Drew Linky
10th of December
There was a recent, massive outage on Discord caused by the failure of Google servers which hosted Discord’s services. This outage happened on the 8th and lasted for a couple of hours. However, the search function was down for a much longer period of time, spanning about two days. All messages sent in that time frame are completely unsearchable, although they can still be read if going through the backlog. This is frustrating due to events on the second day of the outage.
On the 9th, there was a massive Bread celebration in #altgen that lasted anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half. I can’t use the search function to determine exactly how many messages were sent, but it was at least 15,000 based on how long I was around to witness it and the rate of spam. In all I would consider it a glorious return to form for #altgen, especially given that it was recently moved back up to the top of the channel list.
#general and #altgen both seem to be experiencing a rejuvenation of sorts, which I’m happy to see. Conversely, though, #mspa-lit has been getting quieter as time goes by. It’s a very busy time of year for people in school, as it’s more or less time for finals for everyone, so a lessening of activity is probably to be expected. However, this time it feels like it’s more pronounced than usual (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that each time this happens, it gets worse).
Makin has similarly been busy with real life concerns, and has been talking less than we would usually expect him to. Frankly I’m also guilty of this, and I’m sure a few other power users are similarly busy. All of this contributes to a general lack of energy in mspa-lit, retreading certain topics, and a greatly reduced message count overall. I fear Makin’s water filter theory is not working, given the current environment.
When there’s an abundance of activity, making a barrier to increase the quality of activity makes sense. When activity is sparse, however, this just means people will gradually stop using the channel. It’s worth pointing out that things are actually looking up a bit on the server as a whole, but mspa-lit in particular is slowing down a lot. I hope that there’s a simple and effective way to reverse this trend--likely if Makin, myself, and even just a few others start posting more frequently, then that alone will return things to normalcy.
Nothing more for today.
14th of December
There’s been growing unrest in the mod team as of late, for various reasons. A lot of it stems from increased consideration for the content creators of Homestuck 2 and Pesterquest. A lot of this consideration is necessary and good, in the sense that remaining respectful of other people is important. However, in doing our due diligence we seem to be running into more and more people who are only venting their spleen in the most aggressive way possible, with little care for how it affects others.
We’ve been toying with a few ideas that we feel could improve things. One such advisement was to completely ban all discussion about happenings on Homestuck Twitter, which has become increasingly dramatic and self-cannibalizing according to users who view it often. I’ve spoken in the past of my viewpoint that Twitter is a despicable social media platform as a whole: it tends to exacerbate the worst conversational qualities in people through a combination of various factors, which I won’t go to the trouble of listing again.
We would of course allow discussion of tweets that are strictly relevant to Homestuck content, especially important announcements. The main problem is people discussing drama endemic to Homestuck Twitter, especially as it involves various members of the team. A lot of people have expectations of the content creators to behave one way or another. I personally think some of these expectations are valid--professionalism should be required when working in any sort of official capacity, especially on a project as big as Homestuck--but people have differing ideas on what should be expected and in the end it becomes an enormous chore even just to discuss, let alone to implement any sort of policy on the matter. So in this regard, it would probably be best to just ban discussion of dealings on Homestuck Twitter.
This policy has not been enacted yet (or even debated much, really), although it may be in the cards at a later time. For now, we took a more internal route of examining our channels and seeing if anything could be cut out. To that end we focused on two: homestuck2 and althomestuck. The former hasn’t really been much of a problem, it’s more that the channel is usually completely dead and thus useless. Now, #homestuck will serve as a discussion place for both properties, and will be converted to a spoilers channel for a period of one week following updates (a generous period of time given their average length so far).
On the other hand, the latter has been an increasing problem for some weeks, as it was made to keep shitposting out of #homestuck but seems to have served instead as the gathering place for people who simply want to complain about things (especially people and things on Homestuck Twitter). This is neither fun nor productive, so we decided to archive it and lump its functions in wholesale with altgen.
The activity in altgen has been growing significantly after the mods interested in that channel (Valkyrie, Reti, Raarzard, Dingus, and Sea Hitler, with special mention for Anervaria) began discussing ways to develop interest in it again. I’d say that the shitposting culture there is the strongest it’s been in several months, possibly over a year. I have full faith that they’ll be able to integrate any shitposters without too much trouble, and hopefully we’ll see a net gain in activity.
The more unsavory figures at the center of all this are either being beaten into shape as we speak, or they have decided to leave. There’s one user in particular I’m not sure of yet who’s named Ashrahn, and has been an object of significant controversy: they’ve been engaged in some weird back-and-forth with a Twitter user named abraxasGrips. Both are saying that the other is targeting them but there hasn’t been a lot of evidence put forth by either of them.
I would like to settle this somehow by reaching out, but I’m stretched thin as it is, and I really can’t afford another distraction right now. Besides, whenever I try to solve disputes like this it doesn’t seem to make things much better anyway. This debacle and others like it have actually contributed greatly to my desire to end all discussion of Homestuck Twitter drama, as I simply don’t want to deal with them anymore. As it is, lumping althomestuck in with altgen seems to have accomplished that to a large degree anyway.
Another shitter that comes to mind was a fellow named Lord Calidor. An active user first on the subreddit and then later on Discord, he spoke explicitly in parodying fashion of a character from Homestuck named Caliborn. He’s been the object of fascination for some time now, as no one was quite sure how serious his act was. Unfortunately, interactions with him recently took a turn for the worse after althomestuck was collapsed: he finally dropped the parody and lashed out at some of our mods in DMs after being chastised repeatedly. It’s weird to see him go, but not really all that surprising--we knew that this would probably come to a head, as it often goes this way with highly specific and dedicated accounts such as this one.
The restructuring wasn’t very thorough, but hopefully it will be effective. It’s hard to tell what the ramifications for this will be, and I’ve largely given up predicting because I’m wrong as often as I’m right. That having been said, I actually feel significantly engaged and optimistic about things for the first time in a while. I think that becoming a little more insular and not discussing the drama of other platforms is a good step--it doesn’t do much to include anyone, and in the end it just discourages regulars from talking for various reasons.
As we go into the new decade we’ll probably have to continuously figure this stuff out over and over again. As more time goes by, I increasingly realize that nothing is ever solved forever. Things will never stop from keep happening as long as the HSD is around, and it’s a struggle to stay interested and happy in light of that. However, in the short term, things can and do improve. I’m still happy to be here, and as I’ve said before, I hope the HSD persists for as long as it possibly can.
Nothing more for today.
23rd of December
At least once a year it seems, someone out there in the fandom creates a blog or some other outlet for making callout posts against the HSD and anyone else they happen to disagree with. This year, merely days away from Christmas, it has happened again. We were alerted to the existence of a new callout account on Twitter last night and spent some time laughing at how ridiculous it was, but I’m afraid that by today it led to real repercussions, even if they were relatively minor.
I’m going to neglect to post the actual page in question, because I’m personally miffed about all of this for various reasons. Callout accounts are universally mired in pettiness, relying on misleading or outright fabricated information in order to make their claims more sensational (in this case, posting screenshots that are plainly and sloppily doctored). This isn’t new or surprising given how many times we’ve put up with it before, but for some reason seeing it yet again has been far more irritating than I expected.
A lot of the claims being put forth concern events that happened years ago now, which makes it feel even more pointless this time around than it did in the past. The biggest accusations are that Makin knowingly put underaged mods in charge of the NSFW channels (explicitly untrue) and some nonsense about paying children to mod the server. This second one baffles me the more I think about it, it’s so absurdly garbled that I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to mean. The reality of the matter is that none of us have ever gotten paid to do this, and if any of the mods aren’t okay with that the rest of us would reasonably expect them to step down.
I think part of my frustration stems from the fact that the callout account was explicitly endorsed by Kate. This is a disappointing spit in our face in light of how transparently false the information is, and especially considering how much we’ve been trying to improve the server. In retrospect I guess expecting a different outcome was foolish. Given that it feels like all of this is kind of coming out of left field all of a sudden, I haven’t felt quite so disillusioned with the idea of “Homestuck fandom diplomacy” in a very long time. I no longer see the point in trying to understand the detractors in this scenario and others like it.
On the other hand though, this has had an unusual effect on the mod team. Far from discouraging us, it seems that almost everyone on the team has sort of rallied behind Makin this time. More than just myself, I think we’re all tired of putting up with this kind of trifling slander at this point. To be clear, it would be hugely inappropriate to suggest Makin deserves no criticism for anything. However, as more time passes from the original altercations that these accusations bring up, the more evident it seems that they come not from a place of genuine concern for the afflicted, but instead from personal grudges and biases.
Makin has his own explanation for why people might behave this way regarding him, but I’ve always maintained that he makes things out to be more complicated than they really are. To tell the truth, I don’t think the why necessarily matters at this point anyway. The fact of the matter is that there’s a loose cabal that hates him and will never stop trying to sue for his removal from the fandom. Conversely, Makin will never willingly step down regardless of the scale or validity of the accusations against him. These facts alone preclude any potential debate on the issue, and so it all serves only to make everyone involved more tired and upset when it happens.
Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t bother writing much more about this. I’m considering making a more adamant personal rule about not dealing with anyone or anything from Homestuck Twitter because of all this, as interacting with them seems to bring nothing but pain and misery. In the end it only serves to make me angry, and time has already proven to us repeatedly that it doesn’t actually matter what we do in this regard; there will always be people trying to harass us for one thing or another. It is a virtual impossibility to satisfy these people, so responding and capitulating to demands from them isn’t really an option.
Admittedly my frustration is temporary, because as with every callout account like this one, it will amount to nothing in the long run. Our reputation has been assaulted yet again, but time will pass and we’ll proceed as normal as with each time this happened before. Doubtless, too, we’ll go through all this again in less than a year’s time or so. The inevitability is almost as dispiriting as it is funny.
Makin, for his part, seems totally unbothered. I’m sure that on some level he’s put out by people attempting to drag him through the mud yet again, but he’s been through this song and dance enough times already. More than anyone I think he understands the transient nature of these events, as well as the inherent absurdity of claiming this place is unsafe or unwelcoming to people given everything we’ve done over the last few years. I think that my temporary annoyances aside, we’ll be just fine.
On a far more positive note: today Raar, Anervaria and Valkyrie initiated another Bread Ceremony in altgen. They had been planning something for around Christmas and I regret that I missed it today, but it lasted for an hour from 6:21 PM to 7:35 PM EST. In that hour they brought the channel’s messages for the day to over 17,000. Based on this we can estimate that, for the Bread Ceremony from near the beginning of the month which lasted approximately an hour and a half, they sent between 20,000-25,000 messages. The Discord search function is still broken for that period of time and will likely never be fixed, but I’m content with that approximation. It’s good to see altgen returning to form with an endless stream of truly awful shitposts, it gives me life.
Nothing more for today.
30th of December
Some weeks ago, Disney started airing a new Star Wars show called The Mandalorian, which has turned out to be far more interesting and popular than any of us really expected it to be. The first season finale actually just came out, and some of us haven’t had the chance to watch it yet. Those of us who have were being rather inconsiderate with spoilers though, which is a rather serious faux pas given the nature and history of our community.
Makin was among those who hadn’t seen the finale, and issued one warning to stop with spoilers. Someone made what they thought was an innocuous reference, but Makin wasn’t fucking around: in retaliation he “deleted” the entire channel of mspa-lit and shunted everyone into #general for a few hours.
Makin recently gave me access to the channel even when it’s down so that I can record stats in the evening, but he went the extra mile this time and revoked even my access, renamed it to #deleted-channel, and made it so people couldn’t see message history if they were tabbed out and came back in. At first I figured this was just an extension of the usual prank, and went about my business.
I remained largely unfazed until people started seriously asking for mspa-lit back, and then in mod chat Makin said: “uhhh I did delete it / sorry I got really mad / I really like the mandalorian / I'll just make a new one / we have the pin archive at least.” This successfully convinced me that he had actually deleted the channel, and for the first time I felt true despair.
In retrospect this was more believable than it should have been because I’ve literally experienced it before: a personal friend was in charge of a group server, but she got so angry once that she completely deleted it. As it is, I wholly believed Makin and said as much in chat. I nonseriously said, “I quit,” (to which Makin later said no take-backs) and then revealed the ruse for what it was. Everyone had a good laugh about it, and I was enormously relieved.
The exact words I used to describe how I felt as it happened were, “i just lost my will to live for a solid ten minutes,” which Daniel found extremely amusing. I’m just glad the channel actually isn’t gone. I should never have believed Makin’s jape though, considering how invested we both are in preserving knowledge.
It was a nasty shock, but at the end of the day everything is still intact going into the new year. I’m actually rather pleased; this year as a whole was more subdued than usual, but with the return of a variety of official content coming out it feels like things are picking back up. Especially given the energy and dedication of some of our new mods like Valk and Raar, it seems that their target channels are experiencing some rejuvenation. I’m pretty happy about all this. Though a full write up of the subreddit and Discord server is probably needed, in general things are looking up. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep this momentum up into 2020 and things will continue to improve.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
(No commentary for this month)