi! I'm Misha, currently the (pseudo) moderator for the eastern-media channel. I joined the HSD April 1st of 2019, so well after Drew first thought of ending SPAT. I am not mentioned in this work at all in its current form, so you might be wondering what I even have to say being such a recent member that freakishly acquired a staff position due to his unbridled charisma and charm, and why I'd care about the HSD that much to begin with.
But first, let's talk about Hitler.
As we all know, before being a power-hungry dictator and general monster, Hitler attempted to be an artist. Now, many will tell you he failed to get into the Academy of Vienna because he was a mediocre painter - but this is rather unfair. It'd be more correct he painted the wrong things for the Academy of Vienna's tastes at the time. It might surprise some, but at the time, the modern art movement was already in full stride. Compare:
On the left, one of Hitler's works - on the right, Egon Schiele's Living room in Neulengbach, from 1911 - a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
In essence, the rise of modern art prevented an artist whose contemporary and strict style would've easily fit with the works of past generations. It'd be somewhat unfair to entirely blame modern art for this - Vienna still had its contemporaries represented in Christian Griepenkerl, who despite this fact rejected Hitler twice due to his own bias towards Classical portraits focused on human figures rather than vistas. Famously, he decreed, 'too few heads'.
After this, we know the story - the NSDAP, the Night of Long Knives, World War 2. And with the end of World War 2, came the American occupation of Japan, which allowed western culture to interact with the isolated country. And with that influence... came anime.
Now, wait wait wait, I know you're thinking, how does that relate? Well, Osamu Tezuka is the father of manga and anime de facto, and artists who studied under him defined what anime is today - Go Nagai alone created mechas, magical girls and the foundations of battle animanga in the span of a few years. And Osamu Tezuka's main inspiration?
Donald Duck. Yeah, he'd even send Carl Barks (the then cartoonist for Donald Duck and Undle Scrooge) signed Astroboy New Years cards for years.
Pictured here.
So in essence, the desire to challenge the foundations of art in Europe indirectly raised to the rise of consumer-grade degeneracy we see imported from the Land of the Rising Sun today. My point? That things often supercede their intended purpose in ways that we cannot predict, but that have value in their final form regardless.
The HSD is far from just the 'Homestuck Discord'. It is a community with its own values, history and qualities. It'll survive, in one form or another, far beyond Homestuck's own lifespan - even if under other forms, come calamity or simple boredom with the association, be it through successors or rebranding.
And I'll be there for it. Probably. Unless calamity is just really, really persistent before then.
moonjail
On December 31st, 2018, I finished reading Homestuck, about five years after I started. I stumbled into HSD, toppled headlong into altgen, and landed in /lit with a revolting flop.
I was left feeling sad and isolated by the holidays, like a lot of people, which compounded a broader sense of alienation that doesn't merit getting into. HSD did not help this. For a while. And now it does.
I make an unfortunate habit, both online and in person, of arriving late to well-established, close-knit communities, then getting dejected when I'm not welcomed with a tender hug and a stoneware mug of warm milk. It is difficult to accept that there are places where you will never belong, and people who will never like you. De facto oldfriend general was therefore pretty much the worst place to end up. At first I was concerned mostly with emulating the culture of the channel to endear myself to the existing users. I installed DoA pretty much exclusively so I could be involved in talking about it. DoA Burg still fucking sucks, by the way. I have yet to find an interest in playing further.
After a few months of these efforts, I've arrived at a point now where I'm relatively comfortable in the channel. I think most /lit users recognize me. A few like me. The in-joke still rules supreme, but I know most of them. And at least one person usually knows what the fuck I'm talking about, which is nice.
MrNostalgic
My Experience with the Homestuck and the HSD
(Sorry if this is a rambling mess, I’m not very good at writing)
Homestuck.
My experience with Homestuck, began in October 2016, the day the Credits came out. That day when I arrived at my university for class, I saw a friend sitting on a couch and watching something on her cellphone.
I got close to say hi, and while doing that I noticed the video she was watching; the art style caught my attention and I asked her what it was, she told me it was the end credits of a webcomic she had been reading for years, and recommended it to me.
So between classes I started to read it, and whew, I got hooked instantly, the story was funny and entertaining, and it was unlike any other webcomic I had ever seen before, so I just kept reading, and reading.
I spent my free time of the next 2 weeks reading the webcomic, so fast that I missed a lot of details, and being blown away by the story, the music, and, the flash animations, until finally, I finished it.
My first impression after finishing was that the whole thing was great, but because I had read it so fast and in such a short time, I decided to reread, making sure to take my time and appreciate some of the stuff I had missed, or foolishly skipped (cough The first Intermission cough).
This reread helped me see some of the most glaring issues the comic had, and changed my opinion of the end, at the time, of the story. I still enjoyed the comic overall, but I realized that it had problems once Act 6 started, the biggest ones being how the pacing dies just after Collide, and how Act 7 doesn’t give any resolution to the story.
Anyways, while doing this reread, I decided to look at what the community around the comic was like, and this leads me to:
Reddit.
I had been using Reddit for almost 3 years when I started reading Homestuck, after finishing my first read, so I was curious to see if there was an active subreddit for the comic, to no surprise there was, and I instantly subbed, wanting to see how the community interacted.
To my disappointment most of the content I saw consisted of shitposts and memes, there where some good stuff here and there, but there wasn’t much that I thought was interesting, so I never really used the sub. Only checking it from time to time to see if something interesting popped up.
I would most likely have ignored Homestuck after a while had it not been for:
Discord.
I started using Discord on January 7, 2017, after one of the mods of r/DC_Cinematic, a sub I was somewhat active on at the time, sent me a DM on Reddit, inviting me to their recently created server.
I had heard of Discord before, and even seen some ads for the HSD, but I was never really interested in using it, but I was curious about the server, so I created an account, and joined.
I spent a couple of hours chatting with the people there, had a good time, and realized how good Discord was for chats, way better than other apps like Skype, so I decided to look for other servers to join.
And so, I joined the HSD on January 9, 2017.
My first impression of the server was that it was a weird place, first thing I saw was WoC berating other users for not using Compact Mode, another user calling me a Furry because of my profile picture, and shortly after, Griever shilling Jojostuck to me.
But the weirdness made the server even more appealing to me, the combination of all those things happening almost at the same time made me laugh, I sure wasn’t expecting that to be the first thing a new user could see.
After taking a look at the server, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of channels it had, but decided to see what each one offered, instead of just muting most of them.
So I spent the next couple of days lurking most channels, watching each sub-community of the server, Altgen was the first one to be muted, the place was too wild for my liking, and the quality of the memes posted there was so low that I just found the whole place to be bad, although I did spend some time participating on the famous Hunger Games simulator, before it was banned for being spammy.
MSPA-Lit was next, I was a bit afraid of the channel, after all most of the mods chatted regularly there, and I didn’t want to commit a blunder that would end with me being banned.
Other channels where muted as well, mostly because their topics didn’t really interest me.
For the next few months I used gen the most, chatting almost daily with other regulars, and sometimes doing other activities, like playing Payday 2 with Shitler and Dingus, or watching random stuff on Rabbit.
After a while I noticed that while some users used the channel regularly, others moved on to use other channels more. This led me to try and give some muted channels another chance.
So, I lurked channels again, but again almost all of them failed to grab my attention, the exception being MSPA-Lit.
The same reason I was initially afraid of the channel, most mods being there, was now the thing that made me the most curious, I asked myself “Why do they use that channel in particular as a hangout spot?”
So I started to lurk the channel and chat there, and I noticed that the topics of the channel where more interesting than the ones would see in a place like Gen, all the time someone would bring a new topic, be it a new meme they saw, or some piece of literature they were reading.
I started using the channel so often, that Gen was completely ignored, and eventually muted. But I didn’t really care, the sense of comradery, as Drew would say, that I felt in Lit was way bigger than the one I felt on my time in Gen.
And the topics discussed there always managed to engage me, because there was always something new to discuss, be it the new shill Makin wanted us to read, or dumb shit like the Trolley Problem and it variants.
...
I’m glad I started using Discord, and I’m even more glad that I joined the HSD, it led me to meet users with whom I’ve had a lot of fun, be it by just chatting with people like Drew, Tera or Tmt, or by playing games/ watching movies and TV Shows with them and the countless other users of the server.
I feel like this document is a bit of a mess, but after hearing that SPAT was ending, I wanted to write a bit about my story with the Homestuck, and with the HSD, just as Drew did with SPAT.
Thanks for writing SPAT Drew, that document was a lot of fun to read, and one of the best contributions the server has ever received.
Multivac
SPAT Retrospective
He's finally here, writing for you
It's the Homestuck mod, Linky Drew!
He's smart, and strong, and funny as well
If you irritate him, he'll ban you to hell!
He's keeping track of the current events
In his SPAT book, with exciting contents!
Huh!
D.K.! Donkey Kong!
Huh!
D.K.! Donkey Kong is here!
I joined HSD right before its second birthday, and was soon wrapped up in THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF JESUS CHRIST. This was a rather unusual beginning to my experience (especially because it quickly led to the heady drug of altgen posting….), and it led to me perceiving HSD differently than I do now. In particular, I also was a lot more afraid of the HACK FRAUD admin that we have than I am today.
I’m not sure how long it took me to come around to readshills, but that’s essentially where I’ve stayed. In my time in readshills, and in HSD at large, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful events that couldn’t have ever happened without the amazing efforts and fresh, ahead-of-the-curve leadership of the HSD mod and pseudo team. The sense of community here is comparable to truly no other internet space, and that’s because the mods are truly grade a-material. Even the ones I don’t like, or frequently make fun of, contribute significantly to the health and growth of HSD, and probably will for years to come. In particular, I think that people coming up with their own shill lists is a severely underappreciated and under-celebrated feature of the channel.
I want to also make note of how SPAT gives monumental information for people in HSD. On updates, I find new documents about the goings-on in readshills and other channels, which often provide a completely new perspective that I would have otherwise missed. SPAT has been a superb HSD resource, and I imagine if one told Past Drew about its great value at the document’s inception, he would have been extremely confused, and probably called them a wiener. And yet, it has evolved in a very cherished way, and it truly adds something extra to this server.
In conclusion, read Conference Call, and ban Ever17 due to its kabbalistic obscenity: E17=י17 which sums to 27, which carries the meaning via gematria of “sin,” “weeping tears,” and “to perish.” Not only are these obviously reflected in the themes and plot of E17 itself, but I can only conclude that Makin wants to inflict kabbalistic harm upon us and make us cry. In related advice, vote Marianne Williamson for President, because she is the only candidate who can defend us on the spiritual plane, and has a clear policy goal of initiating Third Impact.
Neth
Having been an active user on the HSD for 2 and a half years at this point, I think it's safe to say I kinda like the place.
I don't want my Oh So Important Entry On SPAT That Will Immortalize My Presence In This Online Chatroom Forever to be overly gushy and sentimental, so I'll try my hardest to avoid that. Having said that, I can't completely ignore the frankly absurd impact the server and the people I met through it had on my personal development and on the most bizarre moments of my teenage years.
I joined the server on December 3rd, 2016, during my summer break. I signed onto Discord with the very clever (or so I thought at the time) username "hey hey hey", which was accompanied by a very crude MSPaint drawing of Fat Albert as a cat on my profile picture, a reference to a joke I heard on Game Grumps some millennia ago. Being my first real experience with real-time online chatrooms outside of literal children's games, I had really no idea what to expect. The Homestuck fandom was already mostly dead by the time I got into it, so the idea of a place packed full of people who had the similar emotional connection to Homestuck as me was both exciting and incredibly frightening for me at the time.
After embarrassing amounts of hesitation, I finally clicked the "Join" button. In the first few hours, I met some of the people who, to this day, I consider to be some of the most amazing and trustworthy I've ever met, and in my first week I had the (dis)pleasure to watch one of the first cases of server-wide drama outbreak to happen in this server devolve right before my eyes. The timing couldn't have been better. To no one's surprise, I got hooked into the community right off the bat. I eventually adopted a semi-decent moniker, deciding to call myself "Neth" after realizing the Fat Albert references would only be funny for so long, and adopting Ravio, my *actual* favorite character of all time, as my profile picture and representation to the world.
Eventually, days turned into months, and those turned into years. It wasn't all fun and games the entire time, of course. I've met my fair share of bullshit people, and I've experienced a sizeable portion of bullshit situations, some related to the server and some not; either way, I would go through all of it all over again if given the chance because yadda yadda made me who I am today. You know the drill by now.
I could mention my entire journey through the channels and communities of the HSD, but honestly I'm already getting a headache writing in this small as fuck notepad app, so I'll have to cut it short and give my personal thoughts in advance.
All in all, the HSD is only as unique as any other online community. It has its own inside jokes, its own manner of interaction between users and its own maniacal server owner. That being said, I think there actually *is* something truly special about it, a feeling you can't get anywhere else, no matter how hard you try. I applaud Drew, the mod team, and all the people who work hard to keep the server a wacky and zany place to relax in every single day.
Alright, enough of the sentimental schtick. I have to go tell WoC gargle chloride acid again.
See ya.
Niklink
I discovered Homestuck in 2011, in the middle of a highly transitional period for my personal entertainment tastes. In those days, Nintendo was the only videogame company that actually existed, at least according to my then-absurdly limited knowledge of the subject- and they were announcing a new generation of consoles that I was slowly realizing I would not be able to afford. This fact was threatening my entire existence as a person who only really woke up in the morning so they could get back from school and park their ass in front of some choice videogames. The concurrent surprise gift of a low-midrange computer (the same one I am using to write these words) led to a shift towards affordable piracy-based PC gaming, and with it an expansion of my online activities. The atrocious webcomics of 2009 gave way towards a more refined form of stupid shit. And Homestuck was just the thing I needed to forget that I fucking existed in the first place.
Homestuck became the blindingly bright ball of media-fire that my life-planet spun around. Staying up until late every night, because that’s when updates happened; even later if an update DID happen, as it demanded not only consumption, but analysis, discussion, dissection, mockery, and total absorption into my core being. Falling asleep during class everyday was a welcome side effect- it helped maximize the amount of time I could stay conscious perusing Homestuck. Becoming unable to discuss anything about what was demanding the entirety of my free time was unimportant, as I didn’t want to talk with my family and the people at school didn’t really want to talk to me. And while I fancied myself a loner, my good old human brain still required a modicum of social interaction. But if I was going to fill that need, I had to make it about Homestuck somehow.
Everything had to be about Homestuck somehow.
My first forays into the raging oceans were /hsg/ and MSPAF. Getting replies to whatever I was saying made me happy; Malcolm Brown made a little tune in response to one of my posts and I walked on air for a week. It was a time where, if sadness generally kept itself confined to its designated corner, happiness seemed to be in short supply as well, so I took whatever I could find. But it wasn’t long until I wanted more. I wanted the Full Homestuck Interactions. And that grim road led me to the foreboding gates of Pesterchum.
If you’re not aware, the Pesterchum fan client was really just an IRC interface, but its idiotic novelty translated into great simplicity. The client auto-connects you to a specific server, and from there all you had to do was browse the list of public channels and pick whatever struck your fancy and you would be instantly dropped into a wind tunnel of nigh-incomprehensible typing quirks. And it was full to the brim of people that didn’t care if I literally exclusively talked about Homestuck all day. I had found the place where I could set my tombstone, because I was pretty sure I was going to stay there until I fucking died.
Of course, that didn’t happen, because the community that I joined on Pesterchum wasn’t actually full of Homestuck fans. In a nefarious plot twist, it turned out that Pesterchum was actually just full of people that liked whatever was hot on Tumblr at the time. And as each ‘memo’ only consisted of a singular channel with user counts that never really exceeded a couple dozen, the new preferred topics of discussion simply supplanted the old ones. Suddenly, people just wanted to talk about Dr. Who and other Tumblr-adjacent interests that I didn’t share… and the more the conversations changed, the more I realized that I actually didn’t like any of the people in our memo. I just liked talking about Homestuck. And coming to the realization that you’d dumped over a year of your time with people that you didn’t really enjoy, and that you could see were socially moving away from you, while at the same time you had no one else to go to… it was hard. It was hard, and nobody understood.
And the funny thing was, it ended up that the people from Pesterchum that I still remember fondly to this day were the ones that I talked to neither frequently, or in the big channel I was always in. It was the few people that I talked to one-on-one that had an impact on me. I lost contact with most of them when they left Pesterchum with no other means of communication. It would have been sadder if it hadn’t been so god damn poetic. Just two people stumbling upon each other and sharing a brief but intense moment of genuine human connection, and then disappearing into the void of the world. It’s enough to make a man purchase a typewriter and a box of cigars. Or to join /r/homestuck.
I’d been using the subreddit for several years at that point, mainly to be a total asshole to everyone. I was known for commenting on bad fanart, which comprises approximately 100% of all fanart, with tirades that bordered on the constructive only so I could justify to myself that I was, in fact, aiding these poor souls that had dared to draw poor anatomy and be oblivious to the fact that they were a blight to all art. There was a lot of complaining about artists who made Dave’s eyes visible behind his glasses, which I assumed was because of a compulsion to put anime fucking eyes on everything regardless of how it explicitly defied characterization. And while I was hopefully entertaining by 2012 standards, the question remains: why was I acting like such a piece of shit? I think the Karkat-like shtick was a way to work out my teen, repressed, grey-hoodie-ly sort of emotions in a safe environment. I can only assume I wasn’t banned because the mod team was full of incompetent idiots. The only person who remains from that era is Makin, who we all know to be an incompetent idiot, because he ended up modding me.
In any case, I ended up in the sub’s IRC channel some time after waking myself up from my Pesterchum nightmare, and thankfully after calming my ludicrous shit down proper. It was, again, a very small group of people, and they were all nice enough, interesting enough, and Homestuck enough for my social needs. And while the whole thing was still ultimately a bunch of bullshit, unlike Pesterchum, we were all entirely aware from that fact, and that allowed us to cool down the engines whenever necessary, take a step back, and actually discuss how the fuck we’d gotten in such an idiotic argument about I’m going to say probably anime but actually was about interpersonal issues, because that’s literally what it always is in the end. I’d grown out of the early internet phase where I was still afraid on some level of chatting with strangers online. It was mainly characterized by the gut feeling that I was eventually going to press a wrong button and my computer would spontaneously combust. Or even worse, people would think I was an idiot. But secure in the knowledge that people knew I was an idiot, I had been somehow unshackled. And I had a lot of fun conversations with people I respected, and it was generally a nice time, and I’m happy that it happened.
In the end though, the same things started to happen. 2013 and 2014 were not particularly kind years to Homestuck (tricksters, teen drama, gigapause), and a lot of people started to lose interest (not me though, never me), and the chat began to reconfigure itself around me into something quite entirely different. This time around, the focus shifted mainly toward programming and obsessing over Linux setups. I could have stuck it out ‘till the end of the line this time around. But back in real spacetime, I was having the shittiest moments of my life. I ended up in some very dark, listless, maybe I’d say empty mindspaces. My brain was kind of like an attic nobody knew the house had, and the only thing in it was a crate full of human fingernail cuttings, and you got the feeling that the attic very intensely did not want you inside it, and whenever you tried to sleep in that house again you just knew that the attic was there, and you still had a year left on your lease somehow. I retreated from everything in my life, and that even included my online friends that I had because I was retreating from not having friends. It was a fucking mess. And so another part of my life just kind of stopped.
Most of 2015, I don’t even remember what I was doing. I mean, I usually don’t remember what I was doing, but I can usually place myself temporally through associating Homestuck updates with specific events in my life. I honestly think I just stared at the ceiling that whole year. Obviously I was still doing Homestuck shit, and moderating the subreddit, but I don’t even remember what Homestuck shit I was up to during that time, even though this whole year was a good one for the comic. I had simply left myself adrift, like a boat without an anchor and a drunk captain on a booze snooze. Ultimately, there was only one thing that could undo my zephyrous state: the big one. The end of Homestuck. We laugh now only because we have forgotten how much we wept then. Big, fat, juicy fucking tears, that were as salty as our souls, preceding slick trails of snot half as disgusting to watch as our arguments.
Actually I think the only reason I joined the subreddit discord server (in those days, ‘discord server’ was still grammatically subservient to ‘subreddit’) was because we were going to stream EOA6 and some stupid logistical issue had come up, because back then we knew what we were doing even less than usual. It ended up getting sorted (I just went back and checked, Makin’s internet had gone out at a hilariously bad time), but I realized already there was untapped potential. Act 7 brought an eruption of disappointment, but to me it was a beautiful eruption of activity. This volcanic crater was to become my own personal swimming pool. Over three years later, the lava has flowed and cooled into igneous rock… but if you’re not careful where you put your hands, you might still get burned.
Initially, I used to give Discord a lot of grief over being a crappy dolled-up IRC substitute that sacrificed some amount of function over form. While a lot of that still holds true, I now understand what the platform brings to the table that IRC cannot do, and it’s exactly the reason why I’ve had a longer career on HSD over the chatrooms that preceded it: the server structure. It’s actually extremely similar to Reddit’s subreddit structure that allows you to cordon off a slice of a large social platform and turn it into your own community. Crucially, this requires zero investment on your end to obtain a space that you control from top to bottom; while you could open a channel on many IRC servers, you could not ensure ultimate mastery unless you were the one to actually go to the length of setting up your own server, which was not a free action. Furthermore, a Discord server not only consists of exactly the channels you decide on, but there’s bundled together in a much tighter and clearer way.
This setup makes Discord essentially immune to the issues that drove me away from other chat communities. Since there were subsections of the community dedicated to different topics, I could stay where the conversation was relevant to me. And there was no danger of the well running dry, since users often drift from channel to channel, some leaving for other pastures while new or returning faces came to our corner of the server. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of HSD serves no function except to serve as adjacent spaces to retain the people coming and going from #mspa-literature— it might as well not exist. The overall effect is that I have a little rotating cast of characters to inflict my personal brand of conversational pain upon. It’s kind of like those soap operas that have been around for fifty years, which I can only assume is the end result of a twisted government project to sustain the life force of bored housewives and pushy grandparents and harness their energy for soul magics. None of the original cast members remain. In fact, if you try to dig up information on the show, you’ll surely find that several years’ worth of episodes are missing from the public record. And yet the collective consciousness somehow retains the entirety of that information. Never in one place, or in one piece, but if you ask enough crocheting grandmas, you would be able to construct the full radiance of ancient, uninspired stock plotlines. It’s perhaps an analogue to the very effort contained in this document: to coalesce the history of something idiotic and absurdly specific from a fractured mindspace into a gleaming monolith.
If you want to understand HSD’s history, you don’t really need to read this whole document, because I’ve got a secret TL;DR for you right here. It was pretty wild for about a year, year and a half maybe, until all the people that couldn’t stand Makin’s attitude either left or acted out and got banned. Essentially, a self-selecting social group of people. Now it’s a lot quieter, because no one will start shouting at you for saying something that doesn’t line up with their beliefs, and also because Homestuck has obviously died down as a general internet presence. But there’s still a healthy amount of people, and enough fuckery to keep it semi-interesting without being intolerable. Honestly, there’s not much else to say that would deepen your understanding. In fact, we should delete the rest of this document and replace it with this paragraph. Fuck, this part is going to be at the end, isn’t it? When it should really have been the first thing you read. You are now shaking your head over the time you lost on the rest of SPAT.
On a personal level, my feelings on HSD are… disappointingly mixed. Like asking for a vanilla-chocolate swirl, and getting something that is technically a swirl of white and brown ice cream. But when you put it in your mouth, you know. There’s something that’s not right. The stars, they have misaligned. You look up, but it’s a noon scorcher and you just blind yourself with the sun like an idiot. Hoping nobody saw you, and realizing your whatever-the-fuck-this-ice-cream-is is starting to melt, you just eat the damn thing. It’s what you wanted. Or at the very least, what you thought you wanted. It’s refreshing, but at the same time, it’s that feeling at the back of your mind. That those very same stars are now laughing at you, because as soon as you placed your order, your disappointment was written unto them, and all they had to do was watch your poor choice of refreshment drive you into a weird funk of a mood. You snap your head up at the sky again and get blinded AGAIN. Another choice is made in that instant. You are going to buy a fucking telescope, you think.
What I’m trying to say here is, I don’t think HSD has taken me where I wanted to go, socially. On one hand, that’s not exactly a fair expectation to burden any social mechanism with. It is what it is, and that’s to no one’s fault or merit. But on the other hand, you keep hearing about people inviting their whole MMO guild to their wedding and getting them horribly tacky groomsmen gifts to post on Reddit, and then they all go out back and take turns fucking each other’s characters or whatever it is you do in MMO guilds. I’ve dipped out of the community on several short occasions, because I was bored, or angry, or unsatisfied in some other way. But ultimately I think the feeling that I would be terribly sad if HSD were to come to a stop underpins my relationship with it. So instead of being a friend that will probably move away, it’s more like that cousin you hang out with at every family reunion because, what else are you going to do? Who else are you going to talk to at those things, your aunt Sharon? Fuck off, Sharon. No one cares about your vacation pictures.
That’s not enough to call the whole thing useless though. HSD has done a lot for me, and given me many great moments with many great people. There’s been a slew of new things I’ve learned through it, and a mountain of things I wish I’d never heard about. It’s put me in contact with many specific individuals that have greatly aided the cause of Doing Homestuck Shit. And even if I’m missing a lot of peeps out of the current roster, it continues to be, yes, a safe and comfortable space where I can put my feet up on the table and forget about stifling my various bodily noises. It’s the bar where everyone knows your name, but not because you’re a drunk, but because you just kind of like to sit in a specific table and look out the window every day. And when you decide to stop gazing and start carousing, you know that everyone’s going to put up with your shit.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, HSD has given me the time and the space to work through the fact of Homestuck, from a mental perspective. After such a long time living as a pulsating conduit for Homestuck’s unyielding energy flow, it kind of taught me how to live with the electricity turned off. Not so much because the story was going to end, but on some level I just felt like, story or no story, we would just continue to discuss Homestuck until the last dregs of energy blinked out of the sun (it might come as a surprise for you, but I really, really like Homestuck), and instead the server has managed to fully take me through to the other side. Kind of as to say, hey. It’s cool that you like Homestuck and all. That doesn’t have to stop being a thing that happens. But out here? Out here, you can live without it, if you needed to. You can step into a new world. Full of new things you can decide aren’t as good as Homestuck was. Full of new people you can bite your tongue instead of mentioning Homestuck to. And full of possibilities to ignore in favor of doing nothing all day. So, ultimately, and I say this wholeheartedly: HSD helped make me a better person.
As for the future, I don’t expect too much out of it. HSD doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere in the short-to-medium term. And I don’t seem like I’m going anywhere in that timeframe either. Perhaps I’ll end up moving on to whatever bullshit the next thing winds up being. Maybe I’ll just let it stop there, and start doing something else entirely. Maybe the cataclysm that finally destroys the server will destroy us all with it, which would be fun to watch at the very least. Most likely it will just wound itself down slowly over time. But that’s fine. These things, they aren’t meant to last forever. That’s just bullshit fed to us by tv shows trying to get renewed for five more seasons. The important part is that it lasts long enough so that we can be happy with what we got, instead of bitter of what was taken early. And barring some Homestuck miracle that completely defies my understanding of the universe, we already are past that point. But when you take it on a day-to-day basis, it turns out there’s nothing to worry about. Hell, nothing to write about, which makes this entire exercise retroactively inadvisable. So maybe clear your mind from the crushing melancholy of finite time. It’s not useful to anyone. Turn your attentions, I beg you, to the humble chat box. It’s empty, but full of potential. See? Someone’s talking about how they really liked something. But you know. You know it’s actually the stupidest fucking shit. Better go tell them before the topic changes. You know what? I’ll finish writing this later.
I have some other shit to talk about right now.
Olkiswerve
in my time in the fandom, I’ve seen a lot of social circles and friend groups come and go. I’d give anything to have a record of those earlier days, and be able to look back on all the time I spent online fondly. we’re lucky to have someone like drew, who undertook a colossal effort for our sake and for the sake of ‘internet historians’, whatever that means (and if you ever question his dedication, I advise you read his entry for the 19th of september 2017). I am proud to have pseudo’d for people who I may never see again - homestuck has always been about the fans for me, and the HSD reflects that pretty well. the server is a pretty cool guy who doesn’t afraid of anything and I hope it continues for a long time. rip #hangout. nothing more for today
qweq
First things first: thanks to Tmt for her awesome help with the proofreading!
This was initially a simple list of things that i witnessed and my thoughts about it at the time. With some links to pictures related to the topics, i tried to give it a small touch of comedy. By the end it turns into a “thank you” to this server. I don’t know if that is fitting to the journal or not, but it was quite the experience to write that.
It lacks dates estimates because i don’t know exactly when the events took place. Even with a rough estimate i could get the chain of events wrong, so better leave it as that. Detailed entries about all that are sure to be in SPAT, so you can check all of it out.
It’s also quite the mess, but hey, that’s me!
I can remember one of my first messages to this day, unfortunately it was in #altgen. The dedicated shitposting meme fest channel. It was the first place where I became a regular. At that time, the channel wasn’t… the best… The channel had a very specific feeling, something that either survived or was born from whatever happened before my arrival. It could be extremely toxic. It would demonize some people, bully and gatekeep who they didn’t see fit. I should make clear that these acts weren’t by all users of the channel, but people who would be considered old or regulars. Still i remained there mostly because i was interested in seeing funny stuff, and talking to some lads. It wasn’t long until some of the people who made the channel that way got banned. There was a small time during and after this event that the place was only drama and people being mad… For better or for worse it was quite easy for me to blend in. I would post memes, we would comment on some stupid stuff we found here and there, whatever it was, usually followed, if not always, by more chaotic shitposting.
It wasn’t long after my arrival that the Rapture happened. I woke up and saw many channels missing, and i thought my phone app was busted or something, but i quickly realized what was going on. It was pretty amusing to see all the chaos over a simple flushing on the mod team, Makin surely did a good job to make it as wacky as possible. Makes me wish i could have seen the Reckoning, the first time he did that. I was still a simple newbie on the server, and i knew no one who was picked for the roles, so i went on with my HSD life. However it did bring to my attention that Makin wasn’t your average user, or even server owner. He likes to make things interesting, in his own wacky way.
#mspa-lit came to my attention pretty early on, even though i didn’t talk there until much later. It did have a good share of problems that i can’t even point out, seeing how i would only look in there sporadically. It was intimidating, after all Makin would talk there almost the entire day. Makin, who kept being painted as mean and bad by a loud minority would scare me, as silly as that sounds. The channel is some sort of mod hangout place, not only that, it’s also home to topics that were too complex for me, so more to add on the intimidating aura. At this time #mspa-lit wasn’t in it’s best moments either. Just like #altgen, what i saw was apparently just a fraction of the problems it had. I remember seeing fights, people genuinely getting mad, leaving and banned. It was the drama blackhole of the server. Quoting something i read at the time, “#mspa-lit was a blight on the server”, and indeed it was.
I remember visiting other channels, mostly to check out what was there. #general was a wasteland, the messages would be mostly AradiaBot mentioning new users and saying welcome, the new users talking for 5 min before diving into another channel, and poor Nujaka talking with one or two other users. It makes me laugh to think he kept talking there for so long, for his dream to be real only one year later. #social, which later became known as #hangout, was a small point of interest for me too. It was pretty much a general chat to talk about real life stuff, take selfies, talk about food and anything that wasn’t too serious. It wasn’t until later that i went there and made friends. #homestuck and #hiveswap, both for the designated topics were a interesting place to watch, but i never had anything to add there. I was someone who just read homestuck, and not only that, at a time the had “ended” quite a while ago, so everything that there was to explore had already been explored. #serious is still a place that feels bittersweet for me. Its point is clear, it’s supposed to be the place where people will seriously discuss something that could be touchy, or that could hijack another channel out of its usual activity. Politics, venting, matters of urgency like hurricanes, earthquakes, and even server topics being great examples. All that is very interesting and i find it great to have a place like that, but i just… It’s not my cup of tea, best way to put that. #coding-tech was the last channel i would use from time to time, with nothing much to add, aside from the stupid questions i had about coding.
It took some time for me to drop #altgen. After everything that went on there, it had a hard shift. What before was toxic and displeasing turned into almost a second #hangout, but messier. Some people would come with a lot of personal talk that simply didn’t belong in a meme channel. It was worse when they got mad that their talk was being interrupted by 10 users sharing different versions of Markplier with Farquaad’s face deepfried to hell. It was a giant echo chamber. They would post matters that were more IRL than what the channel was for, many that would be even considered venting. It was known as hugbox, and it was terrible. The hugbox would drown the channel in sad topics and useless advice, and the people who wanted memes or a simple chat about something random would get shut down. I enjoyed the IRL talk we had there, i like to share things about my life, I even talked like that in #altgen. It was a mistake, and i realized that if I wanted to do that, i should just do it in #hangout. Not only would it be the right place, the impending hugbox wouldn’t exist since #hangout was moderated by a pseudo who kept a degree of order, something that simply isn’t found in a shitpost channel. In the end, #altgen came to a point where both sides were aggressive to each other, until it was shut down by the pseudo mods of the time, Deus and Dingus, with the final revamp of the channel by Drew. Since then, #altgen has been at its best. It has memes, people are usually posting the latest and shittiest edits that exist. It’s top content! With the occasional SACRIFICE by Drew, it stays alive as the random memey channel, as it should be. It was there that i grew as a user, where i made great friends, even if we don’t talk much anymore.
#hangout was a great place. We talked about many real life matters and slightly serious things, so long as it didn’t get out of control and people stayed calm. Olki, the pseudo at the time, would be very attentive and present. Every single person from there that i talked with made me grow a little. I could say that some changed my life somehow, and for the best. It was great to be a regular there. One day, however, it was brought up that #hangout would end, as it was simply a general chat that wasn’t situated in #general. In other words, it just made #general useless. Since that was the channel everyone went to first, it gave a bad impression of the server. The idea was that #general and #hangout would get merged, but in practice it meant that #hangout would be deleted (technically hidden, but deleted is more accurate to most users’ experience) and everyone would migrate to #general. It wouldn’t matter which channel got deleted, it was the influx of users and the clash that would be the issue. Instantly most of the #hangout regulars complained, as it was a community with a set identity, and a merge would break that. The main argument was that #hangout had some sort of filter which kept the channel quality up, which was true. The quality there was pretty high, and new users were not common, again it was a set identity and a tight knit community. In the end, the idea was put into action and #hangout got closed down and everyone fled to #general. The matter was heavily discussed for the first day, and then the next, and the next… For almost one month people would be asking what happened to #hangout, the mod team would explain what the deal was, and it would repeat daily. #general wasn’t at its best. Complaints were constant for the whole first month, all of them coming from #hangout regulars. Many of these regulars left, some went too far and got channel bans, some of them went crazy after it and got full bans, others just left, cooled down and came back. A minority kept cool from the beginning and merged quite easily, but after a while, many faded out when their other friends went inactive. Since then there are almost no old #hangout regulars in #general. After all that, #general became my new home channel. The activity there is high, the quality… not so much, but it’s bearable. It got slightly better with time.
#mspa-lit was once again brought to my attention, some months after the #hangout-#general merge. Some regulars from #hangout would be talking more in #mspa-lit, plus the fact that i saw the shill list and started reading one of recommendations made me go there and try engaging. It surprised me how #mspa-lit evolved during my time on the server. The fights became more rare, as had drama and heated argument. I took my time to look at it again, and change my mind about it. It was still intimidating but it wasn’t a monster, it was a channel with unique topics and dynamic. Aka whatever Makin wanted to be discussed whenever he was online, and a mod + old user general chat when he isn’t around. I did my best to squeeze myself in it, and i still don’t know if i managed to. What i know is that since then, #mspa-lit has been great. Whether discussing the shills, having a general chat with some old users and mods, or getting yelled at by Makin.
Around the same time, there was a server survey. It wasn’t the first survey ever, it was actually the second i saw. In both, Makin would leave a field for suggestions and you bet what happened. But this survey brought me something that I never expected. Small changes on the mod roles were made. One user, Spiral, was made a full mod, she was before that a pseudo mod for the Homestuck category. General was still not completely over the merge, so other pseudos and full mods were overseeing #general for a while, even if it wasn’t their obligation. Still Makin thought the old janitor role should be brought back to keep the channel clean and tidy. It was a mix of people asking to get the role, others voting, and people complaining about another person to oversee the channel, and how it would make moderation more volatile. In the end, some said my name. I was in general for a while and people did recognize me as a regular. But it wasn’t even the people saying my name that made me jump from my chair, it was when Makin listened to the people, and made it real.
Time went on, and soon came the new year. We had new people, up to the point where the server reached 15,000 users. We had a complete reread of homestuck with the community, going all the way to 4/13. We read again the thing that brought us together, some of us for the second time, others for the tenth time. Right after, we got the epilogue tease and, the following week, the full epilogue. We read it, as soon as it was released, and all of us started discussing it. And it made me think about all we had done together… The HSD covered the Troll Call, which made the whole server spam “NEW TROLL CALL” weekly when new trolls were released to the public. Later it covered the Friendsim, with a channel for discussion whenever a new DLC was released, quickly followed by art in the art channels. It investigated the “ARG”, all of us together looking for every little piece of information about our common interest was one of the wildest things i have witnessed. There have been great community streams, sometimes to listen to a new fan album, to commemorate 4/13, 6/12, or the server anniversary. April Fools was something that I never got to really experience, since it’s not a thing where i live, but god if allowing quirks and a RP channel wasn’t a great idea.
Being in the HSD was one of the best decisions i took in my life. Thanks guys.
Red
Hey there, it’s Red!
I think there’s only one really important thing for me to note, and it’s that when I joined Homestuck Discord, I genuinely believe I was a bad person.
Don’t get me wrong. HSD did not change that.
But as infamous as my server is for being a “splinter” of HSD, some of the people you have / will read about in SPAT have been there for my most formative years and continue to be my friends to this day because I met them on this server.
I got into Homestuck as a young kid, twelve whole-ass years old. Kid-me loved it with all my tiny heart because it was engaging, as well as something shiny and new I had never seen before. But now, it holds a special place in my heart because at its core it is a story about friendship. And when I joined Homestuck Discord in early 2017, I never assumed I had the whole “friends” thing cut out for me. I wasn’t very kind, genuine, or even pleasant to be around (and I’m sure as hell not always those in the present, either). I was bitter and jaded from a lot of pretty bad online experiences attempting to make some solid friends.
To this day I’m still working on being the best “me” I can be. But the people I met across these past two and a half years on this server and beyond helped shape me into someone I can and be proud of, and I’m forever grateful for them. I’m not going to name names, but if I ever called you a friend -- you’re included, too.
I’m not a sappy person, so this was weird to write.
But I think it’s important that whoever reads this knows that there’s always a place for you in this wacky world if you’re willing to work for it. And who knows, maybe HSD can be that place for you too.
Signing off,
Your favorite Splinter Bitch, Red
reti
The Willow
The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring,
In fibers of trunk, the characters stored,
The stories take currents, they make true words sing.
It stands on great hill while lowly arms swing,
Presenting the foliage, the leaves dew-adorned.
The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring.
The curious birds strike wood with a ping,
Dissecting soft bark with repetitive chord.
The stories take currents, they make true words sing.
The leaves dance through air flow, dispatch lines to spring,
Releasing the paragraphs, and though some go ignored,
The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring.
While proud willow stands tall, for both common and king,
Roots run beneath, to the nutrient hoard.
The stories take currents, they make true words sing.
The stories are spread, more stories roots bring,
Defender of memories, shield and sword.
The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring,
The stories take the currents, they make true words sing.
Sea Hitler
Man, where do I begin. I’ve been on the HSD for 3 years and maybe a couple of months now, and to say you’ve been at the same place for 3 years, yet you never lose focus or excitement of that place is a well overcame hardship.
I joined the HSD when I first installed discord, and to say I was a problem user was an understatement, I was the worst of the worst, an ALTGEN REGULAR. But after that “arc” of my life is now long over I became a general regular, meeting some of my best friends I’m still friends with today, Nikki, Neth, Angel, Red,Toast and Dingus to name a few.
Around the same time of becoming a general regular I started to speak more friendly with everyone in the channel, and become a part of it. Around this time I was asked to be a gen pseudo, and I happily accepted because I wanted to look over general and watch it grow as the server did. Maybe 3 months after that I was upgraded to a full moderator, and I still retain the spot after 2 reckonings, which I am so happy to have kept.
Spending my time on the HSD has increased my overall mood in real life and other places, and I’ve met some of my longest lasting friends because of the HSD, I wouldn’t be able to name all of them, but I can give some descriptions of the ones who’ve impacted me the most.
Sandy, dude. I know when I first joined the server I was a literal child and more than a handful to handle, but as I grew I became less and less pepega. You’ve given me some of the hardest laughs I’ve had on the server and I’m sure many other people can say that. I enjoy the time we play vidya and just chill out to talk. Looking forward to what comes next.
WoC telling me off, I’ll remember these words for the rest of my life.
Valkyrie, even though I’ve known you the shortest amount of time out of everyone, you have still made an impact in my life just as large as everyone else. The memories I’ve made with you have made me happier as a whole and I’m very glad because of it. Hopefully we continue to be very good friends, egirl.
Erie, I’ve known you since the day I joined and let me say it’s certainly been a ride with you. You’re without a doubt one of the most prominent gen members and you’re always there while I’m there, I remember the nights where it would be 4 am and it was only you and I in gen just talking about shit, and stuff like that really made me appreciate you.
Last but not least, Drew. Drew was there for me since the moment I got modded, telling me what to do at what times and giving directions in a way anyone could understand. Drew to me has been like a mentor on how to treat other people, and how to handle situations that you normally wouldn’t see every day. Then there's the times when we gather up everyone and play some group vidya together, memories like that will never be forgotten.
As a conclusion statement, this server means so much to me, and I wish to be apart of it for a very long time, I’m glad to say that the HSD has made an impact in my life, thanks.
- Cameron (shitlord)
Sein
5 minute rants
hsd is the only place where someone can add an extra "o" or two to "no" and everyone, including me, who had never explicitly been taught this, could immediately tell they were channelling the spirit of a short clip of legendary cinema "the fesh pince of blair", a video with 2 million views where an unusually elongated "no" plays. i remember this moment because this joke referenced content relatively rarely spoken about, and several people immediately jumped on it based on a one letter variation in a two letter word, which is a testament to the horrific memetic entanglement of people who have read the same tens of millions of words for fun.
-
hsd's shill culture is like being a hiking and nature enthusiast when you hike through an especially difficult and niche route, stop to use an outhouse, and find graffiti on the wall that says "now that our asses have touched the same toilet, we are brothers", except, instead of just being a weird reflection on the nature of ass sittery, under it there's a list of coordinates leading to who-knows-what, contained in even lesser known, eccentric wildernesses. you figure if some traveller who did the same trail you did went out of their way to tell you about these spots, well, they're probably good hikes, too, even if the overall message is unseemly, delivered through an actual outhouse, and a little bit culty. you start visiting them, go on some fantastic hikes, and one day find yourself carving coordinates into trees dozens of miles into the woods for exactly the kind of people who would wander that far out.
the outhouse is a metaphor for ending up in hsd or homestuck itself, reader's choice
Skyplayer
The words have been escaping me on how to properly express what HSD means to me. I originally wasn’t going to write in here. There just isn’t a way to articulate how much this place helped me if the full story is only subtly alluded to under the thick layer of generic praise and nostalgia. Not that HSD doesn’t deserve genuine praise and nostalgia, I’m just not good at such things coming naturally to me. So instead, I’ll give the super-short double-abridged version of how I got here.
From 2013 to 2015 I was known as Becomeimp. This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. When I started reading Homestuck in 2013. It saved my life. It made me realize who I was as a person. And naturally it became a bit of an obsession. I was also a dumb teen with no artistic skills. I had a fanventure, which was terrible. Things began after Andrew Hussie made a tweet with a joke about the username "Marlon B. Rando" being a good name for a twitter account. I was an asshole and in a moment of Vriska-ness felt like I needed to be the one to create the account and leave messages on every tweet Hussie ever made with the worst replies imaginable. All dumb jokes, nothing intended to be malicious. Around the same time I started "Hussietwitter", a tumblr blog that mirrored Hussie's tweets to tumblr, somehow believing that "spreading his jokes to more people" was some kind of act on par with being an actual content creator. This became a bit cyclical after about a year: Hussie made a tweet, I left a joke, uploaded it to tumblr, Hussie tweeted about how ridiculous it was that people were posting his tweets on tumblr, I left a joke. I was an annoying brat. Meanwhile I was becoming a bit too popular in the fandom. Far too many followers for an asshole teen who doesn't know how capable they are of hurting people.
This is the part more people know about.
As Becomeimp, I gathered some information related to the closure of the WP New York studio, and about Hiveswap and the devs in general. Most of it was just cited from a reddit thread, but there were a few things sprinkled in there that I can't believe I would ever post, some totally unrelated personal shit that I can't believe I even cared about, all bundled up in the writing style of an angsty 17 year old and shipped out to the 18,000 followers that Hussietwitter had amassed, then pinned on the subreddit without even being read by the mods. It's not the fault of the subreddit, or of anyone involved other than me. I fucked up. I've never regretted anything as much as I do that one post. But the entire year leading up to it was not anything I'm proud of.
Since then, I've done my best to amend things. I've become close friends with a couple people that I felt were really impacted by what I did. I've told the story to everyone I trust, I never wanted my "identity" to be a secret, it just wasn't something I broadcasted. Because I was scared and rightfully ashamed. It's been over 3 years now and I still think about everything that went down and how things could have gone if I didn’t do what I did.
If you think this is the part where I say how much better I’ve gotten, you’re only partly right. A long road to recovery started in 2016, a road that started with HSD. This community gave me an outlet to start over. Something slightly more closed off, slightly more niche, a tight-knit group of friends not afraid to call me out when I say something shitty, which is often. This community got me to branch out from Homestuck: to read a bunch of shills, to play some fkin sick video games. To join the Minecrafter servers and to attempt to play SS13 and Dwarf Fortress, to read Worm, to rant endlessly on rationality and AI and meta-fiction and philosophy. To make some friends for once.
I’m still not entirely… not entirely sure what word to use here. Normal? Sane? Unproblematic? I’m not up to par on what other communities are willing to put up with. I chose to finally write here because people are starting to dig up old shit and put it in front of me because they believe I would care. But I really don’t. I recognize I’m a work-in-progress.
Now this is getting more personal than I had planned so I’ll cut this short. I actually managed to fit in a little of the generic HSD praise there, so I hope you understand how much I love this place and this wild ride we’ve been on all these years, and I hope this gives you some context to my actions in SPAT.
spiral
Drewology
Three years.
That’s a long time in internet years. Time passes both slower and quicker online, old jokes persisting past new memes that fade fast. People stay for years or leave in minutes. For an online community, on a chat client, no less, to remain relatively stable and consistent for more than a few months- and continuing- is something of an achievement.
Achievements are usually awarded to a single person, or maybe two or three, on the grounds that they were spearheading the operation. However, this is also usually a crock of bullshit. Here, especially. Were you to try to award one person for keeping this community together, there wouldn’t be a singular name to pin down: Hussie, for making Homestuck? Makin, for making the subreddit? The users who joined? Those who actively participate in the channel every day all day? It’s a work of many.
All are important to it, and yet few singular people can be pinpointed as directly necessary. It’s a hive, living and breathing and tapping away at their keyboards. It is its own little buzzing niche in the cracks of the web, here for as long as those people continue to pour love into it, be it in the form of these SPAT contributions or as snarky remarks on the discord.
But Drew captured all of that.
This discord is significant to a fair amount of people, for varying reasons, and Drew has catalogued that here. However long this discord lasts after this message, this will remain an account of what was and provide some insight on what- hopefully- continued to be. The sheer effort he’s put in here is not something to be sneezed at.
(Three years, Drew.)
$trider
hey
some of you may know me by a shit ton of aliases but the one you probably know me best by is $TRIDER
i want to talk about what the HSD really means to me and all the great people ive met here
when i first joined the HSD i lurked in gen and decided to move to altgen, which is where i promptly got banned for spamming
now normally i wouldnt give a shit about this kind of thing but idk it felt wrong and i felt bad after i got banned
i moved back to gen and started to make friends
one friend i remember was Mr Yum
him and i were chronic shitposters in gen and often shit up the place a lot
fast forward more then a few months
i started using altgen like fucking crack cocaine i just couldnt get enough of it
my name started to become recognized as an altgen reg and i took a little pride in that
it was naive and childish
and this is a great example of what the HSD means to me
from that naive and childish behavior i grew, and along the way, i met plenty of friends and foes
the HSD is a place i will always cherish, its a place i learned plenty of lessons and realized things about myself i never truly understood before.
its a place where i can look back on and remember plenty of good times.
theres a lot of love and passion i feel for this server, its almost like a family to me.
i never really had a lot of that in my life and it feels really cool that i can come into the server and feel welcomed, and like im at home.
id like to thank everyone on the server for existing, and the mods for making the HSD such a special place.
tensei
Small collection of haikus
New user enters
a controversial remark
they fell for the bait
Sound of keys clacking
A finger errantly slips
Haha, a typo
A lively debate
"Hey guys, why are you talking?"
Uh, okay cookie
Teratosapphic
Three Years
to be accompanied by acoustic guitar
It's been a long, long time since we first met here
Under the banner of a shared passion
And it's been a fun ride
As we've all stemmed the tide
Of a community that seems to be done.
Ohh,
Three good years
And countless tears
From laughs and cries
And sarcastic jeers.
Ohh,
Three good years
and nearing four
But will you be here
In three years more?
We saw Christ come back as a rat
We saw a car flown into space
We saw a man try to paint us all as gaping assholes
And we turned around and laughed in his face.
Of course, I wasn't here from the start
Not many people can claim
To have seen it all
From then and back
It's really kind of a shame
Yet we still look back with fondness at all of our little oddities
And bizarrities
And contravicies
And idiosyncriocrities
It's like we all knew each other before we even met
It's something I don't think anyone will ever get
how…
Ohh,
Three good years
And countless tears
From laughs and cries
And sarcastic jeers.
Ohh,
Three good years
Just to be sure
Will you be here
In three years more?
Will you be here
In three years more?
Will you be here?
Please say you will!
Can't say I've ever met anyone
quite like our tight knit little corps.
Will you be here
In three years more?
TIPSY
Some tipsy reflections
(written while actually tipsy – do not try this at home)
I've got a funny experience with the Homestuck discord. When first joining, lots of people were intimidated because of the reputation I'd built for myself on Reddit/Tumblr for wanting to pick a fight over stuff I thought strongly about. But that fear quickly faded, and I saw the community as a refuge from more stressful small-group social encounters, until it has become the only place I socialize. Perhaps this demonstrates unhealthy behaviour on my part. I'll admit I dread the emotional dependency that is created in small groups. However I appreciate the laid-back atmosphere of the massive HSD, with all its channels and sub-communities. The place puts the creativity of the fandom into one space, where you might get teased for being yourself, but you're not going to get called out, bullied, or otherwise threatened. Worst case scenario you get banned for being highly inappropriate, or for shits and giggles. It's a “safe space,” in the way Tumblr (and especially Twitter) could never be MAKIN DONT READ.
By the same token it would be difficult to ignore the experiences of others. Some past faces see the HSD (or MSPA Lit) as hostile, offensive, and otherwise negative. Most of this surrounds Makin's attitude towards people he sees as overly sensitive. But you've heard enough of this story by now to get the picture – he thrives on entertainment, and sometimes he will act like an offensive douche for teh lulz, sometimes he will act reasonable. One thing I've never seen Makin Poring do is accept guilt for his actions. Then again, with some of the accusations levied his way, I'm not sure if he should. There's only so much shit you can throw at a person for being a bit of a bellend, and there's far more awful people out there, like manipulative 30 year olds who would launch callout campaigns at teenagers on Tumblr/Twitter because they said something to piss them off. That would easily be the greater evil, even if said teenager had bad opinions. Not going into the worse figures who we've seen Makin thoroughly erase from the HSD.
“Evil”, however, is not a word I would use to describe Drew. Nor is wacky-zany, despite his best attempts to fit the role.
Drew Linky is a complete dork. He's the Batman to Makin's Joker. He's got this insane ability to get interested in whatever you throw at him. He's a good man. If he ran the discord it might have been shut down some point years ago, reaching his limits with all the mods putting pressure on him. Or maybe it would still be alive? Maybe it would be smaller, but closer? Who knows. Who cares? It is what it is. Drew's never going to
If I were to defer to a part of Drew's narrative that I respected deeply, it would be his resilience in staying invested towards the community itself when the original material that allowed the community to bond together ended up decaying like milk in the sun. Homestuck isn't even good once you cut flashes out of the equation. Since when do people put effort into keeping groups alive when their core series gets set on fire by the creator? When you make sure that everyone around you is chill enough to enjoy the fireworks.
However, the HSD being as apathetic as it is leads to friction as per above. Drew has explained often enough his frustration at people being nasty to each other, Makin's bullcrap, the decay of our community following Act 7. Maybe that's why SPAT is coming to an end? He's ran this string to its logical conclusion, and like Andrew Hussie, he will leave you with a cliffhanger so your imagination can fill in the endless future. I hope whatever alien robots find this document in the future look at us and see the spirit of enjoying what must be a passing breeze in the universe's cogs. Also I hope they understand that we painted ourselves orange every day, sacrificing hooved animals fortnightly, in honour of the Horse Man. Also Terezi and Vriska are in love.
If SPAT is going to end, I want to contribute something genuine to it. And what gets more genuine than cartoons? To all the readers at home, here is Tipsy's cartoon shill list, which Drew can feel free to cut if he is weak:
- 1. Adventure Time – Massive show with 284 11-minute episodes. Up its own asshole. Favourite thing about this show is you should go into each episode with no expectations. Even the miniseries can go off into weird tangents that provide insight into a character. Or maybe they won't. This show spawned off a lot of children and grandchildren, but only Steven Universe kept its Cerebus Syndrome trait.
- 2. Duck Tales, woo,oo - Life is like an airplane, here in duck berg. Airplanes airplanes airplanes, here in duck berg. It's like like an airplane, oh god there's airplanes!
- 3. Over the Garden Wall - Saw this one as it was releasing live, back in 2014. Only 10 episodes long. Deserves to become a classic. Save it for Halloween though.
- 4. OK! KO - This show has decided to go every length NOT to take itself seriously, and has become endearing to me for it. The show plays with deeper themes but does not allow itself to get caught in Cerberus Syndrome, and is the polar opposite on the spectrum to Steven Universe.
- 5. Star vs the Forces of Evil - This show WAS hit by Cerberus Syndrome but not as hard as AT or SU. Or Homestuck. Fuck that comic. Anyway, I'm having a hard time describing what's appealing about the show. You will find it abrasive in the first season, but if you enjoy cartoons for being cartoons, you will put up with it. As the show goes on it focuses more on its poorly structured romantic drama, but the thing that kept me endeared was how it worked as a coming-of-age story for Star and Marco, how they grow from being stupid kids to being more emotionally mature than the adults around them.
- 6. Avatar the Last Airbender – So low down because I forgot to mention it earlier. You will enjoy this if you like cartoons for both the fun parts and the epic parts. A rigidly structured story with standalones that will have you rolling. VERY appealing to tweens, except for tweens who hate bald characters, like past Tipsy, so I missed out on this in favour of Dragonball Z and Teen Titans. No, neither of these will make the shill list, sadly.
- 7. Gravity Falls – Similar tone to Over the Garden Wall, so I wouldn't say that it's hit by Cerebus Syndrome, though season 2 plays up the character drama. Had a Homestuck-worthy update schedule, with all of season 1 airing quickly and season 2 being spread across 4 years. I don't enjoy it as much as the others on this list, but some see it as their forever show. Give it a try.
- 8. Samurai Jack – Enjoyed better in small doses, not in Minish's 24hr streams, so use a TV guide. When Samjack does good, it does good. Very atmospheric. Very goofy at other times. Had a final season on Adult Swim recently, with Super Saiyan Cerebus Syndrome. Your tongue isn't the only one twisting at that, because Jack develops a fondness for tying tongues with a psychologically broken teenager. Started off great. Shit second half. Series is otherwise a worthwhile classic.
- 9. Stets and the Crystal Gamz – Steven Universe is a mixed bag for me. Earnest, at least. I think you should watch it because you might like the parts I hate, and hate the parts I like. For me the goofier first three or so seasons were fantastic, formerly would have topped this list, but I loathe Seasons 4 and 5, save for a couple of fun oneshots. If you hate shows that take themselves too seriously stay very clear of everything after season 3; not even Adventure Time approaches SU's pretentiousness, and only Samjack outdoes it with edginess. This show is the Lucien Cramp to OK!KO's Wayne, both aimed at the same audience and trying to share life lessons, but SU overindulging while OK!KO has a laugh. Unfortunatley both shows are being treated like trash by Cartoon Network, so most of your watching will be archival. I doubt either have more than a season left before CN takes them behind the shed.
And that, as they say, is that. Wait no. Watch Mao Mao, Heroes of Pure Heart, because that's what we're watching right now. It's as if you can be here with us.
tmtmtl30
When I was first thinking about writing this submission, the channel was called #read-shills. I was going to refer to it as such, and weave in a witty retort about how people can’t accept what the channel is actually called. Then it was renamed to #cafe-mspa, so it’s probably best to refer to the channel by its Discord identification code, 184908151185866752. This identifier is far less likely to become irrelevant, at least until Makin decides to do away with the 5.48 million message backlog.
I don’t need to repeat message count statistics here -- Drew has that covered -- but it bears noting just how relevant 184908151185866752’s history is to the present day. The first 100 or so messages in the channel were sent by 8 users (9 if you include a now-removed bot), 2-3 of which (Putnam, Niklink, and MrCheeze) still remain notable presences in the channel today. That’s ignoring Makin, who I’m sure you’re at least superficially familiar with. It’s been 3 years (!) since the channel’s inception, but the cohesive channel culture seems to have stayed remarkably constant. I’m not sure how many channels on the server can say that.
My participation has been far narrower in both timeframe and message count. I joined the server on March 4th, 2018. After a brief conversation in #altgen (I can’t stand the place, personally), I migrated to 184908151185866752. I’ve remained there almost exclusively ever since: about 91% of my 135,000 messages have been sent there, and I don’t anticipate the balance changing significantly in any other channel’s favor. i type like this, effortlessly intermixing profanity with awkward sentence structure like a concussed poet ready to spew bullshit wherever she goes.
Despite the fact that I am submitting this entry to SPAT, I’ve never been an avid follower. It’s a little ironic, considering that my participation in 184908151185866752 is due in no small part to the piece. I only read the first few months, but something about the channel stuck with me, and it’s probably what convinced me to join. Ever since I started participating in earnest, though, it’s felt vaguely masturbatory to read SPAT thoroughly. Instead, it remains a monolithic account of 2 years worth of channel history, useful for crossreferencing and reviewing the actions of user5 but too intimidating to be fully consumed.
One scifi trope that’s always interested me is that of somebody being recreated using their digital imprint. Their posts are all collected and fed into some high-tech AI that synthesizes all of it and is able to imitate their online presence. OP might be long gone, but their footprint is left behind, and from that, they are -- in some sense -- born anew. I can’t say for certain how greatly 184908151185866752 has influenced me, or how much my current identity is based off of experiences I’ve had there. But without access to the channel’s logs, I think that a recreation of me, millions of years hence, wouldn’t be very accurate at all.
Toast
Hey, my name is Toast. I won’t bother talking about who I am or what I’ve been up to on HSD, because SPAT does a great job of recording notable events since Drew joined the server.
First of all, I’d like to thank YOU, reader, for finishing Drew’s journal and its chronicles of our varied online exploits (tinted as they may be by a bred-predating dirt-sifter’s perspective).
When I first joined the Homestuck/Hiveswap Discord, back when it was just a server for gathering people to play Overseer, it was my first experience chatting with people online in any capacity beyond the reserved spaces of PSN and Steam messages, which had always lacked a certain magic. The first time I logged into Discord and opened HSD, I was awed at how many people were talking at once. This was what I’d been looking for online— a real-time, group messaging service based around Homestuck, the comic I’d so recently caught up on.
Discord is a beautiful service, not just for its ease of use but how it’s brought so many wonderful and terrible people from every diverse and varied background that you could name together under whatever server’s banner they choose. We argue, we agree, we fight and ignore each other, shitpost and write essays, but everyone can agree that Discord and the Homestuck Discord have brought the lot of us together to talk together every day.
I don’t know what you’re going to take out of this, or if there’s even a “lesson” to be learned beyond that of watching a community shift and grow over time. Maybe it’s to cherish your friends, or to appreciate the faceless people that walk, talk, eat, breathe, and post online that we are all blessed to interact with. It could even be that we’re all loonies congregated in memory of a dead webcomic, and you can’t believe that you wasted all this time on some random guy’s journal on a few years of antics.
Whatever it is that you take away from SPAT, my message to you, and the last notes from everyone else, I hope it has an impact and this wasn’t an enormous waste of time. Hopefully it was an entertaining read, at the very least. (especially my parts!)
To those of you reading this in the future, if we’re still around, consider dropping by mspa-literature/read-shills and saying hi.
You won’t regret it— I haven’t yet.
Much love,
Toast#0965
tori
In a conversation I was having the other day, someone said, "Isn't Drew's journal basically his cringe collection?", and that, of course, changed my life.
There's something about the Homestuck Discord that's unique even among larger servers- for whatever reason, shit gets absolutely hog and wild out there. Long ago, this meant ridiculous but terrible and cursed drama. Eventually, that crap stopped happening, but the neutral and positive events are still something. Really, HSD is a land of "you don't get that shit anywhere else". It's the Florida of Discord servers or some shit. Is it just the result of it being a Homestuck community? Is it because Makin is an absolute motherfucker? It's probably both or something, I don't know. I just shitpost in the shills channel all day.
Trickster
WARNING: Copious amounts of text ahead.
If you asked me to come up with an analogy for the HSD, I'd immediately say we're all a bunch of apes trying as hard as we can to paint the walls before the roof collapses and we cease existing. Except the apes are living electric blips across the world, chaining combinations of transistor clacks and tings across mountains and seas, beating away at the plastic drum.
Most people have an innate desire to remember and be remembered. Through the development of civilization and even nearing its immature beginnings, our ancestors painted the cave walls with pictures of the great hunt, erected stone monuments and laid ceremonial roads, set the bases of the great pyramids remembering the lessons of the ancients, inclined obelisks carved with information, raised temples and decorated them with colorful murals, adorned tombstones for the deceased. With the advent of the metals, the transition of the ages, the taming of more and denser sources of energy, the age of electricity, so too grew our desire to keep that knowledge alive for the generations to come.
Nobody writing this document knows for certain how far into the future it will last. Hell, I even considered not submitting anything at all (which would’ve made several of you pretty happy), but I supposed a little rambling has never hurt anyone.
Anyways, continuing with the analogy, what Drew has done here over the tortuous expanse of this document is a clear indicator of our desire for posterity. However, some outsiders may not know that these behaviors are not new, and some have served as décor in the halls of history. The Buddhists have an oral tradition, or at least used to, of the vanishing of all of the prior teachings of their honorable figure. A cleansing of information, a movement towards chaos and misinformation, a precursor to a modern phrase “post-truth”, but without the bullshit politics thrown in.
Ignoring the religious subset for a moment, I would like to share this quote with you, and try to analyze it a little bit:
"As time goes on there will be irreligious kings and courtiers under irreligious governments. Then the people throughout the kingdom or countries will be irreligious.
The country will not prosper, there will be drought and other hardship with famine and scarcity of food. The devotees will gradually stop providing the four requirements to the monks (Sangha): robes, alms, support for the sick and dwelling places. The pious, not receiving the requirements, will not enter the order (Sangha), and the learned will not teach their knowledge to the novices. Learning will slowly disappear."
(Fragments of the Pali Canon, translated, Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 July 2019)
(The dana-yuga is the time period being described in this quotation, specifically the Dhatu Parinirvana; the period of the Buddha’s dispensation and part of the cycles of coming and going away from the world, if taken in the literal sense it reflects the cyclical nature of Buddhahood, if taken analytically we can refer to this as the timespan between periods of enlightenment and the preservation of information, the natural state of entropy that lead to their end, and finally the restoration of the “faith”, the restoration of order.)
These are the worried exclamations of men that, like many others, have seen the impermanence of knowledge in the world. Naturally their civilization progressed, and finally with the advent of writing, they began to write down their accumulated knowledge in thin slices of bamboo, followed by parchment, etc.
This is not a history lesson. I believe it is important to realize the fact that even today, our modern medium for recording information does not propagate it "forever" into the future, and there is no permanence to our actions. Frankly I have taken a great respite in this notion during my time in the HSD, as I’ve learned to enjoy our time together more, even considering how bizarre, odd and obviously unimportant it is in the “grand scheme of things”, if there is even one of those out there.
Maybe all of my vacuous rambling will come off absurd if this document manages to survive the years, which I really wish it to, with my deepest hopes. Drew has poured an inhumane amount of effort and dedication to keeping this memoir going, even going to the length of hosting it in his own (albeit, shared) website for posterity. Many of the readers have surely also downloaded it to their solid state or conventional magnetic disk drives, and I will not be pedantic about the notion of time and how things will last long out into the future anymore, because I understand it is just a byproduct of well, being a biological machine.
SPAT is a work of art. Qualitatively the prose and the style of writing can be dismissed as historian stylized mumbling, but there is something subtle to knowing that a digital version of you, the notion of you, has been perceived and enjoyed by other people, that makes it somewhat of a timeless experience. Connection, weakening, reconnection, it’s almost neuronal.
Even more so because Drew himself, in his very last line, pleads for the mercy of time, the humble acknowledgement of the future dissolution of the community, of language, of digital expression. Perhaps the warning of the monks towards the disappearing of learning was not a call to continue spreading our different forms of knowledge, but a precautionary tale narrating the precursor to a modern dark age of information, a cognitive change in human perception.
Too many variables, too many negative on-looks for the future, I wish it only the best, truly. If humanity has already whisked through some of its hardest challenges (on the evolutionary sense, outcompeting their similar Neanderthals, developing a basic sense of group thinking, creating tools, taming the environment) maybe it will also speed through the remaining few, and we'll arrive at one of the fables heavens of the past. And on a personal sense, it will be one of our sadder yet less acknowledged challenges to wave each other goodbye someday, and to move on with our lives.
Internet communities are a rare phenomenon. I think they communicate to each of us on a deeper level than we'd like to admit, strumming a chord of relationship and connection around a shared prospect, shared interest. Like all other groups of people, this Homestuck discord has suffered its moments of friction, collide, and strife. Yet I tend to believe that, the moments that we have enjoyed surely made up for it. Even if after all we are just strangers connected through a common language, all separated by geography, learning through each other’s pocket universes.
But perhaps, that is not the case in all communities, maybe it was our luck of not having disbanded in such a long time span that brought things to be, to try and understand the human being across the other side of the screen, clawing away time in the silent classroom, the bogged restaurant, the lonely desk and chair.
The other human beings at the side of the digital roadway, the soulless connection that binds us all towards a common end, the devastating truth of entropy, our ways of dealing with fact and falsehood, our belief systems, our shared experience. I would have never guessed that I would ever write something in the memory of a place that once seemed like a diversion to complement my enjoyment of an obscure internet webcomic, which turned out into a net of interactions and fun that spanned philosophical and historic discussion, literary analysis, and wackiness.
Maybe this is the natural way of things, towards understanding and unity. Perhaps this is why we exist, to connect and oppose destruction, to try and back away the forces of chaos, the dragon in the cave. Some might argue that my constant pursuit of chaos has been for the worse, a contrarian towards the binding forces of social emotion. But I digress; at least I can appreciate the end of it all now.
I hope that the reader didn’t interpret this as overly dramatic, if anything it is a poor man's attempt at trying to condense nearly three years of experience into a couple of paragraphs. I decided to not go into profound descriptions of my enjoyment of the HSD and my background before joining it, mainly to keep some of the mystery to my character, but also because I believe that in the same way as through this mask of anonymity I’ve been allowed to enjoy a lot of time together with some exciting individuals, surely that the collective experience we’ve enjoyed and even hated at points can only be interpreted in the moment, for it is just transient, passing away, impermanent. It’s literally the friendships we’ve made along the way.
tripheus
"see you spat cowboy..."
valkyrie
HSD is a dumb little big thing
Hey there, I’m Valkyrie. It’s kind of weird for me to use punctuation and stuff? I never do when I’m like. Texting. Anyway. I’ll just start.
THE ERA OF ALTGEN I INHABITED
I first joined HSD like… a while ago. Not as long as other old regs, but I am a good 2 years strong on this server. I’m sad to say, I was an altgen reg. But I think we had maybe a different stigma back when I was a big reg. I made… actual friends. People I’d sign in to see everyday and check up on. We’d laugh and talk about the latest funny meme or even cheer each other up sometimes. The people I recall the most during this era are Stress, Cent, FurDominatrix, Dabby, WeatherReport, Qweq, and probably others I’m missing. I invented something extremely cursed that, thankfully, most members don’t recall today: Peegen, which is ridiculous in name and even more ridiculous in execution. It’s gross and it’s childish. But it was one of my marks on HSD; the community of this server. Fellow users have so many screenshots of me saying silly things. I know there’s this one screenshot of Dingus (back when he was altgen pseudo,) saying: “Why are you people like this” and below it was just me saying “torture my weewee”. Isn’t that stupid? But, I think what’s even more stupid is how a smile gets brought to my face and I feel genuinely happy when I see that dastardly, stupid screenshot or someone remembers “peegen” or someone even remembers who I am.
PSEUDO MOD
I think, back when I was a lowly altgen reg, that I never even thought I could be a pseudo mod. During the reckoning, I was in a discord call with Sea Hitler. I remember him telling me that it was nigh impossible for me to become a mod because I’m… me. (For the record, I totally agree but I had that hope in my heart.) I think I remember who first voted for me and started the chain. It was Dabby I’m pretty sure. (Dabby, if you’re reading this, screw you. I’m in hell!) At first, Makin said I was a altgen janitor. That was good enough for me. Then, he said I was going to be altgen pseudo?? That made me fucking double-take I’m sure. Anyway, the users came up with a silly little jingle. “Dingus overrated, deus outdated, valkyrie coronated.” that sounds INSANELY silly but I’ve come to look back on it and chuckle. Anyway, if you want my opinion on being a mod, it’s cool I guess. I made a shit ton of friends and I’m happy. But the users are sometimes annoying and make me sift through piles of crap. But for the record I’m (begrudgingly) happy to do so.
DUMB LITTLE BIG THING
This server is my dirty little secret I think. I don’t tell many people I’m in it, but it’s special to me. I guess HSD is just my favorite thing right now. It may not be like that in the future, but for now it’s a big part of my life and I enjoy it a lot. I’m gonna call some of you fuckers out by name, so be ready to be SPATified!
Wizard of Chaos: Dude, I hated you at first. But you know the story. All I’m gonna say is I’m glad I met you and you’re a great friend. Love you dude, you’ve helped me through so much.
Sea Hitler: I LOVE YOU EBOY!!!!! I remember we met by joking about having a “straight pride VRChat wedding”. I have a lot of favorite memories with you.
Dune/whatever your username is for today: You were the first real friend I made on HSD. For that, I think you might be a little epic bro… Haha, jokes aside, love ya brother. You’re hilarious and keep at DJing dude.
Bella: You hold my favorite HSD splinter. My favorite memory is playing club penguin with you and saying “roleplay” in a weird voice at 5am for 3 hours straight.
Reti: You play games with me, and you’re a great fuckin’ guy. Thanks for always talking to me and I’m so glad I met you!
Drew: We don’t really talk, but thank you for being such a great moderator. Thanks for SPAT. You deserve a drink dude. Seriously, cheers.
Anyway, I’m out! Thanks for reading my little piece of SPAT
~valkyrie, current pseudo of altgen
wadapan
one evening, as the end of the semester draws near, some friends and I light a fire on the beach. We drink, and we cook smores - the best smores I've ever tasted, in fact - and we shoot the shit. It's fun, but the night is tinged with melancholy. One of my friends will be returning to America, and there's a strong possibility that we'll never see him again. Another may be transferring to study in another country
truth be told, this particular group hasn't been sustainable for a long time. We argue frequently, over incredibly stupid things - more a clash of personalities than of ideologies. We never go anywhere or do anything. In that respect, this fire is special - and, for the first time in a while, the tension dissipates. When night falls and the embers finally burn out, we find ourselves staying up anyway - knowing that this might be the last time we get to do something together. It is, in a way
occasionally, people in #read-shills like to talk about their dreams. It's always dumb, weird stuff that would never happen in real life - "I dreamt that I was Vriska! I dreamt that we were all on a spaceship! I dreamt that Ever17 got removed from the shills list!" - seriously, just search "had a dream" in read-shills, there's over five hundred results. This shit's a gold mine. Makin hates dreamposting - "I'll allow it only because the chat is dead", he once said, only to state "I regret allowing it" immediately after seeing the dream in question. Usually, I'd agree with him; I've always found hearing about people's dreams to be a pretty uncomfortable experience, because there are only two kinds: the kind that's just stupid shit, and the kind that reveals way too much about the person dreaming
after my friends leave, I finally go to sleep, and - for the first time in a long time - I dream. In the dream, I'm back on the beach. The fire is bigger, and there are more people - but my friends aren't there. I realise that these people are all the faceless randos I've been talking to in #read-shills. As everyone talks, Drew stands off to one side - expositing, SPAT-style, about what's happening to Makin over the phone
the moment I realise what the dream is, I hate it. I hate what it says about me - that I somehow prefer these strangers to this group of friends. I wake up immediately. For a brief moment, I consider mentioning the dream in #read-shills. I don't, because I know that - if someone else posted the same dream - I'd hate reading about it. I haven't dreamt since
a couple of weeks later, Drew announces that SPAT will be drawing to a close. He mentions that he'd be interested in seeing people write about '"how the HSD impacted me" or some such / maybe not phrased so dorkish', and I remember the dream. I remember how nebulous it was, how the people were defined not by their faces or voices or their locations - just by their words, and who they were sharing them with
WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES
It took a long time for me to actually read Homestuck. I first tried it out sometime in 2012 to moderate disinterest, and sat on it for years until GAME OVER released in late 2014. That flash is what convinced me to give the comic another shot. I spent around a month or so just pouring through that shit, and hopped on /r/homestuck to discuss it more. I participated in RPGStuck (the tabletop system based on Homestuck with a whole side-community of its own) when it first started up, and I basically just bummed around within its Skype chat for most of 2015 and 2016. Eventually, I joined HSD sometime in early 2016 in order to discuss Homestuck after it recently returned from a lengthy hiatus. At first, I only really came on to talk about the new updates, but something about the place made me stick around. I’m not really sure what it was, maybe the atmosphere just amused me. After about a year and a half, I more or less cemented myself as a regular in mspalit (now read-shills). Then like a week back I got modded for some reason. It’s kind of weird! In any case, HSD has always been a nice place for me to relax, and it also allowed me the opportunity to check out a lot of stuff I doubt I ever would have had the chance to experience otherwise.
In particular, if it wasn’t for the HSD, I probably never would have tried to join the CANMT, and thus would never had the place to develop my skills as a musician. I’m glad that I got the opportunity to participate in its shitpost music hell, even if I feel its prime has long passed. While I do participate in contributing works occasionally, CANMT now feels like a shadow of what it once was. Granted, as the shadow of a force that was an absurd force of spewing out content, making 59 albums in the span of 3 years, it’s still pretty fucking active even with a fraction of its contributors. Even so, I think most of the drive for making fan music in the community has spread out between newer (and older) teams, so the sector of musicians is a lot less centralized than it used to be. Still, CANMT was a wonderful place while it had lasted, so I’m content. I’ve met a lot of good friends through it, and maybe some bad ones, but I doubt I’d be making music today without it.
This community has always been kind of a clusterfuck, at least for the time that I’ve been in it, but it’s been an enjoyable one by my metric. It’s kind of surreal that a lot of our horseshit is now recorded within SPAT, even if I’m not sure who’d be interested in leafing through it besides ourselves in our eternal quest for masturbation. Still, it’s nice to look at this whole journal as a way to remember the HSD, even if as of 2019 this place looks like it’ll still be kicking around for a while (god please don’t let this be an incredibly ironic sentence). On the whole, I’m happy I was part of the community here, for as strange and as crazy as it can get.
Oh, also you should read Prequel. It’s a pretty good fancomic of the fourth Elder Scrolls game. It’s probably not finished yet by the time you’re reading this but it’s still worth a read.
https://www.prequeladventure.com/
Zentoyo
I don't actually care much about HSD in general, but read-shills, cafe-mpsa, mpsa-lit however you want to call it has a place in my heart and is an example of an internet community at its best.
I've seen it go to the lowest points of being almost twitch chat-y to the "most" relevant discourse of ethics and political stuff passing by all the stages in between; there is beauty in that.
And even if I've not changed my mind on a subject that many times during discourse, I've come to understand other points of view or at least I think I have. And that is what read-shills is all about or rather the part that draws me in (that and the shills but well get on to that l8r), that is a place of understanding rather than judging or at least it has enough understanding that its not drowned by the other stuff.
This is perfectly represented by the "what did they mean by this" meme where someone post a quote tweet or whatever which meaning is unclear or seemingly stupid followed by the aforementioned words,
Another example of this is, well, the overall tone of SPAT.
Plus, when is not like that at least most people are self aware enough or wacky enough to make conversations enjoyable as a participant or lurker and blah blah blah, lets get on to the RELEVANT STUFF: SHILLS.
To the average human shills can be defined by a dictionary and the internet, but here they take a deeper meaning. Shills, or rather shills lists are based on makin's shills list, a list of works he compiled on whatever criteria he had and other users have followed up on the initiative by doing the same with their own intent mine being shilling stuff that I myself like A LOT to find people who also like it A LOT so I can get more shills.
Other people made their own with they own reasoning behind it (to generate discourse, to give light to more obscure works, to make people give a chance to stuff they wouldnt otherwise) them all being compiled into a shill list of shill lists where even the joke lists are included. And i got to say, for someone who originally came to the internet to look for a place to consume stuff n talk about that stuff it brings me unspeakable joy. You guys are truly wonderful.
So yeah, send me your shills so I can judge them and your tastes and through them judge you as a human being! Praised be shill econony! God bless shill econony! Long live shill econony!
On a less positive note some people in mspa-lit like visual novels unironically, nothing is perfect huh?(delet e 17)
PD: read a manga called fire punch
Wizard of Chaos
WHY USERS ARE THE ENEMY
If you’re looking at this at all, you’ve probably read a goodly chunk of Several People Are Typing (which has the charming acronym of SPAT), which is an ungodly work of literature on the most boring shit imaginable: moderating a Discord server. Five hundred thousand words on a bunch of monkeys in a chatroom. I’m not nearly insane enough to create such a thing, but my compatriot and fellow moderator Drew is. I am awestruck, baffled, and deeply disturbed at the effort that has gone into this thing. It’s as though someone told me they’d spent three years painting a house by repeatedly getting a mouthful of paint and licking it. I respect the effort, of course, but… why?
I’m Sandy, but by this point you know me as WoC or Wizard of Chaos. Everything Drew has said about me is exaggerated. I currently moderate under him with the specific areas of #gaming and #general, which are the two best channels, clearly. I’ve been demodded three times now, but it didn’t take. I draw cartoons, do some coding occasionally, and use firearms and other explosive devices more than is probably safe. My personality is like I got caught in a time rift from the internet of 2008. You probably already read quite a bit about me, but I’ll quote my favorite bit: “Naturally WoC's demeanor also puts him at odds with a significant number of people in the userbase; he is often pointed to as one of the most hard-to-get-along-with members of the team, specifically because he seems to derive pleasure from purposefully messing with people on occasion.” This isn’t entirely untrue.
Truthfully, my position here is more of a mystery to me than anyone else; I’ve only front-to-back read Homestuck once because I lost a bet (I’ve since read various sections, but only entirely completed it once). I joined the server right after the Gigapause ended, I believe, then stuck around for a few months. During the first major overhaul of the server, Makin was looking for a #gaming pseudo, and I think I was the only one who requested it, so I got the spot, and I’ve pretty much been there ever since. I’ve done my best to keep the channel as quality as possible. I think it’s worked; we have a decent post rate and quality arguments.
A powerfully fried image of the time Drew and I met up for pizza and gelato. I’m whichever one you think is prettier.
One of the areas where Drew and I differ, though, is our moderating style. I told him I’d write up an epilogue on why everything he does is wrong, and here it is. You see, Drew has the appalling tendency to treat users like they’re people.
I don’t make this mistake often; the consequences for doing so are dire. Drew’s style comes straight from the heart. He tries to solve every problem individually and does his absolute best to help each user through whatever situation they’re going through, and often advocates for giving people second, third, fourth, and fifth chances because the user in question has convinced him they are truly repentant. He’s got a lot of empathy going for him.
It’s crap. All of it. I respect the urge to help people in that way but my patience for that shit is extremely low. I’m not really in the business of giving people second chances at all; sometimes not even a first if the offense is particularly bad. They serve out their bans or just flat out get the boot permanently. I’m not unfair about this. People get a warning and then they’re done if they keep going. I do my absolute best to judge users entirely on their actions, with absolutely no extenuating circumstances.
That all makes me sound a bit callous, no? In reality, I think Drew’s approach ultimately leads to more hassle and more problems. What this leads users to believe is that Drew is the more pliable and approachable moderator, because that’s the image he gives off. That means that anytime they think they’re being treated unfairly, they go straight to him. Anytime they have a problem, or think the server’s going in a bad direction, or even just want to get their way, they go straight to him. This means Drew has to deal with quite a few manipulative users one-on-one, because they see him as the easiest target. It never takes, really - Drew isn’t an idiot, but it does lead to a long, extended headache where he and the mod team have to decide what to do about this guy. And, unfortunately, sometimes it works. I can think of multiple times Drew has been absolutely convinced that we needed to cut someone more slack, or give them a second chance, and a week or a month later they pull something unspeakable and we have to permanently ban them from the server. There was this guy called recursiveSlacker who has probably been talked about extensively that serves as an excellent example of this behavior.
My approach doesn’t deal with any of that shit, because I don’t treat them like friends. I am focused purely on their contribution to the server. If it’s garbage, they get a ban or a warning, and if it’s good, they get left alone and engaged with. I don’t have to deal with many private messages from shitters; usually it’s along the lines of “why did I get banned” where I have to explain to them why their actions were unacceptable. I have a bit of a reputation as a hardass for this; if I make threats it’s known on the server that I will follow through on them. Ultimately, though, I think it’s better for the server. People are less likely to rely on slack from moderators, and I don’t ever get targeted by manipulative users (I think it’s happened maybe once or twice, and both times I slapped them down pretty quickly and called for a global ban). I’m sure Drew has countless screencaps of manipulative DMs. Users like recursiveSlacker, twonks, Bisc, and Revlar are all indicative of problems that were allowed to sit and fester for far too long that had negative impact. recursiveSlacker in particular is still a sometimes headache. His approach fails disastrously when it does fail, and the community impact is dire.
It’s not all bad. Sometimes we got hilarious shit like this.
This predilection for respecting users as people also leads to inane shit like calling for votes or listening to popular opinion. We added the channel #hangout entirely based on a user poll, and it eventually got deleted because it was a total mistake that just sucked all conversation from the general chat - which was the front page of the server and extremely important for both attracting and retaining new users. If we allowed it, users would vote for a roleplay channel, which is something that has been instituted before and deleted nigh-instantly due to becoming ERP within a matter of seconds. Time and time again, what the people want is wrong, or even actively detrimental to the server community. Breaking up hugboxes, banning sprites in the art channel - all of these are things that were bitched about to great extent but ultimately were for the greater good. If a bunch of teens want to spew horny garbage about how they want to suck some toes, they can do that somewhere else, thanks.
This has led me to the conclusion that users are, in fact, the enemy. They are not your friends, they are not your allies. At rest they at hundreds of tons of snow, looming on a mountainside, and when angry, they become an avalanche that buries our mod team in a cloud of crap. To quote George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.” We have 12,000 users at the moment, with no real end in sight - the number just keeps going up. By this logic, around six thousand people on that server are fuckin’ morons. And it’s just going to keep getting worse. We can only give the people what they want by explicitly ignoring polls, really. It’s almost like a parent telling their kids they have to eat their dinner instead of having candy all the time. By and large, what the people vote for is flat out wrong.
Even leaving aside the idea that half of all the people there are idiots, there’s just problems of scale to consider. With twelve thousand people, we absolutely cannot consider each and every one individually. There’s about fifteen total moderators for all of those people. It’s not doable. Most of them don’t talk, it’s true, but even then it’s skewed heavily on the side of the users (I think Drew’s estimate was like 2500 active ones a day at peak times). Even trying to is a complete waste of time and energy; the time dedicated to helping out a single user could have been better spent by making sure a channel isn’t entirely taken over by furry porn. Who knows what the hell we’re going to have to deal with?
At the time of writing, there has been another reckoning where everyone got de-modded and voted back into office. The new mod team is great, so far - they’re doing their jobs, they’re easy to work with, and they’ve been cracking down on problems that the old mod team was content to let fester. This could be taken as a counterpoint to my argument that voting is bad and the users are always wrong about what they want; however I assure you it isn’t. What actually happened for the voting process was that some actually well-known regular would suggest someone to be mod for a channel or in general or whatever and then convinced the rest of the users to spam their name after that. It was less a vote and more a tightly controlled mob that went in pretty much the exact direction it was told to. If we had actually let it go to a vote I’m sure the results would have been disastrous. What occurred was not a vote, or at least not a properly designed democratic vote. I’m pretty sure Makin knows this.
Even then, half the new mods were totally shocked at their appointment - which is exactly as it should be. Anyone who actually wants power should under no circumstances be allowed to have it. There were several crybabies who whined about not getting mod despite being really active users and accruing good boy points for months on end just in the hopes they would accrue the tiniest crumb of power. No. Look, let me explain it in a screencap:
Goddamn, what a chore.
This is a screenshot from our moderation log. We’re currently experiencing a whole shitload of bots joining the server and private messaging people with porn. This is what it looks like for about 1200 posts in a row (probably not actually that many, that’s just the total bot count). Is this fun or engaging in literally any way? Fuck no, it isn’t! It’s the moderating equivalent of ditch digging. We’re just banning bot account after bot account and everyone is chipping in to do the job. Nobody wanted to do this. You’d have to be fucking insane to want to do this. The only reason any of us are doing this is because we have to in order to make the server a better place. It’s utterly mindless tedium. That screenshot right there is exactly why nobody who wants to do this should under any circumstances be allowed to. That’s why votes are garbage, because they are in effect what the users want and the person being voting in is probably wanting to do it anyway. Ask yourself: Do you really want to sit in front of a computer for actual hours on end throwing out a bunch of accounts manually? I don’t. If you do want to, you shouldn’t be allowed to.
In summary: the users are always wrong, and treating them with empathy leads to terrible results more than it does good results. Whether or not someone is an objectively quality user is the only metric by which they should be judged, with no extenuating circumstances. While I admire Drew’s approach, ultimately I am convinced that it is the wrong one. I’ve probably exaggerated the extent to which I take this policy (“users aren’t people” is a hell of a phrase, isn’t it?), but the fundamentals are there, even if it’s coated in a fine glaze of irony. I don’t think that I could use any other sauce if I tried.
Wizard of Chaos out.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe